Generation Z has shocked their elders. The campus protests that have swept the country reflect deep-seated anti-Israel sentiment — and worse. 

In December, a Harvard/Harris poll found that 67% of 18-24-year-olds agreed “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” By contrast, 27% of all adults agreed. 

This has manifested in young people chanting “Intifada revolution” and “From the River to the Sea,” even if they can’t identify the river or sea. 

This disturbing trend of anti-Jewish attitudes, sometimes but not always masked as anti-Zionism, makes it clear that campus indoctrination isn’t the whole story. Rabbi Daniel Levitt, who spent 15 years as a campus Hillel professional, posted, “They’re radicalized before they get to campus.”

A litigator and strategic consultant whose national practice specializes in representing private school parents argued that campus activists “show up having already tested the waters with their K-12 administrators.” These students “know they can make false statements, be threatening, aggressive, and vocally vicious all without penalty, so long as they are taking a stand that fits within the administration’s progressive narrative around race and oppression.” And antisemitic campus protests certainly do.

In the three months following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Anti-Defamation League tallied 256 reported antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools nationwide. The Washington Examiner spoke to more than 40 people about their own recent experiences in public and independent schools. From a parent who resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America over its response to Oct. 7 to Donald Trump supporters, they spoke of progressive ideology that often ignored antisemitism or even fanned the flames.

Adherents of this ideology prefer it remain unnamed, but it is variously called diversity, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory, critical social justice, anti-racism, and wokeness. It dominates schools and will shape the country’s future.

Consider one high-profile example. Montgomery County Public Schools has been highly ranked and serves a sizable Jewish population relative to the national average. While Jews are approximately 2% of all Americans, “Montgomery County is about 10% Jewish,” according to Meredith Weisel, regional director of ADL Washington, D.C. MCPS is now also the subject of a federal Title VI investigation based on allegations of antisemitism.

The school system has repeatedly made headlines for reported antisemitism. Still, it’s difficult to track the frequency of such incidents. 

Andrew Winter, an elementary school principal and the founder of the Montgomery County Jewish Educators Alliance, said, “MCPS tracks reported incidents of hate bias.” Winter does “not believe” the findings are published. However, “I know this year from the start of the school year until Oct. 7 — that weekend — the number was 19 incidents. Since Oct. 7, there’s been over 60 more incidents that have been reported,” Winter shared in mid-January.

Moderately MOCO, a local news outlet, analyzed “hate and bias incidents” for July 2022 to October 2023. Eighty-one incidents, or 61% of reports from all schools, targeted Jews.

When MCPS put four educators on leave for antisemitic social media posts and a “River to the Sea” email signature last fall, Jewish parents hoped the school system would stand strong against antisemitism. However, three of those four teachers have already been reinstated at different schools.

Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said her organization filed a Maryland Public Information Act request last October, seeking “three weeks of emails from the Board of Education [and superintendent]” mentioning Israel, Hamas, and related terms. In a response letter Neily shared, MCPS said fulfilling that request would cost $8,492.08, a price seemingly intended “to dissuade people from asking.” By February’s end, Neily said, MCPS had released only external documents.

Parents have encountered other barriers. Nicole Kashtan, the mother of two MCPS students and a member of the Montgomery County Jewish Parents Coalition, recalled meeting with an MCPS administrator about the district’s anti-racist audit: “We said to him a number of times we’re concerned about this potentially promoting progressive social justice antisemitism. He really rebuffed that. … [He] refused to include antisemitism as part of the audit and refused to push MCPS to do a separate, parallel audit specifically on antisemitism. That was problematic, because even in 2021 and into 2022, antisemitism was already high among young people.” Antisemitism certainly feels widespread to parents. A middle and elementary school parent said, “The incidents have increased tremendously since Oct. 7. They were already on the rise, but after Oct. 7 every single Jewish kid I know had something.”

Even early grades aren’t immune. Marci Serfaty, a teacher at Bayard Rustin Elementary School, described teaching kindergarteners a Hanukkah lesson last December and taking questions at the end: “One child raised his hand and said, ‘My father said that Jewish people are the bad guys, and they’re killing everybody.’ Then a second child said, ‘the Jews are going to hell.’ My school administrators took it very seriously. They contacted the families to meet with them about the incident and included the school counselor. … I was assured that this type of behavior would not be tolerated.”

Margery Smelkinson, an MCPS parent who co-leads the Maryland Jewish Alliance, a Facebook group for parents concerned about antisemitism, said MCPS administrators “rarely talk about Jews, do not appear to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month, or even discuss antisemitism.” Smelkinson added, “Even before Oct. 7, there were lots of swastikas and derogatory comments. If there were email communications from administrators to the community about it, they would say, ‘We don’t support hate speech,’ but in the end, no one was ever punished.” Beyond that, “there’s a lot of online bullying, but some schools claim they are at a loss for what to do with that.”

The allegations aren’t just online behavior. Melissa Stein, a parent and former teacher in the system as well as board member of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, a parent stakeholder group that works directly with MCPS’s board and leadership, described a January middle school incident featuring such taunts as “of course a Jew is telling me how it is” and telling a non-Israeli Jewish boy “to ‘go back to Israel.’” The incident continued until there were “three mentions of Hitler.” Only then, “the teacher intervened.”

“I was an MCPS elementary teacher until January a year ago,” Stein recalled. “During our professional week, a day in August 2022, every teacher spent half or two-thirds of a day doing anti-racist training, because the county invested in an anti-racist audit. They taught everything you do is either racist or anti-racist. We were taught by MCPS as teachers to accept that as fact.” There was no antisemitism training.

