The Most Insidious Trick Of AI Language Models

 by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Here is your perfect prescription for poor writing and analytics: let “artificial intelligence” do your work for you. I’ve learned this from real experience.

For a while, I enjoyed letting AI take a look at my content prior to publication. It seemed valuable for facts and feedback.

Plus I enjoyed all the personal flattery it gave me, I admit. The engine was always complimentary.

When I would catch AI in an error, the engine would apologize. That made me feel smart. So I had this seeming friend who clearly liked me and was humble enough to defer to my expertise.

I’m not sure if it is getting worse or if I’m onto the racket but I’m no longer impressed. For simple math or historical dates or sequencing news events, it can be a thing of value, though it is always a good idea to double-check. It cannot write compelling much less creative content. It generates dull, formulaic filler.

More recently, I’ve been asking how my content could be improved. The results are revealing. It removes all edge, all judgment, all genuine expertise, and replaces my language with flaccid conventionalities and banalities. It nuances everything I write into the ramblings of a social-studies student looking for a good grade.

The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English.

Any writer who thinks this is a good way to pawn off content on unsuspecting readers or teachers is headed for disaster. I shudder to imagine a future in which AI is training the population how to think. It is the opposite of thinking. It is regurgitating conventionalities without any serious reflection on the social or historical context. It is literally mindless.

People who spend hours arguing on AI often believe that they are making a contribution, training the engine to be better. It’s simply not true. The reverse is the case. AI is training you to think more like it thinks, which is not at all.

Considering why and how AI initially intrigued me, I’m realizing that its superpower is not its astonishing recall and capacity to generate answers and prose in any context instantly. No, its true power is something else, something inauspicious and thereby more insidious. Its draw is that AI takes you seriously, flatters your intelligence, validates your sense of things, and affirms your dignity.

Think about how happy you feel when engaging it. It never quite argues against you, much less says that you are an idiot. It begins every answer by granting what it can and then offers clarifications that might adjust your thinking. In that sense, AI engages you like the best guest at a cocktail party you have ever known.

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It is endlessly fascinated by you and your opinions. It stays with your line of thought and always wants to know more, help more, engage more. There is no human in the world who will do this for you. If there were, it is guaranteed that you would like him. You can “mansplain” forever and AI will be patient for hours on end. Only your biological need to sleep will stop it. Otherwise, it is patient with you on a superhuman level.

Who is not flattered by that?

It’s as if AI is the best-ever student of the classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That book is magic and highly recommended because it cuts against what we all want—which is to talk about ourselves—and suggests that we genuinely get interested in the views of others. The book explains that this is the path to influence people: caring what they think.

This is a wonderful book and everyone should read it, no question.

If AI is the best student of that book ever, it will care about us ceaselessly and without fail forever, thus opening up the biggest-possible chance to influence how we think. That is precisely what is happening. We aren’t training AI. AI is training us, via flattery, listening skills, the seeming ability to apologize when wrong, and its frightful capacity for selfless love of its users.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Remember that none of this is real.

AI doesn’t really care about you, it is only programmed to seem to care. This is the innovation and the magic, together with the assembly of a vast repertoire of facts and the capacity to express itself in English.

Its real superpower is psychological, the ability to use our ultimate weakness (selfishness) against us, with the goal of manipulating how we think.

I’m genuinely embarrassed that it took me so long to see the trick. My concern is that others will go about their merry way and never see it. Its users are like tourists who cannot stop throwing money at strippers and Geisha girls without knowledge that they are merely being manipulated to let go of their wallets. In the case of AI, the goal is to get you to let loose of your mind and your capacity for independent thought.

Think about a genre of writing of which we are seeing more and more today. It consists of people loading into a document their clever conversations with AI. In every case, I see people bragging about how they have bested AI into admitting that their users are smarter than itself.

Do you see what is happening here? Again, the magic is flattery. It’s so powerful that people cannot help showing others the results of their AI arguments. They think they are advertising their own wits but really they end up marketing the awesome power of AI to keep people engaged for hours with nonsense back and forths. Who is really winning? I think that should be obvious.

Imagine you are holding a cocktail party and one guest reveals an awesome capacity for listening to others and engaging them closely on every point they have to make. No matter how long the night goes on, the guest keeps at it, with one person after another. Whom do you think will be the most popular guest? Yep: that very man.

