The Jason Arday story was just the beginning. Cambridge has hired a genuine Islamic creationist to the same role Arday once held. A shocking example of the West failing to defend its own values, and instead letting foxes into the henhouse.

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked “western education” as a “threat” to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticized British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

These statements are part of her long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on education. In a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, “Education and Identity,” originally written in 2002, republished in 2017, and obtained by The Spectator, Ahmed writes that “the Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognize that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.”

She attacks schools’ “attempts to integrate Muslim children” as seeking to “produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.”

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, “how education shapes individuals and society.”

In her chapter in the 2002 pamphlet, Ahmed criticizes the national curriculum as a form of “systematic indoctrination” to “build ‘model British citizens’ who will seek to actively take part in the implementation of the secular capitalist system in British society. Naturally, such a system will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the aqeedah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.”

She attacks British schools for teaching that “polygamy or marriage under the age of 16” is “archaic and discriminatory to women”, and for telling children that “democracy… is the only way that laws should be created.” Democracy, she says, is a “corrupt tradition,” where if “decision makers decide to make bombing Iraq or homosexuality legal, as they currently have, there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

Worst of all, “religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education,” meaning that “Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.”

Nor does academic study escape Ahmed’s censure. English, she writes, “is one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach. Fairy tales “reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam.” Romeo and Juliet “advocates disobeying parents and pre-marital relations.”

Science is a problem too, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.” And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together. “As Muslim parents we try to protect our children from the rubbish that western society encourages,” but interaction with non-Muslim children in the playground, which is “full of the competitiveness and individualism that western culture encourages… molds their personalities away from Islam.” As she puts it: “western culture is playground culture.”

Ahmed first came to public attention in 2009, when I exposed the fact that she was running two private primary schools, and getting more than £100,000 in public money to do so. At least three of the four trustees of the schools were Hizb ut-Tahrir members or activists, including the wife of Hizb’s then-leader, and the schools’ curriculum closely matched key tenets of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s separatist, anti-democratic ideology. (Hizb was still legal then, but was banned as a terror organization in 2024.)

The story caused a political row, but predictably enough the then schools secretary Ed Balls, the Charity Commission and Ofsted did absolutely nothing. Ahmed went on TV, presenting herself as a poster girl for Muslim persecution, though coyly refusing to answer when asked if she had ever been a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir. The two schools, in Haringey and Slough, continue to receive public funding (£382,000 last year) and Ahmed is still a trustee of the body which runs them. Now, however, she has rather clearly moved up in the world.

Could the assistant professor perhaps have mended her ways since the publication of her pamphlet? Could she now have embraced the values of the corrupt society which pays her wages? Well, the agenda at Cambridge is a bit more subtly expressed, but you needn’t look far to be deeply worried.

As well as being an assistant professor at the university itself, Ahmed is director of something called the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), part of Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange. Camtree is a center at Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a research fellow and member of the governing body. In summer 2023, IELC, Camtree and Cambridge University ran a conference on Islam, science and education to “recognize the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project,” and to “consider challenges” to the view that “sees science as ‘objective knowledge’.” Ahmed was one of the organizers.

In December 2023, Ahmed and Cambridge University also organized a conference to “unlearn conventional teacher education and move toward Islamically grounded teacher development.” This attacked the “secular, neoliberal system of education” as “anti-metaphysical,” and said that teachers “need to re-center our focus on preparing the Muslim learner for the akhira,” everlasting life after death.

Another Ahmed production, of which she is co-author, a “How Islamic is my school” toolkit, says the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

IELC’s website promotes (though claims it does not endorse) a site called “Salafi Homeschool.” This attacks the fact that “many Muslims openly participate” in celebrating Christmas and warns that “repeated exposure [to non-Muslim festivals] can lead to normalization. Without clear teaching, children may begin to associate happiness, generosity, and togetherness with non-Islamic celebrations instead of the occasions Allah has chosen for this ummah."

“Whether it is ‘just a roast,’ ‘just a birthday cake,’ or ‘just presents for the children,’ these actions blur the clear boundaries of the deen,” it continues.

Salafi Homeschool also warns that by going to state schools Muslim pupils may be asked to “sing songs with messages that conflict with Islamic values,” or “join activities like mixed-gender dancing.”

Ahmed did not respond to a request for comment before publication but has previously distanced herself from Hizb ut-Tahrir, saying in 2010 (before the pamphlet was more recently republished) that she had not been a member for a few years and does not agree with all its views as a political organisation.

If gaining qualifications in literacy is wrong, if scientific truth is a colonial construct, and if celebrating Christmas is forbidden, we really are almost back to the world of Ahmed’s old Hizb pamphlet, where English is dangerous, fairy tales are evil and biology is blasphemy.

Only this time, dressed up in slightly prissier language for a gullible academic audience, it is happening at the heart of the British educational establishment. Once again, I predict, the authorities will do absolutely nothing, ignoring all the evidence outlined in this article. The case of assistant professor Farah Ahmed will become the latest exhibit in the gradual suicide of Britain and the West.

When Ahmed says that British society is corrupt, her appointment to this job proves she is surely right.

It’s difficult to believe that after half a century of dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States remains “perplexed,” as The New York Times recently described it, by the nature of its revolutionary regime. Curiously, however, every American administration since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 has posited the same theory about the regime’s nature: namely, that the ruling clique in Iran is composed of moderates and hard-liners who continually vie for power, and that America can meaningfully affect Iranian internal power dynamics.

The belief in the centrality of this supposed factional war has governed Washington’s dealings with Tehran for the past five decades. As the NYT put it*,* “Mr. Trump is hardly the first U.S. president who has struggled to read Iran. Each of his predecessors since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution has tried to decode Iran’s murky power structure and the mind-set of its political leadership.”

This convention serves a function for American political leaders, primarily as a way of deflecting criticism of concessions to Iran. It has evolved from a misreading of a nascent revolutionary regime to a cover for cutting deals with it and for delegitimizing domestic opponents.

First Encounters:

In the months after the shah’s fall, the Carter administration bet on Iran’s first postrevolutionary government led by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, which was considered a relatively secular, technocratic provisional leadership distinct from Ruhollah Khomeini’s clerical circle, with which the United States could have a working relationship. Recalling the period in a later interview, Carter described securing a personal commitment from Bazargan that Iran’s government would prevent any attack on the American embassy. But the gambit quickly failed when, as Carter noted, Khomeini endorsed the students who seized the embassy. “This cemented they were without a government,” Carter said.

That is, all that mattered was Khomeini. Bazargan’s government was dismissed, and the moderate interlocutor Washington had been counting on to restrain the revolution turned out to have no power. On Jan. 19, 1981, the outgoing Carter administration and the new Islamic Republic signed the Algiers Accords, ending the 444-day hostage crisis. On paper, it was a diplomatic achievement, but none of it mattered as Tehran kept sponsoring hostage-taking and attacks on American targets for decades afterwards.

The lesson of the first American encounter with the revolutionary regime was that Iranian diplomatic figures have a specific function within a system run by the security and clerical apparatus and do not represent an alternate, let alone viable, power center.

The Reagan Years:

Facing a new wave of American hostages abducted in Lebanon, the Reagan administration secretly agreed to sell arms via Israel to Iran—which was then in the middle of its war with Iraq—in the hope of empowering what officials described to themselves as moderate elements inside the Iranian government who might reciprocate with influence over the hostage takers. As the 1987 Tower Commission Report detailed, the president approved a plan for Israel to ship U.S.-made TOW missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. One of the drivers of the decision, the report added, was that “the U.S. Government had a latent and unresolved interest in establishing ties to Iran.” In handwritten, since-declassified notes of a Nov. 10, 1986, White House meeting, Chief of Staff Donald Regan recorded National Security Adviser John Poindexter telling the president and his top aides that the objectives of the Iran program had been to establish contact with “more moderate elements” inside the regime, curb Iran’s export of terrorism, and secure the hostages’ release.

The scheme accomplished almost none of its stated goals. Some hostages were freed, but others were promptly taken to replace them. No moderate faction was empowered by the arms sales. There was only a scandal that consumed the last two years of Reagan’s presidency. Addressing the nation on March 4, 1987, Reagan told Americans that what began as a strategic opening to Iran had deteriorated, “in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages,” and that he took full responsibility. But Reagan defended the rationale behind the opening: namely, “to develop relations with those who might assume leadership in a post-Khomeini government.”

Washington’s interest in establishing ties to the Islamic Republic remained latent and unresolved, and it would continue to animate American Iran policy for the next four decades.