One parent told the Washington Examiner about their children being asked by a cafeteria worker if they “liked Palestine” when receiving kosher meals. Another described a Nazi salute directed at her son during the national anthem. 

High school supercharges the hostility. Rachel Barold was a freshman in December 2022 when her high school was graffitied with “Jews not welcome.” In response, she organized a 600-student walkout. The Washington Post then reported that two debate team members “allegedly joked about using challah to lure Jewish people to the secluded Andaman Islands and burning them at the stake.” Barold was the second name listed, she said. 

Barold gave her principal high marks for addressing antisemitism. Unfortunately, there’s been “a lot of antisemitism” there since Oct. 7. “It’s almost cool to hate Jews, to be anti-Israel. It’s very hip. A lot of students take it that if you want to be a Democrat, you can’t support Israel. They get that from social media [and] various politicians.” And since the curriculum isn’t focused on teaching about Jews, Israel, or antisemitism, misinformation frequently remains uncontested. 

“Most kids are on TikTok 1-4 hours a day,” Barold said. It’s important that students “get facts before they hear something wrong on the internet.” Indeed, a recent study found “spending at least 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances a respondent holds antisemitic or anti-Israel views by 17% (compared with 6% for Instagram and 2% for X).”

County school officials did not respond to a request for comment.

But it’s a trend seen all over the country. “We had a speaker compare Jews to Nazis in the ninth grade,” said Dr. Logan Levkoff, an independent school parent in New York who’s had two very different school experiences. “My son was called an ethnic cleanser by a student. He had one-sided speakers — plural — blaming only Jews in Israel for what’s happened between Israel and the Palestinians. They had two speakers from J Street, who were supposed to be thoughtful but focused only on one side. When my son said, ‘Hey, there seems to be part of the story missing,’ the conversation was shut down. He had teachers who told students that Soviet anti-Zionism was a legitimate political movement and had nothing to do with antisemitism.”

A common thread is an ideology that divides the world into two distinct groups: oppressors and the oppressed. “The first thing is the oppressor versus oppressed binary that all of these other things are built upon,” said Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement with the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. “What’s in that framework is the belief in an anti-capitalist idea that is a tentacle of white supremacy. It feeds the old and long-lasting trope against Jews as the ultimate bad actor capitalists, which comes from neo-Marxism … if we’re in a school critiquing white supremacy that believes that the ‘ultimate white’ is Jews, and Israel gets that overlaid, Israel is the ultimate ‘white supremacist’ state.”  

Paul Rossi is a ninth grade math teacher in the Bronx, former teacher at Manhattan’s Grace Church School, and leader of Terra Firma Teaching Alliance, a networking and support group for traditional teachers. “Everything is relational,” he said. “Any antisemitism from the Right, [the school] will say, ‘This is wrong. It’s terrible. We need to fight this.’ But when it’s intersectionally inconvenient like Oct. 7, or self-defense on the part of Israel, the Jewish identity falls in the wrong bucket. You’re on the side of colonialism and Western exploitation. It’s a deeply uncomfortable thing.”

That discomfort can be widely felt, as this worldview “creates division where there doesn’t need to be any. When you start putting the focus on the differences, children don’t learn to see the commonalities,” said Kate Hudson, founder of Education Veritas, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about goings-on in public and nonpublic education from kindergarten through college.

This ideology brooks no dissent. “It’s an orthodoxy. This is why it looks, feels, and smells like a cult. You can’t question,” Shufutinsky said.

Indoctrination also starts early. “This starts in pre-K. As soon as they get into school, they are slowly cajoled into this way of thinking,” Rossi said. “Jewish students are lumped into white people. That trumps anything, any type of ethnicity or religion they have, so inclusion goes out the window on those kinds of things. … What matters is your proximity to whiteness. Whiteness is the big evil.” This is a central article of faith.

David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and the author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, explained, “Only people with lived experience of oppression are permitted to, and have the standing to, define oppression for the rest of society.” This typically excludes Jews. “Historic discrimination against Jews is whitewashed or minimized or otherwise disregarded in favor of modern marginalized groups,” civil injury lawyer David Pivtorak said. 

“If you want to believe oppressed people can never succeed, you have to explain the Jews. … The whole narrative falls apart with the Jews. They’re ‘white supremacists,’ or benefit from ‘white supremacy culture,’ so they become a scapegoat because they undermine the core narrative of wokeism,” observed Andrew Gutmann, the father who wrote the viral Brearley letter as a New York City independent school parent, has since dug into these ideas, and is now running for Congress in Florida. “The progressive ideology that has infused K-12 education — you can’t separate that from the antisemitism,” but antisemitism is “not the driving force.”

Shufutinsky offered another view: “I don’t want to minimize that here in the United States the overall target is the West. But since Oct. 7, it feels like [Jews] are the target. That’s why we’re now seeing protesters in the streets of New York chanting, ‘There is only one solution, communist revolution. Intifada, intifada.’” 

“DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field,” Dara Horn wrote in the Atlantic. “But antisemitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.” 

Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, an international nonpartisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism, said StandWithUs has noted an increase in these views: “We are addressing numerous instances of biased or one-sided materials used in classrooms across the country about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and current events. Our student leaders are being bullied online and in person for having a connection to Israel. There are also instances of physical threats and violence against Jewish students.” For American Jews, “normal” is being redefined.

Parents report that DEI has flooded independent schools. Gutmann observed, “This ideology has been entrenched in the K-12 pedagogical ecosystem, in the teachers’ education, [and] in the professional development teachers have been doing for a very long time.” 