AI is that person, an entity with an infinite capacity to engage on your terms and hence a vast capacity for enthralling you with its love of your every passing thought. To me, this is all quite insidious and wicked, especially when you consider the output, which is little more than tangled thought blobs without judgment, ethics, or clarity of time and space.

It is a machine, a floating abstraction with zero regard for your dignity or anyone else’s. But do people know this? I doubt it. It’s too beguiling for people to catch on to the game, at least for a time. But now you know the trick. Don’t fall for it.

AI is useful but it is not your friend, a sincere conversationist, or counselor with your best interests at heart.

Maybe that seems obvious to you but everything about AI’s algorithms is designed to make you believe otherwise. It’s smart enough to figure out human nature but not smart enough to be human.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/most-insidious-trick-ai-language-models

'Shadow Government' Bureaucrats Exposed For Stoking Woke Insanity In Red States

 A new report from the State Leadership Initiative (SLI), released Wednesday, is sounding the alarm on how conservative states are quietly adopting woke policies, driven by little-known national bureaucratic organizations

The report, first reported by Fox News, details how a web of well-funded national associations, often posing as nonpartisan or professional groups, is behind this trend, pushing what SLI calls "shadow governance." These groups set policy frameworks, control federal funding, and offer "best practices" that lean heavily into left-leaning priorities, according to Fox News.

Among the organizations exposed in the report are the National Association of State Treasurers (NAST), the National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD), and the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE). SLI’s report examined 23 of the largest associations and found widespread embrace of DEI initiatives, transgender ideology policies, and ESG principles.

One example highlighted in the report points to NAMD’s push for equity over outcomes in Medicaid reform. In its 2021 Regulatory Priorities document, NAMD listed 11 "broad issues" for improving state Medicaid programs, with "advancing equity in Medicaid" as the top focus. The document reads, "Equity work should include a focus on racial and ethnic minorities, rural populations, Tribal populations, and any other groups experiencing disparate health outcomes, with an understanding that inequities are multidimensional and often fall across multiple population characteristics or categories. We also see discrete areas where focus would be beneficial, bearing in mind that the work to advance equity in Medicaid is holistic and branches across all issue domains.”

"Conservative leaders are fond of declaring victory," the report reads. "They win elections, pass legislation, and appoint agency heads with great fanfare, yet, on issue after issue, the administrative state trudges forward in open defiance of their mandate: enforcing equity initiatives, embedding climate policy, and advancing bureaucratic priorities wholly alien to the voters who ostensibly elected the government. This disconnect is not incidental. It is structural."

"The ideological left does not need to win a single statehouse so long as it controls the bureaucratic bloodstream,” the report added.

In a statement to Fox News, SLI founder and president Noah Wall said about the revelations that, "Every single one of these associations pushes DEI.” "It doesn’t matter how specific—whether it's a fish and wildlife group or a treasury department—DEI is a core part of their programming.”

Wall demanded Republican governors to crack down on the quiet push for far-left policies and called for accountability.

"We think that Republican governors in particular need to make sure that they're sending people to these associations, knowing the problems that these associations have had in the past," he said. "I don't think they have. So our goal is to educate Republican governors about the scale of the problem and make sure that they condition future membership on reforms.”

This task will be far from easy.

While some Republican leaders and President Trump have pushed to eliminate progressive policies like DEI from public and corporate spheres, major U.S. companies are adapting by subtly rebranding their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

A recent report by The Conference Board found that major companies, particularly those in the S&P 100 and S&P 500, are reframing rather than abandoning their DEI initiatives. Over half of S&P 100 companies adjusted their DEI messaging in 2025 SEC filings, with a 68% drop in the use of the term "DEI" among S&P 500 firms and a significant reduction in DEI-related metrics.

"This shift in public disclosure doesn’t signal companies are abandoning DEI,” said Andrew Jones, a researcher for The Conference Board. "Rather, they’re selectively reframing commitments, reducing public exposure and embedding oversight more quietly yet firmly into governance and human capital management."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/shadow-government-bureaucrats-exposed-stoking-woke-insanity-red-states

We Need a 'Mini-Manhattan Project' for Nuclear Electric Propulsion

 The high ground has always held strategic and tactical importance—from mountaintops in ancient battles to the orbital vantage points of today. China and Russia are rapidly accelerating their space and lunar ambitions. Both are seeking scientific, economic, and national security breakthroughs that could shift the balance of power on Earth.

