This week I attended a webinar on disinformation in Sudan, a topic that does not receive a lot of mainstream attention in the United States. I thought I’d use my newsletter, then, to share what I learned and connect it to broader dynamics playing out in social media, A.I., and information warfare.

First, it bears stressing that the work on disinformation in Sudan is not my own. I was impressed with the activists and scholars who presented it, and part of my goal is to amplify their efforts using my platform. The speakers included:

• Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Access Now;

• Eilaf Mohamed, a research fellow at the African Middle East Leadership Project;

• Hussam Abualfata, a Sudanese political activist; and,

• Amgad Abdelgadir, a London-based journalist with Radio Dabanga.

Please follow them on social media and read their materials.

Sudan is not a subject I have devoted much attention to in my career. It is a hugely complex country (now two countries), the history of which I will only briefly summarize.

Any understanding of Sudan is intermingled with its neighbor to the north, Egypt, with whom it has a long, interconnected past that dates back thousands of years. At the heart has been the Nile River, which served in ancient times as a vital trade route for Egyptian grain going south and Sudanese gold, ivory, and carnelian going north. Also going north were slaves, as the Egyptians captured indigenous tribal members and enslaved them as servants, concubines and soldiers. The specter of Egyptian enslavement still informs Sudanese-Egyptian relations today.

As is the case with much African territory, the country we know as Sudan was battled for and contested throughout the centuries by Egyptians, Romans, Kushites, Byzantines and others. Arguably the most consequential event was the arrival of Islam, which gradually cleaved Sudan into two halves: a northern half that adhered to Islam and a southern half that adhered to a variety of indigenous animist religions. A pattern formed of a northern half trying to impose Islam on the southern half, a dynamic that lasted for approximately 700 years and ultimately, along with other factors, led to a split into two countries: Sudan and South Sudan.

Imperialism also played a role: in the 19th century, the Egyptians returned in coordination with the British and subjugated Sudan into an Anglo-Egyptian colony. The Suez Canal had opened in 1869, and to protect its economic pathway to India and the Far East, the British became heavily in invested the Red Sea, along which Sudan has more than 500 miles of coastland. The British, with help from Egyptian, Indian, and south Sudanese forces, suppressed a violent Islamic jihad movement and established an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium under British rule, which lasted from 1899-1955. As part of their rule, the British abolished slavery, which had continued under Arab Muslims in the north.

The Second World War and the decolonization movements it empowered arrived in Sudan following the war, and by 1956 Sudan had declared independence. The subsequent decades, however, were defined by military rule, a series of coups, ethnic and tribal conflict and continued animosity between north and south. Two decades of civil war ended in 2005, setting up a referendum six years later wherein voters in the south overwhelmingly chose to secede and create South Sudan, which became its own country in 2011. However, independence did not remove long-held tensions. Within a couple of years, South Sudan descended into civil war along ethnic and religious lines vying for political power. Today’s fighting is an extension of failed attempts to create a unity government, disarm militias, find harmony among various ethnicities, and hold elections. The current president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, a Roman Catholic from the Dinka tribe, is a former rebel commander who fought for South Sudanese independence as part of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement. He became South Sudan’s president in 2011; elections have not occurred since.

If this backdrop sounds exceedingly complicated, it is. Sudan is large and incredibly diverse, making it highly complex to unify into one—or two—countries. Prior to secession, Sudan was the largest country in Africa and the tenth largest in the world, at nearly 1 million square miles. It contained more than 400 languages and comprised roughly 600 ethnicities. The north had large Muslim populations where Sharia law existed, there were also Christians (Catholics, Presbyterians, Coptics) and indigenous African religions, which predominated in the south. Southern distrust of the north was long-in-the-making due to the legacies of Islamic/Arab enslavement and the imposition of Sharia law, most recently by the dictatorial al-Bashir regime.

Sudan also has oil, which was discovered in the 1970s and has been a source of revenue and conflict. Even today, Sudan and South Sudan continue to fight over oil revenue and oil pipelines. The region also has abundant natural gas and minerals (including gold and asbestos), which also contribute to fighting as factions vie for access and control. (Some of the violence between Muslim militias and tribal groups have been over the control of gold mines). Finally, Sudan and South Sudan are still contesting who owns the regions near their border, as well as the fates of southerners who lived in the north and northerners who lived in the south.

Within this morass of messy history, warfare has raged on the ground and online, with all sides attempting to suppress, distort and manipulate information in order to advance their objectives. The research presented during the webinar divided the information manipulation into four categories:

• Internet shutdowns

• Attacks on journalists

• Crafting narratives and flooding the zone

• Using A.I. to obfuscate and confuse

Internet shutdowns

Internet shutdowns are unfortunately a common tactic of governments to stifle dissent and opposition. Readers will be familiar with Iran, which cut off Internet access among its people as it violently suppressed protests in recent weeks. When one looks across the globe, one can find evidence of Internet and cell service shutdowns by governments in nearly every corner of the world: Myanmar, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Iraq, El Salvador, Jordan and more. Sometimes restricted access to Web and cell service lasts for a few days; other times it can last for weeks or months. France, for example, blocked access to TikTok in its colony of New Caledonia for several days in 2024, accusing the app of being complicit in organizing violent protests against its rule.

Such government actions—which run counter to the United Nations commitment to freedom of opinion and expression—purposefully restrict access to information during times of crisis as a means of social control. The justification is always framed in language of an “emergency” or “national security,” but the intention is to suppress speech, quell opposition and compel public opinion. In Sudan, the Sudanese Armed Forces cut off Internet access in the Darfur region in 2024. In retaliation, the Rapid Support Forces—a paramilitary force formed from prior militias and comprised largely of Arabic-speakers—seized control of data centers in Sudan’s capital, sabotaging equipment and causing widespread internet outages.

The practical effects have been that it remains extremely difficult for Sudanese civilians to find information they need to navigate the violent civil war. Sudan has an estimated 25 million people who require humanitarian assistance, with an estimated 18 million people facing acute hunger. Lack of Internet access blocks individuals from knowing where to find food, where aid distribution centers are located, how and when to evacuate an area ahead of fighting, or how to access basic goods and services. Into that information void steps the military and the militias, who dictate what information gets delivered.

Attacks on journalists

Another method of dictating what information gets delivered is to attack and intimidate the journalists who report on the conflict. This will be another familiar tactic to readers around the world, as attacks on journalists have become all-too-common by governments seeking to control what information their citizens know. The homepage of the Committee to Protect Journalists identifies 129 journalists and media workers killed in 2025, with 329 imprisoned and 84 individuals missing.

Sudan has witnessed many attacks on journalists. The researchers stated that over 90 percent of Sudan’s local media outlets have stopped functioning. Newsrooms have been shattered and journalists have been threatened. One panelist showed a photograph of a studio from the Article Centre for Training and Media Production in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, which was completely destroyed during military operations. Journalists who remained in Sudan to document the massacre by the Rapid Support Forces in Darfur have reported their colleagues being killed, detained, tortured and threatened. In one instance, a surviving journalist was captured, beaten, stripped of his belongings and forced to walk five days across the desert without food or water in order to reach safety.

The result has been an increased difficulty of Sudanese citizens, and the world at-large, to understand the true extent of the carnage. Images and reporting have trickled out, but much of the information about the conflict remains opaque. One antidote has been the use of short-wave radio; using radio waves that reflect off the ions in the Earth’s atmosphere, Radio Dabanga can transmit short-wave signals in Sudanese Arabic that reach remote areas besieged by conflict, independent of satellites, the printed press and the World Wide Web.

Crafting narratives

When journalists are silenced and the internet is restricted, it creates an information vacuum. Into that vacuum steps those who wish to shape the narrative and dictate what people understand about current events. Such propaganda has the express purpose of swaying public opinion to sympathize with one side over another, and to believe a particular version of events regardless of how biased they may be.

The panelists highlighted several narratives used in the Sudan conflict to sway public opinion. One tactic is to frame the other side as an existential threat. Such a narrative justifies the use of lethal force—including against unarmed civilians, women and children. If the opposing side is an existential threat to the existence and survival of your country, then violence by any means becomes a justified response to eradicate such a threat. Readers will find this concept familiar; variations of it have been used in genocides throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries to justify ethnic cleansing and unspeakable crimes, including during the Holocaust, where European Jews were framed as an existential threat to German society, leading to horrific violence. In Sudan, content on social media is crafted to advance a similar narrative, distributed across social media channels, particularly messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Botim and Viber. (The Sudanese government blocked access to WhatsApp under the pretense of “national security” but many Sudanese have found ways to circumvent the ban.)

Another technique has been to downplay incidents and shift blame to victims. It has been concluded by the United Nations that the RSF Arab paramilitary forces committed a genocidal massacre in the city of El-Fasher, going door to door and murdering non-Arab civilians. The response from the RSF has been to downplay the incident and blame the victims for the crime. Readers may also find such a tactic familiar. It is drawn from a playback of skirting responsibility and blaming victims that stretches from Moscow to Minneapolis.

Using A.I. to obfuscate

The final tactic discussed was the introduction of A.I.-generated content into this already complex ecosystem. While the amount of A.I.-generated content remains relatively low, it has been having an effect. According to a report released by the African Middle East Leadership Project, voice cloning using A.I. has been used to simulate the voice of Sudan’s former president as well as commanders discussing alleged plans to murder civilians. These A.I. forgeries have circulated on platforms such as TikTok and Twitter / X. Supporters of the Sudanese Army also generated a conspiracy using A.I. that the leader of the Rapid Support Forces was dead and his entire life had been fake and A.I.-generated. Polling suggested that even after seeing a video of him alive, nearly half of respondents were not sure it was real.

Content creators have also used A.I. to fabricate images of suffering from Sudan that are not real. The A.I.-generated image depicted at the top of this article received more than 1 million likes on Instagram. Other content creators have taken war footage from other conflicts and claimed it was from Sudan. (This has also been done for Gaza and Ukraine, where images and videos from prior conflicts are edited and re-used claiming to be from current ones). The rationales for such manipulations are usually to boost follower counts and views. When topics are trending online, particularly newsworthy topics with vivid imagery that capture world attention, opportunists will claim to be showing emotional or gut-wrenching scenes in order to draw more attention to their accounts, boost their followers, and gain influence.

The sum effects of these A.I. manipulations remain an open question. The researcher on the webinar suggested that one current effect has been to make information consumers skeptical of all information. In a world where anything can be A.I.-generated, nothing is believable. Another effect, she said, has been to recognize that what we choose to believe relies on our preconceived notions. In other words, we don’t distrust information because it is A.I.; we distrust it because it does not align with our previously held convictions, regardless of whether it is A.I.-generated or not.

What was most striking about the webinar was how the dynamics described were so recognizable. As stated at the outset, devastating as the war in Sudan has been, it has not been a huge area of focus for my own work. Yet, as the researchers presented their evidence, it all felt entirely familiar. Attacks on journalists, cutting off access to Internet or social media platforms, crafting propagandistic narratives, and A.I. generated material that blurs the lines between reality and fiction—these are themes that should be familiar to us all. Regardless of where we live and what world events capture our attention, these dynamics are present. They have become ubiquitous in 21^st century warfare, and they have also become tools that governments and paramilitary forces use to wield power, suppress dissent, and erode basic freedoms. The playbooks are universal, adapted to specific circumstances and local conditions.

What is happening in Sudan carries lessons for all of us—lessons we should hold closely if-and-when these dynamics, inevitably, begin to appear in our own countries.

Have an informed week,

-JS

If you used social media in January, you may have encountered the 2016 trend. The trend asserted that “2026 is the new 2016,” and involved users posting photographs from 10 years ago with a short caption about what was going on in their lives at the time. Personally, I’ve seen people post about prior jobs, prior significant others, or their life prior to having kids. Celebrities and influencers have participated and parody accounts have mocked the trend.

As is often the case with such memes—the word meme in this instance being used broadly to signify an idea or behavior that spreads through social networks, forging a shared cultural experience and carrying with it a broader societal commentary—it’s not clear how this trend began. The website knowyourmeme.com cites as possible origins a post on the sub-Reddit “GenZ” (i.e., Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012); an Instagram post by Boots UK, England’s largest pharmacy; or an article in the student newspaper of Antioch Community High School in Antioch, Illinois. Each of these appeared in October 2025 claiming that 2026 would be the “new 2016.” Each was linked to a pop culture or entertainment release:

• The GenZ sub-Redditor cited the 2026 releases of the video games Grand Theft Auto and Battlefield, both of which also had releases in 2016;

• The Boots UK campaign was a promotion for Kylie Jenner’s upcoming cosmetics line, apparently a 10-year re-launch of her 2016 cosmetic line;

• The Antioch High School newspaper cited the bookending of Netflix’s Stranger Things (debuted in 2016, ending in 2026) and Justin Bieber releasing an album (he released one in 2016 and has one planned for 2026) as further proof that “echoes of that era are resurfacing.”

(As an aside, apparently the single year of 2016 is now considered an “era” in some corners of the Internet. We have the Mesozoic Era, followed by the Paleozoic Era, and, finally, the 2016 Era.)

Snark aside, the proliferation of this trend—estimates are that in January the hashtag #2016 spiked on TikTok by more than 450%; searches on Snapchat for “2016” lenses were up 613%, and posts featuring 2016 fashion and trends achieved 3x higher engagement on Instagram—evinces how nostalgia continues to be a reliable genre of viral social media content. As I wrote in the introduction to History, Disrupted, even as social media evolves and new platforms come and go, the forms of e-history that achieve the highest visibility online stay remarkably consistent year-after-year. “Nostalgia on demand,” as I’ve termed it, is one of them, an online phenomenon that dates at least to the late 2000s, if not earlier. (Nostalgia as a human emotion, of course, dates back far longer. Thomas Dodman, who was a fellow at the Library of Congress when I worked there, wrote an excellent book on the history of nostalgia.)

On-demand nostalgia packages moments from the past into micro-doses of sentiment in order to gain visibility in our feeds. The primary objective of any e-history is visibility, and e-history packaged as on-demand nostalgia has proven over 20 years to be a highly effective conceit for capturing attention, stopping people from scrolling, evoking an emotion and inducing a click, like, share or comment. It does this by offering the user an instantly-gratifying and satisfying jolt of sentiment that provides a “good-enough” understanding of a past event or phenomenon. In other words, on-demand nostalgia is not interested in serious history, i.e., a critical examination of past events that relies on multiple strands of evidence to form a well-researched conclusion. Instead, it is selling us “historical emotions”—feelings about the past—regardless of whether those feelings are grounded in any reality. As such, because it invokes a passing feeling as opposed to a critical thought, such content continues to be effective, powerful, shareable, and—in some cases—quite profitable.

In this particular case, the feelings that the 2016 trend has invoked are almost absurdly removed from the reality of how the year 2016 was experienced. Readers might be old enough to remember that, at the time, The New Yorker pegged 2016 as the “worst year ever,” as did The Guardian and local news outlets in America such as Penn Live (which services the U.S. state of Pennsylvania). Among the reasons cited were the ongoing war in Syria, climate change, Zika virus, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, mass shootings, disinformation on social media, vapid super hero movies and the deaths of Prince and David Bowie. The notion that this confluence of events would rank as the worst year ever was also mocked contemporaneously by various writers who felt it paled in comparison to, say, 1349, when The Black Death killed millions of people across Europe. In other words, that the year 2016 was the worst year ever was, itself, a meme in 2016, appropriately parodied and mocked by the people who lived through it.

Ten years later across the social Web, the year 2016 has taken on a completely new valence. Among influencers participating in the trend, and in puff pieces opining on the trend published by the Today Show and NBC News, the prevailing sentiments have been that 2016 was somehow an “iconic year” when life felt more “carefree.” Two particular talking points recur over-and-over: that 2016 was a time when social media was less algorithmically driven and less business-oriented; and that 2016 was one of the last “normal” years before the Covid-19 pandemic upended life as we knew it.

As it pertains to the first claim, not much could be further from reality. Social media was, beyond a doubt, already a corporate, algorithmically-driven, money-printing enterprise by 2016. Instagram itself, where the current #2016 trend has flourished, already had 400 million users in 2015, with corporations spending over $1 billion on influence marketing by 2017. Facebook generated $27 billion in revenue in 2016, and Twitter, of course, was already valued at more than $1 billion and was the epicenter of global politics and information wars. To say that social media was carefree and innocent ten years ago is akin to saying that fossil fuels were cleaner and better for the planet a decade ago. The only way such a claim could make sense was if it was filtered through the eyes of a person so young s/he could not have known any better. It would be like my grandmother saying that there was no antisemitism in Europe when she was a child, only because she wasn’t old enough to understand that it was all around her.

The second claim is equally curious, a sentiment that 2016 was somehow that last “normal” year before the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything. This mirrors a sentiment I heard from university students when I was director of the Lepage Center from 2017-2020; that their college years had been overshadowed by the Trump presidency and a global pandemic, and as such they were deprived a “normal” college experience. The implication in both lamentations seems to be that starting in 2017 with the first Trump administration and then in 2020 with the pandemic, life had become unmoored from its safe harbor, never to be re-anchored. The year 2016, thus, becomes emblematic of a rupture point in the timeline, the moment from which things diverged and never returned.

Such a sentiment was actually brilliantly predicted in 2016 by a cartoonist mocking such future nostalgia. As the cartoonist illustrated at the time, “I’m sure we’ll look back on 2016 and think to ourselves ‘remember the year before the [insert terrible thing here] happened!’” Sure enough, ten years later, the trend on social media is to look back at 2016 and nostalgize it as the year before social media became too corporate, the year before the news cycle became so crazy, the year before everything became unpredictable, and the year before the world stopped being so carefree. Not to mention it was the year of Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber and Grand Theft Auto.

One thing that was different in 2016 as compared to 2026 was the lack of consumer-facing artificial intelligence applications. In 2016, A.I. was largely confined to private labs and research papers. Ten years later, of course, it has proliferated widely. Data collected from social media has been one of the principal drivers of A.I., so in 2026 it is reasonable to wonder whether this trend is being harvested—or perhaps was even initiated—in order to collect training data for artificial intelligence purposes. In other words, one of the wonders of A.I. is its ability to take a photograph of a human being and either age him/her ten years, or de-age him/her ten years. To do so would require millions of examples of human faces aged over ten-year-periods. Is it so inconceivable that the 2016 / 2026 social media campaign has been a ruse to collect millions of examples of people’s faces ten years apart, in order to train some current or future A.I. application? If so, that would also bear some similarity to 2016; in that year, tens of thousands of people took a personality quiz on Facebook, the data from which, along with their contacts, was harvested and sold to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to tailor psychographic advertising during Brexit and the U.S. Presidential election.

It is precisely because of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, as well as the public discourse around artificial intelligence, that a cultural critic such as myself might have thought that social media users would be more wary of a nostalgic trend in 2026 than they were in 2016. Judging by the statistics, that does not appear to have been the case.

The answer to why such trends continue to gain traction year-after-year points to another truism about social media over two decades: its incentive structures remain largely unchanged even as the features, news cycles, and hype machines come-and-go. The platforms reward visibility first and foremost; the more views you get, the more followers you can accumulate, the more interactions and comments you can stimulate, and the more influence you gain overall within the ecosystem. All social media platforms are selling us the promise of influence through visibility, and they reward content that achieves visibility, including nostalgia. As I detailed in History, Disrupted, this is by design. As early as 2010, Facebook was experimenting with features that would show us sentimental snapshots of our activity from prior years, and by 2012 tech companies were stating that social media provided “an untapped opportunity in the past.” Companies such as Facebook, FourSquare, Memento, Memolane and others all consciously made the past a centerpiece of their digital economies, selling us “historical emotions” as a means to keep us on the platforms for longer. Such is why it is so meta (pun intended) that a nostalgic trend, which incorrectly nostalgizes social media prior to it being commodified, has been trending on the platforms owned by the companies that commodified nostalgia for social media.

By this point, you may be thinking that this has been a lot of ink spilled (typed?) over a fairly benign social media trend that will soon become a passing footnote. So, if you take away anything from this missive, please remember the following three points:

1. The incentives of social media have not changed much in 20 years, despite the headlines, news cycles, new features and trends. Much of how social media works has remained consistent for two decades;

2. The forms of e-history that achieve visibility on social media have also not changed very much. “Nostalgia on demand” worked in the mid-2000s to achieve visibility and virality, and it continues to work in the mid-2020s, in large part because certain platforms have been built, over time, to privilege such content as a means of selling us “historical emotions” and keeping us engaged;

3. The images and data you post when participating in any trend, quiz, game or other application will almost certainly be used in ways you do not expect, probably to target you for advertising or to train an artificial intelligence application—or both.

Even when social web users recognize these realities, it remains likely we will still participate. Why? It’s fun. It stimulates emotions. It allows us to romanticize and glamorize our own lives into a tidy story of progress and evolution. It gives us a feeling of participating in a larger cultural phenomenon. And it offers the promise that if we hop on the right trend, we’ll “go viral” and be rewarded with widespread visibility and, maybe, even fame (temporary or permanent). As for who is ultimately responsible for making 2026 the new 2016? My bet is on Kylie Jenner and her cosmetics line. Given that the advertising for her campaign began in October 2025, and that she is one of the largest accounts on Instagram, with 391 million followers at time of writing—coupled with the resources at her disposal to launch a guerilla marketing campaign at scale across multiple platforms—I suspect the team attached to the re-release of her cosmetics line ultimately set this bandwagon into motion. Perhaps that is the true lesson of this meme: it is Kylie Jenner’s world, and we are all simply living in it.

Have a nostalgic week,

-JS

P.S. - As a run-up to this article, I experimented with a couple of nostalgic posts on Instagram: one from the Sundance Film Festival in 2023 and one from bowling at The White House in 2014.

If you’re new to this newsletter, you may have surmised that I wrote a bestselling book called “History, Disrupted: How Social Media & the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past.” Released in 2022, it continues to be quite relevant today. Consider giving it a read; it’s available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, my publisher’s website, or it can be ordered through your favorite book store using the ISBN 9783030851163.

This past week I was fortunate to participate in and attend a series of interesting events in Washington, D.C., one of them being a panel on how to regulate artificial intelligence hosted at the Ronald Regan Institute, a beautiful glass and steel building near The White House. One of the speakers at the event made an observation that, admittedly, has been made before by many people (including me), but was well-stated and bears repeating. In response to a question about the absence of a national framework on how to regulate A.I., the speaker reminded us that sometimes inaction is indicative of democracy at work.

It’s not a revolutionary insight, but it is an important one. Amid our desires to “do democracy” and “deliver for our constituents” we tend to conflate activity with evidence of a democracy functioning well. We also tend to lament inaction as a dereliction of our democratic duties. In the case of A.I., the audience member was suggesting that inaction on A.I. was indicative of Congressional malfeasance, to which the panelist suggested it could be, in fact, indicative of a wide array of opinions that have yet to arrive at a clear consensus.

Democracy is, by design, a deliberative process—”deliberative” implying, if not defined by, a slow and methodical approach for arriving at decisions. Such an approach can be painstaking as multiple stakeholders from numerous political parties, racial and ethnic communities, businesses and interest groups lobby for the space and time to express their points of view. Granting that space and time can result in long periods of perceived inaction. Sometimes those periods are, indeed, missed opportunities. And sometimes political actors use those periods to purposefully derail progress (the filibuster would be an example). But other times the periods of debate, discussion, evidence-gathering and reflection are critical components of a democratic process at work, even if they do not always produce a tangible outcome. That our democracy does not always deliver tangible outcomes absolutely causes frustration, especially when concrete results are sorely needed. But sometimes a group of diverse stakeholders come together, talk through their different points of view and ultimately decide that no appropriate action can be agreed upon or that action might be more beneficial down the line once more evidence is gathered. I’m not suggesting this is the case with A.I., but in some instances, it can be the case.

This is one of the reasons why the penchant of tech and Silicon Valley to “move fast and break things” can be construed as anti-democratic. To be sure, there are other ways that tech undermines democracy—mass surveillance, monopoly power, lack of transparency, etc. But the idea of moving fast and breaking things implies an override, or even a disdain, of a longer, more deliberative process wherein a wide array of stakeholders voice their concerns. Were such a process allowed to unfold, it would take much longer to bring a new product to market, ship updates, and might even result in no product being developed at all. That could be better for democracy, but it would be worse for the bottom line.

Democracy and speed are, thus, not correlated—and an emphasis on speed can undermine a true democratic process from taking place. This presents a dilemma as it pertains to A.I., as it pits a fast-moving industry predicated on hastening decision-making and quickening productivity against slow-moving institutions such as the U.S. Congress. What does such a collision portend for democracy itself? Is our anxiety to do something quickly on A.I. compelling us to make impulsive decisions about how our democracy should function overall? At this juncture, I’m not sure any of us knows the answers to these questions but it feels important to ask them.

The Reagan Institute event featured several inquiries along these lines. There was a healthy line of questioning about what, if anything, individual states should and could do to regulate A.I. absent any action from the federal government. This included a philosophical debate about whether states were even allowed to regulate technologies whose usage regularly and repeatedly crossed state borders. (For those in need of a civics refresher, see this helpful summary of the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause). The Reagan Institute event was preceded in the day by an event hosted at the Brookings Institution on A.I. and education, which touched on similar questions, albeit in a different context. Brookings researchers spent a year investigating the effects of A.I in the classroom, and found that sometimes A.I. helps students and teachers enormously, while other times it does not. Given those findings, what types of regulations and guardrails make sense, either by governments or school officials? This particular conversation included a college student in dialogue with a senior researcher, a dynamic that juxtaposed two very different visions of A.I.’s future. The researcher was far more pessimistic and cautious about A.I. in education, suggesting stricter guardrails. The student, on the other hand, shared several ways that she was currently benefiting from A.I., and advocated for a lighter touch that emphasized education as opposed to restriction. This was an instance of democracy in action (two words, as opposed to one): taking time to do the research, then bringing together different stakeholders with different perspectives to talk about them in an attempt to find consensus. Democracy in action at the research level can beget periods of inaction at the policy level.

What to do about A.I. was also a topic during a congressional hearing I attended the previous day. Hosted by the United States House Committee on Ways & Means Trade Subcommittee and titled “Maintaining American Innovation and Technology Leadership,” the hearing showcased the ways that technology and A.I. are changing digital trade. The witnesses spoke about several methods that America’s closest allies—Canada, Australia, South Korea—use to target American companies in the digital realm. For example, Canada has instituted a tax on American streaming companies (Netflix, Amazon, Apple), requiring them to pay fees that support Canadian production companies. (Canada also requires American platforms to showcase a certain percentage of Canadian content, meaning that if you watch Netflix in Canada, 20% of your recommended titles will be Canadian, even if you have no interest in Canadian shows.) The Motion Picture Association representative argued this was an unfair trade practice that violated Canada’s trade agreements with the U.S. How should America respond? What should Congress and/or the President do? Not surprisingly, Democrats and Republicans differed in their answers.

The hearing also discussed the effects that A.I. was having on communications workers, for example individuals who work in call centers. Much like we often do not hear the voices of students in A.I. debates, we similarly do not often hear from front-line workers about how A.I. is impacting their lives. The representative from the Communications Workers of America made a compelling argument that A.I. is creating a “global race to the bottom” when it comes to workers’ rights and human rights. Call center representatives, for example, are now surveilled by their employers, have sentiment analysis monitoring their conversations for tone and behavior, have their keystrokes tracked, and, most discomfiting, are being managed by A.I. applications that dictate performance and personnel decisions. In places such as the Philippines, call center workers can earn as little as $1 per day and face constant abuse and harassment. The questions were posed to Congress: how should we respond and what should we do?

History plays a significant role in a democracy precisely because it offers methodical, deliberate analysis that digs through the past to find answers to questions. I was fortunate at the outset of the week to attend a conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum where powerful research and tools were displayed that are helping to answer difficult questions about the past. A sobering presentation by a museum historian discussed the Nazi euthanasia program that systematically murdered individuals with disabilities. For many years, scholars saw these horrific and despicable killings as distinct from the broader Holocaust of Jews and Roma, but as researchers have asked more questions the more evidence has pointed to these events being interconnected. Some of the same units and individuals were responsible for the murders of different groups of people, often at the same or approximate facilities. The story of how the Nazi regime determined who was undeserving of life spanned Jews, Roma, the disabled, political dissidents, Communists, and religious figures, and those connections were much more closely intertwined than was previously understood.

At the same conference, the museum also unveiled a digital map that showed the full extent of the Nazi camp system created during World War II. Emerging from a collaboration with Project Muse, the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos interactive map included tens-of-thousands of structures across Europe, Central Asia and North Africa, each linked to scholarly articles and resources that described or mentioned them. Already at the conference educators were imagining questions and answers for students and citizens that such a map could foster, another piece of evidence to add to democracy’s deliberations. Democracy not only requires such history; it also requires us to constantly create new resources and access points to information so that future generations of students and citizens can use their ingenuity to forge connections and patterns that we have not yet been able to see.

Speaking of World War II, I will lastly mention that I had an opportunity this week to sift through the townhouse of a retired military historian. He had recently moved into a senior center, his home on Capitol Hill was up for sale, and myself and a neighbor were invited to look through his library. I’d had a similar experience when my grandmothers died years ago, salvaging items collected over a lifetime that, in an instant, had become burdens to be disposed of. His library included several interesting volumes, including a history of the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam, a chronicle of the life of soldiers during the Civil War, and a book about the early U.S. nuclear program. There was something very human and precious about that evening, democratic in its own way, another act of diffusing knowledge from citizen to citizen, generation to generation. Allowing books to have a second and third life, as opposed to burying them in a landfill, allows pieces of our lives and our collected knowledge to continue on even when we no longer do. The answers written in books by one generation become the foundation for the questions of the next generation that reads them.

Questions and answers; democracy and policy; action and inaction; history and A.I… I thought a lot about each this week, not just at the events I attended personally but in conjunction with the broader series of events happening around us: Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Minneapolis. I read a lot about this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, which happened almost an entire continent away from D.C. and displayed autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, and new A.I. infrastructure that will undoubtedly pose even more difficult questions for policymakers, educators, students and workers. (All subjects for future newsletter articles). I also thought about the closure of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after 240 years juxtaposed against an A.I.-driven news outlet that now boasts 8 million users per month, and it seemed to me that somewhere beneath the intersections of geopolitics, information, history and A.I. was a deeper story about how the soil beneath our feet is being dramatically turned over as we stand on it. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel like we are sinking.