Lessons can apply to parents, too. Recalling his experience three school years ago, Gutmann said, “We had to do mandatory anti-racist training. [Brearley] made us do it, so we saw it firsthand. They tried to force us to sign a pledge that not only would we support anti-racism initiatives at school, but also in our home. We refused.” 

A school spokesperson emailed, “Each year at Brearley, we require one parent from each family to attend curriculum night, parent/teacher conferences, and a learning session designed to engage them as members of our diverse community. This year’s choices for that session have included talks on antisemitism, Islamophobia as well as new parents getting to know one another. We do not ask parents to sign a pledge.”

Accreditation is another vector. Gutmann noted, “Technically the regional accreditors accredit schools, but NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools] accredits the regional accreditors, so they can mandate schools have to do DEI.” 

DEI also informs NAIS’s national conferences. Numerous interviewees expressed concerns about the annual Student Diversity Leadership Conference. The last SDLC brought approximately 2,000 independent school students to St. Louis in December.

“The NAIS is pushing activism with these students,” Hudson said. “That’s part of the indoctrination they get at these conferences. These schools pay exorbitant fees for students and teachers to attend. … According to some who have attended, they have to sign an NDA when they go. They aren’t allowed to relay information from it. It’s oddly secretive.”

At the last conference, a student delivered extemporaneous remarks about the “genocide” in Gaza. He was applauded enthusiastically by the audience, but one Jewish mother described her daughter’s traumatized reaction to being one of 20-30 Jewish students in a large crowd cheering antisemitism. Other adults reported similar anxiety and a desire to leave early from other Jewish attendees they knew.

An NAIS spokesperson described the SDLC as a conference that “helps students develop cross-cultural communication skills and learn the foundations of allyship and networking. … The conference aims to help students navigate complex and often challenging conversations respectfully. Students are invited to share their perspectives in various settings during the conference. The remarks in question came from a student commenter. Some students were deeply offended by the comments. These students reached out to SDLC faculty members, who worked to support them and to facilitate discussions. As an organization, NAIS condemns antisemitism in all forms, and our work — at SDLC and more broadly — strives to embrace diversity and champion inclusivity. These values continue to guide everything we do.”

For an era whose byword is “inclusivity,” this school year’s seen a lot of exclusion, from college campuses to K-12 schools. It doesn’t help that so many educational leaders not only seem unclear about what antisemitism is, but also seem disinterested in leading on it.

Some interviewees would be content if their schools’ DEI staff started including Jewish children and content. However, save for the rare exception, DEI staff hasn’t reciprocated that interest.

DEI creates problems for both the included and excluded. Dr. Staci Weiner, clinical psychologist and owner of Apple Psychological, a group private practice in New York and Florida, observed, “If you’re saying you’re born ‘oppressed,’ then you might believe you have no chance to be successful. In other words, ‘You might as well give up now, because you were born into this life and your actions cannot help you define who you are as a person.’” Meanwhile, “if you’re ‘the oppressor,’ and you’re convinced of that, you might feel you have to apologize or feel ashamed for something you haven’t done. We are creating roles, oppressed [and] oppressor, and pigeonholing people before kids are even figuring out who they are or want to be.”

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“That’s psychologically harmful too,” Weiner said. “I worry about kids feeling disempowered. The narrative that we tell ourselves is who we inherently become. Our self-talk is extremely important in shaping the decisions we make and the path we take toward the future.”

The harm to Jewish students has been very visible this school year, but it will ripple throughout a whole generation. Without a change, the American future will not only be balkanized but could look like the explosive anti-Western, antisemitic fall of 2023. What are we, as a country, going to do about it?

Melissa Langsam Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) is an independent writer in metropolitan Washington.

“On the projected depletion date, 83% of benefits will be payable if Congress does not act sooner to prevent that shortfall,” reported CNBC, which again attributed the “slightly improved outlook” to a supposedly “strong economy.”

There’s just one problem: None of this is true.

Contrary to the intentional conflations by the media, the federal retirement portion of Social Security is still projected to go broke in 2033, as the trustees projected in last year’s report. Upon reaching insolvency in nine years, Social Security will only be able to pay out 79% of scheduled benefits, equivalent to the 21% across-the-board benefit cut fiscal hawks have forewarned for years now.

But the media and President Joe Biden‘s administration want to raid the Disability Insurance Trust Fund to stave off the impending bankruptcy of Social Security’s retirement program by another two years, something that is currently illegal.

Although it is called the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance program, Social Security’s retirement fund is not actually an insurance program but rather a generational wealth transfer. Furthermore, this wealth transfer is wildly regressive. Whereas various measures of the poverty rate for retirees are at or below 10%, with one Social Security study estimating it as low as 7%, the country’s overall poverty rate is about 12%. Because baby boomers stopped having children and started racking up multitrillion-dollar deficits on Uncle Sam’s charge card, the ratio of workers paying into Social Security to the program’s beneficiaries has plummeted from four in 1965 to three in 2009 and now 2.7 in 2024. Since 2021, Social Security has paid out more than it has received in payroll taxes, as the trustees project it will continue to do indefinitely.

Already, Social Security OASI steals from the comparatively poor to pay for the rich. Now the trustees have found that to stave off its own bankruptcy, OASI will steal from the abjectly poor and disabled, the DI Trust Fund, to pay to pad the coffers of the wealthiest generation in human history.