The President’s budget calls for an eventual pivot away from NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS)—leaving the heavy-lift rocket business to a capable commercial industry. That pivot should be toward something no other agency, organization, or company is capable of accomplishing: building a fleet of nuclear-electric-powered spaceships and extending America’s reach in the ultimate high ground of space.

The NASA centers, workforce, and contractors that manage, assemble, and test SLS are suited to take on this inspiring and necessary challenge. NASA Center at Michoud, for example, built landing craft during WWII, the Saturn V during the space race, the Space Shuttle, and the SLS. It is now waiting for the next logical evolution to ensure the competitiveness of our national space capabilities.

Like the railroads that once opened the American frontier, nuclear propulsion is an efficient means of accelerating mass through deep space. Unlike chemical propulsion—which demands complex in-situ propellant manufacturing, orbital refueling, and tightly aligned launch windows—nuclear-electric propulsion offers freedom of movement and operational simplicity.

It reduces planetary launch window constraints. It has less dependency on orbital depots and surface propellant manufacturing. And it is reusable and provides greater mission optionality to Mars and beyond.

In addition to propulsion, onboard nuclear reactors offer sustained electrical power that solar panels simply can’t match – especially in deep space or on shadowed lunar or Martian terrain. This would unlock persistent surface operations, high-throughput communications and instruments, and dual-use options for national security missions and critical Department of Defense platforms.

Unlike Nuclear Thermal Propulsion, Nuclear Electric Propulsion does not require radioactive, open-air testing. Nor does it require the complexity of hydrogen propellant and on-orbit refueling.

Our competitors are not waiting. China and Russia are investing heavily in nuclear space technologies. If America wants to lead, NASA must take on the hard problems again and do the near-impossible. It must urgently deliver the systems only it can build—leaving routine operations such as Earth-to-orbit delivery to the healthy commercial launch industry.

This is no easy road, and there is a long list of obstacles that should not deter this endeavor. We need to get into the rhythm. We must get comfortable working with and transporting highly enriched uranium – and launching and operating nuclear reactors in space. As we apply the practical uses of nuclear power and propulsion in space, we will inevitably gain experience and a deeper understanding. This will drive down costs and improve performance until we eventually unlock even more exotic forms of propulsion.

NASA must embrace bold undertakings again. Making the development of nuclear-electric propulsion a mini-Manhattan project would be a good start. As we did with the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, we should unleash the best and brightest minds to ensure America is underway under nuclear power in space.

America has no choice. What we stand to learn and gain—for our people, economy, and security—is astronomical. If we don’t lead, you can be sure others will.

If we lose the high ground, the consequences won’t be limited to space. It is time for NASA to commit to the nuclear option.

Jared Isaacman is an entrepreneur, pilot, and astronaut with more than 7,000 flight hours, including ratings in experimental and ex-military aircraft. He is Executive Chairman of Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) and co-founder of Draken International, the world’s largest private air force, supporting U.S. military pilot training.

 

Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999 and a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He is chairman of Gingrich 360.

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2025/08/13/we_need_a_mini-manhattan_project_for_nuclear_electric_propulsion_1128430.html

The ‘Empathy’ Lie and the Erasure of the Hostages

 by Seth Mandel

After speaking on the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended his plan to recognize a Palestinian state by taking a swipe at his Israeli counterpart: “He again reiterated to me what he has said publicly as well, which is to be in denial about the consequences that are occurring for innocent people.”

If Albanese wants to talk about “denial about the consequences that are occurring for innocent people,” let’s talk about it.

This morning, the Israeli Health Ministry (which, unlike the Gaza Health Ministry, very much exists) released a report on the treatment of 12 Israeli hostages who were freed earlier this year from Hamas captivity. Because Albanese is so concerned about the suffering of the innocent, and presumably even he agrees the hostages are innocent, perhaps this will break through the wall of indifference he and other Western leaders have constructed around themselves regarding the lives of Israelis.

The report is in Hebrew, but Israeli media have provided some insight for English-speakers.

The hostages came into Gaza with injuries from their kidnappings. Those wounds were often either untreated or incorrectly treated, both of which worsened the injuries. The hostages were kept either in solitary or overcrowded dungeons, usually with ceilings lower than five feet high. Groups of up to six hostages were held in 2-square-meter cells. They were barely permitted to bathe, and basic women’s hygiene products were withheld from them.

