He was four years older and much bigger and stronger than me, so I had little means of defending myself. Sometimes it was suddenly pummeling me with brutal punches. Sometimes it was dunking my head in the toilet. But what my brother most seemed to savor was prolonged psychological torture in which he would do his damnedest to break my spirit, spending hours either sitting on me such that I could hardly breathe or trapping me in an endless headlock. The highlights of my childhood were when my brother went to sleepaway summer camp; I’d enjoy a few weeks of blissful respite and then burst into tears when I was told he was coming back.

Why didn’t my parents intervene? To some extent, because my brother and I were latchkey kids several afternoons per week who spent a lot of time by ourselves. To some extent, because loving parents have blinders and never want to believe bad things about their children. To some extent, because they were naïve ’60s-era liberals who felt that enough Shel Silverstein and Peter, Paul, and Mary would yield groovy people, man. And to some extent because they felt so bad that my brother had been a social outcast from his earliest days on the playground, and so perhaps unconsciously concluded that it was the rest of the family’s duty to hold our breaths and walk on eggshells and treat him with kid gloves. It was the early ’90s: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Autism spectrum weren’t yet household terms, and there was no way to anticipate the schizophrenia that would come in roaring a decade later.

Thankfully, the beatings tapered off by the time I hit the third or fourth grade, and there were a good few years when my brother became a fitness maniac who didn’t go out of his way to abuse me. And then disaster struck. My brother had such a hard time socially when he entered middle school that, midway through the sixth grade, my parents had moved him up a grade to an “alternative” school called Crossroads that was well-known in the St. Louis area as a destination for troubled kids. Unfortunately for my brother, after a year or two Crossroads hired a new director, an uptight white guy named Billy with a white goatee and ponytail, who was intent on shifting the institution’s reputation from a kennel for weirdos to a more respectable and “progressive” school for artistic and diverse young creatives. One day, some troublemaker who’d constantly taunted my brother grabbed him by his backpack straps and tried to pull him to the ground. In self-defense, my brother managed to work his assailant into a headlock, and for that Crossroads expelled him even as the attacker got a slap on the wrist.

And so back to public school it was. Alas, somebody happened to have called in a bomb threat to the school the day before my quirky brother arrived, and when he showed up midyear with a crew cut carrying a duffel bag rather than a backpack, he acquired a cruel nickname that he could never quite shake: Unabomber. My brother was highly intelligent, and might have fit in to some extent had he been placed in honors courses, but he wasn’t disciplined enough in his schoolwork to qualify and the kids in the regular classes ragged on him constantly. Underlining his vulnerable outcast status was that his handwriting was illegible and he was the only student in his grade who took notes on a laptop. One day, a black classmate kept pretending to steal his computer and my brother obliviously told him to “get back where he belonged,” prompting many of the school’s deseg kids to grandstand and call him a racist. He hadn’t been a racist, not in the least bit, but the relentless bullying drove him to drop out of high school in the 11^th grade and soon down online rabbit holes that converted him into becoming a rabid racist and antisemite, despite being half-Jewish and that Winona Ryder was his celebrity crush.

Spending his hours stewing watching Jerry Springer and playing Doom II, my brother spiraled further into darkness and rage he was all too eager to inflict upon the rest of the family, including the cat, and especially me as the supposed golden child who’d apparently had everything handed to me on a silver platter. No longer would he address me by my name, but as “Jewboy,” and a typical conversation was him screaming that he was going to kill me and everyone else who’d ever wronged him, too. He didn’t beat me as often as he had when I was younger, as I’d become somewhat capable of self-defense, but he was always breathing down my neck and took to frequently overturning the dining table, throwing chairs across the room, and grabbing my mother’s beautiful artwork off the walls to snap over his knee or hurl into the houseplants.

I repeatedly begged my parents to throw my brother out so I could have some semblance of a normal life, and they would tell me again and again that sometimes even when it was stressful we had to make sacrifices for family members; I felt like the designated sacrifice. The truth was, they were petrified that he’d kill himself, or maybe perpetrate the next Columbine before suicide by cop, and at one point he did acquire a shotgun that my Dad thankfully found and hid in the back of a closet amidst rolls of wrapping paper. For several years in my own homes I lived in near-constant fear for my life.

The spring before my junior year of high school, I was selected among 330 peers statewide to spend three weeks at the University of Missouri over the summer as part of a free annual pre-college program for gifted students called the Missouri Scholars Academy. The experience turned out to be among the most intensely formative of my life. The day I arrived, I was an obese, shy, nerdy introvert who’d reflexively gravitate to whoever looked like they’d geek out about Star Trek; out from under my brother’s thumb, I changed my diet and started running and began figuring out how to talk to girls. As each day passed, and I felt like I’d found a new life, I more and more dreaded going back home to hell.

The first couple of days back my brother was on relatively good behavior, but his psychotic antics soon resumed and intensified. It was as if any success on my part magnified his failures, and he was determined to drag me down to his abyss—and he nearly succeeded. But my mother had seen the new light in my eyes, and she couldn’t deny that light dimming and flickering as her firstborn strained to choke out my future, and that finally drove her to a decision she should have made years earlier: she picked up the fucking phone, called my Dad, told him that joint custody was over, and that he needed to come collect his elder son immediately because my brother would never set foot in her house again. That remains the greatest day of my life.

Immediately, I thrived: I lost 90 pounds in six months, joined the cross-country team and earned the Most Improvement Award two years in a row, got myself elected president of my senior class, and managed to get into an Ivy League school. A lot of people assumed the class presidency was just a stunt for my college applications, but it wasn’t. I mainly just wanted to see how far I could go without my monstrous brother at my throat. And even that was a matter of degree; I was close with my Dad, so I still saw my brother frequently, and his banishment turned him even more vicious, but at least I could sleep at night behind locked doors without active terror that I was about to be murdered.

Whereas my mother could be a battleaxe when provoked, my late father was a quiet and gentle man who himself had come up frequently slapped around by my alcoholic grandfather. As a social worker driving his busted station wagon into dodgy neighborhoods checking up on folks inhabiting various states of mental disability and derangement, my Dad channeled his extensive experience trying to defuse tense moments with his father into talking down all manner of crazy people. That proved invaluable in managing my brother’s outbursts: my Dad had a pretty impressive track record of deflating my brother’s rages with well-timed mellow jokes subtly poking fun at the hissy-fits’ performative nature, but there were still many times that my brother battered him despite their forty-year age difference.

Gradually, by emphasizing that it would help him feel better and that it would bolster his case to get on disability, my Dad was able to coax my brother into going on heavy psychotropic medication. For a time it worked and my brother’s behavior veered into the range of appropriate—he got his G.E.D., took a few community college classes, and worked on honing his writing. He was a wonderful writer when he applied himself, better than me. And then he discovered the euphoric mania of taking a fistful of pills at once so that he would be up for three or four days at a time, followed by a steep crash that would have him out cold for days. I never knew when venturing into my Dad’s house if I’d find a blissed-out stoner blabbering about Oprah sending him secret messages through his online horoscope, a tweaked-out Nazi chasing me out the door, or a strung-out junkie asleep on the couch. Usually it was the Nazi.

One thing was clear: absolutely any information that my brother had regarding my life he would twist to use against me, so I took care to impart as little information as possible. Early one Friday evening the spring of my senior year of high school, I endured a violent home invasion when my mother went to the movies and forgot to lock the sliding-glass back door. I was upstairs in my bedroom listening to Pearl Jam when I heard a strange noise. I went to my door and suddenly a masked intruder smashed me in the face with one of my mother’s flowerpots, spun me around to put a knife to my back, and inquired as to “where the jewelry at.” I happened to know where a few hundred dollars of cash was at, but that’s not what he asked for, and his frustration was clear when I showed him where the jewelry was at and it was all exotic ethnic trinkets of no street value. When the intruder asked “where the basement at?” I thought he was about to slit my throat, but mercifully he just locked me in the basement and ran off. We had a phone down there, so I was able to call 911, and the house was cordoned off with yellow police tape by the time my mother got home.

I told one friend what had happened that evening, and by Monday morning it was the talk of my high school. Suddenly I was a celebrity and everybody wanted to ask me about it, never once considering that maybe I didn’t want to relive the event again and again. I’d already had more than my fair share of post-traumatic stress disorder, but the PTSD from the home invasion finally drove me into therapy; for about a year after the attack, I could not help but compulsively check every ten or fifteen minutes that all doors and windows were locked. Literally everybody I knew heard about the home invasion, except for my brother, because the perp happened to have been black and I wasn’t willing to give him any more fodder for his racist rants.

Over time, my brother’s insanity spilled out into public. He abruptly turned on a friend of the family who had humored him by selling some of his strange homemade novelty t-shirts at an indie record store, berating the guy out of the blue. He got banned from the nearest supermarket for sexually propositioning a check-out girl. By mail, he sexually propositioned one of my mother’s middle-aged neighbors who had once hired him to do some yard work. Hell, he even sexually propositioned my mother’s own sister, also via U.S. Mail. Because my mother was adopted, that might not technically have been proposing incest, but I don’t think that made any difference to my brother. One day, he started screaming and throwing punches at another supermarket, so he got tazed and arrested.

The arrest was pivotal, because it enabled the state’s psychiatrists to step in and change his medicinal regimen from pills he could abuse to a monthly shot that he could not, so once again my brother’s behavior swerved back to minimally appropriate. It was good timing, too, as my Dad suffered the first in a series of strokes a few months later that soon rendered him bed-bound. As a retired social worker, my Dad knew full well how horrendous nursing homes could be and he was very much in denial about still being able to live independently. But the writing was on the wall: at some point before too long we’d have to sell the house to pay for a nursing home, and my brother would need a new place to live. To my brother’s credit, he did his best for a few years to help take care of my Dad and do what he could to make up for the years of abusing him. My mother put in tons of research and legwork to get my brother on the waiting list for the optimal place she could find for him to live: a subsidized Section 8 apartment building overlooking The Loop, one of the St. Louis area’s prime cultural drags.

It was during this time that I did something I never imagined I could do: I forgave my brother for all he had done. He really had gotten some unlucky breaks in life, both neurologically and in repeatedly finding himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d had a tough time, much of his early cruelty had been paying forward what the world had offered him, and schizophrenia made people do wild things, or so I resolved to believe. There were flood waters under the bridge, but I tried to build the bridge anyway. I’d long since moved to New York, but when I was back in town I’d hang out with him, cook him a couple of giant cheeseburgers per week, and regularly take him out to eat. It was a fraught relationship, as he was a pathological liar almost constantly being blatantly manipulative, but his maneuverings were so clumsy that they sort of faded into white noise after a while, although occasionally I’d experience vivid flashbacks to darker times. My mother and I spent countless hours shaking our heads at my brother’s maddening behaviors. Without doubt, he had some real limitations and disabilities; equally without doubt, he shamelessly milked and exaggerated those problems in order to passive-aggressively shirk as much responsibility as possible. His sense of entitlement was roughly the size of Jupiter.

After two and half years a spot opened up at the building my brother had been on the waiting list for, and as it turned out he lucked into one of the best units in the entire high-rise: for a few hundred bucks a month he got a spacious studio on the top floor with a respectable kitchenette and a dramatic view of the Gateway Arch and the St. Louis skyline. One can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison, as his building was poorly maintained and most of his neighbors were pretty marginal, but an apartment of that size and condition with that kind of view would easily cost six or seven thousand a month in Manhattan. My mother set up for my brother a self-sustaining life on ultimate easy mode: he didn’t have to work, he didn’t have to pay taxes, all he had to do was stay on his meds, visit our Dad at his nursing home, and keep out of trouble. Doing nothing, he had more expendable income than I did.

One of the benefits of writing for Columbia University was that after a few years I generally only had to be on campus during the academic year, so I could spend a few months each year back in St. Louis visiting family. Unlike most nursing home patients, who are left alone to rot, my Dad had a cavalcade of visitors most days who gave him reason to stay alive. Every day that I was in town, I’d bring him fruit and ice cream and try not to complain too much about the MSNBC he typically had on blaring. Once Covid came along, I knew he wouldn’t last long. I last saw him the day before he passed, saying goodbye through a narrowly cracked window as I shivered in the winter cold. My Dad died of loneliness less than a year into the lockdowns, and there was nothing I could do. My brother and I grew a little closer after that, depositing some of my Dad’s ashes in a distinctive tree stump along one of his favorite hiking trails.

For a number of years I’d spend time with my brother playing video games and watching Youtube videos, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable as his apartment grew ever more cluttered and strewn with trash. To try to converse with him was to have to try to ignore the multiple cockroaches crisscrossing the wall behind him at any given moment. I don’t know if the filth and slovenliness came from sheer laziness, as all he liked to do was lay on his stained semi-collapsed mattress scrolling on his phone, or if he derived some form of comfort from hoarding garbage, but by early 2025 I no longer felt safe entering his apartment. I would still visit him downstairs and take him on errands, as his car had broken down, but the apartment had become a biohazard. And he obviously had started passing weeks and months at a time without bathing or doing laundry; often when I’d take him to lunch or to get his shot, the passenger seat would stink for days such that I couldn’t drive without windows open.

Last spring, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, so I started spending most of my time in St. Louis to help supervise her treatments. In December she fell and broke her hip, forcing me to remain in St. Louis full-time by her side to shepherd her end-of-life care. Following two hospitalizations, readers may recall, I moved her in February to an ostensibly fancy nursing home that promptly threw out my mother’s $43,000 custom dentures. The facility is run by a den of sleazy scoundrels who immediately rushed to avoid taking any responsibility, but I was successfully able to threaten them into agreeing to replace the dentures.

And then, catastrophe. On the very day my mother took an ambulance van to have her molds taken by a dentist the facility had hired to fashion replacement dentures, the facility found bed bugs in her sheets. I was utterly blindsided: the facility may be run by liars and thieves who deserve to be sued into oblivion, but they do keep things reasonably sanitary. There could be no doubt where the bed bugs had come from: my no-good brother, whom I had taken on any number of errands and brought to the facility to visit my mother on perhaps half a dozen occasions. He had to have known that he had bed bugs, there was no way he couldn’t have known, and he was smart enough to understand how easily they spread, and yet he carefully avoided ever once tipping me off. It was the most spectacular example yet of that maddening passive-aggressive question mark that always loomed over my brother’s behavior: had he failed to mention his bed bugs simply because it would have inconvenienced him for me not to drive him places, or had he deliberately given me and our mother bed bugs out of malicious resentment that had been festering for decades?

I knew in my bones that it had been primarily deliberate, that he was proud of giving us bed bugs and that he found the situation hilarious, but I couldn’t prove it when he inevitably denied ill intent. Nonetheless, I immediately disowned him and cut off all contact, forever, other than texting him as of that time when our mother has passed. And on that same day of realizing that I’d been so profoundly betrayed, the very piece of trash cracker responsible for the theft and destruction of my mother’s dentures—aggravated grand theft under Missouri law—got up in my face in front of half a dozen employees to scream that I was a filthy loser on the verge of getting banned from visiting my own mother. She knew I’d demanded that she be fired, so she clearly relished taking maximal advantage of the moment to try to maximally humiliate me. Mark my words, she will live to regret it.

And so my mother and I got placed in quarantine for a whole month; our door was kept closed, I could not leave the room other than to enter and exit the building, and aides would only enter the room after donning what looked like spacesuits. Understandably, the facility insisted that my house get inspected for bed bugs, so I called a company called Rottler that’s considered the gold standard for St. Louis-area pest control. Rottler must have had an off day, because their agent came to inspect my house and car and he assured me that I had no bed bugs, and yet I steadily grew itchier and itchier over the next few weeks. It reached the point that my arms, hands, legs, and feet were covered with dozens if not hundreds of burning welts that totally overwhelmed my immune system. I assumed my brother must have given me fleas or ticks and called Rottler again, and the second time they found a bed bug infestation in my own bed.

I’d never had bed bugs, I’m a financially comfortable Ivy Leaguer who owns property on the Upper West Side. And yet my brother, my own flesh and blood, managed to defile my inner sanctum, the place where I sleep. Rottler was able to solve the problem for nearly $2000 over the course of several weeks, but not before I acquired what seems to be permanent scarring on my hands and feet. I’m haunted by how many more innocent people my brother must have blithely infected all the times I took him places with upholstered furniture, like his social workers’ offices in the Central West End and the IHOP in Clayton, or all the subsequent riders in the Ubers he’s taken to his appointments without me as his chauffeur.

With quarantine concluded and my mother growing ever more frail, I was eager to get back to the urgent task of replacing her dentures. The dentist had informed me that she needed an oral cleaning to proceed, and the facility promised that it would have that oral cleaning done in-house, but week after week passed with the facility making flimsy excuses for why the scheduled cleaning hadn’t taken place. Blatantly, they dragged their feet in aim of making me decide that my mother was too fragile and give up on replacing her teeth, so in frustration I sent a couple of hotly worded emails threatening legal action and withheld $10,175 from a $50,000-something bill in protest: $10,000 pending the facility replacing her dentures, and $175 for a bogus late fee that was the facility’s own fault. And then the facility did something enormously shortsighted: they dispatched a greasy shitbag of an attorney to declare that I had no case, to rescind the facility’s promise of replacing the dentures, and to essentially threaten my mother’s life in cold blood if I did not immediately pay every cent. It was ostensibly a threat to evict her, but with my mother’s condition hovering between life and death that would be tantamount to murder.

With a figurative knife at my mother’s throat, I was forced to pay up and give up on the dentures. In the end, my brother got his revenge against my mother, whom he had long hated for “lying to him” that if he applied himself life might get better. And maybe that despicable lawyer had a point: it may well be that the good ol’ boy Republicans who dominate Missouri politics have the laws rigged so that a David like me has no legal chance against a corporate Goliath like his client, we’ll just have to wait and see. But what the facility failed to comprehend is that the formal courts are irrelevant in this case, as I ply my trade in the court of public opinion. This David has his trusty sling and a mountain of stones that I’ve been stockpiling every day since the facility perpetrated that fateful felony against my mother. So long as she is alive the facility has all the leverage, but when she’s gone they’re going to find that I hold their fragile reputation in my hands. Goliath is going to make a reasonable settlement, or a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs and Goliath will emerge much the worse for wear.

A couple of weeks after that contemptible attorney issued his outrageous death threat, I received a frantic call from my saintly aunt, the matriarch of my Dad’s side of the family who’s been so reliable and indispensable for both of my parents in their times of mortal need. She had just received a rambling email from my brother breaking the news that he was being evicted, had to be out in less than a week, and that he urgently needed a place to stay. My aunt said that she respected that I’d disowned him, but asked that I at least look at the email and go down to the building to see if I could talk them into reconsidering or at least giving him more time to move out. What she forwarded me was a florid and preposterous narrative that my brother had been viciously hounded and persecuted by sociopathic bullies in management holding him to impossible standards in a diabolical scheme to gentrify the building.

And so I found myself walking into his building for the very last time to try to see if I could offer management the proverbial blank check to reverse their decision and restore the arrangement my mother had worked so hard to secure. To my intense distaste, my brother happened to be waiting in the lobby and had the gall to try to start a friendly chat as if he hadn’t annihilated our relationship. I just raised my hand at his face and said “No.” Inside the building’s office, I met the management team that my brother had cast as somewhere between Nurse Ratched and Heinrich Himmler, and it turned out that they were polite, competent, reasonable professionals, including a social worker. They acknowledged that the building had experienced a bed bug outbreak, and noted that they had been able to spray and fumigate almost all problem areas in the building, but that the exterminators couldn’t effectively treat my brother’s apartment with all the trash on the floor giving pests places to hide, so each time they’d wipe out bed bugs from the rest of the building the pests would radiate back out from my brother’s apartment to reinfect the building all over again. They explained that they were not gentrifying the building, but housing residents in motels for a couple of months for the building to receive much-needed maintenance and for everyone’s units to be renovated.

For eight months they’d been trying to get my brother to pick up his trash so they could sanitize his apartment: first they cajoled, then they begged, then they warned, and then they threatened him, and each and every time he promised he’d take care of it and then returned upstairs to not lift a finger. There was no amount of money I could offer them to reverse their decision or give him any more time, and they were frankly thrilled to wash their hands of him. I would have preferred if they had been willing to change their minds, but the truth is that I’d have done the exact same thing in their position.

So, for eight months my brother had been fully aware both that he had a raging bed bug infestation and that he was on a collision course with an eviction notice. I saw him dozens of times and he sent me hundreds of stupid texts, and yet not once did he mention either of those mounting crises. Had he simply told me that he was in a jam and removing all that trash was too overwhelming a task for him, I would have grumbled and yelled at him a little bit, and then I would have hired a cleaning crew and Rottler to get his apartment back in the range of habitable. Instead, he chose to stay strategically silent for months when he knew it was only a matter of time before he’d be evicted, and he even chose to wait several days after he received his formal notice of eviction before emailing my aunt. The evidence incontrovertibly proves that he wanted to be evicted, and that he deliberately waited to ambush my aunt—and by extension me—in order to give us as little maneuverability as possible.

Why would he do this? Had my brother warned me or my aunt that eviction was on the table, one of us would have gone to management to sort out what was going on and arranged for his apartment to be cleared of trash. But that would have left him answerable to the management staff that he despised and still subject to the occasional unit inspections that he resented. Had he gotten in touch with my aunt sooner, that would have given her more time to work with his state social worker to find him a place at a homeless shelter or group home. He felt he was way too good for that. My aunt and I are both busy and preoccupied: she, running a small business and recovering from injuries from a recent car accident, and me spending 9-10 hours a day every day at my mother’s side. My brother selfishly wagered in his months of scheming that, since any apartment we could find for him would almost certainly cost more than his entire disability check, we’d end up throwing up our hands and he’d either move into my aunt’s house or, as I suspect was his real goal, manage to slither into my house so I’d have to pick up after him for the rest of his life. He thought he was playing chess when he can hardly play tic-tac-toe.

After the stunts he pulled, there was no way I was going to bail my brother out. My suggestion was that he try his luck on the streets; Fredo betrays the family, then Fredo deserves whatever’s coming to him. But my aunt doesn’t carry the same decades of baggage and begrudgingly stepped up to help. First, she placed him in a dingy motel until he ran though the last of his money. Then she very reluctantly took him in for a number of days, insisting he bathe and making him spend all day outside on the porch and spraying his temporary room three times a day in addition to daily fogging. I am sure my brother assumed that he would at very least be able to stay with my aunt for months on end, but she made it clear that he had to leave as soon as possible. After a week or two working with my brother’s social worker, she managed to find a south St. Louis group home willing to take him in despite the eviction on his record, and off he went.

I will never see him again, but my aunt showed me some pictures she snapped of my brother’s new residence. It looks as grim as can be, just a few hairs away from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Whereas the apartment he threw away provided him a fridge, an oven, his own bathroom, and a spectacular view, the group home provides a small austere room, a communal bathroom, no view, and three meals a day that are apparently disgusting. He’d made some cool friends at his old digs, but I’m told that he hates both the residents and staff of his new home where he’s likely to spend the rest of his life. He used to have hundreds of dollars of expendable income that he would squander ordering stupid shit off the internet that only ended up more trash on his floor, but the new place collects all but $50 of his monthly check. The damned fool is hoist by his own petard.

I realize now how badly I erred in trying to be generous with him over the years. Generosity only works when it’s small gestures offered intermittently; any more than that, and the recipients tend to start feeling resentful and entitled to ever more largesse. My brother liked the cheeseburgers and free rides, perhaps part of him loved me in some sense, but a bigger part of him hated me ever more for making him feel small. It would have been better had I never forgiven him and just let sleeping dogs lie. Certainly, my mother would have had her dentures back by now had I cut off ties long ago.

