Finally, the government has waged a different sort of propaganda campaign abroad, one designed to convince gullible foreigners that Polish judges are Communists left over from the bad old days, and that they therefore deserve to be purged. A bit of math disproves this claim: The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago, while the average age of a Polish judge is 42. The vast majority were not old enough to be Communists, or even anti-Communists, at all. A little history helps, too. The upper ranks of the Polish judiciary were indeed purged, in the 1990s. Those judges who were then allowed to stay—and only a tiny handful of them now remain—were relatively young and had been involved only in strictly criminal, apolitical cases.

At the moment, it is not the judges but ruling-party politicians who now sound remarkably like the former Communists they claim to hate. President Duda chose a beer hall as the venue to use the language of ethnic cleansing and pogroms: “We must cleanse our Polish home,” he said, speaking of the judges he wants to eliminate, “so that it will be clean, orderly, and beautiful.” Still, it is amazing how many outsiders have fallen for it. British conservatives, for some reason, seem particularly susceptible.

All of this activity, from the anonymous trolls to the fake authors to the fake anti-Communism, has had a straightforward goal: To convince both the Polish public and the international community to accept a series of changes misleadingly described as a “judicial reform.” In reality, these changes have, as noted, amounted to an elaborate exercise in unconstitutional court-packing. Law and Justice does not have a constitutional majority. It does not even control both houses of Poland’s legislature. And so the party has sought to change the rules regarding judicial appointments by making hundreds of minor changes to legislation, thus creating new courts and judicial bodies that will enact what are, in practice, radical constitutional changes.

The word reform is misleading, because this group of policies was never intended to make the Polish judiciary more efficient or more competent. On the contrary, the so-called reform has gummed up the entire system. The point was to ensure that the majority of judges, even if unqualified, are blindly loyal to the ruling party. An example: Law and Justice has appointed to the country’s constitutional tribunal a man named Stanisław Piotrowicz, who is not only a former Communist, but a former martial-law-era Communist prosecutor, responsible for putting dissidents in jail. His appointment made a mockery of the argument that this “reform” was about clearing out old Communists, but mockery may well have been the reason he was chosen. Law and Justice is taunting its opponents.

By failing to deNazify, the Brotherhood lost a democracy.

Things went wrong from the beginning. Poe’s friend, who was to secure an introduction to Robert Tyler, was sick and could not take him around. Poe drank too much and made a fool of himself in public. He behaved so badly that one of his hosts, Jesse E. Dow, wrote to Poe’s business partner to say he’d better come get Poe and take him home. Dow didn’t think it was safe to put his friend on the train alone. The letter is strikingly compassionate toward Poe. “He does not understand the ways of politicians,” Dow wrote; “how should he?” Poe, he reflected, “has the highest order of intellect, and I cannot bear that he should be the sport of senseless creatures who, like oysters, keep sober, and gape and swallow everything.” […]

Alcohol clearly played a role in Poe’s disastrous Washington trip. When Poe was drunk, and sometimes even when he was sober, he would find himself acting against his own interests for reasons that were opaque to him. Poe could have been thinking of frailties like his own when, in his short stories “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), he wrote about what he called perverseness: the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself”—the mysterious desire he felt, and believed we all feel, to get in our own way.

Perverseness, Poe thought, was as fundamental a drive as hunger or libido, with its own dedicated region of the brain. When we are perverse, we turn not only against our better judgment but also against what are apparently our desires. “The Imp of the Perverse” begins with an essay defining the concept and giving examples that range from the harmless to the unsettling; Poe classes as perverse both procrastination and the impulse to kill oneself by jumping from a great height.

Morality consists, in its entirety, of repression of the self.

That has electrified the working-class town of Taibe, where more than 80 percent of residents voted this week. “We should now translate that result into making real improvements in our lives,” said Amir Hajj Yahya, 30, who had gathered with friends outside a burger joint on Wednesday night.

And yet, while Taibe was celebrating, the reaction in other parts of Israel was very different. Some members of the opposition were quick to rule out joining forces with Arab parties to form a government. Influential television pundits rushed to warn against the possibility that the Arab parties could have a hand in future government policy on security and foreign affairs.