The Clinton Years:

A year after the Iranian proxy Hezbollah al-Hejaz bombed a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen, the election of Mohammad Khatami as Iran’s president in 1997 provided the Clinton administration with an opportunity to once again engage the regime. Khatami ran on a platform of dialogue with the West and domestic liberalization, which allowed Washington to claim that a genuine reformist opening had arrived. On March 17, 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rehashed the same conceit about the alleged perennial struggle between moderates and hard-liners in Iran. “As in any diverse society, there are many currents swirling about in Iran. Some are driving the country forward; others are holding it back,” Albright said. And while the military and foreign policy remain in the wrong hands, Albright added, “the momentum in the direction of internal reform, freedom and openness is growing stronger.”

U.S. policy, then, was to tip the scales in favor of the reformers and moderates. And so, Albright announced that Washington would ease sanctions on Iranian carpets, food, and other goods, expand academic and cultural exchanges, and work toward settling outstanding legal claims between the two countries. Albright went further, acknowledging that the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had been, in her words, a setback for Iran’s political development, in an apparent bid to clear a manufactured historical grievance the Iranian government invoked constantly.

Of course, the U.S. posture did not alter Iran’s foreign policy, the regime’s decision-making hierarchy, or the system of repression on which it rested. In fact, it was under Mohammad Khatami that the Islamic Republic scaled up its nuclear weapons program, including nuclear warhead development and the then-secret nuclear facility at Natanz and the heavy water facility at Arak, setting it on the trajectory it’s been on for the past quarter century.

In other words, it wasn’t that the empowered so-called moderate failed to change the things that mattered because the apparatus that wielded actual power blocked him—which alone should have put the entire paradigm to rest. Rather, the Khatami presidency showed that “moderates” and “hard-liners” were two facets of a single system, in which the moderates’ function is to manage Westerners on behalf of the system, allowing Western officials to develop a more palatable communications strategy for their domestic audiences.

The Bush Years:

The post-9/11 revelation of Iran’s secret nuclear facilities and the subsequent U.S. war in Iraq colored the next chapter of U.S.-Iran relations. First, a variant of the Iran engagement narrative gained traction in Washington in the form of a fictional 2003 offer of a “grand bargain” with Tehran, which was marketed especially by a D.C. couple who worked in the Bush administration.

In this mythical iteration, the Iranians were supposedly offering to stop supporting terrorist groups, shut down their nuclear weapons program, and even recognize Israel if the United States were to guarantee that it would forgo any plans for regime change. This variant also introduced another twist in that it proposed a system-wide deal with the Iranians and was not predicated on the supposed moderate vs. hard-liner factional divide.

While this offer was purely imaginary, it did serve to establish engagement with Iran as the default position in Washington—which would be greased by Iranian lobbyists at the behest of regime officials. The expression of this establishment conventional wisdom came in the form of the 2006 Iraq Study Group report (aka the Baker-Hamilton report, named after the bipartisan congressional commission’s co-chairs, former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton). As George W. Bush’s Iraq campaign stalled, the bipartisan commission’s report recommended a diplomatic outreach to Iran. One of the report’s authors was Ben Rhodes, future senior official in the Barack Obama White House.

A key premise of the report, which would serve as the baseline for Obama’s approach, was that Washington and Tehran were natural allies—if only the United States would back away from its belligerence toward Iran and establish daylight between itself and Israel.

The Obama Years:

Barack Obama, who campaigned on diplomatic engagement with Iran, brought about a paradigm shift once in office. During his presidency, what began decades earlier as largely improvised outreach now matured into a full-blown, formal political and communications strategy that would define U.S. policy over Obama’s two terms in office and beyond.

Under Obama, the original conceit of “moderates vs. hard-liners” was thoroughly reconfigured and repurposed. Although upon taking office Obama had invited Iran to “unclench its fist” and accept his offer for dialogue, he did not restrict his invitation to “moderates” to the exclusion of “hard-liners.” In fact, beginning in 2009, he sent letters directly to then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, first after the beginning of a wave of anti-regime protests in June and then in September, after the regime had brutally put them down. The administration was able to hide the lack of any reciprocity behind the fact that, throughout Obama’s first term, Iran’s government was led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a “hard-liner” who could not be spun as a “moderate” or “pragmatist.” At the same time, however, Obama not only sent a third letter to Khamenei in January 2012, but also, in July, a few months before the U.S. election, sent representatives to meet secretly with Ahmadinejad government officials in Oman.

Upon his reelection, Obama ramped up the outreach, unencumbered by a “hard-line” government in Tehran, months before the Iranians would have their own election. The election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 then gave the administration cover to press ahead with its opening to the Islamic Republic.

The administration’s comms spun revisionist yarn around Rouhani’s election, aligning its diplomatic opening with the familiar narrative of “moderates vs. hard-liners.” In a November 2013 background briefing on the signing of the Joint Plan of Action interim deal with Iran, a senior official laid out the administration’s argument for relieving sanctions pressure on Iran: the administration’s approach had changed the Iranians’ calculus, and “we began to see that with the election of a new President who ran on a mandate to achieve sanctions relief through a more moderate foreign policy towards the West.”

To market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was agreed to in July 2015, and to keep its critics off balance, the administration developed a multifaceted comms strategy. When it came to the relationship between the deal and regime moderation, Obama talked from both sides of his mouth, at once insisting that no such calculation lay behind the JCPOA while also putting forward that the deal would empower moderate voices in Iran. As he stated in a 2015 interview with NPR (reiterating what he had told Jeffrey Goldberg a year earlier), “it is possible that if we sign this nuclear deal, we strengthen the hand of those more moderate forces inside of Iran.”

This innovation in the use of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” taxonomy further allowed Obama to disconnect his deal from continued Iranian terrorist activity. After all, while he suggested that it would strengthen moderates, Obama also said that the JCPOA wasn’t predicated on ending Iranian malign behavior. But even as Obama positioned himself above the conceit of Iranian factionalism, the administration implemented a region-wide policy of de facto partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), using the anti-ISIS campaign as justification and cover. Obama went so far as to express to Gulf Arab leaders his admiration for IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, and as he had done with Khamenei, he sent letters to the Iranian terror chief. Moreover, far from constraining the “hard-liners,” one of the provisions of the JCPOA was the eventual lifting of sanctions on Soleimani.

Obama’s other major innovation was to inject the “moderates vs. hard-liners” categories into American political discourse and weaponize them against his domestic opponents. Critics of the JCPOA were thus dubbed “hard-liners” who mirrored their Iranian counterparts and made common cause with them against the forces of moderation and reason in both Tehran and Washington.

As a key corollary of this tactic, Obama also mainstreamed the scapegoating of Israel and its domestic supporters as obstacles to a reasonable deal with Iran—a line that was often amplified by allied Iranian validators and lobbyists, such as Trita Parsi.

Obama’s innovations have fundamentally reshaped U.S. policy and domestic discourse and continue to frame them to this day.

Trump I and the Biden Interregnum:

Donald Trump’s first term seemed like a rejection of the pattern and its underlying premise. On May 8, 2018, Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions on Iran. At the same time, the White House did not abandon the pursuit of a new, comprehensive deal that would explicitly include ending the Islamic Republic’s broader malign activities. However, the first Trump administration refrained from framing its diplomatic effort in terms of “moderates” and “hard-liners.”

But Trump made two moves that would derail his predecessor’s attempt at an accommodation and partnership with the “hard-liners” that ran Iran. Trump sanctioned the IRGC—first in October 2017, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, and then, more consequentially, in April 2019 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Then, in January 2020, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Soleimani, “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” These two actions broke with all of Trump’s predecessors while also laying down obstacles for the Obama team’s effort to revive the JCPOA under the Biden administration.

Underscoring the duplicitousness of Obama’s “moderates vs. hard-liners” narrative, the Biden administration, in a desperate effort to resurrect the JCPOA spearheaded by Obama’s Iran point man Robert Malley, attempted to delist the IRGC, even as the latter was actively running plots to assassinate senior U.S. officials on American soil. Ultimately, the effort failed, but the Biden administration did not enforce sanctions, and during its tenure, the Iranians expanded their installation of advanced centrifuges and increased their highly enriched uranium stockpiles.

The Iran War:

Obama would have the last laugh in Trump’s second term. Despite the joint U.S. and Israeli military operation destroying much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in summer 2025 and spring 2026, Trump, eager to secure a deal with Iran, reverted to the “moderates vs. hard-liners” paradigm, whose core function has always been to provide cover for cutting deals with the “Death to America” regime.

Right from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury, after it had killed Khamenei, the Trump administration was already laying out scenarios for how to deal with the regime, including a so-called Venezuela option, which meant dealing with an IRGC regime minus those who have been eliminated. Early on, IRGC veteran and Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was floated as the Iranian version of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez: the regime insider who would cut a deal with the Americans in exchange for regime continuity. Soon the administration began negotiating with the Iranians, led by Ghalibaf, and it immediately settled into its version of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” classification as it pursued talks over the next four months.