By the time the weekend arrived, I had settled on the process of debate and exchange as being fundamental to history, journalism, democracy, and technology. Whether it is a journalist asking hard questions to a President, or a scholar asking difficult questions of the past, a policymaker asking tough questions to an expert witness or a student asking questions to a chatbot, the freedom to ask questions and have debates are what enable democracy to happen. Such debates can become ossified into a number of familiar formats: books, panel discussions, Congressional hearings, or conference presentations. Perhaps those can feel like moments of inactivity. But they are evidence of our democratic muscles being flexed, engaged, and strengthened by friction, resistance and different views. Even if we are not always arriving at major policy decisions, we are still building critical democratic muscle-memory that will help inform the future.

Those activities especially matter right now as forces within society seek to stifle voices, suppress dissent, forgo debate in favor of hasty, unilateral action, and scold us for asking hard questions. It is imperative that we keep our democratic muscles functioning, especially when they are threatened in so many directions. We can accept periods of inaction as a consequence of democracy; but we can never allow inactivity to devolve into atrophy, lest we lose democracy itself.

Have an enlightened week,

-JS

In each of the past two years, I’ve begun this “State of the World” column with the year’s most important country. In 2023, it was the Netherlands. In 2024, it was Argentina. In 2025, that distinction belonged to Qatar.

Qatar is the world’s 164th largest nation. Geographically it is roughly twice the size of the U.S. State of Delaware, and has only 2.5 million inhabitants—75% of whom are male, on account of the large numbers of migrant workers from East and South Asia. An absolute monarchy where political parties are banned, its capital city, Doha, at one point had the highest per capita income in the world. Its wealth largely derives from oil and natural gas; Qatar has approximately 13% of the world’s natural gas reserves, and produces 180 billion cubic meters of LNG per year as well as 1.8 million barrels of oil per day. It is a petrostate in every sense of the term.

Qatar has put on a master class in geopolitical influence over the past two decades, culminating in 2025. Since 2012, the Islamic Resistance Movement Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya—otherwise known as Hamas—has had a political office in Doha. Qatar has transferred millions of dollars to Hamas, used to buy weapons, build tunnels, and support the movement’s stronghold in Gaza. This has positioned Qatar in the Middle East and Global South as a champion for the Palestinian cause and an influential player in regional politics. Doha has also been the headquarters for the pan-Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, which now has a global audience of an estimated 350 million people. It is not hyperbole to say that Qatar has been at the heart of agenda-setting and narrative-framing for the Arab and Islamic worlds through its diplomatic, media and propaganda channels.

Simultaneously, Qatar has situated itself at the center of the so-called “Western” world. Qatar was the first Arab country to host the FIFA Men’s World Cup. Qatar hosts the regional headquarters for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and has thousands of American troops stationed in the country. Qatar is designated by the U.S. as a major non-NATO ally, a commitment that was re-doubled in 2025 by President Trump, who ostensibly stated that an attack on Qatar would be treated as an attack on America. Qatar gifted President Trump a luxury plane to be used as Air Force One this year, while also announcing plans to build an air force facility inside the U.S. State of Idaho. Qatar has spent more than $250 million on lobbying inside the U.S. during the past decade, and pays millions of dollars per year to social media influencers operating across the U.S. and Europe.

The result has been that Qatar sits at a nexus point between Islamic and Western geopolitics, a position that was fully displayed in 2025 as it negotiated both sides of the cultural divide. Qatar emerged as the indispensable mediator among Israel, the Palestinians, the U.S., Europe and Egypt, helping to end the two-year war between the IDF and Hamas. The tipping point came in September 2025, when the Israeli military conducted an airstrike in Doha targeting Hamas’ senior leadership. Shortly after the attack, which was widely condemned, including by the U.S., negotiators met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and, by the end of the month, had unveiled a 20-point peace plan that, at time of writing, serves as the foundation for a ceasefire. None of it—neither the war that began in 2023 nor the ceasefire that ended it in 2025—would have been possible without Qatar.

As an autocratic petrostate fluent in diplomatic double-speak and propaganda, Qatar, in many ways embodies the global trends of 2025: a retreat from democracy, a doubling-down on fossil fuels, the overt purchasing of political and geopolitical influence, and the use of mass media and social media to shape the narrative. But Qatar—and, indeed, the entire Middle East—have also been at the center of another global trend: artificial intelligence.

In February 2025, Qatar announced a five-year partnership with the U.S. firm Scale AI to spur adoption of A.I. within the Qatari government. In December 2025, Ooredoo, Qatar’s multinational telecommunications company, announced a partnership to deploy A.I. applications country-wide using NVIDIA chips. These announcements paled in comparison to Saudi Arabia’s: a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI to build data centers throughout the country, a joint initiative with Cisco and AMD on A.I. infrastructure, an A.I. engineering center in Riyadh sponsored by Qualcomm, and a targeted $40 billion in A.I. investment from the Saudi government by 2030—not to mention a pledge to invest nearly $1 trillion inside the U.S. Not to be outdone, the United Arab Emirates announced in 2025 a $15 billion partnership with Microsoft for A.I. cloud infrastructure.

The flurry of investments between American corporations and Middle Eastern governments shows how in 2025, artificial intelligence became not solely about technological innovation, but the centerpiece of geopolitical power politics. For the current Presidential administration of the United States, the imperative is clear: strike deals that enrich American companies, retain American technological and economic dominance, and keep the Middle East—with its energy and wealth—tied to America, as opposed to China, through long-term military, financial, and technological commitments. Not part of the equation? Democracy promotion, as made evident by Washington’s 2025 National Security Strategy that states America will not “impose” democracy on nation’s that have no interest in it, and will stand against international organizations that commit “sovereignty-sapping incursions.” This was, perhaps, most evident when President Trump welcomed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to The White House without condemning the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, or when he rolled out a red carpet for Russian president Vladimir Putin on American soil—a man whose unprovoked war against Ukraine has caused approximately 1.5 million casualties.

One aspect of American foreign policy that supported democracy promotion was USAID. That was dismantled this past year under the current administration, with deleterious effects on poor, diseased and malnourished populations across the globe. In Kenya, U.S.-backed care had virtually eliminated HIV in newborns; now those infections have returned, according to doctors on the ground. Health centers in Ethiopia have run out of HIV prevention kits, and in South Africa drop-in centers that serviced HIV patients have closed. One organization estimated that the closure of USAID could lead to 3 million preventable deaths per year. It was not just the United States, though, that retreated from humanitarian assistance. The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Japan were among the countries that slashed aid budgets this past year. Depending on the source you look at, overall foreign aid has decreased anywhere from 17% to 25%.

We, thus, now live in a world where nations invest billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, fossil fuels and weapons sales while eliminating billions of dollars in foreign assistance, disease prevention and democracy promotion. It should not be a surprise, then, that according to Freedom House, global freedom declined for the 19th consecutive year and global internet freedom declined for the 15th consecutive year.

In addition to freedom and democracy, nations have also retreated on efforts to combat global climate change. At this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil, held in the Amazonian city of Belém, no new agreements were made to wind down fossil fuel usage or curb deforestation, the delegates from countries around the world instead focusing on “adaptation.” Meanwhile, this past year was either the second or third hottest on record, depending on the source you consult (2024 was the hottest), with the U.N. stating we could be on track for a warming of between 2.3 and 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The planet also crossed a boundary and a tipping point this year: the mass acidification of the oceans and widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. The combination of both means, essentially, that the planet now faces irreversible environmental consequences that we cannot yet foresee.

It is not just the oceans below us that human beings are profoundly changing; we are also changing the orbit above us. We have now have more debris in outer space than ever before as the commercial space industry continued to accelerate in 2025. The global space economy is now on pace to exceed $1 trillion in a few years, and this year saw a record number of space launches with a liftoff to orbit every 28 hours between January 1 and June 30. While some of those launches carried people, most carried communications satellites. There are now approximately 40,000 objects orbiting Earth and an estimated 1.2 million pieces of space debris larger than 1 cm above our planet. In addition to the United States, among the nations planning billions of dollars in investment in space capabilities are Russia, China, Germany and France.

There are even visions of combining A.I. with space. Elon Musk—CEO of SpaceX—spoke publicly this year about his goal for solar-powered A.I. satellites. Basically, for Musk and his global acolytes, the health and progress of a civilization is correlated with the amount of energy it is able to harness. The principal source of energy is the sun, the amount of which we only receive a small fraction of. The solar power available in space far exceeds what is available here on Earth, making it clear to Musk, as he said this year, that “space is overwhelmingly what matters.” In one bright spot (pun intended) for those of us still on the planet, solar electricity generation increased approximately 30% this year around the world, with China being the leader in both solar energy capacity and solar equipment.

Thus, while a series of ceasefires went into effect this year in efforts to “end” (per the U.S. President) conflicts across the world—Israel and Hamas, Israel and Iran, India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo—a much broader series of conflicts have already begun:

• A battle for technological supremacy;

• A battle for energy dominance;

• A battle for supremacy in outer space; and

• A battle for competing visions of the future.

In the recent past, one vision of the future entailed strong, multinational organizations that fostered democracy, were generous with foreign aid, were united in reversing global climate change and used multilateral treaties and globalized trade rules to promote diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and lift billions of people out of poverty. The countering vision is now being implemented by nationalist and populist leaders on every continent: autocratic nation-states with closed borders; restrictive, often ethno-nationalist views of citizenship; pursuing supremacy in technology, weapons, and energy; with little regard to the effects on international organizations, democratic governance or the environment.

But perhaps the most consequential fight is the one being waged over information and reality. The widespread adoption of A.I.-enabled applications has already shown its effects in 2025. Disinformation networks are publishing up to 24,000 articles per day in efforts to shape our perceptions of what we think we know. Agentic A.I. Accounts already generate 4.5 billion views and create 43,000 posts almost exclusively with A.I. The proliferation of these technologies combined with autocratic leaders pursuing power at all costs should give us pause. Such a combination was no more starkly displayed this year than in Burkina Faso, where strongman Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in a coup and has since suspended political parties, repeatedly used A.I. and social networks to distribute false information, including fabricated images of European crowds supporting him, a false audio clip from Pope Leo XIV endorsing him, falsified statements of praise from Beyonce and Justin Bieber and a fake story about a French spy working for an NGO allegedly caught attempting to map the country’s military installations—a doctored video viewed more than 2 million times on TikTok. In my own life this year I have had a person on Facebook Marketplace nearly back out of a proposed sale because she thought the furniture I was advertising was A.I.-generated; a friend tell me that her A.I. chatbot thought her poetry written when she was in eighth grade was composed by A.I; and a person at a party tell me that she followed ChatGPT’s instructions to apply six coats of paint to her coffee table, which was wholly unnecessary but sounded convincing. From the sublime to the mundane, our sense-making and decision-making apparatuses are being upended in real-time.

As I look back at the “State of the World” columns from 2023 and 2024, and compare them to 2025, it is striking how many trends and themes have remained consistent. News cycles come-and-go, and what lands on our home pages or social media feeds changes frequently. But beneath the surface, the dynamics shaping those events are remarkably constant:

• The expansion of technology into every aspect of our lives,

• A global retreat from freedom and democracy,

• A resurgence of autocracy and militant ethno-nationalism, and

• A continual slide towards irreversible planetary climate change.

There have been signs of hope, most notably protests by Gen Z and millennials in Bulgaria, Nepal, Morocco, Indonesia, Peru, South Korea and the Philippines demanding political change and an end to corruption. These brave young people in the streets have risked their lives to try and reverse our current trajectory. While it may be dispiriting and discomfiting for the remainder of us to confront, the state of the world at the end of 2025 is one where dominance and power are prevailing over empathy and compassion, where the wealthiest governments and individuals benefit and the poorest and most vulnerable suffer, and where our efforts to maintain an inhabitable planet for future generations are falling short. What collective actions can we take to ensure a compassionate, human-centric future? What can each of us do in our own lives to safeguard democracy, advocate for human rights, and support our vulnerable populations and planet? These remain, for me, the most pressing questions as we enter the new year, and ones I will be exploring throughout these pages in the year ahead.

May it be a healthier and happier one for us all.

­-JS

As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, a former curator at a Holocaust museum, and as a student of history, seeing violence and hatred towards Jews did not surprise me. The lack of meaningful response from societal leaders and other communities was also not surprising—there is a long history of people idly standing by while Jews are threatened. What struck me most during that period was how many American Jews refused to stand up for themselves. Some even purposefully hid their Jewish identities. I recall two conversations in particular: a friend in California who was terrified to identify as Jewish at her workplace, for fear that her co-workers would harass her, or possibly terminate her; and a scholar who confessed to me privately that he would never publicly stand up against antisemitism or defend Israel for fear of being mobbed by his fellow academics. I had experienced similar during my four years in higher education; it seemed that every faculty meeting I was part of devolved into ad hominem attacks against Israel and anyone who supported its existence. It was one of the reasons I left academia; as a Jew, I realized that no one had my back.

American Jews who came of age in postwar America had hoped that 2021 might be an outlier, a product of a combustible conflict during a combustible global pandemic. We were wrong; 2021 proved to be an inflection point on a timeline that has had its arrow pointed steeply upward. Antisemitism has been creeping out of the shadows and into the mainstream throughout the 21st century, and in the past five years has become more vicious, ubiquitous and emboldened in America. The reasons are multifarious: the growth of the far-right, the rise of the far-left, the spread of disinformation, the proliferation of social media platforms, the collapse of trust in civil society institutions, historical illiteracy, propaganda campaigns by well-funded hostile actors, Islamic extremism, algorithmically-driven conspiracy theories and a lack of unified or consistent response from societal leaders have all contributed.

It has been inflamed by the two-year war between the IDF and Hamas, yet even amid a ceasefire a recent analysis found online antisemitism to be at its highest levels ever recorded across numerous platforms. Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. have increased 344% over the past five years, including a hostage-taking incident at a synagogue in Texas; swastikas on schools in California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Washington and other states; assassinations of Jews in Washington, D.C. and Boulder, Colorado; and proclamations by activists, pundits and influencers that any organization that could possibly have “Zionists” associated with it (as determined by them, of course) were fair game for violence, harassment, intimidation and murder. Holocaust denial and glorification are broadcast weekly to audiences on social media platforms by figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Myron Gaines, and while pundits on the political Right spread Judeo-Israeli conspiracy theories with impunity, leaders on the political Left have endorsed a candidate for Congress who, literally, had a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

One thing that has changed in four years has been the willingness of American Jews to not remain silent. Advocacy organizations, synagogues and individuals have realized that since few people will come to the public defense of Jews, they must do so alone. Still, there remains a substantial portion of American Jews (a precise number is difficult to determine) that have taken to silencing themselves, blaming themselves or aligning with their abusers—convincing themselves they deserve antisemitism as penance for Israel’s sins, or that the discrimination might subside if they align themselves with the movements that hate them. Similar to how those in abusive relationships come to believe they are deserving of their inhumane treatment, the current state of affairs for American Jewry evinces just how mainstream, toxic and ubiquitous antisemitism has become.

Antisemitism is nothing new in the United States. There is a long history of it, documented in several lengthy books, including this one, this one and this one. At different times in America, people who adhered to Judaism or identified as Jewish have been denied full citizenship; denied the ability to hold public office; denied the opportunity to buy homes in certain neighborhoods; been denied entry into schools; been denied entry into the country; been beaten, murdered, massacred, and lynched; and been falsely accused of everything from the assassination of JFK to the terror attacks on 9/11. America had Nazi youth camps on its own soil during the 1930s, replete with Nazi flags atop flag poles and a special train from New York City to Yaphank, Long Island, dubbed the “Siegfried Special.” The U.S. Department of State was so antisemitic during the Second World War it concocted a sham conference in Bermuda whose sole purpose was to deflect all pressure or responsibility for accepting into the U.S. any European Jews at risk of being murdered, “a façade for inaction,” as one participant admitted years later. After the war, when six million Jews were dead and hundreds of thousands were stranded inside refugee camps, American Congressmen purposefully crafted an immigration bill that excluded most of them from entering the country, while at the same time welcoming former Nazis and their collaborators to, supposedly, aid in the Cold War.

Most Americans today are unaware of these histories. The history of American antisemitism is not taught in most U.S. high schools, and the Holocaust, when it is addressed, is more often covered in English class than in social studies. (The reason is that books such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Anne Frank’s Diary are mandated as part of the English curriculum, whereas the mandate to teach Holocaust history in social studies remains uneven.) Antisemitism in the U.S. is taught at the university level, but as has been documented in this newsletter and elsewhere, each year fewer college students are taking history classes.

Even if it was wider known, it’s not clear that this history would be wholly relevant to today’s antisemites. In the past, American antisemitism worked to keep Jews out of arenas of power—out of desirable neighborhoods, out of elite universities, out of political positions, or out of the country altogether. Today’s antisemitism assumes that Jews are in too many arenas of power—Hollywood, Wall Street, government, business—and seeks to remove them by any means necessary. Indeed, a contemporary study published in Nature concluded that “anti-hierarchical aggression” was the strongest predictor of antisemitic attitudes on both the political Left and the Right. In other words, a desire to overturn the existing social order—and taking joy in doing so, even violently—is today positively and directly correlated with hating Jewish people. Amid a zeitgeist where many Americans are angry at their elected leaders, angry at the top 1%, angry at traditional institutions and angry at the un-achievability of the American Dream, the desire to “burn it all down” includes bringing down American Jews with it.

The desire to “burn it all down” has been a feature of the American far-right for decades. Far right hate groups have trafficked in antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories for years as part of broader separatist and supremacist movements. Occasionally their hateful ideas seeped into the mainstream, but such sentiments were rejected by the plurality of Americans. To paraphrase what a friend from rural Michigan once told me, everyone in his town knew where the Neo-Nazis lived, but so long as they minded their own business, they were left alone. That changed over the past decade. Whether it was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville; the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; or the hate speech of Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson, the antisemitism of the political Right has used spectacle, shock, virality and memes to capture news and social media attention, granting its ideas wider exposure and acceptance. Its conspiracies—which include Jewish control of the American government and widespread denial of the Holocaust—have been amplified by platforms such as Gab, Rumble, Telegram, Discord, Facebook and Twitter/X, the latter two algorithmically recommending such content to users at various points. The sum effect has been that when Tucker Carlson devoted multiple episodes of his show to Jew hatred and Israel conspiracy theories, he gained audience members—and even after Candace Owens trafficked in blatant Holocaust denial and distortion, she received a sympathetic featurette on CNN’s home page.

But hate mongers such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are merely the tip of the iceberg. A descent down the rabbit-hole of the right-wing “manosphere” reveals a dizzying and complex mix of misogyny, white supremacy, Christian nationalism and antisemitism. Consistent across this web of interconnected social media influencers and content creators are screeds against each of the perceived emasculating forces within society that have made the American Dream unattainable for young men: feminism and women’s empowerment, which have made it difficult for men to copulate and marry; the American government, which has built a hyper-regulated surveillance state that represses free speech and the possession of firearms; and, of course, the Jews, who have somehow conspired to hijack all the levers of power in America at the expense of white Christians. (This echoes a hallmark of right-wing conspiracy theories for decades, namely the fear of a “Great Replacement.”) Exploiting the very real hardships that American young men face—job precarity, student loan debt, loss of upward mobility, loneliness, social isolation and addiction—these seductive messages have brought the “tear-it-all-down mentality” off the sidelines and into a wider portion of the Conservative movement, to include hateful, vocal and very public antisemitism. (See examples here, here and here). These movements have even hosted conferences on American soil dedicated to the “JP”—”Jewish Problem”—and have been validated by the participation of societal leaders, including current and former Members of Congress and current and former Administration officials.

Such mainstreaming of antisemitism has not solely been on the political Right, however. It has also surged on the political Left. The opening remarks at the 2024 “Jewish Problem” conference were delivered by former Member of Congress Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat and the first African American woman elected to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives. A six-term Congresswoman, McKinney claimed to be participating under the guise of “anti-Zionism” when, in reality, her antisemitic conspiracies run the gamut from alleged Jewish control of NATO to an alleged Jewish responsibility for 9/11. She, and others at the conference, openly participated in discussions that called for each person who had been “awakened to the Jewish problem” to remove the “shackles” of Jewish influence from their lives.

The trope of eradicating Jewish presence from all aspects of American life pervades the contemporary far Left. It is wrapped under the pretense of being “anti-Zionist” or “anti-Israel” – and, to be sure, condemning Israel’s government, military or its citizens does not equate with antisemitism. Yet the left-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories mirror, in many ways, the thought patterns of those on the right. I recall being at a Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill a few months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that massacred 1,200 people, and protestors from the left-wing group Code Pink were denying that the atrocity had actually happened. It is not uncommon to find far-left pundits and activists espousing the tropes of a Jewish cabal rigging the geopolitical landscape. In this worldview, Jews are always deceitful, plotting or scheming to take advantage of any situation at the expense of others. This trope has become so normalized it was shared via text messages among deans at Columbia University, one of whom was a former classmate of mine (the deans were later removed from their positions). The suspicion that Jews always have an alternate agenda unites the extreme right and the far-left.

Israel has served as the centerpiece of these conspiracy theories, a portion of which originate in the Middle East. They find their ways to European and American audiences via the web and social media, where thousands of accounts amplify them for the purposes stoking division and promoting hatred. The Iranian government, for example, has made antisemitism and Holocaust denial a foundation of its foreign policy. Its state-run television channel Press TV is full of unfiltered hate against all Jewish people—not solely Israelis—and features a program targeted to left wing audiences called “Palestine Declassified” hosted by two British men who were so antisemitic they were barred from academia and politics in the U.K., respectively. “Palestine Declassified” makes no distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist,” using the words interchangeably, even within the same sentence, as it spouts conspiracies and incites violence. Evidence suggests the United States now accounts for 20 percent of Press TV’s viewership, the highest percentage of any country outside of Iran.

The Iranian government’s anti-Jewish hate is equally, if not more, extreme than any in the world. It spends tens-of-millions of dollars each year on propaganda that has been refined to align with far-left talking points of “anti-imperialism” and “resistance.” The Iranian government and its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis combine this post-colonial rhetoric with open and direct admiration for Nazism. Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s website actually, at one time, had an illustration of the flags of Iran, Palestine and Hezbollah over the city of Jerusalem—the current capital of Israel—surrounded by Islamist fighters holding machine guns and the words “Final Solution” at the top. (The “Final Solution” was the name of the plan developed by the Nazis during World War II to deliberately and systematically murder all of Europe’s Jews.) In 2021, a meme circulated on Telegram that showed a Hamas militant and a Nazi S.S. trooper posed heroically together under the words “One Struggle”; in 2024, both Nazi and Hamas iconography were painted onto the home of a university administrator in the U.S. Much like the Nazis convinced themselves of a racial purity necessary by any means, Hamas fighters and their global apologists believe they are foot soldiers in a larger project to “purify” the Middle East and the broader world of Jewish presence “from the river to the sea.”

The rise of Democratic Socialism in the U.S.—which began with Bernie Sanders in 2016 and was punctuated by the election of Zohran Mamdani to mayor of New York City in 2025—has grown to have entangled with it such a belief in “purifying” the United States from Israeli and Jewish presence. It is important to re-state declaratively that not every member of the DSA is antisemitic, nor are expressions of solidarity with Palestinians antisemitic. (Indeed, a percentage of American Jews are DSA members and deeply support Palestinian human rights and statehood). But as was evidenced by the encampments and protests on university campuses the past few years, strands of antisemitism do exist within the movement, often unapologetically and rarely with condemnation from the broader community. Being antisemitic will never disqualify you from being a member of the revolution, whereas being pro-Israel will. The strategy has been to gradually shift the discourse so as to normalize antisemitism as part of the broader platform.

For his part, Mamdani has stated his desire to see the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state—which some Jews (though not all) feel is an antisemitic position since Mamdani has not called for any Muslim, Hindu or Christian countries to be eliminated. The “Hot Girls for Mamdani” election night victory party featured a poster that included eradicating the American Israel Public Affairs Committee from New York—which some (though not all) feel is an antisemitic position since no other nation’s lobbyists are being targeted for removal. Pro-Palestine influencers on social media such as Hasan Piker, who has 1.6 million followers on TikTok, and Isabella Moody, who has more than 200,000 followers on X, regularly intersperse pro-Palestine and anti-Israel messaging with blatant antisemitism, for example a recent tweet by Moody mocking Jewish-sounding names. (As an aside, I reported Moody’s account to X and received a reply that she had not broken any “safety policies.”) Fueling this hate is an “anti-hierarchical aggression” on the Left that mirrors that of the Right. The Marxist-Communist-Socialist program aspires to overthrow the ruling classes—including the current Democratic Party leadership—tear down the American capitalist system, and replace it with a new one. That tear-down includes ending American support for Israel, erasing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, normalizing relations with the antisemitic regime of Iran, and toppling the Jews on Wall Street and in Washington who, it is believed, have oppressed the working classes. The largest home for Jews outside of Israel—New York City—now has a mayor from a political party that endorses such a platform.

The Nazi summer camp on Long Island in the 1930s included a large banner that read “Free America.” The intimation was clear: America needed to be freed from Jewish influence. The language was crafted to appeal to American sensibilities of the time, and today, similar messages of “purifying” America from Jewish influence are being framed in language that appeals to Americans’ anger about the state of the country, particularly young people who are jaded, frustrated, and have come of age during a period of political violence, social media disinformation, and record-high inflation. In an era of cynicism and low trust, intoxicating messages that position the elimination of Jews and/or Israel as part of the revolution have become pervasive.

In an event hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, historian Christopher Browning spoke about how everyday Germans became killers or collaborators in a short span of only a few years. In his remarks, he cited Helen Fine’s observation that in the run-up to the Holocaust, Jews had been “expelled from the community of human obligation.” In other words, through society-wide indoctrination, the Nazis successfully used community as a weapon, harnessing the emotions of community-building into an exclusive concept: those who were not Jewish or Roma or disabled could be part of the revolutionary fraternity building a new world order, while the Jews, the Roma and the disabled were excluded and eventually murdered. The Nazi government set the expectations, and everyday Germans tried their hardest to live up to those expectations in order to feel a sense of belonging, be accepted by their peers, not be left behind and secure their place amid the new nation. A poisonous ideology mixed with a social-psychological need for belonging enabled individuals to become changed, numbed and eventually brainwashed by what they saw and heard every day.

Similar phenomena are emerging on the Left and the Right in America today as political and social movements create revolutionary communities of exclusion. On the far-right, feminists, LGBTQ+, immigrants of color and Jews are the ones expelled from the community of human obligation, with no place in the revolutionary future that is proposed to be built. On the left, it is “Zionists,” capitalists, centrists and the political establishment expelled from the community of the future, with Jews expressly targeted for exclusion from Pride Marches, teacher associations and even medical care (see examples here, here, and here). It is not difficult to imagine a potential endpoint where first “the Zionist” and then, eventually, “the Jew” will no longer be considered a person American society has an obligation to protect, making the assassinations of Jews in the streets all-the-more possible. If you can make people fear the alleged power of the Jews, the eventual murder of the Jews becomes rationalized as an act of self-defense.

Such an outcome is not inevitable. It could be avoided if-and-when The White House, a bipartisan group of Members of Congress, Governors and societal leaders from White, Black, Asian, Latino, Tribal, Muslim, Hindu and Christian organizations unite in a joint, coordinated effort to condemn antisemitism however and wherever it manifests, and re-affirm that the revolutionary American future we desperately need includes everyone, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. That is in keeping with the spirit of democracy and a worthy message as we approach our 250th birthday and the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

Sadly, such a coalition appears unlikely to materialize as our politics become ever-more divisive heading into a consequential election year. That reality, in of itself, should be sobering to all of us. That a broad coalition of Americans have not yet stood together to banish antisemitism once-and-for-all should be a wake-up call to how dangerous a moment we have arrived at. “Nobody knows where antisemitism will end,” once said Israeli statesman Dan Meridor, “but we all know where it can lead.”

Have a meaningful week,

-JS

All of us attending stayed on the castle grounds—my room was in the converted horse stables—and in the morning we gathered for breakfast where we (mostly) met for the first time. Not knowing anyone, I chose a table at random, and had the good fortune to sit next to an amazing person: Sofia Dyak, from Ukraine.

At the time, Ukraine was enduring relentless, senseless and murderous attacks by the Russian military upon its people and sovereignty—attacks that continue to this day. Sofia’s journey out of Ukraine to Germany had been long, arduous and involved multiple modes of transportation across multiple countries. But one would not have known that from talking to her; over breakfast she was alert, sharp and incisive. As Director of the Center for Urban History in Lviv, she brought an expert knowledge of Eastern European history concomitant with living through an inflection point in that history. As further testament to her brilliance, she was proficient in six languages: Ukrainian, English, Polish, Russian, Belarusian and German. We struck up a rapport that continued throughout the meeting, and at the conclusion we resolved to stay in touch.

What I did not know at the time was that she and her colleagues were planning to launch a new literary journal for Ukraine, called re/visions.

Fast forward one-and-a-half years later, and re/visions is now a reality. As good fortune would continue to have it, Sofia and her colleagues were kind enough to feature me in the latest issue, “Issue 5. The Future.” The interview is principally regarding A.I., and the role that history and the humanities might play in its development. We also explore whether A.I. will equalize the balance of power in the disinformation wars, or further entrench patterns of disinformation into our lives.

I encourage you to read the interview. The interviewer, Ukrainian Ph.D. candidate Olena Gruba, asked very smart and pertinent questions.

More importantly for me, though, I wanted to showcase the journal itself, and the heroic work of its founders, editors and writers. I also wanted to know more about why they felt that Ukraine needed such a cultural product at this particular time.

So, I took the opportunity to turn the tables on my friends half-a-world-away, and interview them for this edition of my newsletter. Specifically, I directed my questions to Editor-in-Chief Daria Badior and editor Natalie Nougayrède, formerly of Le Monde. Here is what they told me:

Q: What was the inspiration for the journal?

A: “After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the world was no longer the same for us. In an attempt to make sense of the massive upheavals of our times, we started wondering about some of the concepts we thought we were familiar with. We felt a need to explore them more. That’s how the idea of re/visions was born.

“The name we’ve chosen, re/visions, is drawn from how this war has triggered an intense revisiting of previous experiences and narratives, a rethinking of words, even creating new ones. With this journal, we want to explore how our life experience is shaped, articulated and put into words and images.”

Q: How did the journal come about?