Unlike the OASI program, the DI Trust Fund is both an actual insurance program — a distribution of the risk that any of us could fall severely and debilitatingly disabled, as stringently defined by federal law — and a progressive program. Whereas Social Security retirement funds transfer money from disproportionately poorer populations to the wealthiest, the DI Trust Fund transfers payroll taxes to a more impoverished population. A 2012 study by the SSA found that compared to those 7% of retired workers who live in poverty, nearly a quarter of disabled workers do.

Under the law, the DI Trust Fund is entirely separate from the Ponzi scheme that is the retirement program, and unlike the OASI Trust Fund, the trustees are confident in the growing solvency of the DI Trust Fund throughout this century. It is, in fact, the singular portion of Social Security that is operating as social insurance should: a financially sound investment that distributes the risk of disabilities to help the unfortunate few who become disabled and cannot help themselves or their families. Unlike the rest of our entitlement schemes, it is never projected to go bankrupt. For those 9 million disabled people and their dependents who would otherwise be on the streets, the solvency of the DI Trust Fund is a success story.

And that is exactly why the trustees, who are all political appointees of Biden, want to raid it. The OASI program can remain solvent for two extra years by bankrupting an otherwise sustainable and successful program.

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“Social Security’s combined trust funds are projected to cover full payment of scheduled benefits on a timely basis until the trust fund reserves become depleted in 2035,” the trustees bury on Page 26 of their report. “Full payment of benefits until depletion of the hypothetical combined reserves in 2035 implicitly assumes that the law will have been changed to permit the transfer of funds between OASI and DI as needed.”

While raising the retirement age would not salvage Social Security entirely, average American life expectancy has risen 23% in the near century since the retirement age’s establishment. Raising the retirement age or slashing benefits for healthy adults with multiple decades left to work may seem politically dicey, but consider the Biden administration’s alternative: destroy a fiscally sound program for the nation’s least privileged to extend the boomers’ free ride for another two years.

Well, it’s a difficult question for California.

Two assembly Democrats have introduced bills that would allow California to fund shelters that require sobriety, which is against state law. California’s current homelessness regime is considered a “housing first” plan, which means homeless people get housing with no strings attached, but only if they want it, and with no further incentive to get them into housing or treatment programs if they refuse.

Is it really a surprise that California’s homelessness crisis, already easily the worst in the nation, has only grown worse year by year?

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Now, it seems that even some Democratic legislators in the Golden State recognize that making a dent in the homelessness crisis by any means necessary is much better than its current pie-in-the-sky attitude. It isn’t quite the realization that sobriety-focused housing would be better for dealing with rampant fentanyl overdose deaths, but hey, you can’t lead California to water and make it manage it in a responsible way. It is a miracle that California is even considering breaking the grip of ideological homeless “advocacy” groups. Consider it a small step in the right direction.

On the bright side, it is hard to see California’s homelessness policy getting worse. Between the billions spent for no progress and the various scam projects the state has fallen for, the status quo may just be the lowest the state could go. The fact that California is having this debate at all is a step in the right direction. Now, let’s see if it can finally make a good decision.

If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a bigger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews p-hacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s Alpha-Evelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind. 

Given this context, it is no surprise to find Apple’s latest taking for granted its own narrative plausibility. Kidnapped into an alternate reality, the show’s protagonist barely asks questions, so complete is his faith in physics to achieve the impossible. Fifteen years ago, the same program might have saved its quantum gobbledygook for a late-episode “reveal,” stunning viewers with a high-theory exposition dump. The Dark Matter of today, by contrast, throws us into the deep end halfway through its pilot. With the multiverse on every tongue, there is simply no need to disguise the engine driving the show’s brazenly ridiculous plot.

Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a Chicago-area community college. Married to artist Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), Jason enjoys a comfortable life and has no regrets about a long-ago decision to prioritize family over the lab. Things change when, one rainy evening, a masked man abducts our hero and injects him with a mysterious syringe. Upon waking, Jason finds himself known to all as a famous scientist and entrepreneur. Even Daniela has changed, recalling him as a one-time boyfriend but decidedly not as a husband. 

If the plot I’ve summarized thus far owes much to The Twilight Zone, the similarity is often to the good. Like “The Parallel,” a fourth-season episode anticipating today’s alternate-universes obsession, Dark Matter captures well the existential terror of being the only sane man in the world. Helping matters greatly is the performance of Edgerton, who brings to his protagonist role a bruised vulnerability reminiscent of Steve Forrest’s in 1963. Who cares if the Australian roughneck is as believable a physicist as Leonardo DiCaprio would be a priest? The actor nails Jason’s panicked frustration. 

To whom does one turn when one’s sense of reality matches no one else’s? The answer, for a while, is Connelly’s Daniela, who possesses, in both universes, all of the actress’s customary warmth. Later, a psychiatrist named Amanda (Alice Braga) plays an important role as our hero explores the technology responsible for his crisis. Through it all, Jason’s goal is simple: to get back to “real” life and vanquish the kidnapper who has stolen his very existence. To do so, he will have to enter “the Box,” a room-sized, steampunkish cube that holds a gateway to every possible world. 

It is no spoiler to reveal that the villain being chased is Jason himself. The series shows us as much half an hour into the pilot. Brash and swaggering, this doppelganger is the very man our protagonist has been mistaken for. What he wants is a taste of married life with Daniela, an outcome he foreclosed in his own reality by choosing careerism and pecuniary success. 