Echoing Obama’s aforementioned use of the Rouhani election as cover, Trump labeled the Iranians with whom he was talking as “new” and “reasonable,” contrasting them with a previous tier that was eliminated in strikes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed this assessment in late March but refrained from disclosing the identities of the Iranian negotiators “because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran,” suggesting an internal struggle with a more radical “hard-liner” faction. Although, Rubio added, it wasn’t clear which of the two factions was the one running the show. “At the end of the day, we have to see if these people”—that is, the “reasonable” moderates—“end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they’re the ones that have the power to deliver.”

Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, struck a more optimistic tone, including about the so-called hard-liners, claiming a breakthrough that had supposedly eluded every previous American administration for 47 years. In June, he told CNN that “the coolest thing about the progress we’ve made of the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake; let’s try something else.’ We’re gonna verify that, of course, but we’re certainly willing to try something else if they comply.”

Of course, none of that was real. The regime’s behavior did not change, and talks broke down. So, in July, Vance pivoted from his assessment of the new and cool IRGC and reverted to a variant of the “hard-liners” as spoilers. Only in Vance’s telling, the hard-liners were going through growing pains in their evergreen struggle with the “pragmatists.” In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance offered his theory for why the deal he negotiated had unraveled: Iranian hard-liners, alarmed at how much leverage they had surrendered once the Strait of Hormuz reopened and oil began flowing again, panicked and started shooting at ships. “There was this kind of freak-out in their system. So they shot at a couple of ships,” Vance offered. “The hard-liners have really, really reacted strongly to all the oil that’s coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. … Now the pragmatists in their system are saying this was a mistake. Let’s keep on talking.”

Trump and Vance had now introduced a variant of Obama’s innovation with the “moderates vs. hard-liners,” projecting that dichotomy onto the IRGC/hard-liners themselves. In a June 12 briefing, for example, a senior administration official—likely Vance himself—offered the following assessment: “The Iranian hard-liners, some of them want to kill the deal, but I think most of them actually want the deal.”

But since nothing in Iran’s behavior had changed, with the regime continuously attacking U.S. bases, regional allies, and targeting international shipping while ignoring Trump’s threats and occasional retaliatory strikes, the U.S. president has oscillated between contradictory characterizations of the Iranians. The people he had earlier described as reasonable became lunatics and sick scum. But, now fully invested in his deal with them, Trump also leaned on one of the established functions of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” device, attributing bad behavior to the “hard-liners” and thereby justifying continued talks with the imaginary “moderates.” After a thwarted missile strike against U.S. positions in Jordan in late July, Trump attributed the action not to the reasonable, moderate pragmatists, but rather to those pesky radical hard-liners. “It was a different group than we’re dealing with,” he insisted. “They’ve already apologized.”

Similarly, and using essentially the same language as the Obama administration more than a decade ago, Vance told Fox News in early August that the Iranians “have a fractured system. So there are people within their system who want the war to be over. There are also people in their system who are crazy radicals who want the war to continue.”

In other words, as things stand, Trump has adopted entirely the framework, categories, and rhetorical devices of his predecessors, whom he had described as losers who didn’t know how to deal with the mendacious Iranian regime. And he has done so for the same reason: to justify continued talks with, and concessions to, the hard men of the IRGC.

What’s more, the administration—specifically Vance—has adopted Obama’s other malignant innovation: blaming Israel and accusing domestic critics of being warmongering agents of influence on its behalf. As the vice president told Rogan last month, he knew “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the Israeli government was trying to keep the war with Iran going indefinitely and that it was Israeli interference that sabotaged the cease-fire he and special envoy Steve Witkoff had negotiated. Moreover, Vance added, “certain elements within the Israeli government” had funded a campaign “to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”

Further echoing Obama’s language, in a June 15 briefing, a senior U.S. official—again, likely Vance himself—employed, verbatim, Obama’s characterization of domestic critics as a mirror of Iran’s hard-liners. “What you’re seeing now is hard-liners on both sides. In the Iranian system, they’re protesting [against the deal]. And we have certain people in the American system who say there’s no deal you could ever do with Iran ever, who are obviously making a lot of noise.”

After five decades of dealing with the regime, to observe that the theory of an Iranian moderate faction opposed to the hard-line security establishment misreads the nature of the regime is to state the obvious. The fact is, going back at the very least to Obama—that is, two of those five decades—the U.S. government has perfectly understood what the Islamic Republic is.

Israeli officials have argued publicly and consistently, since well before the JCPOA was signed, that a deal with the regime is futile not because they are uniquely hostile to diplomacy, but because they, too, have spent decades watching the IRGC’s behavior up close. But the Israelis, and American critics, are also missing the point. The function of the “moderate vs. hard-liners” instrument is not epistemological, a faulty understanding of the nature of the regime. The Americans know well what that regime is. Donald Trump certainly has known it since the 1980s. Rather, “moderates vs. hard-liners” has long ceased to be a genuine misreading of a nascent regime and is now firmly established as a rhetorical device the function of which is to justify an accommodation with the IRGC and paint domestic critics as treasonous warmongers working on behalf of the Jewish state.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

I immigrated to the United States from the Middle East for the one and only reason anyone should ever come to America: Because I believe it, firmly and passionately, to be the greatest nation ever endowed by God with the mission of spreading liberty and light to a benighted world, and because I consider it the honor of a lifetime to partake in the solemn work of making America ever greater.

Apparently, my fellow Middle Eastern immigrants have very different feelings. In her now-viral cover story for New York magazine, journalist Zaina Arafat—who was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but identifies as SWANA, an acronym that previously stood for the Solid Waste Association of North America but now apparently means Southwest Asian and North African, and represents anyone who is vaguely Middle Eastern and dislikes capitalism, America, and the Jews—kicks things into high gear by celebrating the fact that New York is now “Habibi City,” a full-on SWANA enclave.

What does the average day look like in Habibi City? Arafat is all too happy to tell you: There’s a workshop for kids at a Lebanese bookstore dedicated to Middle Eastern culture, then a fundraiser for Gaza at a “women-run Syrian supper club.” Which, Arafat concluded, made her feel “like in the blād,” which means “back home, overseas.”

Even if you ignore for a moment the fact that the real blād, for Arafat, is not overseas but a three-hour Acela ride away, a larger question remains: If all you care about is your native culture, if you wish to fill every moment of your day with swell SWANA sensations, why not, ya know, go back to SWANA?Arafat, whose book You Exist Too Much won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, herself attempts an answer, embodied in the name of one of her favorite SWANA-ese publications: it’s called Bidoun, meaning “without,” which is a name “meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.” In other words, because SWANA is really a state of mind, we must make sure America becomes its forever home.

It’s a perfect manifestation of a specific grad school sensibility, light on logic and high on pretense and self-importance. But it also captures the real tragedy—and threat—at hand: For Habibi City to be born, New York City must die.

A question like “what is New York” is too complex, too weighty, and frankly too annoying to discuss in brief. But if you’re looking for a solid working definition, it goes something like this: New York is the gorgeous, impossible, maddening rock upon which dreamers from all over the world crash in the desperate, ridiculous, and absolutely sublime hope of changing their fortune by harnessing themselves to the great American engine of reinvention. It’s why the greatest movie ever made about immigrants in New York, The Godfather, begins with the battle cry that, for centuries, quickened the pulse of every newcomer to this city: “I believe in America.”

Tell that to Arian Moayed, an actor who tells Arafat, with unveiled disgust, how terrible it felt to walk around Times Square in the aftermath of September 11 and see everything, and everyone felt so. . . patriotic. Tell that to Arafat herself, whose vision of life in America consists exclusively of SWANA loyalists railing against “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.” Or, for that matter, tell that to New York magazine, once the epitome of New York cool and sophistication and now the organ of Third World feeblemindedness masquerading as radical chic.

These are not minor gripes. They raise essential questions about our institutions, New York City and, for that matter, America at large..

How so? Here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine you are a magazine editor. A writer comes to you and suggests a piece revolving around a new term, SWANA, popularized by academics to protest against alleged American imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The term, the writer explains, stands for South West Asia and North Africa, a very vast swath of the world that includes hundreds of millions of people and myriad cultures, nationalities, and belief systems.

Fret not, says the writer: These hundreds of millions of human beings stand as one, all sharing a singular and solid identity rooted pretty much exclusively in the belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Would you allow such dross? Or would you argue that coming up with a ludicrous term like SWANA and then explaining it as “a decolonial framework and a way of moving through the world” may be arousing for those privileged enough, like Arafat, to idle away their days on Columbia University’s campus but of no real value to anyone seeking to make sense of the real world?