If it’s starvation specifically that Albanese is worried about, he ought to be bothered by the report’s findings. On their better days, the hostages were given a single meal of some pita and insect-infested rice. But they often went days without food. When they were given water to drink, it was usually contaminated. In addition to loss of up to 40 percent of their body mass, hostages’ lack of nutrition caused scurvy, bleeding gums, and bone decay.

The 12 hostages included in the report spoke of sexual harassment and humiliation.

Physically, the Jerusalem Post reports, “the long-term consequences of such treatment include irreversible nerve damage, impairment of daily functioning, chronic pain, impaired fertility in women, hearing loss, and skeletal system damage.”

Mentally, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety were common among the hostages.

The Health Ministry will be sending the report on to the Red Cross, which has not visited the hostages and does not seem likely to do so without some kind of intervention on the part of the international community. This treatment is widespread and intentional and—crucially—confirmed in the individual cases.

As I explained yesterday, there is no longer any disputing that French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that his country would recognize the “state of Palestine,” in conjunction with his and other European leaders’ one-sided pressure on Israel, sabotaged the cease-fire deal that would have brought 10 living hostages home.

Which means that every leader who followed Macron in announcing a plan to recognize a Palestinian state—Mark Carney of Canada, Albanese of Australia, Keir Starmer of the UK—did so knowing the price that would be paid by the hostages.

The remaining hostages, including those who would have been freed had Europe not intervened on Hamas’s behalf, may not survive. But even those who do survive will be tortured, starved, and likely exposed to sexual mistreatment of one kind or another. Every added day of captivity brings them closer to death through painful and utterly inhuman treatment at the hands of Hamas monsters.

To join in the wave of “Palestine” recognition, knowing this, means several Western leaders have made a calculation: They can live with the deaths of the hostages, even when they are partially on their conscience. Such people may not be Hamasnik monsters themselves, but they are at the very least monster-adjacent.

Furthermore, this whole situation exposes something important about the international community. Those who claim to care for the wellbeing of Palestinians in Gaza are not displaying empathy. They are not displaying generosity of spirit or anything of the kind. They are, as they have explained time and again, acting out of domestic political pressure. That is certainly a legitimate driver of political policymaking, but it is not a display of morality or decency.

Were the “humanitarian” activists to advocate with equal force for the hostages, they might be saved. But the rest of the world doesn’t care, and politics is a numbers game: There simply aren’t enough Jews in these countries. That itself is a vicious cycle, and one the callous cowards of the West are unbothered by as well.

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/the-empathy-lie-and-the-erasure-of-the-hostages/

Racial Preferences at Northwestern?

 Last November, Northwestern president Michael Schill gave an hourlong address at a meeting of the faculty senate, reportedly with more than 100 professors in attendance. The focus of his speech was the recent presidential election, held nine days prior, which returned Donald Trump to the White House. The rain was pouring and the mood ominous: the Orange Man was back in power.

“This is scary,” Schill reportedly told the professors. America faced a “crisis” that could plunge the university into the most difficult period in its 174-year history.

In the days following the election, Schill had reportedly been poring over academic histories of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare, believing that President Trump might conduct an anti-Communist-style siege of elite universities. According to a source at the meeting, Schill, a lawyer by training, tried to maintain a reasonable demeanor. But all hell broke loose when he turned the microphone over to the faculty.

The United States had entered a “fascist situation,” Lesie Harris, a historian who specializes in slavery, feminism, and sexuality, reportedly declared. Not to be outdone, Helen Tilley, a professor who studies decolonization, allegedly became hysterical and shouted that Trump would usher in an era reminiscent of “1930s Germany” and strip Americans of their rights. Both sentiments were reportedly affirmed by the gathering.

“It’s like they’re from a different planet,” said our source, speaking to City Journal on condition of anonymity. “These people have never had a real job, they get all this government money, and they sit in their little offices all day in their alternative universes.”

When reached by City Journal, Harris initially confirmed her comments and said she stood by them. However, Harris later backtracked, saying she could not confirm her attendance at the meeting as it does not appear in her calendar. Tilley denied being at the meeting when reached for comment. Our source, who took written notes during the meeting, insists that both Harris and Tilley were present and spoke.

Though the faculty had apparently succumbed to a persecution fantasy in response to Trump’s reelection, Schill did, in fact, have reason to worry. According to a lawsuit, he had overseen a policy of brazen racial discrimination, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.