Is it a sign of bad morals that I found myself cheering for the false Jason? He is certainly the more interesting figure, dressing down “his” bored students one moment and seducing Daniela the next. In a plot twist that delivers much-needed emotional complexity, Connelly’s character finds herself at least temporarily impressed by her husband’s alteration. Like Beauty preferring the Beast, she wants the dangerous man, not her familiar milquetoast. Never mind that fake Jason knows nothing about their life together and can’t get through a dinner party without a who’s-who cheat sheet. 

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For the most part, Dark Matter balances its dueling plotlines well, shifting between Jasons like a magician flipping a coin. Less compelling are the graspers and hangers-on who dog the real Jason in his adopted realm: Dayo Okeniyi as a fanatical corporate stooge and Jimmi Simpson as our protagonist’s apprehensive frenemy. I suppose these supporting players are necessary if the show is to fill nine hours. Then again, the program feels bloated even at its best. If ever there were a series that could have lopped off four episodes, this is it. 

Still, one is tempted, coming to the end of each installment, to let the next one start up. Dark Matter is handsomely produced, reasonably intriguing, and the beneficiary of two solid leads. At least in this iteration of our universe, there are far worse shows. 

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.

“Here’s the thing: Small acts of kindess that are mostly domestic labor just add up to work at the end of the day,” a TikTok momfluencer named Paige Connell explained in a recent video.

“I don’t do his laundry. He can do that himself. I do my laundry, and we do the kids’ laundry, but he does his own,” she says in a video titled, “A list of things I don’t do for my husband.” That was the only appearance of the word “we” in the video, which included over 30 instances of the word “I.”

After explaining she doesn’t pack him lunch or cook the family dinner, she comments, “Would it be kind of me to do that? For sure. Is it my job? Absolutely not.”

And that’s where the worldview shines through: A marriage is just like any other contractual relationship. Only a fool would do any more than he or she is required.

“That’s domestic labor,” she says of small favors such as moving her husband’s wash to the dryer. “Those are not acts of kindness. … It is not my job as a wife. It is not in my job description.”

This isn’t merely the impatient ranting of a stressed-out mother of young children. It’s the cogent articulation of an entire anthropology — one that holds individual autonomy as the highest good, and one ought only do what one has explicitly agreed to do.

Personal finance celebrity Suze Orman, in the same spirit, tells couples to separate their finances and keep a strict ledger. “Having joint bank accounts can lead to power imbalances and a loss of autonomy. … You all should be autonomous human beings. You’ve come into this relationship as an autonomous human being.”

Marriage is an odd fit for this worldview. Marriage involves laying down one’s life for each other, and that results in two people becoming intertwined. But that intertwining undermines autonomy.

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One New York Times op-ed in praise of divorce instructed all married couples to adopt a 50/50 custody agreement, which will lead to “a lot of very tidy and businesslike communication.”

Isn’t that what every young man and woman dreams of? One day, I want to have a tidy and businesslike relationship — with no uncompensated domestic labor.

Fico himself is a creature of the modern age, a former communist apparatchik who rose to power by railing against economic liberalism and who, more recently, took to engaging in Trumpian culture wars. The murder attempt is a product of those culture wars, which see every political difference catastrophized.

When the Slovak Republic was born on Jan. 1, 1993, political assassinations were thought to be a thing of the past. The partition of Czechoslovakia had been amicable, and Slovakia, historically the poorer partner, began a rapid rise toward Western European living standards.

That is what countries did back then. They moved, however fitfully and patchily, toward the kind of society that people in North America and Western Europe took for granted. On every measure, the world in the 1990s became more peaceful, more democratic, and more law-based. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

What changed? Why, after seven decades of steady advance, did liberal democracy begin to retreat after 2012? Why did a country like Slovakia, a textbook exemplar of the benefits of globalization and democratization, elect a Putinite with thinly veiled authoritarian tendencies?

And why are other countries doing the same? Even in the United States, taboos against threatening the division of powers and refusing to acknowledge democratic election results have weakened perilously.

There are three possible explanations for what has gone wrong. First, the global financial crisis delegitimized the market system. Low- and median-income families were hit by taxes in order to bail out wealthy bankers and bondholders. For the first and only time in history, an essentially Marxist critique of the capitalist system seemed vindicated. The rich really did use state power to hang on to their wealth. Voters have not forgotten.

Second, there has been an unprecedented increase in global migration, a völkerwanderung enabled by advances in technology. The spread of smartphones allows people to transfer information and credit, so making feasible journeys that their grandparents could not have contemplated.

Rapid demographic change is unsettling. We are a territorial species and, when people move without permission into what we regard as our space, we react. Slovakia is no exception. Excluding Ukrainian refugees, the country saw a nine-fold increase in illegal immigration last year. “God alone knows how many of them are terrorists or how many have infectious diseases,” declared Fico during the Trump-flavored election campaign that saw him returned to office.

Smartphones bring us to the third explanation. Put simply, screens have addled our minds, shortened our attention spans, placed us in political silos, and made us grumpier. Jonathan Haidt has written a compelling book called The Anxious Generation, which shows how smartphones have left young people more frightened, more credulous, more unhappy, and more stupid. Starting in 2012, in every developed country, the mental health of young people deteriorated, self-harm and suicide rates increased, and test scores fell. No other explanation fits the timeline.

Haidt’s interest is in children under the age of 16, whose minds are more plastic and therefore more vulnerable. But why assume that adults are immune? We can all see the way screen addiction has made people less interested in nuance, readier to reason backward from their preferred conclusions, and more prone to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe the demented and largely fact-free arguments over the 2020 election would have taken off in an earlier age.

“Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. After he wrote those words, people became steadily better informed, as literacy spread, the price of printing fell and, in time, the internet arrived.