For many Arab citizens, the response has underscored what they say is the unwillingness in much of Israeli society to give them a say in the country’s future, and some fear the vote may prove futile. “This reaction is proof of racist attitudes we’re facing,” said Shadi Hajj Yahya, 34, a truck driver in Taibe.

Joining a coalition without requiring recognition of the nation of Palestine will be a loss.

The film brilliantly dramatizes Chris and Regan’s close emotional bond and then exaggerates the brutality of its eventual decline, showing the ways deep love can quickly curdle into hate, and how love and hate or attachment and dissolution can, and often do, exist at the exact same time.

In this way, beyond whatever political and social anxieties it seemed to express in 1973, The Exorcist hits upon a primal fear: the daughter will reject and loathe the mother, the mother will resent and fear the daughter. The mother-daughter relationship is inevitably shaped by the looming specter of betrayal and loss. As Adrienne Rich writes, “The loss of daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.”

And yet Chris and Regan’s relationship also holds within it the possibility for redemption. At the end of the film, there lies the other promise of all mothers and daughters, a promise so often left unfulfilled: the daughter, waking up from a long and frightful dream, crawls into a dusty corner of her room and calls out for her mother. Her mother, hesitant at first, runs to the daughter and envelopes her in her arms, everything forgiven.

At the very top of Taylor and Vallejo streets here on Sunday morning, I stopped to take in the view. Idling in a 2011 Ford Mustang V6, I looked down through the windshield at the impossibly steep hill below, immortalized in the 1968 film “Bullitt” starring Steve McQueen.

Seated next to me was Loren Janes, 79, McQueen’s longtime stunt double and the last surviving member of the “Bullitt” car crew. Mr. Janes drove the green Mustang in the movie’s most daring and riveting scenes—the one down Taylor Street and the other along Guadalupe Canyon Parkway. I even brought along a CD of the “Bullitt” soundtrack for the ride.

Two weeks after the death of “Bullitt” director Peter Yates, Mr. Janes and I set out to honor him by driving the movie’s chase route—cautiously. “Peter wanted everything about the chase to feel risky and rough,” said Mr. Janes, whose stuntman credits include more than 500 movies and 2,100 TV episodes. “Peter never got cold feet about any of the stunts that coordinator Carey Loftin lined up. He knew that a memorable film needed to be on the edge.”

Hazony’s book is an attempt to make the case that nationalism is a preferable political arrangement relative to individualistic anarchy or highly centralized imperialism. Anarchy, Hazony argues, allows for high individual liberty, but routinely lapses into chaos and cruelty because it lacks structure. Imperialism, on the other hand, fails because it imposes order and public security from the top down, depriving humans of the chance to politically organize themselves more organically via the bonds of family, clan, tribe, and so on.

Nations, Hazony argues, solve both problems because nations arise from the natural ways human beings interact with one another. Our life in the world begins with our family. Our families then form bonds with other families, for reasons of mutual affection and mutual security. Those bands of families then unite together with other bands which share a common religious heritage, language, and generalized culture. This is how Hazony understands what a nation is.

By a nation, I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies–characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors. By a national state, I mean a nation whose disparate tribes have come together under a single standing government, independent of all other governments.

Nation-states, then, are a kind of administrative container that protects and preserves the common life of nations relative to the lives of other nations. Note that Hazony particularly singles out “religious tradition” as part of a nation’s heritage. Thus from the start there is a key question here regarding religious liberty: If, for example, India claims that Hindu religious practice is part of its national heritage, does Hazony’s system allow India to harass Christians and Muslims on grounds that it is protecting its national identity? Hazony’s own past behavior will provide an answer to that question, as we will see shortly.

It is worth noting here that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between what Hazony says here and what Stephen Wolfe argues in The Case for Christian Nationalism, which is unsurprising given that Hazony endorsed the book, calling it, “A pioneering work that paves the way for a new genre of American Christian-nationalist political theory.”

Here is how Wolfe discusses what makes a nation:

I use the terms ethnicity and nation almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize the particular features that distinguish one people-group from another. Since every people-group has internal differences (e.g., class-based differences), nation is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.