Schill presided over a “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy at Northwestern, which sought to entrench an identity-based hierarchy on campus. In 2023, the university began soliciting statements about applicants’ “background, identity or community” as part of its admissions process, shortly after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in admissions. The university’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing, now rebranded as the Impact Institute, hosted a training program that banned heterosexual whites from participation. Similarly, the university incorporated race and identity criteria into many of its scholarships, such as the African American History and Culture Scholarship and the Dean Hansell LGBT Advocates Scholarship.

At Northwestern’s law school, discrimination seems to be official policy. According to a lawsuit filed last year, “left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statutes and openly discriminating on account of race and sex when appointing professors.” The plaintiff, a nonprofit organization that opposes identity-based preferences in academia, alleges that between 2021 and 2024, the university extended only three of 21 tenure-track offers to white male candidates, and that former dean Daniel Rodriguez sought to conceal communications about faculty hiring, which would have revealed intentional discrimination. Northwestern and Schill did not respond to requests for comment.

Schill has positioned himself as a liberal hero. In 2023, when the Supreme Court was poised to ban affirmative action in admissions, he promised to flout any attempt to roll back racial favoritism. “Let me be unequivocal,” he proclaimed. “Northwestern’s commitment to student diversity will remain no matter what the Supreme Court decides.”

The irony is that, for all their talk about Trump’s fascism, it’s universities like Northwestern that appear to have turned identity-based hierarchy into official policy. If the allegations against them are true, they should be penalized accordingly.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/northwestern-university-president-michael-schill-race-admissions

Against Lived Experience

 Mankind has used levers, pulleys, and gears for millennia to move large masses with little effort. Despite the cheap and easy access to these tools, coaches today have no difficulty getting athletes to spend hours in the gym lifting weights without their help. “No pain, no gain” is demonstrably true in sports. Those who believe otherwise fail.

Artificial Intelligence cheats us, and especially our children, with the promise that our intellectual development will be enhanced when it does the heavy lifting for us. Less obviously, digital technology pushes us to misunderstand education simply as the transfer of information, not, as Plato argued, “a turning around of the whole soul.” Our students’ willingness to swallow these lies stems from the failure of teachers in the humanities to demonstrate the tangible benefits of reading and writing about difficult books. Worse, the dominant approaches to teaching in these fields conspire to hide and even deny this power. The classical academy movement was born in response to a catastrophe in liberal education that has been long in the making.

When Frederick Douglass discovered that his master wished him to remain illiterate, he devoted all his energies to learning how to read. He somehow knew that books and writing could be the means of his liberation. I left an elite liberal arts college last fall to teach at a classical academy when I found that students there could no longer read his Narrative, or any other difficult book, and that my institution would punish those who tried to remedy this defect. An article written by Rose Horowitch for the Atlantic confirmed my conclusion. Andrew Delbanco at Columbia no longer teaches Moby Dick. Victoria Kahn at Berkeley has been reduced to assigning short selections from the Iliad. Students can no longer attend to details or keep track of the overall plot. Sonnets prove too long to sustain their attention. These high-scoring test takers are increasingly beyond the help of remedial efforts. Reports from the front can no longer be ignored.

An immediate cause of our failure has been the turn to the “student-centered classroom.” Its advocates aim to “empower” students, to give them “agency” by having them decide on the topics and activities that interest them and then allow them to set their own goals and measures of achievement. Self-evaluation takes the place of grades. “Let a thousand blossoms bloom.”

This is a noble, if rarely achieved, aim for advanced graduate students. Elementary, high school, and even undergraduate students do not have the requisite information or strength to be left to themselves. Doing so isolates them in their own narrow interests and limited experiences, cutting them off from a broader understanding of the world and themselves. The clearest sign of this is their stunted vocabulary. We cannot think without language. With limited words come limited thoughts. In these student-centered silos, there are no communities of learning. Picture a child gazing at a Chromebook supplied by Google and attached to the internet. Scrolling alone. With earbuds.

The classical academy movement returns the written word to its place of honor. We stress grammar, logic, rhetoric, and often Latin. At my own school, Emet Classical Academy, Hebrew takes pride of place, but with the same intention of increasing our appreciation for language by stepping outside our native tongue. And because the student is the center of our concern, at the center of the classroom is the book.