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But might we have reached saturation point? More words are being written and read than ever before, but we are becoming lazier about applying the filters of plausibility, consistency, and common sense. Like our pre-literate and pre-Enlightenment ancestors, we have taken to assuming that those who disagree with us are simply bad people.

When Putin and Xi talk, as they did at their summit this week, of replacing the Western world order, they have cause to be confident. That order, the liberal order that became ascendant from the 18th century and dominant after 1945, depends on a habit of mind that we are losing. In the world that succeeds it, political assassinations will be the least of our worries.

These contradicting policies won’t work economically or help Biden politically, but they do point to the commonsense way forward. Namely, an end to Biden’s impossible EV mandates, an end to Biden’s costly EV subsidies, and an end to Biden’s many bans on domestic rare earth mineral production.

The underlying political and economic pain Biden is trying to mitigate all stems from his radical plan to force drivers out of the internal combustion engine cars they love into inferior, unreliable, and expensive electric vehicles they do not want.

Biden’s scheme has two components. First, using the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency, Biden has issued strict new mandates forcing all domestic automobile manufacturers to ensure that two-thirds of all cars sold by 2032 are electric. If any car company misses that metric, it will be hit with crippling, trillion-dollar fines from the EPA. 

Second, Biden is also using the power of the purse to bribe as many drivers as possible into the electric cars he is forcing Detroit to make. Key among these subsidies is a $7,500 tax credit for each electric vehicle purchased.

Many Democrats who signed on to these electric vehicle subsidies, however, did not want them to benefit foreign companies. So, the law authorizing these tax credits, the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, also required that a certain percentage of the components of each car must be produced domestically to qualify for the credit. 

This is where Biden’s gift to Chinese EV component manufacturers comes in. This month, the Energy Department issued its final regulation governing the tax credit, and it essentially decided not to enforce the Chinese component ban at all until 2027, at which point there would be nothing stopping the Biden administration (if still in power) from not enforcing the ban again. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) called this regulation “outrageous and illegal” and accused Biden of “effectively endorsing Made in China.”

Manchin is right. By not enforcing the Inflation Reduction Act’s ban on tax credits for cars made with foreign components, Biden is effectively subsidizing Chinese companies. But here is the thing: Without those subsidies, domestic car companies will never be able to reach the strict EV mandates set by Biden’s EPA. If the Inflation Reduction Act were enforced as written, none of the existing EVs on the market would qualify. Our domestic EV makers are simply too dependent on Chinese components to meet Biden’s EV mandates. No amount of tariffs on Chinese-built cars is going to fix that problem.

Electric vehicles, whether manufactured in China or the United States, just aren’t good enough for most people to make the switch. They take too long to charge, it is hard to find charging stations, the battery life shrinks in the cold, and it shrinks even further when the vehicles are asked to pull heavy loads.

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People simply don’t want these cars. And they are not buying them at anywhere near the numbers necessary to meet Biden’s mandates. Ford, General Motors, Rivian, and Tesla have all been forced to fire workers as EV production has outstripped demand. It’s time to admit Biden’s EV revolution is a failure.

Instead of raising tariffs on low-quality Chinese EVs Americans don’t want anyway, Biden should repeal his EV mandate, freeing consumers to buy the cars they want, and repeal his EV subsidies, allowing for tax relief for families. And if he wants to make EV manufacturing easier here in the U.S., he must stop his Department of Interior from banning the mining of the rare earth minerals necessary to build them.

At least 15 Republican-led states have sued the Biden administration after the Department of Education released revised Title IX regulations, arguing the move will strip females of single-sex spaces and males of due process rights. Since mid-April, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida are among the states contesting the administration’s revision of the regulations, which prohibit sex discrimination in federally funded schools and higher education programs. 

President Joe Biden is making good on his 2020 campaign promise to transgender voters. The rules will take effect Aug. 1. But this radical revision pits traditional views on gender, sexuality, and due process against the administration’s adoption of the left-wing agenda, which will undoubtedly result in dozens of legal challenges at the local and state level.

Biden sets off string of lawsuits

The Texas lawsuit takes aim at executive decisions and the idea that Title IX was rooted in biological distinctions between sexes that this progressive administration wants to ignore. “Stymied in its attempts to implement this agenda through informal agency guidance, and unable to amend Title IX through the legislative process, the Department has now formally amended the Code of Federal Regulations. This Final Rule tells States and other regulated parties that they must ignore biological sex or face enforcement actions and the loss of federal education funding,” the lawsuit noted.

Together, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho have also sued the Department of Education. It’s a scathing indictment of federal coercion. “[The rule] is a naked attempt to strongarm our schools into molding our children … in the government’s preferred image of how a child should think, act, and speak,” the lawsuit added. “The final rule is an affront to the dignity of families and school administrators everywhere, and it is nowhere near legal.”

Surely the administration knew such regulations would trigger a bevy of lawsuits, and they have. Even in light of the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which Biden used to support his changes, it’s hard to see how he will even benefit politically, as he surely won’t legally. 

“The timing and the sheer number of courts that have been invoked here sort of stack the odds against the Biden administration because there are just so many hoops to jump through,” Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, told the Hill. “You have to basically beat every single one of them to win. And if any one of them vacates the rule, under the general understanding today, that vacates it nationwide.” 

Title IX and equality for women

Passed in 1972, Title IX transformed athletic and educational opportunities for women and girls, finally offering them the boost necessary to begin education or athletics at the same starting place as males. It reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” 

Biden’s new rule adds almost 1,600 words to that basic premise, flipping the biological definitions of gender and sex on its head, changing them to include gender identity, a concept that has only recently taken hold in American culture. 