Wolfe foregrounds ethnicity in a way Hazony does not, yet both are arguing on essentially phenomenological grounds about the nature of political society. Both begin with the bonds of one’s kin, expanding those bonds in a limited way via a specific appeal to “ethnicity” (Wolfe) or to common culture, religion, language, etc. (Hazony). Both then, as we will see, harden that definition by erecting a moral barrier around the container of the nation, rendering it immune to external critique in how it conducts its own affairs.

Wolfe does this via the explicit call for a “Christian prince”, which is an anti-liberal caesar-like figure who exemplifies the spiritual vitality of the people. A regime organized under such a figure would, almost by definition, devolve into despotic rule given that it is anti-liberal (and therefore hostile to liberal rights) and built on the notion of a singular figure whose very existence is a kind of symbol for the spiritual life of the nation and who rules that nation accordingly.

Hazony, for his part, also wants to insulate nations from liberal moral critique. In his chapter on principles of nationalism as a form of international organizing (which he contrasts to imperial forms of international organizing) Hazony explicitly says,

The second principle (of the order of national states) is that of non-interference in the internal affairs of other national states. This is what, in a free state, permits the nation to pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding. Without this principle, powerful nations would take control of the affairs of smaller nations, and the order of national states would collapse into an imperial order.
In other words, if one nation-state observes another treating people residing within its own boundaries in ways it judges to be immoral, the first nation-state still must leave the second alone on grounds that each nation-state has the right to “pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding.”

They just disagree about which ethnicity to valorize.

Monica Weindling still remembers the interview well. It was the summer of 2017, she was fresh out of undergrad and had applied for an entry level research job at a nonprofit organization called BSCS Science Learning, based in Colorado Springs. Founded in 1958 to reinvigorate the American science educational system in the post-Sputnik panic, BSCS is the main player in high school biology textbook publishing in the U.S. Donovan had landed there as a research scientist after Stanford and quickly secured a $1.3 million grant to further develop what he called the humane genomics literacy curriculum, teach it to teachers, and roll it out to students in a randomized trial. To do that he would need help.

One week before the interview with Weindling, Donovan sent her background reading on the project. It came to more than 100 pages. “It was very intense,” Weindling said. Over the years she saw him do the same thing with every potential new employee. She began to realize it wasn’t some kind of test, it was to ensure that people came in with eyes open and able to have an effective interview. “He’s always thinking about teaching and setting people up for success, even at the hiring level,” she said.

Weindling got the job and by October she was in San Francisco conducting “thinkalouds” with middle schoolers. She listened as they verbalized the first thoughts that came to mind as they read through the HGL materials.

The lessons are structured around two fictional teenagers, Robin and Taylor, who are trying to figure out how to interpret data from two real-world surveys. In one, the National Football League reported that 28% of its players in 2014 self-identified as white and 68% as Black. In the same year, the National Center for Education Statistics found that 75% of university professors in STEM fields identified as white and 6% as Black. Robin thinks the lopsided representation likely has something to do with genetic differences between people of different racial groups — specifically in genes for athletic or intellectual abilities. Taylor isn’t so sure. He thinks people have different genetic makeups but that those differences aren’t associated with race.

The truth is that Taylor is more right, but neither has a completely accurate view. It’s the students’ job to learn about the science of population genetics and multifactorial inheritance so they can interrogate the veracity of Taylor and Robin’s claims. That means learning that genetic differences emerged as early groups of humans expanded across the globe but that the variation between groups — in Africa versus Asia, for example — is much smaller than the variation that exists within each group.

This part of the curriculum drives home something Donovan often emphasizes in teacher training and speeches; that bias is best understood as a neurological process. It’s a coping mechanism humans evolved to make sense of living in an increasingly complex world. If we see a difference between how two people look on the outside, we might take a cognitive shortcut to erroneously conclude that’s because of something different about how they’re put together. It’s a way of framing things for students that’s blame-free, that invites curiosity both into the workings of our own minds and what science has to reveal about the world around us.

Students are also taught that unlike the seed coats on Mendel’s peas, most human traits aren’t driven by single genes. Common traits like height or blood pressure are influenced by variations at thousands of locations in the genome, each exerting a tiny effect. They’re also influenced by the physical — what you eat, where you live, what pollutants you’re exposed to — and social environments you inhabit.