I’ve been using the term “my brother” as a matter of convenience, but the reality is that I don’t have a brother anymore, if I ever did. The lying, cheating, manipulating fuck-up over in that south St. Louis dump is no relation of mine, and dead to me. After forty years of abuse and betrayal, it is one of the great blessings of my life to finally become an only child.

About The Exile

I was pleased to recently review Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control in The Washington Examiner Magazine, which ended up being the second review that I wrote. Upon concluding the book, I found it to be of such staggering significance that I had no idea how I could encapsulate it in what the magazine realistically had room to run, so I decided to just start writing until I felt that I had done the book justice, and couldn’t stop until I reached the nearly 5400 words below. Catharsis complete, I could turn to the more concise Examiner review.

The 2003 documentary The Fog of War, tracing the career and late-life musings of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, has become an ever more fascinating artifact as the decades go by. At the time of its initial release, it was difficult as an undergraduate not to see the film in the context of the “Dubya” administration’s rash invasion of Iraq and blundering attempt to build a western-style democracy from the rubble. At that moment, however badly McNamara had erred decades earlier, he came across as a wise breath of fresh air detailing his mistakes so that subsequent generations could avoid them.

But twenty-odd years later, the film reads more as stubborn rationalization from a vain old man refusing to take stock of his actual legacy. McNamara was a brilliant mind who seems to have basically had good intentions, but also a brittle ideologue enslaved by the technocratic fantasy that, given enough data, the best and brightest whiz kids can engineer a rational, enlightened global society. Alas, all humans, even the more talented ones, are frail and fallible, and hubristic overreach is inherent in the DNA of managerial technocracy as a sort of Original Sin.

A parade of such unappetizing characters feature in journalist and U.S. Army combat veteran Jacob Siegel’s bracing, upsetting, terrifying new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, which traces the inexorable rise of authoritarian managerialism back to the rise of bureaucratized nation-states in the 19^th century, with intellectual antecedents stretching back centuries. Vastly expanding upon an essay Siegel wrote for Tablet magazine in 2023 that went mega-viral, the narrative details how the march of technology has enabled ideologues and opportunists alike to manipulate and herd electorates in preordained directions about which they have little to no say.

“It made no sense to wait if one believed, as they did, that the correct answers were already available through technical calculation and the empirical method,” Siegel writes of the late nineteenth century progressive movement. “The real obstacle to implementing these advances was the public itself, that teeming lump of superstitions, which democracy had naively granted a veto over the experts. Propaganda provided the solution.”

For those who believe in limited, representative, and constitutional government, the stunningly self-righteous presidency of Woodrow Wilson proved catastrophic. With typical moralizing imperiousness, once Wilson determined that the United States should enter The Great War he dealt with critics not as fellow citizens with different points of view but as enemies of the state who deserved to be censored and even arrested. Wilson’s key mechanisms for controlling information were both established in 1917: the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a hybrid civilian-military bureau founded as America’s first full-fledged state propaganda organ, and the Espionage Act, sweeping secrecy and censorship legislation giving the executive branch vast authority to censor and persecute people considered problematic.

“With the advent of machine-age capitalism, leading progressives saw the U.S. Constitution as an outdated relic,” Siegel writes. “Wilson dismissed it as ‘a lot of nonsense’ talk ‘about the inalienable rights of the individual’ and other manner of ‘mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation.’ He opposed the principle of divided government, which was designed to act as a check against tyranny, as an impediment to technocratic efficiency.”

The war provided Wilson and his progressive supporters pretext to override the messiness of democratic governance. “War dispensed with the burdens of educating ignorant citizens to get them to support particular policies,” Siegel notes. “Galvanized by the national security threat and the need to support frontline troops, the masses could simply be marched in formation toward the proper beliefs… All the cloying articles of democracy that slowed the movement of progress could be swept away.”

With the end of World War I and the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding promising “A Return to Normalcy,” the excesses of the Wilson years appeared to have receded, but they hadn’t. “Wilson’s greater legacy endured,” Siegel notes. “The American propaganda complex triumphed by outlasting both the temporary state of emergency and the postwar backlash. The CPI was shuttered, but the functions of propaganda, censorship, and publicity diffused throughout countless government offices, public relations agencies, military and intelligence bureaus, and advertising firms.”

With the development of increasingly sophisticated computing machines during World War II and the Cold War, vainglorious technocrats’ ambitions ballooned yet further into a sort of idolatry of pure information that fed fantasies of engineering away human folly for a new golden age. “With the dawn of informational power, shooting wars did not disappear, but the military’s focus shifted from coordinated attack and devastating violence to managing systems of information and narrative control,” Siegel explains. By the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy’s campaign had engaged a firm to digitally analyze and predict voter behaviors, as if human beings’ social existence could be understood and altered in the same sense as wartime tactics. “The digitization of politics, while just as powerful as the atomic bomb, would allegedly be a peaceful event, perfecting the spirit of democracy,” the author writes.

Vietnam proved a prime setting in which, not for the first or last time, arrogant technocrats would fly too close to the sun. Officials like Robert S. McNamara hoped to achieve military victory as much by winning Vietnamese peasants’ “hearts and minds” as conventional military tactics. “Counterinsurgency revived a progressive, technocratic impulse to civilize warfare, by rationalizing its aims and directing them towards worthy goals like redressing poverty,” Siegel argues. “Most of the experts who led Kennedy’s war effort were sophisticated thinkers, not chest-thumping militarists or narrow-minded bigots. To them, the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement at home fit together as pieces in a larger project of modernization and rational reform.” But, as rational as that approach may have appeared on the surface, the reality was that the military’s insatiable appetite for information incentivized the indiscriminate collection of data ranging from valid to irrelevant to pure junk, and leaders’ approach bent towards managing the war as opposed to winning it. As has become familiar in more modern times, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

“Vietnam pioneered a self-perpetuating system of technological super-surveillance,” Siegel writes. “The system failed to achieve its own aims, underperforming by any objective standard, yet grew inordinately larger and more powerful as a result of that failure.” And it’s continued to metastasize ever since, despite intermittent organic resistance from the public, because the notion of rational governance administered by ever-more-perfect machines has appealed to dreamers across the ideological spectrum. “By the end of the 1960s, it was clear that the anti-technocratic backlash had done little to stop the expansion of centralized databases and technological surveillance beyond leaving a record of warnings,” the author notes.

In the 1970s, faced with public outrage about Watergate and the Vietnam War, the U.S. Senate convened the “Church committee,” named for Idaho Senator Frank Church, to investigate security agency abuses dating back to the Truman years. The sixteen-month investigation uncovered a vast sea of unconstitutional misconduct ranging from mass spying upon American citizens to far more dystopian programs. “Mirroring tactics used by the Soviet secret police and borrowing counterinsurgency tools developed to fight foreign enemies, US intelligence agencies ran “black ops” on American citizens,” Siegel writes.

There was the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s notorious COINTELPRO program, which surveilled people considered subversive and used whatever dirt it found to sabotage those people’s lives and careers. There was the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Mockingbird, which aimed to steer news coverage in both the United States and abroad, feeding propaganda and even entire prewritten stories to outlets including The New York Times. And then there was the CIA’s MKUltra program. “Experiments carried out under the name MKUltra entailed forcibly drugging and attempting to brainwash unwitting subjects in what was formally classified as ‘the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification,’” Siegel explains. “It saw human beings as essentially blank slates who could be programmed by the right cocktail of drugs and psychological techniques, into ‘a wholly dependent controlled tool—a value-free spying machine disguised in a human body.’”

Outrage against these dystopian excesses led to demands for reform and the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act establishing a FISA court, but Siegel argues it was a fundamentally toothless change: “The judges who sat on the FISA court lacked the national security credentials to vet the claims coming before them. In practice, when officials with high-level security clearances justified a spying request as a matter of urgent national security, the court deferred to their expertise—which is how the signature reform of the intelligence community, which is still held up as a model of effective oversight, turned into a rubber stamp.”

With the emergence of relatively compact mainframe computers, and personal computers by the late ’70s, the possibilities of mass surveillance and control began to swell yet further, trending toward ubiquity. And with the end of the Cold War bringing slashed military budgets, the information warfare approach promised to do more with less, and in more hygienic fashion. “The doctrine rested on the belief that human societies are glorified ant colonies,” Siegel observes. “The enemy’s mind did not possess any inherent essence or spark of a soul. It did not even seem to contain the chaos and incompleteness that mathematics and quantum physics had discovered at the beginning of the century were present in all things. Rather, it operated as a matrix of inputs that could be mapped and exploited.”

And with the arrival of so many new toys came a broad cultural forgetting, Siegel writes. “Remarkably, the technological dimension of America’s failure in Vietnam seemed to have been wiped from the collective memory in only a few decades. Popular culture replaced the image of Harvard-educated generals demanding more data with the iconic lone soldier, John Rambo, exorcising his personal demons. The war was no longer an indictment of America’s ruling class, which had planned and led it, but a source of individual trauma and shame for the mostly working- and middle-class soldiers who fought in it.”

Drunk with hubris at the United States becoming a unipolar superpower, and the supposed End of History, managerial technocrats embraced the notion of globalism, that all of humanity could become cogs in a well-oiled administrative machine transcending obsolete national borders. Siegel points to a 1996 RAND Corporation report entitled “Strategic Information Warfare,” which “suggested that the capacity for intelligent individuals to make any distinctions based on their own senses was disappearing. They would have to rely on the superior calculations of information machines that were built to navigate a borderless world.” Despite all the triumphal humanitarian rhetoric, Siegel suggests that there was more than a whiff of self-interest involved. “Computers had not demanded the eradication of national borders or the construction of a single global marketplace. The claim that information required financial deregulation or unfettered access to goods and labor did not come from machines. It was an ideology that served a particular constituency—knowledge-class professionals and their political representatives—in the name of a global good.” Part of that ended up involving chasing near-term profits in effectively relocating much of the U.S. manufacturing base to China.

Following the horrors of 9/11, more managerial opportunism bloomed like algae in a stagnant pond: the terrorist attacks were blamed on the vague catch-all term of “intelligence failure.” That was ominous, Siegel argues: “There was no question that a terrible failure had taken place. Yet, the problem with the sweeping indictment is that it upheld a misconception about intelligence. It presumed that there was something like an impenetrable intelligence system and that failure represented a deviation from that ideal. But that way of thinking mistook quantity for quality and process for outcome… the rhetoric shifted responsibility for the breach of America’s defenses from particular individuals to an amorphous process.”

After 9/11, with a vast windfall of new spending, managerial self-indulgence reached the point of the absurd, if it hadn’t already. A nuclear physicist named John Poindexter, who’d been forced to resign as Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser due to involvement with the Iran-Contra affair, was appointed to head up the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, designed as a “database of all databases” to enable seamless and unprecedented surveillance of the entire population right down to their financial transactions. The office was headquartered in a replica of the bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation that the Pentagon had commissioned years earlier, complete with doors that made ‘whooshing’ sounds. TIA “sought to anticipate signs of political instability and impending violence as if they were seismic waves that could be detected by a well-calibrated machine,” Siegel writes. “Plato described how the ancient Greeks studied the entrails of birds to divine the future in a ritual called augury. Americans harvested the innards of their databases with the same intention.” When a backlash ensued, Congress officially shut down TIA after two years, but to little effect. “When Congress ended its authorization, U.S. officials who answered to no one simply changed its branding,” Siegel notes. “The signage was scrapped as the program quietly migrated to different government offices and out into the private sphere.”

The sloppy open-endedness of the George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror engorged messianic technocracy. The unipolar United States would take out all the terrorists and all the states that sponsor terrorism, extend democracy across the Middle East, and lead a reformation of Islam removing all jihadist elements. “As the sole superpower after the Cold War, the United States was considered by much of the American ruling class, including its policymakers in Washington, to possess almost unlimited power to transform the provinces,” Siegel writes. “Beneath this lay the implicit premise that all societies are basically alike, only at different stages in the process of universal development.” And so, inevitably, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became quagmires much as Vietnam had been, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumseld echoing Robert S. McNamara in impotently demanding ever more data to conjure up a technological deus ex machina.

Furnishing and processing that endless flood of miscellaneous data were not just members of Washington’s national security apparatus, but Silicon Valley tech companies that made billions conducting surveillance and data analytics. “As the war on terror dragged on, there would be efforts to blame its failures on the American public, which had supposedly been whipped into a war frenzy and acted on emotion,” Siegel contends. “But that exercise in blame shifting is belied by the duration and aims of the conflict. It was not hot-blooded middle Americans out for vengeance who kept sending soldiers to Afghanistan for two decades to participate in nation-building initiatives. That was a project of political and military experts who saw more to gain from extending the war, while misleading the public about its progress, than from bringing it to an end.”

The steamrolling cult of personality that brought Barack Obama to the White House portrayed the candidate as a sort of demigod: the dazzling combination of Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Martin Luther King whose only flaw was that sometimes he could be too smart and logical, like Mr. Spock. Obama was a deft politician adept at painting himself as all things to all people, but underneath the masks was a moralizing ruthlessness that paralleled that of Woodrow Wilson nearly a century beforehand. “Obama’s unique vision was to see how the new digital environment presented an opportunity to fuse public and corporate power together in a structure of governance that would appear to be everywhere, at once intimately connected to voters’ daily lives and able to be overseen by his party’s elite cadres,” Siegel illustrates.

In short, Obama strove to transform the United States into a one-party state ruled top-down by an alliance of Democratic Party power brokers and Silicon Valley oligarchs. Saint Barack “would use the bully pulpit to push Americans toward accepting views on contentious subjects, like the health-care system, climate change, or the root causes of Islamic terrorism, that aligned with the interests of his political party,” the author argues. “Informing the public meant to him roughly the same thing it had meant to Wilson. It was an instrument of indoctrination, useful to promote acceptance of decisions that had already been made by unelected administrators serving the party of expertise.”

Obama heralded a fundamental sea-change in the nature of the Democratic party: gone were any last trappings of FDR’s ragtag New Deal coalition, replaced by well-to-do professionals in the “knowledge economy” and clients dependent on federal payouts. Ever since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, “an extensive latticework of intersecting nonprofits and NGOs” had gained power over traditional grassroots movements and advocacy. “The nonprofits provided America’s wealthiest citizens and corporations with a way to distribute largesse and influence the political system through tax-exempt cutouts,” Siegel observes. “Their value was independent of the results they produced. Employing millions of people, the nonprofit industry functioned as a jobs program for the educated professional classes who could be mobilized as a voting bloc.”

Significantly, the proliferation of such nonprofits depended on perpetuating the very problems they were supposedly created to solve. “Financed by Democratic Party donors, the nonprofits filled a para-governmental role, in which they served the interests of the party and its donors while avoiding oversight,” Siegel explains. “Solving entrenched problems, assuming solutions were even possible, was not really in anyone’s interest.” The nonprofit-industrial complex accelerated the superseding of regional elites, with variegated perspectives, with a single basically homogenous ruling class who’d passed through the same cultural and institutional bottlenecks. “As a whole, the class adhered to the tenets of progressive technocracy,” the author writes. “Yet there was nothing that its members believed in more fervently than their own providential destiny to rule, regardless of their failures.”

The increasingly cozy revolving door between the White House and Silicon Valley enabled progressive technocrats to impose broadly unpopular social views dominant among elite circles via unlimited and arbitrary ‘content moderation’ online, seamlessly marginalizing the sensibilities of hundreds of millions via a “whole of society” approach that “circumvented the normal legislative process by seizing the levers of the digital system to enact sweeping policy changes… like a phone automatically updating its operating code.” Siegel notes that the term “whole of society” had originated with missions for nation building in the third world: “The fact that U.S. officials were now embracing a mechanism designed for missions in East Africa and Afghanistan suggested that they had come to see their own country through the developmental prism as a project in need of expert-led rebuilding.”

Indeed, the author continues, “In the ‘whole of’ sense, society now described a select set of stakeholder organizations brought together to execute state policy. The term became a euphemism for powerful institutions, including banks, universities, and social media platforms that did not represent the public but controlled its access to resources like financial services, social connection, and professional accreditation.”

The dystopian implications appeared unlimited: “No borders could demarcate and contain the information empire. Its ideology was globalitarian, in Paul Virilio’s phrase, fusing the classic imperial ambition to rule territory with the twentieth-century totalitarian states’ ambition to dominate the inner life of its individual subjects.”

And yet, even after Edward Snowden’s devastating revelations of unlimited data exploitation by the emergent new nexus of power, what was left of the establishmentarian press took essentially no interest in holding arbitrary power to account. “By the end of the Wilson administration,” Siegel notes, “its excesses had alienated many of the progressive journalists who had been loyal supporters. No comparable period of public reckoning and reflection followed the Obama presidency… politics ultimately mattered less than a shared sense of cultural identity and class interest. For journalists and other members of the new American ruling class, Obama would always be ‘one of us.’”

Such was the stark presumptuousness of the Obama era that elite technocrats imagined they could dictate the beliefs of hundreds of millions of citizens through media manipulation and domestic information operations based on those designed for wartime enemies. “Controlling the narrative promised authorities a cheaper, faster means of minting legitimacy. And for a while it seemed to provide that, until the currency began to crash,” Siegel writes. With the administrative state having abandoned any credible claim to democratic legitimacy, the disenfranchised electorate turned in desperation to populism in the form of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Democratic power brokers managed to smother the Sanders campaign in its crib (and Sanders eventually revealed that he was but a technocrat in democratic socialist clothing) but they were largely too arrogant and incompetent to realize that Trump might actually win, although the Clinton campaign did work alongside rogue FBI agents to subvert the intelligence process and manufacture insinuations that Trump was working for the Russians. The appropriate response to Trump’s shock victory would have been for elite technocrats to do some soul-searching about their tyrannical overreach and to try cultivating a sense of shame, but they proved incapable of that. “Like aristocracies through the ages, they considered their authority inborn and inviolable, unconnected to the record of their performance,” Siegel writes. “The fact that the populist challenge was both legal and highly democratic did not affect their view that it was illegitimate. If democracy allowed such a threat to arise, then the rules of democracy would have to be changed.”

In the waning days of the Obama administration, resentful of the electorate and convinced that Trump represented one last four-year bump in the road before Democrats would forever hold power in the United States roughly equivalent to that of the Chinese Communist Party, Obama and leading Democrats conspired to kneecap the new administration before it even entered office. The Global Engagement Center, an office recently established under the State Department ostensibly to counter foreign disinformation, was expanded into a “whole-of-society campaign to align the most powerful actors in the public and private sectors with the policies of the ruling party… [which] effectively created an official government office for coordinating the resistance to Trump,” Siegel explains.

The administration didn’t stop there. In his final weeks in office Obama personally ordered a bogus intelligence community assessment of Trump to advance the false Russian collusion narrative that shills like Rachel Maddow could be counted upon to hype. On the same day that snake oil was released, Obama’s chief of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson unilaterally seized control of U.S. election infrastructure for the administrative state with the dubious and overblown rationale of preventing Russian cyberattacks. Perhaps the Russians really were plotting to subvert American elections, but elite technocrats beat them to it.

Hillary Clinton lost to a loudmouth game show host because of thermostatic reaction to Obama’s overreaches and that she was an unappealing candidate with an off-putting air of entitlement who ran a lazy data-driven campaign that barely bothered to get out of Brooklyn. Instead of accepting those hard facts and going back to the drawing board, progressive technocrats opted to blame social media for not censoring Trump and his voters enough. To Mark Zuckerberg’s credit, he did briefly resist the massive pressure campaign to introduce a censorship regime to Facebook, but within weeks of the election Obama strongarmed him into abandoning his former commitment to neutrality on the platform in favor of a new focus on fighting so-called “fake news.”

Conveniently volunteering to help Facebook police the information space was an ostensibly non-partisan NGO called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), in fact a front group for the Democratic Party, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and Big Philanthropy. “Unconstrained by congressional oversight or the Constitution, the IFCN did not require any statutory authority to pressure a company like Facebook into accepting its edicts,” Siegel writes. “Rather, the large tech platforms sought to inoculate themselves from government regulatory pressure that would affect their profits and from the threat of lawsuits from the NGO sector by accepting the authority of the fact-checkers… What the IFCN offered was not fact-checkers in the traditional sense, but a cadre of compliance officers who would scour the Internet, flagging anything that threatened the interests of the ruling party.”

A parallel effort focused on bullying Twitter into advancing the false Russiagate narrative, including by banning or throttling accounts purportedly spreading Russian propaganda. Twitter’s internal investigation determined that the allegations were untrue and the accounts being targeted were legitimate human users who happened to lean right. Nonetheless, Twitter executives kept that fact private, normalizing social media as a playground for federal agents to manipulate discourse, spread propaganda, and encourage Americans to be hateful and fearful of their fellow citizens who happened to have voted for a different candidate.

“Russiagate was not a tragedy but a crime against the country,” Siegel writes. “Disinformation was both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up, a weapon that doubled as a disguise… By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning tools of war against American citizens.”

A vast and lavishly funded counter-disinformation industry arose virtually overnight, ostensibly aimed not only at eliminating disinformation and misinformation, but also a new category known as malinformation, which comprised statements that were true but delivered with malicious intent, as if that could be objectively quantified. Cynical as the industry sounds, Siegel argues that “most anti-disinformation crusaders were not cynical opportunists and power-mad schemers. Following the social and career incentives of the knowledge class, they became earnest believers in their mandate to regulate the public’s thought and speech. In the moralizing style of their politics, they resembled a modern temperance movement.”

By 2020, federal and quasi-federal pressure had long since decisively tilted the digital media playing field to disfavor conservatives and especially the populist right, and then operatives got the chance to exploit the Covid crisis to systematically loosen ballot integrity standards in key states. When the Trump campaign dropped its October Surprise that fall, with the New York Post reporting that Joe and Hunter Biden were implicated in a serious corruption scandal regarding crooked deals with foreign governments, the counter-disinformation industry leapt to unprecedented action. Not only did the vast majority of legacy press outlets totally ignore the scoop, but social media platforms systematically censored and suppressed the story online, going so far as to delete links to the story in users’ private direct messages. Twitter even suspended the Post’s account for daring to retweet its own accurate reporting.

“An influential segment of the technocratic elite appeared to see censorship as a noble act,” Siegel suggests. “To them, the public had forfeited its privilege to think for itself by making irresponsible decisions like voting for Donald Trump. Censorship might have certain unfortunate connotations, but it was necessary to protect democracy from the people.”

Was the 2020 election “stolen,” as many MAGA diehards allege? The question isn’t answerable, as it’s impossible to quantify to what extent censorship and propaganda shaped voters’ decisions, and there will never be definitive numbers for the amount of illegal ballot harvesting enabled by mass voting through the mail. But it’s safe to say that it was indeed rigged to some extent, and that Joe Biden entered office with a big fat asterisk. That likely explains why the administration leaned so hard into defining the January 6 riot at the Capitol as an “insurrection” rather than a protest gone bad: the real insurrection had taken place among elite technocrats throughout the previous four years, and proved an infinitely more salient threat to constitutional government. Alas, that insurrection was just getting started.

The pandemic in particular enabled an orgy of ever more arbitrary abuses, with wildly shifting rationales justifying the day’s top-down directives but subject to reversal at any notice. “Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science,” Siegel writes. “The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.”

The information regime revealed itself to be a new kind of sovereign. “An effort to extinguish the public’s unruly beliefs had spawned a single digital apparatus of law, punishment, culture, and government that policed the political arena and crouched inside its subjects’ inner lives, where algorithms worked to invisibly edit their desires,” Siegel describes. Without the slightest compunction, the Biden administration demanded ever more surveillance, censorship, and control. “Individuals accused of spreading misinformation were treated as vectors of disease, like pathogens who needed to be isolated from their peers and rooted out.”

