Commentary Culture Investigations

The government has seven days to appeal the conclusion that it violated Anthropic’s free-speech rights.

Smugness is not a credential, much less an accomplishment.

While they celebrate the leftist “No Kings” protests this weekend, the Left is monitoring the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas. Mediaite was alarmed by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s comments about how “President Trump is taking on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”

Leftists are horrified that the supposed “independent agency” is aligning itself with the president — as if that’s never happened at the FCC. But Democrat FCC chairs are only a soothing presence for the DNC Media.

FCC Chair: Trump is winning. Look at the results—PBS and NPR defunded. Joy Reid, Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, Jim Acosta, John Dickerson are gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough CNN will have new ownership as well. pic.twitter.com/8kdrG5T3GP
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 27, 2026
Carr explained Trump’s actions: “When he ran for office, he ran directly at the fake news media. So many other politicians and Americans simply gave way to the legacy national media. They let the legacy media set the narrative, and President Trump smashed the façade. He said, ‘You don’t get to decide what we say, what we think, how we’re gonna vote inside the voting booth.’ President Trump took on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”

The elitist media are used to setting the agenda for both parties, and Republicans have traditionally sought to roll with the punches the media were throwing. Trump hasn’t allowed the press to set the agenda, especially in the second term. 

Carr continued: “Look at the results so far. PBS — defunded. NPR — defunded. Joy Reid — gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd — gone. Jim Acosta — gone. John Dickerson — gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is gonna have new ownership as well.” Cheers could be heard.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison and his son David acquired CBS, and are now in the process of getting CNN, too. 

“So, we’re not at the point yet where we’re raising the ‘mission accomplished’ flag, but President Trump is taking on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning,” Carr concluded.

This is definitely a dramatic list of changes, but for anyone like us who monitors media content every day, there hasn’t been a noticeable evolution in the nature of the “news.” It’s still hyper-negative in its approach to Trump, even if some vocal hosts and reporters ended up on Substack. CBS News isn’t “MAGA-coded,” no matter what the Daily Beast says. Defunding PBS and NPR was certainly a victory — so that conservatives and Republicans aren’t funding their opposition media. But their programs are still incessantly left-tilted.

It’s certainly premature to declare a victory, but it’s also true that the leftists feel quite demoralized about the trends in media, which they like to portray as creeping authoritarianism. They pose as the saviors of democracy, and when they lose, so does democracy. They want Democrats to retake control of Congress, and then they’ll feel like they have their mojo again.

Over the past week, Fox News has given daily updates on the case of an 18-year-old woman, Sheridan Gorman, who was murdered on March 19 in Chicago by an illegal alien who was allowed to enter the U.S. under the Joe Biden administration.

Furthermore, while MS NOW and CNN have ignored the story, Fox also reported that, in spite of being arrested in Chicago for shoplifting, he was never turned over to ICE for deportation or even arrested when he failed to show up in court.

Fox has been covering the case since the killing first happened on Thursday, March 19, and, on Sunday, first informed viewers that the alleged perpetrator is an illegal alien, Jose Medina-Medina, who is from Venezuela.

For example, on Monday’s Fox & Friends, reporter Todd Piro related:

Police arresting 25-year-old Venezuelan national Jose Medina-Medina in connection to the shooting of 18-year-old college student Sheridan Gorman. Now the Venezuelan migrant has been officially charged with first-degree murder, first-degree attempted murder, and multiple counts of felony aggravated assault. Now, the Department of Homeland Security saying Medina-Medina had been arrested twice before in 2023, but was released back into the United States under former President Joe Biden.

Later on The Story, Fox host Martha MacCallum recounted:

Venezuelan migrant Jose Medina, the Department of Homeland Security says in May of 2023 he was apprehended by the Border Patrol and released into the United States. Shortly after that, he was arrested for shoplifting in Chicago, but he still got to stay in the country, and he was released on bond — and then, surprise, surprise, he never showed up for his court appearance.

She then noted that the murder happened in the same area where Governor JB Pritzker (D-IL) went for a walk in September and made a big deal about claiming that it was safe even though he was walking in the early morning rather than at night. Here’s MacCallum: “…and it is the same lake front that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker touted as very safe and said everyone’s making too big of a deal out of crime in Chicago back in September.”

Later in the day, Fox host Laura Ingraham also played clips of Governor Pritzker claiming the area was safe.

On Tuesday’s The Faulkner Focus, reporter Garrett Tenney informed viewers that facial recognition technology had helped crack the case as he recalled the poor timing by some Democrats in the legislature of trying to bar the use of such technology in spite of its usefulness.

And by Thursday, Fox was reporting that Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson finally commented on the case, leading to Gorman’s family issuing a statement criticizing the lame reactions by the two Democrats.

On America’s Newsroom, co-host Dana Perino related:

And this story, the family of Sheridan Gorman — the college student who was allegedly killed by an illegal immigrant — issuing a new statement. They’re taking aim at Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson over their responses to Sheridan’s murder.

