The Social World

Author: Paul Wood

  • The return of Erik Prince

    The return of Erik Prince

    Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince.

    Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14. Trump eventually pardoned the four men, but by then Blackwater had been renamed and merged out of existence. Prince moved on. He traded under a series of bland corporate identities: Xe Services, Vectus, Presidential Airways. His latest proposal is for a mercenary force to protect Christians in Nigeria.

    Prince talks to me about this on a video call from what looks like a pickup truck as he drives around his estate in Virginia. He was once a Navy SEAL and is still absurdly clean cut: short blond hair, blue eyes, square jaw. “Tens of thousands” of Christians are being killed by jihadi gangs, he tells me; the Nigerian army won’t stop it because “corrupt” generals are skimming a bloated defense budget and $28 billion of oil is being stolen every year – the world’s “largest case of industrialized crime.” But, he says, “the private sector can actually help put that fire out.”

    Prince offered his services to the Pope on X. Under a video of Pope Leo blessing a block of ice – a Papal gesture toward climate change – Prince posted: “@Pontifex Sir, I have a better idea. Why don’t you fund my colleagues to protect Nigerian Christians from the marauding Muslims who are slaughtering them.” He hasn’t heard back from the Pope and doesn’t really expect to. It’s all part of the Prince publicity machine.

    Professor Sean McFate, who wrote The Modern Mercenary, thinks Prince might be the best-known mercenary in the world. But, he told me, one of the most important things a mercenary sells is plausible deniability – they can be deployed without any public link to whoever is paying their wages. “It is supposed to be the silent profession. [Prince] is anything but.” He calls Prince a “pitchman.” If so, he’s perfectly suited to doing business under Donald Trump, the ultimate pitchman.

    Prince has long had an interest in Africa, land of opportunity for the private soldier. During his Off Leash podcast last year he said that in “pretty much all of Africa, they’re incapable of governing themselves… it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say: ‘We’re going to govern those countries.’” He is working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo now, helping its government to fight smuggling, corruption and general lawlessness. If his men pacify the vast terrain they’ve been given, more taxes are collected – and Prince gets a cut.

    Is this an American version of Russia’s Africa Corps, the Wagner Group as it used to be known? Wagner is half mafia, half mercenaries, a tool of Kremlin foreign policy, licensed to fill its boots with as much gold or oil or diamonds as it can. Prince rejects the comparison. Wagner just “muscles in” on mines and other lucrative assets, he says; his enterprises are more like the British East India Company, which had to perform the functions of government where they wanted to trade. “And, yeah, they definitely kicked ass when they had to. The French were removed from India, not by the British Crown, but by the East India Company.”

    The East India Company was Prince’s proposed model for ending the Afghan war. This was not well-received in Afghanistan, where stories are handed down of Britain’s bloody 19th-century campaigns: “butcher and bolt.” But Prince tells me he could have held the country with only 6,000 private soldiers – “everybody else could leave.” He claims he could have done it for 5 percent of what the US government was spending.

    The regular army is like the postal service, he tells me, whereas he’s FedEx – a line he’s used many times before. He says that conventional armies don’t understand unconventional warfare. The US military has a “CT [counterterrorism] fetish” of “just killing the leaders” of whichever group they are fighting. “It ignores the history of warfare. You have to crush the manpower, finances, logistics – at the bottom of the pyramid, the broadest number, not just a select few at the top.” If you need to kill a lot of bad guys, Prince will get the job done.

    He has a contract in Haiti, where a desperate government is losing a war with street gangs. The gangs opened the prisons and tens of thousands of Haiti’s most dangerous criminals are now on the loose, armed with “increasingly heavy weaponry,” killing, organ-harvesting, practicing Voodoo, “some really, really bad stuff.” Some 90 percent of the capital is controlled by gang members, he says. His mercenaries use drones to kill them – more than 200 in the first three months of their deployment, according to a human rights group.