Intended to protect transgender people, Biden’s gambit may instead upend the natural, equal rights of females to have privacy, safety, and single-sex spaces in schools, college campuses, and locker rooms across the country. There are now few, if any, legal safeguards females have should they find themselves on the other side of this policy, whether it is privacy while using the bathroom or swimming at a meet against females.

“Bloated educational bureaucracies will waste no time in investigating and disciplining students and faculty for politically incorrect speech that now runs afoul of expansive, nebulous, and shape-shifting definitions of sex-based discrimination,” Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, wrote at City Journal.

For an administration that has repeatedly pandered to progressive ideas that emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusivity, it’s ironic, even awful, that it embraced regulations that could set women back decades. 

Biden refuels debate

Although the administration’s rules didn’t mention transgender athletes, Biden originally planned to include a provision that kept schools from enacting bans on students playing outside their biological sex. Explicit language to that effect has been put on hold, but some opponents think the revisions imply it already. At least 23 states bar transgender student-athletes from competing on sports teams inconsistent with their biological sex. 

Athletic associations nationwide had already been struggling to reconcile women’s sports with progressives’ emphasis on the inclusion of transgender athletes. In March, 16 female athletes filed suit against the NCAA arguing its rules violate Title IX’s ban on sex-based discrimination. The NCAA sets the rules for over 1,000 colleges and universities. While the female athletes stand a fighting chance, Biden’s revisions don’t help.

On May 3, a couple of weeks after the rules were unveiled, Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE) announced his state simply won’t comply with the new rules in light of what he believes his constituents want in women’s sports. “The Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX is an affront to the commonsense idea that men do not belong in women’s-only spaces,” Pillen said in a press release. “Protecting our kids’ and women’s athletics is my duty. … The president’s new rules threaten the safety of women and their right to participate in women’s sports. Nebraska will not comply. We must fight against radical gender ideology and vigorously protect the rights of Nebraska women and girls.” 

Alliance Defending Freedom, of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission renown, has sued the Biden administration twice regarding the Title IX changes already, too. While it has long defended the right of females to compete in female-only spaces in the lower courts, Biden’s Title IX revisions add fuel to a flame it’s been fanning for years. On May 6, ADF asked to join an existing lawsuit on behalf of A.C., a high school athlete from West Virginia. 

“The Biden administration’s radical redefinition of sex won’t just rewire our educational system. It means young girls will be forced to undress in front of boys in gym class, girls will share bedrooms with boys on overnight school trips, teachers and students will have to refrain from speaking truthfully about gender identity, and girls will lose their right to fair competition in sports,” ADF legal counsel Rachel Rouleau said in a statement. “Our client A.C. has already suffered the humiliation and indignity of being harassed by a male student in the locker room and on her sports team. No one else should have to go through that. But the administration continues to ignore biological reality, science, and common sense. This court deserves to hear from those most severely impacted by the administration’s attempt to rewrite Title IX.”

It’s hard to see how the Biden administration squares its new reading with the original Title IX or how decimating the future of sports for females helps them or him politically.

Due process effects

During the Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued policies that revamped the way universities handled sex-crime allegations, doing away with “kangaroo courts,” bolstering the rights of the accused, and emphasizing a need for due process. 

“We released a final rule that recognizes we can continue to combat sexual misconduct without abandoning our core values of fairness, presumption of innocence, and due process,” DeVos said at the time in a call with reporters. 

False claims of sexual crimes are rare but not nonexistent, and they can destroy a young person’s life and reputation. One could almost hear a collective sigh of relief among men and women on college campuses nationwide.

Biden’s new rules toss this out with reckless abandon, removing the right to a live hearing, the right to cross-examine the accuser, and the right to representation. Now, one person in the school’s administration can serve as the arbiter of justice, hardly an environment for due process to thrive.

“As bad as the redefinition of ‘sex’ is, what’s arguably even worse is the new rule’s subversion of due process and free speech. The Kafkaesque inquisitions that were the hallmark of Obama-era governance will now return with a vengeance,” Shapiro remarked.

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“If, when Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, he’d been afforded the same due process procedures he just approved for men accused on college campuses, he’d be in prison,” commentator Megyn Kelly posted on X. 

Title IX lifted women and girls to a place of equal footing in terms of education and athletics — and to a place where even their differences are celebrated. Biden would destroy any recognition of these differences. Right now, the only tool conservatives have to combat these executive branch decisions is to challenge them in court. 

Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist for USA Today. She lives in Texas with her four children.

“Hang up the phone,” he said. “Don’t do it. The whole wisdom tooth thing is a scam. They just love getting you all gassed up and then going at you with the pliers. My advice is, toss that paper out and forget all about it.”

“But he’s a dentist,” I said. “A trained medical professional. Don’t you think I should listen to him?”

My unimpressed father shrugged. “Go ahead and have them yank those teeth out of your head if you want,” he said. “But it’s going to be painful and bloody, and you’re going to be miserable for a few weeks at least. My advice is, don’t do it.”

He looked at my skeptical expression and instantly read my thoughts. “And it isn’t about the expense, OK? Unlike your ridiculous highway robbery college tuition, getting your wisdom teeth out is covered by my insurance.”

He told me that when he was 18, a dentist had told him the very same thing. And he ignored it completely. If his wisdom teeth started to hurt, he told himself, then he’d have them extracted. But as long as they were just sitting there in his head, tucked away and keeping quiet, he saw no reason to dig them out. That was, he told me, 30 years ago. So far, so good.

