America is engaged in negotiations to end the war in Iran on terms favorable to the United States. It is difficult to believe this will be achieved through negotiations alone, however hopeful President Trump is about the prospects. Like many Americans, the president wishes to bring this war to a close. After all, America is not the policeman of the world. Nor are we the protector of the Middle East.

When the United States spends the blood and treasure of the American people, we do so for the good of the American people. This is both the beginning and the end of President Trump’s strategic view of the war in Iran. Although other very high-priority policies must be carried out—the deportation of 25 million illegal aliens that came during the Biden Administration, for starters—this war must be prosecuted to a satisfactory conclusion for the United States.

President Trump does not see the war in Iran as a diversion from America’s true interests, as many of his critics on both the Left and the Right insist. He sees it as one front in a larger world war that America did not choose but needs to fight and win.

The Chinese Communist Party declared a “People’s War” against the United States in May 2019. Communist China and Russia have supplied, financed, and shielded the Islamic Republic of Iran for decades precisely because Iran is useful to them: a deadly proxy that bleeds America and the West while Beijing and Moscow deny responsibility.

And Iran is useful to the broader Islamic world as well. However much Sunni and Shia Islam may differ, Iran regards itself as the military vanguard of the global Islamic movement—the effective instrument of Islam against the United States and the West.

To treat the war in Iran as an isolated regional quarrel is to misunderstand the global war we are in today.

The Mullahs and the Iranian People

To understand the war, one must first understand the Iranian regime.

The mullahs who rule Iran look on the Iranian people—whose attendance at Friday mosque services ranges from a high of 12% to perhaps as low as 1.5%, the lowest in the Middle East—with contempt. They regard themselves as the faithful remnant, determined to fulfill an apocalyptic worldview, whatever the cost to the nation they rule. The Iranian people are expendable instruments of that destiny.

Herein lies our central challenge: we Americans value human life. We do not wish to kill the Iranian people, the vast majority of whom do not share the anti-Western fanaticism of the Islamic Republic. But because the Iranian people do not have guns, they are poor candidates to overthrow the regime that oppresses them. Any serious effort at regime change would require continued economic warfare, the arming of various factions within the country, and the separation of the Iranian military from the theocratic leadership. These are not quick or easy steps, and no one should pretend otherwise.

Let us be clear: in this war we play by different rules than our enemy. If Iran had the capability to launch an array of thermonuclear weapons against the United States—whether from long-range ballistic missiles or from medium-range, ship-launched ballistic missiles, the latter delivery system well within their capability—they might well do so. It would not matter to them that the response would be the nuclear annihilation of Iran. For the mullahs, such a cataclysm would fulfill their apocalyptic worldview. A regime that hates its own people will not be deterred by the promise of their destruction.

This is the reason President Trump believes Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. It is not a position he arrived at recently, nor one supplied to him by the so-called Israel Lobby or the military-industrial complex. He has held this view for more than a quarter century, as I’ve previously argued.

As Trump wrote in 2015 before he was president, “Whatever it takes, whatever we have to do, Iran cannot be allowed to build a nuclear weapon…. An Iran with a nuclear weapon would start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East with potentially devastating consequences.” And in the first two weeks of his second term, he translated that belief into policy in National Security Presidential Memorandum-2, which includes this language: “A radical regime like this can never be allowed to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, or to extort the United States or its allies through the threat of nuclear weapons acquisition, development, or use.”

President Trump abhors nuclear weapons. He regards them as a necessary evil for deterring our enemies abroad, and nothing more. This is a key reason he has placed such emphasis on building the Golden Dome missile defense system. A fully operational and robust Golden Dome would render the Iranian nuclear threat irrelevant. Iran could still do us harm—terrorism in its various forms would not be out of the question—but the civilization-ending attack by a nuclear warhead or an Iranian electromagnetic pulse device detonated over the American homeland would be largely negated.

The U.S. Golden Dome, however, is still years from completion. Until it is finished, the American people remain exposed to precisely the ship-launched ballistic missile scenario the Iranians rehearsed in the Caspian Sea two decades ago, and rehearsed again from the IRIS Shahid Mahdavi in 2024.

We do not know with certainty whether Iran already possesses a nuclear warhead. Prudence requires that we assume the worst, especially as Iran is so closely allied to our mortal enemy, Communist China. It also requires that the building of the Golden Dome proceed at a pace far more rapid than it is currently.

The Stakes

The Iranian regime’s strategy today is simple. Fight a war of attrition against the United States. Maintain strategic, military, and economic relationships with Communist China and Russia to keep the economy afloat and the arsenal of drones and missiles replenished. And wait for the day when President Trump is out of office, trusting that his successor will lack his resolve. The mullahs believe time is on their side. Every American president before President Trump taught them to believe it.

President Trump very much wants to end this war—but only on terms that guarantee the security of the United States. From the beginning, and even now, he has not set out upon the task of regime change. The key strategic objective continues to be to deny Iran the ability to launch nuclear weapons against the United States, and to do so in ways that do not create an expanded war with Communist China and Russia.

Those who demand regime change should be honest about what it requires. It is not enough that the regime be defeated; they must know they have been defeated. That is very difficult to achieve against men who belong to what can only be described as an Islamic death cult, men who would welcome a global cataclysm in service of a delusional worldview.

And there is a harder question still: How many Iranians are we willing to kill? Short of a nuclear attack upon us, I do not believe the president is prepared to kill millions of Iranians in order to degrade Iran to the point that regime change would require. President Trump is a civilized man. He has not crafted a military strategy that will lead to the annihilation of the Iranian people. The mullahs, by contrast, may well fight and expend Iranian lives to the bitter end.

The Permanent Problem

To avoid a forever war, we need to understand a truth that our political class resists: as long as the Islamic Republic stands, it is a permanent enemy of the United States.

What we face is not a forever war, but a permanent problem—the perpetual ambition of the mullahs to build nuclear weapons—with which we must deal. If regime change is not possible, however desirable it may be, then the next best option is a military strategy that continuously destroys Iran’s nuclear capabilities as they appear, for as long as they appear, until American missile defenses are fully operational.