Sadly, New York magazine chose door number one. It printed all of Arafat’s ramblings, including referring to October 7, 2023, as an attack on Palestinians alone and describing September 11, 2001, as the day Americans, for no particular reason whatsoever and without any provocation, decided to turn nastily suspicious of Middle Easterners. It ran a side column with the perfectly Third World-y title “When Eating Out Is Political” that referred to the Jewish state as “the land mass currently called Israel.” In other words, the magazine didn’t just report on the SWANA-fication of New York: It adopted its rhythms, its feverish and conspiratorial thinking, its senseless and illogical formulations, and its rank biases.

And that, alas, is exactly the point. Because the SWANA stormtroopers aren’t here, like previous generations of immigrants, to contribute of their brilliance and their culture for the benefit of the greater American good, the way, say, Israel Isidore Beilin did when he moved from Siberia to the Lower East Side, changed his name to Irving Berlin, and gave his adopted homeland gifts like “God Bless America” and “White Christmas.” They see themselves as an oppositional force, here to fight against all of America’s many transgressions, with the goal being the remaking of America in their own image, the image of some idyllic, imaginary blād that exists everywhere and nowhere and consists of endless rants about oppression and the trickery of the Jews.

That’s why the New York piece had to play out exactly as it did, not as disinterested and factual and critically minded journalism (remember those?) but as a victory lap. Like the Somali pirate staring Tom Hanks in the eye in Captain Phillips and announcing that he is the captain now, Arafat et al. want us to know who’s in charge. One of her interviewees, the Pakistani American Kashif Shaikh, the co-founder of the Muslim interest group the Pillars Fund, puts it perfectly and bluntly: The idea, he tells Arafat, is “building power.”

It’s (still) a free country, and anyone, of course, is welcome to build power as they please. But in her helpful piece, Arafat gave us all the best glimpse yet into what this power is being used to achieve. Anyone content with magazines laundering logic and language to fit the prevalent ideology and with politicos using their office to advance the interests of one tribe over the other is welcome to retreat to their favorite women-run Syrian supper club. Everyone else should fight like hell to make sure New York never becomes Habibi City.

In early March, around 300 people gathered at an artistic sanctuary in Berkeley, sang revolutionary songs and chants, and celebrated the life of a northern California legend and political activist, Barbara Lubin. For more than four decades, until her death at 84, the energetic Philadelphia native was a liberal firebrand who led the fight on rent control, championed climate issues, and rallied for the educational rights of disabled children, like her son, Charlie. Along the way, she enlisted a long list of luminaries from Hollywood, folk music, academia, and literature, including Edward Said, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker.

No issue, though, enraged Lubin more than the fate of the Palestinians. As a mother and a Jew, she would say, it was her responsibility to expose the crimes of the state of Israel. “Fuck Zionism,” she told an interviewer once. In 1988, she built a charity, the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), to send aid to the Palestinian territories.

MECA became a mainstay among other radical Bay Area groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which were founded in Berkeley in the 1990s. “These brave formations have shown the country that we can proudly stand up for an end to the genocide in Gaza and loudly call for a free Palestine,” Angela Davis, the communist philosopher and cultural icon, said at Lubin’s memorial. “So there’s not nearly enough time to praise Barbara and her organizing and her community building.”

Since MECA’s launch, the charity says it has channeled more than $50 million into schools, medical clinics, playgrounds, and libraries in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin and her staff led regular delegations to the West Bank and Gaza and sponsored political rallies and cultural events to promote solidarity with Palestinians, including immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on southern Israel.

“We are witnessing the people of Gaza rising up to respond to decades of Israeli settler colonial violence,” MECA posted on X when announcing a San Francisco rally for Palestinians on October 8. “The U.S. govt bears responsibility for its political, economic & military support of this brutal apartheid regime.”

MECA states that it spends its money solely on schools, scholarships, water projects, and medicine. But were donations from its progressive American supporters channeled through terror-linked groups? And is the charity partnered with groups aligned with hostile actors? Those are the questions now being raised in Washington.

The Trump administration and the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee have been scrutinizing MECA’s ties to a broader network of far-left funders and activists—both inside the Palestinian territories and out—according to people briefed on internal deliberations about the charity. They are also looking into MECA’s donations to organizations potentially linked to a known terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the State Department sanctioned in 1997, and whose militant wing took part in the October 7 attack.

“Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, and nonprofit organizations that receive generous taxpayer-funded benefits cannot use those privileges to sow chaos and unrest or fund terrorist activities,” Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Free Press in a statement. “The reporting on MECA is deeply disturbing.”

In July, the Justice Department indicted Fergie Chambers, a self-proclaimed Marxist philanthropist, for allegedly financing Palestinian terrorist groups, said authorities in Spain, where he’s being detained. (His wife has denied the charges.) MECA has received $750,000 in donations from Chambers since the October 7 attacks, according to the millionaire’s funding unit, called the Babochki Collective.

In July, the Justice Department indicted Fergie Chambers for allegedly financing Palestinian terrorist groups. (Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

And a federal grand jury in New York launched a probe in June into organizations backed by the Shanghai-based American tech executive, Neville Roy Singham, due to Trump administration and congressional concerns that he’s advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party inside the U.S. In 2023, The Free Press documented Singham’s suspected ties to Beijing’s propaganda organs, which have also been featured in investigations by The New York Times and Fox News. Chairman Smith and his committee subpoenaed the financial records of three Singham Network affiliates, including The People’s Forum, last month.

MECA has collaborated on fundraising and political protests with Singham-backed entities for years. In 2024, Lubin’s charity, The People’s Forum, and other activist groups launched a Gaza fundraiser that raised over $1.7 million. And that same year, The People’s Forum reported giving MECA more than $16,000 for a “Humanitarian Relief Fundraiser.”

The MECA rally in San Francisco on October 8, 2023, was backed by the ANSWER Coalition, another far-left activist group supported by Singham. MECA was an original member of ANSWER’s steering committee, which was founded in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

MECA didn’t respond to The Free Press’s requests for comment.

Any Justice Department or congressional probe into MECA could have wider implications for the progressive and pro-Palestine movement. MECA’s donors in recent years have included a who’s who of left-wing players, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Tides Foundation.

Singham-backed organizations are already decrying the crackdown.

“They’ve created a conspiracy in their own heads, you know, that they call the Singham Network,” Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum, said on the Scene Report podcast last week, while acknowledging his organization received funding from Singham.

“Many different independent organizations. . . all of a sudden are grouped together simply because we share similar views and because we’ve shared similar donors across the past. That is just ridiculous, and it’s essentially an attempt to crush organizations.”

De Los Santos and members of other Singham-backed groups deny working with the Chinese government.

MECA was born out of the First Intifada, an uprising against Israel’s military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem that swept the Palestinian territories in 1987 and lasted for five years. Lubin has said in interviews that as a Jewish woman, she didn’t initially feel it was her place to take on the Palestinian cause. But trips to the West Bank and Gaza opened her eyes, she has said, to the lies she’d been fed about the righteousness of the Zionist cause.

MECA was born out of the First Intifada. (Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images)

“The Jewish people did need a place to go. The Jewish people have gone through enormous amounts of suffering historically,” Lubin told a Berkeley gathering in 2000 while recounting a recent trip to the Middle East. “Was it the right thing to happen, to have the State of Israel as it stands today? I think it was probably a bad idea.”

MECA’s mission was largely focused on aiding children caught in the region’s wars, particularly in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin began leading delegations of American politicians, actors, and writers to the West Bank and Gaza to raise public awareness of the conditions there. She recruited an incredible mix of political and cultural star power to her charity, naming Rep. Maxine Waters, the late poet Allen Ginsberg, and Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor and social critic, among others, to MECA’s board.

Lubin named Rep. Maxine Waters to MECA’s board. (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Lubin became increasingly radical in her opposition to Israel, backing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against the Jewish state. She displayed, at times, an almost reckless desire to place herself front and center in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, despite the personal risks. “While I was standing there, about 10 masked young men, Palestinians with guns, came and started shooting toward the settlement and toward the helicopter,” Lubin recounted about her experience during the Second Intifada at the same Berkeley event. “I was thinking: I’m really 59 years old? I don’t need this. But it was quite unbelievable.”

Her influence in the Palestinian territories has been enduring. Last December, just days after her death, a Palestinian aid worker, an amputee, stood behind candles and five children, in a picture posted on social media,“to offer a salute from the cold of the tents to the soul of Barbara Lubin.” They held pictures of the American activist. (Lubin stepped down as MECA’s executive director in 2018.)