Students are given data about how racism has produced profoundly different environments for Black and white Americans. And they learn about how these environmental variables often explain much more of the variation in people’s experiences. In one example, they read about a study of college football recruiters who had a history of rating Black high school athletes higher than their white counterparts. When asked to evaluate the athletes based on their stats alone, without knowing their race, that bias disappeared. A key part of the curriculum is conveying that genes aren’t the only thing people inherit.

“That was a big eye opener for me and I think for a lot of other teachers,” said Paul Strode, a high school biology teacher in Boulder, Colo., who was one of the first instructors to work with the HGL curriculum. “It’s a far cry from Punnet squares and other status quo materials that teach kids that things like eye color, nose shape, they’re all just coin flips. That cements this misconception that human traits are simple, and what Brian argues and what I agree with is it opens the door for making assumptions about people based on what they look like.”

As students work through the HGL curriculum, they’re not just learning about genetics, they’re also learning about how to reason with evidence. The fictional characters don’t just create a safe space for kids to think through their own misconceptions about genetic causes of racial inequality, they also model what it looks like to overcome science denial. “It’s more effective than me, as the authority, just telling them ‘here’s how it is,’” Strode said. “It’s them discovering how it is based on the science.”

Whether it be the current protests and riots, PSG’s Champions League victories, or the 2023 riots (when over 2,500 buildings were burned or damaged, while rioters rammed a burning car into a mayor’s family home with his wife and two children inside), France has become accustomed to moments of unrestrained violence. This state of permanent chaos is made worse by the internal implosion of the traditional French political system, long dominated by a Jacobin state.

In place of a strong Leviathan, France has a Jacobin state that, after years of centralisation, is obese, indebted and weak, incapable of pacifying the atomised society it helped to create. As with most stories about France, the tale begins in 1789. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, the revolutionaries sought to create a society of free individuals, emancipated from subjugating customs and intermediary bodies. Among the Jacobins especially, democracy was conceived as an unmediated relationship between the individual citizen and the nation-state. Sovereignty could be neither divided nor mediated: it belonged to the undivided will of the people.

Fun watching folks try to blame immigrants for the core French pathology.

The postliberal critics of classical liberalism and its application in American constitutionalism do indeed focus on human flourishing. Vice President JD Vance argues that markets are means rather than ends and the government may legitimately favor ends like family stability and productive industry. Patrick Deneen goes farther and argues that liberalism undermines the tradition and moral restraints upon which flourishing depends. It follows that constitutional machinery alone is insufficient to produce a virtuous society. The disdain postliberals often display towards “neutral” institutions is a result of this argument. Was Madison incorrect?

Classical liberal philosophers Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl argue that government should protect people’s freedom to pursue good lives, rather than prescribe what those lives must look like. In Norms of Liberty and subsequent works, the Dougs reconcile human flourishing and liberty in an Aristotelian fashion. They argue that human flourishing is a real thing and depends upon virtues such as practical wisdom, but is also, importantly, individualized and self-directed. A single political definition of the good life can never be appropriate for everyone.

Rights, therefore, do not provide a complete theory of the good life, but establish political and legal conditions — metanorms, as they call them —under which people can undertake their pursuit of happiness. Rasmussen and Den Uyl explicitly do not argue from moral neutrality. Their argument is that a substantive account of human nature and flourishing by its very nature places limits upon political power. The good life, in Aristotle’s sense, must be self-directed, so political authority cannot by itself instantiate that good. The pursuit of happiness, rather than any specific definition of happiness, is what government is instituted to protect.

Yet there remains a problem. American government today does indeed seem biased against a virtuous pursuit of the good life. The reason for that is neither the Madisonian architecture of the Constitution nor the turn towards free market policies of the Reagan administration, but what was done to government by the Progressive era.

Woodrow Wilson and his fellow travelers argued that the constitutional framework frustrated purposeful government, which required expertise, technocracy, and active government. The invention of what was effectively a fourth branch of government — the administrative state — was the means to circumvent constitutional requirements like separation of powers into a more active government that embodied norms rather than metanorms.

As Michael Oakeshott argued, the American state transformed from being a rules-based civil association to being a teleocratic enterprise association. Certain social outcomes were desirable, and government would attempt to achieve them. Differing faculties would indeed be corrected as a matter of social justice. If liberty suffered as a result, so what? Differing outcomes that would previously have been regarded as risks or misfortunes were now to be mitigated by an active, scientifically informed government. In some cases, the very property rights that Madison regarded as sacrosanct were to be the object of this correction, which is why the government stopped a man from growing his own wheat on his own land for his own use, in the infamous case Wickard v. Filburn.