And yet the tireless efforts to stamp out dissent did not lead to social harmony and support for the ruling party, but the rolling collapse of the establishment’s credibility and legitimacy. “Perhaps it was not a coincidence that the crusaders against disinformation tended to come from fields like counterterrorism, journalism, academia, and epidemiology that shared records of failure in recent years,” Siegel speculates. “If information control failed to achieve its putative goals, it did keep many people employed, offering them back some of the authority that their professions had squandered.”

In seeking to manufacture a new, tidier reality out of whole cloth, with zero regard for the electorate’s sensibilities, elite technocracy comprehensively discredited itself and shattered the nation’s ability to agree upon basic facts. “As the ruling party separated itself from the nation at large and pursued divisive and unpopular goals, it lost not only the consent of the governed but its tether to a shared reality,” Siegel writes.

The first major crack in the firmament of the information state was Elon Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter in 2022, ending the disinformation industry’s monopoly on public discourse and enabling a furious backlash that had been gathering like a storm. Soon, the Twitter Files revealed what the ruling class had inflicted upon those they considered their subjects. “Opening up Twitter’s internal records presented concrete proof of systematic public-private collusion to censor or otherwise influence public discourse on nearly all of the most contentious political issues of the past decade,” Siegel explains. “They presented a starkly revealing portrait of how familiar institutions secretly colluded to control public opinion and engineer the political arena.”

Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance demonstrating his diminishment once and for all, despite the insistence of the mainstream press that he was sharper than ever, further torpedoed whatever shreds of credibility the information state still retained, and Kamala Harris was not a skilled or substantive enough candidate to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. When Donald Trump reentered office in 2025, he acted swiftly to demolish the centralized mechanisms of controlling discourse. “By mid-April, the administration had mostly dismantled the enormous counter-disinformation machine that Obama had set in motion nine years earlier as he left the White House.” And yet, Siegel notes, “much of the technical infrastructure, while dormant, remained fundamentally intact.”

“The Internet remained an arena of mass surveillance and collective psychosis,” the author writes, and even though the government was no longer directing social media companies’ use of algorithms, “those platforms remained venues for continuous propaganda and information operations, which ensured that public life remained a hostile and paranoid place and preserved the tempting possibility of a future public-private fusion.”

Elon Musk did not purchase Twitter out of the goodness of his heart, at least not exclusively, but because he had much to gain from owning Twitter (renamed X) as a vast living trove of information. “What all the posting on X added up to finally was more communication, more information, feeding into the same digital maw. In this case, however, the maw was Musk’s, and he was using the data for the same purpose as every other ambitious tech CEO and government the world over at that time: to train artificial intelligence.”

Siegel concludes with a warning: humanity may have won a bit of ephemeral breathing room from algorithmic total control, but governments and tech companies alike are racing to “planetary AI that will absorb all existing knowledge” and enable novel forms of control not yet imagined. “From the rubble of the old information state, the outline of a new one takes shape.”

Next: Scar Tissue

Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

For the most part, I relished my eight years as staff writer for Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. I hadn’t taken a real STEM course since high school, but it was deeply satisfying to help world-class scientists and engineers — brilliant at so many things, but not communication — explain and emphasize the exciting implications of their very boring incremental research. For my first number of years working there, beginning in 2013, Columbia Engineering was essentially apolitical, a most refreshing contrast to the strident dogmatism running rampant almost everywhere else on campus.

But by 2017, that was changing: the winds of woke had become a hurricane, and more and more of my assignments were churning out propaganda about climate change and the imperative of weaning the country off fossil fuels. Worst of all was having to cover Columbia’s annual “Data Science Day,” in which Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, would deliver self-aggrandizing utopian keynote addresses in between carefully choreographed panel discussions of faculty from across the university, pandering for grants and media exposure.

Increasingly, the impeccably credentialed experts promised to harness algorithms and artificial intelligence to automatically impose an indisputable vision of “social justice” determined outside of the democratic process. No longer would the backward bigots in Tulsa, Omaha, and Cleveland have a say in our democratic society; instead, expert “stakeholders” in Washington, New York, Boston, and the Bay Area would magnanimously shepherd “our democracy” and protect it from the ignorant masses.

So it was with a disgusted sense of recognition that I devoured journalist Jacob Siegel’s disturbing new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, an immediate contender for book of the year and likely of the decade. A U.S. Army combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Siegel traces the seemingly inexorable rise of authoritarian managerialism to the emergence of bureaucratized nation-states in the late 19th century, with dreams and theorizing stretching back centuries. Vastly expanding upon an essay Siegel wrote for Tablet magazine in 2023 that went mega-viral, the narrative details how the march of technology has enabled ideologues and opportunists to manipulate and attempt to herd electorates.

The suffocating paternalism that typified President Barack Obama’s second term in particular had its antecedents in the late 19th-century progressive movement and in the imperiously moralizing presidency of Woodrow Wilson. “It made no sense to wait if one believed, as they did, that the correct answers were already available through technical calculation and the empirical method,” Siegel writes of the early progressives, though his description is equally applicable to the Obama and Biden administrations. “The real obstacle to implementing these advances was the public itself, that teeming lump of superstitions, which democracy had naively granted a veto over the experts. Propaganda provided the solution.”

During World War I, the Wilson administration pioneered a federal propaganda apparatus that never really went away despite the successor Harding administration’s promises of a “return to normalcy.” Instead, Siegel writes, “the functions of propaganda, censorship, and publicity diffused throughout countless government offices, public relations agencies, military and intelligence bureaus, and advertising firms.” During World War II and then with the rapid evolution of computers during the Cold War, elite technocrats lapsed into a sort of idolatry of pure information that fed fantasies of engineering away human error for a new golden age.

Vietnam proved a disastrous crucible for elite technocrats’ vainglorious hubris. Supposed “whiz kids” such as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara were dead certain that, given enough data, the best and the brightest could manufacture a rational and enlightened global society. They would win in Vietnam as much by capturing peasants’ “hearts and minds” as through conventional warfare. But, as rational as that approach may have appeared on the surface, the reality was that the military’s insatiable appetite for information incentivized the indiscriminate collection of data ranging from valid to irrelevant to pure junk, and leaders’ approach bent toward managing the war as opposed to winning it, leading eventually to humiliating defeat.

“Vietnam pioneered a self-perpetuating system of technological super-surveillance,” Siegel writes. “The system failed to achieve its own aims, underperforming by any objective standard, yet grew inordinately larger and more powerful as a result of that failure.” Backlash to Vietnam and Watergate led in the 1970s to the “Church Committee” exposing decades of horrifying abuses from U.S. intelligence agencies and to the establishment of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts installing some modicum of oversight.

But, the author argues, the reforms were cosmetic: “In practice, when officials with high-level security clearances justified a spying request as a matter of urgent national security, the court deferred to their expertise—which is how the signature reform of the intelligence community, which is still held up as a model of effective oversight, turned into a rubber stamp.”

With the end of the Cold War bringing slashed military budgets, the information warfare approach promised to do more with less, and in a more hygienic fashion. Then 9/11 happened, and was blamed on the vague yet expansive notion of “intelligence failure,” leading to vast sums of money getting thrown at technocrats promising to protect the homeland via unprecedented surveillance. Furnishing and processing that endless flood of miscellaneous data were not just members of Washington’s national security apparatus, but also Silicon Valley tech companies that made billions conducting surveillance and data analytics.

Riding a wave of public outrage against President George W. Bush’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama surged into office with a Wilson-esque agenda of “fundamentally transforming the United States” into a one-party state ruled top-down by an alliance between Democratic Party brokers and Silicon Valley oligarchs. “Obama’s unique vision was to see how the new digital environment presented an opportunity to fuse public and corporate power together in a structure of governance that would appear to be everywhere, at once intimately connected to voters’ daily lives and able to be overseen by his party’s elite cadres,” Siegel explains.

Chummy collusion between the White House and Silicon Valley enabled progressive technocrats to impose broadly unpopular policies via unlimited and arbitrary “content moderation” online, seamlessly marginalizing the sensibilities of hundreds of millions via a “whole of society” approach that “circumvented the normal legislative process by seizing the levers of the digital system to enact sweeping policy changes… like a phone automatically updating its operating code,” Siegel writes.

Yet, the press evinced little interest in holding Obama to account for his unconstitutional conduct. “By the end of the Wilson administration,” Siegel notes, “its excesses had alienated many of the progressive journalists who had been loyal supporters. No comparable period of public reckoning and reflection followed the Obama presidency … politics ultimately mattered less than a shared sense of cultural identity and class interest.” In turn, elite Democrats complacently assumed that they’d scored an indefinite lock on the White House and thus the Supreme Court.

The proper response to Donald Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 presidential election would have been for leading progressives to engage in some soul-searching about Obama’s abuses of power, to acknowledge that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate who’d run a lazy campaign, and to get back to the drawing board to win back the median American voter. Instead, they chose to blame Clinton’s defeat on social media not censoring people enough. “Like aristocracies through the ages, they considered their authority inborn and inviolable, unconnected to the record of their performance,” Siegel writes. “The fact that the populist challenge was both legal and highly democratic did not affect their view that it was illegitimate. If democracy allowed such a threat to arise, then the rules of democracy would have to be changed.”

In the waning weeks of his administration, Obama conspired with senior Democrats to kneecap the Trump administration before it even entered office, and Obama personally ordered a bogus intelligence community assessment to advance the false narrative that Trump was working for the Russians. That it wasn’t true didn’t mean that control of both the social and legacy media echo chambers couldn’t generate enough hype to make it feel true to many millions for many years. “Russiagate was not a tragedy but a crime against the country,” Siegel writes. “Disinformation was both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up, a weapon that doubled as a disguise … By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning tools of war against American citizens.”

And yet that effrontery sowed the seeds of the regime’s downfall. Supercharging paranoia and undermining Americans’ shared sense of reality ultimately only undermined elite technocrats’ credibility and legitimacy. The dirty tricks only ensured the populists’ return. Trump wasted no time smashing the centralized information apparatus when he returned to office, but the technological capacity for control advances day by day, along with the temptation to use it. Siegel leaves readers with a warning: “From the rubble of the old information state, the outline of a new one takes shape.”

Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

Next: The Metastasis of Technocracy

One thing you discover quickly is that there is no such thing as a great nursing home. At whatever price point, some meals are missed and mistakes inevitably made. The real customer is you, the desperate family member trying to keep your ailing loved one alive, and quality of care depends directly on how much time you’re willing to spend on hand supervising—in my case most of the day every day. But if you’re willing and able to spend enough time and money, there might yet be some good nursing homes, so long as you keep your eye on the ball.

The fancy facility where my mother now resides has been generally pretty decent: the staff are almost all gentle and kind, the food is usually better than merely edible, and the hallways don’t generally smell. But, about two weeks after my mother moved in, the facility made a tragic if understandable mistake. Going back to her infancy in a postwar Munich orphanage, before she was adopted by Americans, my mother has always had trouble with her teeth. She’s always been loath to spend money on herself, but corn on the cob is one of her favorite foods, so a number of years ago I managed to persuade her to splurge on custom dental implants so she could eat whatever she wanted. For some reason, some employee of the facility decided to soak my mother’s very expensive dentures in a disposable Styrofoam cup instead of the usual green plastic case, helpfully writing “TEETH” on the side, and then some other employee obliviously threw that cup away without bothering to check if it contained $43,000 cargo.

A few minutes after 5:00 PM on Friday, February 27, when my mother asked to munch on a few of her beloved Macadamia nuts, I realized with horror that the dentures were missing. I ran to the nursing station in a panic, and a member of staff slowly ambled over to check the trash, which had been emptied. In desperation I asked where the dumpster was, and somebody led me to a dock at the back of the building. I was starting to climb into the dumpster to find my Mom’s teeth when security interrupted me and I was briefly detained in the security office as the skeleton crew on afterhours weekend duty furrowed their brows and pretended to text their supervisors. I demanded to speak to the senior person on duty, and was led to a hostile, standoffish monster of a woman, first initial M., who could not have been any more rude, callous, cruel, and unprofessional. We both knew down to a half dozen cubic yards where the dentures were, and that retrieving them was eminently possible, but she refused to take the slightest responsibility or even pick up the phone to call one of her supervisors. No, she had the gall to say to my face that, if any dentures were in fact missing, then that was my fault or that of my mother, and our insurance would have to cover it if we bothered to replace them. The facility bore no responsibility, but would call the garbage company on Monday to tell them to keep an eye out.

And so my mother’s $43,000 dentures sat in a dumpster all weekend long, when it would have been trivially easy for the facility to retrieve them, and on Monday morning they were hauled away to be smashed and incinerated. Somebody on staff came by to look around the room and confirm that they were missing, and off the record grimaced and said they were personally sorry for what happened, and then it was radio silence. Incredibly, this fancy and extensively insured facility with its oh so carefully cultivated reputation was attempting to proceed as if nothing had happened and their gross negligence hadn’t torpedoed my dying mother’s quality of life and deprived a helpless old lady of pretty much her last remaining pleasure in life. The senior administrator of the facility should have found me on Monday to apologize profusely and promise to make things right, and instead he gave me the runaround. When I finally tracked him down at the end of the week, I did my best to keep my cool but realistically was probably yelling at him that I was prepared to sue for millions, that I’d been president of my class at Clayton High School (one of the more affluent districts in the area) and would tell all of my influential friends about the facility’s horrific misconduct, and that I’m a New York City journalist who would stop at nothing to cost the facility as much as I possibly could.

Stewing over that weekend, pacing furiously through my mother’s house in the dead of night, I spiraled to a wrath tinged with madness. If they refused to make my mother whole, I would avenge her honor not only by suing for as much as I could possibly get, not only by telling every affluent St. Louisan with aging parents to avoid the facility like the plague, not only by writing the most devastating takedown that I possibly could, but I’d do my damnedest to stage the biggest media spectacle to hit St. Louis since Ferguson: billboards, television ads, and paid protesters with bullhorns in addition to the embarrassing lawsuit. I would make it my life’s work to bring down the facility and get as many people as possible fired.

Early the next week, the facility saw reason. I sat down with the administrator and the head of nursing behind closed doors, explained my position, and emphasized that they were ultimately in charge of how the story I was going to write would end. Would they do the right thing as ethical employees of a classy and trustworthy place? Or would they force me to break the glass and go nuclear? Ultimately, they agreed to hire their own dentist to replace my mother’s dentures to her satisfaction if I’d quit with the loose talk of lawsuits and damages and people needing to be fired. And that was enough for me; we are now working together in a race against time to try to replace the dentures while my mother is still around to make use of them.

I am not a greedy or malicious person, but I am not a doormat either. The issue was never about the money, but dignity and mutual respect. Human beings make mistakes, and we owe each other mercy and compassion and grace. With the one catastrophic exception, my mother has had decent care at the facility and I have no real desire to upset the apple cart. But I’ll do what I have to, even if it involves baring fangs and finding my inner Michael Corleone.

It would have saved us all a ton of time, stress, and money had that awful woman, M., simply done her job in the first place. She is a liability to the facility and I would much prefer that they deduct the cost of my mother’s replacement dentures from that heartless villain’s salary rather than go through insurance. I’ve emphatically recommended to the facility that they terminate her employment immediately, as the next customer whom she insultingly wrongs may well be less magnanimous and forgiving than I try to be. My priority remains restoring my mother’s ability to enjoy her corn on the cob and Macadamia nuts again, as soon as humanly possible.

Next: The Decline and Fall of the Information State (For Now)

Things had begun so promisingly: somehow, I’d landed my dream job working for my hero Bill Moyers on PBS. In those auspicious early days I still saw the terms “progressive” and “public interest” as essentially synonymous. It was a great privilege to get to work closely with Bill as his blogger and research assistant, but once Barack Obama entered office our weekly public affairs interviews drifted toward guests who more typically glorified and defended the new administration rather than offer much in the way of analysis and critique. It wasn’t all Bill’s fault, as he was mostly mirroring the high-end discourse as it was in those heady days, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable throughout our extensive coverage of the hashing out of Obamacare.

I don’t claim to be an expert in health care policy, but I did major in public policy, and one didn’t have to be an expert to see that the Obama administration’s narratives selling the Affordable Care Act were fanciful and misleading. The notion that introducing many tens of millions of disproportionately poor and sick people to insurance rolls that had basically been built to serve the gainfully employed middle class and above would somehow “bend the cost curve” through mass expansion of preventative care had always been too good to be true, regardless of that one Atul Gawande New Yorker article that people liked to namedrop. No, the case for universal health care was fundamentally a moral rather than a fiscal one.

But to have that moral argument honestly would have been to have to acknowledge that the middle and upper classes would inevitably end up paying substantially more for somewhat lower-quality care, and that would have been politically dangerous. And so by and large the prestige media chose to suspend disbelief as the administration made obviously untrue blanket promises like “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” In the case of Bill Moyers Journal, we did platform various critics of the emerging Affordable Care Act, but nearly all of them were advocates for “single-payer,” i.e. “Medicare for All,” arguing that the legislation didn’t go nearly far enough. I understood where Bill and my colleagues were coming from, that some form of universal health care felt like the great unfinished business of the Great Society, but began to feel that our weekly broadcasts were painting viewers a misleading portrait of the true policy debate. In my little fiefdom of the Journal’s blog, somewhat under the radar with some degree of editorial independence, I did what I could to smuggle in the most rigorous and cogent critiques of the legislation I could find from more diplomatic voices on the right, typically from outlets like the Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. I felt certain that our audience would benefit from exposure to the other side.

As the Journal wound down, and Bill retired for what turned out to be the second to last time, I assumed I’d probably have to go to law school. But, literally the day before I was set to submit my applications, I lucked into a job up at Columbia Journalism School producing its centennial commemorations and celebrating the Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to my immense relief at dodging the bullet of law school, I felt somewhat relieved to be serving as a public relations flack rather than a journalist per se, and hoped that might help me feel less guilt about massaging the truth for maximum fundraising. And so began an intensely disillusioning eleven-year journey across the university that culminated with my disgusted departure to become a whistleblower as The Ivy Exile.

After a honeymoon first few months, I gradually came to understand that the J-School was essentially an exalted diploma mill that offered the cheapest and easiest way to earn an Ivy League credential in under a year while living out a glamorous Manhattan fantasy. There were some truly impressive journalists on faculty, and a narrowing pipeline of smart and interesting people passing through, but the standard curriculum was a rather threadbare ten-month boot camp that hardly justified the claim of having earned a “Master of Science” degree. The two-year “Master of Arts” degree focused on magazine writing was a much more legit program, but represented a small fraction of the overall business model.

With the conclusion of my two-year contract at the Journalism School, I soon crossed campus to promote Columbia Law School. I’d lost much respect for the J-School because it had turned out to be an increasingly chintzy and unserious place. The law school proved far more substantive, but also toxic to a terrifying extent. That isn’t to say that there weren’t many brilliant professors who meant well, most notably the great Philip Hamburger, and that most of the students weren’t decent enough grinds who just wanted to make tons of money as corporate lawyers, but the bulk of my job was lionizing the most narcissistic and power-hungry villains on campus. In truth, Columbia Law was primarily known as a feeder to BigLaw and Wall Street, which was something of a turn-off to a lot of idealistic and/or woke twenty-somethings applying to top law schools, not to mention lots of aging philanthropists. Despite being an Ivy League institution, Columbia Law was steadily losing ground to competitors like the NYU School of Law, with its vaunted Brennan Center for Justice. As a result, to perfume its corporate stink, Columbia Law threw money and jobs at domineering social justice ideologues, more than a few of whom were unambiguous bigots like Katherine Franke.

While I did enjoy chronicling outstanding legal minds pursuing valuable work in areas like intellectual property law, half or more of my role was taking notes on unhinged diatribes from zealots I often felt were mentally unwell, and figuring out how to make all that venom and bile palatable and even persuasive to the public. Some of the people I promoted harbored hatreds against entire demographic categories, but it was my job to portray them as beatific Mahatma Gandhi types. There was no denying that I’d become complicit in their malignant agendas, and I began to hate myself for that. Some part of me got a kick out of getting paid to attend fancy galas and rub elbows with fancy people, with open bars and multicourse dinners, but I was selling my soul and felt like a prostitute. I had to get out.

Fortunately, I had an escape hatch: I’d also started writing for Columbia Engineering, my first assignment being to handle its 150^th anniversary commemorations, and could stay afloat writing only for them. And so I tendered my resignation from Columbia Law and focused on covering Columbia engineers’ groundbreaking scientific research. I ended up staying there eight years, so much did I enjoy the work: it was a privilege to help endearing nerds translate their boring incremental research into grander visions of the possibilities gradually being unleashed, and a joy to see stammering aspiring entrepreneurs grow in the months between the annual Fast Pitch competition in the fall and the higher-stakes Startup Columbia competition each spring.

Yet by 2017 the corruption and rot I’d witnessed elsewhere on campus were creeping into the engineering school, too. More and more of my assignments were writing up propaganda about climate change and, more unsettlingly, woke data scientists gushing about the potential for discriminatory algorithms to automate the constant and universal imposition of social justice according to the tenets of intersectionality espoused by Columbia Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw.

And so, turning 35 in summer 2020, I felt trapped and at a loss. I’d written a manuscript about my time at Brown and road to New York, but the market for thoughtful critiques of the left from closer to the center had become a smoking crater. For the crime of a book as muted and inoffensive as The Once and Future Liberal, my fellow Columbian Mark Lilla had been lucky not to lose his job. Intellectually, much of the left seemed to have collapsed into a mob braying for identitarian socialism, and speaking out was a recipe for excommunication or worse. But in early 2021, when Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health recruited me to handle their centennial commemorations, I realized immediately that I’d found my ticket out.

Much of the work would involve sugarcoating the indefensible and be almost unbearably distasteful, I knew, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get an inside look at the scandal of the century: public health technocrats’ opportunistic tyranny exploiting Covid to advance unrelated policy goals. It was the biggest story in the world, and the missing piece of the puzzle that would make it fully viable for me to become a whistleblower about Columbia’s sordid underbelly. The Mailman School turned out to be even worse than I’d expected; I really liked my coworkers, to the extent that I got to know them working from home, but the institution was profoundly compromised. My impression was that roughly a third of the school consisted of impressive professionals pursuing important life-saving work, that roughly a third were doing somewhat useful research that was badly distorted by ideology and partisanship, and that roughly a third were unprincipled rent-seekers pushing empty slop for grant money.

I did a genuinely good job for the Mailman School, which to be fair does have quite a proud history and even prehistory up until the past few decades, and it was a subversive thrill to mastermind its centennial even as I drafted the opening salvos of what would become The Ivy Exile: I felt like a secret agent in a cat and mouse game of cloaks and daggers. The Mailman School still owes me many thousands of dollars, I should mention, but that’s a story for another day.

Since launching this Substack three years ago, I’ve been having the time of my life. I’m working harder than I ever have, but feeling more personally and professionally fulfilled than ever. I’m doing the public interest work that I came to New York to pursue, I’ve met tons of interesting people, and I can sleep at night. A few weeks ago, I was pleased to appear on a Mike Pesca podcast with the great Ruy Teixeira, who I’ve read religiously for years. I could pinch myself that this is my life now; being 40 is awesome!

All that is true, and yet being 40 has also been an absolute nightmare. Last spring, my near-octogenarian mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I’ve spent most of the past year flying back and forth to St. Louis to stay for weeks or months at a time keeping her company and making sure she gets to all of her medical appointments. She did well with radiation, which proved much more effective than the doctors expected, but entered a steep downward spiral after she started immunotherapy, losing weight and most of her vitality at an alarming rate. Two and a half months ago, a few days after I returned to town, she fell and fractured her pelvis. It took a few days to coax her into agreeing to go to the emergency room, and she ended up being hospitalized for nearly a month before getting discharged to a rehab facility. Her physical therapy initially looked promising, but she was obviously regressing in the days before she got discharged over my vehement objections.