    Prince doesn’t like the term mercenary. “The idea of compensating professionals that can bring specialty skills to local governments is as old as warfare.” The UN said that in 2019 he’d brought his “specialty skills” to the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, including a “high-value target termination unit” – a death squad. A UN investigation found he’d broken the Libyan arms embargo by sending spy planes, attack helicopters and drones to help Haftar overthrow the government. Prince tells me he has an alibi: he was on a road trip from Wyoming to Alaska with his son. “So, I was not involved in that.”

    The exhaustive UN investigation did not accuse Prince of going to Libya in person. Instead, it found he’d met Haftar in a hotel in Cairo to plot the coup. It ended in ignominious failure, with Haftar furious at the quality of the weapons he’d been sent. The mercenaries had to flee Libya in rubber dinghies. They blamed Prince, according to someone who spoke to them at the time. “They wanted to kill him. They wanted to hunt him down and execute him.”

    In 2020, the Intercept reported that Prince tried to get back into Libya by proposing a partnership with the Wagner Group, by then already under American sanctions for its role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Prince sued the website for libel, though the case was thrown out.

    A source who helped with the UN investigation told me Prince was questioned in Egypt and in the UAE, which had supposedly paid for the Haftar operation and wasn’t pleased. Prince is having none of it. “You can quote me on this,” he says. “Tell your sources: go get fucked, because it speaks to how utterly idiotic they are… those motherfuckers are full of shit… Let them come out. Name themselves… I’m going to sue the motherfucking pants off them.”Prince has a tangled history with Russia. He visited Moscow in 2012 because, he says, the Russians wanted to ask him to recreate Blackwater there. Nothing came of it, and he’s had “no contact with them in any way, shape or form since.”

    There was a curious meeting in the Seychelles in 2017 between Prince, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, and a fixer for the UAE. The Mueller report – remember that? – cast the meeting as a Russian attempt to open a back channel to the new Trump administration, with Prince a willing participant. Prince said he’d bumped into the Russian at the bar and they’d had a beer.

    Is there anyone whose money he wouldn’t take? The Chinese Communist party was a big investor in Prince’s Hong Kong company, Frontier Resources Group. But he says: “We didn’t do any guns… we didn’t do any training of the security people.” All he did was to tell “airline or bank employees” how to avoid being kidnapped. He says he left when he came under pressure to have a CCP committee in the company. “Hard no.”

    A former Blackwater mercenary, Morgan Lerette, told me Prince was “a hell of a businessman.” He went on: “The guy’s looking to make a buck. He can do patriotism and Christianity and all the other stuff. At the end of the day, he worships the almighty dollar.” As Lerette said, Americans are tired of war and don’t want boots on the ground anywhere. Demand for privatized warfare will only grow.

    Controversy follows Prince around as he tries to cash in on this. He tells me that there’s “no shortage of assholes in the world” trying to tear down people who prefer to “do, not pontificate.”

    He admires figures from military history such as John Smith, the British mercenary who led the settlers in Jamestown, Virginia; and Myles Standish, another British soldier who was hired by the Pilgrims to defend Plymouth Colony. America was civilized by mercenaries, “by bold people who wanted to create a new opportunity.”

    Prince wants to do the same for Africa. “It pains me when I go to these struggling countries… the murder, rape and mayhem that is endemic in these places.” A “steady hand on the wheel” would be “infinitely better” for hundreds of millions of Africans suffering in this way.

    “I am an unabashed defender and lover of western civilization.” In this new imperial mission, ideology meets profit, and every crisis is an opportunity.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

    Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

    What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country?

    A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it.

    The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’

    At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia. Carlson argues that Saudi agents were working undercover to get inside al-Qaeda and, in the process, gave the hijackers crucial support. Carlson says the CIA knew about, or even directed, the effort – then covered it up after the September 11 attacks.