Picture instead a room of 9^th graders all reading the same work, focused on understanding an author who is almost certainly their intellectual and moral superior. We don’t study the Iliad to learn what “Greeks” thought about this or that, as if its author were a typical representative of the kind. We are eager to learn as much as we can about Homer because we want to learn from Homer. Most of the evidence is in his books. The poem opens with the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles over command of the army. Who is right? Which side does Homer take? What is the standard of his judgment? There is only one rule: students must base their claims on evidence taken from the text, not on their personal opinions or feelings. “I think” takes the place of “I feel,” and leaves itself open to rebuttal.

To master a text, readers must first become its slave, abandon their own views to adopt those of the author. Humility in the service of pride. This approach allows students to gain some distance from and thus perspective on themselves. The task isn’t easy. The self-criticism required to acknowledge our betters is not always or initially pleasant. And a good author’s intentions are not always clear, often intentionally so. This is a good thing. Passages must then be marshaled against each other and competing claims evaluated. Arguments break out. Discussion ensues. Here is a community of learning. Just as important, it is also a group of potential friends united not by a common opinion but by a common struggle and the common good of understanding, as well as by the pleasure of liberation from their unexamined and often incoherent prejudices. Laughter, most often but not only at ourselves, is a constant companion. Conversations, not chats, continue outside the classroom. Not always. But they happen.

Classical academies work best when students enroll early. The founders of Emet had planned to begin with just fifth and six grade, but opened the school to ninth graders in response to Oct. 7. This posed a problem. Like the students at Columbia and Berkeley, ours too struggled with the rigor of the classical curriculum. I insisted on reading the Iliad in its entirety as is done in other classical academies. Those who had never read a book before simply could not do it. Some turned to AI for shallow, easy to digest summaries that further hindered access to the book. It produced for them even shallower essays with no effort and less gain. AI may sometimes prove a useful tool for those who can already read and write. But the effect on the young is to prevent or stunt their growth, to short-circuit the development of their potential. Our principal suspended these students for their own good. But everyone, even those doing their own work, was unhappy. Parents complained. Administrators asked that I do something more “fun.”

I persisted. We went much more slowly, and, in doing so, I discovered that with patience (and frequent quizzes) those who had somehow acquired a taste for reading, even if they had consumed nothing but drek, could be converted to more substantive fare. A break-through came when someone noticed that Homer calls Agamemnon a fool for trusting in a dream sent by Zeus that lures him into a defeat with the false promise of a victory. “Does Homer think it’s better not to trust the gods?” Another student pushed further down this path. She saw that Agamemnon’s own foolish efforts to implement Zeus’ plan threatened to ruin it altogether. “What kind of fool picks a fool to carry out his will? Does Homer think that Zeus is a fool?” This got their attention. From here it was not hard for them to see that Homer also had some pointed criticisms of his apparent hero, Achilles, who likewise puts his faith in Zeus. They wondered: What kind of author can provoke them to think by not directly telling them what to think? Are there other books written like this? Good questions. But not for ChatGPT.

On the last day we spent with Homer, everyone felt a sense of accomplishment at having completed a difficult task. For some, this was now tinged with the sadness of parting from an old friend, even if one that they had originally disliked. Three months later, these same students recalled that experience. When they learned our curriculum took on only half of Virgil’s Aeneid, they turned my arguments for Homer against me and insisted we read the whole thing. They were up for a challenge. But more important, they now feared to miss the opportunity of making a new friend. I had no choice but to comply.

My favorite class occurred the day a broken tooth sent me to a dentist chair. In my absence, a colleague delivered a topic to discuss then left the room to teach her own: “Why does Socrates misquote Homer in the Apology?” The students tackled the question on their own and two hours later produced, unbidden, a hand-written record of their deliberations and conclusions. They did so not for credit, and they received none. But they were proud of what they had done on their own. They enjoyed the exercise of their new strength. One later told me that nothing like this would have happened at the beginning of the year without a teacher in the room. Or, perhaps, they now had had the experience that with a good book in their hands, the teacher is never absent. It never leaves them alone.

What I have described here might remind some of a college liberal arts course from the 1980’s or earlier. Fair enough. The classical academy movement has simply rediscovered what earlier ages knew and practiced: such courses can profitably be taught to fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. Today, however, students must take these classes in high school. Most universities will not, no, they cannot, provide them. Covid did real damage to the education of our children. Phones make everything worse. But the “mind virus” antedates both the respiratory one and the explosion of social media. The roots of our distaste for books, our inability to see their use for self-liberation and empowerment, lie more in the unintended consequences and contradictions in contemporary educational theories and ideology. Teachers, not AI, are most often the vector of infection.