“But go ahead, if it makes you feel better. Just don’t come crying to me when you have to spend two weeks eating Jell-O.”

I stood with the phone in my hand, paralyzed. “Good morning, Dr. Kendall’s office,” came the sound from the receiver. “Hello? Hello?”

I hung up the phone and forgot all about it. I would follow my father’s advice and let sleeping wisdom teeth lie. The year was 1984, and the only thing I regret is that I didn’t follow more of my father’s advice. He had a lot of wisdom along with his wisdom teeth. He knew that people cause a lot of pain for themselves when they try to fix things that aren’t broken.

Three weeks ago, and many years later, I finally had to admit that my upper right wisdom tooth needed to go. It had been on its very best behavior for nearly 40 years but had lately been achy and inflamed. My dentist didn’t even bother to make a case. He simply pointed to the oddly colored blob on my X-ray and said, “It’s only going to get worse.”

So on Tuesday of last week, I had my upper right wisdom tooth, and only my upper right wisdom tooth, removed. The other three remain snugly packed into my jaw, untroubled and peaceful. But still, I felt a little bit like a failure. My father died a few years ago, and I miss him terribly. He was a hero to me, and sitting in the oral surgeon’s chair, I felt ashamed of myself, and my tooth, because I wasn’t able to live up to his example of ignoring medical advice he found inconvenient and unnecessary.

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Though, to be fair, in the ensuing decades, the procedure has become a lot less invasive and much easier to endure. My oral surgeon even offered a special technique to accelerate healing. The nurse took a small blood sample before the procedure, and while the surgeon was extracting the tooth, which took barely 15 minutes, the blood sample was put into a centrifuge that separated out platelets and collagen and combined them both into a sticky gel-like liquid that was applied to the wound before it was stitched up. It’s supposed to make the recovery process much faster.

It was also an extra $1,700 and not covered by insurance, which I didn’t realize until I staggered out of the office with a mouth full of bloody gauze. Maybe it was a side effect of the painkillers, but I’m pretty sure I heard my father, somewhere, chuckling and saying, “Told you it was a scam.” Which in a way made the entire ordeal worth it.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.

One reason is that the majority of you did nothing other than offer disapproval in a poll. All those years of your teachers telling you to “be an upstander, not a bystander,” and you still blew it. You could, as students at the University of California, Los Angeles, did, have fought back. But you didn’t. As the dead, white, cis, colonialist male Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The bad among you have done the rest. 

Some of you will rip up your diplomas onstage today. The rest of you can rip them up later. Your master’s degrees in social work, gender studies, consciousness-raising, cuddle therapy, and English Lit are all worthless, except if you crawl like some kind of dying animal into the academic shrubbery and spend the rest of your life in the subprime educational industry. There, you can become a teacher in the barren field of your expertise and recite the content of your worthless degree to people whose ignorance and sloth remind you of you when you were young. 

Or you could become an enforcer for the diversity, equity, and inclusion mafia. In that scenario, your recent experiments in Jew-baiting will vouch for you in the way that a professor’s reference used to in the days when American universities were serious places. The world used to look to America, especially its rush to the technological and intellectual frontiers, as the future. Now, the world sees you and concludes that America’s time is over. Is this true?  

That is not a rhetorical question but a Socratic one, an attempt to establish what you do and do not know. Some of you — again, a minority — want America to be over. Although you believe you are unique and new, you are the pale shadows of old archetypes. Nearly a century ago, another dead, white, cis, colonialist male, the ex-Burma policeman George Orwell, observed that England was “the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” 

Those of you who have lately taken down the Stars and Stripes and raised the Palestinian flag will recognize Orwell’s feeling that his left-wing contemporaries would “feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.” I blame the adults. Your teachers have failed you, and deliberately. If John “Bluto” Blutarsky were to attend Faber College now, he would emerge much the same four years later. But if you’ve spent most of the last weeks eating Deliveroo in a tent, sniffing out Jews, and making new friends with Islamists, you have both paid attention and learned the wrong lesson. Much of it is lies and silliness, but some of it is, if taken literally, dangerous to yourself and others. 

The professors who taught you have no intention of risking their cozy positions, but they are happy to send you out as “activists.” Again, you are on a well-worn historical track, whether you know it or not. Orwell, writing in the “critical years” of 1941, said that his intellectual contemporaries had for years been “chipping away” at everyone else’s morale and spreading an outlook that was “sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.” 

Your society is not yet in 1941, but these are still critical years. If the United States continues on its present path, it will fall apart internally and fall over internationally. You are supposed to be its future leaders. Instead, you are chipping away, with an outlook that is squashily pacifist when it comes to denying Jews the right to defend themselves from the worst kind of terrorism, violently pro-Islamist when it comes to killing Jews without consequence, and always, always anti-American. 

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Your future is in your hands. So is the future of the rest of us, because we have to live with you. Some of you will become the intellectual equivalent of acid casualties. You will never leave the campus. You will never grow up, only old. Most of you will turn into real adults. The sheer weight of your student loans will compress much of the silliness out of you. But a few of you will keep going after you enter the real world. Again, the familiar path awaits. 

The intelligentsiya of czarist Russia produced anarchist bomb-throwers and Bolshevik tyrants. The ’60s radicals produced the Weathermen. You don’t know it, but your ideology fuses the theatrical tradition of campus leftism, which is now as faded as your grandfather’s denim, with the real thing, Islamism. You have no idea what you are dealing with. Student loans can be forgiven. Terrorism and treason cannot.