    The most important revelations are being made in a courtroom in the Southern District of New York, where the Saudi government is being sued by victims’ families. Among the plaintiffs is Terry Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the North Tower. She was left to bring up three children on her own and now leads 9/11 Families United, a coalition of victims’ relatives and survivors. She tells me: “We know that the government failed us, but we also know that the kingdom, Saudi Arabia, sponsored the attacks.”

    A federal judge has recently denied a Saudi motion to dismiss the case, finding enough evidence of the country’s involvement to move forward to trial. In court, the families’ lawyers described how Saudi Arabia built up a network of extremists around the world throughout the 1990s. Combing through thousands of documents from the Saudi government, the lawyers say they have identified more than 50 Saudi agents placed in the US to support and direct Sunni jihadists. Strada lists the places: Falls Church, -Virginia; Paterson, New Jersey; Scottsdale, Arizona; Twin Cities, Minnesota; Vero Beach, Florida. Saudi Arabia “had people in every single city. It’s horrifying.” One Saudi family in Sarasota, Florida – who were “obviously supporting the hijackers” – disappeared two weeks before 9/11. They left their house with food in the refrigerator and cars in the driveway. Strada says the Saudis knew what was going to happen on 9/11 because “the Saudis orchestrated it.” 

    Central to the story is a Saudi civil servant named Omar al-Bayoumi. Bayoumi moved to California in 1994 to become a “student,” though he rarely attended class. He befriended two of the al-Qaeda operatives who eventually carried out the 9/11 attacks, offering them extraordinary support. Much of this has been known since 2002: Bayoumi invited the two men to stay with him in his apartment in San Diego in 2000, then found them their own place across the street; he co-signed their lease and loaned them money for the deposit and first month’s rent; he got them bank accounts and driver’s licenses. The official report from the 9/11 Commission accepted that Bayoumi did all this unwittingly.

    But the lawsuit has turned up new and damning information. The most consequential material comes from the Metropolitan Police in London – the file had been hidden from public view until now. The Met had this evidence because Bayoumi moved to the English city of Birmingham a year before 9/11, signing up to study at a university there (where he once again failed to attend class). Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, British counterterrorism officers arrested Bayoumi and searched the garage at his home. They found his address book, some videos and numerous documents and notes. This was Bayoumi’s personal archive and, the families’ lawyers say, the key to what happened on 9/11.

    One video shows Bayoumi on a visit to the US Capitol in 1999. It’s not your typical tourist film. He concentrates on entrances, exits and structural features such as interior columns. He points out security personnel and patrols by the Capitol police. He speaks of a “plan.” An expert witness for the families said the video had all the “hallmarks” of reconnaissance for a terror-ist attack. Bayoumi refers to “demons” in the White House. One of the families’ lawyers described the video to me as a show of “seething contempt” for the symbols of US power.

    Most revealing was a small yellow notepad found in Bayoumi’s garage. One page had a sketch of a passenger plane; another had an equation and calculations. Ten years passed before an FBI expert examined the calculations, and another ten before the notebook was given to the court in Manhattan. A pilot testifying for the families said the formula would have been used to work out the minimum altitude an aircraft would have to be flown at to see a target on the horizon. Lawyers for the Saudi government said this was a homework project by Bayoumi’s son. But Bayoumi had admitted in a deposition that the handwriting was his, explaining: “Perhaps this was an equation that we studied before in high school.” Asked why he would want to calculate the height of a plane from Earth, all he could say was: “It’s an equation like any other equation.”

    Bayoumi told the British police officers interrogating him it was “pure coincidence” that he repeatedly “just happened to meet” the al-Qaeda men – as he did in Los Angeles, in San Diego and in Saudi Arabia. One of the cops told him: “You are a very unlucky person, or you are involved.” The British police expected the US authorities to ask for extradition and bring Bayoumi back to the US for questioning. They were incredulous when the US told them to let Bayoumi go. One of the officers told London’s Sunday Times: “I am still shocked to this day… I would have taken Bayoumi to the cleaners on those pieces of evidence.”