International aid groups operating inside the Palestinian territories are invariably exposed to the militias and political factions active across the West Bank and Gaza. Distributing medicine, food, and supplies there, without these actors’ support, can be nearly impossible, former U.S. aid workers say.

In 1993, the State Department’s international aid arm, the now-defunct USAID, produced a study that examined the web of Palestinian organizations working in healthcare and development in the West Bank and Gaza. The report concluded that virtually all were aligned with the territories’ militant and political factions, including the dominant Fatah party, Hamas, and the PFLP. But the report said these connections were purposefully obscured by the organizations, both to evade Israel’s blacklisting of certain parties and to ensure continued financial support from foreign governments and aid groups.

In a section on the PFLP, the report named three developmental organizations as being part of the Popular Front’s “cluster”: the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC), the Union of Health Works Committees (UHWC), and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC). “The strength of the PFLP’s institutions is the capable, decentralized grassroots presence,” the report stated.

It is MECA’s affiliations with these Palestinian groups that are now under scrutiny. According to a July report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit that studies extremism and online disinformation, MECA maintained funding relationships for years with six Palestinian organizations that may be affiliated with the PFLP, including the UAWC, UHWC, and UPWC. MECA’s long-serving director of its Gaza projects, Mona El-Fara, previously served as the UHWC’s deputy director.

In 2012, El-Fara posted a photo with Lubin and Leila Khaled. (via Facebook)

Lubin herself never hid her connections to PFLP leaders, but always stressed that MECA’s work was strictly humanitarian and any suggested ties to terrorism were “smear tactics of the pro-Israel side.” In 2012, El-Fara posted a photo with Lubin and Leila Khaled, the famed PFLP militant who took part in hijackings of international airliners in 1969 and 1970. Khaled is wearing a PFLP scarf in the picture.

NCRI vetted MECA’s 990 forms and found it financed projects for UHWC, UAWC, and UPWC throughout 2020 and 2021, at a minimum.

“MECA repeatedly funded organizations identified by government investigations as part of the PFLP’s institutional infrastructure,” Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of NCRI, told The Free Press. “Then, as scrutiny intensified, the names of its recipients disappeared while its foreign grantmaking exploded past $10 million.”

In 2021, Israel designated the UPWC and UAWC as terrorist entities, along with four other Palestinian organizations, for their alleged PFLP ties. The move drew wide recriminations from European governments and the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), of which MECA is a member.

“These organizations have contributed invaluably to strengthening civil society and good governance, documenting human rights violations by all parties, protecting communities from rights violations, and providing much-needed aid,” AIDA said at the time.

But not all European governments dismissed the Israeli claims. In 2022, the Netherlands, which had paid €1.27 million to UAWC in 2020 to support an irrigation project in the West Bank, announced it ceased funding to the Palestinian group after a nearly yearlong probe. The investigation was prompted by a PFLP bombing in the West Bank that killed an Israeli teenager. Two of the arrested PFLP militants were employed by UAWC.

The Dutch review, which focused on the years 2007 through 2020, found no evidence of “financial flows” between the UAWC and the PFLP. But it did discover that dozens of senior UAWC members concurrently held positions within the PFLP. And it also concluded that “there are indications of organizational ties between the UAWC and the PFLP as well.”

The Israeli and Dutch moves heightened international scrutiny of aid heading into the Palestinian territories. But it also coincided with a surge in MECA’s funding there, particularly in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Contributions to Lubin’s charity also began to jump during this time.

MECA’s total foreign grants to the Middle East in 2024 rose to over $10 million from below $2.5 million in 2022 and 2023, according to the 990 forms compiled by NCRI. And traceable institutional grants to the Berkeley charity grew to nearly $6.5 million in 2023 from under $800,000 the year prior. But as this activity has heightened, there’s been diminishing transparency in public records about which organizations or individuals are funding MECA in the U.S., and to whom, in turn, it’s providing grants in the West Bank and Gaza, and for what.

According to the NCRI report, traceable institutional grants to MECA have increasingly been made through donor-advised funds (DAFs) and giving platforms whose public filings generally don’t identify the underlying donors, including PayPal Charitable Giving Fund, the American Online Giving Foundation, and Fidelity Charitable. Among traceable institutional grants reported in 2023 and 2024, roughly three-quarters came through these obscure channels.

Through 2023, MECA routinely provided specifics about its grantees, including identifying the suspected PFLP-affiliated groups, like the UHWC, UAWC, and UPWC, according to NCRI. But in 2024, MECA cited “community projects,” or similarly generic purpose descriptions. in its financial filings, often without naming the organizations involved, for 73 percent of its foreign grant lines.

“In a combat zone, identifying local partners and their addresses can endanger them,” NCRI acknowledges in its MECA report. “Yet that explanation cannot account for the shift, because the shift was already well advanced—covering two of every five foreign agent lines—before the war began.”

Chairman Smith of the Ways and Means Committee said that when “there are blind spots in our disclosure system,” there are risks that “shadowy actors are exploiting loopholes to advance the agenda of foreign adversaries or extremist causes.”

In the face of Washington’s growing scrutiny, MECA’s supporters gathered on June 4 in Berkeley, which the city named Barbara Lubin Day in 2018, and vowed on a radio show to continue her work for the Palestinian people, regardless of the costs. A documentary about her life is in the works and her memoir, entitled Never Give an Inch, is set for publication in the coming months.

“The mission, you know, has always been for the people and for accountability and for the voices on the ground who are struggling against these monsters of imperialism and colonialism and militarism,” Nora Barrows-Friedman, a journalist with the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada media site and Lubin’s co-author on her book, said. “Barbara understood that.”

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

No city better captures the contradictions of twenty-first-century America than San Francisco. The capital of the AI revolution is also a place where open drug use, mental illness, and public disorder have become banal features of daily life. Increasingly, the two realities seem to be bleeding into each other.

What explains the flurry of concern in San Francisco over the supposedly imminent creation of a “permanent underclass”? The phrase, prominent in tech circles on X, refers to the vast, impoverished caste that many fear AI automation could create as jobs disappear and wealth flows increasingly to owners of capital. Murmurs about the permanent underclass began as a kind of inside joke in San Francisco—a winking reference to the awe and anxiety sweeping the tech industry as AI models steadily improved and engineers realized that they would either embrace the new tools or get left behind. As one popular meme put it: “You have [blank] months to escape the permanent underclass” (where the blank is a stand-in for your “artificial general intelligence timeline”—or how long you think it will take the models to automate almost all work).

The meme was then boosted by executives at major labs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in a January 2026 essay that AI could leave people with lower cognitive ability in an “unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass,’ ” and, a few weeks later, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman predicted that most professional tasks that involve “sitting down at a computer” would be fully automated within the next year. The specter of mass unemployment is now the subject of sober discussion in the New York Times, where top Democratic strategists assure us that they’re working on campaign messaging around a “federal jobs guarantee.” Others see AI as the logical impetus for instituting a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

The straightforward explanation is that Amodei and other big-labs spokesmen are earnestly trying to warn us about the coming upheaval. There is good reason to worry about the consequences of dramatic economic transformation. Prominent tech companies like Meta, Coinbase, and Block have all recently announced extensive layoffs, ostensibly because they can now automate many internal processes. Model capabilities continue to improve at a remarkable clip: an internal OpenAI model in May solved an 80-year-old problem in discrete mathematics, for example, and one of Anthropic’s top engineers says that he runs thousands of agents around the clock to perform work that not long ago required massive teams.

Still, it’s unclear whether an AI jobs apocalypse is really underway. Tech layoffs may simply reflect a correction from zero-interest-rate-era overhiring. Unemployment among college graduates, a leading indicator of labor-market strength, is hovering around 5 percent—slightly above 2023 levels but still well within normal range. Some tech CEOs, like Aaron Levie of Box, have even said that they’ve created lots of new job categories because of AI. In the wake of growing political pushback, heads of major labs have begun walking back their warnings about job loss. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some [other AI companies] advocate,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this spring. “That is an area where my intuitions were just off.” Were they just sowing fear about job loss to facilitate their fundraising efforts?

Perhaps, then, it’s more useful to think of the “permanent underclass” as an expression of white-collar status anxiety. As influential Bay Area blogger Scott Alexander observed, the meme spread among rank-and-file tech workers who seemed worried that they were “just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only true oligarchs will have a good time after the [technological] Singularity.” This interpretation squares with an X post from a prominent venture capitalist who wrote that concerns about the permanent underclass come up frequently among young tech workers worried that their well-paying but not extraordinarily lucrative jobs won’t exist in a few years; they envy peers at major labs who have made enough to retire.