A: “When the Russian full-scale invasion started, Daria Badior evacuated to Lviv, as did many culture-makers from Kyiv and other cities that were closer to the new frontline. There were many discussions about the drastic changes which happened after February 24, 2022, and are set to continue in the future as a result of this war.

“We started to imagine a series of discussions dedicated to revisiting and revising the words and concepts that were so often heard at that time: peace, justice, genocide, etc. We talked about this idea a lot, but could not wrap our minds around it exactly. So after a while, we decided that rather than organizing a series of events, we could try to create something more sustainable: a journal where such discussions could occur and stay available for readers.”

Q: How do you see the role of the journal in the face of continued Russian aggression?

A: “We like to think of re/visions as a space where some deep questions can be explored, such as our relationship to places, memories, nature, hope, the notion of time. Such questions are alive within Ukrainian society, like everywhere. War triggers all sorts of rethinking, but we really want to cast our eye beyond Ukraine also, precisely to contribute to a wider conversation. We don’t “lock” ourselves into the topic of the war in our editorial choices, although of course the war is very present in our lives, so it obviously filters through in the journal.

“It’s essential for us to make the journal a space where voices connect across borders and cultures, and across time, to try build a dialogue between people inside and outside of Ukraine and have a pluralism of voices from today and from the past. We believe providing a calm space to think is an act of resilience in times of war.

“We stay clear of the news cycle because people already get huge volumes of that and sometimes want something different to read about, something connected to events but in an indirect, insightful and perhaps unexpected way. By bringing in writers and experts from academia, the arts, literature and journalism we offer in-depth, long form interviews and personal essays.

“We try to build a collection of essays, interviews, images, that convey something about the times all of us are living through, wherever we may be. re/visions, its team, authors and, judging from the feedback, our readers are part of a wider global conversation about big questions. What does friendship mean, what is grief and how we are dealing with it, or how do we relate to the notion of the future — these are some of the topics we took.”

Q: How do you see the journal fitting into a long lineage of Ukrainian literary and intellectual culture?

A: “We hope that this journal will serve as a platform that helps revisit perceptions of literary and intellectual culture in Ukraine. Rather than thinking along ethnic or national lines, we want to embrace the complexity of the different milieus, cultures and identities that have shaped and are shaping what Ukraine is today. We attempt to trace lineages and explore narratives in a sensitive manner, providing historical context, and looking at interconnections.

“Plenty of magazines and intellectual journals were produced on this territory over the last 120 years.They were products of their times, as well as attempts to look beyond: into the future or behind the curtains. re/visions tries to do the same. It’s not an easy time to launch an intellectual online journal, but perhaps there never is a perfect time. We are delighted to hear from our readers and authors that we’re providing what they need: a slow-paced, small and thoughtfully curated conversation.

“By inviting Ukrainian and international contributors — either to write or to be an interviewee,— and by publishing issues both in Ukrainian and English we try to build another bridge between reader communities. We bring Ukrainian voices into the English-reading world and new international authors into Ukraine’s public space.”

Q: What are your aspirations for the journal and how people around the world can help?

A: “We want to build a community around re/visions, connecting people within Ukraine and outside of it. Alongside the journal, we are gradually building up a series of in-person debates and discussion groups. We’ve started taking part at a conversation festival in the Baltic region and want to reach out to other such events in other European cities, and why not, beyond Europe. We have started holding our own, re/visions, public events in Ukraine, in particular in culture hubs in Lviv. We are also building partnerships with cultural and educational institutions across different regions of Ukraine, reaching out especially to young people, students, and creators.

“We are an NGO registered in Ukraine. We don’t collect donations for now. We are supported by European foundations. So the best way to support us is to sign up to our newsletter, to send us ideas and feedback, and perhaps help us find more donors among people who care about supporting an initiative that works for a pluralistic, open, tolerant public space. Doing this in the context of a war is our way of trying to contribute to a better future.”

The latest issue of re/visions is here.

Sign up for their newsletter here.

And remember that resistance is as much intellectual activity as it is a military one.

Have a good week,

-JS

When I worked at the U.S. Library of Congress, one of my favorite activities was to wander through the stacks. “The Stacks” were where we kept the books; not all the books, as the Library has more than 25 million of them, but a certain percentage. It used to be that all Library of Congress employees had stack access; older colleagues would tell me stories of reading inside the stacks on their lunch breaks. That changed over time for security reasons. By the time I arrived, only a fraction of Library employees had such access. I was one of them.

I have many fond memories of those labyrinthine and cavernous corridors lined with books, basking in centuries of accumulated knowledge. I vividly remember one day stumbling into an entire section of books on Napoleon, bookcases as far as the eye could see overflowing in all directions in dozens of languages. As someone who once tutored high school students in AP European History, it was a sobering moment. Surely, I knew more about Napoleon than 95 percent of my fellow Americans. Yet, amid a temple of knowledge, I was awestruck by how much there still was to learn. Suddenly, I felt as though I knew nothing at all.

When people ask me about the “lessons” we can draw from history, my first answer is to say that when done right, history should teach us humility. There is an endless amount to know about the past, and even the most gifted and brilliant among us only knows a small fraction of it. History has the capacity to humble us about how little we understand about our world.

The value of studying history, then, comes from the process of discovery. Searching through an archive, researching old newspapers, or reading the books of those who came before us forces us to grapple with something we never knew. It is from that friction that we learn, grow and forge new connections in our brains. We call that process “education.”

The A.I. applications available to us today promise to remove that friction. Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, and “Answer Engines,” such as Perplexity, execute the discoveries for us. They sift through billions of pieces of online text, extract relevant information, and synthesize it into an output that simulates what a human would create. We, the users, are separated from the process of finding unexpected connections or uncovering things we never knew. Retrieval becomes a proxy for education.

On a recent Saturday, then—with the books about Napoleon inside the Library of Congress in the back of my mind—I decided to experiment with Perplexity and Google Gemini and see what outputs they would generate about Napoleon. Napoleon had come up for me in other contexts recently; when I was in Latvia with the U.S. Department of State, many of the young men I met told me they were fascinated by Napoleon and regularly searched for content about him on social media. I could imagine those high school students now using A.I. applications for their searches.

For those unfamiliar, Perplexity is an “Answer Engine.” It combines the functionality of a search engine with the text generation of a large language model in order to produce real-time answers to user questions. Those answers come with citations, i.e., URLs that can be clicked on to learn more. Google Gemini is a “multimodal” A.I. model, meaning it functions like a large language model while extending beyond language to generate images, audio, video and code. Gemini can retrieve information from across the Web and synthesize it into an array of outputs, include reports, illustrations and webpages.

My question to Perplexity was, simply, how many books are there about Napoleon? The answer engine generated a response that stated the number of books to be 300,000 titles. According to the citations, that statistic derived from a thread on the social network Reddit. The Reddit thread, in turn, cited a website called UKEssays.com, an “essay mill” that allows British students to purchase essays on subjects they need for school exams. UKEssays.com, in turn, seemed to have taken the statistic from a book called Napoleon for Dummies, published in 2005 and written by J. David Markham, a high school and community college teacher in the U.S. Finding Napoleon for Dummies in Google Books, I saw that, indeed, Markham made his claim on page 1 of chapter 1, stating that more than 300,000 unique titles existed about Napoleon. Where he got that number from was unclear, as he cited no sources.

Perplexity also listed in its sources a 2023 article published in the online magazine The Conversation written by Ben McCann, an Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Adelaide in Australia. In his article, Dr. McCann cited businesswoman-turned-Napoleon enthusiast Margaret Rodenberg who in 2021 claimed there were 60,000 books published about the Emperor General. It’s unclear where she got her statistic from, as she also did not include a source. Even though Perplexity listed The Conversation article among its sources, it did not integrate its information into its output. In other words, Perplexity’s output used the number 300,000 but did not include the possibility that the actual number could be 80% fewer.

I, then, went to the Library of Congress website and conducted a Library of Congress catalog search. That search returned 5,662 books with Napoleon in the title. Next, I went to the British Library website and searched the British Library catalog, which returned 1,852 books with Napoleon as the subject. I, then, ran an Amazon search for Napoleon in “Books,” which yielded over 40,000 results; however, that included authors with either the first or last name of Napoleon. It seemed, then, that there could be either 1,852 | 5,662 | 40,000 | 60,000 | or 300,000 published books about Napoleon, depending on the source you looked at and who you believed. That was a very wide discrepancy!

A.I. applications have a penchant for generating inaccurate or fictitious information, so this exercise was a good reminder to treat their outputs with healthy skepticism. But the point of the exercise was not to impugn the output generated by Perplexity, rather to begin to understand how Perplexity arrived at such an output in the first place, an aspect of what I consider to be “A.I. Literacy”—understanding how A.I. models generate their information.

In this instance, the pathway seems to have been:

1. The book Napoleon for Dummies, published in 2005, makes an unsourced claim;

2. A website, UKEssays.com, repeats the claim in 2021;

3. A Reddit post from 2021 cites UKEssays.com as a credible source;

4. In 2025, Perplexity cites Reddit, UKEssays.com and Napoleon for Dummies in order to generate a response it determined to have a high probability of accuracy.

The notion of probability is significant, as large language models rely heavily on probability in order to function. LLM’s such as ChatGPT have been trained on billions of pieces of text—including from Reddit, Wikipedia, billions of web pages and millions of books—to predict how human language looks and sounds. In overly simplistic terms, these models use probability (math) to determine the likelihood that certain words should appear in a certain order. For example, based on its training, ChatGPT recognizes that the word “Elon” is likely to be followed by the word “Musk,” which would be followed by the acronym “CEO,” which would be followed by the word “Tesla.” Thus, if I were to prompt ChatGPT with the question “Who is Elon Musk?” it would output “Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla” with a high probability of accuracy.

The models perform similarly for claims that reside within their training data or the data they can search online. If enough “credible” sources reinforce a claim, the model will assess that claim as having a high probability of accuracy and integrate it into its output. This can be thought of as a “logic of consensus,” and it is similar to the logic underpinning Wikipedia. As I explained in chapter three of History, Disrupted, Wikipedia’s guidelines presume that if enough credible sources assert something to be true, that consensus becomes part of the Wikipedia entry—regardless of its veracity. For example, if several credible sources said the sky was green in 1885, Wikipedia’s entry for 1885 would include the sky being green—even if it was, in fact, blue. A consensus of credible sources becomes the foundation for making truth claims.

Hopefully it is clear why such an approach can be problematic. In the Perplexity example, the “answer engine” did not have the Library of Congress catalogue among its training data. As the largest library in the world, in existence for 225 years, with more than 175 million items, and with a mandate to collect books in all languages from across the globe, the Library of Congress likely has the nearest accurate count of the number of books published about Napoleon. Napoleon died in 1821, meaning it has only been 204 years since his passing. For there to be 300,000 published books about him would mean that nearly 1,500 books each year would have had to be published since his death—which seems unlikely. Even 60,000 total books would mean 294 Napoleon books published each year, on average, since his death—conceivable, but also not likely. That two Napoleon enthusiasts are so widely discrepant in their math also raises questions; presumably two experts on the same topic would be in closer alignment. Both their statistics seem apocryphal.

By relying on Reddit, UKEssays.com and Napoleon for Dummies to generate an output—and not the Library of Congress or the British Library—Perplexity illustrates the limitations of a model trained on the lowest hanging fruit of the Internet. It also illustrates how a consensus of sources can collapse under scrutiny. Sometimes a single source is more authoritative than a wide array of sources. It also demonstrates the circularity of how Internet claims become accepted truths; it is often the case that companies or those with commercial or political agendas purposefully start threads on Reddit that link back to their products or services as a way to drive traffic. It’s conceivable that the Reddit post that linked to UKEssay.com was, in fact, created by someone associated with UKEssay.com. The model interpreted the Reddit post and the UKEssay.com site as two independent sources without factoring in the possibility that they could be the same. Finally, Perplexity seemed to accept that a claim published in a book had a certain weight of “truthiness” to it, even though it had no evidence to back it up. In its entirety, this small example offers a window into how various actors can flood the public sphere with false or misleading information by planting claims inside books, websites and social media posts—which are then scraped, aggregated and disseminated by A.I. models. The expectation is that users would accept the A.I. outputs at face-value without digging deeper.

A.I. Literacy is part of our defense against such blanket, non-critical acceptance.

Next, I asked Google Gemini to “Tell me about Napoleon” using its “Deep Research” mode. In response, Gemini generated the following plan:

Research Websites

(1) Research the early life of Napoleon Bonaparte, including his Corsican origins, military education, and his rapid ascent during the French Revolution.

(2) Summarize Napoleon’s major military campaigns and strategic innovations, identifying his most significant victories and decisive defeats.

(3) Investigate the political and administrative reforms enacted during the Consulate and the First French Empire, focusing specifically on the creation and lasting impact of the Napoleonic Code.

(4) Detail the transition from the French Republic to the First French Empire, including the political rationale and public reception of his self-coronation as Emperor.

(5) Analyze the primary factors leading to Napoleon’s downfall, including the Russian campaign, the Peninsular War, and the final sequence of events involving Elba, the Hundred Days, and St. Helena.

(6) Explore the long-term legacy of Napoleon on European politics, warfare, and national identity, particularly concerning the spread of revolutionary ideals and the rise of nationalism.

(7) Find contemporary and modern historical evaluations and critiques of Napoleon’s leadership, character, and overall impact on global history.

Analyze Results

Create Report

I could have refined the plan (i.e., fine-tuned the model’s weights and parameters) but for this non-scientific exercise I chose not to. Gemini then began its output generation, which took several minutes and resulted in a 13-page report, titled “Napoleon: A Comprehensive Study.” The report is available in my Google Drive.

To inform its report, Gemini cited 21 websites:

1. Fondation Napoléon, France, 2008;

2. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, 2012;

3. Encyclopedia Britannica, United States, 2025;

4. History Hit, United Kingdom, 2021;

5. The Cultural Experience, a tourism company in the United Kingdom, 2018;

6. Encyclopedia Britannica, United States, 2025;

7. A European clothing store;

8. Shannon Selin, a Canadian public official turned amateur historian, 2020;

9. Lumen Learning, from a course called “History of Western Civilization II”;

10. An English-language Wikipedia page about Napoleon, created in 2001, last updated in 2025, with a long edit history, including from suspended accounts;

11. Fiveable, an online AP study guide, AP European History Review, United States;

12. An English-language Wikipedia page on the Concordat of 1801, created in 2003, last updated in 2025;

13. Warfare History Network, a part of Sovereign Media and Homestead Communications, United States, 2000;

14. EBSCO research starters, 2023;

15. EBSCO research starters, 2023;

16. Cambridge University Press, a one paragraph summary of 470-page book, United Kingdom, 2022;

17. National Army Museum, United Kingdom;

18. MyTutor, an hourly tutoring service for students, United Kingdom;

19. Age of Revolution, a project of Waterloo 200 Ltd, United Kingdom, 2000;

20. HISTORY.com, 2022;

21. Study.com, an online resource for students, United States, 2025.

Continuing on the theme of A.I. literacy, after reviewing the report I was struck by several observations:

1. Regardless of how many thousands (or tens-of-thousands) of books on Napoleon have been published, Google Gemini, in this instance, did not retrieve or cite information from any of them directly. It pulled information from a summary of one Cambridge University Press book, and drew on two Wikipedia entries, which themselves cited books, but no text from any books was scraped directly.

2. The e-history it did cite, for the most part, did not, themselves, cite any sources. Presumably Study.com, HISTORY.com and History Hit relied on information about Napoleon from Wikipedia or Britannica, as well as published books or articles. But barely any of these e-history sites used footnotes. Thus, while Gemini deemed its sources as “credible,” the lack of citations undermined their credibility.

3. Gemini seemed to assume that I was either a student or a history buff, based on the sources it pulled and the manner by which it generated its report. In other words, there seemed to be a bias in the model itself for who would ask such a question about Napoleon. The model seemed to assume as a baseline, without any fine-tuning, that such a question would likely be asked by a student or a history buff—even though a journalist, an elected official, a genealogist, a filmmaker, a military officer, or an attorney might also want information about Napoleon. Napoleon as a subject was assumed to be for either students studying for an exam, or enthusiasts who want to go on heritage tours with other enthusiasts.

4. All the sources were “Western,” Anglo-American, and white. It is a verifiable fact that people of color in countries beyond the U.S., Canada, Australia, France and U.K.—for example Egypt—have written about Napoleon; however, they were not reflected in the citations. As well, none of the world’s top scholars on Napoleon and French History (or military history) were included. Instead, the sources were amateur historians, military enthusiasts, tutoring sites, edutainment sites, encyclopedia authors, EdTech contributors and popular writers.

5. It is also a verifiable fact that The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Oxford University Press, Foreign Policy and numerous university websites have articles and resources online about Napoleon. Yet, none were cited for this report. This, again, suggests an assumption in the model for who would be asking such a question and the grade level / sophistication of an appropriate response.

6. The source materials were all text: no videos, podcasts, or artwork (there are many paintings, drawings and visual depictions of Napoleon).

7. The output largely ignored the 150 years of knowledge produced about Napoleon prior to this century. It also ignored the context of why certain information about Napoleon was created during certain periods of time. For example, in 2023 there was a Hollywood film about Napoleon directed by Ridley Scott. The film was announced in 2020 and for the next several years inspired numerous articles, books, and op-eds, including The Conversation article. Five years earlier, the 200^th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 2015 also prompted an array of articles, exhibits and webpages on Napoleon, especially in the United Kingdom. Gemini seemed to treat its sources as evergreen, whereas a more sophisticated analysis would recognize them as context-dependent, in conversation with cultural moments such as a film release or major anniversary.

8. The model weighted sources and information about Napoleon’s exploits in war and politics more heavily than it did questions around gender, domestic life, identity, etc. As such, its claim to be “comprehensive” was, in fact, quite selective.

It’s worth re-stating that this Saturday afternoon exercise was not a substitute for a thorough, longitudinal study. It was a thought experiment, meant to tease out some ideas for wrestling with these emerging technologies:

1. As technological achievements, Perplexity and Gemini function remarkably well. In a very short amount of time, the applications search the Web, retrieve information from sources, make decisions about relevancy, synthesize information, and generate long-form responses that are structured and coherent. Over time they will become more accurate and increasingly customizable. Users will be able to fine-tune the citations, style, sophistication and tone in order to achieve better outputs.

2. Despite those improvements, as producers of original analysis and scholarship, the applications fall short. This is partially because the sources they rely on are of mixed quality; partially because they do not conduct any interpretation of those sources; and partially because they do not generate incisive responses that dig below the surface of what exists on the Web and social media. They do not identify gaps and do not express awareness of what they do not know. If I was back in the classroom, and a student submitted the essay generated by Google Gemini, s/he would receive an ‘F’ – not because they used the application, but because they failed to demonstrate any critical thinking about the application.

3. This creates an opportunity for new types of A.I literacy lessons. How do A.I. models generate their outputs? What types of sources do they rely on? What types of sources do they omit? How does historical consensus get formed? How can our current information ecosystem be exploited to propagate disinformation? Engaging students in these types of conversations creates the friction that is essential to learning. It reconnects them to the purpose of historical study: making surprising connections and grappling with new information. If done well, such lessons could, potentially, lead to positive educational outcomes, particularly for 21^st century learners.

Ultimately, knowing the number of books published about Napoleon is a largely inconsequential statistic that makes little material difference to the world. But understanding why our A.I. technologies cannot generate a good answer to that question? That feels like something worth knowing.

Have an enlightening week,

-JS

On March 1, 1954, five Members of Congress were shot on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The would-be assassins were four members of a Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. The quartet had booked one-way bus tickets from New York City to Washington, D.C.; snuck weapons into the viewing gallery above the House of Representatives; and opened fire shouting “Viva Puerto Rico libre!”—“Long live free Puerto Rico!” while unfurling a Puerto Rican flag. The motivation for the attack was, ostensibly, Puerto Rican independence; Puerto Rico was annexed by the U.S. after victory in the 1898 war with Spain and has remained an American territory ever since.

The four shooters were arrested, charged, found guilty and spent varying lengths of time in prison before their sentences were commuted. Because none of the Congressmen died, the shooters were convicted of assault as opposed to murder. Representative Alvin Bentley (R-Mich.) was the most seriously wounded, a bullet piercing his chest and striking his lung, diaphragm, liver and stomach before exiting his back. Doctors that night told reporters he had a 50/50 chance to live, yet after a 1.5-hour operation by the next morning he was stable. Confined to a wheelchair later in life, he died in 1969 at the age of 50.

I don’t recall exactly when in I first learned about this incident, which never appeared in any of my high school history textbooks. But I do vividly recall reading an article in an academic journal a few years ago that celebrated it. Without naming the author or the journal, I will simply say that the scholar—a female academic at a U.S. university—quite openly suggested that the attempted murders had been justified as part of Puerto Rico’s decolonization struggle. She then linked the attempted assassinations in 1954 to the cause of contemporary Palestine. There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that the four Puerto Rican nationalists of 1950s New York had connections to the Middle East. The through-line, for this contemporary scholar, seemed to be that acts of murder against perceived oppressors required neither apology nor justification.

If such sentiments sound familiar, it’s because they are omnipresent in contemporary America. Just within the past year or so, the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated in the streets of New York City; a state representative and her husband were assassinated in Minnesota; the current President was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania; two employees of the Israeli embassy to the U.S. were assassinated in Washington, D.C.; the home of the governor of Pennsylvania was set on fire by an arsonist; and Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah.

(This excludes 47 school shootings so far this year, 600 threats against government officials last year, and a Molotov cocktail thrown at a crowd of demonstrators in June that killed an 82-year-old woman in Colorado.)

More startling than the violence has been their justifications—and, in some cases, wanton approval. Healthcare executives, political leaders, and those affiliated with the State of Israel are perceived, by some Americans, to be oppressive forces. Ergo, anyone involved in supporting such forces is a fair target for violence. In my own personal interactions, I have been taken aback at how gleeful and approving many people have been of Charlie Kirk’s murder in the weeks since it occurred. Publicly, they may express remorse. Privately, they believe something very different.

What has led to such vitriol? Like all things, a historical perspective offers some inroads for making sense of these phenomena. While 19th century America was an atrociously violent place—lynchings, street riots, slavery, rebellions, massacres of indigenous populations and a war between the Union and the Confederacy—political assassinations were not celebrated. President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 cast a pall over the entire country that lasted for weeks. Newspapers from 1881 report that the assassination of President Garfield drew anger and sorrow nationwide. The assassination of President McKinley in 1901 (technically one year after the 19th century had ended) was not cheered beyond anarchist circles, and was met with fierce backlash against anarchists in the U.S. for their alleged complicity.

Such sentiments began to change in the 20th century, particularly after World War II. Among the shifts wrought by the Second World War were rhetorical and discursive evolutions in how violence against political actors was spoken of. The bloody war that liberated Europe from totalitarianism had resonated across the globe, particularly among nations that were oppressed by European imperialism in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. If fascism in Europe needed to be defeated with violence and bloodshed, would that not also apply to the imperialism that Europeans had inflicted upon colonized lands?

In the decolonization rhetoric of the post-war era, one finds a shift in the tactics and justifications for violence as a means towards achieving political objectives. One of the most influential voices for these ideas was Frantz Fanon, though he was not the only one. Fanon (who died in 1961) framed violence as an inevitable tool of resistance. The colonizers had used violence to subjugate native peoples; native peoples, thus, had a right to channel their anger and mistreatment into a violent response. Acts of violence were the only means by which the colonizer would take the colonized seriously and see them as an equal, thereby making negotiations for liberation possible. Violence would serve as the cleansing activity that would rid the world of exploitation and re-establish self-respect and self-worth for those who had been denied it. The endpoint would be the forging of a socialist society free from capitalism and imperialism.

In the case of Puerto Rico, these ideas were already beginning to express themselves in 1946, shortly after World War II, and before Fanon published his seminal works. The Puerto Rican “Independentistas” had grown weary of the U.S. Congress not acting meaningfully enough to further Puerto Rican independence. Hence why the U.S. House of Representatives was selected as a target in 1954. An act of violence in the U.S. Capitol would draw attention to the struggle and force policymakers in Washington to take the Puerto Rican independence movement seriously. Speaking to newspaper reporters following the attack, Lolita Lebrón, the female ringleader of the assassins, expressed no remorse for what she had done. “I do what I must for my country,” she reportedly said from her jail cell. She insisted, according to the Key West Citizen, that members of her group were “patriots—not criminals.” She vowed to continue the struggle, and indeed, once President Jimmy Carter released her from prison, Lebrón returned to Puerto Rico to work as a speaker, writer and demonstrator. After she died in 2010 at the age of 90, the Workers World Party—the self-described “revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party”—eulogized her as a hero, citing her as an example of “La Patria es valor y sacrificio”, which translates to “Homeland is courage and sacrifice.”

The Workers World Party is a useful website to peruse when trying to reconcile some of the justifications for political violence that pervade contemporary America. On their about page, the party states plainly that they do not “leap on the bandwagon” of criticizing or chastising those who use violence to overthrow perceived oppressive structures. This includes, for example, Hamas, which the Workers World Party openly supports, praising their recent terrorist attack in Jerusalem that killed six Israeli civilians, parroting their propaganda and calling on fighters everywhere to “set our land on fire under the feet of the usurping zionists.” Their party platform includes praise for the former Soviet Union, a call to dismantle NATO, and a global revolution that would eradicate capitalism and replace it with socialism. Their positions are not so dissimilar from that of the Democratic Socialists of America, who also call for the abolition of NATO, cessation of relations with Israel, normalization of relations with Iran, North Korea and China, and the abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism. (One of their party members, Zohran Mamdani, is the favorite to be the next Mayor of New York City).

While some pundits may claim such ideologies are solely the purview of the political left, similar sentiments have been emerging on the political right throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. One of the most influential figures in this regard was Murray Rothbard, an economist whose writings have grown in stature and legend since his passing in 1995. During his lifetime, Rothbard did not mince words on how he viewed the post-war political struggle: a politics of war. Rothbard and his disciples—of which there are many—argued against any measured and judicious discussion of societal issues with the political opposition. Instead, he argued for a relentless and confrontational politics of resentment. “We need,” Rothbard once wrote, “an adherence to the military metaphor, to the concept of us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys... for eventually we must drive the wooden stake through the heart of the Enemy.”

The notion of a political enemy whose death must be the final outcome of the struggle was not confined to non-fiction. Arguably one of the most influential books on the far right in the 20th century was The Turner Diaries, written by a former professor who was an adherent of the American Nazi Party. The Diaries are a fictional account of a future race war between whites and their alleged enemies, i.e., Jews, Blacks and the American government. The hateful plot entails a series of lynchings, suicide attacks and bombings executed as part of a “patriotic fight” to take back the country. One of the attacks imagined in the book is the bombing of an FBI headquarters, which reportedly inspired Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, murdering 169 people. The book has inspired other murders by white supremacists in the U.S., and been cited—among many titles—by numerous hate groups, of which the Southern Poverty Law Center now tallies more than 1,000 in contemporary America.

It's important to recognize, then, that the violent ideas coursing through our political discourse are not new. They have long histories, histories that intersected and co-existed with the “post-war liberal consensus” of the previous century that media pundits and Presidential historians are fond of recalling. Such is one of the perils of looking at the past through rose-colored nostalgic glasses; it tricks us into believing that some ideologies have only emerged with the advent of social media or in the wake of 2016. In truth, their origins long pre-date our current times, and, indeed, long pre-date America’s young people who seem so enamored with them.

So, why have such ideas gained such traction now? That, too, has a complex history; far too complex for this short article. Needless to say, when the cost of living for most Americans is impossible, healthcare for most Americans unaffordable, our politics intractable, and our wars seemingly unendable, it stands to reason that people would feel disaffected and disenfranchised by existing systems and seek out radical communities beyond them. Couple those frustrations with the realities of persistent discrimination, wealth inequality, non-responsive institutions and environmental degradation, and it can feel as though any hope of changing the existing system through the existing system would be futile. Revolutionary action becomes more attractive as the only option for systemic change. If violence is a necessary part of that revolutionary action, according to certain political voices that have gained more exposure through social media and the Web, then such violence will increasingly be rationalized. Reactionary violence then becomes rationalized in response.

In July 1881, after President Garfield was assassinated, the weekly Louisianian, a Black newspaper in New Orleans, published the following words: “The assault upon President Garfield is an astounding assault upon the nation. The shot fired by a madman is a shot fired at all of us.”

Today it feels like the inverse is true: the shot fired by a madman is a shot fired on behalf of all of us. The killer of a healthcare CEO acted on behalf of those aggrieved and wronged by the American healthcare system, we are told. The murder of Israelis in Washington, D.C., was done on behalf of those angered by what is happening half-a-world away, it is said. The murder of a Conservative political activist was done on behalf of those who were insulted or aggrieved by his words, social media tell us. In an era where the divide between fantasy role play and reality has become indistinguishably thin, political assassinations mediated through screens serve as yet another activation of our brains’ mirror neurons. When we watch sports, our mirror neurons make us feel as though we are playing along, experiencing similar emotions as the players. When we watch someone play video games, our mirror neurons make us feel as though we are experiencing what the players are experiencing. And when individuals take the call for violent revolution into their own hands—almost surely meaning that they, too, will be killed or incarcerated—our mirror neurons make the oppressed, marginalized, disenfranchised or victimized among us feel as though we, too, have actively participated in the struggle. When those expressions become highly visible online and rewarded by the social media ecosystem, they are replicated by others seeking similar adulation.

This is not a phenomenon relegated to one side of the political spectrum. In today’s America, toxic combinations of ideas on the Left and Right—oxidized by the incentive structures of social media, worsened by the immovable realities of American political life, stoked by propaganda and disinformation, and fueled by widespread access to firearms—have turned political assassinations from solemn moments of reflection and introspection into something akin to a spectator sport, where we “cheer” or “boo” from the sidelines while consuming endless media about the topic from multiple angles. The cycle stokes our emotions and fuels our infatuation with the effects of violence, which only exacerbates the likelihood of it happening again. Invariably the assassination attempt becomes adaptable as a piece of evidence into a larger narrative: evidence of the necessity to destroy the Left, evidence of the necessity to destroy capitalism, evidence of the imperative to restore American civility, etc. All the while, would-be assassins, themselves often alienated individuals, become further enamored by the attention they may earn from committing such acts and desensitized to the consequences of destroying a fellow human being’s life and family.