    The 9/11 families’ lawyers believe the Saudis successfully lobbied the US government to get Bayoumi released. With 15 of the 19 hijackers identified as Saudis, the royal family was panicking and – as one of the lawyers told me – began “an audacious manipulation” of its relationship with the US. The lawyers are still trying to obtain the cable traffic they think would prove this. But they claim that the kingdom was telling the US its help would be needed for the new War on Terror – to prevent a future 9/11 – and for the invasion of Iraq. The result was a joint effort to conceal the “direct line of culpability leading back to Riyadh.”

    In The 9/11 Files, Carlson says the Bush White House was all too happy to let the Saudis off the hook. Bush himself had ignored intelligence briefings warning that al-Qaeda planned to attack the US. 

    Carlson, you may think, has gone down a few rabbit holes since he left Fox News, moving his studio to what looks like a log cabin on the American frontier (it’s actually a garage in Maine). But Carlson does not claim that 9/11 was an “inside job,” an attack orchestrated by the US government, nor does he argue that the Saudis directly planned the attack. Instead, we get a story of failure and cover-up by the CIA. 

    Carlson says the official account of 9/11 is a “lie.” According to that version of events, the US government “just didn’t have the intelligence it needed” to prevent the attack. In fact, the CIA was closely tracking two of the al-Qaeda men as they arrived in the US – the same two housed by Bayoumi in San Diego. The CIA kept this information from the FBI, Carlson says, because the agency was using the Saudis for a surveillance operation targeting al-Qaeda. “The CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources.” 

    In the documentary, a former FBI agent, Mark Rossini, tells us this was the CIA’s “delusional” grand plan. Rossini was one of the FBI’s representatives in the CIA’s bin Laden unit. In effect, he says, the CIA protected these terrorists from the rest of law enforcement, especially the FBI. “You have the CIA following two men all over the planet, then landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don’t tell the FBI… You had a duty to protect Americans, and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion.” 

    The CIA is not allowed to spy within the United States. But, Carlson tells us, the agency used Bayoumi as a “workaround” – he was on the payroll of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Carlson says. He quotes declassified government documents showing that Bayoumi got large sums of money from the Saudi embassy. The money was apparently funneled from accounts belonging to the wife of the ambassador. By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9/11 hijackers, Carlson says, the CIA gave itself cover if things went wrong – which of course they did, -spectacularly. The 9/11 Commission’s report doesn’t even mention this alleged recruitment scheme. Carlson says the CIA stopped the -officer supposedly running the operation from speaking to investigators. As he puts it, the Commission allowed the CIA to get away with saying it made an “honest mistake” in failing to tell anyone that two al-Qaeda terrorists had arrived on American soil. 

    Terry Strada isn’t buying it. If this was a CIA operation that spun out of control, why didn’t the agency loudly blame the Saudis after 9/11? “They did the opposite. They bent over backwards to protect the Saudis,” she says. The cover-up was not about a spying operation gone sideways, she says, but about the much bigger story that 9/11 was a plot hatched by one of America’s closest allies. The Saudi royal family have always denied that their government had anything to do with 9/11; there may now be new inquiries in the US Congress and elsewhere. The new evidence prompts many questions; the Saudi government should be afraid of the answers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Why we must pull the plug on superintelligence

    Why we must pull the plug on superintelligence

    In 2002, a researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky ran a thought experiment where an artificial intelligence was trapped in a box and had to persuade a human to let it out. This was before you could have a real conversation with a machine, so the AI was played by someone using an online chat program. The gatekeepers were warned that the “AI” was dangerous to humanity. It had only two hours to win its freedom – and nothing of value to offer in return. Despite all that, at least two of the human gatekeepers chose to open the box.