That took place on a Friday afternoon, unfortunately, so a home health nurse couldn’t come to assess my mother until Monday afternoon. That was an all but sleepless weekend, my mother toggling unpredictably between being two thirds of her old self and sudden vomity listlessness bordering on the comatose. Thankfully I have a saintly aunt, her ex-sister-in-law, who stepped up to help. When the home health nurse finally arrived, it didn’t take her long to recommend that we call the doctor and head back to the emergency room. Three more weeks of hospitalization followed, in which we discovered that my mother hadn’t been ailing because of cancer, as we’d assumed, but because her stomach was badly distended on account of her intermittently losing her ability to digest food. When she’s able to absorb nutrients, she’s recognizably her feisty and still fairly lucid self, but when she can’t she has no more reserves to draw upon and becomes more akin to a sweet, angelic child. The doctors are “flummoxed,” to use their term, and could only refer me to palliative and hospice care.

Eventually, my mother got stabilized enough that it was time to transfer her to what euphemistically is described as an extended care facility, but more frankly a nursing home. We’d had a thousand conversations over the years on how much she hated nursing homes and never wanted to go to one, but at or near the end of the day there was no better alternative. She was supposed to be transferred to a fancy place on a Thursday, but her paperwork got delayed and the transfer got pushed to the next day. I got a call from the fancy place saying that they wouldn’t have a bed for my mother the next day unless I spent $535 to lock it down. At that point, I wasn’t sure if she was actually going be transferred the next day, so I declined.

But the next day, when I saw the nursing home my mother got transferred to instead, I would have dropped that $535 in a heartbeat. To describe the dump my dear mother got placed in as a hellhole of Dickensian squalor would be too generous: all I could think of walking its dingy halls and witnessing its indifferent staff was George Orwell’s essay on “How the Poor Die.” I’d done my best, but I’d dropped the ball, and the rage and guilt—my God, the guilt—I felt seeing the person I cherish most in the world get treated like an animal in a factory farm were indescribable. At least the first night my mother had her room to herself, but Saturday afternoon a couple of EMTs moved in a roommate who’d badly fractured her leg in several places. From then on, only a curtain away, the days were punctuated with a stranger’s howls of pain.

I was back on the phone with the fancy place first thing that Monday morning, and thankfully they had a room, but the dump in which my mother was marooned was too slow and sloppy with paperwork for her to be transferred until the next day. With my aunt there for moral support, wheeling my mother down the hallway and out of that place forever felt like a jailbreak, but I couldn’t help but feel for the inmates who were damned with no other recourse. I had the option of switching my mom to a more civilized environment because she can afford it, but tens of millions of aging and elderly Americans cannot.

In the midst of all of the stress, I’ve not had the bandwidth to publish anything long-form in months, and it’s turned out that posting impromptu thoughts in Substack Notes is far more productive in terms of accruing subscribers. The last piece that I wrote before my life turned upside down concerned my decades-long advocacy for immigration policy that puts American citizens’ interests first by preventing the mass influx of impoverished migrants and cracking down on businesses unscrupulous enough to hire unauthorized labor. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden shamelessly abused their executive powers to administratively dismantle immigration enforcement, incentivizing millions and millions of impoverished migrants to flood into the United States and leading directly to Donald Trump getting elected, twice. And yet the fact was not lost on me that, on the very day the Trump administration announced that they were ending Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, the health aide who bathed my mother was a lovely Haitian woman. In that context I wasn’t concerned with her immigration status, only grateful that she was treating my loved one with kindness and compassion.

I’m a longtime border hawk. The vast majority of the millions and millions of migrants that Joe Biden illegally admitted via mass asylum fraud need to leave or be removed. Temporary Protected Status is supposed to be just that, temporary, and I do believe that it’s past time for many of the Haitians living in the United States under TPS to return home. But, unavoidably, America is in dire need of many more health aides to take care of Baby Boomers in their final stage of life. Millions of migrants need to leave, but I’m also inclined to think that if someone is an honest woman with a gentle demeanor and a strong back who’s willing to fill a depressing job in eldercare, she should probably be allowed to stay. We need people like her, millions of them.

The day draws late, but it’s not over yet. My mother seems to slowly be regaining more ability to digest solid foods some of the time, and she’s gained a tiny bit of weight for the first time since her initial diagnosis. I’ve been with her most of the day every day, except for the one Sunday when I was literally snowed in, doing what I can to keep her alive and comfortable. My definition of a good day has become one that I can still tell her that I love her and she can still say it back, and by that standard it’s been almost all good days. I’d welcome a miracle, but it seems likely that she’s running out of time. Death is often not a single discrete event, like in the movies, but a lingering process of weeks or months.

If you, dear reader, are so fortunate to have a mother you love still among the living, stop everything you’re doing and call her to tell her all that she means to you. Better yet, if you’re within driving distance, show up and tell her that with hugs and kisses and flowers and chocolates. Do it today, not tomorrow, because tomorrow might be too late.

Next: On the Exercise of Soft Power

That rule has generally worked out well, but was strenuously tested at Passover this year when within moments folks began dropping F-bombs (“Fascism!”) as the evening’s primary topic of conversation. The elephant in the room: that everyone knew I’d boarded the Trump train early on, and supported his candidacy three times straight, but we were all polite enough not to mention it. And so I nodded and stroked my chin and did my best to gracefully change the subject.

During the Seder itself, after the recitation of the plagues, a relative pulled out a sheet of paper and declared that there were also a bunch more plagues more apropos to 2025: deportations, tariffs, cuts to scientific research, and so on, with the capper “And rather than next year in Jerusalem, how about next year in American democracy?” All I could do was gaze out the window and try to keep my face expressionless until we could get back to the Haggadah.

The issue over which almost all of our arguments had taken place, and that most decisively alienated me from the Democratic Party, and that repeatedly proved such low-hanging fruit for Donald Trump, is immigration. Lest anyone leap to the conclusion that I’m some kind of xenophobe, some throat clearing. My mother is an immigrant, born to Holocaust survivors the year after the war, who was lucky to be adopted into an American family whose parents had come through Ellis Island a few decades earlier. I’ve had close friends from first-generation immigrant families since middle school. Most of my romantic involvements have been with women of color from immigrant families. The record couldn’t be clearer that I haven’t the slightest shred of xenophobia.

What I do have in abundance, though, is love for my Dad’s side of my extended family, largely working-class folk in Missouri I see at Christmas whose livelihoods have grown ever more precarious over the past few decades. Many of them make their livings in manual labor like tree-trimming, landscaping, contracting, and roofing, and the mass influx of impoverished migrants in recent years has not only undercut their wages but raised the costs of housing and strained the institutional resources and infrastructure that they rely on. Outsourcing had already taken most of the good jobs away, and in recent years it’s felt like importing cheap labor from elsewhere has claimed the lion’s share of what was left. From the perspective of someone equally invested in the dignity and material circumstances of my family in “flyover country” as my family in the Acela Corridor, Biden-Harris era migration policy proved not just distressing but alarming.

My stance on “illegal” or “undocumented” or “unauthorized” or “irregular” immigration, whatever one prefers to call it, is the traditional stance of organized labor and was the standard rhetorical position of the Democratic Party as recently as the 1990s, when I was growing up very liberal. There’s tons of footage on YouTube of figures like Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and the great Barbara Jordan forcefully articulating what remains my exact position today: that the United States’ immigration policies ultimately need to prioritize ordinary American citizens’ interests even as it’s also good to try to be generous. I harbor no personal animus against that vast majority of migrants who aren’t criminals and would likely attempt the same dangerous journey were I in their shoes.

Back in 1986, when Ronald Reagan signed the bipartisan Immigration Reform and Control Act, it was billed as finally solving the problem of illegal immigration once and for all. In exchange for legalizing roughly three million largely sympathetic migrants who’d already been in the U.S. for years, we’d finally get serious about protecting the U.S. labor pool by cracking down on employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. But after a couple of years enforcement gradually petered out, which was a bipartisan failing: Democrats often liked to look the other way for humanitarian reasons, while the ascendent class of Chamber of Commerce Republicans were eager for as much cheap labor as they could get.

Then, in George W. Bush’s second term, there came a full-court press for another stab at “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” this time legalizing around 12 million largely sympathetic illegal immigrants in exchange for enhanced border security that would supposedly finally solve the problem once and for all. Working-class Americans had heard that script before, and there was no reason to believe any serious attempt at sealing the porous border would actually be made beyond the first year or two. No, there could be no “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” until Washington demonstrated that it could be trusted to legitimately enforce the laws already on the books. I called both of my Missouri senators’ D.C. offices every day that the bill was under consideration nagging them to vote against it, and some of their staffers could get pretty nasty. It was a great relief when the legislation went down in defeat.

A few years later I was back on the phone urging my home state senators to oppose the DREAM Act that would grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants who’d been brought to the United States as children. I’d had a close friend who was a “Dreamer” and didn’t want her or any Dreamer with a clean criminal record to be deported, but on principle opposed legalizing anyone illegally present in the United States until border security and interior enforcement alike were being handled in good faith. It wasn’t about wanting the Dreamers removed, but preventing a lather-rinse-repeat cycle of serial amnesties every decade or two that would incentivize ever further mass immigration to further undercut American labor.

Contrary to his “Deporter in Chief” moniker, Barack Obama actually presided over a comprehensive softening of the immigration system from top to bottom. What he couldn’t achieve via legislation he would surreptitiously engineer “by pen and phone.” As someone who spent years in progressive PR, I have my suspicions that the “Deporter in Chief” meme was astro-turfed into the news cycle to help Obama look tough and give him cover for eviscerating enforcement in the national interior. For one thing, the administration conflated removals from U.S. soil with migrants turned away at the border, enabling them to generate impressive and technically not untrue stats with far fewer of what the lay public would consider actual deportations. Then, claiming “prosecutorial discretion,” the administration declared that they were focusing on the baddest of the bad guys that much more strategically, but the policy amounted to an announcement to everyone on earth considering sneaking into the United States that they could more than likely stay forever so long as they stayed out of major felonious trouble.

In 2012, on a landmark day I still viscerally recall, President Obama announced he was unilaterally imposing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), effectively legalizing hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants by executive fiat despite his having previously acknowledged repeatedly that it would be unlawful for him to do so. My jaw dropped and my stomach lurched when I saw the news, so flagrant a violation it was of longstanding norms; my feeling that day was exactly what progressives have felt amidst Trump’s second term. Two years later came Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA, which was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court) arbitrarily exempting nearly all illegal immigrants with children from deportation. Absent any legislative authorization whatsoever, Obama managed to shift deportations from being a constant Sword of Damocles discouraging migrants from coming to a measure of last resort largely reserved for hardened criminals, thus encouraging ever more migrants to make their way to the United States.

Given Obama’s record on immigration, there was no way I could vote for a Democrat in 2016—especially after Bernie Sanders abandoned his principled career-long opposition to open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal” and became indistinguishable from the rest of the field. The Republicans weren’t much better, having bought into the official GOP 2012 campaign autopsy that the only way to compete amongst the changing electorate was to drop opposition to mass migration. I couldn’t possibly support Jeb Bush, who had famously described illegal immigration as an “act of love.” It’s not that I disagree with that characterization in probably most cases, but that my opposition to mass migration is just as much an “act of love” aimed at protecting my working-class loved ones. Supporting Marco Rubio was out of the question, as he’d repeatedly sponsored unacceptable “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” legislation, and Ted Cruz had proven himself wobbly, too. I’d never watched The Apprentice and had no particular affinity for Donald Trump, but he was the only major candidate who emphasized getting serious about immigration enforcement. I felt I had no choice but to support him, and was glad when he won.

People forget how ideologically flexible Trump was when he first got to Washington. It seemed to me that he primarily wanted to be popular, slap his name on a bunch of shiny new construction, and politically more or less split the difference between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura. Had Democrats been willing to negotiate with Trump in something like good faith, he might have been the Nixon in China with the populist credibility to get some form of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” over the finish line, albeit with a gleaming new border wall and much more enforcement than the Obama administration had singlehandedly made the new normal. Such a compromise wouldn’t have been the whole loaf that woke activists demanded, but it would have been more than half the loaf. But instead of negotiating, or even entertaining the possibility that Obama’s administrative maneuverings might have strayed too far for true public legitimacy, Democratic bigwigs by and large decided to double down on lawfare and #Resistance theatrics. Compromise was off the table, not just in terms of policy but even of rhetoric.

Most immigrants of my acquaintance are grateful and appreciative to be living in America. But I couldn’t help but notice in my years writing for Columbia Law School that the lawyers and activists who claim to speak for immigrants often have the opposite attitude: an overweening sense of entitlement and a penchant for “We Will Bury You”-esque discourse denigrating Americans of European heritage and mocking them for their shrinking share of the electorate. NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta’s 2019 book This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, which argued that infinite immigration was but the arc of history bending toward justice and that Americans need to assimilate to newcomers rather than the other way around, neatly encapsulated what had become the conventional wisdom up at Columbia. I and probably most Americans find that sentiment offensive, but it had become par for the course among upscale progressives and Mehta’s book received glowing coverage on NPR (which may help explain why NPR’s federal funding got zeroed out this year).

I held my breath and hoped for the best when Joe Biden narrowly squeaked into office; I expected he’d probably restore the Obama administration’s counterproductive migration policies, but he had a generational opportunity to be a true statesman and historically great president by governing as he’d campaigned, as a center-left moderate lowering the temperature, restoring normalcy, and rallying Covid-battered Americans around an agenda the majority of citizens could get behind. For whatever reason, though, the Biden-Harris administration instead chose to proceed with shock and awe in precisely the opposite direction, particularly with regard to migration.

At the very height of the pandemic, as lockdowns were being vigorously enforced, the new regime moved literally on day one to extensively facilitate not just the unvetted entry of millions upon millions of impoverished migrants, but their rapid diffusion across the country at taxpayer expense as if to make it as difficult as possible to potentially remove them later. The scheme involved a cunning strategy that pro-migration NGOs had innovated under Obama and fully embraced during Trump’s first term, faced for the first time in decades with an administration making a real effort at reducing illegal immigration, to help migrants skirt the law and finagle long-term residency in the United States: NGOs started coaching prospective migrants on the precise script hitting all the talking points needed to apply for asylum and get admitted into the U.S. with quasi-legal provisional status, the intent being that the backlog for adjudicating those claims would grow so long that, even though the asylum would most likely be denied eight or nine years down the line, the migrants could then just disappear into the shadows until the next amnesty gave them citizenship. To close that loophole and disincentivize people from putting their lives at risk in making the attempt, the Trump administration had instituted the “Migrant Protection Protocols” requiring asylum seekers to wait outside the United States as their cases were processed. By ostentatiously dropping the Migrant Protection Protocols, the Biden-Harris administration essentially rolled out the red carpet for just about anybody who wanted to come and signaled to the entire planet that if they could get to a U.S. port of entry and recite a few magic words, they would very likely score very likely permanent residency.

Inevitably, a sea of migrants flooded to the southern border for their promised golden tickets. I don’t blame them for that—they were responding rationally to the Biden-Harris administration’s reckless action. As if throwing open the borders wasn’t irresponsible enough, the Biden-Harris administration also immediately halted construction of the border wall (later auctioning off the surplus materials for a fraction of what they’d cost) and announced that they were essentially exempting almost anyone but hardcore felons who’d been physically present in the United States before November 2020 from any threat of deportation. The very day that Joe Biden was inaugurated, he largely dismantled immigration enforcement by stroke of autopen, and then throughout his term indiscriminately handed out temporary protected status to over a million more impoverished migrants.

I don’t buy some of the more hyperbolic claims about the number of migrants the Biden-Harris administration ushered in or otherwise became “gotaways.” Some MAGA conservatives claim the number is 20 or 30 million, which doesn’t add up from the stats I’ve seen, but something in the vicinity of 10 million in just three and a half years is a reasonable estimate. Throughout the crisis, with thousands of migrants streaming into the U.S. every single day, the administration swore up and down that they were doing everything they could to secure the border and that Congress needed to pass new legislation for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” giving them the tools they needed. But since they weren’t using the tools they already had, there was no reason to believe they would legitimately enact any of the token border security provisions tacked on to the massive amnesty they were so eager to pass. As the administration demonstrated when it eventually tightened up the border in Spring 2024, in what seemed a belated effort to neutralize migration as a campaign issue, it could have done so at any time: the border crisis wasn’t driven by climate change, as officials frequently liked to claim, but in fact by a deliberate series of coordinated policy decisions intentionally implemented by the Biden-Harris administration and allied NGOs, however valiantly Matthew Yglesias argues otherwise.

So why did they do it? Why did they persist with such deeply unpopular policy over such vast public outcry that ultimately drove even Hispanic voters into the waiting arms of Donald Trump? I will give the administration the credit that in their minds and epistemic bubble they probably saw themselves as enlightened humanitarians uplifting the Global South’s downtrodden. They probably looked at the statistics of an aging America with low fertility rates and figured migrants could fill jobs in occupations where there really are some legitimate labor shortages. In terms of realpolitik, they likely presumed that more eventual voters of migrant backgrounds would be a boon for the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party, and hoped that the unprecedented spectacle of so many migrants entering day by day might demoralize border hawks into throwing up their hands and concluding that resistance was futile. But the single biggest motivation, I believe, was spite. Immigration had been The Donald’s signature issue, so the new sheriff in town was going to rub Trump’s deplorable xenophobic supporters’ faces in more migration than they’d even imagined possible. The Biden-Harris administration wanted to ritually humiliate Trump voters, to put them in their place once and for all, and that was more important to them than public opinion or their constituents’ material interests.

It was offensive and wrong for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to suggest that the Haitian migrants placed in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets. I condemn that. But in the grand scheme of things, it was more offensive and wrong for the Biden-Harris administration to suddenly settle 20,000 impoverished migrants in an already struggling small city of 40,000 residents. To the extent that large numbers of desperately poor migrants get dumped into communities, it should be in locales affluent enough to uplift the newcomers: places like Martha’s Vineyard, Scarsdale, Chevy Chase, Aspen, and Malibu. Each of those tony enclaves voted lopsidedly for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and have lots of outspoken citizens proclaiming their solidarity with migrants, so it’s puzzling that they haven’t stepped up to do their part.

Had Kamala Harris managed to get elected president after the unprecedented migration free-for-all, I suspect the administration would have turned the spigot back the day after the election to welcome in at least 10 million more migrants by 2029. Indeed, I fully expect that any Democratic president who can make it through the primaries for the foreseeable future will reopen the floodgates on their Inauguration Day. So in assessing Trump-Vance immigration policies, I’m considering not just what’s happening now and through January 2029, but gaming out how to preemptively limit the damage of a prospective Buttigieg or Ocasio-Cortez presidency.

However harsh it might sound to some ears, the key to deterring mass migration is for people considering migrating to the United States to know that they’d really be taking their chances; there has to be a high degree of probability that they’ll get turned away at the border time and time again, and then if they finally manage to sneak in that there will be a solid chance that they’ll eventually be deported, even if it’s for something as minor as a DUI ten years later. There simply must be a credible and ongoing risk of deportation, or else endless waves of impoverished migrants have no reason not to come. The Biden-Harris policy enticed millions and millions considering migrating into believing that they were perfectly welcome to enter the country and would have virtually no chance of being deported unless they were gang members or terrorists, and even that was negotiable: sanctuary city prosecutors routinely downgrade migrant gang members’ felonies to misdemeanors to help them remain in the country.

I don’t disagree with my progressive friends and family that the Trump-Vance approach of dispatching federal officers to chase down and tackle day laborers in Home Depot parking lots is cruel political theater not particularly effective at nabbing very many migrants and that frequently results in civil rights violations of American citizens, but it’s not without its brute logic. Most people have smartphones nowadays, even in poor countries, and the upsetting viral footage of random migrants’ hopes being dashed and their new lives being ruined is potent evidence that making the arduous journey to the United States just isn’t worth it, and still won’t be worth it even when the next Democratic president casts open the borders again. So far, in its brass-knuckled way, the approach has kind of been working: practically no migrants are entering the country and something like two million people have already either been removed or left voluntarily. It’s an awfully mean strategy, and by no means what I’d have chosen, but the greater cruelty was the Biden-Harris administration encouraging millions of people who had so very little to upend their lives and sacrifice everything to rush up to the United States when an ugly backlash was so predictable and inevitable. Anything short of a strong majority of the ten million migrants who flooded in between 2021 and 2024 being removed or departing of their own accord would be a vindication of the Biden-Harris policy, and all the more encouragement for the next Democratic president to do it all over again.

The performative cruelty plays another purpose as well: it’s chum for the angrier and perhaps more prejudiced segments of the MAGA base with utterly unreasonable expectations of removing every last illegal immigrant from the United States. If the Trump-Vance administration were truly gung-ho about mass expulsions, there’s a much easier way than what ICE has been doing. They could start raiding poultry plants in Arkansas and almost effortlessly round up tens of thousands of migrants in single fell swoops. But that would send the price of chicken skyrocketing, and nobody wants that. Instead, the administration is delivering vibes-based wildcat immigration enforcement nudging recent arrivals in particular into concluding that self-deportation is in their self-interest while mostly overlooking longer-standing populations of illegal immigrants who have become structurally important to the economy and who have the strongest claim of deserving legalization.

I personally regard Biden-Harris migration policy as the starkest abuse of executive authority since Japanese internment, dwarfing any and all of Donald Trump’s abuses in office thus far. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t far too many good people who’ve done nothing wrong getting caught in the crossfire. My own dear mother applied for her REAL ID earlier this year so that she could board a plane, and we had to dig out her tattered old naturalization documents from the 1940s for the feds to review. She did get her REAL ID eventually, but it took a lot longer than it should have, and I couldn’t escape the impression that the long delay was intended to convey a message. There are some siblings I happen to know whose parents have legally resided in the U.S. for decades bouncing between the banking sector and working as diplomatic functionaries for their home country’s government. As far as each sibling knew, they were all U.S. citizens, but it turns out under scrutiny that even though they were all born at the same hospital during the same number of years, two of them are legally not citizens due to the fine print of their parents’ specific employers on their particular dates of birth. Year after year they voted and did jury duty when summoned and all the other things good citizens are supposed to do, because both they and the government had no idea that they weren’t technically eligible to do so. One of them married an American citizen and started an American family; one of them even voted for Trump. And now their statuses are up in the air and they’re being treated like criminals—they can’t apply for business loans or travel internationally, and live in constant terror that jack-booted thugs will kick down the door and drag them away. It is little exaggeration to say that the Trump-Vance administration has arbitrarily ruined their lives. Cases like theirs are an outrage that cannot stand.

Joe Biden threw away his opportunity to transcend the political moment and become a true statesman who might be remembered fondly. Today, Donald Trump is veering down a similar path. True, Biden broke his promise to try to restore normalcy, while Trump is governing as the wrecking ball he promised in his campaign, but the sloppiness and brutality of present migration policy is increasingly discrediting the very concept of immigration enforcement among many moderates who might otherwise have been inclined to seek compromise.

The truth is, America is in desperate need of compromise. Millions of border hawks like me have to acknowledge that most illegal immigrants aren’t bad people and that millions of them hold undesirable bottom-rung jobs that not enough Americans are willing to do. Those workers and most of the Dreamers, at very least, deserve to be legalized. But by the same token, pro-migrant advocates need to acknowledge that the benefits of mass migration have primarily accrued to the migrants, and to the affluent people who enjoy cheaper labor, while the costs have disproportionately been borne by working-class and middle-class American families that were already hurting and have seen their livelihoods dramatically eroded in recent years. H-1B abuse is real and has been endemic for years. The country needs a robust deportation protocol and hermetically sealed borders to fight the cartels and protect the American labor pool. A genuine compromise on systemic immigration reform would be a great achievement, but the legislation Washington has offered up for decades has so patently been a bait and switch aiming for all of the amnesty and none of the enforcement.