This is not the endless nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan. It requires no occupation, no democracy promotion, no American garrisons rebuilding Iranian society. It is the periodic and decisive application of American power in defense of the American homeland—nothing more, and nothing less.

What would such a strategy look like in practice? Consider the Pickaxe Mountain site, the complex Iran has been tunneling beneath a ridge just south of the Natanz nuclear facility since its centrifuge assembly plant was destroyed there. Its halls are buried at least 100 meters down, deeper than our GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which burrows through some 60 meters of earth, can reliably reach. And although it is also believed that enough sustained bombardment may permanently bury the uranium at Pickaxe, a facility does not need to be totally destroyed to be rendered ineffective.

Pickaxe Mountain has four known tunnel entrances, ventilation shafts, and above-ground power lines running to it. An American strike would not have to reach the halls themselves. B-2 bombers would put Massive Ordnance Penetrators into the tunnel portals, collapse the ventilation system and sever the power—entombing whatever centrifuges and whatever portion of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium the mullahs have buried there.

And when the regime begins to dig it out—an excavation that takes months and is visible from space the entire time—we strike again. For the United States, sealing the mountain costs a few sorties. For Iran, unsealing it costs a year. That is an exchange rate America can sustain until we have a fully operational Golden Dome system in place.

Some will ask why we do not simply go and take Iran’s highly enriched uranium by invasion, or by a special forces operation. An invasion can be dismissed quickly. To conquer and occupy Iran—a nation of 90 million people, four times the size of Iraq, where 150,000 American troops proved too few to hold the ground—would require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. That is the forever war, arrived at by another name.

A special forces operation sounds more attractive, and it deserves a serious answer. To be sure, such a raid is within American capability. It would require a few thousand men: special operators, an airborne force to seize and hold a desert airstrip, and American airpower overhead to suppress Iranian air defenses and keep a corridor open.

The numbers, however, are not the problem.

First, one must know where the material is. Four hundred-odd kilograms of highly enriched uranium fit in a handful of transport cylinders; it can be moved in a few trucks and dispersed the moment the regime suspects a raid. Much of it now likely sits beneath the rubble of our own strikes, which means excavation.

Second, excavation transforms the raid into a siege: American forces holding a fixed position deep in Iran’s interior for days or weeks while the IRGC masses against them. A fixed American position in the Iranian desert would present the mullahs with a stationary American target, the one thing their remaining arsenal was built to hit, as they demonstrated against our base at Al Udeid.

Third, even a flawless raid ends nothing. Iran would keep its scientists, its centrifuge know-how, and its intent. We would have seized a stockpile, not a program—buying the same delay as the bombing campaign buys, at vastly higher risk.

And here is the essential point: we do not need to possess Iran’s uranium. We need Iran not to possess it. Highly enriched uranium entombed beneath a collapsed mountain is denied to the mullahs as surely as if it were in American hands—without a single American boot on Iranian soil.

And the War Came

Let me close with two points: one about expectations, and one addressed to those who support the president but do not approve of this war.

On expectations: the American people should not expect a surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. Wars against regimes like the one in Iran do not end cleanly. They end when the enemy is denied the means of destroying you and knows that any attempt to rebuild those means will bring their destruction. That is the standard by which President Trump’s conduct of this war should be judged—not by the false choice between a forever war and a pretended peace.

To those who support the president but not this war, let me ask a question in a spirit of friendship, for I understand the sentiment: How long did we imagine it would be before something had to be done about Iran?

The Islamic Republic has committed textbook acts of war against the United States for 47 years—the seizure of our embassy in 1979, the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, the American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq by Iranian munitions—while president after president deferred the reckoning to his successor. Did we believe this problem would never mature to the point where we would have to deal with it? That a regime whose schoolchildren recite “Death to America” each morning, and which enriches uranium to build a weapon, would simply grow old and moderate on its own? The debt was always going to come due. It came due on President Trump’s watch, and rather than defer payment once more—the politically expedient thing every predecessor did—he paid it.

The choice before us was never between this war and no war. It was between war now, on our terms, against a regime not yet armed with nuclear weapons, and war later, on their terms, quite possibly announced by the destruction of an American city.

And here a word must be said to the president himself, one I have made before and make again. President Trump, knowing well the American people’s reluctance to go to war, has never fully explained the Iranian nuclear threat to them. Now would be a good time to do so.

The American people have been asked to bear real sacrifices—the expenditure of American military power and treasure, oil prices above $100 a barrel, the disruption of the economy, and the daily risk to American servicemen—without ever hearing, plainly and from the Oval Office, what a ship-launched Iranian nuclear missile or an electromagnetic pulse attack would mean for their country. These hard facts are unpleasant to explain. But the American people are more than capable of bearing sacrifice when they are told honestly why it must be borne, and they will not sustain a war they have not been given reason to understand.

A people who know the stakes will see this war through to its conclusion. A people kept in the dark will demand it end before its object is achieved—and hand the mullahs the only victory available to them.

Put simply, this war ends when the nuclear threat from Iran ends, and when the regime in Tehran understands that it is suicidal to attack the United States. Until the Golden Dome is complete, President Trump must deny our permanent enemy the permanent object of its ambition. That is the task before us and one we must achieve sooner rather than later.

The post A Defense of the President’s Strategy in Iran appeared first on The American Mind.

Every political community needs its story. It needs an account of itself, its heroes and villains, its founding wounds and saving deeds. The public does not merely remember these things but also reinforces them by making them a template for education, teaching the young what is noble, what is shameful, what must be revered, and what must never be permitted to return. This is not simply propaganda. It belongs to political life. No polity can live by disembodied ideals alone, and no people can endure without memory, piety, gratitude, and shared attachments.

The difficulty begins when people start to forget that their sacred story, however reflective of the truth it may be, is nevertheless a parable or a narrative about justice, not justice itself.