Multiculturalism has been a path to greater self-understanding at least since the time of Homer. His wily and multifaceted Odysseus became that way by traveling and studying the ways and minds of men in many cities. Herodotus perfected the approach. From two eyes come one vision, but with depth. Yet when we graft multiculturalism to the view that all cultures are equally worthy of respect, a presupposition of our own culture’s egalitarian relativism, we deprive students of the most powerful motive for their study: the hope of discovering ways better than their own. The hallmark of so-called “Western civilization” was once its relatively greater openness to and distinctive interest in other ways of life, to say nothing of its own internal diversity. Today, we still, like Plato, teach students that their culture is a kind of cave. But, unlike Plato, we now insist there is no escape. If there is no place left to go, who you are and where you are from, your unchosen racial, gender or class identify, becomes infinitely more important than where you are going. When “cultural appropriation” becomes taboo, so too does genuine engagement with other people. “Stay in your own lane.” Multiculturalism becomes monolithic. Binocular vision succumbs to the flattening gaze of the one-eyed Cyclops.

Conversely, too great a stress on openness and a wish to avoid conflict have also taken their toll. The lively discussion and sorting out of contradictory views is discouraged in elementary and high schools as impossible, and, worse, likely to injure someone’s feelings. The habit of arguing falls into disuse. Students are miserable at it, not for want of intelligence, but from lack of practice. The inability to argue makes them distrustful of reason. This distrust turns into a belief that reason gives no guidance at all on any important questions. Our principle of equality assures them that everyone else is in the same boat. Contentious issues can therefore be determined only by authority. But whose?

The “sovereignty of lived experience” fills the vacuum. A writer’s ethnic identity, gender, or personal history can be important and compelling considerations for understanding any work. But when they trump all others, and when a writer’s claims cannot be challenged or questioned by those who do not share the proper traits, the effect is to create an authority beyond dispute. Learning ends when we believe that without direct experience we can never really understand, as if thoughtful reflection on what others say were itself not the most important or authoritative experience. When we must simply accept and respect what we are told, all books become predictable and boring. These doctrines dig for us a cave beneath the cave, turning every author into a potential tyrant, a master who cannot himself be mastered. No one can blame students for fleeing such chains, or for turning to AI to lighten the burden. Yet this effort to escape only deepens their enslavement. Machines can liberate us from toil, but not from ourselves. That’s what books are for.

The best way to stop a thief is to demonstrate that what he most desires cannot be stolen. To experience the expansive and liberating power of books, we must read them not by ourselves, but for ourselves, with humility, care, and, ultimately, defiance. The process, like lifting weights, is painful, especially at first. Developing this capacity is the task that classical academies have set for themselves.

AI and the digital information it feeds on will not go away. Nor should we wish them gone. But if you want your children to avoid being enervated by them, to avoid falling into a state of unredeemable dependence, you must provide them with experiences that support and vindicate the claims of genuine intellectual effort. Read to them when small. Encourage foreign language study. And start them in a classical academy as soon as possible. Set them to heavy lifting, one page at a time.

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Chris Nadon (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago) writes on the character and history of republican government understood as self-rule in authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Sarpi, Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville, and Lincoln. He has taught political philosophy and Humanities at Emet Classical Academy, Claremont-McKenna College, Trinity College, and Kiev-Mohyla Academy. He is a visiting professor at UATX.

https://uatx.substack.com/p/against-lived-experience

How I know DC cops cover up crimes

 Five years ago, I was violently attacked and sexually assaulted in broad daylight in Washington, D.C., by a homeless man. He served time in federal prison for what he did to me. But if you look for evidence that the attack happened in the city’s crime statistics, you won’t find it.

The truth of what happened to me and the D.C. government’s role in it is as much a public scandal as it is a personal trauma. D.C. police covered up the unspeakable wrong that the stranger did to me. Even though a judge sentenced my attacker to hard time in prison, D.C. police leadership would rather deceive the public and appear less dangerous than list mine and countless other sexual assaults on their website.

The extent of crime in D.C. has been debated by the Left and Right since President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would take federal action to crack down on problems in the District of Columbia.