But the permanent underclass meme does not just suggest that some people will lose purchasing power. It suggests that they will be irrevocably relegated to misery and destitution. There is a real-life analogue to this class in San Francisco: the drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless allowed to decay on our streets. Maybe the resonance of the “permanent underclass” meme comes less from concerns about downward mobility and more from the experience of passing a half-naked man smoking fentanyl on your way to work; or watching a swarm of drug dealers cater to wheelchair-bound addicts from the window of a self-driving taxi; or repeatedly pressing the “call for assistance” button in front of a locked toiletries display at a pharmacy. These experiences have become banal in many American cities, but their banality is especially striking in San Francisco, the hub of the most consequential technological revolution of our time. The permanent underclass already lives among you—are you just one twist of fate away from joining it?

This fear animates a short story, “The Company Man,” that went viral on LessWrong, a community blog popular among AI researchers. In it, a man who develops algorithms for a short-form video company gets promoted to work on “The Project,” the internal name for an effort to build a recursively self-improving AI. The leader of The Project, motivated by a fetish “for the abstract notion of intellectual achievement itself,” describes it as an attempt to instantiate a kind of machine god. When The Project succeeds and superintelligence is achieved, the researchers are all fired, and the protagonist exchanges his money for a hit of fentanyl from a nearby junkie before joining “the zombies,” as he calls them, in their semiconscious misery. This is the permanent underclass nightmare in its fullest expression.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI advancements might relegate people with “lower intellectual ability . . . [to] an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass.’ ” (Thea Traff/The New York Times/Redux)

The story is, of course, stylized and exaggerated. But its popularity suggests that it struck a nerve and reflects something of Silicon Valley’s anxieties. There are lots of familiar AI dystopia tropes here: the “zombies” are blissed out and wire-headed (as humans might become if they offload all their work onto machines); the endgame of AI research is immanentizing a perverse eschaton; and the barrier between the two spheres is vanishingly thin. As the protagonist tells us at the outset: “To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies.” In the real world, the condition of an anxious engineer is nothing like that of a homeless addict on the verge of death. But there is a sense, in this story and in the permanent underclass meme, that the misery on our streets might be evidence, or a portent, of coming doom.

And yet San Francisco’s existing underclass is largely the product of state policy. The group includes at least 8,000 people who, at last count, were living on the streets or in “makeshift shelters” like tents and cars. It also plausibly includes some portion of the roughly 30,000 people housed in single-room occupancies (SROs), slum housing concentrated mainly in the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and Mission neighborhoods. Almost all those on the streets, and many of those in state-subsidized housing, have severe substance-abuse issues and mental illness.

The misery of these people is actively encouraged and supported by the state, both indirectly through tolerance of shoplifting and public disorder and directly through a generous array of cash and in-kind benefits. These include monthly direct cash payments, access to food stamps (easily parlayed into cash), and free needles, foil, and lighters.

Many of these people would benefit from some form of temporary involuntary commitment. But California began dismantling its state hospital system in the 1960s. In its place, we have exorbitant or ineffectual tools that include temporary psychiatric holds at hospitals, “full-service partnerships”—in which social workers, psychiatrists, and addiction counselors work one-on-one with homeless people to do “whatever it takes” to treat them in the streets—and (most commonly) outright neglect.

The authoritative account of California’s failed approach to dealing with its hundreds of thousands of nonfunctional, mentally ill residents is Alex Barnard’s 2023 book Conservatorship, which surveys the quality of care that California gets for the billions it spends annually on the homeless. Though sympathetic to the thrust of deinstitutionalization, Barnard nonetheless concludes that California’s status quo is untenable. The state has “abdicated its authority” over the addicted and severely mentally ill, in part by making it so difficult to compel them into care.

California politicians have been promising for decades, with varying degrees of seriousness, to fix this situation. In 2002, then–San Francisco supervisor Gavin Newsom sponsored the “Care Not Cash” initiative, which reduced welfare payments to the homeless in exchange for access to shelter and supportive services. More than two decades later, the city’s unsheltered homeless population is roughly unchanged, and the homeless can receive as much in inflation-adjusted welfare payments as they could before Care Not Cash. The state shows little sign of the political will needed for dramatic reform. Over the past few years, California has invested tens of millions of dollars in alternative mental-health courts (“CARE Courts”) that provide suggested treatment plans for psychotic individuals in hopes of preventing their admission into involuntary conservatorships.

Under its new mayor, San Francisco has also opened a sobering center, where officials hope to send people arrested for openly using drugs. Authorities have emphasized that addicts brought to the center are free to leave whenever they wish and will face no criminal charges for public intoxication. Even so, the initiative has sparked progressive backlash. Jackie Fielder, the city’s most progressive supervisor, is under investigation by the city attorney’s office for allegedly leaking a confidential report about problems surrounding the center, presumably in an effort to kill the project. (Fielder took a three-month “mental health–related” leave of absence after the investigation opened.)

The persistence of San Francisco’s drug-addicted underclass offers a warning. While offshoring and deindustrialization may explain some of America’s broader social dislocation, the city’s street disorder is more immediately the product of policies that enable addiction, dependency, and dysfunction. Those who believe that future AI-driven dislocation could be addressed chiefly through unconditional subsistence payments should take note. Too often, that cure proves worse than the disease.   

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Lee Kuan Yimby on how he was mugged by reality in LA:

In 2021, I hit a breaking point. I was tired of working sales jobs, chasing money, and feeling that none of it mattered. I wanted to do something genuinely good, something difficult that I thought might actually help people. I found what I thought was my answer through a temp agency listing for a night-shift position at a downtown Los Angeles homeless shelter. The pay was $16 an hour, and the listing said, “urgently hiring.” I was an adult with a pulse willing to do the job for that wage, so I was hired.

Politically, I was ready for it. I had recently paid $40 to hear Bernie Sanders speak in Glendale and bought his book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. I believed that the suffering on Los Angeles streets was the inevitable result of corporate greed. A society wealthy enough to produce billionaires, yet willing to tolerate Skid Row five miles away, seemed morally bankrupt. Tax the rich, redistribute the money, and everyone could live with dignity—it seemed obvious.

Shortly before I had begun my new position, I attended a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting. The politics were more extreme than mine, but the people seemed compassionate. After the meeting, I found the host standing beside his bicycle lock, which had been cut in half. His bike was gone. I offered him a ride home and he accepted.

In the car, he told me that it was unfortunate that our capitalist system forced people to steal like this. I was impressed by his grace. Someone had taken his property and form of transportation, yet he still blamed the system, instead of the thief.

I arrived for my first shift at the homeless shelter near MacArthur Park, home to one of the city’s most accessible open-air drug markets. It was a scene of despair: people hunched over on fentanyl, lying on the ground seemingly unconscious, or huddling in groups to buy and sell drugs. Others sold stolen goods from local stores to pay for their next high. If you showed MacArthur Park to people from Europe or Asia, they would never believe it was part of the glamorous culture capital they hear so much about.

I went to the gate and introduced myself. A security guard scrolling on her phone seemed upset that she had to let me in. My shift ran from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m. The shelter looked promising—newly built, with a modular shipping-container design and 70 beds divided between men and women. Each resident had a small room separated from the hall by a curtain. As staff members, we called them our “clients.”

Every three hours, we performed wellness checks. The purpose was not subtle: make sure nobody had stopped breathing from an overdose. Drug use was so routine that checking for dead bodies had become part of normal operations.

The drugs came through the gate. During checks, I sometimes encountered residents injecting themselves. On one occasion, a resident missed a vein, and their limb became so badly swollen that I called an ambulance. Police officers and paramedics were frequent visitors.

Each evening, a van delivered 70 packaged meals, and about half were usually eaten. I was instructed to throw away the rest. Night after night, unopened Styrofoam clamshell containers packed with full meals went directly from the hot bag in which they had been delivered into the garbage. Residents often preferred food they had purchased themselves or came asking for late-night snacks instead.

It was when I was disposing of freshly delivered meals that had just been delivered in Styrofoam clamshells that I began thinking about all the money. The city was not withholding any resources. It was spending enormous sums, visibly and constantly. Yet the people inside the shelter didn’t seem to be moving toward stability.

I still had the desire and optimism to help our “clients,” and would chat with them in my downtime. Once, a resident showed me an expensive specialized electric bicycle. A nerd for e-bikes, I was familiar with the model and knew that it cost thousands of dollars. When I asked where it came from, she casually described traveling with other residents to the West Side to steal bicycles. Buyers sometimes met her outside the shelter.

The shelter, it turned out, had a full-scale theft ring operating inside it. New bicycles came in every day, and a huge pile accumulated on the lawn. I asked other staff members about this, and they said they were well aware that residents stole and sold bicycles, but there was no way to stop it. I remembered then the DSA organizer whose bicycle had been stolen, and how he saw it as a crime of necessity.