Is there a solution? Perhaps if our politics were better able to solve people’s problems, resolve structural inequalities, invest in countering disinformation and reverse environmental degradation that would lead some people away from the fringes and make them more optimistic that deliberation and debate can produce meaningful policy outcomes. Political assassinations are not solely an American phenomenon: Haiti, Japan, Ukraine and others have each experienced their own, as have many other countries. But part of being an American is believing that change through democracy is possible, and that hope and optimism for a better tomorrow are not empty promises.

Part of the solution, then, it seems to me, must be to not lose hope that an end to violence is achievable—even when all evidence points to the contrary.

Have a peaceful week,

-JS

Fazal Rahman lives in Pakistan and, up until recently, had never heard of the Holocaust. When asked by the BBC about the event, he confessed he did not know what the term meant. Yet he was familiar with images of it… A.I.-generated images, that is.

Rahman is part of a network of Pakistani content creators who use artificial intelligence applications to generate fictitious images of historical events, including the Holocaust. They principally post on Facebook, where their pages have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. For producing content that generates a high number of interactions—such as A.I.-generated Holocaust imagery—they can earn $1,000 per month as part of Facebook’s content monetization program. The more clicks, views and shares their content gets, the more they get paid—particularly if their content is consumed by higher-income audiences in the U.S., U.K., and Europe. For Rahman, it has become his sole source of income.

How would someone such as Rahman, who’d never heard of the Holocaust, get the idea to post A.I.-generated Holocaust imagery? They ask ChatGPT. According to the BBC investigation, creators inside these content groups use AI chatbots to determine which historical events create high-performing social media content. The Holocaust was one of the answers.

Since 2022, there has been growing discussion about how artificial intelligence applications such as large language models, image generators and chatbots will affect “history”: both the professional discipline of history and public understandings of the past. In 2025, the contours of that influence are now visible. A.I. applications are being used around the world in dozens of history-related contexts. A shortlist includes:

• An exhibition at The White House about America’s “Founding Fathers” and “Founding Mothers,” curated by PragerU, which includes historical portraits that morph into A.I.-generated video clips, activated by scanning a QR code;

• Game designers, such as in the Netherlands, incorporating A.I.-generated historical imagery into their games, trying to, in their words, “leverage the potential of AI to bring history to life”;

• Historians and researchers in multiple countries using tools such as Google’s Notebook LM to summarize and synthesize scholarly literature, as well as take notes and arrange book chapters;

• Reviewers of peer review journals, in some instances, using ChatGPT or large language models to author their assessments of scholarly articles;

• Holocaust museums—and other sites of conscience—using hologram technology coupled with A.I. to simulate conversations with deceased witnesses and survivors of past events;

• Conservators and historic preservationists in Italy, Greece, India and China using A.I. to reconstruct destroyed archaeological sites or damaged cultural artifacts such as paintings, sculptures and mosaics;

• Hitler speeches and writings translated by AI, remixed and propagated on social media set to background music;

• The current Presidential administration in the U.S. using A.I. to generate a list of history books with perceived offensive key words in their titles and removing them from library shelves at the U.S. Naval Academy;

• University presses licensing their books to train large language models;

• Museums and universities establishing policies and procedures for using A.I. in the workplace;

• Approximately one-third of professors across disciplines, including history, describing themselves as frequent users of generative AI tools, according to a recent New York Times article, including developing lesson plans, making lecture slides, and designing custom chatbots that answer student questions;

• Students in classrooms worldwide using ChatGPT and other large language models to author homework assignments, historical essays, and, at least in one case, write a PhD dissertation.

(As proof of ChatGPT’s mass adoption among students, data has shown that ChatGPT’s usage peaks in May around final exams, declines over summer break, then spikes again when the school year starts.)

The proliferation of uses of A.I. in historical or history-adjacent spaces prompted the New York Times to publish an article in June, titled “A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.” Presumably in response, at least in part, the American Historical Association (AHA) released its Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education shortly after. Though only two months old, the AHA document, while laudable, already feels like an artifact, staking a claim to land that has experienced a seismic continental drift. The AHA document asserts several times that A.I. cannot replace history teachers or professors. The wider world seems to disagree. Over the summer, Microsoft released their top 40 occupations with the “highest AI applicability score.” Historians were number two, behind only interpreters and translators, with a “coverage” score of 0.91 out 1. According to the second largest corporation in the world (by market capitalization), most of what historians do can be replicated or outsourced to machines, either now or in the future.

History.AI is here, then—and with it, the likely alteration of the history profession as it has been practiced for decades. What it becomes is still to be determined. While some observers and traditionalists had held out hope that A.I. might be a passing fad, akin to the laser-disc or the unicycle, that appears unlikely. Much as A.I. applications and advancements will alter medicine, law, marketing and science, so, too, will they alter “history” in all its manifestations.

So far, no one has quite been able to articulate what that altered future looks like. The punditry around History.AI has largely mirrored conversations from prior decades when new platforms and technologies emerged. In the 2000’s, crowd-source historical knowledge on Wikipedia was perceived as a threat to expert-centric models of historical knowledge. The debate was whether Wikipedia would ever be accurate enough to be considered reliable history, or tackle the harder intellectual questions that historians felt they tackled. Today, Wikipedia is the fourth-most visited website in the world; its content informs everything from YouTube videos and Amazon Alexa to journalism and legal research.

With the advent of social media and “e-history” in the 2010’s, historians again criticized the diluted and inaccurate historical memes that circulated online, arguing that the viral past would never be a substitute for accurate and rigorous historical knowledge. Today, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook and X are all among the top 10 most visited websites in the world, with some history-related accounts (as documented in my book) boasting millions of followers/subscribers.

While Wikipedia and social media have captured worldwide attention, professional history has clung to a rapidly diminishing air space. As has been well-documented in this newsletter and many other places, history departments in the North America and Europe are being shuttered, retiring history professors are not being replaced, fewer history degrees are being awarded, history museums are closing—some due to lack of visitors and donor support, others due to political pressures—funding for historical research is disappearing and full-time job openings for professional historians in universities or museums/historical societies are few-and-far-between, often with paltry salaries. Anecdotally, I know many historians and history-degree-holders working in jobs—or pursuing jobs—outside of the profession. It is all well-and-good for advocacy organizations in Washington, D.C., to plant a flag and say they are not moving. The problem is that everyone else has.

For a period, it seemed that so-called “hallucinations” and inaccuracies produced by generative A.I. might be the kryptonite that would protect expert-centric disciplines such as history. Surely the need for accuracy would always ensure the need for professional historians. Alas, the tech companies were playing chess while scholars were playing checkers. The more that everyone uses A.I. technologies, the better they become. We are all training the machines in real-time every day. Now armed with access to scholarly databases and thousands of university books, the A.I. applications are far more accurate and less “hallucinative” than they were even one year ago, and rapidly improving. In the case of historic preservation and recreation of bygone relics, A.I. is likely to become more accurate than a human ever could be.

In prior decades, there were arguments, too, that the proliferation of these technologies might help professional history—and, by virtue, public understandings of history. If only professional historians could leverage Wikipedia and social media to elevate their own voices, the technologies would boost the relevancy of history and historians in people’s everyday lives, and the web would be overflowing with accurate historical analysis. Some public intellectuals and journalists continue to hold out hope that A.I. will do similar, that its transformative power will “bring history to life.” These scenarios failed to account for the realities of how people behave within incentive structures shaped by modern technologies. If the ecosystem rewards rapid-fire posting on social media with financial, reputational and political gains regardless of accuracy, that is what people will do. Other forms of cultural production won’t disappear overnight; they’ll simply become novelty items that people admire but don’t feel are necessary in order to succeed in their everyday lives.

That is precisely what has happened to history; even as we are surrounded by billions of pieces of e-history every day online—some created by humans, most generated or circulated by A.I. and algorithms. With more than 20,000 history institutions in the U.S. alone, Americans struggle to name a single historian, identify a historian they know or have met, or even recite basic historical facts. (According to one survey, 48% of Americans could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto from World War II). While historians continue to publish books, Americans continue to read fewer and fewer of them. Amid a deluge of information, misinformation and disinformation—as well as unflinching demands on people’s time, energy and attention simply to make ends meet—rigorously researched information about the past is among the first items to be jettisoned.

Where is all this headed? Futurology is a tricky business, akin to batting in professional baseball; being right 30 percent of the time makes you eligible for a lucrative payday and consideration for the Hall of Fame.

The evolution of A.I. and the decline of “History” have not happened in a vacuum. Their stories are intertwined with broader political and geopolitical agendas. In the U.S., the race to lead the world in artificial intelligence has become a national imperative too consequential to finish runner-up. Across multiple administrations and Congresses in both political parties, it has resulted in a massive infusion of funding into S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering and math) at the expense of the humanities, as well as a deregulatory environment that has balked at imposing any serious restraints on the technologies, lest China, Russia, Saudi Arabia or India surpass us. It is a powerful political statement to be winning the global race for the future. It is less impactful to say we are winning the global race for the past.

At the college and university levels, the allure of high-paying S.T.E.M. careers that would justify the high costs of tuition lured students (and parents) out of the Liberal Arts buildings and into the science and business halls. A.I. has upended that story, too—coders and engineers are now facing bleak job prospects—but the students have not returned. With no history students, administrators can justify fewer history professors and no history departments. Why pay salaries plus benefits for professors to teach to empty classrooms? Students can learn the history they need for free from a variety of high-quality YouTube videos or podcasts. And while history museums and historic sites still retain high trust among American audiences, maintaining such sites is expensive (people, facilities, maintenance, programming, climate-controlled storage, etc.). Donors are donating less, some donors have passed away and others are scared to takes a stand on matters of history for fear that elected officials will come after them and their bank accounts.

So, while A.I. applications such as Notebook LM and artifact reconstruction software will help the remaining employed professional historians write their syllabi, refine their classroom slides, or do museum work, A.I. is unlikely to improve the state of professional history in North America or Europe… and beyond. At least as currently constructed, A.I. will not help students do better research or become better writers; will not improve the quality or accuracy of e-history in the public sphere or on social media; will not boost funding to history institutions that sorely need it; and likely will aid propagandists and repressive forces as they continue to pressure independent thought and scholarship on difficult topics. But A.I. will continue to be used because the discourse around A.I. taps into one of humanity’s biggest fears—a fear of being left behind. If everyone else is using it, surely, I need to as well. (Anecdotally, I hear this from students all the time. If all their classmates are using LLM’s, how can they not?). The more they are used, the better the applications become, and the more legacy professions fade into obscurity.

What A.I. really offers is proving too alluring to pass up—and, indeed, this has been the genius of how A.I. has been marketed to the public. A.I. tools offer the promise of being ahead of the curve: saving time, earning money, processing more information at greater scale, parsing data to reach a plausible explanation, and getting to an outcome faster, even if that answer is not the best one or even the correct one. All technologies have politics, and A.I.’s politics are engineered for speed, automation, profit and predictability. The best history, on the other hand, emerges from a deliberate and tortuous human exploration of what is often unpredictable and unexpected, usually without a clear profit motive. That experience, itself, could soon become a thing of the past.

What will replace it? For inspiration, I asked Google Gemini. It produced a lengthy A.I.-generated report that claimed that “instead of facing obsolescence, the profession of history is in the midst of a profound and necessary evolution.” It cited 24 websites, more than half of which were university webpages marketing history classes to their non-existent students, with three additional citations from Wikipedia. It was eerily similar to the A.I.-generated Holocaust images produced in Pakistan; it had the illusion of reality, while simultaneously being completely divorced from it.

A metaphor for our current times, perhaps.

Have a good week,

-JS

This post focused on the challenges. A subsequent post will focus on the solutions. There are some! Hope is not lost!

In 1953, the syndicated newspaper columnist Hal Boyle wrote that America was at a crossroads. The reason? Air travel.

Boyle, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting during World War II, began his column by noting that, “A man who travels regularly by air today no longer lives at home. He spends most of his life at airports.” The point of air travel, Boyle surmised, was to get from city to city quickly; yet most airports were not in cities but in “reformed cow pasture[s].” Between waiting for the plane to take off, waiting at baggage claim, and long trips to and from the city center, a fast commute was anything but. “Sooner or later we are going to have to choose between living at airports or in cities,” Boyle mused.

Three years earlier, in 1950, a Nebraska columnist named Romaine Saunders warned the U.S. was at a crossroads similar to that of the American Civil War. The reason? The Korean War, and the potential for American intervention. “I stem from a tribe that wore the blue in the 60’s,” Saunders wrote, a reference to the blue uniforms of the Union Army, “and am now led to wonder if our national destiny must continue to send our khaki-clad legions to the ends of the earth.”

Nine years earlier, the Black intellectual Emmett J. Scott penned a column called “America At The Cross-Roads.” Scott—who had been the chief aide to Booker T. Washington as well as special advisor of black affairs to the Secretary of War during World War I—saw the storm clouds of World War II gathering and, lamenting those who were not supporting President FDR’s foreign policy, lauded the loyalty and willingness of African Americans to join the military and the war effort. “He is not asking for a New Deal. He wants a Square Deal,” Scott wrote. America had to choose whether to allow Blacks “equal treatment and recognition in the Army and Navy” and “a fair and decent place in the defense employment.”

One year earlier, Roger W. Babson declared America at the crossroads in his 1940 campaign for President. The reasons? Unemployment, the expanded role of government, the plight of the middle class and declining religious worship. A Conservative Christian, successful businessman and Isaac Newton aficionado, Babson ran for President on the Prohibition Party ticket. He argued that, “For too long our governments have been in the hands of the wealthy, the theorists, the racketeers.” To end unemployment required a recommitment to middle class job creators, as well as a national reawakening of religion. “America is at the crossroads. The next four years either will make or break us,” he wrote.

And in the presidential election of 1936, Republican Alf Landon, also running against FDR, published a book called America at the Crossroads. Landon opposed the New Deal for its alleged over-regulation of businesses, and he accused FDR of corruption for an alleged overreach of executive power. (The first chapter in the book was titled, “The New Frontier,” a phrase that would be made famous by JFK many years later.) Landon wrote, “Each generation in turn has its own problems to solve for posterity. No age has escaped this inspiring responsibility.”

In each generation, in every decade—in each year, perhaps—we as Americans face choices about who we are, the country we create, and who we wish to be. To embrace the New Deal; to grant equal opportunity to African Americans; to intervene in the Korean War; and even how and where to build our aviation infrastructure… throughout the 249-year existence of the United States, the choices made by one generation have shaped the circumstances of the next.

So, as we pass July 4, 2025, and begin our 250^th year (1776-2026), we as Americans would be wise to ask ourselves what choices we are making today that will shape the lives of those who come after us. Once again, America sits at a crossroads—not one, but several. The decisions we make will reveal who we are and what future we will create for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Specifically, in my view, we face stark choices in three critical areas: ecological, technological and humanitarian. Allow me to use this week’s newsletter to explicate what I believe faces us.

1. Global climate change

The Earth’s climate is changing; this is undeniable. These changes are not evidenced by a single heat wave in the U.S. or Europe; a stretch of hot weather does not global ecological change make. Rather, what confronts us are difficult truths:

• Each year we break records for the hottest year ever documented by human beings;

• Sea ice is disappearing faster than we can tabulate it;

• Parts of the planet have become so hot they are now inhospitable to human life; and,

• Villages, towns, cities and islands are melting into the ground or sinking into the sea.

This has been a reality for decades. But in 2025, we stand at a crossroads; we are on pace for a nearly 3°C warming of the planet by the end of this century. Greenland—which has been in the news a lot lately—has been losing approximately 75 cubic miles of ice each year due to warming. If Greenland’s ice melts entirely, it will raise global sea levels by more than 23 feet. That means the East Coast of the United States would be underwater, as would parts of Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. Entire cities will be lost and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced.

The United States is not solely responsible for this ecological collapse; it has been a global failure. But the time for incremental action is past. At our current rate, there will be no adaptation strategies left by the end of the century (unless we live underwater or relocate to Mars). As the foremost power in the world, America holds enormous leverage to lead global action before it is too late. We can use our convening power to bring nations to the table, and we can use our scientific knowledge, entrepreneurial creativity, industrial infrastructure and financial largesse to advance solutions quickly, including removing tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through “carbon dioxide removal” technology.

Yet, we are currently doing the opposite. Climate.gov, a U.S. government website that explained climate science to teachers, journalists, farmers and urban planners has been shut down. The scientists and science communicators who maintained it have been removed from federal service. The Chief Scientist at NASA, a climatologist, was fired, along with her staff. The U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement that sought to lower carbon emissions and temperatures globally. We have repealed requirements to reduce carbon dioxide in the air; granted exemptions to polluters from complying with emissions standards; and approximately 20% to 25% of Americans still believe that climate change is hoax (depending on which survey you look at). Climate change was not a top issue among Democrat, Republican or Independent voters during the 2024 elections, according to exit polls, and the average carbon footprint of Americans remains the largest in the world due to vehicle travel, air travel, utility consumption and food consumption. An attempt was recently made—avoided for now—to decimate the wind and solar industries in the U.S. through federal legislation, electrical vehicles tax credits have been ended, and federal buildings will no longer have electric charging stations.

We are at a crossroads as it relates to the fate our planet; we cannot ignore the reality that stares us in the face. We must do something to stem the rise of global temperatures, lest we pass down a world to our children and grandchildren that is significantly uninhabitable.

2. Artificial Intelligence

I have written and spoken extensively on artificial intelligence, as long-time readers of this newsletter are aware (click here for a refresher).

What is lesser known are the ramifications of A.I. adoption on the future of the workforce. There have been speculations about this future by CEOs and corporate leaders that have appeared in the news. In May, Axios published an interview with one tech CEO who warned of 10% to 20% unemployment as a result of A.I. adoption. This unemployment would especially impact entry-level positions, where much of the work could eventually be outsourced to machines.

The pending jobs crisis is not relegated to the United States or North America. Consider Africa; according to the World Bank, 1.2 billion people on the African continent will be seeking to join the workforce over the next decade. Yet, there will only be an estimated 420 million jobs available to them, as many industries that employed previous generations—such as customer service call centers—become fully automated. This does not solely portend an economic crisis; it also portends a political one. Mass unemployment and lack of economic opportunity create fertile grounds for extremism and political violence.

There is also a risk of how A.I. gets deployed not solely by corporations but also by governments. We have already seen in the U.S. how government has used A.I. to cancel contracts, terminate employees and ban books. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reportedly relied on A.I. to make its decisions on what services to cut—overstepping the input of employees and leading to numerous errors. When books were pulled off the shelves at the U.S. Naval Academy, A.I. was reportedly used to identify the titles.

Despite concerns about how corporations and governments are implementing A.I., the most recent Congress attempted to place a moratorium on state-level A.I. laws for the next 10 years. That did not pass; yet we are at a crossroads as it relates to our relationship with technology. We must retain human agency over our technological creations in order to be fair to our children and grandchildren, lest we hand them a world where erroneous and biased decisions made by machines dictate the patterns of their everyday lives.

3. Humanitarian assistance

Lost amid the flurry of news the past few weeks was the fact that on July 1, 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development ceased to exist. The closure of USAID and its integration into the U.S. Department of State made headlines in February; but since then, the dismantling has happened quietly while press coverage and social media attention focused in other directions.

USAID was far from perfect, but the wreckage left behind by its disappearance has been equally harmful. People around the world who depend on food assistance were suddenly cut off from that aid. Medicines to treat a wide range of diseases never reached those who needed them. Trust that the U.S. took decades to build in countries where trust is hard to foster was eroded. Some estimates are that over the next five years, the elimination of U.S. foreign assistance will lead to 8 million deaths among children under five-years-old, 4.2 million deaths among people living with AIDS/HIV, and 75 million children who will not receive necessary vaccinations.

At home, recent legislation has imperiled the lives of those who rely on supplemental nutrition assistance (SNAP) and health insurance coverage (Medicaid). SNAP has been fully funded by the U.S. government; new legislation will shift a portion of those costs to the states. However, several states do not have the money to cover those expenses, meaning they will have to cut in other areas or they will terminate SNAP altogether. More than 42 million Americans rely on SNAP for food assistance, including thousands of military service members and veterans. Up to 25% of military families have reported food insecurity.

More than 70 million Americans rely on Medicaid for health insurance coverage. This coverage primarily benefits low-income families, rural communities and people with disabilities. It gives hope to individuals who cannot afford expensive hospital treatments or pharmaceuticals. Its payments also enable hospitals—often in rural areas—to stay open, as patients often do not have private insurance and cannot afford the procedures. Recent legislation will make it more difficult for some Americans to receive Medicaid, increase fees for coverage, and prohibit certain medical services.

There is no doubt that providing medical coverage to 70 million Americans is expensive, as is providing food assistance to 42 million Americans and humanitarian assistance to tens-of-millions of people around the world. Americans have paid these costs for decades, and the lives of those less fortunate in our country and globally have benefited. Now, we stand at a crossroads: continue to be generous with life-saving care and assistance, or slowly and steadily undermine these programs. What we choose will define us domestically and internationally.

America 250, a crossroads moment

Each of these challenges returns us to a deeper existential question: will the United States act boldly and unapologetically on behalf of those who are most vulnerable and need assistance?

• Impoverished and under-resourced communities are the most vulnerable to climate change. Will we act decisively for their benefit before it is too late?

• Vulnerable, young and at-risk workers are most in danger of being displaced by A.I. Will we intervene to ensure they can maintain their livelihoods?

• Economically disadvantaged, disabled and rural communities are most vulnerable to cuts in life-saving medical care and food assistance. Will we protect those who need nutrition and medicine?

As America begins its 250^th year, we all must collectively answers these questions, regardless of party, ideology, race, religion or ethnicity. A crossroads is, literally, a place where two roads meet. Figuratively it describes an important choice to be made that, depending on the selection, can lead to widely varying possible futures. We all have an opportunity to determine our collective future.

Our choices will tell us much about what type of nation we wish to be. Do we serve the interests of a privileged few… or do we extend the hand of generosity and assistance to all who need it? Will we make choices that ensure our long-term future, even if that means making sacrifices today? Do we prioritize fiscal priorities above all else, or does the value of a human life exceed any financial calculations?

We are about to embark on a yearlong commemoration of America’s 250th birthday. Let us use this opportunity to not only look back at our past, but also use our history to make informed and compassionate decisions about our future. Perhaps, one day, our descendants will look back at 2025-2026 and marvel at the wisdom we possessed to choose as we did, enabling them to enjoy a beautiful, thriving world.

Have a good week,

-JS

Orion was a very earnest and eager young man. He had big ideas and big dreams. He had strong opinions and was armed with statistics accumulated from various online sources. He was very attuned to politics and current events, both in the U.S. and around the world.

What I remember most about Orion, though, was his insistence that the biggest problem facing the United States was that older people in positions of power were not listening to younger people. He believed that older generations in positions of influence only cared about themselves and only acted in their own interests, whether it be in government, corporate America or elsewhere. None of us old people (myself included) understood the youth experience, which included a feeling that their generation was far more disadvantaged than others before them due to a lack of good jobs and home ownership being so far out of reach. If only young people had more power, things would improve.

I’ve thought about Orion in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s recent mayoral primary win in New York City. For readers not attuned to local politics, Mamdani is a politician from Queens, New York, who most recently served in the New York State Assembly. In four years in the state legislature, he passed three bills. He also helped launch a pilot program to make five NYC buses free (other cities such as Boston and Washington, D.C. had previously experimented with free buses). Perhaps most notably, he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and now, at 33-years-old, is the Democratic candidate for mayor in a city where 2/3 of the electorate are registered Democrats. This makes him the favorite to win the mayorship and govern America’s largest city with its trillion-dollar economy.

America’s punditry class has devoted a significant amount of column space to dissecting how Mamdani won and what his victory “means” for American politics. This is a particular feature of American political news coverage that has become quite predictable: pundits take the results of local politics and extrapolate their alleged significance to national politics. The reality is that no one knows if Mamdani’s primary victory is transformative or circumstantial, if it reflects conditions specific to New York or to the broader electorate, or if Mamdani will actually win in November (he still has to face the incumbent, Eric Adams, who is running as an independent).

But Mamdani clearly connected with younger, college-educated voters such as Orion. Orion was not a New Yorker; however, voters of similar age, education and profile confessed to voting for Mamdani precisely because they wanted someone younger who understood their concerns and rejected the old guard of American politics. Henry from the Bronx said he was, “tired of the same old politicians,” and Regina from Queens said, “Tired of corruption and politicians who are bullies… sick of the political environment as it is.” Christian from Manhattan added, “The Democratic Party needs to be forced to turn over.” [1]

How did Mamdani accumulate power and support among young people in such a short period of time? (Four months ago, Mamdani was polling in the single-digits.) Part of the answer does, in fact, reveal a truism about our national politics, as well as our international politics: the power of memes. The political candidate with the best memes on social media is often the candidate who consolidates power the fastest, particularly among young people.

To attribute Mamdani’s success solely to social media would be to devalue his organized and shrewd campaign, as well as his policy positions. The latter definitely resonated with younger voters suffering under inflation. Mamdani has repeatedly called for free buses, free childcare, a rent freeze and a $30 minimum wage—all of which sound appealing in a city where 50% of households are rent-burdened [2], childcare costs are the highest in the U.S. [3], and public transit is the slowest in the nation.[4]

But to get the message on through (to paraphrase the Doobie Brothers), Mamdani and his team leveraged social media expertly. Three months before his victory, Mamdani appeared on local NY1 television. When asked how he was reaching young people, he said plainly, “at their homes, on subway platforms and through social media.” He added that social media had helped young New Yorkers “see themselves” in him.[5]

Part of his social media success stemmed from his visually-arresting brand. As I explained in my book chapter on the visual past, on a platform such as Instagram, visually-arresting imagery is critical to making users pause their scrolling and engage with a piece of content. Dull, predictable imagery will not be visually-arresting enough to captivate users. Mamdani’s creative team—who were actually based in Philadelphia—opted for a bold, fresh color pallet that included a yellow that matched a New York City taxi cab and a blue that invoked the New York Knicks basketball team, who at the same time were advancing through the NBA playoffs and igniting city-wide pride. “His entire brand is a design love letter to [New York] city itself,” noted a fellow creative director.[6] Inspired by Bollywood, the overall aesthetic was purposefully bright and colorful; optimistic for New Yorkers and eye-catching online.

Another tried-and-true tactic for getting people to engage with content on social media is to have very attractive people sporting your brand. As I documented in the same chapter on the visual past, Instagram has become a destination for young attractive people to admire the lifestyles of other young attractive people (fashion models, celebrities, adult film stars, etc.). This was another tactic Mamdani’s campaign benefited from through an Instagram account called “hotgirls4zohran,” which delivered exactly what it promised. In addition to attractive young people in slick Mamdani merchandise, the account ran a series of promotions that gave away free Mamdani clothing in exchange for signing up for a mailing list, becoming a volunteer, or sharing a post on social media. Having been a budget-conscious young person myself once (as opposed to the budget-conscious old person I am now), I completely understand the allure of free clothing.

Mamdani also received powerful endorsements from important social media influencers. The world-famous fashion model Emily Ratajkowski came out in support of Mamdani on Instagram, where she has 29 million followers, and TikTok, where she has more than 2 million followers. Her endorsement generated valuable press coverage and widespread visibility. Mamdani also received online endorsements from, arguably, the two most important influencers in Democratic politics: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. All three are connected politically through the Democratic Socialists of America, and Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani both represent Queens, New York. Aahil from Queens admitted that he voted for Mamdani because he was “endorsed by AOC and Bernie.”[7]

Mamdani’s team also skillfully produced short videos for Instagram, TikTok and X that featured quick cuts, sophisticated editing, comedic interludes (such as being interrupted by a street vendor asking if he was going to buy any food) and Bollywood references. One of Mamdani’s videos, which has millions of online views, included a cutaway to Amitabh Bachchan, a legendary Bollywood actor. One young New Yorker of South Asian heritage commented that the Bollywood references got Mamdani’s TikTok videos circulating through all her mom’s WhatsApp groups.[8] Mamdani’s mother, herself, is a distinguished filmmaker, and one social media account commented how Mamdani’s videos used professional filters to lend them a soft and warm aesthetic that contributed to his overall vibe.[9]

Then there were the memes. Back in 2021, I wrote about how the #ConstitutionDAO movement put the culture world on notice with its use of memes. The Trump campaign in 2024 masterfully used memes on social media to amplify and spread the President’s message, and political memes have been effectively used in the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as elections in Europe such as the presidential election in Romania. It has become a truism of political life that the candidate or movement with the best memes can use social media to accumulate electoral power.

In Mamdani’s case, one could argue his entire campaign was a meme, a virally transmitted image or text that uses cultural symbols to convey a social commentary. Mamdani’s campaign, was in essence, a running Internet commentary on the current state of American political life: exorbitantly expensive, out of touch with everyday people, and dominated by an old-guard billionaire class. (Many of Mamdani’s videos and social media posts blasted his competitor Andrew Cuomo for representing the interests of the wealthy elite, echoing the talking points of Bernie and AOC’s “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour). Mamdani and his supporters were not afraid to lean into the irony, snark and humor that make memes successful. There was no single meme that tipped the scales; rather it was the embrace of memes—and Internet culture more broadly—that allowed his policy positions to spread virally through online networks.

Though he won the Democratic primary, it should be noted that Mamdani’s vote total was well below 50%. In a city of 8 million people, Mamdani earned slightly over 432,000 votes. Mamdani also generated strong opposition from those who view his policies as unrealistic; similar to AOC and Bernie, his plan for funding free grocery stores, free public transportation and free childcare is to increase taxes on New York’s wealthiest residents, which may or may not occur. New York has also been a hotbed of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment over the past several years, and Mamdani has embraced these activities as opposed to condemning them. And for all his working-class rhetoric, Mamdani did not perform well in New York’s working-class areas. In both the Bronx and Staten Island, Cuomo won by double-digits.

So, why did Mamdani’s campaign become such a cause célèbre? In large measure because it tapped into a broader debate among Democrats about the future of the party. After resounding losses in November 2024, one faction of Democrats has argued that the party needs to move to the center in order to win back voters. An opposing faction has argued that the party will only win elections if it moves further to the left. The true audience for the Bernie-AOC nationwide tour are Democrat powerbrokers in Washington; the rallies are intended to signal to the party’s leadership that the energy and path to victory are on the left, as opposed to in the middle. The Mamdani campaign was a window into which vision for the Democratic Party’s future has more viability.