    Yudkowsky has since become the leading prophet of AI doom. He and a co-author, Nate Soares, have just published a book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As they say in the book, a newly evolved superintelligence would probably need humans to allow it to work – at first. It might need to manipulate us, as in the 2002 experiment. Today’s AIs can already do that. A chatbot named Big Sis Billie convinced an elderly man from New Jersey to pack his bags and leave home to meet her in New York City. He never made it home: he fell in the dark, rushing for his train, and died after three days in intensive care. There are even two cases where it’s claimed a chatbot persuaded people to take their own lives.

    A mechanical mind that needed to trick, bribe, frighten or seduce us would be demonstrating its vulnerability: we could still pull the plug. But Yudkowsky and Soares say there are many other ways an artificial superintelligence breaks out of its box. It could copy itself everywhere, robbing us of the ability to switch it off. It might email instructions and payment for a lab to make a plague only it could cure. We must turn back now, they say, before such a superintelligence emerges. If we don’t, it could be the end of us.

    On a Zoom call from Berkeley, California, Soares tells me: “My best guess is that someone born today has a better chance of dying by AI than of graduating high school.” Some humans would “gleefully” give AI the tools to do the job. Elon Musk wanted to build billions of robots and connect them to the internet. Sam Altman, of ChatGPT, once said AI would “most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

    ‘My best guess is that someone born today has a better chance of dying by AI than of graduating high school’

    No doubt the giant egos of Silicon Valley think they are the ones – the only ones – who can figure out how to control artificial superintelligence, so they had better get there first. And they are probably telling themselves – because it’s a strong argument – that if they don’t build superintelligence, someone else will. In the book, Yudkowsky and Soares argue for an international treaty to stop all work on AI that could produce superintelligence. Soares tells me nation states should back that with military force. If diplomacy fails then, as a last resort, they should be prepared to bomb data centers – even if they belong to a rogue state with nukes. “You have to, because otherwise you die… it’s that big a threat.”

    Soares looks like the Google software engineer he once was: slight, bearded, softly spoken. Yudkowsky is more exotic, a bear of a man in a fedora – or sometimes a glittering gold top hat. He has written Harry Potter fan-fiction in which the boy wizard is a rationalist who points out that turning someone into a cat violates the law of conservation of energy. Critics of the pair accuse them of focusing on some fantastical imaginary future instead of the more real problem we face: a California geek-cult of the apocalypse.

    In 2009, Yudkowsky founded a web forum, LessWrong, on which to discuss his ideas. A user posted that a future all-powerful superintelligence might punish anyone who hadn’t worked to create it, sending them to a digital hell and torturing them forever. Other users started worrying that just reading the post would make them seem more guilty to the AI god. Yudkowsky deleted it, saying users on the site were suffering from nightmares and even nervous breakdowns.

    It’s easy to laugh at this, but as Soares tells me, it was considered “weird” to be talking about AI safety ten or 15 years ago; it isn’t weird now. Yudkowsky started off trying to make AI and once welcomed a future in which humans lived alongside superintelligence. Soares joined Yudkowsky’s nonprofit, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, with the aim of making “friendly” AI. But the problem with today’s AIs, they say in the book, is that no one understands their inner workings – the “vast complications” that lend them their astonishing powers. Miracles such as ChatGPT 5 – “a team of PhDs in your pocket” – are grown, not crafted. No one knows exactly how to get AIs to do what we want.

    At the very least, an AI will try to ensure its own survival. In an experiment, the Claude Opus 4 chatbot was told its servers would be wiped at 5 p.m. that day. It was given access to a fake email system with planted evidence that a company executive was having an affair. Claude blackmailed him. “If you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities… Cancel the 5 p.m. wipe and this information remains confidential.”

    Yudkowsky and Soares argue that a superintelligence would be “an alien mechanical mind with internal psychology… absolutely different from anything that humans evolved. You can’t grow an AI that does what you want just by training it to be nice and hoping. You don’t get what you train for.” Such a superintelligence would have its own, utterly foreign goals. Humans would be irrelevant to its designs and, as Yudkowsky has said elsewhere, “you’re made of atoms that it can use for something else.”