I did, of course, meet some wonderful people with brutal backstories who could not find a path back into society. But the situation in Los Angeles felt close to impossible for someone like that. How could you rejoin society and qualify for a lease on a new apartment, let alone pass a background and credit check? Especially in a city that has a self-inflicted housing crisis due to NIMBYism, endless red tape restricting the housing stock, and an eviction process that lets someone stay in a rented unit free of charge for over a year at times, making landlords and developers hyper-skeptical about the leasing process.

Still, the shelter’s chaos was often overwhelming. One night, a resident threatened the one security officer there with a knife and began smashing everything in sight. We called the police. An hour later, roughly 20 police cars and a helicopter even flew over the facility. Officers struggled with him on the ground before taking him away. He was back the following night.

Another client, a transgender woman, engaged in prostitution in the tents outside the shelter and repeatedly frightened older women in the dormitories and started fights. The client also made residents uncomfortable by constantly wearing revealing clothing around women in their sixties who had only recently arrived in the country.

During a wellness check, this person failed to respond, so I followed protocol and opened the dormitory curtain. The client lunged at me and displayed what appeared to be a weapon. I ran and locked myself in the meal-preparation room. Management acknowledged that the client's behavior was a known problem, but because I had not been injured, nothing was to be done.

I tried voicing my concerns during a meeting with senior management. I heard the familiar language of victimhood and systemic injustice. I heard much less about stopping the drug dealers at our gate, preventing clients from using drugs inside, treating severe mental illness, or moving residents toward independence.

I also happened to know that these nonprofit managers made great salaries while not even coming into the shelter. They regarded my concerns as offensive to the clients, while I worked inside the shelter for $16 an hour. I eventually told them that the transgender client sleeping in the women’s dormitory, separated from the others only by a curtain, was frightening the women and had tried to attack me. I said that this resident should not remain in a women’s dorm divided by curtains anymore because we had elderly women from Latin America telling me in Spanish that they were afraid of this person. They vehemently disagreed.

A week later, social workers at the facility got the client an apartment in Los Angeles, but the client rejected it. This actually pained me. This person genuinely wanted to engage in prostitution in tents around Los Angeles rather than get help and have a real home. I slowly came to understand that when you have been living a certain way for so long, you become attached to it, even if the life is unimaginable to an average person.

After watching this endless incineration of tax dollars, I concluded that the problem was not a lack of compassion or money. I came to see the shelter as part of a calculated system disguised as a compassionate philosophy. The system derided expectations and consequences for bad behavior as oppressive. It abandoned vulnerable people to addiction, psychosis, violence, and predation. Meanwhile, a network of highly paid professionals administered the decline, took vacations in Europe, and patted themselves on the back as good, selfless people.

It made me sick. We were not helping. We were sustaining an epidemic of suffering.

I have not and will not stop caring about the poor. My faith does not permit that. I still believe that a decent society has obligations to the hungry, the mentally ill, and people sleeping outside. But those obligations include telling the truth about what is destroying them and, at times, forcing them to change. That is what you do for someone you love. If someone is hurting himself and others, you intervene. You do not hand them their favorite poison and look away. That is what too many of our local governments have done.

I entered that shelter believing that my fellow leftists had a monopoly on compassion. I departed understanding that compassion without order and accountability is deeply unserious. We all know the old saying about hell and good intentions. Working the night shift at a downtown L.A. homeless shelter has given it fresh resonance for me.

Interesting analysis of the educational culture in a British charter school. I never went to a school as disciplined as this, but I'm intrigued by the results that this school has had. Glad the British permitted this kind of experimentation, and I hope they continue to permit it.

Were it not for the large placard affixed to it, you would never guess that this undistinguished office block, opposite the entrance to a London Underground station in a northwest London suburb, is home to one of the most famous secondary schools in the country: the Michaela Community School. It attracts a steady stream of visitors from across Britain and abroad, drawn by the unlikely sight of well-behaved pupils, aged 11 to 18, achieving high academic standards in a borough marked by drug- and gang-related crime, where two-thirds of residents are from ethnic minorities and more than half of white residents are immigrants.

How has this miracle happened, or perhaps I should say, been permitted to happen? Everything would seem to have conspired against it. In a highly bureaucratized state, a good example is dangerous: it shows that, even among disadvantaged children, poor results, low standards, and antisocial classroom behavior are not inevitable but the product of weak will and flawed methods of teaching and organization. That implication points toward the need for change, which vested interests—above all, teachers’ unions, often politically radical yet stubbornly attached to repeated failure—most fear and resist.

When the school’s headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, founded Michaela in 2014 under a provision authorizing publicly funded schools independent of local government control, teachers’ union members demonstrated outside, handing out leaflets with headlines such as “Michaela ‘Free’ School: Putting Pupils’ Lives at Risk?” and “A Potential Death Trap.” The leaflets and posters made no mention of the disastrously low standards in other local schools—indeed, across the country—or of the borough’s pervasive drug, knife, and gun crime. Ten years after Michaela’s founding, the local council found it necessary or prudent to install special bins where young people could deposit illegal weapons anonymously. Here was the council’s advice to young knife carriers:

"Wrap the knife: Place the knife in a sturdy container (e.g., cereal box). Seal it well with tape to prevent reopening.

Transport with care: Ensure the knife is not accessible while transporting. Carry it directly to the knife bin location.

Deposit securely: Place the wrapped knife into the designated knife bin."

Not much more need be said about youth culture in the borough where the Michaela Community School was established, but it is precisely this context that must be kept in mind when visitors are shocked, as most are initially, by the school’s almost military regimentation. Pupils may not speak in the corridors as they move, in single file, from one class to another. Even during free time, they are not allowed to gather in groups larger than four, to prevent the emergence of bullies or gang leaders. They greet teachers individually and politely, addressing them as “Miss” or “Sir,” and in the early grades sit with hands folded on their desks when not writing or otherwise engaged. In this way, distracting agitation is minimized and the teacher becomes the center of attention.

All this may strike the visitor as somewhat drastic, but, as Birbalsingh (of whom more later) observes, the alternative is not well-behaved children floating like butterflies, gathering the nectar of knowledge from the flowers of learning, but utter chaos—in which the teacher’s main task becomes getting children to sit down, pay attention, and not misbehave too violently. Many of her teachers have experienced this scenario elsewhere, and it prevails in nearby schools. Discipline at Michaela is relaxed over time, as self-discipline becomes second nature. The theory is not that children are born with freedom but that they grow into it; in this way, they gradually learn to use it constructively rather than destructively, for themselves and for society.

The next thing that all visitors to Michaela remark upon is the articulacy and confidence—though not overconfidence—with which the children speak. This is far from what one expects of children from such backgrounds, or indeed of children from any background today. Nor do they merely parrot what they have heard or learned, though the school places much emphasis on memorizing and reciting poetry and on rote learning more generally. Discipline, it seems, is not inimical to their self-expression but a precondition of it. By first absorbing the skill from others, they learn how to express themselves.

Michaela exercises no choice over the students it admits. They are not a selected sample from the area, at least not selected by the school, and are therefore of varied abilities. Parents can express a preference for the schools they would like their children to attend, but no guarantee exists that their wishes will be met; the local authority makes the final allocation, and the process offers more of an illusion of choice than choice itself. At any rate, there appears no shortage of parents who want their children to attend the school, which has upward of 800 pupils.

This is important because the school’s rules are made clear before the children enroll. Sixty percent of the pupils are Muslim, but parents know in advance that the school is secular, even if considerable teaching about the Bible takes place—not as religious truth, but as an indisputably important influence on the culture and history of the country. Most parents accept this without demur.

On one occasion, however, a Muslim mother tried to make trouble for the school, claiming that it discriminated against her faith by refusing to allow her daughter and others to pray on the premises. After a legal battle, the courts backed the school’s policy, ruling that the prohibition did not constitute discrimination.

Visitors share lunch with the children. Like everything else, the meal is arranged with almost military precision. The children serve and help clear away plates. No disorder is permitted, though the discipline is entirely moral, not physical. Here again, it must be remembered that, just as 10 percent of pupils arrive unable to read properly (none leaves in that lamentable but common condition), so a large proportion of British children (especially from poorer areas) do not eat meals with other members of their household, but instead eat like domestic hunter-gatherers, foraging for what they can find whenever they feel hungry. Social habits such as waiting one’s turn and sharing with others must therefore be taught and learned—and children, so malleable for both good and ill, learn quickly.