That said, having grown up in the New York area and traveled across the U.S. as an adult, I can confidently say that New York City does not equate to the rest of America. To draw conclusions about the nation’s political map from this specific, local election would be fallacious. New York is exorbitantly expensive, exceedingly complicated, extraordinarily diverse and, to quote Taylor Lorenz, extremely online. Bollywood-style TikTok videos complemented with free Knicks-inspired merch may excite 20-somethings in Brooklyn and Queens, but it’s an open question as to whether that will be effective among older voters in Lincoln, Nebraska; Minneapolis, Minnesota; or Houston, Texas.

What has been proven to be effective, however, has been understanding Internet culture and leveraging that as part of a political campaign, particularly one that seeks to activate young voters who wish to see themselves—and people like them—in positions of influence. A campaign that features:

• An eye-catching brand;

• Attractive influencers;

• Short, well-produced videos;

• Campaigns with clear calls-to-action;

• Endorsements from individuals with large followings;

• Cultural references and callbacks;

• A stream of fresh content across multiple platforms; and, of course

• MEMES

Stands a good chance of success. In our current age, social media offers a pathway to political power. If you meme it, they will click.

Have a meme-ing-ful week,

-JS

Notes:

[1] Post by Ride the News on Instagram, June 26, 2025.

[2] “Spotlight: New York City’s Rental Housing Market,” website of the New York City Comptroller, January 17, 2024, https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-rental-housing-market/#:~:text=In%20the%20ACS%2C%20median%20gross%20rent%20in,StreetEasy%20for%20on%2Dline%20available%20listings%20in%202022.

[3] Karen Yi, “Why child care is so expensive in NYC that it’s become a crisis,” Gothamist, April 15, 2024, https://gothamist.com/news/why-child-care-is-so-expensive-in-nyc-that-its-become-a-crisis.

[4] Ben Brachfield, “NYC buses running at slowest speeds since 2019,” AMNY, November 26, 2023, https://www.amny.com/nyc-transit/nyc-buses-running-slowest-speeds-since-2019/.

[5] Erica Brosnan, “Mamdani makes case for generational change in NYC mayoral race,” website of Spectrum News NY1, March 8, 2025, https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/mornings-on-1/2025/03/28/zohran-mandani-pitches-mayoral-campaign.

[6] Emily Bloch, “Zohran Mamdani’s branding went viral for standing out—two Philly creatives responsible,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 26, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/fashion/zohran-mamdani-s-branding-went-viral-for-standing-out-two-philly-creatives-are-responsible/ar-AA1HtMkf.

[7] Post by Ride the News on Instagram, June 26, 2025.

[8] Post by @signull on X, June 25, 2025.

[9] Post by @mansizzzzle on X, June 25, 2025.

-Italo Balbo, military official, Italian Fascist Party

At the end of World War I, Italy sat at a crossroads. The war had killed 650,000 Italian soldiers. Italian politics were fractious and dysfunctional. Regional rivalries had long beset the Italian national project—the south agrarian and largely impoverished, the north industrial and trending towards socialism—and the government in Rome seemed incapable of unifying the country. Unemployment surged, and despite being on the winning side, grievances persisted against the League of Nations for unfair treatment during peace negotiations. A deep cynicism and frustration simmered throughout the country, largely directed at the establishment classes.

Into that cynicism stepped Benito Mussolini. A newspaper editor and columnist of limited name recognition—and who only briefly served in the war—Mussolini weaponized Italy’s economic and political frustrations to fuel his own ambitions. In 1919, he and a small group formed what they called the Fasci di Combattimento, or the “Fighting Fasces,” the first official fascist party in Europe. They promised to cure Italy of its “national cowardice,” and to replace its weakness with strength. They promised to stamp out the socialists and Marxists, and restore law and order. They promised to return Italy to its past glories.

Past glory was endemic to the very foundation of the movement. The term “fasces” came from Ancient Rome, a golden age of the Italian past that was viewed as a model and an inspiration. The fasces were bundles of wooden rods, tied together with leather straps and an axe protruding. They were carried by attendants waiting on Roman high officials, and were meant as a symbolic show of force. They could be used at any moment for corporal punishment, and were intended to instill fear and respect for authority into those who viewed them.

For the Italian fascists of the 1920s, the allusion to Ancient Rome was meant to reinforce the strong leadership that Mussolini and his new party would bring. That strength would be buttressed by violence, including Black-shirted militias inspired by the clothes of Roman laborers. The fascist militias would soon attack their perceived enemies and stage a coup that subsumed the previous Italian government, holding power for twenty years before their collapse in World War II. Millions of Italians supported or enabled them, as did politicians, journalists and citizens in other countries. (Several American newspapers and politicians praised Mussolini during the 1920s and 1930s.) Fascist movements soon emerged throughout Europe and spread across the world, many still in existence today and new ones forming.

What has made fascism so appealing—and why does it remain so attractive one hundred years later? Allow me to use this week’s newsletter to offer some ideas.

“Fascism” and “fascist” are words that are commonly used but not always precisely defined.

Fascism is, at heart, an ideology—a word that is also difficult to define. Generally speaking, an “ideology” is a set of integrated ideas and beliefs held by a specific political group. Fascism, then, is best defined not by particular people (Mussolini, Hitler, etc.) but rather by a set of common beliefs held by a cluster of political movements. Fascists across multiple countries and time periods tend to adhere to a similar set of ideas, and use a similar suite of tactics to put those ideas into practice. Those beliefs include a dictatorial leader at the helm of government; a mandate for fierce loyalty to the party and the nation; a disdain for the structures of democratic governance; and the forcible suppression of dissent and opposition. By virtue of holding such beliefs and executing them across society, a political group comes to embody a fascist ideology.

The notions of an all-powerful leader and compulsory loyalty did not originate with fascism. In the case of Mussolini and the Italian Fascist Party, a range of past ideas—including from the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and Napoleon—were incorporated into their belief system. What distinguished 20th century fascism from its predecessors was the rooting of those beliefs inside the nation-state, intertwined with virulent strands of nationalism. Ancient Rome was an empire comprised of subjects; Italy was a country comprised of individuals bound together by an Italian national identity. That nationality was imagined as having a common past, a common language and a common set of beliefs (e.g., a shared religion of Christianity) that distinguished them from those who did not share those traits. The loyalty that fascism demanded was not solely to the leader and the party, but also to the nation-state and its preferred characteristics.

The most well-known example of 20th century fascism, Nazi Germany, makes these abstruse concepts more concrete. Like their counterparts in Italy, the Nazi Party used force and coercion to assume and hold power, and violence and intimidation to suppress dissent. The party demanded loyalty to the Fuhrer, as well as loyalty to the idea of the German Nation (the “Volk”). Disloyalty to the nation was a form of treachery, and the purity and greatness of the nation became the party’s sacrosanct goal. This warped belief in national purity and racial hierarchy ultimately led to genocide against those deemed inferior or alien, including Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the intellectually and physically disabled.

The violence of fascist movements is what most of the general public remembers. But 20th century fascism was marked by many other beliefs and strategies that were far more mundane. It was these strategies that earned the movement popularity in Italy and Germany, as well as Greece, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, as well as around the world. These included:

• Disdain for international institutions

Both Mussolini and Hitler decried the influence and betrayal of international institutions on their nations. They argued that international organizations—and the elites who supported them—had put shackles on the nation’s greatness and prevented them from achieving territorial and economic expansion. Both Mussolini and Hitler pulled their countries out of the League of Nations under the pretense that they were treated “unfairly” during the peace negotiations after World War I, and they made internationalism a scapegoat for complex political and economic problems. In fascist Romania, the disdain for international institutions was coupled with antisemitism to brand Jews as the “ultimate evil,” representative of a foreign corruption “poisoning” the Romanian nation.

• Lamenting national weakness and promising to cure it with strength

Connected to the alleged influence of international institutions was an obsession with a perceived national “weakness.” The previous regime was always depicted as weak, ineffective and paralyzed by interests other than the glory of the nation state. That weakness, it was argued, degraded the national character and led to embarrassments on the global stage. Fascist leaders promised to make their countries great again by restoring strength, order and control, curing the weaknesses of prior eras in the process.

• A promise to restore law and order through violent displays of force

For fascists, force was the best solution to the threat of disorder caused by rogue and impure elements within society. To Mussolini, for example, that meant “saving” the nation from the dangers of labor unions, socialists and Marxists. To rid them from Italian society, Mussolini’s Black Shirts used violence and intimidation. He also censored the press and later outlawed opposition parties under the guise of maintaining unity.

• A demand for loyalty, unity and unconditional love of country

Loyalty to the leader becomes synonymous with loyalty to the nation; one could not have one without the other. “The heart of Fascism is the love of Italy,” remarked philosopher Benedetto Croce in 1924. When an opposing party leader stood before Italian parliament and condemned fascists for voter intimidation and fraud, he was accused of being a traitor. Ten days later he was kidnapped and murdered. In Romania, where the fascist movement was closely linked with Christianity, the leader of the Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu, positioned himself as a religious figure whose destiny was intertwined with the destiny of the nation. Codreanu wrote in his 1933 handbook that, “all share one thought: the Fatherland, one flag, one commander, one king, one God, one will: that of serving faithfully unto death.’’

• Infallibility of the party leader

Fasicst leaders were always depicted as the chief of the nation who, alone, was solely capable of leading the volk to its rightful place of destiny. In Romania, for example, Codreanu came to be viewed as a Messianic figure. In Nazi Germany, the Fuhrer was supreme. In Italy, signs at Mussolini rallies would read “Il Duce Ha sempre ragione,” or “the leader is always right.”

• Imperialism

Imperialist expansion was fundamental to fascism insofar as it was necessary to further the prestige and power of the nation and satisfy its growing economic and geopolitical appetites. This was articulated by Mussolini in his 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, in which he equated the glory of the nation with territorial expansion. “The growth of empire,” it read, “is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist: any renunciation is a sign of decay and death.” International institutions that limited the fascist state through treaties or “unfair” agreements contributed to its decadence.

• Attacks on government employees and academic institutions

For fascists, ideas that were alien or divisive were a threat. The government bureaucracy had to be loyal to the leader and the party in order to effectuate the ideological change that society needed. As such, the previous bureaucracy was always portrayed as the enemy, responsible for the suppression of the people. Professors and scholars, too, were deemed to be among the international elites who betrayed both the national glory and loyalty to the leader. As such, they were attacked or intimidated into silence.

• The recruitment of youth to carry on the cause

The Italian Fascists recruited their youth to “Believe! Obey! Fight!” It was the Italian youth that would inspire the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany. In fascist Bulgaria, the youth were envisioned to be spiritually revived, nationally-unified and standard-bearers for future strength.

In addition to political elements, fascism also included cultural, artistic and historical elements. A shared national culture and a unified national identity were both critical to the fascist ideology, and a common tactic to achieve them was to seize control of artistic, cultural and historical institutions in order to reinforce conformity and consensus.

On the ten-year anniversary of the fascist takeover of Rome, for example, Mussolini mounted an art exhibit, the mostra della rivoluzionefascista (“the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution”) replete with art, documents, and historical relics. The exhibit paid homage to the idea of a unified national culture. The fascist coup was celebrated as a pivotal moment in Italian history, with the Fascists going so far as to retroactively restart the calendar to making October 28, 1922 the first day of the year. The fascists were always the heroes; the enemies were the political Left, the socialists, communists and old-guard politicians. The exhibition was a huge success, attracting more than 2.8 million visitors; “fascism found responsive audiences, ready to have ‘Italianness’ imposed upon them,” in the words of historian Marla Stone.

The defeat of the Axis by the Allies in World War II drove European fascism into the shadows. Yet, fascism as an ideology did not disappear, and elements of it remained throughout the 20th century. In the 21st century, it has seen a revival, albeit in different forms and powered by different technologies, including social media. Why has fascist ideology proven to be so durable?

First, it should be noted that fear is a central component of fascism. Many who go along with fascist movements do so not out of genuine love for the cause but out of fear of what may happen to them if they do not conform. In the litany of fascist takeovers, the theme of appeasement recurs over and over. Fascist leaders were repeatedly appeased by those who calculated that they had too much to lose from standing up to them, or that they had enough political and social power to mitigate their effects. The leaders of the Italian government did both; they feared losing their elite status and they falsely believed their elite status would allow them to contain Mussolini. The German government of the early 1930s felt similarly; they feared Hitler but also felt that they could appease him by making him Chancellor. In both instances, they miscalculated dearly.

Still, fascism has had millions of devoted adherents throughout the decades; by 1932, there were 20 million Germans in the Nazi Party. Political psychologists have undertaken several studies to unpack the appeal, arguing that such political movements meet very real emotional and psychological needs for people. Fascist ideology promises to offer a sense of certainty, stability, identity and belongingness that individuals crave. Fascism also promises safety and security. It purports to uphold tradition, hierarchy and order. And it responds to anxieties about dangers in the world with concrete actions that reinforce predictability and control. It turns out that millions of human beings seek such order, structure and certainty in order to function—especially during periods of economic or geopolitical upheaval. Such was the case after the chaos of World War I—and in a post-pandemic, A.I.-dominated world, a similar climate exists today.

Political theorists and historians have their own explanations as to how and why fascism emerges. The British literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote that fascism “only emerges when it has to.” “For fascism to grow rapidly,” he continued, “[economic] crisis must coincide with a defeat and demoralization of the working class.” Such was the case in Germany and Italy after World War I and in the 1920s; deep demoralization of workers coupled with unemployment, economic recession and The Great Depression. One can see a similar formula today; a demoralized working class abandoned by corporate and political elites, coupled with record-high inflation and a global pandemic.

Beyond political psychology and cultural theory, there are also more mundane appeals of fascist ideology. Fascism thrives on spectacle: large rallies, choreographed marches in matching uniforms, beautiful propaganda projected through the media. In different eras, oral histories of participants recount being captivated and mobilized by such spectacles with feelings of wonder, amazement, euphoria and pride. The genius of effective fascist propaganda lays in tying the individual participant to the broader spectacle on an emotional level; in other words, using the majesty of the large event (a rally, a parade, etc.) to manufacture a feeling of common identity and belonging. Being part of the movement to seize back a country, or to expand the power and prestige of the nation, becomes an emotional experience that even the most disenfranchised citizen can feel empowered by.

Ultimately, fascism is about power more than anything else, and that power can be both attractive and intoxicating. The French philosopher Simone Weil expressed this well in her anti-fascist writings of the 1930s. In one of her more potent works, Weil suggested that ideologies such as fascism played the role of a “phantom” in contemporary society, i.e., an illusion with no physical reality. That was because a fascist ideology was ultimately geared towards increasing the power and prestige of the nation at all costs, yet that power and prestige could never be accurately measured in the real world—and no nation ever thought it had enough of either. The need to increase national glory and prestige was a phantom cause that was continually chased but never actualized, instigating a cycle of violence and repression in service of that goal and perpetuating the very need for fascism itself. “Ideologies often promise things that they do not actually deliver,” political psychologist John T. Jost once wrote, “and this is an important part of the story of why people are attracted to them.”

The fasces in Ancient Rome were a custom of significant complexity. Evidence suggests the Romans inherited the idea from the Etruscans, and at different periods of the empire, different numbers of attendants waiting on different levels of the hierarchy would carry different amounts of fasces for different reasons.

Over the subsequent centuries, most of that complexity was lost or forgotten. During the Renaissance, the fasces became symbols of stable governments. During the American and French Revolutions, they evolved into a symbol of strength through unity; one stick alone was fragile, but bundled together the sticks became unbreakable and lethal. Fasces are still visible today across American civic spaces: at the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, in the Minnesota Supreme Court and even on the flag for the Borough of Brooklyn. Fasces are everywhere in the U.S., if you know where to look.

Perhaps that explains two final aspects of the fascist appeal: (1) its iconography remains littered across our civic landscape, and (2) as a symbol it has proven to be very malleable and adaptable. That is often a hallmark of an ideology that endures; it can mean one thing in one era, but shift meaning in a different era with equal potency and effect. In the present day, our world feels destabilized by technology; the unraveling of institutions; political division; and ecological collapse. A message of strength and unity, coupled with promises of greatness, reinforced with highly effective visual symbolism, can be quite appealing. As the late historian Charles F. Delzell once wrote, Italians after World War I faced the choice of “muddling through disorder and economic disarray under often inept, yet essentially benevolent democratic regimes, or falling in line behind a decisive but brutal dictatorship. Italians chose the latter. They embraced the strong man’s notions of a grand New Age. But Mussolini’s intoxicating vision of Italy as a great power, they eventually discovered, was a disastrous delusion.”

It seems that each generation must learn that lesson for itself.

Have a good week,

-JS

It was a long-way off, as I was still quite junior in my career when I entertained the idea. But what a privilege it could be to represent the United States in advocating for the importance of the humanities to American public life—and to be able to distribute much-needed funding across the U.S. to celebrate and explore what it means to be human.

Perhaps, in the future, that aspiration will return. It will, however, necessitate the existence of the agency, which is now unclear. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for all intents and purposes shut down the NEH this past week. The demolition began in mid-March when the Chair of the endowment, Shelly C. Lowe, was forced to resign. Then, this past Monday, reports leaked to the press and advocacy groups that DOGE planned to cut the agency and suspend its funding. At approximately 11:00 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, humanities organizations nationwide began to receive letters stating that their grants had been terminated in order to “safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” By Thursday evening, most NEH employees were placed on administrative leave. By Friday morning, it was clear that nearly all NEH employees would be RIF’ed, the government term for being laid off (RIF = Reduction in Force).

Simultaneously, DOGE was dismantling The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Long-time readers of this newsletter know that I was once a Global Fellow at The Wilson Center in the History and Policy Program. The Wilson Center had been a second home for me at various points during my career; when I was at the Library of Congress, we worked very closely with the Wilson Center, and, later, The center helped launch my book History, Disrupted. In mid-March, the President signed an Executive Order to reduce The Wilson Center to the minimum presence allowable by law. This week, the head of The Wilson Center, former Ambassador Mark Green, was removed, and by the end of the week nearly all Wilson Center staff were placed on administrative leave. Only four employees and one member of DOGE remained.

This all happened alongside the extirpation of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The same Executive Order from mid-March mandated that IMLS be reduced to the minimum function allowable by law. After installing a temporary director at the end of March, this past Monday all IMLS staff were placed on administrative leave with their access to IMLS emails revoked. The 2025 grant applications were placed on hold and millions of dollars in appropriated funds to support libraries were canceled. IMLS board members who questioned the legality of DOGE’s actions were also removed from their positions.

The Wilson Center, NEH and IMLS accounted for roughly $493 million annually that the American government invested in the humanities. That sounds like a lot of money—and it is! When I traveled overseas with the State Department, I had the privilege of telling my audiences that the U.S. government and American taxpayers had, for decades, been extraordinary supporters of humanistic inquiry. Nearly half-a-billion dollars each year supported research and programs devoted to music, poetry, art, ethics, religion, philosophy, history, language and literature. These investments included events of national significance such as a conference on the history of U.S. migrant policy at The Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., to programs with hyper-local significance such as a speaker series for teenagers at the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center in Guntersville, Alabama.

In one week, the funding for most of these programs has been withdrawn. In Nevada, the Nevada Humanities Council received approximately 75% of its funding from NEH. The sudden cessation of NEH means that the Nevada Humanities Council may cease operations. In Michigan, federal grants represented 90% of the budget of the Michigan Humanities Council, essentially putting that organization out of business. In Colorado, approximately 60% of the state’s library operations budget came from IMLS, meaning all Colorado libraries risk closures and layoffs. National History Day, a nationwide competition since 1974 that challenges students in grades 6 through 12 to research a historical topic and then present about it to a panel of judges, overnight lost more than $330,000 in funding, putting this year’s competition in jeopardy and making any future competitions impossible without new philanthropic support. Research programs at The Wilson Center such as the Indo-Pacific Program and Global Europe Program have posted on social media that they are shutting down all of their events and scholarships.

While these actions occurred in one week, the change were years in formation. In 2017, the President’s budget proposed eliminating NEH, IMLS, The Wilson Center and numerous other agencies. At the time, the rationale for eliminating NEH was “[the] Administration does not consider the activities within this agency to be core Federal responsibilities.” The rationale for eliminating the IMLS was that its efforts were duplicative of state, local and private efforts to support libraries. The Wilson Center, the administration said then, could be “supported through private fundraising”—plus, the Administration did not consider the center to be “core Federal responsibilities.”

Members of Congress refuted the President’s budget request and continued to fund these agencies. During the Biden Administration, many of their programs received slight funding increases. The current administration learned not to make the same mistake twice, though; instead of relying on the Legislative Branch to eliminate the funding, the administration reasoned that it could use the powers of the Executive Branch, vested within the Constitution, to reduce agencies to their lowest levels required by law, then allow Congress to zero-out what remained in next year’s budget. That appears to be what will happen, as the Senate and House execute a complex legislative maneuver to pass next year’s budget along party lines, including trillions of dollars in cuts. Whether the actions of the Executive Branch were, in fact, constitutional will be decided by the Courts.

Is supporting the humanities a “core Federal responsibility”?

For proponents of limited government, the answer to this question has, for decades, been “no.” Inspired by economists such as Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, the public arguments for limited government have morphed depending on the news cycle, but the overarching sentiment has remained the same: if something is meant to exist, it will be created or serviced by the private sector. Government works best when it stays out of the way of the private sector delivering goods and services directly to consumers. If the humanities are meant to exist, they will be underwritten by private donors or by private industry. Government should not be involved in propping them up, and should limit its activities to only critical functions such as national defense, law and order, policing and settling disputes among citizens through the courts.

Smaller government also means lower taxes, which appeals to many conservatives and libertarians. All government programs require revenue, and revenue is principally collected through taxation. The less the government spends, the less taxation becomes necessary. In this theoretical framework, government spending is also responsible for inflation. Drastically cutting government spending is theorized to drive down inflation, lower the need for taxation, and spur the private sector to step in where government has retreated, ushering in a new era of economic growth. But DOGE is also guided by an ideology that believes there are, simply, some activities that the Federal government was never intended to partake in, and doing so constitutes broad government overreach. Such activities might confer benefits on certain groups of people, but even so, those costs should not be diffused across the broader population.

I happen to disagree with this interpretation on the role of government—and so did President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1965, President Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. The law stated, in part, that “the encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for private and local initiative, are also appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government.” The law went on to state that, “an advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.”

This vision did not emerge out of a vacuum. The drive for an endowment that would support the arts and the humanities—what became the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities—was very much informed by the emerging concerns of the decade. The Space Race, the proliferation of television as a “vast wasteland,” to quote former FCC chairman Newton Minnow, and the passions of scholars, journalists, philanthropists and senior government officials convinced Members of Congress from both parties that American global leadership and democracy would not endure through technology alone. Rather, as the legislation stated, “democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.” The act continued, “It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Initially focused on large national projects, starting in the 1970s the humanities endowment instituted a “state committee” model to reach local populations in more effective ways and address local questions. By the 1980s, these “state committees” had transformed into the “state humanities councils” that we have today (e.g., Nevada Humanities Council, Michigan Humanities Council, etc). Since the state humanities councils have very few staff and serve the entirety of their states, Congress charged NEH with ensuring that a portion of its federal funding each year got passed to the states and territories for them to support their local programs. Over the years these funds have helped support libraries, museums, historical sites, high schools, colleges, lecture series, oral histories, historical reenactments, book festivals, teacher institutes, digital encyclopedia and fellowships for writers, educators and scholars.

The late 1960s also saw the creation of The Wilson Center, emerging from a similar set of historical conditions. The Wilson Center was the nation’s official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson. As a university president who became President of the United States, the Congress of the late 1960s believed that a scholarly center that bridged the worlds of academia and policymaking would be an appropriate tribute to the former President, in addition to helping America win the Cold War by attracting international scholars to Washington, D.C. to help inform policy and strengthen alliances. The late James H. Billington, formerly the U.S. Librarian of Congress, led The Wilson Center during the 1980s. (Fun fact: apart from Members of Congress and Library of Congress staff, The Wilson Center was the only institution allowed to check out books from the Library of Congress.) Billington was a historian of Russia and the Soviet empire, and during his tenure The Wilson Center played an important role in advising the Reagan Administration as it navigated the Cold War intellectually and diplomatically.

The last of the three organizations, IMLS, was created in the 1990s when Congress combined two pre-existing programs: the Institute of Museum Services, which had been part of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities since 1976, and the Library Programs Office, which had been part of the Department of Education since 1956. At the time of its creation, the Clinton Administration noted in its policy rationale that “the arts, the humanities, and museum and library services are essential to the well-being, health, vitality, and democracy of our Nation. They are the soul of America, reflecting our multicultural and democratic experience.”

A significant portion of IMLS funding each year was diverted to the 125,000 libraries and 21,000 history museums in the U.S., both large and small. IMLS particularly focused on supporting libraries in Black communities, Hispanic communities, tribal nations, and rural areas with limited Internet access. As just one example, in its most recent Congressional Budget Justification, IMLS noted that it would deliver approximately $3 million to Native American and Native Hawaiian museums and libraries in order to help them preserve their heritage, train their workforce and support the National Tribal Broadband Summit, i.e. high-speed Internet for tribal nations.

For the past 60 years, then, a majority of Americans from all walks of life and on all sides of the political spectrum have felt that supporting the humanities were a Federal responsibility—not exclusively, but at least in part. That’s because the United States has never led the world based on our military might or scientific prowess alone—though both certainly have contributed. Part of our global leadership emanates from our powerful and unique ideas about democracy, freedom, human rights, diversity, tolerance, pluralism and good governance. Those ideas do not form on their own; they emerge from debate, discussion, research and critical inquiry, which is what the humanities do. The humanities use frameworks such as ethics, religion, philosophy and history to ask critical questions about ourselves, our society and our behavior. By asking those questions about our past, we discover better answers for the future.

This is not a modern-day phenomenon; it is a tradition that dates back to the very founding of the nation. American history is replete with institutions that today we recognize as humanities organizations: the American Philosophical Society, established by Benjamin Franklin in 1743; the Library of Congress, established by John Adams in 1800; the New York Public Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia both established in the 1890s; and the Federal Art Project, the Federal Writers' Project, and the Federal Theatre Project during the Great Depression. Asking critical questions about society is endemic to American democracy, with deep roots that extend into both the private and public sectors.

It is worth recalling, too, the text from the 1965 legislation about technology: that we must foster education, the arts and the humanities so that we become masters of our technology and not its “unthinking servants.” These words were written during a period where rapid innovations in science and technology, such as space travel and television, threatened to dilute American intellectual and cultural life. National leaders, recognizing the threats, stepped in to ensure that critical inquiry and reflective thinking would remain a bedrock of the American democratic experiment. Today, in an age of Artificial Intelligence, when we are, literally, outsourcing our thinking and writing to machines and Large Language Models, one would argue that we need more funding for the humanities, not less, particularly from the federal government. Indeed, this has been my clarion call for the past few years since History, Disrupted was released; in order to counterbalance the overweight status we afford technology in our lives, policymakers would be wise to increase spending on the humanities, lest we lose our humanity altogether.

What does all of this mean for the humanities in the United States—and for American society more broadly?

Several of the administration’s Executive Orders are being challenged in court, so we shall await to see whether the actions by the Administration were Constitutional or whether they overstepped their Constitutional authority. And we will await to see what Congress decides to do with the federal budget; I encourage all readers in the U.S. to contact their representatives and let them know your feelings.

In the short-term, however, many wonderful colleagues and friends will lose their jobs and many wonderful organizations will not be able to continue their work. Teachers will lose training opportunities; libraries will shutter services; museums will close their doors; oral history projects will stop conducting interviews; historic homes and houses will lose the ability to maintain their properties; scholars will lose funding to conduct research; international collaborations will be put on hold; and valuable artifacts from our nation’s history will be neglected. Will that make enough of a difference in American life for voters to notice? That likely depends on who you ask. But there is no doubt that there will be tens-of-thousands of Americans who are affected, and a countless number of ideas that will never get formed, questions that will never get asked, and answers that will never be formulated.

There is always the prospect that private philanthropy could step in where government has retreated. For the moment that seems unlikely; nearly $500 million each year dispersed among 125,000 libraries and 21,000 museums across 55 states and territories is difficult to replace, at least as quickly as institutions will need it to stay afloat. In general, over the past two decades, philanthropy has moved away from funding the humanities. Many organizations that used to fund humanities research have stopped, and while older generations tended to support museums, libraries and historical societies in their communities, younger generations have shown little appetite for such philanthropy. More broadly throughout American society, humanities disciplines have been in decline, humanities majors have dwindled, humanities departments at universities have shuttered, and the humanities as a broad umbrella of disciplines have been dwarfed in cultural and societal relevance by science, technology, engineering and math. The Federal government was one of the last stable sources of funding; without that support, it is not an exaggeration to say that the entire field faces existential collapse in the United States.

For complicity in this, we must all look in the mirror, as the collapse of the humanities is all of our faults. It shouldn’t have been the case that the 90% of any humanities organization’s budget would be from the federal government, or that humanities buildings on college campuses nary receive visits from incoming students. Each of us bears responsibility for the fading relevance of humanistic inquiry from public life as we have collectively prioritized business, tech, politics and entertainment while neglecting our intellectual and cultural needs. Perhaps this week will be a wake-up call that we must do more, speak louder and contribute more money in order to ensure that the humanities survive, and that our fellow citizens retain the wisdom and vision necessary to navigate these turbulent times.

Long-time readers of this newsletter know that for the past few years I had the honor to represent the United States overseas as a speaker with the U.S. Department of State. My role was to speak about disinformation and media literacy, but invariably as a representative of the United States our conversations would turn towards the state of American democracy more broadly.

On each mission I embarked on, I would comment to my audiences—diplomats and students alike—how imperative it was for a democracy to have a thriving intellectual culture rooted in historical and humanistic study. It simply was not possible to have a true democracy without them, because in a democracy you have to be able to ask critical questions of your elected representatives… and you won’t have the ability to ask those questions if you have not empowered your citizens to look at the past with honesty, accuracy and scrutiny.

The true greatness of America has always stemmed from our freedom to ask such questions, challenge authority, and demand better from our leaders and ourselves. That is what the humanities offer: a chance to appreciate all the beautiful things that humans do—from love and religion, to poetry and literature—as well as recognize all the horrible things that humans are capable of. You could make an argument that the federal government shouldn’t be involved in that business, but it is an argument that I will never abide. A government for the people and by the people has an obligation to support the study of those people in all their complexity.