The American postwar consensus is such a story, and one that has been generating a fair amount of controversy of late. This consensus is not merely the historical fact that the United States and its allies defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or the moral fact that this was a good thing. Nor is it merely the institutional settlement that followed the war: Bretton Woods, the United Nations, NATO, the national security state, the administrative welfare state, and the open-ended commitment to upholding the liberal international order. At its deepest level, the postwar consensus is how America came to understand itself under Franklin Roosevelt.

According to this myth, America passed through the Depression and World War II to emerge not simply victorious, but purified. The older constitutional republic, with its local attachments, constitutional restraints, inherited moral habits, and suspicion of centralized power, was reinterpreted through the drama of 1945. The new America would be universal, managerial, egalitarian, therapeutic, and global. It would secure freedom from want and fear at home while defending democracy, rights, and openness abroad. It would not merely preserve an inherited republic. It would carry forward the moral meaning of history.

This is why World War II became more than a war in American memory. It became a second founding, or more precisely, a new founding myth. The Axis became not merely defeated enemies, but symbols of metaphysical evil. The American-led order became not merely the victor’s settlement, but the institutional negation of fascism itself. To be loyal to the postwar order was to stand with democracy against tyranny, openness against hatred, equality against hierarchy, and progress against barbarism.

The power of such a myth is obvious. It gave moral coherence to a nation emerging from economic depression, total war, and global responsibility. It honored real sacrifice, named real evils, and helped explain why America should assume burdens that older republican prudence might have avoided.

The danger might have been less obvious, or less imminent, at the time. But it is becoming clearer, and more present, almost 81 years on.

Once a regime identifies its own institutions with the defeat of evil, opposition to those institutions becomes morally precarious. Dissent is no longer merely dissent. It can be recoded as reaction, extremism, disloyalty, hatred, or latent fascism. The regime’s preferred policies become signs of civic righteousness, while its opponents become symptoms of a disease the regime believes it was born to cure.

World War II did not create every idea later associated with the postwar order. Wilsonian internationalism, progressive humanitarianism, New Deal economics, liberal Protestant universalism, racial egalitarianism, anti-colonial rhetoric, and suspicion toward inherited local attachments all had older roots. But the architects of America under FDR gathered these older ideas, dramatized them, baptized them, and placed them beyond ordinary dispute.

Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech to Congress looked toward a world founded upon freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, each extended “everywhere in the world.” His “Second Bill of Rights” in 1944 proposed a new economic understanding of citizenship, including claims to employment, housing, medical care, education, and material well-being.

These were not casual policy proposals but cornerstones of a refounding in which liberty would increasingly be understood not as ordered freedom under constitutional restraint, but as security administered by the modern state. The Hobbesian bargain was no longer promised safety from a violent death, but from discomfort itself.

A serious critique of this refounding must avoid two temptations. The first is vulgar revisionism, which imagines that because the postwar myth is false, the Axis regimes must somehow become defensible. That is morally unserious. Imperial Japan was a brutal expansionist empire, and Nazi Germany was a monstrous regime. These orders emerged due to the particular histories of their respective societies, and those histories are worthy of open study. Their obvious guilt need not be diminished in order to criticize what the victorious liberal order made of the war.

The second temptation is pious submission to the official myth, which says that because the enemies were evil, the victors’ order must be sacred. This allows every later project of centralization, social reconstruction, global management, and ideological discipline to borrow sanctity from the sacrifices of the dead.

The truth is harder. World War II was a terrible war against guilty enemies, fought with courage by millions of ordinary men, and concluded in a world where even the victors crossed moral lines that should never be treated lightly. Japan illustrates the problem. Pearl Harbor was an act of war, and Japan’s conduct in Asia was brutal. But the Pacific War did not erupt without context.

The United States had placed Japan under severe economic pressure through asset freezes, embargoes, and restrictions that threatened the strategic life of the Japanese Empire. The State Department’s historical account of the road to Pearl Harbor notes that these measures created serious shortages and that Japanese leaders concluded they had to act swiftly. This does not justify Pearl Harbor. But it does complicate the innocent mythology of passive America assaulted by inexplicable barbarism.

The end of the Pacific War is equally difficult. By August 1945, Japan was strategically finished. Its navy was broken, its cities were burning, and its economy was strangled. Soviet entry had shattered what remained of its diplomatic position. The question was no longer whether Japan could win. It was whether its ruling class could be forced, shocked, or permitted to accept defeat. The atomic bombings were not the simple moral necessity of the postwar catechism. They were part of a larger total-war campaign in which civilian population centers had become instruments of coercion.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey later concluded that Japan probably would have surrendered before November 1, 1945, and certainly before the end of that year, even without the atomic bombs, Soviet entry, or invasion, though that judgment has remained contested. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 in Operation Meetinghouse should haunt the American memory as much as Hiroshima. It killed roughly 100,000 civilians, left about 1,000,000 homeless, and destroyed vast sections of the city.

Military necessity may explain some things. It does not transfigure all things. The older Christian and classical mind understood this better than the modern ideological mind. It did not assume that the enemy’s guilt made the victor innocent. It knew that war endangers the soul, not only the bodies of soldiers. It knew that even in a just war, victory itself can become a temptation. The city that triumphs may come to believe that its triumph has revealed its innocence.

Rewriting History

In time, if the postwar myth becomes calcified enough, the key political and philosophical question—“What is justice?”—becomes displaced by another question: “What must we affirm in order to remain faithful to the saving event of the regime?” That is the decisive corruption. The city’s memory becomes the measure of the good. The regime’s survival story becomes a moral standard. The defeated enemy becomes a kind of negative revelation, defining evil so absolutely that the victorious regime is tempted to define goodness as whatever is most unlike him.

This is why the postwar mind so often reasons by inversion. Fascism was nationalist, therefore nationalism is suspect. Fascism was hierarchical, therefore hierarchy is suspect. Fascism appealed to blood and soil, therefore rootedness is suspect. Fascism subordinated the individual to the collective, therefore every inherited corporate form becomes suspect. Fascism was militaristic, therefore martial virtue must be supervised by liberal humanitarianism. Fascism invoked destiny and peoplehood, therefore any thick account of nationhood must be watched for signs of relapse.