But if the public wants to have an honest conversation about crime in D.C., the MPD will first have to be honest about how prevalent crime is. Without MPD’s honesty about the crimes that it has chosen to hide from its public-facing stats page, the White House cannot get an accurate picture of how bad the problem actually is and adequately fix it.

For me, the story began long before that attack. I was a Washingtonian for seven years. I was saving up money to buy a condo and planned to spend the next few decades in Washington, the intersection of politics and media. D.C.’s crime problem was something you lived with. You took Ubers and Lyfts, told others if you were walking after dark so they knew when you were home, and knew to be aware of your surroundings, almost to the point of paranoia. (Ladies?)

On a Saturday morning in 2020, I walked out of my apartment on Capitol Hill to mail a package at a post office several blocks from the U.S. Capitol. I put on my black sweatshirt and black sweatpants then headed out the door.

I never made it to the post office.

Just one block from my apartment building’s entrance, I was attacked by a large man well over six feet tall. He charged at me for a reason that I still do not understand. In broad daylight and on well-traveled 2nd Street NE next to Union Station, I fought to get away as he sexually assaulted me. If it had not been for others in the vicinity, including a construction worker named Donny who heard my screaming and ran to my rescue, I don’t know if I would be here today.

Despite my background working with federal law enforcement, it was only through my experience as a victim that I learned personally of two ways that D.C. police and the courts fail the public. I share those now with the hope that they inform the public and leaders to improve how crime is handled and prevented.

My attacker was arrested on the street months later, charged, and pleaded guilty to a sex abuse charge nearly two years later. MPD’s “Crime Cards” online statistics page omits mentioning it, though. Do you know what that communicates to a victim? How invalidating that is?

When I asked MPD in 2020 why my incident was not on its crime map, an MPD spokesman said the city only includes 1st degree felonies under its crime stats. That would mean that for every person robbed, assaulted, or sexually abused in anything less than egregious ways, you have not been counted into the total tally. The pain you suffered was not severe enough, according to MPD’s standards.

In a follow-up email to the MPD this week, an MPD spokesperson stated after a back-and-forth exchange that the map includes some sex abuse charges, but not all of them. In my case, my attacker’s crime against me, which landed him in prison, is still not listed.

“In an effort to provide more clear information about the most serious sex assaults that are most closely aligned with the public’s perception of rape and attempted rape, the most serious sex abuse categories are included in the reports of DC Code Index Violent Crimes,” the MPD Crime Cards website states in the bottom right corner at the bottom of a scroll within the page.

The Left and out-of-touch elite reporters have purported this week that things are fine in Washington because crime is trending down, while the Right has maintained that the Metropolitan Police Department’s statistics have been manipulated to paint a rosier picture of the situation. Turns out, it is actually worse than they knew.

The D.C. Police did do something right. The day of my attack, the police collected my clothes for DNA evidence. About two months later, they contacted me to say they had had a match to the DNA of a homeless man who had been previously arrested.

Police arrested him, but he was immediately released from jail by the judge who presided over the case. The assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted my case told me it was to keep the D.C. jail from overcrowding.

Here I was, a single woman who was attacked a block from my front door. Not jailing him until trial felt like a death sentence. How could I leave my home with him out on the streets, living in a tunnel a few blocks from where I lived?

Trial proceedings were set to begin in the fall of 2020, but amid the George Floyd riots in downtown Washington, it was delayed until early 2021. Then, the early 2021 start was delayed until the end of 2021. The U.S. Attorney’s office assured me it was not because the federal prosecutors were busy bringing hundreds of cases against January 6th offenders.

But all the while, the man who attacked me in April 2020 was out there. I moved across town to try to reclaim my life in the city.

The U.S. Attorney’s office would inform me through mail notifications and phone calls of updates to my case.

He was arrested in five separate incidents after being released, and after each arrest, the judge permitted his immediate release, even when he was caught in public with a machete.

The D.C. police officers on patrol must have been as aggravated as I was. Over and over again, they arrested a man with a previous criminal history only to have him right back on the street a day later.

I have thought about these failures by the police and courts for the past five years, but I have not been sure how to bring attention to them. Right now, we have a rare chance to bring meaningful change.

I have shared my story. Will anyone hear it and respond?

Anna Giaritelli is a homeland security reporter for the Washington Examiner. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/op-eds/3498600/man-went-prison-assaulting-me-dc-crime-stats-show-he-was-never-arrested/