Studying the humanities is an essential component of democracy. A government that abandons that responsibility is one that, I fear, might be willing to, one day, abandon democracy itself.

Have a good week,

-JS

Patricia Dowd is a name that many Americans likely do not know.

She was the first American to die from Covid-19, found dead in her home by her daughter on February 6, 2020. Initially ruled a heart attack, an autopsy revealed she was positive for Covid-19 and had died from complications from the infection. She was described by her daughter, Kaila Dowd, as a best friend who “gave the best hugs.”

Patricia Dowd’s name can be found publicly online, though not without some effort. She is mentioned on Wikipedia, and there are a handful of news stories about her, largely from 2020 and 2021 in California-based media outlets. Her death was reported as a local story, of interest to the San Jose regional community where she lived. To the national media, she was a data point in a broader debate as to when the American government knew (or should have known) that Covid-19 was circulating throughout the country.

Patricia Dowd represents one of the many tragedies of the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in 2019 and hit the United States in full intensity five years ago this month: while we drowned in a sea of data, graphs, charts and trendlines about the virus, we knew little of the names, stories and faces who lost their lives. Approximately, 1.2 million Americans died of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic—and Americans are still dying from the disease, though, thankfully in far fewer numbers. The fatalities are more than the Spanish Flu, World War II, Vietnam War and 9/11 put together, a staggering loss unprecedented in American history.

Yet over the past five years, the public sphere has rarely spoken about the dead. We know more about the January 6 rioters than we do people that died from coronavirus. Nowhere in America, to my knowledge, are all of the names of Covid-19’s victims listed in a single comprehensive database, and only a few grassroots efforts have attempted to even do so.

Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg has led one such effort. In fall 2021, Firstenberg, a D.C.-based artist and activist, conceived of and installed a temporary exhibition on the National Mall of more than 701,000 white flags, one for every individual killed by Covid-19 up until that point. Originally envisioned as 666,000 flags, during the “delta variant” surge of 2021 she and her volunteers added, on average, 2,000 flags each day—roughly the equivalent of the 9/11 terror attacks every 24 hours.

Simultaneously, with the help of a software engineer named Jeremiah Lindemann, they established the “In America, Covid Lost Loved Ones” website, with stories and photographs submitted by families and friends. A sample of the deceased include:

• Gina Ilbery, December 2020, Illinois: “Even in the hospital with COVID just before she passed my mom, Gina Ilbery, was sending my wife ways to restore the table she gave to us and ways to renovate our house. She was always thinking of others and would do anything she could for them. She taught me the meaning of selflessness. She was an amazing woman, and an excellent role model. I miss her every day.”

• Loretta Banks, November 2020, Arkansas: “A wonderful sister and a loving person. She was the mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great grandmother, sister, aunt and friend to us all. Always smiling, always willing to lend a helping hand or her famous motherly advice. She never left the company of anyone without telling them that she loved them. And she meant it. She was loved by all and will be missed by all those who were fortunate enough to know her.”

• Holmes “Snuffy” Smith, October 2020, Louisiana: Pipe welder, “Husband, Daddy, Popa, Son, Brother, Uncle, Friend…you are missed beyond description, loved for a million lifetimes.”

• Frank Ojeda Jr., August 2021, Washington state: “A kind and gentle man. Born in Cameron TX, he was the oldest brother to 11 siblings, a husband, and father to two daughters and one son. He loved his family, always making them the center of his life. He loved sports and was an umpire for youth baseball.”

• Casey Marie Retz, August 2021, Montana: “This beautiful soul was a nurse, mother, wife, sister, daughter, grandma, friend, she lived loved and laughed for 64 years. Leaving behind so much family that is heartbroken.”

• Jeffery Scott Denzer, March 2021, South Dakota: “We honor our husband & dad, Jeff Denzer, 54, who fought a tough, 4 mo. battle with Covid. He lived by the words, “Be a giver, not a taker.”

• Eliza Grigsby, December 2020, Kentucky: “a loving wife, mother and grandmother who is missed every day.”

• Thomas Dale Coon, May 2020, Maine: “Thomas Coon “The Rogue Ranger” an Allagash Ranger for 25 years in the North Maine Woods. A friend to many and loved by all who knew him!”

• James Ryan Tomberlin, September 2021, Georgia: “Ryan was my husband of 18 years and my best friend. He was only 41 years old, leaving behind me and our daughter who is now 17 years old…He impacted so many lives and has left a huge void in the lives of those who loved him.”

• Joan Earnest Skup, December 2020, Florida: “Joan was an artistic person, always looking for the next craft project to do. She loved making arts and crafts for her family. She was married to her husband, David, for 48 years and had two wonderful boys.”

These are only ten out of the tens-of-thousands of victims. Firstenberg estimates that she documented 20,000 individuals—meaning that more than 680,000 flags remain unattached to a specific person. Her efforts ceased at the end of 2021, the flags now preserved in her archive, meaning that more than 500,000 deceased Americans never even got a white flag.

Will the Americans who died during the pandemic ever receive a permanent, lasting memorial? Just past the five-year anniversary of the pandemic’s beginning, it may feel premature to ask such a question; however, history shows that, in fact, conversations about how to memorialize a tragedy can begin in the very immediate aftermath.

For example, after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 167 and injured 684 people, “unsolicited memorial ideas poured into the mayor’s and governor’s offices within hours,” writes historian Edward T. Linenthal.[1] Within months, the mayor of Oklahoma City had convened a task force of 350 people that included survivors and family members who, through discussion and negotiation, devised a plan to create a space for remembrance and mourning, coupled with a civic space to “protest the shattering impact of violence.”[2] Included in the memorial was a list of names.

The inclusion of names drew inspiration from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which also did not take very long to come to fruition. U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975 with more than 58,000 Americans killed. Only four years later, a movement had emerged to build a memorial, led by the veterans themselves. The wall opened three years after that, in 1982, “warp speed in Washington,” according to founder Jan Scruggs.[3]

On the flip side, there are memorialization processes that have taken decades, if not centuries. It took a century to build memorials to the victims of the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, which killed more than 675,000 people. “When I looked for memorials to the flu, I found nothing,” said Brian Zecchinelli to the New York Times in 2020. One of the flu’s victims was Zecchinelli’s grandfather, who died at age 35. On the 100-year anniversary of the influenza pandemic, Zecchinelli commissioned a five-ton granite memorial in his hometown of Barre, Vermont. Other local memorials do exist in the U.S. and around the world. Yet, America still does not have a federal memorial to that pandemic, even as it scarred an entire generation.

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS Quilt became a temporary, grassroots memorial on the National Mall that was powered by art and activism, similar to Firstenberg’s white flags. It represented the more than 400,000 Americans who died of HIV/AIDS, devastating families and communities in ways similar to the Spanish flu. (Like the white flags, the AIDS Quilt only bore the names of a fraction of the total dead). The AIDS Quilt had a profound effect on those who saw it (including me), and inspired the creation of a permanent AIDS Memorial in San Francisco that, eventually, was elevated to a national memorial via legislation.

“Memorializing is a tricky business,” said long-time public historian Richard Rabinowitz, a mentor of mine who has worked on nearly every type of public history exhibit, park or memorial in the U.S. during his amazing career. I called Richard on Zoom earlier this month asking him to help me think through ideas for this essay.

“Memorialization has radically changed in your lifetime,” he began by telling me. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a major break, in many ways. 9/11, Oklahoma City—the people who are being commemorated are victims, not heroes.”

From Richard’s vantage point, the American memorials of yesteryear were often singular individuals (actual or imagined) erected onto pedestals in honorific poses. “After the Civil War, it took about 20 to 30 years, and every New England town put up a statue of the common soldier,” Richard said. “They were understood to be heroic.”

Somewhere along the line that changed. “As we’ve lost our attachment to the common good—or the notion that we have a responsibility to the common good,” Richard continued, “we’ve lost the idea that those people who fight for the common good are somehow heroes. Instead, we are commemorating episodes of shared pain. That is a remarkable change.”

To further the point, Richard cited the American Merchant Mariner’s Memorial in Battery Park, at the lower tip of Manhattan. A beautiful memorial, it commemorates the more than 8,300 mariners who were killed at sea during World War II and beyond. Conceived in 1976 and opened in 1991, today almost no one goes there, and barely anyone leaves flowers or objects as they do at the Vietnam Wall or in Oklahoma City. The Mariner Memorial is a call back to a prior form of memorialization that honors a select group of heroes through allegorical figures cast in valorous poses, a form that has fallen out of favor, replaced by modern modes of memorialization that encapsulate shared and collective victimhood.

“People want a voice now,” is how Suzanne Firstenberg put it to me in a Zoom call that she graciously agreed to for this article. “They expect it. In my art, it’s very often now a public participatory art, because people need to be seen and heard.”

Firstenberg attributed that change to social media, which surely has amplified it. But it pre-dates social media, which is what makes the Vietnam Wall that much more remarkable. Erected in the early 1980’s, the architect Maya Lin, in some ways, predicted the rise of the selfie and the participatory involvement in memorialization. “The genius of Maya Lin was to make the stone reflective,” Richard explained, “so the visitors would connect themselves to it. As you approach [the memorial], you become a bigger figure because you are coming to a mirroring surface. You become a larger part of the story as you get closer to it… It’s all very brilliantly done.”

Lin’s design also managed to diffuse the divisiveness that engulfed the Vietnam War, listing 58,000 names chronologically and eschewing physical representations of soldiers in heroic poses (though some were added later to appease veterans’ groups). The effect, according to the National Park Service (NPS), was to offer a site for healing and remembrance in a manner that resembles a “turning of a page.”[4] The wall “offers family members of the deceased and the general visitor a place to meet, remember and honor those who gave so much,” the NPS goes onto say.

The Covid-19 pandemic, similar to Vietnam, divided society politically as well as socio-economically. In that respect, any potential memorial to the victims of coronavirus could take inspiration from Lin’s designs to help heal a fractured nation and move it forward. After all, national memorials exist, at the end of the day, to further the cause of the nation-state. They are intended to demonstrate the state’s capacity to recover and endure. The memorials at Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center are as much about the continuance of the national project of the United States as they are about honoring particular individuals. It is, in fact, the embedding of individual loss into a broader survival narrative that gives the deaths their civic meaning.

Those who proactively choose to “make the ultimate sacrifice” on behalf of the nation, to use the language of war, are usually the ones for whom the state repays with memorialization. That illusion of choice—choosing to die in a national cause through service—is what is being commemorated. Something is presumed to have come from that sacrifice: honor, legacy, pride, the glory of the nation, etc.

At this moment, that is a challenge that bedevils any national attempt at a Covid-19 memorial. The victims of Covid-19 did not choose to make an ultimate sacrifice by enlisting in a war or performing a duty in a military uniform. They died reluctantly, or unexpectedly, often sheltered in their homes while a nation ripped itself apart. They did not run out of a foxhole or plant flags on a hill. Perhaps most sobering, nothing has come from their sacrifice that has bettered the nation. There has not been an improved public health infrastructure, a better investment in pandemic response, a commitment to global cooperation on disease, or an increase in vaccination rates. The nation-state has not recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic—and who knows if it ever will?

Memorials can be part of that recovery. Take, as an example, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, built to memorialize our national shame of more than 4,400 Black Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. The site has helped to advance racial healing in the U.S., but alone it does not have the capacity to repair our racial wounds entirely. Indeed, as recent backlash against DEI and “critical race theory” has shown, the “victims” in the story of American race relations have been perversely inverted to not be the generations of African Americans who suffered indignity, but rather the White Americans forced to learn about it.

A similar dynamic has unfolded in the case of Covid-19, where some of the living have made themselves into the greater victims than the deceased. The true victims, we’ve been preposterously led to believe, were the ones who were forced to wear masks, or get vaccinated, or stay home from school… not the people who actually died. These individuals would have you believe that their sacrifices were so mighty that they were the ones that should be memorialized.

For Richard Rabinowitz, this preoccupation with victimhood stems from a broader collapse of the collective in the United States. “In the 1950’s, there was much more energy in the word ‘collective,’” he recalled. “There were individual stories but a real sense of collectivity. We have lost that entirely in the United States, we just do not have that idea.”

Richard continued: “I can remember the Salk vaccine [against polio] being introduced and that was a civic event. You had to stand up in a classroom, went to a community health center, everybody lined up nicely… it was an amazing public event and there was no opposition. Jonas Salk was a genius. I don’t see that happening at all… As Robert Putnam would say, we’re being vaccinated alone.” [Putnam is the author of the acclaimed book Bowling Alone]. Our loneliness and disconnectedness fuel our cynicism and victimization, which is then exploited and weaponized by political actors.

The white flags on the National Mall have not been the only memorial to Covid-19’s victims. Over the past five years, several grassroots projects emerged to memorialize the fallen and lend support to survivors. Inspired by her mother working on the AIDS Quilt, a 13-year-old girl named Madeleine started a Covid Memorial Quilt project in 2020. Today, the panels are on display at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix. A website called WhoWeLost.org was launched by a woman in Kentucky, collecting stories of coronavirus victims from across the U.S. and beyond. There is a podcast devoted to Covid-19 fatalities and a Facebook page for Covid victims with 13,000 followers. There is even a National Covid Memorial augmented reality (AR) project that is attempting to collect all the stories of coronavirus victims and raise funds, as well as lobby Congress, for a permanent memorial that would “honor all 1.2+ million people lost in the U.S.—not as numbers, but as people.”

A public memorial to Covid-19’s victims—with its potential beauty, solemnity and civic architecture—could become a space for public reflection that takes the chaos and violence of the pandemic and turns it into a symbol of a nation repairing its collective civic culture. But that would require sealing ourselves off from Covid-19, a task that has proven difficult with the virus still a threat. Events such as 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, as horrific as they were, had finite endings. Covid-19, both the virus and the vitriol around it, have kept going, compounded by one global calamity after another: wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and new viruses. “The destruction is still ongoing; we cannot stanch the bleeding,” Richard said.

For her part, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg believes America must create a permanent memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic in Washington, D.C., for no other reason than to support the continued memory of it. Such a memorial, in her view, would not be one that “gets politicized or that tries to interpret the history.” Rather, she said, the purpose would be “simply creating a beautiful place—a glade—where people can bring their grief… A place where people can leave, in some way, in some form, a piece of themselves.”

By leaving a piece of themselves, the visitors would have a voice in the repair of the nation, and feel as though they are seen and heard, which is its own form of healing. At the same time, the 1.2 million Americans who died would finally have their anonymous data points personified into names, stories and voices. Public memorials speak, after all; they have a civic voice, an artistic voice and a popular voice. The Covid-19 dead have long been silent, more than one million Americans with far too little representation in the public sphere.

Will the nation that silenced them ever allow them to be heard?

Have a good week,

-JS

For paid subscribers only: listen to a behind-the-scenes podcast about this article, featuring my interviews with artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg and public historian Richard Rabinowitz.

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Notes

[1] Edward T. Linenthal, “Oklahoma City, September 11, and the ‘Lessons’ of History,” History News, winter 2002, vol. 57, no. 1 (winter 2002), pp. 12-15.

[2] Linenthal, “Oklahoma City, September 11, and the ‘Lessons’ of History.”

[3] Katie Lange, “Remembering Vietnam: The Story Behind 'The Wall,'” U.S. Department of Defense, March 8, 2022, https://www.defense.gov/News/FeatureStories/Story/Article/2979448/remembering-vietnam-the-story-behind-the-wall.

[4] “Introduction to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” National Park Service, November 16, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=F7122BC7-1DD8-B71C-07CC0CDC91E91CFA.

In October 2023, I flew to Halle, Germany, to speak at a gathering of documentary filmmakers that was called the “Progress History Summit” (Progress being the name of an East German archival film company).

It was a wonderful conference, and included some of the most remarkable film footage I’ve ever seen. One example was footage from the Iran-Iraq War shot behind the Iranian front lines, the only time I’ve seen such footage from that 1980s-era conflict. There was also color footage of nuclear tests conducted by the U.S., Great Britain and France during the height of the Cold War.

But, by far, the most harrowing footage was from Ukraine. Shot by Anton Yaremchuk, a Ukrainian cinematographer and filmmaker based in Kramatorsk, the footage he showed was from Bucha. It was too ghastly to describe, and, quite frankly, so awful that I’m loathe to say much about it. In one scene, the cameraman descends into the basement of a building to find civilians massacred with bullets through their necks.

In the early days of the Ukraine war, the massacre in Bucha was supposed to be a wake-up call to the world about the true intent of Russia’s full-scale invasion. This was not about alleged provocations by Ukraine or supposed expansions of NATO. Had it been, those could have been resolved diplomatically. This illegal and immoral invasion was about something more sinister: the complete erasure from the map of the Ukrainian people, history and heritage. It was an invasion with genocidal intentions that had poisoned the minds of its aggressors to the point that binding the hands of unarmed civilians, executing them, and burying them in unmarked graves was justifiable within the first months of fighting.

Bucha was only the tip of the iceberg of the atrocities committed by the Russian military in Ukraine since February 2022. A few months after Halle, I was in Kosovo with the U.S. Department of State for a screening of 20 Days in Mariupol, another heartbreaking and sickening documentation of Russia’s actions. In this film, Mstyslav Chernov documents, among many scenes, the Russian bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital, including a pregnant woman with her stomach and uterus blown in half (neither she nor the baby survived). It also films two parents watching their son die in the hospital after the Russians detonated missiles on his soccer field.

For three years, the United States and Europe have supported Ukraine’s defense against this evil with funding, weapons and words. I was part of that defense; in the 14 public diplomacy missions I undertook with the U.S. Department of State to 12 different countries, Russia’s action in Ukraine came up on nearly every visit. I had no role in the funding or the weapons, of course. But part of the Russian aggression included a war against Ukrainian history—and the history of Europe, NATO and the U.S. more broadly. Russia distorted the historical record to perversely suggest that Ukraine had always been part of Russia, owed its independence to Russia, and had no future without Russia. Russian propaganda lied about NATO expansion, used long-settled past grievances among European countries to stoke divisions between them, and fabricated claims against the U.S. and its role in guaranteeing European security and democracy.

My role in the war was to try and help counteract these Russian lies. Sometimes it was to help military officials or lawmakers in European countries devise strategies to combat the disinformation and propaganda. Other times it was to build media literacy skills among high school and college students in Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria or North Macedonia. I loved the work because it demonstrated how being a historically literate and media literate citizen mattered in the real world and geopolitics. But I also loved the work because as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, as well as the grandchild of a soldier who served in the Second World War, I had made a promise to my ancestors that what happened in Europe 80 years ago could only happen again if people around the world believed the lies, turned a blind eye and said nothing. I could not be such a person.

It is with this background that you can surmise how I have felt about the President of the United States recently suggesting that Ukraine somehow bears responsibility for its own slaughter; about an American special envoy equivocating that Russia was “provoked” into war; about the Vice President of the United States telling Europeans that their own governments are more of a threat than a dictatorial nuclear power at their doorstep that slaughters indiscriminately; and the American representation at the United Nations refusing to condemn Russia for its actions—let alone the conduct of our President and Vice President at The White House this past Friday during their meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. These are not the actions of a staunch defender of democracy, human rights and freedom who upholds those values on the world stage for all to see. On the contrary, they are the actions of a transactionalist who peddles the fibs of an autocrat in order to try and strike a deal.

Americans and Europeans have tried to make deals with Russia before. In 1945, at the Yalta Conference, the Americans and the British thought they had struck a deal with Russia to allow free elections throughout the war-ravaged nations of eastern Europe. Stalin never kept his promise; communist governments were established in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and genuinely democratic elections were not held until after the Cold War.

In 1920, Moscow signed a deal with Georgia recognizing its independence, only to see Russia invade the country the following year and subsume it under the U.S.S.R. for 70 years. Today, once again an independent nation, Georgia has asked Russia to recognize that treaty, and in exchange Russia has tried to destabilize Georgia through sham elections and military force.

In recent years, the number of treaties and agreements that Russia has broken includes the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty; the Open Skies Treaty; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; the Chemical Weapons Convention; the Geneva Conventions; the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, according to former American Ambassador Michael R. Carpenter.

History suggests, then, that whatever deal is brokered by the United States to end the war in Ukraine, the likelihood that an imperial Russia will abide by its terms is slim. That is why Zelenskyy has insisted on any peace deal including security guarantees from the United States. Without such guarantees, it will only be a matter of time before Putin breaks his promise and attacks again. Appeasement is rarely a precursor to a lasting peace.

The U.S. and Europe have their own treaty that they have held steadfastedly to in order to try and maintain peace: NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization founded in 1949 in the aftermath of World War II was created, as friend and historian Jeremi Suri has said, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” quoting NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay. For nations in Eastern Europe, keeping “Russia out” is, quite literally, a matter of life-and-death. European countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have vivid memories of what it means to live under Russian occupation as a “Soviet Republic.” Other countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria intimately understand how the grip of the “Iron Curtain” stifled individual liberties, political dissent and free speech during the Cold War. In the aftermath of a madman rampaging across Europe slaughtering millions during World War II, the U.S. and Western Europe determined that another totalitarian force in the form of the Soviet Union could not be allowed to do similarly in the second half of the 20^th century.

The NATO military alliance, backstopped foremost by the United States, managed to keep the Soviet Union and other authoritarian influences from spreading fully across Europe. Over the past 35 years, it has guaranteed the security of many European countries. To put that in layman’s terms, countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—each colonized by Russia during the Cold War—remain free and independent today because of the presence of NATO and the United States. Vladimir Putin has spoken openly about reconquering each of these nations by force. Small countries with limited armed forces, they would be no match for Russian aggression. It is only American and NATO forces that keep Russia at bay.

I have felt this reverence for the U.S. in my trips to the Baltics. When Russian jets scramble above the skies of Lithuania or threats by Putin are made on Russian TV and broadcast into Latvia and Estonia by Russian satellites, people know that their lives are safe, for the moment, because of the U.S. and NATO. Similar feelings exist in Romania and Bulgaria, both countries where Russia is interfering politically in order to establish a renewed sphere of influence. (Some readers may be familiar with the recent Romanian elections where a Russian-backed candidate won only to have the result nullified by the courts due to blatant foreign interference.) American soldiers, American weapons, American money and American diplomacy, in solidarity with our European allies, have created a forcefield of democracy around our partners and friends on the continent. It has come at a cost to American taxpayers, unquestionably. But such is the price of defending human rights and freedom.

It is worth remembering the utter disregard for human rights endemic to the Putin regime:

• A military invasion of Ukraine

• A political invasion of Georgia

• Repeated threatened invasions of Estonia and Latvia

• A puppet state in Belarus

• Murder of political opponents

• Imprisonment of political activists and journalists

• Censorship of scholars

• Assassinations of dissidents on foreign soil

• Sabotage attacks against foreign countries

• Planned and executed bombings of civilian targets in foreign countries

• Cyber-attacks worldwide

• Billions of dollars spent on disinformation and propaganda

• Documented war crimes and massacres of civilians

• Rigged elections

• State control over the media

• No freedom of speech or assembly

• Arbitrary arrests

• Excessive use of force by police and military

• Corrupt oligarchy

• Harassment of minorities, particularly LGBTQ+ individuals

These are not the characteristics of a free and fair society. The spread of such a culture across Europe and the world would be calamitous for humanity—and the United States, in tandem with Europe, remain the only entities strong enough to counteract it.

I will give President Trump credit for trying to end the war. It has been a senseless conflict, with hundreds of thousands of people dead who did not need to be. Yet it is one thing to negotiate with a tyrant for the sake of a greater good. It is another to peddle the lies of such a tyrant in hopes of currying favor for future transactions (oil and gas deals, mineral rights, passage through the Arctic Circle, etc). The values embedded in our Constitution and Bill of Rights should never be betrayed for short-term expediency… and America should never turn its back on its allies on the world stage, preposterously suggesting that overzealous bureaucrats are a greater threat to the world than a genocidal dictator with a nuclear arsenal. That would be the equivalent of telling your friend that binge eating during the holidays is a greater risk to their long-term health than decades of toxic chemicals in the food supply.

In my research on the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) prior to my trips with the State Department, I came across information that illuminated starkly the legacies of Russian imperialism in Europe and Asia. Estonia was occupied by the USSR throughout the Cold War, and part of that occupation was a sprawling complex of Russian military bases. As the Soviet Union collapsed and Soviet troops withdrew, they dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of jet fuel into the ground, improperly disposed of toxic chemicals, and discarded explosives and weapons in coastal and inland waters. Upon regaining independence, the Estonian government realized that its topsoil and underground water supply had been utterly contaminated. Clean-up operations cost tens of millions of dollars to reclaim drinking water for the local population.

You might argue that 1993, 1945, and 1920 are a long time ago. Yet these are precisely the histories that Putin looks to for inspiration. Putin served as a KGB agent who came of age during the Cold War. He maintains open reverence for the Soviet-style system of repression and surveillance, stating publicly that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man” and reconstituting a Ministry of State Security that shares the name of Stalin’s secret police from 1943 to 1953. Putin has been quoted on the record as longing to re-establish Russia’s influence in Europe. He is not deterred by international treaties, environmental protections or individual liberties. He is not interested in the welfare of any of the tens of millions of people within his capacity to invade or attack. He is interested in conquest, empire and ego—his own and the Russian nation’s. He has proven that he will take the darkest episodes of the Soviet past and re-apply them today if they grant him more power internally and globally.

During the long 20^th century, the United States of America fought to safeguard freedom and democracy around the world from such enemies—even when we failed to do so at home. In so doing, we offered protection, hope and inspiration to billions of people striving to live free. The choice between securing a peace deal and abandoning our decades-long commitments is a false one, and we as Americans must have the historical literacy to recognize that we can use our leverage to end the war as well as use the power of our ideas to condemn the parties responsible for it. Bringing to justice those who committed war crimes, and upholding the principles of human rights and democracy, are part of how we prevent such barbarism from happening again.

A failure to stand up for these principles costs us far more than any funding or weapons we may send.

-JS

William McKinley is not a President that most Americans—or, indeed, most people around the world—think about on a regular basis.

President Trump and his advisors, however, seem to have given considerable thought to McKinley’s presidency. Amid Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, seize the Panama Canal, impound Gaza, impose tariffs, eliminate federal agencies and repel “wokeism,” the McKinley influences are ubiquitous: from tariffs and protectionism, to American imperialism and the “White Man’s Burden.” It was not a coincidence that Trump reverted Mt. Denali in Alaska back to Mt. McKinley in one of his earliest Executive Orders.

Allow me to use this week’s newsletter, then, to refresh your historical memory on President McKinley, explain his apparent influence on the Trump Administration, and decipher, for you, what it means for America’s role in the world under Trump 2.0.

📣 Before I do, however, the second Trump Administration has marked a seismic shift in world affairs that demands historical knowledge and media literacy to understand. It will take immense energy and effort to keep up with the flurry of activity, and I need your support. If you’ve messaged me this week asking for my thoughts on what’s happening, please become a paid subscriber so I can devote more time to giving you the answers. Upgrade to paid »

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The McKinley Years

First, the basics: McKinley was a native of Ohio who fought in the U.S. Civil War, practiced law, and was staunch Methodist Christian. He entered politics in 1876, winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and serving in Congress for 14 years, becoming a powerful figure within the Republican Party to include chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. After losing his seat in 1890, he successfully ran for governor of Ohio in 1892.

In 1893, the U.S. fell into a deep economic recession. Banks failed, industrial production fell, and unemployment rose as high as 17 percent. (Recessions were a regular occurrence in 19th century America for reasons too complex to explain here). The hard economic times turned the U.S. population against Democratic president Grover Cleveland, creating an opening for the Republicans in the 1894 midterm elections and the 1896 Presidential election. McKinley saw an opportunity.

McKinley won The White House convincingly, and upon taking office in 1897 instituted a series of policies that would have significant ramifications for the U.S. in the century to come:

• He instituted tariffs;

• Issued an executive order that dismissed civil servants;

• Annexed Hawaii;

• Acquired Puerto Rico and Guam;

• Went to war with Spain over Cuba;

• Expanded American power in the Pacific, principally the Philippines;

• Bolstered the American military, particularly the Navy;

• Advocated for business and industry; and

• Professed a sympathy for American workers.

McKinley also skillfully manipulated public relations and the press, including printing nearly 200 million leaflets and posters to denounce his Presidential opponent, William Jennings Bryant, and recording the first-ever campaign film in U.S. politics. (I made a YouTube video about this with the Smithsonian years ago.)

McKinley won reelection in 1900, but his life was cut short in 1901 when he was assassinated in Buffalo, New York by a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. The assassination paved the way for Vice President Theodore Roosevelt to become Commander-in-Chief, ending the Gilded Age and ushering in a Progressive Era that would last until the end of the First World War.

Already, you may see similarities between McKinley and Trump. Both were Republicans; both were pro-industry; both were interested in expanding America’s global empire; and both were victims of assassination attempts (though, obviously, Trump survived his).

One could argue, too, that both were “America First” – perhaps, even, that McKinley was the progenitor of “America First.”

McKinley lived during a period (and, indeed, was an influential figure) when the U.S. became a global superpower. Between 1865 and 1900, U.S. exports quintupled from $261 million to $1.53 billion.[1] The fastest growth was in manufacturing where U.S. companies emerged as world leaders, exporting goods around the globe and fueling budget surpluses of hundreds-of-millions of dollars. U.S. industry ballooned during the Gilded Age with “Robber Barons” such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Westinghouse amassing vast fortunes.

With economic power came an elevated position on the global stage. To quote McKinley biographer Kevin Phillips:

“The extraordinary progress in science, invention and industry in the United States from the Civil War to 1900 was on a scale with what Britain had achieved from 1760 to 1830 during the gathering of the Industrial Revolution. The great technological exhibitions of early Victorian Britain had stunned the world, and so did the displays in the technology-filled American Pavilion of the Paris Exposition in 1900 and the U.S. Pan-American Exposition in 1901.”[2]

America was experiencing “prosperity at home and prestige abroad,” as McKinley put it. With them came a growing exertion of American imperialism, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. When Cubans revolted against the Spanish in the 1890s, the U.S. intervened, entered into a war with Spain, and quickly routed them from the Caribbean. The U.S. used its victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 to flex its global muscle, capturing Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as exerting colonial authority over the Philippines. (Filipinos would launch an insurgency against U.S. presence that would last for several years and kill thousands of people).