But the opposite of evil is not necessarily good. The opposite of tyranny may be license. The opposite of racialism may be deracinated universalism. The opposite of militarism may be therapeutic pacification. The opposite of domination may be administrative dissolution. Political wisdom requires more than inversion.

Among the reasons this reflexive inversion becomes more dangerous as it becomes more unthinking is that it discredits the very moral truths it seeks to defend by associating them in the minds of the young with empty sloganeering. To portray healthy patriotic sentiment as fascism or racial animus has the unintended but inevitable effect of making real opposition to real fascism look like reflexive gatekeeping. It turns the very objects of taboo—including ethnic hatred—into something secret, forbidden, and therefore exciting to young people.

Sacralized war memory also bears a dangerous kinship with eschatological nationalism. The war becomes more than an episode in the nation’s history; it becomes a revelation of the nation’s mission. The nation becomes more than a people under laws; it becomes the bearer of history’s redemptive purpose. In this form, even an anti-nationalist liberal order can become nationalist in structure. America is imagined as the nation that must transcend ordinary nationhood in order to redeem the world from fascism, hierarchy, exclusion, and war.

Such a politics cannot remain prudential for long. If the nation bears history’s saving mission, then limits become betrayals, compromise becomes appeasement, and dissent becomes heresy. The domestic opponent is no longer merely wrong; he is resisting the future. The foreign enemy is no longer merely dangerous; he is an obstacle to redemption. In this way, sacralized memory turns politics apocalyptic and transforms the regime’s survival story into a permanent mandate for moral emergency.

Once a nation treats its victory as History’s verdict, questions of justice by nature are displaced by the judgment of the age. The regime no longer has to ask whether its principles are true; it need only say that history has rendered its decision. “The right side of history” becomes providence without God, eschatology without revelation, and political theology without transcendence. It supplies judgment, election, condemnation, and final vindication while insulating the regime from the Socratic question it most fears: What is justice?

This is the historicism against which Leo Strauss warned in Natural Right and History (1953) and The City and Man (1963). The postwar consensus is historicist not merely because it emerged after a great historical event, but because it treats that event as morally revelatory. It allows 1945 to function as a substitute for nature, providence, and philosophy. Justice is no longer sought as what is true always and everywhere. It is received as the verdict of History, certified by victory, institutionalized by the regime, and enforced against those who refuse to accept the lesson.

This is why the postwar myth is hostile to philosophy even when it speaks in moral language. It allows citizens to feel serious without thinking seriously. They do not ask, “What is justice?” They ask, “Who threatens democracy?” They do not ask, “What is the good regime?” They ask, “Who is on the right side of history?” They do not ask, “What is man by nature?” They ask, “Who has failed to overcome the past?” That is not philosophy. It is catechesis.

This points to the enduring problem of politics. Every political order depends on a settled story about justice, legitimacy, and the past. In that sense, politics cannot help but be hostile to philosophy, which asks whether those stories are true. Leo Strauss spent much of his life exploring this ancient tension.

Political communities need stories. But the soul needs truth. Politics needs settlement, but philosophy asks whether the settlement is just. The city needs closure, while philosophy reopens. The city needs pious memory, while philosophy asks whether the memory is true. The city needs citizens educated into loyalty, while philosophy asks whether loyalty remains subordinate to justice or has usurped its place.

The America that emerged from World War II was not simply the old republic vindicated. It was increasingly a new regime consecrated by victory, armed with universal moral claims, and willing to remake the nation in Franklin Roosevelt’s image. The founding of 1776 endured, but it was reinterpreted in light of the moral consensus that emerged in 1945. The Declaration became a universal equality charter. The Constitution became a procedural vessel for expanding rights. Lincoln became the prophet of the unfinished egalitarian project. Roosevelt became the architect of the administrative welfare-security state. World War II became the altar on which the new order was blessed.

That altar is now cracking. The regime still speaks in the language of 1945: democracy, freedom, human rights, equity, inclusion, international order, security, and anti-fascism. But these words now sound less like the language of a confident civilization than the incantations of an exhausted one. They are repeated not because they explain reality, but because the regime does not know what remains if they fail.

Socrates would ask the forbidden question: What is justice? Not what does the regime call justice, not what does the postwar order require justice to mean, and not what words preserve the legitimacy of those who rule, but what is justice itself?

A serious conservatism should therefore be neither iconoclastic nor servile. It should not sneer at the American soldier. It should not deny the evil of the Axis. It should not pretend that political communities can live without memory, piety, or inherited stories. But it must refuse to let any regime turn its story into an idol. We can honor the dead, tell the truth about the enemy, and acknowledge the necessity of political order. But we must refuse the final lie of every sacralized regime myth: that because the city has suffered, survived, and defeated evil, it may now identify itself with the good. No earthly city has that privilege of claiming right by sacralizing history.

The post Leaving the Postwar Myth Behind appeared first on The American Mind.

The obituary for the Trump State Department’s efforts against “Far-Left Terrorism” (FLT) may have been premature. The Washington Post—from its lofty position as stenographer for the federal bureaucracy—declared the State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism a flop before it even began. Anonymous sources lined up to chortle that it was a waste of time and was intended only as public spectacle. According to the credentialed experts popular with the Post, the threat of far-left violence exists only in the minds of the president and his supporters.

But the “Antifa summit”—itself a misnomer—demonstrated precisely the opposite: the State Department has approached a critical issue for the future of the West with the seriousness it deserves. In the summit’s public session, Secretary Rubio offered an oblique but sharp rebuke to these critics as he laid out the bloody history of left-wing terrorism, both in the United States and across the Western world:

All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine-gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for fifty-five days before subjecting him to a revolutionary so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the November 17 organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.

And here in America, we remember…. In one eighteen-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil—a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.