It is what happened as a result of the Progressive Era’s upheaval of the purpose of the state that deserves the postliberals’ full ire, not liberalism. When government assumes responsibility for desired social outcomes, the citizen’s relationship with that state and its politics both change.

The republican limitation on dictating ends resides in the requirement that laws be arrived at in participatory fashion and apply universally. Thus is the common good discovered. The Administrative State is the attempt to avoid these restrictions.

Spain’s post-Franco transition offers a more constructive lesson. The transition did not simply move from authoritarianism to unrestricted electoral competition overnight. Legal and institutional changes developed alongside political opening, creating a framework within which political competition could expand. The 1977 elections, Spain’s first free general elections since the 1930s, were an important part of that process. Political parties had been legalized just beforehand, and the newly elected parliament went on to draft the 1978 Constitution. The vote was therefore embedded in a broader transformation of the political and constitutional order.

Spain’s experience cannot simply be transferred to Syria. The two countries have different histories, social structures and political circumstances. The relevant lesson is narrower: Democratic competition becomes more sustainable when political actors have a framework of rules that they recognize as legitimate and within which political power can change hands. That is precisely the kind of framework Syria still needs to build.

What Syria should do now
Syria’s choice should not be framed as institutions versus democracy. It should be institutions and democracy, developed together. Political parties should be able to emerge and organize. Civil society should have space to operate. Citizens should be able to debate the country’s future. Political participation should expand rather than remain permanently restricted.

At the same time, the state must strengthen the institutions that make political competition meaningful. That means establishing a constitutional framework that clearly defines political authority and limits executive power. It means building an independent judiciary that can resolve political disputes. It means creating credible electoral institutions that political competitors trust. It means rebuilding the civil service around professional competence rather than personal or factional loyalty. And it means ensuring that armed power is ultimately subordinate to unified public authority.

These are not technical details separate from democracy. They are part of what makes meaningful political competition and democratic governance possible.

The rub on tariffs was that they were a dumb policy with concentrated benefits but widely dispersed negatives. Protecting U.S. factories had emotional appeal even if economists insisted that tariffs made the country poorer.

Donald Trump bought protectionism and, even more, intuited its political potential. Fencing out foreign goods made great copy (never mind the higher prices and sure retaliation against U.S.-made products). In 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton was sufficiently spooked to renounce the Trans-Pacific Partnership that, as Secretary of State, she had helped to design.

Her conversion came too late for voters. In the decade since, “free trade” has disappeared from the lexicon of political hopefuls, of either party.

But Trump has achieved the impossible. He has made tariffs unpopular.

There goes 50 years of Left/Right dogma.

One of the great innovations of 21st century psychology is its ability to put a name to everything. There are a hundred thousand supposed pathologies that had never been diagnosed before and can now be identified with a couple of tests and a little imagination. Many parents are also desperate to attach a more or less exotic label to whatever is going on with their children, anything to avoid admitting that they are badly brought up, undisciplined, or simply blessed with highly creative minds. Most children with such creative minds, excelling in one subject while displaying little aptitude for others, are now labelled “neurodivergent.” In other words, they supposedly lack a normal brain. This is perhaps psychology’s most presumptuous achievement. Could someone please explain to me what on earth it means to have a normal brain? […]

It is true that psychology, and psychiatry even more so, has made some very interesting advances in treating conditions such as depression and anxiety. Yet psychology still harbors an original sin: the belief that the human mind can be categorized and that it responds in an orderly fashion to patterns, much like an animal’s instincts. I have never encountered two identical minds, or two identical souls, and the search for common patterns is little more than an approximation. Psychology is, in a sense, the science of approaching the impossible, the intangible.

Few states are as successful as China when it comes to surveilling and controlling the population. But taxes represent a reciprocal bargain with citizens, who accept expropriation as legitimate on the understanding that they will get something in return: stability, public goods, improved standards of living, redistribution, and so forth. That is why wars and even empires can be lost when a state loses its capacity to tax its citizens.