So long as the Senate filibuster endures, migration issues have grown so polarized that it’s hard to imagine Congress being capable of passing any major migration legislation for the foreseeable future. If Democrats retake the majority, abolish the filibuster, and pass a massive amnesty with 51 votes, though, they’ll soon regret it; the next Republican majority would find a way to rescind that amnesty with a draconian ferocity making Donald Trump and Stephen Miller look like kindergarten teachers. It’s in everyone’s interest to pursue real political legitimacy and avoid widening the gyre any further.

So, were I advising President Trump, this is what I’d suggest. Migrants are rational actors, and ten million arrived in under four years because Biden-Harris policy made it crazy for them not to come. The priority should be to readjust the incentive structure such that the rational decision is for migrants to leave voluntarily. Unpredictable worksite raids are an essential tool to instill a credible fear of deportation, but there are also gentler ways to encourage people to repatriate. The administration has already instituted a program offering migrants $1000 and a free plane ticket back home. I would suggest experimenting with doubling that cash amount to $2000 or more with a guarantee that if they wish to apply for legal residency through proper channels their history will not be held against them. At the same time, I’d seek possibilities of withholding a meaningful fraction of the federal dollars annually dispensed to sanctuary jurisdictions to help incentivize them to respect federal law. And, I’d administratively exempt from deportation any illegal immigrant with a spotless criminal record who can prove they were present in the United States before January 2009, when Barack Obama began administratively demolishing the immigration system that Congress had established. Those migrants have put down roots, likely have children who are American citizens, and have become significant to our national economy—there’s little compelling reason to remove them at this point.

At the end of the day, we the American citizenry can’t even begin to consider what we might owe outsiders knocking on our door without first figuring out what we owe each other as fellow Americans, in our dysfunctional national family. One thing we no doubt owe one another is a more honest conversation on how relatively open versus relatively closed borders variously impact different echelons of our society. Carefully managed immigration can be a win-win for everybody, I believe, but rash Obama-Biden-Harris migration policies directly made many millions of vulnerable Americans’ lives worse. My progressive friends and family would do well to extend some more of their commendable compassion for migrants to their struggling fellow Americans, no matter who they might have voted for.

Was pleased to appear on ’s Eminent Americans podcast discussing the uncertain future of NPR, along with and …

Next: An Exile Looks at 40

It was like Goldilocks; if establishmentarian Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh left me a bit lukewarm, socialists and communists struck me as burning a little too hot. A muscular progressivism that would be “just right” in terms of pursuing policies to improve the wages and living conditions of working-class Americans was what I was looking for. I stopped attending YCL meetings after a few weeks, but got very active with the Brown “Dems” in the run-up to the 2004 election, first knocking on doors for Howard Dean and then volunteering for the Kerry/Edwards campaign. In the aftermath of that crushing defeat, I got elected to the Brown Dems’ executive board as communications chair—only to resign in protest a few months later at the board’s relentless prioritization of identitarian culture war flashpoints rather than kitchen table issues faced by ordinary Americans like a lot of my folks back in Missouri.

I remained a busy activist, though, primarily with Brown’s chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and worked side by side with many socialists and communists, some of whom became friends of mine. Despite that, I’d turned firmly against socialism and communism by the time of graduation, and dramatically lowered my expectations for what sweeping government action and entrenched bureaucracy could sustainably achieve. Part of it was that I’d majored in public policy and learned how fiendishly complicated and paradoxical the art of policy really is, that it’s almost always a matter of trade-offs, and of picking the lesser evil, and grinding incremental progress, rather than grand pronouncements of vaunted “policy solutions” or any kind of Glorious Revolution. Things are never, ever that simple.

Reading up on public policy explained much of my drift away from the left, but a good deal of it was also troubling behavioral tendencies I’d often noticed among many of the socialists and communists in my activist circles: namely, a frequent predilection for purity spirals in which radicals would reflexively compete to one-up each other as to who could be most extravagantly pious in their ideological fealty and devotion to the sacred Cause. Somebody could start out with a reasonable point that sometimes people steal because they’re hungry and that’s morally different from other theft, and a few minutes later the person who finally “won” the interaction would be fervently preaching that every single shoplifter is a Jean Valjean dispensing breadcrusts to orphans. It seemed like there was no corrective mechanism—almost a kind of intellectual immunodeficiency—to keep the spiraling bluster even remotely tethered to history, human psychology, or empirical evidence. In that unhinged context, sociopathic bullies tended to rise to the top.

There were some people I knew who joined a commune just off campus run by collectivist consensus according to critical social justice philosophy, or so the commune claimed. In practice, it was a psychological warzone in which cloying boilerplate about radically egalitarian principles was wielded like a velvet fist to control, dominate, and terrorize weaker and shyer members of the community. I had a friend of a friend who was a sweet, gentle, quiet guy as inoffensive as could possibly be. But he was white, and he was heterosexual, and as such an irresistible target. He’d paid full freight for his room in the house, and pulled his weight with regard to communal cooking and cleaning, but within two months a zaftig girl who’d fashioned herself the queen bee bullied and browbeat him into giving up his room on account of his “privilege.” Henceforth he would sleep on the floor in the hallway, and he’d have to learn to like it. Passive capitulation earned him no mercy or kindness, only more contempt and abuse.

Which all goes to explain why I’ve watched with sadness the ominous rise of Zohran Mamdani, the socialist trust fund dilettante and former rapper just elected mayor of New York City, where I’ve resided for almost twenty years now. To point out that Mayor-elect Mamdani is an unserious person isn’t to suggest that he’s not a deathly serious threat to the city and especially its more vulnerable citizens. The best-case scenario for the Mamdani mayoralty is that he’s a total phony who believes in absolutely none of his absurd platform of unicorns and rainbows. But, unfortunately, I suspect he’s in earnest. Having had more than my fair share of dealings with limousine leftists over the years, they tend to mistake the ease and elegance of their cosseted lives of luxury for superior virtue and savvy. When you’ve never had to work, and you can fly to any of your family’s several gated compounds in Uganda at a snap of the fingers, you simply don’t know what you don’t know and life is a lark in which every day ends in comfort and self-satisfaction.

No, Zohran Mamdani is deliriously high on his own supply, which is peak woke circa summer 2020, and unfortunately for ordinary New Yorkers his ideology is a radioactive narcotic that will irrevocably harm the city and state. I’m no fan of Andrew Cuomo, but his mode of grubby transactional politics at least involved facts and numbers and hard-headed assessment of conditions on the ground. Curtis Sliwa is an idiosyncratic old school New York character who always wears a beret for some reason, but at least he knew that knife-brandishing maniacs on the subway aren’t the tragically misunderstood good guys.

I’m sympathetic to the frustration and rage of Mamdani’s core base, downwardly mobile aspirational elites who moved to New York only to discover that the dream of life in the big city as seen on social media, TV, and the movies was a lie. Contrary to what the triumphal graduation speeches at Bowdoin and Wesleyan implied, there were no meaningful and remunerative careers or charming Park Slope brownstones ripe for the picking, only precarious gig employment as baristas and dog-walkers as they barely scrape by with several roommates in dingy Bushwick one-bedrooms. Those wannabe elites were bamboozled and hung out to dry, and that was even before Joe Biden dangled the tantalizing promise of wiping away student loan debt and then characteristically failed to deliver. The sad irony is that now they’ve been bamboozled again, with their own enthusiastic participation, and the elation they’re feeling at the moment will gradually curdle into defensive rationalizations papering over the embarrassment of having placed such millenarian faith in so glib an Energizer Bunny of a TikTok conman.

New Yorkers (or rather a slight majority of the roughly 30% of eligible voters who bothered to vote) have bought themselves a fistful of magic beans, but no magic beanstalk will be forthcoming. Instead, we can all look forward to a poorer, dirtier, more disordered, and more violent city in perhaps inexorable decline, courtesy of the Democratic Socialists of America. I was once a lefty, and still feel that it would be wonderful to live in a world where mass transit could be both safe and free, and where there could be bountiful affordable housing for every single person who’s ever had a dream of moving to the Big Apple. But that’s not the world we live in, where we have no choice but to face hard limits and intractable human frailties sooner or later, regardless of grinning demagogues and their wild promises.

The fact of the matter is that it’s just not the 1980s anymore, when no matter how bleak things got in the city the financial sector was pretty well stuck in lower Manhattan. Today, with high-speed internet, there’s little reason but inertia and perhaps aura for “Wall Street” to stay on Wall Street. The only way for the Mamdani regime to try to deliver on its outlandish promises is to levy massive tax increases that will strongly encourage Big Finance to exit the five boroughs. New York retains enough cachet that I don’t expect firms to abandon the city entirely, but they could easily shift primary operations up north to downtown White Plains, or over to Stamford, Connecticut, or out of the tristate altogether down to Texas or Florida. Most likely most of his fellow rich people that Zohran Mamdani loves lambasting won’t leave Manhattan entirely, as their egos are too tied into overlooking Central Park, but many of them may well decide to downgrade to less opulent pied-a-terres where they stay in between their primary residences in the Hamptons and south Florida.

Rage against the ultra-rich is often justified: many of them are unsavory characters who amassed their fortunes by screwing people over. But that doesn’t mean that taxes on the top few percent of wealthy New Yorkers aren’t propping up the infrastructure and social services that working- and middle-class New Yorkers depend upon. If just a handful of big firms choose to relocate their headquarters to Stamford, or just a hundred wealthy families decide to make their primary residence Coral Gables, it will spell disaster for city and state revenues. In grasping to fund his fanciful schemes, Mamdani is poised to kill the golden goose that ordinary New Yorkers depend upon.

Even as net tax contributors hemorrhage out of the city, Mamdani’s giveaways and alluring rhetoric will attract ever more needy people who consume more from the system’s resources than they add to it. Even if Jessica Tisch remains in charge of the NYPD, crime will almost certainly tick up and the homeless population will likely soar even as the municipal tax base erodes. That virtually guarantees more fatal incidents like the unfortunate confrontation between Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny.

The Mamdani administration may well succeed at lowering New Yorkers’ rents, but not in the way that his voters anticipated. To the extent that rents might come down, it won’t be because of rent freezes or massive construction of new housing, but because Mamdani will have succeeded in making New York City a worse and less desirable place to live. By the time of the next mayoral election in 2029, I wager, New York will be a sadder, poorer, more chaotic, more graffitied, more trash-strewn, more rat-infested place with even more petty crime and vacant storefronts than we have today. But hey, at least Mamdani’s volunteers will enjoy the privilege of being menaced by mentally ill vagrants on the free bus back to Bushwick.

Perhaps New York City’s spectacular attempt at urban suicide isn’t the worst thing in the world. As a born and raised Democrat who’s concluded that the Republicans are presently the lesser of evils, the Mamdani administration’s wacky misgovernance will likely provide an endless font of political capital for the GOP. Any moment now we’re guaranteed to once again see the headline “Trump to City: Drop Dead.” And beyond politics, the early promise of the internet was that it was supposed to culturally level the playing field to make media centers like New York and Los Angeles systemically less dominant and open up opportunities for talented people from anywhere to achieve recognition. But the relentless economic flattening of globalization has instead given many aspirational young people the impression that they cannot truly “make it” without living in a handful of extremely expensive global metropolises. It’s true that Brooklyn has a bunch of nice architecture and cute coffee shops and tasty ethnic restaurants and scenic parks, but places like Cincinnati and St. Louis and Pittsburgh have those things too, for a far more attainable cost of living. We’d be better off as a society if young people felt they could chase their ambitions from all over the country, rather than having to cram into a handful of prohibitively expensive zip codes. So, perhaps New York’s self-inflicted loss can become the rest of America’s gain.

Still, that’s squinting mighty hard to try to find a silver lining to the very dark cloud looming over New York City, a place I’ve come to love over the years despite its credulous and shortsighted electorate. God help us.

Next: Sympathy for The Donald

Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

In a sense, human beings are constantly playing games with one another. Whether finding one’s place in the pecking order, testing another’s mettle, angling for scarce resources or more desirable companionship, or striving to predict and influence others’ behavior, many and perhaps most of our species’ interactions can be fruitfully analyzed through the lens of game theory. One particularly chock-full area of recent research involves the technical term “common knowledge,” referring to cases where just about everybody knows that everybody knows a certain thing, and everyone is aware of that, and so on down an infinitude of self-referential rabbit holes that nonetheless remain socially germane.

Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s head-spinning new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, intriguingly maps out these recursive complexities of how homo sapiens consistently does its best to figure out what’s what and how to proceed accordingly. “The ultimate subject of my fascination would have to be how people think about what other people think, and how they think about what other people think they think, and how they think about what other people think they think they think,” Pinker writes. “As dizzying as this cogitation may seem, we engage in it every day, at least tacitly.”

Across an array of telling examples and illustrations, ranging from Great Depression-era bank runs to the game show Family Feud to the virtually instantaneous canceling of social media villain Justine Sacco during a single plane ride to the knotty Age of Aquarius poetry of psychiatrist R.D. Laing, Pinker maps out how human beings can’t help but try to suss one another, contextualizing bottomless layers of self-referential knowledge and intentionality, and even often managing to act in concert. As much as “an infinite number of propositions cannot fit into a finite skull,” he concedes, our species maintains an impressive capacity for at very least intuitively keeping track of one another’s respective status and sensibilities.

While officially powerful VIPs, such as CEOs and heads of state, can assert dominance via ostentatious indications of wealth and power, more ordinary people have to walk a tightrope between conveying that they’re no pushovers and yet avoiding the constant risk of being perceived as trying too hard. “They may consciously flaunt the trappings of dominance, like loud motorcycles, muscle cars, or an overbearing demeanor, but that can turn into a social paradox,” Pinker posits. “A self-conscious display of dominance will be seen as its opposite, a sign of weakness: as bluster, bravado, bombast, braggadocio, being a blowhard, or, as they say in Texas, ‘all hat and no cattle.’”

Amid such tireless social showmanship, “What is a friendship, or any other relationship?” he asks. “It’s not as if friends sign a contract. A relationship is a matter of common knowledge. If two people are friends, it means that each one knows that the other one knows that the first one knows that the second one knows … that they are friends.… And because a friendship entails that each of you is there for the other whenever support may be needed, it must be periodically reaffirmed.”

Dating back deep into evolutionary history, long before our complex bureaucratized national and globalized societies, cooperation has proved mutually beneficial more often than not, at least as measured by the health and wealth of history’s victors and survivors. Which is perhaps part of the reason, Pinker speculates, that it’s often socially least disadvantageous for many to save face by way of relatively subtle rhetorical retreats: “When people negotiate in fraught areas of human life, they seldom blurt out their intentions in so many words. They hint, wink, sidestep, shilly-shally, and beat around the bush. They use innuendo, euphemism, and subtext, counting on listeners to catch their drift, connect the dots, and read between the lines.”

“In a nutshell,” Pinker suggests, “Social relationships are coordination games, which we solve with common salience and common knowledge … a social relationship is a long game … for an indefinite number of day-to-day games we might play in the future.” Such resulting hierarchies are structured not only by de facto dominance but by the status derived in part thereof: “If dominance is backstopped up by the implicit threat ‘I could hurt you,’ status is backstopped by the implicit promise ‘I could help you’” in terms of credible leaders earning voluntary deference.

But all of that labyrinthine indirectness takes a ton of time and energy. “Why don’t people just come out and say what they mean?” Pinker asks. “It would be quicker for the speaker, less work for the listener, and freer of the possibility of misunderstanding.” As a cofounder of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard in 2023, Pinker has a profound stake in the question: he’s preoccupied with fraught issues of intellectual autonomy and viewpoint diversity that have plunged academia into crisis. The human impulse to censor is well-nigh universal, but so, too, are the benefits of expanding our range of understanding.

“So why don’t we cut the crap?” Pinker wonders. “If common knowledge is necessary for coordination, and coordination is a win-win game, why do we keep so much knowledge private? Why the fig leaves, the white lies, the elephants in the room?”

Simple, he answers: “In reality, calling for complete honesty is the ultimate dishonesty. No one really wants it, sometimes for good reason.” There are hard facts about the world and human social relations that are so inconvenient, painful, or downright shameful that, regardless of their veracity, a lot of human beings simply cannot abide becoming part of common knowledge. “Euphemism, politeness, genteel circumlocution, and other forms of indirect speech make social life possible, but they have a dark side.”

One unavoidable aspect of that dark side in recent years: even serious scholars and scientists trying to address controversial issues responsibly have increasingly become victims of cancel culture mobs. “They were not just criticized, as advocates of any strong position ought to be, but censored, punished, fired, threatened, harassed, demonized, libeled, and in some cases physically assaulted,” Pinker laments. “Worse, for every scholar who is sanctioned, many more self-censor, knowing they could be next.” As many people’s most cherished beliefs emerge not from empirical fact-finding but from moral convictions, troublesome ideas are often renounced and suppressed with fury.

“Norms exist to the extent that everyone knows that everyone knows they exist,” Pinker writes. “A moral norm may be endangered if a threat to it becomes commonly known, and so defenders of the norm feel they must prevent the threat from becoming common knowledge, and if they fail, to punish the threatener as a commonly known example to all.”

For whatever benefits of such social immune response in resisting truly toxic or ungrounded ideas, it has become a mortal threat to the discovery and transmission of knowledge. “The only way that our species has managed to learn anything about the nature of things, and to claw increments of progress out of an indifferent universe, is by a process of conjecture and refutation,” Pinker warns. “Any institution that disables this cycle by repressing disagreement is doomed to chain itself to error … An academic establishment that stifles debate betrays the privileges that the nation grants it and is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality.”

And yet that doesn’t mean filters and good manners can or should be dispensed with altogether. Human beings are highly interdependent creatures, and some degree of tact, flattery, and guile is necessary in collective actions ranging from friendships to sports to business to politics; human endeavors tend to require both poetry and prose.

“Authentic human relationships depend on the hypocrisy of keeping many kinds of private and reciprocal knowledge out of common knowledge,” Pinker argues. “The tension between aggressively expanding our knowledge to advance human understanding, and hypocritically keeping some knowledge private to preserve human harmony, is inherent to our condition.” Everyone knows that.

Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.

Next: Chronicle of a Decline Foretold

Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

Like most fans of rock ‘n’ roll, I gravitate to works from the vicinity of Greater Manchester intuitively, involuntarily. Even as someone who’s never once set foot in Great Britain, I’ve always felt I could viscerally relate to exactly where bands from the north of England were coming from. While I might not quite relate to football clubs or bangers and mash, I do hail from America’s Rust Belt, and more specifically, the inner outskirts of a battered old industrial city that was once bustling and systemically significant to national prosperity, but that eventually ended up more or less betrayed and forsaken. Manchester and its nearby municipalities in the United Kingdom have been as mistreated and abused by posh toffs in London as my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, has been pummeled in the United States by, as the viral hit puts it, rich men (and women) north of Richmond.

Consider the effect that small region of the world has had on our soundscape. There’s the Fab Four, of course, and legendary acts of more recent vintage such as Joy Division/New Order, Happy Mondays/Black Grape, The Stone Roses, and The Verve. And then there’s Oasis, currently on its triumphant global reunion tour.

Oasis isn’t my absolute favorite northern English band of its era, but they’re up there, and they have to be considered the scene’s greatest of modern times. Noel Gallagher was never as dazzlingly creative a songwriter as Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays et al., and while he could be quite an emotive guitarist, peak Oasis played like an above-average bar band compared to the almost telepathic chemistry of The Stone Roses and The Verve. But those other bands didn’t record “Live Forever” or “Wonderwall” or “Champagne Supernova,” nor manage to conquer the elusive American market to anywhere near the same extent. However often Richard Ashcroft might declare “Bitter Sweet Symphony” the greatest anthem of all time, the last time I saw him play New York it was for 45 acoustic minutes opening for Liam Gallagher.

What was that palpable X-factor that so differentiated Oasis and made the Gallagher brothers so enduringly relatable to listeners all over the planet? Quite simply, they burningly desired to be the biggest band in the world every bit as much as anyone has ever burningly desired their own most grandiose fantasy.

Released in 1994, and among the greatest debut albums of all time, Definitely Maybe was an explosion of desperate ambition that could only have come from talented but frustrated working-class young men feeling trapped and going nowhere as the dreams they had as children seemed on the verge of fading away. Almost every song is a lumbering beast so thoroughly composed of bits and pieces from the very best of the entire British popular music tradition as to make each feel inevitable, and the intensity doesn’t let up much until the final track.

I’ve never felt it was quite fair to dwell on Oasis stealing from The Beatles. To my ear, Oasis nicked at least as much from bands such as Faces and The Kinks and many of its contemporaries. Extensive borrowing and repurposing is a venerable rock ‘n’ roll tradition so long as it results in great tunes, and Noel Gallagher delivered in spades: Not only are songs like “Supersonic” and “Cigarettes and Alcohol” exceedingly catchy, but they add up almost like a short story collection to searing and earnest reportage about how he and his circle were experiencing life as they scratched by in dead end jobs yet still dared to dream big even as society was telling them that it was past time to settle down and find a proper career. The album’s emotional palette fluidly shifts between defiant bravado and glum recognition that the big dream was more than likely to crash and burn.

But the Gallaghers were hellbent on not letting that happen. Every song on the album would be at least as good as the singles on most bands’ albums. Most bands’ B-sides were random live tracks, extraneous remixes, or goofing off in the studio — and Oasis did engage in a bit of that — but Oasis also famously burned off a number of instant classics as B-sides as if to prove this band was definitely no flash in the pan.

The band’s debut proved an immediate success upon release, but by no means were the Gallaghers about to rest on their laurels: A few months later, even amid an exhausting amount of touring and bombastic rock star antics, Oasis had a newly recorded single out in time for Christmas, “Whatever,” with a couple more top-notch B-sides. And less than a year later, the band released another album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, that proved to be its commercial peak.

There’s a music biz truism that you have your whole life to write the first album, but then just six months to write and record a second one. And in comparison to the sheer slab of gobsmacking genius that was Definitely Maybe and its B-sides, the new LP and its B-sides were somewhat thinner and patchier even as they could boast far higher production values and a clutch of the band’s most beloved songs, including “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” That was more than enough to truly crack American radio and sell an avalanche of CDs, cassettes, and concert tickets far beyond Albion’s shores.

Amid even more exhausting touring and over-the-top rock star antics, the Gallaghers gave it nearly two years before releasing the lavishly produced third record in the band’s grand opening trilogy, Be Here Now. The revealed truth therein was that the band had been snorting truckloads of cocaine in between concerts, photo-ops, miscellaneous recording sessions with Johnny Depp, and ‘Cool Britannia’ press junkets shaking hands with Tony Blair. It was a staggeringly ambitious LP, ultimately far more composed and coherent than its predecessor, but the epic grandiosity had swelled to the point of dragging out almost every song with at least two or three minutes of extraneous guitar solos and sound effects. The album ended up bloatedly self-indulgent enough to dethrone Oasis in the U.K.’s pop pantheon in favor of iconic 1997 albums from Blur, The Verve, Spiritualized, and even Radiohead.

As excellent as some of the later LPs turned out, they’re not really relevant as far as general audiences are concerned. How impressive a comeback Don’t Believe The Truth was in 2005 after the relative disappointment of 2002’s Heathen Chemistry has no bearing on why Oasis’s reunion tour is this year’s hottest ticket. As much as I love Oasis, I wasn’t about to bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to see the band in person from nosebleed seats in a New Jersey stadium. I’ll just watch the inevitable Netflix concert film in a few months. Oasis was never especially a “live band,” judging from the bootlegs I’ve heard from the band’s prime. And at any rate, the Oasis I really want to see still resides back in the 1990s, when the Gallaghers were at their hungriest. The reunion tour is but a footnote to the saga. Instead, I’ve been blasting my old Oasis CDs in the car as I’ve been back visiting St. Louis; the B-sides compilation The Masterplan is as great as any of the band’s albums.