Rubio called attention to the fact that this same form of historic terrorism, using the same methods, has again resurfaced. And the statistics bear this out. Left-wing extremism in Germany, for example, jumped by 40%; 80% of violent extremism in Greece originates on the Left.

Rubio also emphasized the human cost—a CEO executed on a city street, a grandmother burned alive, a city plunged into darkness. These were all real attacks, with real victims who were killed or had their lives permanently altered. But for the majority of “Countering Violent Extremism” experts, a caste the Obama Administration formed in 2009 and was subsequently lavishly funded by government grants and academic sinecures, these victims simply do not exist.

Rubio had some harsh words for these “experts”: they rightly see a “bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group” as “a nefarious and murderous act of evil,” but view one set by Marxist revolutionaries as simply “a tragic excess of idealism.”

It’s against this backdrop—a growing threat that much of our modern extremism expert class refuses to acknowledge—that the summit’s real goal was advanced.

The Gathering Threat

I spoke to a State Department official about what went on behind the scenes at the ministerial to get a better sense of how Secretary Rubio’s bold words are being put into action.

The program wasn’t just a meet-and-greet. It was designed to bring diplomats and counterterrorism practitioners together to discuss shared concerns and best practices among countries dealing with the scourge of Far-Left Terrorism.

During the summit’s closed panels, participants identified four key “verticals” of shared concern. They were:

1. The role of FLT in economic sabotage and attacks on critical infrastructure.
2. The convergence of grievances and the issue of FLT foreign fighters.
3. The use of Far-Left Terrorists by foreign actors to conduct attacks with plausible deniability.
4. The growing trend of targeted FLT attacks against high-profile individuals.

The State Department official called the use of economic sabotage and attacks on critical infrastructure the “calling card” of FLT. Such groups target power grids, data centers, and parts of the military-industrial supply chain. Far-Left Terrorists who support Palestinian terror groups, for example, have attacked segments of the military supply chain purportedly linked to Israel.

“We’re currently engaged in a military conflict in the Middle East. The convergence of groups united by anti-American, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist ideologies to target our military infrastructure, or our partners’ aircraft, can exhibit a significant cost at a key moment,” the official warned.

While not named by the official, the U.K.’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist group, recently upheld by a British court following its June 2025 attack on a British Royal Air Force base, is an obvious example of this growing threat. The U.S. government recently requested that the Spanish government extradite Fergie Chambers, the millionaire far-left funder of Palestine Action, and the leaders of similar “Actionist” groups that are known for targeting the military supply chains of the U.S. and its European allies.

The State Department official also noted the grave concern among partner countries related to the growing convergence of multiple threats across the Far-Left Extremism space. These include environmentalist, anti-Zionist, and anti-capitalist groups, along with an expanding contingent of far-left “Internationalist” foreign fighters and a blossoming transnational network among far-left actors.

“It’s a localized group coordinating with other actors across borders,” the official said. “So there’s a transnational network aspect. Our partners have brought up the use of networking through digital platforms and digital tools, which are difficult for them to address using law enforcement tools. These are areas where Far-Left Terrorism is distinct.”

This has included increased cooperation between FLT networks and groups operating out of the Middle East. A recent intelligence report by the German Ministry of the Interior noted the growing influence of the Kurdish PKK and expressed concern regarding returning Internationalist fighters operating in Northern Syria.

For students of counterterrorism history, the increased focus on the role of foreign adversaries in using far-left groups as terror proxies is particularly intriguing.

During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a marked refusal by most Western intelligence agencies to publicly acknowledge or take seriously the role of Soviet Bloc support for Western far-left terror groups, including the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, and the Weather Underground. For a considerable period, focus on this problem was confined to a fairly narrow academic interest, culminating in vital works such as Hydra of Carnage (1986) and Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network (1981).

Seen in this light, official government recognition of the threat posed by the foreign backing of Far-Left Terrorism is an important success.

Terrorism Close to Home

Released shortly after the ministerial summit, the State Department’s report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, was well-timed to take advantage of this sea change. The report covered both the historic Cuban role in supporting terrorist proxies and its ongoing subversive activities that promote Far-Left Extremism in the United States. This includes the Cuban government’s close association with the Singham Network, the principal funder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). A former PSL member, Elias Rodriguez, murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., in May of 2025.

As the State Department official I spoke to noted, the success of these efforts by Far-Left Extremists cannot be measured solely by the number of attacks committed, but rather by the potential for hostile foreign actors “to destabilize our societies through these groups.”

This is what has been called “armed subversion,” where foreign adversaries use domestic radicals as proxies to conduct attacks and to destabilize the internal political situation. Armed subversion may not be unique to FLT, but it is instrumental in accurately understanding it. That the Trump Administration has embraced the concept is a welcome relief.

The deliberate targeting of high-profile individuals, and especially domestic political opponents, is perhaps the “vertical” most closely associated with the activities of Antifa. One of four far-left terror groups designated by the State Department was the Germany-based Antifa Ost, best known for targeting political opponents for violent assaults, and even attempted murders using hammers and other blunt objects.

The role of targeted violence is particularly salient for American audiences following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which Rubio mentioned during his presentation. The recognition that this kind of selectively targeted violence is vital to FLT activity helps begin to undo the Countering Violent Extremism industry’s obsessive emphasis on counting attacks and plots as the only important metric. The CVE “experts” have largely failed to appreciate that much of the political success of leftist terrorism comes not from mass-casualty incidents, but from calculated strikes designed to intimidate law-abiding citizens and encourage more attacks.

The shift in approach is evident in the State Department’s use of “Political Terrorism” as a category. While seemingly redundant, the phrase helps to refocus attention on the fundamental nature of terrorism as a political tool. This is a subtle rebuke to the Countering Violent Extremism school of thought, which emphasizes psychosocial or “root cause” analysis of terrorism.

Regarding the lackluster quality of statistics, the State Department official acknowledged the struggle to address poor data hygiene in American private-sector counterterrorism databases and studies. He pointed out that partner nations are coordinating to help address this gap. They are beginning to share information about far-left attacks in ways that have helped inform the State Department’s internal understanding, even when these attacks don’t make the front page.