The fate of the Ming and Qing dynasties is telling in this respect. Even discounting for the obvious historical differences, these episodes have faint echoes in developments today. We recently mapped China’s taxes and revenues since 1952. Two features stand out. First, and somewhat surprisingly, the CPC has not presided over a particularly strong fiscal state. Instead, it has raised a substantial share of resources without explicitly taxing its people. Until the late 1970s, about half the resources raised came from profits of state-owned enterprises (SOEs); and in the last two decades, about one-sixth (and as much as one-quarter at its peak in 2020) has come from land sales.

In other words, China has never managed to raise sufficient sums of money via personal income taxation, even during a period of extraordinary economic vibrancy. Over the last decade, its tax revenues from the personal income tax averaged just 1.2% of GDP. Ironically, a communist state ideologically committed to collective ownership of the means of production has had to raise revenue by divesting itself of that most sacred input, land. Evidently, the CPC can make the Chinese cower in silence, but finds it difficult to reach into their pocketbooks.

Earlier this year, it slowly dawned on me that I could no longer ignore these machines. After much hesitation about contributing to companies with unethical practices, I took the plunge and paid for a $30 subscription. What I discovered was the most profound shock of my intellectual life.

In May, I felt like I was working with a great PhD student, by June it was an equal colleague, by July it was better than me, and by August I had the eerie feeling that it had surpassed even the best mathematicians. Then, in September, came a startling announcement: OpenAI claimed a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, a Millennium Prize Problem concerning the motion of fluids. To add insult to injury, OpenAI recently released solutions to a further 372 mathematical problems, including central questions that large groups of mathematicians had struggled with for decades.

It is one thing to hear about AI disrupting other fields. It is quite another to find yourself at the centre of the storm, watching a worldview built over decades of study and grounded in millennia of accumulated knowledge begin to collapse.

This had moral implications. Darwin was “no more and no less than a typical figure of empire, seeing both simplicity and savagery as characteristic of Indigenous peoples, neither of which could match the civilisation of his own kind.”

Darwinism was just the ideology required to make Imperialism more palatable. The victims needed to be our inferiors.

We need a massive, massive liberalisation. None of that’s been done, and no real attempt has been made by anybody on the Right to persuade public opinion that it needs to be done. It obviously should have started five, six years ago. It should start now. That is the second-best time to do it.’

The ideas nobody has heard:
‘People have simply not heard these ideas for a very long time. Most people believe we’ve been living in some sort of crazy neoliberal lab experiment for the last 40 years and it’s time to get the state back into politics. And that’s because nobody has tried to challenge it. People on the Right don’t really want to do it. They don’t want to talk about the spending cuts that are necessary. They don’t want to talk about reforming the labour market again. But if they don’t, we are not going to solve the problems. That’s the basic difficulty. Therefore, they must.’

What’s gone wrong with Britain?:
‘One is we’ve just let state spending drift up too high. It’s 10 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than it was in the early Blair era. That in itself is enough to take 1% off growth, probably. Second, the markets are all gummed up. All our markets of all kinds are simply gummed up, over-regulated massively compared to where we were 20 or 30 years ago. The third bit of it, I think, is less economic and more cultural. I think it’s about the erosion of the sense of the British nation state’s political project – that we are all one country together, all pulling in the same sort of direction.’

One book posited that he was taken out “by a crew of malevolent circus midgets who surreptitiously entered his hotel room in order to add arsenic to his morning tea.” Others have assumed, incorrectly, that Houdini died as he did in the 1953 “Houdini” film starring Tony Curtis: failing to escape from a locked tank during his Water Torture Cell act.

Some have suggested that the magician was assassinated by Spiritualists, given his crusade to debunk their belief in communicating with the dead. Others have postulated that perhaps those Spiritualists were in league with Whitehead.

Many consider it more likely that the student’s punches simply brought attention to an existing case of advanced appendicitis.

Now Larrian Gillespie, a 77-year-old retired urologic surgeon, has deployed the skills of a forensic medical investigator to challenge the conventional wisdom and clear Whitehead’s name.