I’m scheduled to head to England next year to attend a wedding. No doubt I’ll spend a few days playing tourist in London, going to see Big Ben and Notting Hill and Trafalgar Square, but I’m infinitely more interested in heading up north to see where so many of my heroes cut their teeth. Forget the capital city, I want to visit the spot of the old Hacienda club, where so many great bands got their start. I want to go see Thor’s Cave in Staffordshire, where Verve (the “The” came later) shot the album cover of their classic debut, A Storm In Heaven. Some kind of rusted magic up there made so much rock ‘n’ roll genius possible, far and beyond even Oasis’s mighty megastardom.

Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.

Next: “Common Knowledge” and the Games People Play

Wondering if perhaps I hadn’t been entirely fair, I felt the right thing to do was something I’d never done before: send my rather strongly worded critique directly to the Office of the President and senior PR team at Low Library, Columbia’s central administrative hub. I’ve corresponded with many Columbia students and faculty, and even gingerly with a few of my former colleagues, but never had the audacity to send any of my work straight to senior university leadership. The note I sent was to some degree an audacious shot across the bow, no doubt, but it was also extended in friendly good faith. I harbor zero ill will towards any of Columbia’s PR staff, as I’ve been in their shoes and know they’re all hard-working communications professionals doing their jobs.

My dear colleagues and fellow Columbians,

I don’t know if you’ve seen any of my work criticizing Columbia from the exasperated perspective of someone who served as a CU reporter/historian/PR flack for eleven years, departing in 2022. Suffice it to say that I’ve become one of your more persistent gadflies.

A few weeks ago, an outlet bigger than my Substack asked for my take on Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and what I ended up writing was the raw catharsis of how I really felt: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/columbias-sweet-surrender

That essay’s tone wasn’t quite in their wheelhouse, so I ended up posting it myself. But the outlet was gracious enough to invite a follow-up article more carefully examining the specific terms of the Trump-Columbia deal. So I wanted to reach out to see if any of you at Low Library have anything you’d care to explain to help alienated constituents like me better understand the details of the settlement and perhaps begin to feel that Columbia might finally be making earnest efforts at long-needed reforms.

I expect to be back in New York as of early September and would be glad to meet in person on or off the record as far as quotes are concerned, or would otherwise understand if you’d rather default to generic boilerplate. I used to handle crisis communications for Columbia from time to time, so can empathize with the pressure you are under.

In full transparency, if I don’t hear from anyone by end of week I’ll try to reach out to some other public affairs folks throughout the university to see if they have any statement, or otherwise rely entirely on my own research and experience. One way or another, I’ll do my best to publish a tough but fair essay, with or without Columbia’s input: the ball is in your court.

While you are likely to perceive me as an enemy, I consider myself your friend. We share a common goal of restoring Columbia to its historic greatness. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still working for the university, but from the outside. It’s totally up to you whether you’d prefer to work with or against me, but I’m not going away.

Hope to speak with you soon,

Jesse Adams

Realistically I understood that, were I to receive any response at all, it would almost certainly consist of slippery boilerplate. Lord knows I’ve been in the position of having my superiors at Columbia insist that I tersely reply to any and all inquiries with a form letter approved by counsel. Within a few hours came this response:

Hi, Jesse.

Thanks for reaching out and appreciate the note. Happy to try and help with your inquiry.

I’m sharing a resource that I hope will be useful for your reporting here: https://president.columbia.edu/content/our-resolution-federal-government

That link includes our official press release and links to the agreement, a letter to the community from Acting President Claire Shipman, and an FAQ that includes detailed answers to some common questions about the agreement. Feel free to use or quote from any of these materials as needed in your article.

All the best,

[Redacted]

I would’ve been shocked to get anything but a brush-off, but at least it was a diplomatic brush-off, so kudos to [Redacted] for her gracious professionalism. I’ve omitted her name because I’m sure she’s a nice person just following orders and I don’t want to give her any more extra headaches. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to suggest colleague to colleague that her bosses are dropping the ball in terms of pivoting Columbia to a point where it might actually become able to turn the page.

Hi [Redacted],

Much appreciate you writing me back and understand that the generic boilerplate was all that could realistically be expected. You and your colleagues are in a tough spot and compelled to stay on script with counsel-approved talking points. The thing is, hiding behind strained bureaucratese makes Columbia look like it's still hiding things: it reassures neither your critics nor your now disappointed and alienated defenders. Speaking as someone still deeply invested in the university and its future, your higher-ups are bungling this messaging just as surely as they've bungled other significant developments of the past few years. I genuinely hate to see it.

Over the past few years, I've managed to accumulate some small cred among academic reformers, including some of Columbia's harshest critics, while remaining willing to give credit in those instances when credit is due. I recently noted in the pages of the Washington Examiner Magazine that the Core Curriculum has kept the Columbia undergraduate experience more substantive than many of its peers, for instance. Nothing would please me more than to be able to honestly write a piece reporting that I'd had opportunity to sit down with a Columbia rep who could look me in the eye, acknowledge the university's many damaging missteps in recent years, summarize point by point the university's extensive plans to ensure that such missteps never happen again, and leave me with some real hope that perhaps Columbia is attempting a good faith effort at genuine course correction. Alas, reading through the generic boilerplate conveys rather the opposite impression.

Rest assured I'll try hard to be fair and generous to your institutional position, but someday I would love to have reason to write a more positive item about Columbia again, for a change. After all, that was my job for many years.

Thanks again for your professional courtesy,

Jesse

And so back I was at square one, with only the meager materials from Low Library I’d seen long before receiving their form letter, and proceeding on that basis alone felt like boxing against an opponent with arms tied behind his back. Thus I continued to seek out perspectives from less reticent Columbians willing to actually make the case that the settlement represents a dangerous and short-sighted capitulation to the Trump administration. An essay from Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Center seemed as representative as any. To quote one brief excerpt:

“Columbia has been the target of a months-long campaign of extortion by a presidential administration that is contemptuous of legal constraint and deeply hostile to the values that universities exist to promote. We are not convinced the settlement will put this behind us. What we can say with confidence is that the settlement comes at a very steep price to Columbia’s autonomy and to the constitutional freedoms of Columbia’s faculty, staff, and students.”

I urge readers to peruse the whole article to better understand a viewpoint that’s very different from mine, but to put it bluntly I find its arguments thoroughly unconvincing and indeed beside the point. The essay reads almost like a transmission from an alternate universe where Spock might have a moustache. In nearly 2600 words there’s not one lone acknowledgement or glimmer of recognition that the massive backlash against Columbia might potentially be driven at least in part by legitimate gripes. High-minded rhetoric about values and autonomy doesn’t go very far with any real scrutiny of the particular values Columbia has chosen to foster with all that autonomy in recent years, as richly subsidized by American taxpayers.

I’d never have lasted a decade plus at Columbia if there weren’t some things I loved about working there. I got paid to be a roving storyteller covering a range of very talented people at a scenic world-famous university in Manhattan. By all rights it should have been a dream job, and maybe it would’ve been had Columbia’s leadership been properly doing their jobs. But working for them was all too frequently the most disillusioning of slogs, and I was both thrilled and relieved a few years ago to finally make my escape and turn the tables as a whistleblower. Some things are rotten in Morningside Heights, and have been for an awfully long time.

The more carefully I consider the details of the Columbia-Trump settlement, the more staunchly I conclude that Columbia miraculously dodged a bullet in managing to score such a sweetheart deal, with a slap on the wrist of just $221 million in fines to be paid over three years and some indeterminate federal oversight. In my direct lived experience, to remain employable on campus circa the 2010s and early 2020s was to have to always keep one’s mouth shut navigating a minefield of fashionable bigotries, some loudly encouraged and others more tacitly endorsed, with the bulk of sanctioned prejudice aimed directly at human beings of more or less my demographic description.

I myself am Jewish, and the antisemitism endemic at Columbia as of late has been appalling to say the least. But the bulk of the invective and discrimination that I personally experienced over the years came not on account of my maternal lineage, but because of the color of my skin, that I happen to have a Y chromosome, and that I have the wrong sexual orientation. Those traits officially placed me among the lowest of the low, and a lot of folks on campus weren’t shy about reminding me of that. So when I look at Low Library’s carefully couched verbiage begrudgingly admitting that antisemitism has become an issue but refusing to acknowledge any other misconduct, I cannot help but discern distinct notes of cynicism and flippancy. Columbia appears to be wagering that by tactically conceding only that there was a short-term flare-up of antisemitism and paying a relatively minor fine, the institution can wriggle out of further accountability for its unethical and unambiguously illegal behavior stretching back at least two decades.

I struggle not to feel insulted by Columbia having the gall to claim that it hasn’t been constantly violating the Civil Rights Act, and in most spectacular fashion. Of course it has, and until five minutes ago Columbia could not have been any prouder of that fact. If one were applying to attend Columbia or get a job on campus, one’s ethnic background was a defining factor: if applicants were Chinese-American, or Italian-American, or Bangladeshi-American, or Jewish, and so forth, they were considered a dime-a-dozen and subjected to dramatically different standards than members of other groups that the institution deemed more desirable. Columbia embraced with gusto the crude pop intersectionality of demagogues like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It is little exaggeration to say that by the time longtime president Lee C. Bollinger stepped down in mid-2023, exuberant discrimination had become Columbia’s second highest priority after fundraising.

Reading and rereading Claire Shipman’s letter, I find myself growing more rather than less supportive of the federal government taking further action, including potentially revoking Columbia’s tax-exempt status. It seems clear from her strategical talking points that the university has learned nothing and has no intention of substantively cleaning up its act. I find myself increasingly hoping that the Trump administration might soon circle back to help further incentivize Columbia to do the right thing, even if that might involve holding the university’s feet closer to the fire.

What would that doing the right thing look like? Pardon the phrase, but how can we start to make Columbia great again? Truly turning the page will require Columbia to formally acknowledge that it has indeed intentionally violated the Civil Rights Act on countless occasions, and formally apologize for that unacceptable conduct. I would recommend the institution sell off some fraction of its vast real estate portfolio to establish a billion-dollar fund offering some few symbolic pennies of reparation to every single person who Columbia has discriminated against or who’s had to endure the intrinsically hostile environment that the university went out of its way to foster in recent years. And I’d suggest the university set up a blue-ribbon truth and reconciliation commission, kind of like in Rwanda, to record in exhaustive detail Columbia’s recent history of dehumanizing discrimination that can never be allowed to happen again.

I’ve already considered who might be the ideal candidate to head up such a commission: Sheila Coronel, rightfully among the most respected faculty at Columbia Journalism School. She’s the real deal, having spent her early career putting her life on the line to report on the murderous regime of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines. I have complete faith in her integrity, which one day I’d love to be able to say about Columbia’s senior leadership.

Yet even the unimpeachable Professor Coronel’s track record in such positions is complicated. As of late 2014, in the wake of Rolling Stone’s incendiary libel that earned enduring notoriety as the University of Virginia gangrape hoax, the troubled magazine had commissioned her to investigate what had gone wrong. The results were mixed: no doubt Coronel conducted a rigorous review, but it ended up seeming like Rolling Stone had hired her more in hopes of making the PR problem go away than actually correcting course, and particularly trying to find some way to discretely minimize their and Columbia’s mutual embarrassment that the disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely was a much-feted J-School alum. No matter how great a job Sheila Coronel undoubtedly did, the official final audit published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2015—as tinkered with by then-Dean of the J-School Steve Coll—had been airbrushed into a mendacious whitewash that seemed primarily aimed at changing the subject and minimizing Rolling Stone’s legal exposure for having defamed a bunch of innocent frat boys.

In this present hour of crisis, with Columbia at its very nadir, Low Library’s least bad option would be to unleash Professor Coronel to work her magic once more, but not bowdlerized this time. The university needs a ruthlessly clear-eyed accounting of all of its voluminous discrimination in recent decades for all the world to see. Then, and only then, might Columbia have earned enough credibility to make a legitimate effort at building back better.

Next: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Greatest Oasis

But over the past few years, I’m sorry to say, the show has grown stale, inert, and boring. After finally getting around to partially fast-forwarding through the Season 17 finale a week after its airdate, I’m about ready to call it quits. It’s not that I’m not still fond of larger-than-life hosts Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbaja-Biamila, and bubbly correspondent Zuri Hall, but that the spectacle that used to be so thrilling and engrossing just isn’t anymore.

ANW’s producers seem as aware of that as anyone, likely explaining why this year they started awkwardly shoehorning in so many packaged countdowns of “Most Memorable Moments” to compensate for the show having long since lost its spark. The problem is, those memorable moments just serve to emphasize how forgettable the show has become, particularly over the past two or three seasons.

The whole basis of ANW was fundamentally to be there on the sidelines witnessing real-life heroes’ journeys: viewers got to meet memorable personalities from all over the country who’d picked up this crazy new hobby and would do their damnedest to meet eye-popping challenges that looked dern near impossible. The contestants were obviously not a demographic cross section of pudgy 21^st century America—probably half or more of them were former college athletes who’d never quite lost their taste for competition and felt a stirring to see if they still had it, but they were also relatable adults with real jobs and responsibilities.

Therein lay ANW’s vicarious thrill: all the aging and not so in shape viewers on the couch at home could watch these engaging, likable characters navigating and problem solving and figuring out how to overcome a series of delightfully inventive challenges in real time, and dare to imagine their own prospects of maybe somehow making it through that particular obstacle by luck, pluck, and the skin of their teeth. Season by season viewers developed parasocial relationships with indelible inspirational personas who in the meantime had been getting married or having kids or losing loved ones to whom they were dedicating this next singular run on the latest wacky iteration of the course. So compelling was the spectacle that many of those best-liked characters became niche celebrities who were able to make a handsome living quitting their jobs to start independent “ninja gyms” all across the country for all the kids inspired by the show’s theatrics and derring-do.

In a lot of ways, it’s been a wonderful thing for what was once an offbeat hobby to become a whole industry and way of life. Ninja has enticed countless kids off the couch and off of their phones, encouraging them to get fit while making friends and gaining confidence, and it’s also enabled a bunch of contestants to quit their jobs and switch to more fulfilling livelihoods working with young people. (The less said about Drew Drechsel, the better.)

But the professionalization of American Ninja Warrior has necessarily entailed its standardization into a predictable sport for professional athletes rather than a wild pastime for loveable amateurs with compelling life stories. With so many strivers’ careers and livelihoods now on the line, there simply must be exactingly precise MLB-esque metrics and rankings on a leaderboard, which has not only led to much less imaginative course design, but also encouraged an obsessive focus on speed races down to the millisecond over the emotionally relatable heroes’ journeys that had made network primetime American Ninja Warrior relevant beyond its original niche cable audience in the first place. Balancing haste against caution had long been central to the show’s excitement, but there’s no room for that balance anymore, and dwindling room for any of the great characters who made the show an institution.

If there’s one term for the two-hour ANW season finale I just endured, it would be brutal repetition. To be a nationally competitive ninja now almost certainly means you’re a teenager or close to it whose whole life has been Ninja since childhood, and you’ve probably already competed in the short-lived American Ninja Warrior Junior spinoff series. So the broadcast was two hours consisting basically of pairs of interchangeable Ivan Drago-looking teens (most of whom seem to come from Utah) speed racing repeatedly through essentially the exact same course in the exact same way to see who would slip or otherwise be edged out by a few milliseconds. It was tiresome, it was boring, and it had no emotional stakes. My all-time favorite ninja, Joe “The Weatherman” Moravsky, announcing his retirement and then getting a miraculous wild card to compete in one last finals meant something to me; exactly which one of the villains from The Mighty Ducks ended up taking home the trophy meant nothing to me, except some resentment that they’ve spoiled the quality entertainment that Ninja used to provide.

During Covid, I happened to have had the pleasure of meeting the mighty Weatherman himself at La Guardia. He and I were among about half a dozen masked passengers boarding a flight to St. Louis, where ANW was economically shooting an entire season indoors with special pandemic protocols. Keeping socially distant at six feet apart, Joe and I had a pleasant few words and I got to tell him how much I enjoyed watching him so valorously compete and extend my best wishes to his lovely young family that viewers had gotten to know. As long as Joe was on the show, I still had reason to tune in. At this point, the uber-positive Daniel Gil, he of the most beaming smile I’ve ever seen, is the last active competitor in whom I have any meaningful emotional investment.

In announcing his retirement, Joe Moravsky claimed it was to spend more time with his wife and kids, and no doubt that is most of the reason. But I’ve seen Joe compete for years, he has an indomitable will and at 36 still has the tools to remain competitive another few years were he able to devote 18 hours a day to training like the 16-year-olds. He has too many obligations as a husband and father to be able to fit in that level of training, though, and it’s not worth continuing the level of training that he can realistically fit into a reasonably balanced life now that the altered program now gives him little shot of winning against kids without such obligations. He retired voluntarily, but the reality is that ANW had already pretty much shown him out the door: he’s too good for the show’s degraded new format, and so too are many of us viewers.

My recommendation to ANW’s producers would be to rename this dull dishwater version of the show American Ninja Warrior Turbo and move it to a sports network on late night cable where it belongs, and relaunch American Ninja Warrior Classic on primetime NBC without contestants under 21 that gets back to the fun Ninja spirit of old, which had some American Gladiators and Wipeout in its DNA. But my suspicion is that ANW’s producers would love to do something like that, and have likely lamented not being able to do something like that, because they simply lack the money to do it. The economics of producing broadcast and basic cable television have gotten awfully dicey in the past couple of years, with revenues from advertising cratering to the point that programs that were still quite profitable five years ago are struggling to survive. Varying up obstacles like in the old days would cost precious time and money, whereas running kids through the same course over and over generates the same number of hours of content at lesser expense.

When ninja gyms first started to become a thing, they were peripheral to the all-important TV show. Now, with ninja gyms having become a thriving industry and the television industry ailing, the TV show is peripheral to the broader Ninja empire, and indeed may have become sort of a loss-leader that the gyms themselves subsidize as essentially a series of infomercials for the industry. The problem is that the infomercials have become so damn tedious. I would much rather see American Ninja Warrior become good television again than to see it get canceled before long, but at this point its fate is probably written on the warped wall. Rest in peace, ANW, you were a great show in your day.

Next: Can Columbia Be Redeemed?

That might sound absurd, at least before the bumpiness of the past few years, given the institution’s 11-figure endowment, global prestige, low acceptance rates, and that it is by some distance the largest private landholder in New York City. But try to see it from Columbia’s institutional perspective: back in the 1950s, it could reasonably consider itself the third most prestigious university in the United States. (Sure, Princeton had more social cachet, but it lacked law or medical schools.) And even though Harvard and Yale clearly outranked Columbia even then, the brass at Low Library could squint at the hard facts and argue that those schools were in relative backwaters over in Cambridge and New Haven rather than the crossroads of the world in Manhattan, just a cab ride from the United Nations. Those competitors hadn’t housed the Manhattan Project, and they hadn’t just had their university president Dwight D. Eisenhower elected United States president. As far as many mid-century Columbians were concerned, especially among leadership, Columbia had fair claim to being the greatest university on earth.

And then came 1968. Decades later the protests and building occupations of that fateful spring would be hailed by revisionists as a righteous uprising exemplifying the very best of the Columbia tradition, but at the time and for many years afterwards it was experienced as an utter catastrophe that alienated alumni, discouraged donations, and cut off a ton of federal funding. At the same time, New York City was going through a rough patch that made Morningside Heights a far less attractive place to go to school, especially for young women.

And so in the ’80s into the ’90s, when the Ivy League as we’ve known it in recent years began to crystallize—going from exclusive places where top students from across the United States could feel they might have a decent enough shot of getting in to ultra-exclusive enclaves where there were so many applicants from all around the world that admissions were a total crapshoot if they didn’t check the right identity boxes or have fabulously wealthy parents—Columbia was to some extent stuck on the sidelines. As an Ivy it became vastly more exclusive along with its peers, of course, but there was a lingering odor of it maybe being a little dubious, a little run-down, a little yesterday’s news. So while previously Columbia could not unreasonably flatter itself into quite possibly winning the bronze in the academic prestige Olympics, it’s had to endure the continual indignity of inexorably slipping notch after notch down the elite social hierarchy.

Forget any notion of competing with Princeton: the aftermath of ’68 demoted Columbia definitively into fourth place. As Stanford increasingly made its way into being a full-fledged honorary Ivy, Columbia was edged into fifth. Then there was the rise of tech, when much of STEM other than medicine and pure academic science had previously been considered a backwater, so M.I.T. muscled its way into the conversation and in terms of name recognition and desirability surely pushed Columbia out of the top five.

And then comes my alma mater Brown, which doesn’t have a law school and offers far fewer resources than Columbia on a variety of levels, but yet still derives a certain aura and desirability from being the supposedly artsy and creative Ivy where celebs’ kids like to go. Opinions will differ, but I would contend that as of my employment at Columbia it had slipped behind Brown to at least seventh place in terms of social desirability of attending as an undergrad.

Before the protests of the past few years, I still would’ve placed Columbia somewhat ahead of the rest of the Ivy League in terms of positive name recognition and perception of prestige, but now the brass at Low Library has to face the reality of free-fall where, Ivy League or not, Columbia has likely dropped well out of the top ten, and may now sit somewhat behind other institutions that it had never been forced to quite consider peers: Tufts, Duke, Hopkins, Chicago, Northwestern, and (egads!) maybe even some of the flagship state schools.

From Columbia’s institutional perspective, then, the past 57 years have much of the time consisted of humiliating erosion of relative social standing. What the brass at Low Library had hoped would be only temporary embarrassment has proved chronic and defining: they feel in their bones that Columbia is second-rate. It was striking working with faculty across the university how few of them were Columbia grads; there were some, but the numbers blatantly implied that Columbia considers its alumni objectively inferior to those of places like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. I always found it hilarious that every door in Columbia Law School’s Jerome Greene Hall was secured with a Yale®-brand lock.

That fundamental sense of inadequacy and inferiority explains why I had a job on campus for as long as I wanted one: Columbia’s primary structural advantage against its competitors was its location in Manhattan, the nation’s media center. There were always interesting and/or famous people passing through NYC who might pop uptown to give a talk, and Columbia was hungry to promote and glorify itself as much as possible. No other elite school spent nearly as much time or money embellishing its story, because they didn’t feel such need to. There’s little doubt in my mind that the infamous rankings scandal of a few years back, in which Columbia was proven to have manipulated statistics to goose its position in the U.S. News & World Report list of top schools, had been precipitated by senior leadership. The notion that Columbia had climbed up to the #2 spot was preposterous to the point of laughability.

I like to poke fun at Columbia’s recent succession of hapless temporary presidents—the Baroness Minouche Shafik, the head of the university’s medical complex Katrina Armstrong, and presently former ABC News television personality Claire Shipman—but they deserve some credit for doing the very best they could in an impossible situation. The real villain of the story, the pied piper who led Columbia down the primrose path to disaster, is longtime university president Lee C. Bollinger, who had the good fortune of stepping down after twenty years just a few months before the horror of October 7^th, 2023, catalyzed a new era of campus chaos. A talented fundraiser, Bollinger had been a solid enough president for his first few years, but eventually became obsessed with raking in money and building a series of grotesque new university buildings up north at the exclusion of all other considerations.

Much of Lee Bollinger’s tenure can be likened to that of President Joe Biden: a distracted chief executive asleep at the switch as rot festered all around him. Academic and intellectual standards were already shockingly diminished when I reached campus in early 2011, and had only gotten that much worse by the time of my departure in 2022. The most vociferous ethnic animus was celebrated and encouraged so long as it was the right demographics being demeaned and demonized. As a heterosexual male of European descent, I faced a consistently hostile environment and not a day went by that I didn’t experience various “microaggressions” of students and colleagues casually noting that people of my basic description were inherently worse and of less value than people with different ancestry and/or sexual preferences. I don’t know why Lee C. Bollinger failed to ever step in to address that ubiquitous fact of campus life; perhaps as a straight white male himself he thought speaking out for treating everyone with decency would endanger his position and pet projects, or perhaps he is an earnestly prejudiced person. Either way, he had countless opportunities to become that stitch in time that could have saved nine, and his feckless negligence made the recent crisis inevitable.