The U.S. also annexed Hawaii, deposing Queen Liliuokalani and declaring the island chain an American territory, which it would remain until statehood in 1959. By the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. had become an empire.

What drove American imperialism during the 1890s? The reasons, like most things in history, are complex.

Colonialism and imperialism were prevalent ideologies, with European nations staking claims to territories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As America rose in economic power, an appetite emerged among political leaders and the broader public to assert geopolitical dominance in a manner that would rival—and eventually overtake—Europe. That included the acquisition of territory, particularly in the Western Hemisphere and stretching into the Pacific Ocean.

This territorial acquisition was inextricably tied to economics. The boom in American global trade posed an existential question for policymakers, namely how to continue to find new markets to grow American influence? Territorial expansion provided the answer, particularly in the Pacific, wherein China, the Philippines and other nations were seen as emerging markets for American products. Hawaii was to be the strategic economic and military gateway that would protect American interests.

Central to this worldview was also a prevailing racial hierarchy that placed White Euro-American civilization at the top, with people of color from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines at the bottom. Justifications for imperialism included a “White Man’s Burden” to civilize these inferior peoples, imposing Christianity and Euro-American systems onto their societies in an effort to “uplift” them.

McKinley believed in all of these ideas, and they shaped his policies as he rose through the ranks of American political leadership. It was very much an “America First” perspective, without the catchy moniker. He saw the world principally through the eyes of American dominance, manipulating the map in order to expand American influence, imbued with a “White Man’s Burden” to “civilize” and Christianize inferior peoples.

Tariffs

This worldview led McKinley, first, to tariffs.

A tariff is, essentially, a tax on foreign goods that makes them more expensive relative to similar items made domestically. In theory, this helps boost and protect local industry. The tariff—paid for by the foreign entity—also generates revenue for the government.

McKinley laid out his argument for such “protective” tariffs in an article titled “The Value of Protection” published in The North American Review. McKinley reasoned that if governments required funding in order to function, that funding must be procured either by taxing American citizens or taxing foreign imports. “The way to raise this money with the least burden upon the people is the problem of the statesman and the legislator,” he wrote.

“It would not do in time of peace to issue the notes of the government, and thus create a charge upon the people, making no provision for their payment. It would not do to restore the internal revenue system as it prevailed through the [Civil] war… It must be manifest, therefore, that the largest share of the needed income must be raised by tariff taxation or import duties.”

Taxing foreigners was superior to taxing Americans, McKinley rationalized. A tax on foreign products would also protect American businesses:

“Is it not better, therefore, I submit that the income of the government shall be secured by putting a tax or a duty upon foreign products, and at the same time carefully providing that such duties shall be on products of foreign growth and manufacture which compete with like products of home growth and manufactures, so that, while we are raising all the revenues needed by the government, we shall do it with a discriminating regard for our own people, their products and their employments?”

McKinley pursued tariffs throughout the 1890s, both as a Congressman (the McKinley Tariff of 1890) and as President (the Dingley Act of 1897) in the name of “protection,” seeking to raise money for the treasury while also ensuring the dominance of American industry. The policy failed in the early 1890s (tariffs contributed to the 1893 recession) but proved more effective in the late 1890s.

By the turn of the 20th century, McKinley believed that his actions had protected American businesses, lowered interest rates, raised wages, turned a deficit into a surplus, expanded the markets for American products and transformed the nation from “enforced idleness to profitable employment.” Interestingly, McKinley’s language on prosperity and idleness has been echoed by the Trump Administration’s communications, including the buyout email sent to government workers. “The way to greater American prosperity,” the email read, “is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

Pro-Business

Central to McKinley’s nascent “America First” worldview was the dominance of American businesses. Similar to Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk, McKinley had a wealthy entrepreneur and private citizen who helped him rise to power, a man named Marcus (“Mark”) Hanna.

A Cleveland millionaire with interests in coal, iron and steel—in addition to owning the Cleveland Herald and the Cleveland Opera House—Hanna helped McKinley get elected in 1896. He donated significant money to McKinley’s campaign; raised money from other wealthy donors; staged campaign events; and brokered support from Republican delegates for McKinley’s nomination. In archival footage of McKinley’s inaugural parade, Hanna can be seen riding in the carriage with the President-Elect.

For his support, Hanna earned a Senate seat, as opposed to a quasi-Constitutional cost-cutting cabal (more on the legality / illegality of DOGE in a future newsletter). Most significantly, Hanna evinced the importance of the private sector to McKinley’s policies. McKinley argued that a thriving business community was good for American workers. He even argued that the competition for global trade necessitated that American businesses form mega-corporations—even monopolies—in order to sustain American dominance.

If American corporations made record profits, paid lower taxes, and exported American goods to markets around the world, that was good for America overall. It would lead to prosperity, innovation and geopolitical power, and in the late 1890s, that strategy was central to his view of American empire.

American Empire

Historians have debated whether McKinley was a reluctant imperialist or an eager one, but the fact remains that under his presidency, the U.S. annexed and acquired overseas territories in ways it never had before. It also exercised its military might in ways that asserted American dominance on the global stage.

The first instance was Cuba, which had been colonized by Spain. The Cuban revolt against the Spanish garnered much sympathy in the U.S., including among American newspaper publishers. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor provoked America to wage war against the Spanish and expel them from the hemisphere. Instead of granting Cuba full independence, though, McKinley imposed conditions that resulted in a continued American presence on the island. (This is why the U.S. has a facility in Guantanamo Bay, another McKinley legacy that Trump has lauded.)

McKinley used the victory in the Spanish-American War to subsume Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. He also annexed Hawaii. The pretense for these actions were economic and geopolitical; to expand American commercial dominance and signal to Europe that America was a global power to be reckoned with.

But woven within his American expansionism were threads of White supremacy. While the residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Philippines technically became part of the U.S., they were denied many privileges and rights afforded to them by the Constitution. They were viewed as “alien races,” to use the words of the Supreme Court, with the “administration of government and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles,” deemed to be, for a period, “impossible.” McKinley himself, in a speech to Methodist Church officials, stated that the residents of America’s territories were “unfit for self government,” and that it was the duty of the United States to “educate . . . and uplift and Christianize and civilize them.”

Throughout his public remarks and private writings, McKinley’s worldview mixed an imperative to expand American power with the perceived burden of “civilizing” the inferior races that fell within such an expansion. The superiority of White Euro-American culture was always assumed, an assumption that persists today among some Conservative ideologues. Embedded within their talking points are intimations that particular minority groups dilute and pollute a superior White Anglo-American culture that has a duty to perpetuate itself via Manifest Destiny, a very 19th century idea.

Is Trump the new McKinley?

By now, hopefully, it is clear how McKinley’s views of the world inform Trump 2.0.

Like McKinley, Trump and his advisors seem to view the world through the lens of American dominance, with a particular focus on hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. They are not afraid to manipulate the map in order to expand American influence, including an annexation of Greenland, an assertion of rights to the Panama Canal, and a seizure of Gaza. The goal is to expand the markets for American industry, whether that be in the Arctic Circle, the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East or even in Outer Space, a new frontier for resource exploitation and commercial enterprise (asteroid mining, space tourism, etc.). The expansion of American hegemony will boost profits for American corporations and, in theory, create trickle down prosperity for American workers, just as McKinley believed.

Like McKinley, Trump also sees tariffs as a means of shifting the burden of revenue collection from taxation of Americans via an Internal Revenue Service to taxation of foreigners via an External Revenue Service. Trump parrots long-held beliefs inside Libertarian and corporate circles about the evils of domestic taxation. If the federal government slashes its budget and spends trillions of dollars less each year through the elimination of agencies such as USAID and Education—coupled with raising more revenue via tariffs—this would, in theory, substantially curtail or eliminate the taxes paid by American corporations and the American people. It could also realize a long-held dream among Libertarians to eliminate the IRS, which has a very McKinley ring to it. After all, McKinley wrote more than 100 years ago that “direct taxation” would be something the American people “would not stand that long.”

Finally, Trump is a man of grievances, and one of his continual grievances has been that America is taken advantage of by the rest of the world. Trump points to our trade deficits, foreign aid, and spending on the U.N. and NATO as proof points. This also bears a resemblance to McKinley, who sought to use tariffs as a means to balance trade and gain favorable economic advantage for the U.S., as well as ensure that American largesse would not be taken advantage of in the global arena. McKinley was not opposed to cooperating with rival nations on international challenges, for example, sending American troops to China in collaboration with European powers to suppress the Boxer Rebellion. But the pretense was always to act in America’s best economic interest, very narrowly defined through a set of hard power criteria.

All that said, there are substantial differences between Trump and McKinley. As alluded to earlier, McKinley’s legacy has been debated among historians on how imperialist, racist and corporate he truly was. Evidence suggests that McKinley was reluctant to intervene in Cuba until forced to do so by public and media pressure, and that McKinley did have genuine concern for the working class, including being pro-union. McKinley was also a lifelong devout Christian with experience as a Congressman, Governor and President, as opposed to Trump’s career in business and entertainment whose relationships with religious leaders have been largely transactional.

Trump and his inner circle are also not the first Republicans to rediscover McKinley. In the early 2000s, it was reported by several media outlets that Karl Rove, the principal advisor to George W. Bush, had a fascination with McKinley’s presidency. Rove and other Republicans also, reportedly, took note of how Mark Hanna and large donors could sway politics.

Trump has been advised by several Conservative scholars and strategists who are aware of McKinley’s revival. Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy, for example, is an avid reader of history as well as an insider within Conservative intellectual circles. It is not a surprise, then, that one of the Trump White House’s first Executive Orders praised McKinley for stewarding America’s “rapid economic growth and prosperity” and his “expansion of territorial gains for the Nation.” It recognized the deceased president’s commitment to “American greatness” and “legacy of protecting America’s interests and generating enormous wealth for all Americans.”

In truth, not all Americans generated enormous wealth in the late 1890s. Black Americans, for example, saw tremendous hardship during the Gilded Age. The year that McKinley was elected also saw the disastrous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that ruled that racial segregation was constitutionally permissible. This ushered in a period of horrific Jim Crow Laws and a Klu Klux Klan revival that oppressed Black Americans for decades. The 1890s was also a terrible decade for Tribal Nations, who were stripped of their land and forced to integrate into White society. Evoking the same language as American imperialism abroad, the government-sponsored “civilizing” techniques at home included Indian Boarding Schools that sought to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” by erasing tribal languages and cultures. And, certainly, the 1890s were not an era of prosperity for indigenous Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos who found themselves under the thumb of American empire without equal rights as their White counterparts.

What This Means for Trump 2.0

Trump’s foreign policy and trade policy will not hew exactly to those of McKinley. Nor will his actions follow a predictable, historical script; we know that Trump will adapt depending on how the political winds blow.

But his worldview is unlikely to change drastically, and his first few weeks in office, coupled with some historical literacy, offer insights into what that worldview is:

• American economic interests will be paramount, backstopped by demonstrations of hard power;

• Grievances against perceived slights and injustices will motivate retaliatory tactics, including tariffs;

• Expansion of American hegemony and dominance, particularly in the Western Hemisphere will be prioritized;

• Expansion of American markets for raw materials and manufactured goods will include the territory of allies, territories of enemies, below the sea floor and into outer space;

• The success of American corporations and corporate profits will guide economic policies and international relations, with the expectation that those profits will trickle down to the American worker;

• Government spending and regulation will be drastically reduced, with entire agencies eliminated;

• An Anglo-American Evangelical ethos will serve as the ideological North Star.

America will likely continue to work with its foreign partners under Trump, but only when a concrete U.S. interest is identified that advances the aforementioned worldview. Ethereal ideals such as preserving democracy around the world, advocating for equality and human rights, and using our wealth and influence for the betterment of all peoples and species on the planet will be de-prioritized, if they are pursued at all.

Will that make for “prosperity at home and prestige abroad,” as McKinley would have said? We will find out. In my humble opinion, it does not make for a stronger and healthier planet that works together to solve societal and ecological issues, but perhaps that is an old-fashioned 20th century notion. Trump seems to have his eyes on the 19th century. History will judge his actions, much like it has McKinley’s.

The second Trump Administration marks a seismic shift in world affairs and is already demanding deep historical knowledge and media literacy to understand it. I feel a responsibility to offer my insights and analysis to help make sense of it, but it will take an extraordinary amount of energy and effort to keep up with the flurry of activity. I cannot do it without your financial support. If you believe that an understanding of history is critical to preserving our democracy, please become a paid subscriber.

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Notes

[1] Kevin Phillips, William McKinley: The American Presidents Series: The 25th President, 1897-1901 (Times Books, 2003).

[2] Phillips, William McKinley: The American Presidents Series.

Yet, there were aspects of Lincoln’s presidency that made Americans highly uneasy, both during his lifetime and afterwards. Lincoln did whatever he thought was necessary to win the Civil War, including instituting a mandatory draft, dramatically raising taxes and imprisoning Confederate sympathizers without trial in a floating prison off the coast of Manhattan called Fort Lafayette. By the middle of the war, he had notorious anti-war speakers and peace activists deported. Most egregiously, perhaps, he shut down newspapers that criticized his administration. He sent the military to their headquarters, arrested their editors, and threw them in prison. He squashed their ability to send news through the mail, suppressing their circulations. When Americans protested these infringements on their individual liberties and Freedom of Speech, Lincoln responded coldly that they were necessary in the name of national security.

I could not help but think about President Lincoln this weekend as TikTok went dark in the United States. The analogies are imprecise, of course; the algorithmic power of TikTok in the hands of 170 million Americans is something that newspaper editors of the 1860s could have only dreamed about. Imperfect as the analogy is, there is something familiar about an era’s most powerful communication platform being shut down by senior levels of government under the guise of national security. The text of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, one of the foundational tent-poles of the American experiment, states clearly that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” How, then, can a ban of an entire communication platform, albeit a controversial one, be permissible in America—then and now?

I will disappoint you upfront by saying that I will not offer a concrete opinion on whether a forced sale of TikTok is “right” or “wrong.” I’ve been asked this question many times in the past two years, sometimes in the presence of lawmakers with power to make such decisions. Instead, I will offer what I have offered repeatedly in these instances: a line of questioning that you can use to think through the issue on your own terms. Perhaps, by applying your own reason and intellect, you can make up your own mind. History does not offer easy answers, only difficult questions. To paraphrase the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, if we embrace these questions, perhaps gradually, we will find our way into the answers.

The circumstances surrounding Lincoln’s suppression of speech during the Civil War were complex. It bears remembering how influential newspapers were in 1860s America. There were no computers, radios, television, email, mobile phones or social media platforms. The U.S. had more than 2,500 newspapers and these newspapers (and magazines) were the principal ways that Americans learned about what was happening in the world and the actions of their government.

The newspapers were not neutral conveyors of news; they were very much aligned with political parties. For example, the mayor of New York at the time was a man named Fernando Wood, a Democrat. His brother, Benjamin Wood, ran the New York Daily News as a Democratic mouthpiece. Benjamin Wood made no secret about his politics; readers knew where the Daily News stood on the issues. The same was true of the New York World, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Weekly Day Book. These papers were unabashed in their support for Democratic politics, both in their editorial pages and in how they reported the news.

The Democratic Party of the 1860s was not the same party that we know today (Lincoln was a Republican, a relatively-new political party founded, in part, to oppose the expansion of slavery). Descended from the Democratic-Republicans of prior decades, the Democratic party had a tradition of representing the interests of wealthy aristocratic Southerners. Combined with a raging populism inherited from President Andrew Jackson, by the time of the Civil War the Democratic press were aggressive defenders of slavery, argued repeatedly for the rights of states to decide what happened within their borders, and insisted on an immutable inequality among races that under no circumstances would permit Whites and Blacks to be equals.

These ideas existed in Democratic newspapers prior to the Civil War; once the fighting between the North and South began, they became even more vicious. As the war turned deadly and gruesome, the Democratic papers became more critical of Lincoln. They demanded an end to hostilities and a return to “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was” – in other words, a United States where slavery could still exist and expand.

In fall 1862, Lincoln declared his intentions to emancipate all enslaved persons, a necessary action to provide moral footing for the war and rally enlistment among Black soldiers for badly-needed reinforcements. The Democratic press became even more infuriated when the Emancipation Proclamation became official on January 1, 1863. Not only was this a massive overreach by a despotic and power-hungry Executive Branch, they argued, it revealed a conspiracy that had been in the planning all along: that the blood of White Americans was to be spilled for the benefit of African Americans. Among White supremacists within the Democratic press, this unleashed a torrent of hateful rhetoric in newspapers, pamphlets and speeches that would make our 21^st century ears recoil in horror.

As odious as this speech was, should it have been protected under the First Amendment? Democratic editors believed so, and for the most part it was.

However, at key moments during the war Lincoln suspended the free speech and free press rights of American citizens. Early in the war, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus along the East Coast in the name of “public safety.” The State of Maryland, in particular, was a hotbed of Confederate sympathy and anti-war activity, some of it violent. Lincoln had agitators arrested and denied their “writ” (a.k.a. their right) to appear before a judge and contest why they were being detained. He even ordered the arrest of members of the Maryland state legislature. Lincoln, and later Congress, would suspend such rights several times during the Civil War, each time arguing that since the President is charged with the preservation of public safety, during periods of rebellion or heightened danger the Constitution permitted such warrantless arrests.

Lincoln did not stop there. One of Lincoln’s fiercest critics was Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio politician who railed against Lincoln in a series of highly-publicized anti-war, pro-Confederacy speeches. In 1863, Lincoln had him arrested, tried by military commission, and deported. In 1864, Lincoln ordered the military to seize the New York offices of the Democratic Journal of Commerce and New York World newspapers and to imprison their editors and publishers after they published a fabricated document “meant to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.” That was after Lincoln had suppressed or shut down newspapers in Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. In total, approximately 300 newspapers were shuttered during the war, arguably the greatest violation of the first amendment in American history.

The U.S. Civil War was not the only time that government suppressed the speech of American citizens.

During World War I, “alien enemies” within the U.S.—principally German Americans but extended to others—were denied their rights to criticize the U.S. government, as were various elements of the American labor and socialist movements, hundreds of whom were arrested for “anti-war activities.”

On the eve of World War II, students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in class. The school expelled the students and the Supreme Court ruled against their exercise of freedom of speech and religion, citing the necessities of “national cohesion” and “national security.” The ruling was overturned a few years later. Around the same time, Japanese Americans across the U.S. were interned under Executive Order 9066, a gross violation of their fundamental rights.

And during the Civil Rights movement, the FBI routinely surveilled Civil Rights leaders and organizations in an attempt to “disrupt,” “discredit” and “neutralize” the speech and free expression of activists. The justification used was to head off the threat of communism and other radical elements in the name of national unity and national security.

Each of these moments in American history were so complex as to warrant thousands of scholarly books and articles. Analogies among them are fraught with pitfalls—which is why as historically literate information consumers, we know that simple historical analogies do not provide simple, straightforward answers.

A better approach might be to ask ourselves what recurring themes have been used by government officials to bypass the protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution?

One commonality has been the perceived threat posed by an enemy within our borders. To root out the “enemy within” often becomes the justification for government suppression of rights.

During the Civil War, the enemy within were pro-Southern voices agitating in the Northern press. During World War I, they were German Americans and “Bolshevik” (socialist) sympathizers. During World War II, it was Japanese Americans. During the Cold War, it was Communists. In every age, there is always an enemy inside the gates whose apprehension is so critical that, it is argued, civil liberties must be disregarded.

Since our government works for us, though, we have a right—an obligation, in fact—to ask questions of our government officials. At what point do justified concerns bleed into unjustified paranoia? Did any one individual newspaper editor during the Civil War pose an existential threat to the Union? Did a handful of anti-war socialists during World War I truly threaten the American war effort in Europe? Did Japanese Americans during World War II pose any real risk to American security? Was the Civil Rights movement any plausible threat to “national unity”?

In the moments, some government officials argued “yes.” With hindsight, however, the historical argument has often been revised to “no.” Even in the case of Lincoln and the Civil War, as racist as some of the Democratic newspapers were, ultimately it was the Union victories on the battlefield, a belief in the sanctity of a United States, and the moral necessity of eradicating slavery that proved decisive. Most of the historical scholarship suggests that imprisoning certain newspapers editors had little-to-no effect on the outcome of the war.

Another commonality has been that when America is at war, the fight never stays confined to the battlefield. It spreads to all corners of society, with some ideologies, nationalities and political affinities deemed too dangerous to be allowed to persist. The rationale is usually couched in the language of “national security,” “public safety” or “national unity.” But, of course, as historically literate citizens, we know that these are highly contested terms that change their meanings over time. We also know that a national unity in favor of slavery, for example, is not a unity we can morally accept. Eradicating that unity and replacing it with a consensus around equality and human rights is an act of patriotism worth disrupting the status quo for. And, we know that part of what allows America to win ideological and moral battles—in addition to physical ones—are the ideals expressed in our founding documents.

Speaking to those ideals, in overturning the Jehovah’s Witness decision on the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court wrote eloquently in 1943 that we should never allow the fear of dissenting opinions to restrict the diversity that makes us free:

“We apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. … [F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.”

Which brings us to the question of TikTok in the United States. TikTok is owned by Bytedance, a multi-billion-dollar private equity company headquartered in China. Launched in 2018, today TikTok has an estimated 170 million users in the United States and more than 1 billion users around the world.

At the heart of the debates around TikTok in the U.S. are three central questions:

1. As a mega-corporation based in China, is the data that TikTok collects about Americans available to the Chinese Communist Party to use however it wishes?

2. As a sophisticated artificial intelligence program on the mobile devices of 170 million Americans, can the app be used for surveillance, propaganda and subversion of American interests?

3. As part of the broader geopolitical competition with China, can the U.S. abide one of the world’s most powerful algorithms operating on its soil under the ownership of a “foreign adversary”?

The most recent U.S. Congress and President Biden, who signed the law, said “yes” to the first two questions and “no” to the third. As such, TikTok now faces a decision whether to sell the app to an American owner or shut down in the U.S. – and President Trump must decide whether to enforce the law, try repeal it, or negotiate a different solution.

As part of the debates around TikTok, Americans might have been surprised to learn that some of their elected officials and business leaders believe the U.S. is currently at war with China… even though no such war has officially been declared. That “war” is for global supremacy; China is the only country that rivals the U.S. in size of military, size of economy, technological capabilities and global influence. As the chief “foreign adversary” to the U.S., China has been found to be stealing our trade secrets, conducting surveillance and espionage on our soil (remember the mysterious balloon over the American West), undermining American interests abroad, and spewing anti-American disinformation and propaganda. As in prior eras, the perceived threat is the enemy inside the walls—or in this case, the enemy inside the palms of our hands.

Lincoln had argued that periods of heightened danger allowed a President to suspend individual liberties to quell such enemies. A war against an armed rebellion was a clear moment of “heightened danger”—but what about a global competition against an emerging superpower? Does that count as a period of “heightened danger”? Who decides: Congress? The President? The American people? When elected officials seek to make laws that undermine certain rights and advance their pre-conceived objectives, are they at liberty to declare any perceived threat a “heightened danger”?

In prior eras, the suppression of speech often affected racial and ethnic minorities (Japanese Americans, German Americans, Black Americans). In the case of TikTok, it represents 170 million Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic levels. Granted, the content of the speech that Americans perform on TikTok is not being regulated; it is the platform itself that Congress and The White House have deemed a threat. Americans are free to continue making short-form dance videos—they will just have to do it on an American-owned social media site.

It is worth asking ourselves whether the issues around TikTok would have been raised were the app to be owned by a company in any other country. Meta, for example, aggressively collects the data of Americans each day and uses it for a myriad of opaque purposes. But they are an American company. Meta, in fact, has been an aggressive driver behind-the-scenes in lobbying for a TikTok divestiture, as their apps (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) stand to benefit if TikTok disappears.

The technology of TikTok is, indeed, highly problematic; my History Communication Institute issued a report in 2022 articulating numerous concerns with TikTok’s addictive algorithm, unethical business practices, and massive AI facial recognition technology. If TikTok were to be regulated as a dangerous product under the premise of consumer protection, that would be one thing. But it is being regulated under the premise of national security and the possibility that it is being used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese Communist Party. Those are powerful claims that should be critically examined by lawmakers and the voting public.

Ultimately, our political leaders work for us. As such, we should be asking them hard questions about this law and receiving clear and honest answers. Are there certain technologies that are too dangerous to be widely used? Are those technologies only too dangerous when they are operated by certain nations, and not by others? Are we legislating against another perceived “enemy from within” – and, if so, what influence does such an enemy truly have relative to other factors? What precedent is being set by forcing the divestiture of one particular communication platform among many? Can any company or platform determined to be a threat to “national unity” or “national security” be subject to a similar fate in the future—perhaps one that disagrees with a sitting President or advocates for radical policies that deviate from the status quo?

Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, so he never had the chance later in life to reflect on his decisions to suppress speech and civil liberties. It is not worth speculating how he would have felt; such a counterfactual is impossible to surmise (though ChatGPT could probably invent an answer).

Plenty of historians and biographers have examined Lincoln’s actions, though, acknowledging that they played little, if any role, in determining the result of the Civil War. The imprisonment of dissenting socialists during World War I likely had little-to-no effect on that war’s outcome, either. Interning Japanese Americas did not help the effort in World War II; in fact, it probably hurt it. And the Civil Rights movement persevered even despite all the attempts to stifle it.

History often reveals that the suppression of speech rarely, if ever, leads to the eradication of ideas. Ideas evolve and migrate, and if one platform shuts down another takes its place. Suppression can certainly be effective in the short-term. But in the longer struggles, the ones that really matter, freedom usually offers the decisive blow.

Have a good week,

-JS

In last year’s “State of the World” column, I made the argument that the Netherlands was the globe’s most significant country in 2023. Mounting anger over inflation, tensions around immigration and a disconnect between urban elites and rural communities contributed to a surprising election result that saw the nationalist and isolationist party emerge victorious.

I speculated at the time that the Dutch elections of 2023 could be a harbinger of things to come in 2024. They were. With more than 60 elections worldwide and billions of people eligible to vote, nationalist and conservative candidates won in the United States, European Union, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The issues that animated voters in the Netherlands animated electoral politics around the world: inflation, immigration, identity politics and a lack of faith in 20th century institutions. So, was the Netherlands again the most consequential nation in 2024? It was not, in my humble opinion. This year, that distinction belonged to Argentina.

The issues at stake in Argentina encapsulated the principal existential question of 2024 namely, What should be the role of government?

• Should government be large, replete with a variety of agencies with sizable budgets that serve a wide range of people’s needs?

• Or should government be small, concerned solely with matters of economics and national defense with strict limits on all other spending?

• How should governments balance care for citizens today versus the need to ensure solvency in the future?

• How much responsibility do governments have for protecting independent journalism—and what are the consequences when they do not?

• How much responsibility do governments have for supporting science, the humanities, research and the arts—and what are the consequences when they do not?

• Is it the role of government to dictate the cultural and ethnic makeup of a nation? What lengths are justified to do so, and which policies are repressive, immoral and unethical?

• Most fundamentally, will democratic governments that represent the will of the people be able to survive the 21st century?

All of these questions have been debated in Argentina in 2024 under President Javier Milei. Trained as an economist, and achieving fame via television debates and viral Internet memes, Milei assumed office promising to radically reduce the size of government, cut spending, and impose austerity measures that he argued would hurt citizens in the short-term but put the country on sounder footing over the long-term.

During his first year, Milei’s administration laid off tens-of-thousands of government workers, froze wages and pensions, cut universities, closed the national theater institute, shuttered a state-funded news agency and defunded scientific research. The short-term effects have been increased poverty and unemployment. But sky-high inflation, which has plagued Argentina for two decades, reached its lowest level in years, decreasing from a monthly rate of 25.5% in December 2023 to 2.7% in October 2024. Prices have come down, and Milei’s approval rating has hovered near 50%.

Milei’s influence extends beyond Latin America. He has gained celebrity status among like-minded politicians, pundits and businessmen in the United States and Europe, culminating in a relationship with President Trump and Elon Musk. Milei’s “chainsaw approach” to slashing the size and scope of government has, reportedly, inspired the Trump-established and Musk-Ramaswamy-led “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) which aims to eliminate entire U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as eliminate funding for PBS television and National Public Radio (NPR). DOGE embodies a long-held belief by Conservatives in limited government, and with their win in November’s elections they have promised to take aim at a U.S. federal deficit that is nearly $2 trillion, a federal debt that is nearly $34 trillion, and a federal budget that is more than $6 trillion. Nearly half of those expenditures are for medical costs (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) and social security benefits, meaning lawmakers will be forced to make difficult decisions on cutting programs now in order to ensure their solvency later.

The electoral successes of Conservatives have enjoined a wave of spending cuts worldwide. In New Zealand, government jobs and spending are being cut across the Department of Education, Ministry of Housing, Department of Conservation, Ministry for Culture and the agency supporting vulnerable children, just to name a few. Humanities and social sciences research is also being slashed by the ruling coalition that includes the “New Zealand First” party. In the Netherlands, the Conservative government will cut €1.2 billion from education over the next four years, essentially eliminating humanities departments at Dutch universities as stand-alone programs, in addition to eliminating African Studies, Latin American Studies, German, French and Italian. The Dutch government has also revealed plans to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, as has the government of Sweden. Declining government funding for universities in Canada, coupled with a new measure restricting international students who pay full tuition, has put several Canadian universities at existential risk of failure.

This approach to government has not solely been an economic program. As articulated by Milei in numerous interviews, he also positions himself as shaping the cultural and ideological make-up of the nation-state. Milei has openly railed against what he calls the “woke mind virus,” a short-hand for a strand of Progressive politics that he argues is infecting civilization. Ideologues worldwide have set out to use government as a blunt instrument in the culture wars, upholding an Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda, barring healthcare access for transgender youth in the United Kingdom, and restricting immigration and asylum in Sweden in order to protect the racial and ethnic make-up of the state.