An appreciation for the social basis of identity can help us understand the data we see today. Variability in sexual identity is rooted in the social nature of all identities. To “identify” as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, or even heterosexual is to assert membership in a social category and adopt a group label. Even if the qualities or traits defining a category (such as the experience of same-sex sexual desire) are perceived to be rooted in the individual, society interprets those qualities and experiences and gives them meaning. All our labels around sexual identity, desire, and behavior are of very recent vintage. Even “heterosexuality” in our current usage is less than a century old.

Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that as social meanings change, identities, experiences, and behaviors change. The quadrupling of college-age nonbinary and related “genderfluid” identities since 2015 and their plateauing since 2022 fit the pattern of a wave of social contagion. The boom (and possible bust) of non-heterosexual identities is likely rooted in similar social processes. Such an interpretation becomes more plausible with a closer look at the data.

The tremendous growth in non-heterosexual identities since the early 2010s has three signature characteristics. First, non-heterosexuality is strongly female. In 2025, among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old Americans, nearly 30 percent of women claimed a lesbian or bisexual identity, while only 11 percent of men identified as gay or bisexual. The same pattern exists among high schoolers; in 2025, about 22 percent of girls but just 7 percent of boys identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

Second, bisexuality is the mechanical cause of the non-heterosexuality boom. In 2021, at the peak of female high-school-age LGB identification, an incredible 26 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as bisexual while only 4 percent identified as lesbian. Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old women today, four times more identify as bisexual than as lesbian. Among the youngest girls, the 2025 crash in LGB identity has been a crash in bisexual identity; among ninth-graders, bisexual identification fell from 22 percent in 2023 to 13 percent in 2025.

Third, non-heterosexuality skews elite. Research by University of Buckingham political scientist Eric Kaufmann has found that the more elite the educational institution, the higher the levels of LGBTQ identification. In 2022, heterosexual identification at Phillips Academy, one of the most prestigious boarding prep schools in America, was a mere 63 percent. The figure was the same among the eight Ivy League universities in 2024. At leading research universities measured in the annual Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) campus survey, the recent low was 68 percent, while across a more representative swath of American higher education, as measured in the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey, the low was 77 percent. In short: the more elite, the less heterosexual.

As woke values and practices are strongest in elite and female social loci, we shouldn’t be surprised to see non-heterosexual identities exhibiting the same pattern.

It is natural to want to identify as what your social circle valorizes, but it’s stolen valor.

What we found was striking: not a single country, going all the way back to 1789, has sustained a high level of political freedom under socialism. In fact, only one country — Belarus in 1991 — maintained it for a single year. These results corroborate similar empirical tests by Robert Lawson and J.R. Clark on Milton Friedman’s variant of the hypothesis, specifically the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom, and recent work on the deep relationship between democracy and capitalism by Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok.

But how relevant are the historical disasters of state socialism to modern debates of socialism? As Kristian Niemietz exhaustively demonstrates in his book Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies, many experiments with socialism begin with democratic ideals (Bolsheviks derives from the Russian word for ‘majority,’ after all) and promises of popular liberation. The working poor are initially praised by socialist academics and public intellectuals, only to be abandoned when their political utility and economic liberty decline together. One of the most recent examples was Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez promised a new form of socialism that would learn from history and would be “built on cooperation.” Bernie Sanders offered support of this project as late as 2011, and Joseph Stiglitz praised Chavez’s efforts as “very impressive.” At the very least, socialists’s repeated failure to distinguish “good” from “bad” socialism at its origin should give us reason to be cautious. Even more so when combined with the failed record of any socialist experiment — past or modern — to maintain individual and political liberty.

Socialists, both historic and modern, tend to define socialism not by the means but by the ends. But holding up utopian ends can lend itself to justifying a broad array of even despicable means. Writing about the 1917 Russian Revolution, Dan Edelstein notes, “The choice of dictatorship was rather a temporal shortcut, encouraged by the belief in a perfected future. By opening up the future as a space to be colonized by a just society, the modern doctrinaires of progress encouraged their followers to value the world to come so highly that they were willing to accept the temporary suspension of democratic beliefs.”

Rationalists convince themselves that Utopia is just a matter of superior planning.

After controlling for factors like age, education, and income, the team found that the two more active groups tended to perform better in cognitive tests than the least active group. Each additional 1,000 steps per day (relative to a person’s average steps) led to incremental improvements in sustained attention, cognitive control, and delay discounting (emotion recognition showed no association with activity).