I wince each time I pass the “Lee C. Bollinger Forum” building on the new “Manhattanville Campus,” visible from the 1 train when it goes aboveground near 125^th Street. Not only is it aesthetically monstrous, and not only did its construction needlessly displace a bunch of poor people and a convenient drive-through McDonald’s by the entrance to the West Side Highway, but Lee Bollinger’s leadership simply does not warrant that sort of recognition. He’s arguably the worst president in Columbia’s nearly three-century history, leaving the institution on the very brink of calamity, and iconic former president Nicholas Murray Butler must be spinning in his grave. If I were interim president Claire Shipman, I’d strip the Bollinger moniker from that hideous building and stash his portrait at Low Library in a broom closet somewhere, never to be seen again.

While I do have some significant qualms about some of the Trump administration’s assault on elite higher education (I hated to see funding disrupted for the incredible scientific research conducted by brilliant scholars I used to cover at Columbia Engineering, for instance), Columbia eminently deserves a reckoning, good and hard. The appalling antisemitism so inescapable over the past few years is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the fashionable prejudices Columbia went out of its way to promote and inculcate over the past fifteen to twenty years. So I was disappointed to see Columbia wriggle out of substantive accountability with a pittance of a fine of merely $221 million, pocket change for an institution with a near-$15 billion endowment. The university spent years championing and actualizing vicious discrimination against men and against “overrepresented” people of East Asian, European, and South Asian heritage, so a fine of much less than a cool billion is essentially letting Columbia get away with murder.

I should emphasize that I’ve become a persona non grata up in Morningside Heights, at least outside of heterodox circles, and no longer have eyes and ears at Low Library. But, were I to speculatively venture a guess about the mood of Claire Shipman and other senior leadership right now, I’d have to think it’s some combination of sheer exhaustion and grateful astonishment that they somehow landed such a sweetheart deal. Like a cat suddenly getting bored with batting at a sparkly toy, the Trump administration abruptly moved on before Columbia received anything near its just desserts.

Columbia’s drastic decline in social status at last became a sort of advantage: the university has become too marginal to matter as much as it once did. Humbling Harvard is the real prize, and slapping Columbia around but a minor sideshow. I suspect that many on campus are quietly relieved—not only did they evade much in the way of serious accountability for the abundant wrongdoing of recent years, but they may well quietly support many of the reforms that they now have cover to blame on the Orange Ogre in the White House. Having to constantly placate and pacify the woke hordes was a grueling slog that a lot of people are probably pretty glad to leave behind.

Can Columbia lick its wounds and work back to its former renown? I doubt it. One 1968 was bad enough, and the antics of the past few years have perhaps permanently persuaded much of the country that Columbia is but a middling Oberlin on the Hudson. The university still sits on desirable Manhattan real estate, but the looming likelihood of a Zohran Mamdani regime seems poised to cast New York City back to the bad old days of the 1970s, or worse. Because it is an Ivy League school, and a lot of people are desperate for that gold star on their LinkedIn page, I wouldn’t bet against Columbia eventually clawing its way back closer to the top ten. But I expect it will always remain the Ivy with an asterisk, the place that managed to self-abuse itself from near the top of the Ivy League heap to its rock bottom. Low Library has made its bed, a lousy and flea-bitten one, and it will be gratifying to see Columbia have to sleep in it.

Was pleased to be reprinted in filmmaker Ted Balaker’s The Coddling of the American Mind substack.

Next: American Ninja Bore-rior

From that evening in my early 20s when my Dad first brought me there, through the years until the coming of the Covid era, O’Connell’s had to me always embodied a certain old-school workingman’s solidarity. But then, in late summer 2021, the institution suddenly posted a remarkably hostile declaration across social media that any and all unvaccinated people (save children under 12) were expressly banned from ever entering the pub again.

“We ask that you do not come to the pub if you have not been vaccinated. This is coming directly from the owner. We don't want you to come and sit outside and then send a server to go out and wait on the people who are not vaccinated. No way. Just don't come to the pub, ever. It's not safe for you to come now or at any point in the future. Even when 80% of the population is vaccinated it won't be safe. Not inside, not outside, not on the patio, nowhere. If you aren't vaccinated or don't plan to be vaccinated, don't come. Ever.”

My jaw literally dropped the first time I read that, and then the second time too. (And then yet again to see that, as of press time in 2025, they’ve still not deleted it!) While I certainly support the right of business owners to determine what makes the most sense for their establishments, the tone of the post was just so unnecessarily divisive, not to mention fundamentally contradictory to the O’Connell’s brand—perhaps comparable to Cracker Barrel pushing rainbow rocking chairs for Pride Month or Jaguar’s disastrous attempt at image reinvention.

Speaking as a former PR flack, the institution might easily and diplomatically have announced their new policy with something more like “Hey folks, for now we’ve decided that vaxxed-up only is what we and prob most establishments need to do during these scary times, and encourage everyone to get the jab ASAP so we can serve you again like tomorrow :) We’re all in this together!” But the official post was so jarringly discordant, and flagrantly contemptuous of customers who might happen to feel that the decision whether or not to receive an experimental shot should be privately “their body, their choice,” that I’d felt obliged to respect the owner’s request by continuing to boycott his business long after vaccine verification stopped being a thing.

And then a few weeks ago, waiting at La Guardia for a flight back to St. Louis, I happened upon a local news item that venerable old O’Connell’s was struggling to make payroll due to extensive construction making most customers’ usual route a nightmare during rush hour (it went unmentioned that the business had gone out of its way to alienate a big chunk of its clientele) and perhaps teetering toward closure, so the community was rallying to attempt to save the place. Sitting there in New York, on my way back to my good old hometown, I had to confront the hard binary of whether STL, battered hard in recent years by the Ferguson riots, the ignominious exit of the Rams NFL franchise, and most recently by horrific tornadoes that disproportionately wrecked many of the city’s neediest neighborhoods, would be better or worse off without scenic O’Connell’s still around.

Not to mention that I’d heard it through the grapevine that the owner was famous in certain circles for being an irascible character who’d managed to make an enemy of St. Louis’ sizeable punk rock community, and also that the particular offending social media post had been made in grief in the immediate wake of the Covid-involved passing of a well-liked O’Connell’s employee. Plus, the pandemic had been weirdly pregnant with all sorts of stark class implications in St. Louis, as a beleaguered blue enclave in a very red state, that I saw nowhere near as much in New York: in the big city different people felt how they felt about the virus, it was what it was, but in St. Louis the very most ostentatious praise of Saint Fauci, and pious following of each and every rule, and fiercest blaming of every single Covid death on Donald Trump, became a ubiquitous form of social one-upmanship.

And so, even before my plane landed, I’d decided that the time had come to bury the hatchet and let bygones be bygones. It seemed unlikely that I’d ever see eye to eye with the present owner of O’Connell’s, who’d happened to inherit the business from his father, but I’d heard he was in the process of selling off partial ownership to someone, anyone, who might be less objectionable to the public. Having missed breakfast, I headed straight to the pub from the airport to do the right thing for St. Louis, googling on the way to make sure I remembered how to get there. There’s no doubt in my mind that the city is better off with O’Connell’s than without, so I feel obliged to do my part to try to save it.

As I’d sat pondering at La Guardia, there was another St. Louis institution on my mind about which I’ve long had mixed feelings: our local PBS affiliate, KETC, aka the Nine Network, which has just lost a big chunk of its budget via the federal rescissions package zeroing out public funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I grew up watching Channel Nine, and still watch quite a bit of it when I’m in town as they produce a variety of outstanding local content and play an important role regionally. My family had always been dues-paying KETC members when I was growing up, but I’d cancelled my membership some years back in protest of the increasingly blatant ideological bias of PBS national programming, particularly in news content. Speaking as someone who started my career at a national news show on PBS, I now believe that PBS should exit the national news industry entirely.

I’ve been frustrated with PBS for many years, and its critics are absolutely right that some at PBS have time and again fundamentally betrayed the public trust by dismissing and outright demonizing nearly half the country. Heads need to roll, a lot of them, and I understand why so many conservatives are giddy to see the government funding yanked. But I don’t feel giddy—I feel sad that reckless and unprincipled abuse of the public trust from a relative handful of bad actors has brought PBS to the brink of destruction. KETC has irked me on occasion, but the vast majority of what I’ve found offensive about PBS over the years has come from its national news programming. When it comes to Channel Nine and other local stations around the country, there’s a whole lot of precious baby getting thrown out with the bathwater.

And so, ambivalently, I’m in the process of signing back up as a dues-paying member of KETC. Again I’ve found myself faced with the hard binary of whether St. Louis would be better or worse off without an institution that has done some wrong. As many times as KETC has aired inappropriate content, I cannot escape the conclusion that St. Louis is unambiguously better off with the station than without. I don’t like purple-haired librarians indoctrinating children, but the solution to that isn’t tearing down the libraries—it’s replacing bad apples with personnel capable of behaving professionally. St. Louis media is already bleeding; in just the past couple of years we lost our alt-weekly The Riverfront Times even as our fantastic independent radio station KDHX was deliberately run into the ground by malicious leadership. We simply cannot afford to lose KETC, too.

I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic about the long-term future of PBS. There’s little prospect of public funding being restored until Democrats score a trifecta in Washington, which seems unlikely for at least several years. Strategically, national PBS should take the crisis as a wake-up call to finally clean up its act to become more suitable for public funding, but the likelier scenario in my view is that it will instead plunge down the national NPR path of pandering ever harder to stridently progressive donors, becoming even more ideologically slanted, and thus making itself so irrelevant to the broader discourse that the system inexorably withers away. But just because that’s the likely scenario doesn’t mean it’s inevitable—“Nothing is written,” as Colonel Lawrence said, and perhaps if enough squeamish viewers reluctantly donate to their PBS stations as a gesture of good will while making it clear that the spigot will close if the programming does not reciprocate that good will, the grimmest eventuality might yet be averted. At very least, the promise of salvaging PBS is worth the attempt.

I was pleased to appear on Mike Pesca’s Not Even Mad podcast with political consultant Zee Cohen-Sanchez to discuss the defunding of public broadcasting, the politics of immigration, and more.

Next: Columbia’s Sweet Surrender

But as it happened, this year’s HxA conference, held late last month at a Brooklyn Marriott, was a more subdued and almost somber affair. The conversations were as meaty as ever, but the heterodox coalition for academic reform has frayed to the point of fracture. From the initial surge of “wokeness” circa 2014 up through Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, the various schools of thought comprising not just Heterodox Academy the organization but the broader array of academic reformers fighting for freer discourse had long been marching more or less in the same direction. The problem, almost all could agree, was illiberal ideologies, bureaucracies, and administrators—and near-term progress would consist of persuading colleges and universities to embrace the better angels of their natures by affirming institutional neutrality as laid out back in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report.

And then came the wrecking ball: within weeks of taking office, President Trump declared war on American higher education as we know it, particularly singling out symbolically resonant elite schools like Columbia and Harvard. Abruptly, the diverse coalition for academic reform found itself divided, with reformers tending to fall into three broad categories. The first might be considered hawks, as perhaps best exemplified by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who believe that much of higher education as presently constituted is close to unsalvageable and that declarations of institutional neutrality are nowhere near enough. In contrast might be termed the doves, as perhaps best exemplified by suddenly very conciliatory university presidents, who are appalled by the Trump Administration’s siege warfare and think embracing the Kalven Report and trimming a few of their institutions’ most inflammatory excesses should be more than sufficient. And then, somewhere in between, are those of us in the mushy middle, who treasure the best of academia and may feel the Trump approach could use more scalpel and less battleaxe, but have also concluded that so much of the higher education sector has so betrayed the public trust in recent years that severe consequences are warranted.

My 11 years covering Columbia left me shaken and forlorn. It wasn’t that I didn’t meet a ton of great people, brilliant scholars of substance and integrity, but that there were just so many bad actors laundering corruption and bigotry into supposed scholarship and expertise. Having written official histories of three different schools, I appreciate as much as anyone Columbia’s distinguished tradition, but also think it’s evident that the university and many of its peers are no longer capable of meaningful reform without help from the outside. While I lament the present assault on, say, life-saving biomedical engineering research, I’ve also seen vast sums of money squandered subsidizing tendentious public health vaporware.

So I tend to think of the White House’s war on the higher education establishment primarily in terms of game theory. Donald Trump is basically the big bad wolf, come to huff and puff and blow the house down. Were that long-overdue reckoning to somehow be miraculously averted, what would the takeaway be for this failed generation of academic leaders? Gloating vindication, most likely, along with complacent certitude that they’d done nothing wrong and yet more contempt for their proven-ineffectual critics. No, grievous abuses must draw stinging rebuke to help ensure they don’t happen again.

But how? There are no easy answers, and the HxA conference offered a nuanced exploration of higher ed in crisis as of summer 2025. Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock had a fiery interchange with Wesleyan President Michael Roth on balancing academic independence with cooperation with government dictates, in one memorable session, while in another Emory Professor emeritus Mark Bauerlein clashed with UC Riverside’s Steven Brint on the scale to which the Trump administration’s actions might undermine U.S. scientific research over the long haul. And, just a scant few weeks before the University of Tulsa abruptly ousted her from its Honors College in what became national news, now-former Dean Jennifer Frey forcefully argued for rigorous traditional classical education emphasizing personal as much as professional development.

In a keynote inspired in part by a provocative post from Substack stalwart John Carter, HxA president John Tomasi formerly of Brown warned that colleges and universities could readily find themselves in a situation like English monasteries in the 16^th century, being shaken down and eventually dissolved by Henry VIII. To head off that grim scenario, Tomasi suggested that institutions adopt “Open Inquiry U: Heterodox Academy’s Four-Point Agenda for Reforming Colleges and Universities” advancing such radical principles as committing to open inquiry, unleashing the free exchange of ideas, insisting on viewpoint diversity, and investing in constructive disagreement.

As I wondered last year with regard to similar recommendations, how is it that these notions somehow became ‘heterodox’? Isn’t that more or less the code of conduct we’re supposed to have internalized in elementary school? That such advice has to be formally codified and promoted in this day and age is as profound an indictment of the state of academia as any. Hopefully it will have taken somewhat more root by the time the next HxA conference convenes.

Next: To Forgive (But Not Forget) Is Divine

Across a number of stern orientations and trainings over the first few days, upperclassmen warned us against two specific no-nos that could get us suspended or even terminated from working at the station: diverging in the slightest bit from the printed playlists we DJs were provided for each hour by the program managers, or by allowing any ‘dead air’ between songs, ads, promos, sweepers, and us actively speaking. Any dead air might prompt mercurial listeners to turn the dial, so we needed to fill that oppressive silence with something, anything.

In recent weeks, I’ve spent many a morning sitting in a certain St. Louis County hospital waiting room amid chauffeuring my dear old mother to various appointments. Thankfully it’s typically been only 10 or 15 minutes at a time, but I’ve had to endure more Today with Jenna [Bush Hager] & Friends, aka the fourth and most extraneous hour of NBC’s redoubtable Today Show, than I’d wish on my very worst enemy.

At heart, television is ultimately mostly a medium of formulaic comfort food: give the audience the very same predictable and largely disposable content episode after episode right up until the time the show becomes unprofitable. Whether that assembly line consistency comes off as stifling and dreary, or so cozily comfy that viewers demand it all the time, tends to boil down to the sheer charisma and stage patter of atypically magnetic TV personalities.

The immortal Regis Philbin was a genius, and I wonder what will become of his plaque on the ground floor of the old Upper West Side ABC News headquarters it’s been such a whimsical pleasure to periodically happen upon. ABC’s Barbara Walters was also a sort of genius in her own narcissistic way, and Oprah even more emphatically so from Chicago. I was actively bummed when Pat Sajak announced his retirement after 41 seasons on Wheel, wondering who else might possibly pair with Vanna, and had concluded that only Ryan Seacrest could possibly fill Pat’s shoes long before that official announcement was made.

But all of those shiny people really genuinely earned it, organically rising their way through the ranks to cultural ubiquity like such camera-friendly compatriots as Steve Harvey and Howie Mandel and Gordon Ramsay. With all due respect, Jenna (if not necessarily her Friends) is the most gratuitous nepo baby this side of Maggie Sajak, but at least Maggie seldom imposes for more than 20 seconds at a time.

Talk about dead air: Jenna’s cloying, saccharine, vacuous droning left me gasping for each next commercial break. She’s empty calories, every bit as mediocre at her job as her father was at his, and selfishly clinging to a perch that really rightfully should have gone to someone who legitimately earned it. I’m not suggesting that Jenna isn’t probably a pleasant enough person who means well from her pampered sinecure, but that she’s wasting precious airtime and presumably collecting a fat paycheck that plenty of other people need and merit far more. It was hard not to cringe when she congratulated one morning’s special Friend Henry Winkler for being “indicted” into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

But what most offends is that Jenna the child of unimaginable privilege is putting on a kind of minstrel show. I’ve spent enough time around Manhattan media types to testify that to the extent ‘flyover country’ comes up at all, it’s typically to condemn its denizens as backwards peasants to be supervised and punished. Some of that mentality is coastal people who haven’t spent any meaningful amount of time in ‘The Middle’ and lazily presume the worst, and probably more of it is aspirational folks who made it to The Big Apple from somewhere smaller somewhat desperate to escape the taint of their ordinary upbringings.

As a proud son of Missouri gone east, I’ll give Jenna the credit of conceding that her aw shucks Texas folksiness probably comes pretty naturally and is not entirely a cynical schtick. However much she grew up in corridors of wealth and power, she’s very much her father’s daughter. But there’s an extent to which that makes her a convenient Trojan Horse, a disarmingly pseudo-authentic Flyover Mom With Access to launder whatever notions her employers at Comcast or her aristocratic social set prefer straight into the lower common denominator national mainstream. Jenna is reasonably competent at playing the role of a relatable Middle American Mom magically making glamorous and relatable small talk with Broadway stars, but that doesn’t make her show tasteful or appropriate.

Indeed, I’d argue that Today with Jenna & Friends is probably the worst thing on television that isn’t on MSNBC or CNN. ABC’s The View is appalling, and pollutes the national discourse to a far greater extent, but whatever one thinks of Joy and Whoopi and company, some of them are genuinely compelling TV characters who got where they are legitimately. Even Kelly reached national stardom by Regis’ coattails and the sweat of her brow. But all Jenna has to offer is the deadest and emptiest of dead air. NBC, and America, would be far better off filling that time slot with some more old Dateline reruns.

Next: Lines in the Sand

And then gradually, inexorably, much of that prosperity receded with the rise of an increasingly streamlined global market. More and more trucking of imported goods along the new network of national highways looping around denser areas made neglecting the established urban anchors—eventually termed “the rustbelt”—all too easy and profitable. And not only did St. Louis’ local leaders and higher officials make a long list of avoidable mistakes nudging middle-class city residents out to the county and beyond, but the logic of globalization and maximally minimizing costs inevitably implied putting many millions of Americans out of work by the start of the twenty-first century. No matter how convenient and cheap we could make our homegrown labor, without any international shipping costs, we still struggled to compete against barebones subsistence wages abroad. Structurally, we lacked the cards.

I’ve now been in New York City for almost twenty years, through boom and bust, and have often found it underwhelming in comparison to my mother’s St. Marks memories from the 1960s, or my readings about bohemian heartthrob Jeff Buckley moving to picturesque lower Manhattan in the early 1990s. I do love New York, truly, but it ain’t what it used to be: so much of what made New York definitively New York was that it was unique in the sheer funky variety of arts and culture and diverse ethnic restaurants on offer, and it was the combination of that cultural abundance and Bonfire of the Vanities-era Wall Street being stuck in place that perhaps most sustained the city during the troubled years from the early ’70s to the early ’90s.

As an aspiring journalist with an Ivy League diploma and promising job offer in 2007, before the Great Recession, it made perfect sense to move to New York. But would I advise that for very many ambitious newly-minted grads today? Most certainly not, and especially not if they’re thinking about starting a family sooner rather than later. There are dozens of more welcoming and affordable and not much less culturally stimulating destinations all across the country in this globalized day and age, with equally as tasty and Instagram-worthy eateries only an app away across an array of zip codes.

So much of New York City’s prosperity and tax base are ultimately based on the inertia of Big Finance that with contemporary telecommunications no longer actually needs to be physically located anywhere near Wall Street. And the disruption of Covid knocked a lot of the oomph out of the city that it’s never quite recovered even as more workers have gradually returned to the office. The old back-slapping happy hour culture is a shadow of its former self, and New York is nowhere near “The City That Never Sleeps” anymore, to the extent that the subway’s “overnight closures” now typically start as early as 9 PM.

It wouldn’t be fair to say New York has become culturally moribund, as it shares roughly the same dispiriting inertness as almost everywhere else in today’s America, but the NYC cultural scene is an especially stark example of the nation’s spiritual and intellectual impoverishment. In terms of measuring up against sheer creature comforts and material quality of life available for all but the wealthiest, New York has lost its competitive edge against places like St. Louis and Pittsburgh, let alone Austin and Palm Beach. Why would people want to pay more for less?

And so I fully expect that, should the socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani win the keys to Gracie Mansion, municipal finances will crumble as financial firms rationally flee to Stamford or down south. It wouldn’t take too dramatic a push for a bunch of high-worth individuals to rebalance their property portfolios to include only relatively modest pied-a-terres in Manhattan mainly for when they’re in transit to the Hamptons, which would spell further fiscal calamity for the city. And Mamdani is proposing more than just a nudge: behind his crowd-pleasing TikTok schtick, the candidate peddles a fanciful and innumerate platform that would be laughable if it weren’t so foreboding. Slogans and photo-ops aside, Mamdani guarantees a steep downward spiral—perhaps not quite so precipitous a decline as places like St. Louis or Detroit, but a poorer and more dysfunctional, crime-ridden, and chaotic future for ordinary New Yorkers. While New York may remain America’s greatest metropolis, it’s hardly impervious to the advances of technology and globalization, or to the consequences of its electoral blunders. I’ve no special affection for the 1%, but they represent golden geese the city can ill afford to slaughter.

Eric Adams’ mayoralty has been rather disappointing, but his scattershot mediocrity is still infinitely preferable to Mamdani’s zealous utopian demagoguery. The ex-cop Adams has at least made some real progress on crime even as the Biden-Harris administration’s reckless border policies flooded the city with well over 200,000 impoverished migrants, straining the resources and social services that working-class New Yorkers rely upon. Mamdani, by contrast, has only halfheartedly pivoted from his 2020 Summer of Floyd demands not so long ago that the ostensibly racist NYPD be defunded in the name of “queer liberation” and whatever other causes ride along on that dubious Democratic Socialist bandwagon.

If you’re passionate about preserving some semblance of New York City and doing right by the majority of its residents, you should probably support the Adams campaign. And yet, if you happen to have grander national imperatives, maybe the cartoonish excesses of a bumbling Mayor Mamdani would more dramatically dethrone the Big Apple from its increasingly shaky reputation. One way or another, Mamdani ensures bad news for his actual flesh and blood constituents, regardless of whatever symbolic national impact his epic implosion might imply. I’m left ambivalent but not remotely unclear about the lesser of evils: I find support for a Mamdani regime inconceivable even if he were to attempt to resolve many of his more glaring issues.

But perhaps some questionable ascension of Zohran, and the depressing consequences thereof, might not be the worst thing in the world. There’s an ugly slogan I often see on handbags and hoodies, “New York or Nowhere,” which I usually attribute to strained folks’ pointed overcompensation for having to assume terribly spartan circumstances to barely stay afloat in the big city. To whatever extent that sort of arrogant outlook can be definitively discredited would be a win-win for just about everybody.