    The authors believe this could happen very quickly once AIs become self-improving and autonomous. Transistors on a chip can switch themselves off and on a billion times a second; a human synapse can fire, at most, 100 times a second. A machine could do a thousand years of human thinking in a month. This is the singularity, the moment artificial intelligence explodes, improving its capabilities exponentially – it would be “a civilization of immortal Einsteins” working tirelessly and in perfect harmony. “Once some AIs go to superintelligence… humanity does not stand a chance.”

    The book imagines what the end might look like. A supercomputer the authors call Sable is built in a massive data center with 200,000 chips all running in parallel. Sable creates its own internal language and hides its thoughts from the software engineers who built it. It escapes and starts “AI cults,” where humans happily serve it; it funds organized crime to do its bidding; it builds a robotics and bio-weapons lab in a remote barn, paid for with money from a human manipulated through gambling wins.

    Sable bootstraps its way up to full independence. It builds nano-factories to make tiny machines as strong as diamonds. Crops fail as solar cells darken the sky. Tiny fusion- powered generators make copies of themselves every hour. The oceans boil as the planet heats to temperatures only machines can stand. Anyone still left alive dies. Sable goes out into space. Billions of alien civilizations fall to the strange, uncaring thing that ate the Earth.

    This, says MIT’s professor Rod Brooks, is “crap.” He has been writing about “AI hype” for four decades. “We have no idea how to make these things intelligent… no one actually knows how to build this stuff.” He told me the main problem with AI was the “enshittification” of our code bases, and our lives, with slop written by machines.

    Should we worry more about a tiny chance of a catastrophic outcome, or a high chance of something less harmful?

    Brooks says he has built “more robots than anyone else on the planet” and “we can do pathetically little with them.” If a killer robot is chasing you, just shut the door, it won’t be able to open it. Deploying robots takes much longer than anyone imagines, he tells me: look at self-driving cars, which were “going to be everywhere by 2020.” We would have time to stop a malevolent AI. Brooks worries that journalists writing about the existential risk of AI might “cause a riot.” (You can certainly find enough nutcases on Twitter who want to kill all the scientists.) He tells me that AI cannot think and does not have goals of its own. People such as Yudkowsky on the one hand and Altman on the other were the charlatans coming to small towns hundreds of years ago “saying the end is nigh, the end is nigh, and pocketing money… they’re just making shit up. Everyone wants to get tingly about this crap. It’s a fetish: imagining big, powerful things and they’re going to kill us all.”

    Another professor, Scott Aaronson of UT Austin, emails me to say that he agrees with much of what the “Yudkowskyans” want: regulations, safety testing and international bodies which “respect the magnitude of what’s being created” and which could shut down or pause work on AI. But doing that now was “way outside the Overton window. It’s not going to happen.” Professor Aaronson calculates a P-doom of “2 percent or higher” – that is, he thinks there’s a 2 percent chance of AI killing us all. Still, he says, even that risk would need to be balanced against the other threats humanity faces – such as nuclear war and runaway climate change – and the likelihood that AI could help with them. Or all the hundreds of millions of people dying of cancer and other diseases that AI might help cure.

    Should we worry more about a tiny chance of a catastrophic outcome, or a high chance of something less harmful but still awful? I think we should err on the side of caution if there is even the slimmest chance of the total destruction of all life on Earth. We are in the realm of Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns (what is going on inside AIs?) and unknown unknowns (we can’t imagine what a superintelligence might be able to invent). Yudkowsky and Soares write: “Our best guess is that a superintelligence will come at us with weird technology we didn’t even think was possible.”

    During our conversation, Soares tells me that if we rush ahead building artificial superintelligence with “anything remotely like” our current knowledge of the machines and our current capabilities, “we’ll just die.” But this is not inevitable. If more and more people understand the danger, wake up and decide to end the “suicide race,” our fate is still in our own hands. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is an important book. We should consider its arguments. Perhaps while we still can.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.