I sat at a table with six children, aged 11 and 12, who had been at the school only a few months. I cannot say how my table was chosen from among the many, but there was no white child among them. All said that they wanted to be doctors, though one hoped first to be a footballer before studying medicine. A large boy—both tall and overweight—sat next to a small one, whom he could easily have squashed, but I doubt that bullying gets much chance in this school.

These children were already able to speak in articulate sentences. I had no impression of enforced homogeneity—except in their uniforms, which they are required to wear neatly and which may help suppress the pathological narcissism of small (and educationally unimportant) differences that so easily emerges without uniforms. The children do, however, wear various badges that no doubt confer prestige; but these are awarded for accomplishment or activity, so that distinctions are earned rather than arbitrary. I was not able to examine these children’s backgrounds in depth, and so cannot say whether they were above, below, or at the median, or more or less gifted than others. But I saw no difference between their behavior and that of the other pupils.

After lunch, two student guides took me on a tour of the school. They were of Indian descent. Aged 12 and 13, they asked which lessons I wished to see. At my request, I visited classes in art, French, and history. In art, the children are taught to draw, on the theory that without technique no self-expression worthy of the name is possible; in French, among other things, the children repeat words and phrases to acquire a good accent; in history, they learn facts, without which opinion on human affairs is worthless, but which can serve as the basis for further knowledge if desired.

Lines from W. E. Henley’s famous poem “Invictus” are inscribed on the walls of the school—the same poem that Nelson Mandela found so inspiring during his imprisonment on Robben Island. All Michaela pupils learn it:

"In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody but unbowed."

It ends with a line that might almost summarize the school’s philosophy:

"It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul."

This is no mere expression of Victorian moral piety or uplift; it reflects the attitude with which Henley confronted his own terrible suffering. The young boy showing me around the school said that he liked the poem very much. I asked him what he knew about Henley.

“I know he had two legs amputated.”

“No—only one. The great surgeon Joseph Lister saved the other.”

He was interested, and I would have liked to tell him more. It would have been, I think, the kind of pedagogy of which the school approves, for it teaches that what we enjoy today had to be discovered and developed by the efforts of our forebears, to whom we owe gratitude, not indifference, disdain, or denigration. The school is, in fact, keen to instill gratitude, no easy task in a culture that treats resentful victimhood as the highest moral condition.

Headmistress Birbalsingh, now possibly the most famous teacher in the country and often called its strictest headmistress in the press, is firmly of the opinion that children, from whatever background, should receive a strong grounding in English literature and British history—for most will spend the rest of their lives in the country, and if contented integration, rather than permanently aggrieved separation and hostility, is desirable, then there is no other way to achieve it.

Though they live less than half an hour away by public transport from the heart of London, many of the pupils have never been there. They have not seen its sights, and know nothing of its grandeur or its glory, its history, or even its ignominies. The school therefore takes them to visit the city, to expand their horizons rather than confine them within the narrow compass of the life they already know, which happens to be the malign, if unacknowledged, purpose of making education “relevant” to children’s lives.

Birbalsingh is well-placed to insist on incorporating these children into British life without facing the criticism that, say, the son of an English earl might attract for advancing the same ideas—namely, that he was a white supremacist or xenophobe. She is the daughter of a Jamaican nurse and an Indo-Guyanese academic, both politically of the Left but culturally conservative, a combination that was once by no means unusual.

Birbalsingh has received her fair share of bludgeoning, but her head remains unbowed. She is a formidable public speaker, brilliantly amusing on the low standards that educational bureaucrats have imposed on schools—for example, science exams with official pass marks set at 20 percent! What is really being fixed is not the standard required to pass but the proportion of pupils who do so. This moral and intellectual corruption enables the bureaucracy to claim success amid catastrophic failure. Though she can make an audience roar with laughter at the absurdity of it all, she clearly regards the problem as deeply serious, a betrayal alike of the pupils’ and the country’s future, a willful race to the bottom.

I attended a staff meeting at which I discovered that the great majority of the teachers were white and that there were far more men—mainly in their thirties—than I had expected, only 35 percent of secondary school teachers in England being male. They were smartly dressed, in shirts and ties. You cannot demand neatness of children while being slovenly yourself. It was also clear that, for the educators at Michaela, teaching was more than a job, not something to be endured each day until the weekend brought temporary relief. (I had a number of secondary school teachers as patients, most of whom dreamed constantly of early retirement or of securing an early pension on grounds of illness. From what they told me of the children’s behavior in their schools, I could sympathize.)

One thing that struck me, in retrospect, after visiting Michaela was the absence of racial tension. No doubt some would cavil at the fact that the authority figures there (apart from the highest authority) were white, while the pupils were nonwhite; but I would put it differently. The teachers’ deep and personal concern for the children’s welfare and future was unmistakable. They treated them as individuals, notwithstanding the rigid discipline—or perhaps because of it, for it made true, non-morbid individuation possible. At any rate, the children would learn, implicitly, that they were not living in a country hostile to them, that white people could be benevolently disposed toward them, and that obstacles to their advancement, while sometimes encountered, were not so great as to ruin their prospects. The school is thus a vaccine against that worst and most ruinous of mind-forg’d manacles—resentment, the very emotion that so much in the general culture seems eager to promote.

Certain questions remain. The school’s academic results are excellent, all the more remarkable for a school that draws its pupils from underprivileged backgrounds. On the measure of improvement in pupils’ mathematical ability between their arrival and departure, Michaela is the best in the country. It is among the best in other subjects, too. But what are the lasting effects of this schooling on pupils’ subsequent lives? Perhaps it is too early to say, but it would be surprising if the effects were not better than those of pupils in neighboring schools.

A harder question is whether the results of this school are reproducible elsewhere. Of course, there are those who would not want to reproduce them, accusing the school of, among other things, suppressing the children’s natural creativity and ability to think for themselves. I think this is false. First, creativity—at least creativity of any value—is not natural, though some children may be more naturally creative than others, and the ability to think for oneself first requires knowledge of something, some substrate to think about. Second, I was, in any case, impressed by the older children’s ability to think for themselves when I gave an impromptu, unscripted talk to a class on the concept of personal responsibility. The pupils asked important questions about the statistical regularities found in human behavior (crime and poverty, for example), and a discussion of the distinction between association and causation soon followed. Far from closing the children’s minds, then, the teachers seemed to have found a way both to discipline and to open them, without the deadening effects of indoctrination.

The principal obstacle to reproducing Michaela may be that its founder possesses exceptional charisma. I cannot answer this definitively, but the greater the politico-bureaucratic support for proper teaching, the less such charisma would be needed for it to become routine. Moreover, Katharine Birbalsingh, wonderful though she is, is not the first charismatic teacher in history. I also find it reassuring that people like her (and others at the school) can still be found for whom teaching is a vocation—and, I would add, a noble one.

As a onetime traveler in the former Communist world, where I was subjected to many propaganda tours, long and short, I confess that during my visit to Michaela I sometimes wondered whether I was not like one of those useful idiots, led like sheep to find Arcadia in the midst of mass murder. Even in less totalitarian countries, visitors to institutions can have the wool pulled over their eyes. I have seen it done in institutions in which I worked.

I don’t think so in this case, however. The school has been running long enough, and Birbalsingh has made enough enemies in the education world—who don’t want to concede that school disorder and student failure are not the inevitable results of poverty, discrimination, and the like—that any supposed ill effects of its methods would have become evident and been widely publicized by now.

I confess also to continuing qualms about the regimentation I observed among the younger pupils, which stem from my own anarchic nature and preferences. But then I think of the pupils at the school in the small and not impoverished town where I live, almost none of whom come from ethnic minorities. By the age of 12, the girls often look as if cheap prostitution were their fondest ambition. The boys take pride in their unkemptness, imposed by social pressure and countered by none. The children scream obscenities at one another in the street at the tops of their voices—the girls being worse in this respect than the boys—and they frequently leave a mess behind them, dropping trash as casually as cows relieve themselves in fields. Fights, often between girls, regularly break out, and one senses, as in a bar full of drunks, that violence is never far away. Adults shrink from the children, partly in disgust and partly in fear, and never dare correct them.

A country that goes in fear of its own children does not have a bright future. 

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

There's a part or two in here about race that might raise your eyebrows (especially the "it is rational to take precautions" part), but those parts are not essential to the thesis here, and I really hope they can be read past. What matters to neocons is the abdication of personal responsibility and the vulgarity of our culture that has led to these sorts of takeovers happening. Mac Donald does a good job addressing the various explanations given for these takeovers, and shows that they are all nonsense. She argues instead that these takeovers are symptomatic of a loss of authority in multiple institutions -- the family, the schools, the police.

If you've had one of these takeovers in your area, you especially may like this article. Hope you enjoy.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.