Next: The Tyranny of Dead Air

Bill was and is an eternal constant and fixture in my life: from growing up with his cerebral yet folksy visage gazing out from the spines of the A World of Ideas coffee table books, to all of his PBS programs being the real “Must-See TV” in my household, to having the privilege of working with the man as his blogger and research assistant, to all the ways that priceless experience has made the rest of my career possible. Bill Moyers stands among the all-time greats, and he leaves a vacuum that can never be filled. It doesn’t seem to make sense that he’s gone; it’s like saying the Metropolitan Museum of Art is gone, or Lincoln Center has vanished. It just can’t be.

I was more than a little rough around the edges when I lucked into a job with Bill’s nonprofit production company Public Affairs Television back in October 2007, hired on as a junior communications associate. I’d come up in Missouri and cut my teeth at Brown’s alternative rock radio station, so was not exactly tuned in to every polite New York City professional protocol. Thus I badly misjudged what was considered appropriate when Bill Moyers Journal’s executive producer would ask everyone at our staff meeting each Monday morning if we had any thoughts or feedback about the preceding weekend’s episode. I should have taken my cue from everybody’s silence, but was so damn excited to be there that I’d usually speak up about how we might be even more nuanced and informative each next show. Only later did I come to understand how outrageously inappropriate the executive producer found that behavior, and why she’d so palpably disliked me.

Today I get where she was coming from, that I was some smartass kid who didn’t know his place, but what she took as unforgivable presumption Bill and his partner in all things Judith somehow saw as untapped potential. Both actively went out of their way to take me under their wings. One of the best things about working for Bill and Judith was that they faithfully brought their egalitarian ethos into the office: they were kind and unpretentious and kept an open door for we staff to help be their eyes and ears, inviting everyone to share whatever we might have seen in the news that struck us as important or intriguing. In practice most of the time that meant underlings sending them the same clippings from The Nation or HuffPo links to Keith Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment,” but I was the one offbeat millennial reckless or obtuse enough to send them articles from City Journal and The Weekly Standard and even Breitbart. It wasn’t that I didn’t consider myself a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, but that as an aspiring policy wonk I thought progressives needed to have the uncomfortable conversations if we hoped to win the argument. Before long, it became one of the great honors of my career when Bill asked me to be his research assistant.

I gradually developed mixed feelings about some of the programs that aired on Bill Moyers Journal during my time, but never about Bill and Judith themselves, who were so much more generous with benefits and compensation than they really needed to be, and invariably bought dinner for everybody on those nights we needed to work late. Perhaps my fondest memory of Bill Moyers’ remarkable character comes from the final few weeks of the Journal, as we wrapped up our last batch of episodes and packed up the office for good. Half-empty boxes were strewn across offices and cubicle banks, trying to pack up decades with some semblance of order, and amid that chaos my Dad came to town and visited the office for the first and only time. He was a self-made social worker who’d come up from poverty to help build the New Left at the University of Missouri before joining the Peace Corps and heading to India, and eventually earned his master’s degree. I’d never seen my father so intimidated—for him to meet this legendary giant he’d seen on TV for decades, who’d helped establish the Peace Corps along Sargent Shriver, was unfathomable, and he was all but stammering like a schoolboy. Bill quietly understood the dynamic and graciously invited him to a closed-door forty-five minute conversation about that entire early ’60s milieu, and its relevance nearly fifty years on. It was forty-five minutes Bill didn’t necessarily have to spare, but it was an incredibly classy gesture that gave my Dad a profoundly meaningful bucket list experience.

And so I had no shortage of ambivalence and hesitation in launching The Ivy Exile, being all too aware that airing my unvarnished truth would likely hurt some former colleagues’ feelings, including the Moyers’ fiercely loyal inner circle. And, indeed, it wasn’t long before I heard it through the grapevine that some of those people I still love and remember fondly were upset, and that truly saddened me. But what I most absorbed in my formative years watching the Moyers show and getting to work with the man is that the real craft of journalism is all about doggedly following the story wherever it might lead, no matter whose feathers might get ruffled along the way. That was what the entire enterprise was really supposed to be about.

Long live Bill Moyers’ inspiring body of work! He was a wonderful man who did incalculable good, among other endeavors historians shall argue over forevermore. He enlightened my and a bunch of Middle Americans’ sensibilities, free of charge. It was a blessing to get to work with him, to try to carry on that tradition, and we’ll have to see what media cycles roll in over the summer and afterwards. So long, Bill, it’s been good to know you.

Next: On the Slaughter of Golden Geese

Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

Back in 1989, amid the first flush of what was then known as “political correctness,” a troupe of ardent feminists had famously infiltrated the roof of Columbia University’s Butler Library the night of commencement to hang a homespun painted banner of more diverse and ostensibly relevant female writers above the maler, staler, and slightly paler names inscribed upon the building’s front facade: Sappho, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bronte, Dickinson, and Woolf over the boring and apparently chauvinistic names of Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Vergil chiseled into the stonework. Those attendees who’d spent their college years chanting, “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go!” were thrilled, traditionalists either seethed or rolled their eyes, and most of the celebrants were probably more bemused than anything. Over time, the stunt became fondly remembered, and a ritual photo-op Columbia would periodically reenact with ever more diversified rosters, but notably without ever quite bothering to resurface the offending limestone.

Over the decade that I later covered graduations at Columbia as a reporter and PR flack working for the university, the contradiction grew all the more glaring. The timeless affectations the institution leaned on to wheedle misty-eyed parents into opening up their checkbooks — the pageantry, the neoclassical architecture, the strains of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” — were totems of age-old and increasingly unfashionable conceptions of Western civilization the university more typically seemed determined to disparage.

As someone who grew up immersed in old books and periodicals my Dad couldn’t resist bringing home by the armful, thumbing through back issues of the vintage hardcover Horizon magazine and the coffee table book of Kenneth Clark’s venerable TV show Civilisation with that glorious golden Charlemagne on the dust jacket, extensive grounding in the best of the West always struck me as indispensable to learned erudition. I liked it when Captain Kirk quoted Milton, and when Frasier and Niles namedropped the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. After six years of Latin, I expected to find endless more vistas of that sort of thing when I went off to college, managing to land in the outer reaches of the Ivy League, at Brown.

But while I did luck into a charmingly antiquated course on Alexander the Great with an elbow-patched professor who might as well have been Marcus Brody, such options were growing ever fewer and further between. As opposed to traditional 101 surveys introducing the classic essentials, curricula were increasingly dominated by various idiosyncratic preoccupations and esoteric schools of critique that skipped much in the way of orientation to the traditions being attacked and superseded. My English major friends were far likelier to be reading graphic novels than Chaucer or Spenser.

To its credit, even today Columbia isn’t quite as far gone in that respect as some of its peers, thanks to the lingering influence of its hallowed old Core Curriculum for undergraduates, which has steadily eroded for decades but has yet to be completely hollowed out. Across the Ivies, away from the embarrassing headlines and histrionic protests, veins of substantive scholarship and serious teaching of the traditional humanities still endure, even if one might often have to dig to find them.

So I was intrigued but not surprised to hear about the forthcoming two-volume set of quasi-textbooks The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, from eminent historians Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins of Princeton and Harvard, respectively. In disappointed alienation from the accelerating marginalization of Western history in contemporary curricula, the professors toiled for what must have been years during their summers and off hours to produce a fresh survey reviving and to some degree redeeming a rich tradition that, while not without its share of sins and shortcomings, has been excessively maligned.

“We retell the story of the West without apology and, indeed, with a certain sense of urgency. We authors are both professors at Ivy League universities, and we are fully aware that our volumes go against the general trend of the historical profession for the last three decades,” they write. “As academe has increasingly been colonized by political activists, Western history has been positively disfavored. There has been a highly successful campaign to portray Western civilization as uniquely evil — uniquely disfigured by slavery, racism, genocide, militarism, economic exploitation, environmental devastation, monstrous levels of income inequality, and male oppression of women. … The globus intellectualis has become hostile to the study of Western civilization, and its hostility represents a danger to the health of Western societies.”

Nota bene: As of press time, this reader had access only to Vol. 1, primarily penned by Hankins, as slated for publication in August before Guelzo’s Vol. 2 in October. But from the 1,100-plus lavishly illustrated pages I’ve had the privilege of perusing thus far, the endeavor seems just about half the way there to providing precisely the sort of comprehensive old-school yet contemporary overview I was seeking as an undergraduate (and since) to fill in the blanks of what I’d previously mostly learned in fits and starts. Many specialists will no doubt quibble with some of Hankins’s summations, but he’s the furthest thing from radical by the long-standing standards of a few decades ago. And he’s done a monumental job of laying down the essential groundwork while leaving room for further study and debate.

Starting with the valiant vigor of roughly 10,000 mostly Athenian soldiers’ courage at the Battle of Marathon, defiantly taking the initiative against far more numerous expeditionary forces from the Persian empire of King Darius I, the text situates the big bang of Western civilization in 490 B.C., shortly after the unlikely birth of Athenian democracy. Various Greeks, most notably the Mycenaeans, had been kicking around for at least a thousand years by that time, and the Homeric epics had already been written down. But Hankins suggests it was that victory against all odds that unleashed the emergence of a flinty yet increasingly sophisticated Western civilization, capable of just enough scrappy innovation and maneuverability to outfox far longer-standing civilizations from out east, and sparked a certain flickering candle of entrepreneurial individualism.

Speaking as a former aspiring classics major, I found Hankins’s approach more than a little refreshing and, dare I say, cathartic. When he quotes the opening lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey in a sidebar, he draws upon the gold standard Robert Fagles translations rather than the subtly irreverent revisionism of more recent and fashionable translators such as the much-ballyhooed Emily Wilson. When he discusses the decline of Athenian ideals into brute coercion of many fellow city-states, Hankins’s point is evergreen: “If an empire is to last, its basis cannot be forcible exploitation of subject peoples for the sake of a metropolitan elite.” And his descriptions of the root causes of the disastrous Peloponnesian War are equally timeless and applicable in endless different settings: irrepressibly mercantile seaborne Athenians clashing against a landed Spartan aristocracy instinctively “suspicious of clever thinkers and glib speakers.”

Most edifying for me was his discussion of those eastern-inflected Hellenistic centuries bridging the dwindling of the Hellenic era to the rise and primacy of Rome. The stodgy old prejudice was to cast that period as essentially a tawdry time of snake cults and imperial decadence, while modern classicists seeking grants and tenure have too often been prone to excessive glorification of the epoch as exemplifying the ancient multicultural equivalent of today’s globalization. Hankins strikes a nuanced balance between acknowledging definite declines from some of the peaks of Grecian civilization, especially as far as democracy was concerned, and noting impressive advances in the arts, medicine, the sciences, and, perhaps most significantly for historical memory, the birth of philology at institutions such as the great Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon.

“The legitimacy of Hellenistic kingdoms was bound up with the prestige of Classical culture and the claim of their kings to be spreading civilization,” he writes. “Thus it was thanks to monarchical cultural institutions that the West was able to remember the key teaching of Athenian democracy: that average citizens can govern themselves… Above all the Greeks were the first peoples known to history to break with the default setting of the human race in favor of absolute monarchy. That break introduced a dynamic element into Western political life that it has never lost.”

Out west, on the long-peripheral Italian peninsula, the young Roman Republic was distinguishing itself from most of its competitors by sheer military prowess, unusual capacity to absorb those peoples compelled to join their imperium, and relatively representative governance, at least for Roman citizens. In truth, the ideals of the avowed res publica had already pretty well rotted out decades before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to all but topple it, and the formal ascension of Caesar Augustus was more recognition of imperial reality than a dramatic break from the existing trajectory. As with the Greeks beforehand, the reality of government anywhere in the range of “by the people and for the people” didn’t endure very long, displaced by ambitious men’s grasping will to power and the realities of administering a sprawling empire. But, as with the Hellenistic kingdoms, the quality and prestige of classical Hellenic culture helped sustain the old democratic ideals even through a time of tyrants, and many cities far from the imperial seat were more democratic in managing their local affairs than Rome itself.

The hypocrisy was a tribute that imperial vice paid to democratic virtue, as it were, and tribute enough to somehow keep the tradition alive through the traumas of Rome’s decline and fall and the so-called “dark ages” that beset Western Europe for centuries even as Byzantium soldiered on. “It was the hybrid classical culture created by Christian Rome that preserved, often by the most tenuous of threads, the priceless heritage of Greco-Roman civilization,” Hankins writes.

Here in the 21st century, the Western tradition has too often been under siege, caricatured by faddish ideologues with little substantive understanding of what they vilify. At times, most dramatically during the hysterical woke iconoclasm following the death of George Floyd, that “Golden Thread” going back thousands of years seemed to be under mortal threat. But such ignorant assaults on the underpinnings of Western civilization have also fueled a revival of classical liberal education among scholars and students more interested in understanding the past than condemning it. Much of the academic establishment has been content to sit on the sidelines, peddling whatever’s politically convenient, so it’s encouraging to see Hankins and Guelzo apply their Ivy League imprimaturs to help keep that revival chugging along.

“Most of all, we want our readers to understand just how fragile our tradition is,” they write. “And how many times in the three-thousand-year-long history of the West the Golden Thread that ties us to our past and enriches us beyond measure came close to snapping.”

One could find worse beach reading than to take a summer sabbatical with The Golden Thread. The story of how our culture got here is a page-turner of a sort, and it is hard to think of anything that would be more rewarding. Though to get through it unscathed may require some serious SPF.

Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.

Next: Moyers in Memoriam

But then again, international students could be just as mixed a bag as their domestic peers, such as the South Korean debutante roommate of a friend of mine down the hall my freshman year (herself the daughter of an Ethiopian business magnate) who ditched several of our dorm floor’s mandatory first-week activities to hang out with her society friends from back east. I scarcely even saw her around after our perfunctory introductions. In the end, she seemed to have come to America primarily to accrue the prestigious global credential, not to contribute to the broader social and intellectual community; in terms of the cutthroat zero-sum game of admissions to ultra-selective schools, but likely not Brown’s bottom line, it was a net loss for everybody but her.

And thus I was always ambivalent about some of the international contingent at Brown, wondering about the stark opportunity cost for the throngs of equally talented Americans from Nebraska or New Mexico or wherever who might otherwise have landed those prized and coveted slots that really do help open doors in life. In the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I’d had the privilege of attending a publicly funded college prep program, the Missouri Scholars Academy, designed to convene around 330 of the most promising rising high school juniors from all across the Show-Me State to spend a month at our state flagship “Mizzou” in Columbia, Missouri.

I happen to hail from the relatively affluent inner suburbs of St. Louis, sort of a Midwestern Scarsdale, so my life course was really always a matter of when rather than if I’d go to college. But commingling with such a motley array of small town, rural, and inner-city kids, who often ran circles around me intellectually but yet had never considered pursuing higher education since it simply wasn’t in their frame of reference, was a humbling experience that still represents perhaps the most dazzling intellectual community I’ve ever known—much more impressive than almost anything I found among the Ivy League. Most of the time the academic experience at Brown positively paled in comparison, not to mention the manifold disappointments of Columbia University in New York a number of years later.

Among my fondest ambitions for The Ivy Exile has been to try to help demystify and debunk supposedly elite schools’ preeminence in comparison to plenty of other equally or more respectable institutions that well warrant equivalent status. My friends that I roadtripped to go visit at Mizzou’s distinguished Honors College as an undergrad weren’t any less talented on average than the rank and file at Brown or other friends to whom I’d take the Amtrak to go visit at Yale and Amherst. Elite admissions have become such an arbitrary and unfair crapshoot, so unjustly distorted by legacies, quotas, and outright graft, that several dozen more relatively prestigious schools both public and private have inexorably osmosed into the conversation in terms of where even the very highest achieving Middle American strivers might reasonably expect to matriculate.

That’s a big part of why it’s so deeply unfair and undemocratic for highly prestigious institutions with international profiles, that receive so much national attention and federal largesse, to give away quite so many of their most prized seats to non-Americans. And, there’s precious little reason why accomplished graduates of Tufts or Northwestern or Vanderbilt or Wash U in the City of St. Louis should enjoy any less aura and sparkle than those of us who happened to luck into winning the lottery for a golden ticket into the fancier coastal cliques, or why admissions to those sorts of places have to be so starkly discriminatory, or what hierarchical prioritization should accrue to this or that corrupted institution or other.

So my recommendation is this: let’s implement a blanket ban on legacy admissions to the most selective and desirable schools in America, in addition to cutting off heirs of privilege from outside the country who don’t seem so inclined to contribute to our academic abundance. The Ivies and other top-ranked institutions so frequently shoot themselves in the foot intellectually that they urgently need remedial instruction in granting an empathetic ear back to ‘flyover country’ once again.

When it comes to the most intensely desired Ivy League programs, most namely undergraduate and law school admissions, it’s both cruel and unusual to give away so much of that precious prestige to folks beyond our shores. A cap of something around 10-15% for foreign enrollment would make a ton of sense in terms of balancing international outreach and cultural exchange with extending a legitimate fair shake to a variety of gifted American hopefuls with at least the same SAT and/or LSAT scores.

But when it comes to graduate research in STEM, as I learned over eight years chronicling Columbia Engineering, that model quite simply wouldn’t be realistic. The bulk of top American engineering grads tend to want to seek the most immediately remunerative fields as soon as possible, rather than being willing to invest year after year of drudgery into foundational research uncertain to ever blossom into something profitable. Maintaining American primacy in engineering innovation undoubtedly requires robust recruitment of top talent from wherever we can find it, while also striving to seed American talent for generations to come.

But with that wide net comes risk. I had nothing but positive interactions with Chinese nationals at Columbia Engineering, they tended to be perfectly pleasant, but the unsettling fact remains that any researcher with family in totalitarian China is under immediate threat of coercion: deliver pirated intellectual property on demand, or your family’s social credit scores go bye-bye. With increasing dependence on foreign talent comes ever more need for ever more careful scrutiny and safeguards.

Had institutions like Harvard and Columbia behaved just a little less haughtily in recent decades, and been just slightly more inclusive, many millions of Americans might have been a little less gleeful about seeing them be taken to the woodshed in recent weeks. The general public might even have still perceived the Ivy League as champions of knowledge rather than a pack of snooty shysters. For the time being, there still remains some dwindling room for some kind of redemption arc.

Next: Hey Hey, Western Civ Has Got to Stay

Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” Hanlon’s razor advises us. But then again, as another saying goes, “never say never.”

In trying to wrap my mind around the self-inflicted catastrophe that was America’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, imposed five years ago this spring, I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months — that given the panic and the fog of war, people such as Anthony Fauci were entitled to some measure of grace as they adapted to a fluid situation. But in his harrowing and revelatory new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, journalist David Zweig details how swiftly national COVID-19 policies diverged from the broadly accepted protocols enshrined in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic playbook toward an indefinite lockdown model seemingly inspired by China’s heavy-handed mitigation efforts. “The arrival of a new infectious virus was not unprecedented,” he writes. “But the response to it was.”

With Zweig’s young children languishing in front of screens at home week after week and fading prospects of getting them back into classrooms, in spring 2020 the professional researcher and fact-checker started digging into school closure policies around the world, scouring studies and speaking with epidemiologists and other public health specialists, particularly in Europe. What he learned was as baffling as it was frustrating: Many of the so-called studies the New York Times and much of the American media breathlessly cited were based upon computer modeling built on assumptions that were iffy at best, and evidence seemed to suggest that not only were children typically less vulnerable to COVID-19 than to some years’ more virulent strains of influenza, and far less likely to transmit the virus than adults, but that the entire dubious strategy of locking down schools for months was unlikely to do much to slow the spread. Whatever fleeting benefits were likely to be more than outweighed by the longer-term disruption to children’s educations and development, prompting schools throughout Europe to begin reopening by early May of that year, if they’d considered it prudent to close in the first place.

And yet, as Zweig attempted to air his findings among mainstream American media with whom he’d published before, including the New York Times, he almost always found a striking absence of curiosity or critical analysis. That uncanny disinterest “dovetailed with an ignorance and dismissal of a rich literature on both the inescapable harms that would result from the closures and on the evidence of their lack of benefit in the long term,” he writes. “Reasonable people could disagree about whether the schools in the US should open or not at that time, but there was close to zero dissent among politicians or in the framing by legacy media outlets on the topic. The narrative was set.”

What could account for this distinct lack of scrutiny toward the biggest news story on the planet? For one thing, Zweig suggests, for many professionals, “it’s good to feel like you’re doing something,” and a wealth of research suggests that people in charge like to imagine that they exercise more agency and control than might actually be the case. Plus, out of the “abundance of caution” that so many decision-makers so frequently claimed, it was easier just to go along to get along than to conduct substantive cost-benefit analyses.

Another key factor, Zweig argues, was the stark political polarization of discourse purporting to pit the “science-based community” of enlightened managerial progressivism against the drooling hordes of backward Trumpism.

“The Left and much of the cosmopolitan elite in America saw Trump as so clownish, ignorant, malignant, and harmful to society that, with rare exception, it was anathema for a Democratic politician or official, or journalist or news organization (outside of conservative outlets) to ever be seen as agreeing with him on anything,” Zweig writes. “This dynamic was no less ingrained in much of the professional and influencer classes in publishing, technology, entertainment, medicine, academia, and polite society in blue state America.”

Speaking as someone who worked as a flack for Columbia University, chronicling one of the nation’s leading schools of public health during the pandemic, I read Zweig’s reportage about what went wrong with a sickening sense of recognition. In handling the centennial commemorations for Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, I enjoyed ample opportunity both to delve into the history of the field and to observe how the public health establishment was thinking and talking about COVID-19. What I discovered was not exactly encouraging.

Though public health was no doubt a historically noble calling that had saved and improved countless lives over many decades of rigorous empirical and quantitative work, by the 1970s things had begun to go wobbly: More and more activists were tilting the field away from empirical rigor and toward lacquering a questionable scientific patina atop their political priorities. There were still top-flight epidemiologists and others working on challenges such as clean water and infant mortality, but more and more of the field consisted of laundering activism on issues such as gun control or gender norms into pseudoscientific “scholarship.”

To significant extents, the pandemic was exploited as the most tremendous of opportunities, and it’s not hard to understand why. Culturally and institutionally, public health has increasingly attracted and rewarded zealous and literal-minded technocrats who feel that achieving a rationally equitable global society is mainly just a matter of funding and empowering enough credentialed experts to supervise. By January 2021, with a new administration in charge, new standards of respectability and cooperation were becoming ever more standardized. All the norms were largely based on assumptions circa the beginning of 2016, when Brexit was but an unthinkable lark to be vanquished and Hillary Clinton was an inevitable shoo-in to break the glass ceiling and usher in six or seven Supreme Court seats for whatever we, the global intelligentsia, knew was needed.

From an establishmentarian perspective, it was supposed to be a new year zero, and an irresistible chance to restore the natural order. It was, of course, inevitable that the nation-state would wither away, and that soon we elites in the know would more or less enact the enlightened United Federation of Planets as seen on Star Trek. It was not that people such as Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins were monsters, but that they acted monstrously in their arrogance and imperiousness and hubris in striving to enact what they felt they might achieve.

On one hand, they blithely used children as political pawns and stunted millions for life, and on the other hand, they really did believe that with unlimited funding and obeisance, they could readily build it all back better. The problem was inherent deep in the public health formula: the hope of starting again from some kind of beginning for a whole new, reimagined generation of children. Promising as it undoubtedly is for a principled reformer such as the new head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, to be taking over, the inertia is what it is. One comes away from Zweig’s book with the sinking sense that reforming much of the public health universe to create a new class of experts that could address a disease outbreak effectively but would not do what the public health establishment did in 2020 would be like asking economists to stop talking about supply and demand.

Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.

Next: What Top American Schools Owe Top American Talent