One hopeful takeaway from the ministerial, he stressed, is that recognition of Far-Left Terrorism as a concern for the U.S. and other governments will help establish it as a legitimate line of inquiry for private-sector experts and academics.

As for next steps, the State Department official called the summit “a milestone but not a capstone,” emphasizing that additional action, including further terrorism designations and the implementation of new visa restrictions, would follow. He also noted the announcement of a follow-up law-enforcement workshop to be hosted by the German government, contradicting much of the media coverage that sought to minimize foreign partner cooperation. This level of participation is particularly noteworthy due to the German government’s long experience with and struggle against Far-Left Extremism.

Responding to media coverage, the official stated,

There will always be people who shoot from the hip and make assumptions about the way other countries will perceive these issues. We’ve had many conversations with partners across the world, and that is the basis of this effort. The insights we’re getting from partners are helping us become more effective at dealing with this threat. If you ask me, this ministerial was a major success.

The Trump State Department is moving forward on the FLT portfolio in a measured but aggressive manner. Public-facing presentations by Rubio and other Trump cabinet luminaries certainly provided a level of fan service for the president’s base. But they also stressed that the United States takes the developing threat of Far-Left Terrorism seriously and is prepared to use its influence and authority on the world stage to lead an international response. This indicates that Washington recognizes it needs foreign partners to successfully counter a sophisticated transnational network like FLT. It’s a realization that we have something to learn from other nations, many of whom are glad to see the United States awakening to a challenge they’ve been addressing quietly for some time.

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The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Catastrophe at Cambridge – Jason Arday and the Scandal at DEI | The American Mind Podcast

Jason Arday, who rocketed to academic stardom as the youngest black professor at Cambridge, now faces claims that his PhD thesis contains plagiarism. That’s not all: huge portions of his story seem likely to be fabricated, from a supposed brain surgery days before his defense, to an appearace on the documentary Seven Up. But is Arday really the problem? It seems the institutional decay goes much deeper. This week, hosts Spencer and Mike discuss the necessity of a reckoning in the academies. Plus: is America having a Catholic moment? Or is she an irrevocably Protestant nation?

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When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in Trump v. Barbara, it settled for now in the courts who becomes a citizen at birth. It did not settle—and could not settle—whether American citizenship may be bought and sold.

It remains well within the power of Congress and the president to shut down the contracts, clinics, agencies, and visas that convert foreign money into American citizenship—without amending the Constitution or defying the Court. Until the Court revisits the issue, the political branches are solely responsible for overseeing the marketplace, and they have no excuse to delay.

If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.

Nearly 20 months ago, Kyla Simpson of St. Augustine, Florida, gave birth to triplet boys as a gestational surrogate for an intended parent she had never met: a single man in China. He never came. Not during the boys’ two months in the NICU, not through the year and a half the Simpsons raised them, and not even when one of the triplets died of RSV.

Until the man from China sent two strangers in a black SUV to collect the boys, which Simpson refused. Then she moved to terminate his parental rights, and he resurfaced with a lawyer and an emergency pick-up order, which a Florida judge granted. The surviving twins, 20-month-old American citizens, now sit in state care while his attorneys obtain travel documents.

Why would a Chinese man pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for children he has never crossed an ocean to meet? Because he wasn’t buying children. He was buying American citizens.

A surrogate-born child of a foreign national receives a birth certificate, Social Security number, and passport at birth. When the child reaches age 21, he can petition for green cards for his parents and siblings, turning one commissioned pregnancy into chain migration for an entire family, at a fraction of the cost of the half-million-dollar EB-5 investor visa.

Why buy a visa when you can commission a citizen?

Birth Tourism in Overdrive

This citizenship-for-sale system has three serious dangers.

First, the burgeoning international surrogacy industry is a clear example of immigration fraud and abuse. For example, within days of President Trump signing the executive order on birthright citizenship, the agency Surrogate First issued workaround guidance for prospective parents, explaining that for international clients, “the certainty of their child obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth is a significant factor” in choosing America.

Likewise, Creative Family Connections advertised a “2-step birth certificate process” to guarantee citizenship for the children of foreign clients regardless of executive action. Prior to that, another agency pitched surrogacy as cheaper than the EB-5 investor visa.

The co-founder of one California agency told NPR that dual nationality would be “a win-win situation for your children.” A fellow agent admitted many of her clients were “high-level Communist Party officials and celebrities” seeking American citizenship for their children.

Second, the international surrogacy industry is a national security threat that intensifies every year. Children with American passports who are raised under Chinese Communist Party rule can vote as adults in U.S. elections, join our military, work in sensitive research, and even run for president. Beijing exploits every vulnerability American citizenship offers, whether the parents intend it or not. Why would it ignore this one?

Third, the industry is a child-welfare catastrophe. Authorities found 21 surrogate-born children in the home of a former CCP official tied to immigration fraud and smuggling—discovered only after an infant arrived at a hospital with severe head trauma in Arcadia, California. Chinese billionaire Xu Bo has reportedly commissioned 100 children and counting through American surrogates to build a personal dynasty.

According to data in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s own journal, surrogacy cycles commissioned by foreign intended parents surged 78% from 2014 to 2019, from 2,758 to 4,905 embryo transfers a year, with Chinese nationals the largest customer base at 41.7%—quadruple the next country.

More than 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy agencies operate in Southern California alone, many with Mandarin-only marketing and some listing offices in mainland China, where surrogacy is illegal. Indeed, international commercial surrogacy is merely the newest wing of a larger operation. Conventional birth tourism results in an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 annual U.S. births to Chinese nationals—a phenomenon that, according to investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, Chinese sources themselves describe as massive. Since 2013, he estimates that more than one million “U.S. citizens” are being raised in China because their mothers came here to give birth.

Pulling Up Anchor

Yes, the Barbara majority misread the 14th Amendment, whose author said it excluded “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens.” A future Court should revisit the issue, with the Simpson case as Exhibit A. In the meantime, however, there are concrete actions Congress and the executive branch can take to address birth tourism.