These tensions around the ethnic and racial composition of the nation-state have intensified as the numbers of international migrants continue to increase. The United Nations 2024 World Migration Report estimates that some 280 million people globally are now international migrants, comprising 3.6% of the world population. The most active corridor remains that of Mexico to the United States, largely due to the upheavals in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Ecuador, the government has declared a war on international gangs who are ruthlessly executing a massive and lucrative cocaine trade that has turned the country into a living hell for citizens. (The Ecuadorian city of Durán has been ranked the most violent city in the world, with a homicide rate of 145 per 100,000 inhabitants). In Mexico, a country ravaged by drug and gang violence for years, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people remain missing. In Haiti, armed gangs attacked police stations, prisons and other institutions in 2024, paralyzing the capital and forcing the resignation of acting prime minister Ariel Henry, who himself assumed power after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse.

Haitians, Mexicans and Ecuadoreans were among the millions of individuals attempting to flee gang violence, crime and desperate economic circumstances for a chance at a better life in the United States. The result has been millions of encounters at the southwestern border of the U.S. between migrants and Customs and Border Control officials that became the major theme of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Trump interposed the issue of the border and migration into both his economic and cultural messaging: migrants entering the U.S. illegally steal jobs and resources from law-abiding Americans, he argued, and bring with them violence, disease and indignity that will lead to civilizational and governmental collapse.

Governmental collapse, itself, was a feature of 2024: in France, President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the country’s parliament in June after a poor showing in the European Parliament elections, only to have the government collapse six months later when Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted in a no-confidence vote. In Germany, chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in Parliament, triggering a snap election seven months ahead of schedule. In South Korea, the Conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol attempted to declare martial law and use military personnel to block access to parliament, only to have parliament override his decree and throw the country into political chaos. Recently, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad collapsed swiftly and stunningly as rebels swept across the country, deposing the dictator and exposing his egregious human rights violations.

It remains to be seen whether the revolution in Syria proves to be a victory for democracy or an exchange of one form of autocracy for another. In other contexts, it is clear that democratic governance has been undermined or, in some cases, overturned. In Rwanda, President Kagame won reelection with 99% of the vote in part because eight other candidates were barred from running. In Venezuela, authorities declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of a presidential election widely considered to be tainted and disputed, with international observers arguing that his challenger, Edmundo González Urrutia, actually won. And in Georgia, the Georgian Dream party has disregarded the will of the people to join the European Union by making a decided turn towards Moscow. Georgian citizens have responded with massive street protests that have been met with brutality and violence by police.

Violence was another constant throughout 2024, most notably the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Estimates are that the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has caused one million casualties to-date, while the war between the Israeli Defense Forces and the Iranian government’s proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis have killed an estimated 45,000 individuals. In Africa, the ongoing Sudanese civil war has killed almost 15,000 people, displaced 8 million others, and has included numerous mass atrocities and war crimes, including sexual violence against women and girls.

Finally, compounding all of this has been climate change. The year 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, as heat waves across every continent killed scores of people, fueled devastating hurricanes and cyclones, overwhelmed power grids, and exacerbated pollution and drought. In a fitting and symbolic display of government paralysis, global governments met for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, only to leave without delivering any new commitments to cut greenhouse gases and with only modest climate finance goals. As summarized by experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the summit “raised doubts about the ability of the COP process to halt alarming global warming trends.”

Which brings us back to Argentina. Argentina withdrew its delegation from the COP29 climate talks, and is considering withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. President Milei is on the record as describing climate change and efforts to combat it as a “socialist lie,” interweaving the climate issue into both economic and cultural debates. The Argentinian government may view extraction of its non-climate-friendly natural resources—mining, natural gas, and petroleum—as a way to mitigate its short-term economic problems. But the country is also facing historic flooding and drought exacerbated each year by the climate crisis, causing societal instability and billions of dollars in damage that threaten Argentinian society over the long-term.

It is for these reasons that when I look across the world at the end of 2024, I see a widespread crisis of government, as well as a crisis of democracy. Billions of individuals in China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Brunei, Myanmar and other countries currently live under the grip of governments where individual freedoms are severely curtailed by an individual or party wielding unchecked control over state apparatuses, and in which independent journalism, scholarship and activism are severely threatened by intimidation, harassment and violence. Billions more people are living in countries experiencing government upheaval or democratic backsliding, from Europe and Africa to Latin America and the Caribbean, including attacks on journalists, scholars, and civil servants; discrimination against marginalized groups; widespread corruption; and unfair elections. On every continent, governments are collapsing, leaning into nationalist and protectionist sentiments, and favoring short-term political expediency over the long-term protection of our planetary ecosystem and our individual liberties.

The perils of this global reality become even starker when the speed and proliferation of technology-enhanced surveillance, repression and weaponry are factored in. In China, children are monitored by the government from the time they are in kindergarten, with enormous volumes of data collected on individuals from a young age in order to promote regime-compliant behavior. In Serbia, authorities have deployed surveillance technology to repress journalists and activists, using spyware and mobile phone extraction to download contacts and personal data from individuals without their knowledge and using it to stifle dissent or squash protests. In Venezuela, the “Homeland System” integrates a person’s national ID number with their car registration, voter rolls, and social media handles for the purpose of social control. As these technologies become even more sophisticated via artificial intelligence, their potential to be used by governments against their own citizens raises the prospects of digital repression the likes of which we have never seen.

In short, our world currently faces many challenges. To solve these challenges will require stable, functioning and competent governments that can work among themselves and with others within international frameworks to agree on solutions and follow through on their commitments. These governments should be democracies that work for the people, in responsiveness to, and in the best interest of, their citizens. Most crucially, all individuals should be able to think, move, speak, love, worship and live freely, while voting in free and fair elections that hold government leaders accountable. This year has seen a rise of the opposite: movements antipathetic towards democracy and international structures; a further splintering of international collaborations, norms and frameworks; an increasingly inward-facing and ideologically-driven conception of the nation-state; and an inability of government leaders to work together within their own countries or on the global stage.

Such approaches might secure short-term political power for particular individuals or parties, but they are not solutions for guaranteeing the long-term future of the planet and the rights of all species who live on it. To realize that future will require democracy, tolerance, human rights, pluralism, equality, global cooperation, independent journalism and serious historical and scientific research that is adequately funded—ideals of the 20th century that now feel endangered in the 21st century. Our task in 2025 and beyond is to program those values into our new operating systems, and remind our fellow citizens why they are important and worth fighting for.

We have a lot of work to do.

Best wishes for the New Year,

-JS

For those unaware, deep in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on the grounds of the U.S. Department of State, resides a museum dedicated to American diplomacy, called the National Museum of American Diplomacy.

The museum features artifacts from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; objects from Foreign Service Officers stationed in Berlin during the Cold War; and stories of notable diplomats such as Raymond Telles, America’s first Hispanic-American ambassador.

Now, among that collection, is my expired passport. The passport, along with copies of my personal photographs, commemorate my work with the State Department in the realm of public diplomacy and citizen diplomacy. Totaling 12 countries across 14 missions to-date—plus numerous engagements here in the U.S.—I have made a very small contribution to American diplomacy compared to career foreign service and civil service officers. But the museum was kind enough to recognize these contributions, and one day, perhaps, my children and grandchildren will be able to see in the museum a glimpse of how I worked on behalf of my country to try and make a better world.

Why bring this up now? As the current administration makes way for the new one, I can’t help but wonder how the State Department may change in the years ahead.

After all, during the previous Trump Administration, the Department of State was targeted for funding cuts and staff attrition. The Trump White House proposed cutting the State Department by 31 percent in its first year, and many positions remained vacant throughout the four-year term. I recall having coffee in 2018 with a foreign diplomat who told me that she, literally, had no one to call at the State Department. All of the people she’d worked with were gone, and all their positions were empty.

For those who want to see America go it alone, perhaps reducing our diplomatic footprint makes sense. But for those of us who believe the United States needs to build relationships around the world in order to tackle global challenges—and continually invest in those relationships year after year—decimating the State Department seems like a short-sighted policy choice. Building and maintaining relationships takes time, effort and, most importantly, people. When positions are vacant or disappear, our allies (and adversaries) have no one to communicate with, no one to share intelligence with, and no partners to collaborate with. Personally, I don’t see how that benefits the United States or the rest of the world.

But what exactly does the State Department do? What do “public diplomacy” and “citizen diplomacy” even mean? How does this work help the U.S. and the wider world? Allow me to use this week’s newsletter to share some reflections on these questions through the lens of my own experiences.

(Note: this is a long read. For those who want to skip to the end, there is a call-to-action to support a personal project I want to launch in 2025 related to citizen diplomacy. Fast-forward to the bottom to learn how you can help).

I should clarify that I do not work for the U.S. Department of State (DOS), nor have I ever been a DOS employee. It would be interesting to work at the State Department, but that is a conversation for another time.

I should also, briefly, explain the terms “public diplomacy” and “citizen diplomacy” – from my own point of view, not as any representative of the U.S. government.

Diplomacy is the art and practice of interacting and negotiating between and among nations. Those interactions usually happen from one government official to another (e.g., ambassadors from two countries holding a meeting) or from government officials to civilians (e.g., passport or visa services at a consulate or embassy).

But occasionally private citizens do diplomatic work with, or on behalf, of their countries. That’s what I do. I’m an independent citizen who speaks and writes on his own behalf, and I collaborate with the State Department on short-term contracts and/or speaking engagements that work to advance America’s broader diplomatic goals. It’s diplomatic work—building bridges between the U.S. and the wider world—but my point of view is my own.

The work falls under the broad umbrella of “public diplomacy.” Without getting too much into the weeds (USC Annenberg has a robust definition for those interested), the ideas behind public diplomacy are: (1) We can speak directly with foreign audiences—whether it be journalists, government officials, academics or students—to explain our views on world affairs and where we stand on important issues; (2) We can build partnerships with foreign organizations in order to achieve common goals; and (3) We can use public programs to build goodwill and lasting relationships.

There are more cynical views on public diplomacy; i.e., that it is, essentially, a branding exercise that countries undertake to improve their image. That is not how I view it; my goals are to exchange ideas, forge relationships, understand the dynamics playing out on the ground, figure out where we can help, and, most importantly, model and embody what I believe our values should be: democracy, equality, human rights, honest and accurate history, media literacy, critical inquiry and positive change.

I’ve been fortunate to do this in 12 countries on 14 assignments to-date:

1. Lithuania

2. France

3. Belgium (twice)

4. Georgia

5. Germany (twice)

6. Bulgaria

7. North Macedonia

8. Hungary

9. Estonia

10. Latvia

11. Kosovo

12. Romania

I’ve also three times presented to foreign visitors participating in the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and Malaysia); twice worked with the European Digital Diplomacy Exchange; and been part of the U.S. delegation to the international Conference on Holocaust Distortion and Education. Long-time subscribers to this newsletter, or followers on LinkedIn, have likely seen my social media posts about these activities. But, what exactly happens on these trips, and why does it matter?

As you know, I wrote a book called History, Disrupted: How Social Media & the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past. The book examines how and why certain information about history becomes visible and influential online. Even before the book was published, this was an interest of mine for many years. I wrote articles in CNN, TIME and other outlets about how the web and social media were changing what we knew about history right before our eyes—and the consequences that might have for democracy, education, media literacy and international relations.

My first engagement with DOS occurred in 2017, five years before History, Disrupted was even published. At the time, I was the founding director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest when I received an email with the subject line, “Speaking opportunity in Vilnius, Lithuania” from someone identifying as an Assistant Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy. I thought it was a scam. But the email signature seemed authentic, so I replied to learn more.

Lithuania was confronting a surge of Kremlin-sponsored propaganda on social media and the Web. Some of the propaganda was “fake news”; a fake story, for example, alleging that U.S. troops in Latvia were poisoned by mustard gas (completely false, never happened). A lot of it, though, was “fake history;” the weaponization of Soviet-era nostalgia in the hopes of swaying the population away from “the West” (i.e., Europe and the U.S.) and towards Moscow. The American embassy had been in touch with Lithuanian nonprofits, universities and government officials as they monitored this growing trend, and they were looking for a speaker who could come to Lithuania for a week and talk with these stakeholders about media literacy, historical literacy, and how to decipher honest history from propaganda online.

So, I traveled to Lithuania the first week of May 2017 to address these subjects. The embassy arranged for me to speak to students at three universities (Vilnius University, Vytautas Magnus University and Mykolas Romeris University); deliver a lecture to Lithuanian history teachers and educators; meet with the staff of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History; and be interviewed by the Lithuanian magazine IQ. The goal was to advance what I and the State Department both believed to be true, namely that honest and accurate history were essential to democracy—and that the weaponization of nostalgia online served only to advance the goals of authoritarians.

The trip received positive feedback and paved the way for my next trip to France in 2019. At the time, France was in the midst of the “Yellow Vest” movement. The movement was fueled by social media, particularly Facebook, and there was a wave of disinformation being generated by opportunistic actors, including Russia.

The State Department, in collaboration with the German Marshall Fund, asked me to speak about similar topics in France as I had in Lithuania—fake news, fake history, media literacy and historical literacy—with similar audiences, i.e., universities, government officials, young professionals and journalists. The highlight was a public event held inside the stunning Hôtel de Talleyrand in Paris, a beautiful historic mansion that formerly served as the American headquarters for the Marshall Plan.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought international travel to a halt, and I did not think my engagements with the State Department would continue. But two things happened in 2022: History, Disrupted was published in January and Russia launched its full-scale of invasion of Ukraine in February.

The seeds for the Russian military invasion were planted years ago, when Putin declared the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. to be a “geopolitical disaster” and when he penned a lengthy essay claiming that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” who must be united in a single homeland.

For four years, Putin had a pro-Russian ally as the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. But after Yanukovych publicly turned his back on the European Union and embraced Russia more openly, Ukrainians ousted him in a revolution in 2014. In response, Putin’s forces stealthily invaded Crimea, dismissed the Crimean government, installed a Putin loyalist, and held a referendum that claimed to overwhelmingly favor leaving Ukraine and becoming part of Russia. Crimea has remained under Russian occupation ever since; ten years later, Putin is in the midst of a full-scale military attack on Ukraine with the goal of annexing the entire country.

Despite what some Americans may hear, what happens in Ukraine matters greatly to the United States. There are many reasons, but principally:

1. The U.S.-led world order established in the 20th century after two world wars rests on the idea that the sovereign borders of a country must be respected. Putin has flagrantly violated that rule, illegally annexing part of Ukraine and trying to destroy the rest of it;

2. If Putin succeeds, it could embolden others to do the same. Imagine if China decided to unilaterally change borders in the Pacific through an overt or covert invasion. Or if India attempted to unilaterally change borders on the Asian subcontinent. Or Brazil in South America. Each of these countries have chosen to officially remain “neutral” towards Russia’s invasion, effectively condoning Putin’s actions and possibly studying his playbook to achieve their own ambitions;

3. Putin, himself, will repeat this playbook in other countries if he succeeds in Ukraine. Georgia and Estonia are two countries he has already spoken about “reclaiming” in the name of the former Russian empire;

4. This puts tens-of-millions of people who currently live in democracies at risk of being under the rule of an autocrat with no regard for human rights—something we promised after World War II would not happen again;

5. Finally, the European Union, I would argue, is America’s most reliable and steadfast ally, critical to our economic and military interests, as well as the NATO alliance. Our collaboration with Europe helps ensure hundreds-of-millions of people can live in democratic societies. If Europe falls under Russian influence, we lose our most important partner in propping up democracy, human rights and freedom itself.

Again, these are my views. I recognize these notions may be opaque to everyday Americans struggling to pay their bills or find a job. This is why we employ diplomats around the world, to uphold these values on the global stage.

In the wake of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this work has become even more urgent.

As fierce as the Russia-Ukraine war has been on the battlefield, it has been equally fierce online in the domain of history. Putin’s justifications for war are rooted in distorted historical arguments that are amplified 24-hours per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year across Russian media channels, as well as media and social media aligned with, or sympathetic to, the Kremlin.

The narratives are complex, and cannot be done justice here. In brief, they situate Ukraine as central to defining what Russia is, rooted in a historical mythology around Kyivan Rus’, the first East Slavic state that existed centuries ago. The argument is that Kyivan Rus’ (Kyiv is the current-day capital of Ukraine) has always been integral to Russian history, and that today’s Ukrainians are really Russians. Russia, in this argument, is reclaiming territory that has always been “Russian,” liberating it from nefarious foreigners such as the E.U., NATO and the U.S.

While honest people can debate the historical origins of the Russia-Ukraine relationship, the distorted “history” that Putin uses to justify his invasion overlooks long histories of Ukrainians fighting for their own independence, not to mention the diversity within Ukraine that includes people of Hungarian, Romanian, Tatar, Bulgarian, and Armenian descent—clearly not all ethnically Russian—as well as the diversity of languages, cultures and religions that comprise Ukrainian heritage. The “history” the Kremlin espouses resembles propaganda and disinformation more than it does serious scholarship.

Understanding how history operates online and in the media, then, has enormous consequences for our geopolitical moment. Since I, literally, wrote the book on how history operates online, my passions align well with the current priorities of the State Department to counter disinformation and promote media literacy, historical literacy, critical inquiry, and democracy rooted in honest and accurate interpretations of the past. If one looks at the list of countries I’ve traveled to, they either border Russia or Ukraine, or are seeing major Russian influence campaigns within their borders.

Take Georgia, for example. In May 2023, I spent three days in Georgia working with an organization called SovLab. SovLab is a civil society organization that studies the Soviet Union’s history in Georgia, including the repression of dissidents and torture of Georgian civilians who spoke out against the regime. SovLab brought me to a former “Cheka” prison site wherein Soviet police captured and tortured political opponents.

Today’s propaganda efforts by Russia in Georgia paint a very different historical picture: that of Stalin (who was Georgian by birth) as a hero, mixed with nostalgia for a benevolent Soviet empire. This relentless propaganda campaign has, as it did in Ukraine, laid the groundwork for political action. Georgian Dream, a political party sympathetic to Putin, has recently seized control of Georgia through a disputed election, publicly turned its back on the European Union, and has deployed police to beat and maim protestors—a playbook eerily similar to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian forces in the north of Georgia have been laying the groundwork for annexing part of the country and changing its borders.

Romania is another example. I spent five days in Romania in October 2024, first as part of the American delegation to the international Conference on Holocaust Distortion and Education, and then as a speaker with the U.S. embassy. The embassy arranged for me to meet with university students, think tanks, journalists and the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I was also interviewed on a Romanian podcast. (Side note: the podcast host had read my book, and when the embassy informed him I was coming, he was incredibly excited. That was very heartwarming).

Today, Romania is a democracy, but it has a long history of dictatorship, complicity in the Holocaust, and a secret police force, the Securitate, that imposed terror and repression on political opponents for decades. According to experts I spoke with, Romania remains susceptible to autocratic influence. “Romanians think it can’t happen here, but it could,” I was told by one think tank. “We think we are one step ahead of the Russians, but we underestimate how good they are at this.” A few weeks later, the pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s presidential election, leveraging anti-U.S. and anti-E.U. narratives while campaigning on TikTok. The next round of elections, scheduled for December 8, was recently postponed due to mounting evidence of Russian interference.

Historical narratives circulating on social media have the potential to change the course of nations and entire regions. This is not only true of Russia; in my travels, I have seen how this affects nearly every country:

• In Kosovo, where I participated in the first-ever Balkan Disinformation Summit in February 2024, historical debates online center on a long-standing feud with Serbia over Kosovo’s independence. Not surprisingly, Kosovo, which wants independence, supports Ukraine; Serbia, which wants to annex Kosovo, supports Russia;

• In Bulgaria and North Macedonia, where I traveled in May 2023, the two countries have been fighting over history for years, including who is to blame for the deportation of 11,000 Jews from Thrace to Treblinka during the Holocaust. Thrace was in Macedonia at the time, but was occupied by Bulgaria. Both blame the other for the atrocity;

• In Hungary, where I spoke in June 2023, grievances over lost territory from Hungary’s past are part of the fuel for Viktor Orban’s nostalgic authoritarianism that has captured state and civil society institutions across the country;

• In Belgium, where I’ve worked with our embassy twice, Flemish nationalists are exploiting historical narratives and imagery to gain political power, advocating for secession from Belgium and creation of an independent state of Flanders.

How history circulates online matters greatly to world affairs today.

What happens inside the borders, and in the elections, of other sovereign nations are their decisions, not ours. I do not travel to other countries to try and dictate events—nor could I, if I wanted to.

What can American public diplomacy realistically do, then? We can lend our expertise, advice and support to our partners and friends who are fighting for democracy and freedom.

In each country I’ve visited, our embassies have done an incredible job of connecting me to like-minded people and organizations who share the same values:

• That honest and accurate history should be independent of state influence;

• That independent media should be able to report honestly about politics and society;

• That critical thinking that questions nostalgic and simplistic narratives is crucial to a democracy; and,

• That media and historical literacy help citizens understand what they are seeing on social media and the Web.

Upholding these values creates a healthier, better educated, and more democratic society. It also helps guarantee individual freedoms and keeps political power from being abused.

My diplomatic efforts over the past seven years, then, have comprised countless meetings and conversations where we share expertise, forge relationships, and find ways to collaborate in order to advance these objectives. American embassies also make grants available to organizations who do this work; bring individuals to the United States to learn how we operate here; and encourage students and citizens to understand the importance of historical and journalistic integrity. That’s some of what public diplomacy entails—and it is well-worth the investment, in my humble opinion.

Throughout this work, it has become evident to me how much of what happens in Europe does not get reported in the American press. Unless there is an election or political violence, the dynamics in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania rarely makes the news. One has to search hard on the major media sites to find substantive information on these complex places.

🎙️ This gives me an idea: a series of podcast conversations with the individuals I have met in my diplomatic work who are on the front lines of fighting for democracy, media literacy and honest and accurate history and journalism.

These are amazing people, often times standing up for principles in the face of long odds, powerful opposition, and without much support. They are individuals in places such as Hungary, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Germany and Georgia that most Americans never hear from, and likely never will.

🎁 This holiday season, I’m asking for your help in making this podcast a reality.

A good podcast requires resources for editing, marketing and production. If you believe that hearing the stories of these amazing people would be worthwhile, please consider helping to make it possible. You can:

• Become a paid subscriber to this newsletter;

• Make a direct contribution using Venmo or PayPal; or

• Donate via cryptocurrency: 0x97612266209D94dFcea09Bd9F02ED9cE336FBB58

If you’re a podcast producer, and would like to donate your talent in-kind, that would be wonderful, too. Any and all support will be put towards the creation of this series, precise launch date TBD.

Will my work with the State Department continue? I hope so. It may depend upon the incoming administration’s priorities. Whatever those priorities, I hope the powers-that-be recognize the important role public diplomacy plays in trying to make a better world.

The State Department does not always get it right; the department has made mistakes over the years, some with dire consequences. But for my part, I’ve found everyone I’ve worked with at DOS to be smart, engaged and with their hearts in the right places.

Citizen diplomacy and public diplomacy are part of how I try to keep the fragile soil of democracy from eroding beneath our feet. Mine is a small contribution; there are others doing much more. But, to quote Pink Floyd, I would rather have a walk-on part in the war than a lead role in a cage.

Freedom, after all, is worth fighting for.

Have a good week,

-JS

You can also make a donation

Or contribute via cryptocurrency: 0x97612266209D94dFcea09Bd9F02ED9cE336FBB58

Recently in this newsletter, I wrote about the end of the 20th century and how a new societal and political order had emerged—not overnight, but over the course of the past decade-and-a-half.

One of those institutions from the 20th century undergoing massive transformation is the Internet, and this week I was among a group of invited guests that attended a summit in Washington, D.C., examining what the future of Internet could and should be, Project Liberty’s “Summit on the Future of the Internet.”

Longtime supporters of this newsletter will recognize Project Liberty. I’ve been involved with Project Liberty (formerly Unfinished) for four years now; I have been a speaker at their events, my History Communication Institute (HCI) has co-hosted webinars with them on artificial intelligence, and I interviewed founder Frank McCourt (former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers) earlier this year for my podcast. The HCI is part of the Project Liberty Alliance, a consortium of 100+ organizations working to shape the future of the Internet and social Web.

This summit was an opportunity to meet others in the alliance and hear updates on how Project Liberty is realizing its ambitious vision. Most importantly, it was an attempt to try and give shape to what the future of the Internet might look like.

Allow me to use this week’s newsletter, then, to share with you a few takeaways from the summit that have left me ruminating on the end of one era of the ‘Net, and the potential beginning of a new one…

#1: The builders of the 20th century Internet will not be the builders of the 21st century Internet

Several Internet luminaries attended the summit, some of tech’s most brilliant thinkers who were instrumental in the creation of the Internet and World Wide Web—on the technical level as well as the operational level.

In listening to their remarks, and in my discussions with them on the sidelines, though, it became increasingly clear that these individuals are ready to pass the baton to the next generation. These legendary figures shaped the way all of us have lived for the past 25-30 years, but, by their own admission, they were products of a different era. They had different skills, they had different priorities, and they were solving different problems.

Many of these luminaries can now, with hindsight, see where the Internet went wrong. But they struggled to articulate where it should go next. My takeaway from speaking with these esteemed guests was that they had made their contributions—some that benefited us, some that harmed us—and they were eager to see what the next generation of builders could do. This segues into takeaway number two, namely…

#2: Technologists and creators have differing views on what the future of the Internet should be

This summit had a good mix of the individuals whose technical and leadership skills build the Internet and World Wide Web, intermingled with the creative talent that powers them. Throughout the two days of the summit, the gaps between these two important stakeholders became apparent.

The technologists, investors and funders manage companies, investment funds, or large foundations. They are often associated with Stanford, Harvard, MIT or Georgetown. Their pedigree pervades their work, with even the most boot-strapped founders operating under the capitalistic premise that money raised + technology deployed = solving today’s pressing issues and enriching the bottom line. There is a persistent, almost evangelical, belief that this is how the system must work, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

On the flip-side, the content creators often come from more diverse backgrounds. They are more irreverent, less scripted, and often do not have well-polished elevator pitches or Ivy League pedigrees. They are authentic and charismatic personalities, which is how they connect so well with their followers. Most importantly, they recognize very acutely the predicament they are in: they benefit financially and reputationally from an ecosystem that they know is highly toxic.

They also have a much richer ground-level understanding of what the future of the Internet has to be in order for it to be healthier, while simultaneously promoting creativity, flexibility and possibility. After attending this summit, and after attending VidCon in Baltimore last year, it has become clear to me that creator voices must be at the forefront of whatever the future of the Internet and Web will be. This leads me to observation number three…

#3: No one knows the future of the Internet—at least not yet

I’ve been to many of these conferences over the past few years, and I have heard many lectures about the problems with our current online environment. I’ve also heard from a variety of people who believe they have the solutions.

It continues to surprise me, though, how much the proposed solutions resemble the structures we currently have. I suppose this is a natural part of acculturating people to new products, to say how much a new platform resembles TikTok or mirrors Twitter / X. The innovations come from tweaking how things work under-the-hood: more layers of customization, more layers of user-choice, more options for how ads work or more ownership over your data. Such refinements can move the needle significantly, especially at the scale of tens-of-millions of users. But so much of what I have heard does not really feel like a break from the past, so much as an extension of it.

Another element that has surprised me has been the nostalgia that permeates these events. There is significant nostalgia for the ‘90s Internet or the early-2000s Web. There are often debates about how to “re-create” that era or how to “reclaim” the Internet back to what it was.

To my ears, these do not sound like future-focused visions; they feel more like rose-colored glasses. After all, what is nostalgia if not the desire to return to an idealized past that never truly existed in the first place. This is another reason why there should be historians in these conversations (as is often the case, I was the only professional historian in the room that I could find). A critical analysis of the Internet’s past would help us break out of these nostalgic tropes about the “good old days,” and stop us from trying to make the future resemble what we’ve imagined our past to be. The future should not, in my humble opinion, be a reconstitution of our nostalgic memories, which leads me to my final takeaway…

#4: We must invest in education

At this summit, and other events I’ve been to over the years, I have heard a lot about empowering users to be able to build and customize API’s; allowing users to select their own algorithms; users having more control over who they filter or block; users controlling their online data, etc. While all of that holds promise, it will all require a massive educational effort to teach billions of people how to navigate a new Internet—even while we have millions of people who struggle to use the current Internet.

There remain, for example, older generations, rural populations, and under-privileged populations that still need basic computer and Internet skills: how to avoid phishing scams, how to navigate email inboxes, how to operate basic programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel, or even how to get online. Technologists are now proposing that users acquire more skills to customize their own algorithms or take their data with them from platform to platform. This will be a huge educational lift.

There is also literacy work we must do the navigate the future Internet and Web: media literacy, historical literacy and AI literacy. Users must understand how algorithms work, how to discern information they see on their screens, and how to ask critical questions about why things are appearing in their newsfeeds. It always surprises me how these critical questions are rarely raised at such conferences; I am often the person who raises them.

Technologists and investors seem eager to build the next app, invest in the next company, or devise a tech solution to a problem tech created. Yet there does not seem to be an equal appetite to invest in the education that will be necessary to on-ramp billions of people around the world into a new ecosystem. This is another area where we could learn from history; we should recognize that rolling out new technologies without the requisite education for people to understand them and use them is asking for a repeat of the harms of the past twenty years.

All that said, I still thought the summit was terrific. But it is part of our job to be critical; we built this newsletter to be a space for critical thinking, and we need more spaces for critical thinking in this new era of the Web. In fact, I would argue that the future of the Internet and World Wide Web must foster and incentivize critical thinking. One could argue that a lack of critical reflection in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 got us to where we are today. If the goal for Web 3.0 is to be different, it should have critical thinking baked into from the outset, in hopes that we do not make worse mistakes this time around.

The good news is there is much of that already happening. There are terrific people involved in these efforts, there is a growing community, and there are individuals—millionaires and billionaires, as well as boot-strapped founders and content creators—who are taking risks to try and devise something new. For two days in Washington, we were able to connect around that work. I’m grateful to Frank McCourt and Project Liberty for making that possible.

At one point during the summit, we were asked to break into teams and write bullet points about what the future of the Internet must include. After some reflection, here are mine:

• The future of the Internet must integrate critical, historical analysis into its creation;

• The future of the Internet must foster critical thinking, historical literacy and media literacy among its users;

• The future of the Internet must center the diverse voices of creators and be responsive to their desires, needs and concerns;

• The future of the Internet must empower and reward humanists, ethicists, historians and other humanities and social science scholars, in addition to enriching technologists and investors;

• For every $1 dollar we spend on tech, we must spend $3 dollars on education.

Perhaps, if we do these things, we will build a better Internet of the future.

Have a good week—and a Happy Thanksgiving,

-JS