Close the state loophole with federal law. Earlier this year, Florida became the first state to prohibit surrogacy contracts with foreign nationals from adversarial nations, including China, Russia, Iran, and others. But the law does not stop Florida citizens from working with a California-based agency.

We need federal action to shut this market down. As Senator Rick Scott proposed via the bicameral SAFE Kids Act and Representative Scott Perry proposed via the Preventing International Surrogacy Exploitation Act, Congress should ban international commercial surrogacy outright by prohibiting foreign nationals from contracting with American surrogates or agencies. Notably, the vast majority of developed nations—aside from the U.S. and Ukraine—already have a law like this in place.

Cut off the travel and count the trade. Congress and the State Department should deny visas to anyone traveling to the U.S. to commission or collect a surrogate-born child. They should also mandate federal reporting, through the CDC or another agency, of every commercial surrogacy contract and resulting live birth, including the client’s nationality. There is no reason to regulate the export of technology more carefully than the export of our own citizens.

Make the buyer, not the baby, pay the price. Roger Severino, a Heritage Foundation vice president, has proposed the boldest remedy. Vice President JD Vance has already endorsed Severino’s plan to end birth tourism citizenship in U.S. territories, which China has exploited.

Every solution so far has focused on the “anchor.” Severino’s plan, by contrast, targets the “boat.” Under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), the president has broad authority to bar any class of foreign nationals whose entry he deems detrimental to U.S. interests. He should use that power to give every foreign national without permanent residency who has a child on U.S. soil a simple choice: relinquish the child’s American citizenship, or never legally set foot in the United States again.

This doesn’t remove citizenship from the children. But it does mean that the parents who refuse would become permanently ineligible for any visa, asylum, refugee status, or temporary protected status; any lottery or family-based entry; or any future path to residency or citizenship, including through marriage to an American.

The Supreme Court says these children are citizens. Very well—then act like it. American citizens should not be purchased for export, warehoused unclaimed, or shipped beyond the reach of American courts. The 14th Amendment was written so that no one born on American soil could be bought or sold. It’s time to extend that same protection to children born via international commercial surrogacy schemes.

The post Birth Tourism’s Next Evolution: Commissioned Citizenship appeared first on The American Mind.

In the middle of April, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summoned the world’s leftist statesmen to Barcelona for what he called a Global Progressive Mobilization. There are not many leftist statesmen to choose from these days. But Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico and Lula of Brazil rallied round Sánchez, and so did the representatives of activist philanthropies—Bill Gates’s people and George Soros’s, too. Various agitators came for environmental and sexual causes, with their earrings and keffiyehs and polyglot t-shirts.

It was a coronation of sorts. Through an assiduous campaign of policy-shaping, speech-making, China-courting, and Trump-trolling, Sánchez has managed to identify himself to many non-Spaniards as the leader of the global opposition. What Trump explores, Sánchez deplores. Boss of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (PSOE) with only a brief interruption since 2014, prime minister since 2018, and president of the Socialist International since 2022, Sánchez was accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza within weeks of the 2023 Hamas attacks. In 2025 he repudiated the promise of other NATO leaders to increase their defense spending to 5% of GDP. This past January, as the Trump Administration’s ICE arrests in Minnesota brought global opprobrium, Sánchez publicized a plan to give amnesty to half a million migrants. And he has been prominent among the critics of Trump’s Iranian misadventure, even refusing the United States the use of Spanish air bases at Rota and Morón for refueling and repairs. Much of the Spanish establishment has been urging Sánchez to conduct his foreign policy in a more bipartisan way, but as the former foreign minister Alfonso Dastis recently told the Madrid daily El Mundo, “the problem is that he views everything through the lens of heightening the contrast with Trump.”

In most foreign capitals, Sánchez’s strategy has been a smashing success. The Berliner Zeitung calls Sánchez the “leader of the global left”; for the French business magazine Challenges, he is the “champion of the anti-Trump resistance.” The revelation by Reuters in late April that one Pentagon official had proposed suspending Spain from NATO was another feather in Sánchez’s cap. Global public opinion is increasingly inclined to judge Sánchez against Trump, and the verdict has favored Sánchez.

Except, perhaps, in Spain itself. There, the international hero is viewed by a large part of his electorate as a disgrace. He is jeered when he appears in public. People throw mud at him, and three of his longtime advisors have been sent to jail. His PSOE keeps losing regional elections by historic margins—in Extremadura last December, in Aragon in February, and in its historic stronghold of Andalucía in mid-May. He is not term-limited, but he must call an election by August 2027, and his prospects of being re-elected appear vanishingly small. Sánchez, who for a decade now has shown a Houdini-like ability to escape from political disaster, is counting on Trump’s reputational toxicity to rescue him from this one. But for the moment it doesn’t look like that is going to happen—in fact, nationalists are surging in Spain, and new criminal investigations involving socialist influence peddling and slander of judges have left Sánchez fighting for his political life.

Sánchez’s Bag of Tricks

A politician who stays in power when he is at odds with the times must have a gift. Sánchez knows Spanish society well—its generations-old resentments, its class anxieties, its vanities—and deploys that knowledge with agility. He was president of the PSOE in 2016 when a disappointing election left it facing an unpalatable choice. After four months of deadlocked negotiations, Sánchez’s socialist colleagues were pressuring him to enter a coalition with the conservative People’s Party (PP), which, under its lackluster premier Mariano Rajoy, had fallen just short of a majority.

Why do that? Why compromise with the party’s arch-rivals? Because not doing it was likely to produce elections in which the socialists would do even worse. The public had been clamoring for a more radical politics ever since the finance crisis of 2008-09 and the currency crisis that followed. Spain had a new party called Podemos, which is Spanish for “Yes, We Can.” (It was the Obama era.) Podemos wanted even bolder economic redistribution than the socialists did, along with new kinds of identity politics. Now it was breathing down the PSOE’s neck, running just two points behind them in the polls and with nearly as large a parliamentary delegation. If the PSOE did not join with the PP, new elections might have to be called, risking a defeat that would sweep them into the dustbin of progressive history. Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’s leader, described what was going on as a passing of the torch. Rather than fend off Podemos by pretending to be a centrist, Sánchez resigned. With three advisors, he drove around Spain for several months, putting 20,000 miles on their battered Peugeot. That trip is now the stuff of socialist legend. While their colleagues back in Madrid bore the responsibility for having compromised, Sánchez and his team went directly to Podemos’s base and made it their own. In the process, they built a new political machine with the help of the hardball political activists of Spain’s small cities. Within a decade, several of Sánchez’s traveling companions would be in jail.

Read the rest here.

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Appearing before Rand Paul’s Senate committee on July 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the federal government’s response to COVID under Presidents Trump and Biden, refused to answer any questions, even though Biden gave him a preemptive pardon “for any offenses against the United States…in any manner related to his service” to the government between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.

Certainly Fauci has much to answer for, starting with severe errors in judgment—whether criminal or not. As Dr. Scott Atlas and his coauthors put it in a 2024 report, “[A] calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom.” Public health officials “overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health (including substantial non-COVID excess mortality) harms on top of the virus itself, which nonetheless worked its way through substantially all of the population.”

In particular, millions of men, women, and children needlessly lost their lives, jobs, businesses, or years of learning; saw their physical and mental health deteriorate due to unnecessary lockdowns or the side effects of largely ineffective vaccines; were fined or arrested for violating arbitrary public health restrictions; or were banned or censored on social media for sharing COVID “misinformation.”

That’s not all. Senator Paul’s release of Fauci’s diary adds to the evidence that he repeatedly misled and even outright lied to the American people. On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote, “It now appears…that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the [Wuhan wet] market.” Yet in April, he said that Chinese wet markets should be shut down, because “What we’re going through right now is a direct result of that.”

On February 1, Fauci noted that he had a conference call with 11 other leading scientists. Only two of them were convinced that the virus had a natural origin; “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible” and that, given the work at the Wuhan lab, “we could not let this go.” He later dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. On February 8, he wrote that the mortality rate for COVID was “more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%,” but in public he claimed it was “about 2, 2.5 percent.”

He maintained that he “didn’t recommend locking down anything,” but on March 15, he congratulated himself for convincing Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the schools, bars, and restaurants in New York City. Governor Gavin Newsom was persuaded to do the same in California. Fauci initially told the public that “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” but subsequently explained that he said so only to conserve supplies for health workers. Later still, he admitted the evidence that masks helped to prevent the spread of COVID was inconclusive.

In 2021, he told Congress that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” yet he personally approved more than $500,000 in U.S. government grants to that organization. Fauci also admitted in a congressional hearing that the six-foot social distancing rule was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data,” or, as he put it later, “I said that it is not based in science and it just appeared.”

It now seems clear that no measure of punitive or restorative justice could be great enough to set right the harms inflicted by Fauci and his political and media supporters. And the behavior of the Democrats on the committee, who praised Fauci and thanked him for his service, sent the message that they will resist any attempt to hold him (or anyone else) accountable for the bungled COVID response. Nor should the American people expect so much as an apology.

That is particularly unfortunate: American citizens no longer trust public health officials. Unless those officials, elected representatives at the state as well as the federal level, medical professionals, and the media admit that they made serious mistakes during COVID, there will be no way to restore that trust. This dramatically increases the risk of harm to the public during the next national health emergency.

A 2022 article in The Atlantic argued that we need a pandemic amnesty. It’s hard to agree with the article’s premise that the bad management of the COVID crisis resulted from the ignorance and uncertainty of people acting in good faith, not from moral failings. Still, the idea that we would do well to turn away from the past for the sake of the future (the word “amnesty” is etymologically related to “amnesia”) has merit. Yet the very notion of an amnesty implies a degree of culpability that should be officially “forgotten” for the sake of the public good, even if it is not entirely forgiven by private citizens. That culpability must first be fully aired and acknowledged, for otherwise it will be impossible to convince people to move past it.

It is an ironic coincidence that the first recorded amnesty in history followed the defeat of the so-called Thirty Tyrants at Athens, who were overthrown in a civil war in 403 B.C.E. The Thirty were a group of Athenian oligarchs put in power by the Spartans after they defeated the Athenians in 404, bringing the Peloponnesian War to a close. These oligarchs were led by a man named Critias, who proposed to introduce a “scientific” regime of experts whose knowledge would ensure that they made no mistakes in managing public affairs. (This story is told in the Charmides, a dialogue by Plato.)

Irked by Socrates, who raised critical questions about his policies, Critias effectively forbade him from engaging in philosophical conversations. The Thirty kept lists of citizens they considered to be polluted by vice. They also silenced their political opponents by putting them to death, ultimately killing 3,000 of their fellow citizens.

The physicist Richard Feynman once wisely remarked that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Any pandemic amnesty must be based on the understanding that whatever Fauci was peddling, it wasn’t science—and what’s more, that Faucism, taken to its logical conclusion, culminates in tyranny. This is precisely why America’s founders vested power in elected representatives and not in lordly bureaucrats with no accountability to the public.

With Critian hubris, Fauci outrageously defamed his critics and tried to shut down questions about his directives. He claimed (falsely, as we now know) that “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science because all of the things I have spoken about from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science…. That is what’s going on. Science and the truth are being attacked.” On another occasion, he asserted that Ted Cruz and Rand Paul were “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

Fauci also coordinated with Francis Collins of the NIH to dismiss the argument against lockdowns set forth in the Great Barrington Declaration—authored by Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford epidemiologists, signed by almost 10,000 medical and public health scientists and 26,000 medical practitioners—as “ridiculous” and “total nonsense.” Following Fauci’s advice, officials kept lists of people who refused the vaccine, many of whom lost their jobs or suffered other adverse consequences for not complying with mandates. That’s not the kind of “expert” we need to be calling the shots during the next pandemic.

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