After noting that neither Democrat had contacted the Gorman family, reporter Garrett Tenney recalled:

Now, the Gorman family is responding, saying this about Governor Pritzker: “We appreciate that he has now, five days after our daughter Sheridan’s murder, that he has finally spoken publicly about Sheridan. But Sheridan’s death cannot be reduced to a general ‘tragedy,’ nor can it be explained away by broad references to failures somewhere else. Sheridan was a daughter, a sister, and a young woman whose life was taken in a way that should never have been possible. This was not abstract. It was preventable.”

Tenney went on to read the family’s statement directed at Mayor Johnson, and noted that the Democratic mayor this week went ahead with plans to introduce a new snow plow provocatively named with an anti-ICE slogan — “ABOLISH ICE” — which was the winner of a local contest.

 

Transcripts follow:

Fox’s Special Report with Bret Baier

March 19, 2026

6:11 p.m. Eastern

JOHN ROBERTS: Fox 32 in Chicago as a Loyola University student is fatally shot early this morning. Police say the woman was walking with friends when a masked suspect started shooting in their direction. Police have not announced any arrests.

(…)

Fox & Friends

March 23, 2026

6:16 a.m. Eastern

AINSLEY EARHARDT: An illegal Venezuelan migrant is due in court this morning facing charges for the murder of this Loyola University student.

BRIAN KILMEADE: So Todd Piro has more details. Todd?

TODD PIRO: Good morning to all three of you. Police arresting 25-year-old Venezuelan national Jose Medina-Medina in connection to the shooting of 18-year-old college student Sheridan Gorman. Now the Venezuelan migrant has been officially charged with first-degree murder, first-degree attempted murder, and multiple counts of felony aggravated assault. Now, the Department of Homeland Security saying Medina-Medina had been arrested twice before in 2023, but was released back into the United States under former President Joe Biden.

The family of Gorman saying in a statement, quote: “We are gravely disappointed by the policies and failures that allowed this individual to remain in a position to commit this crime. When systems fail — whether through release decisions, lack of coordination or unwillingness to act, the consequences are not abstract. They are real. And in our case, they are permanent.”

(…)

The Story with Martha MacCallum

March 23, 2026

3:52 p.m. Eastern

MARTHA MacCALLUM: Venezuelan migrant Jose Medina, the Department of Homeland Security says in May of 2023 he was apprehended by the Border Patrol and released into the United States. Shortly after that, he was arrested for shoplifting in Chicago, but he still got to stay in the country, and he was released on bond — and then, surprise, surprise, he never showed up for his court appearance.

This is an old and very tragic story when it comes to this young woman and her grieving family. This is Sheridan Gorman — 18 years. She was a freshman at Loyola in Chicago starting her whole life — her college career out for a walk with friends by the lake — and it is the same lake front that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker touted as very safe and said everyone’s making too big of a deal out of crime in Chicago back in September.

GOVERNOR JB PRITZKER (D-IL), dated September 24: Here on the South Side, early morning, lots of runners coming by on the Lakefront path — Lakefront Trail, absolutely gorgeous…

(…)

The Ingraham Angle

March 23, 2026

PRITZGER: Here I am on the path of the lakefront at 6 a.m. on a Monday, and we got a lot of people running, having a great time. Doesn’t feel like a hell hole here.

LAURA INGRAHAM: Well, tell that to the family of 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman…

(…)

The Faulkner Focus

March 24, 2026

11:03 a.m.

GARRETT TENNEY: This man has been on police’s radar now for years. Jose Medina had a judge issue an arrest warrant for — more than two and a half years ago after he stole $132 worth of merchandise from a Macy’s store in downtown Chicago. He got released on bail and then never showed up to court again. At the time, he was living in one of the city’s migrant shelters, receiving housing, clothes, food and medical care all on the taxpayers’ dime.

(…)

TENNEY: Police were able to use surveillance video to track 25-year-old — this 25-year-old Venezuelan from this pier where he allegedly killed Sheridan Gorman just a few blocks away to his apartment. And from there, they were able to use facial recognition software to positively identify the Venezuelan national. Despite that, today, the Illinois lawmaker representing the same area is pushing a bill to ban the use of that kind of facial recognition software by police. Democratic Chicago alderman Raymond Lopez says bills like this send a clear message to criminals that they can get away with anything, including murder.

RAYMOND LOPEZ, CHICAGO ALDERMAN: What the hell is wrong with these people when this happens? How can you with a straight face look your constituents in the eye and say, “This is the perfect time for me to outlaw the use of cameras and biometric technology even though I know it helped solve this murder?”

(…)

America’s Newsroom

March 26, 2026

9:06 a.m.

DANA PERINO: And this story, the family of Sheridan Gorman — the college student who was allegedly killed by an illegal immigrant — issuing a new statement. They’re taking aim at Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson over their responses to Sheridan’s murder. So Garrett Tenney has the latest from Chicago. Hi, Garrett.

GARRETT TENNEY: Yeah, Dana, good morning to you. Sheridan Gorman was killed one week ago today, and still neither Mayor Brandon Johnson nor Governor JB Pritzker have reached out to her family. It took them both days to even acknowledge her death allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant. And when they finally did, both men tried to shift the blame from their own sanctuary policies to President Trump.

Now, the Gorman family is responding, saying this about Governor Pritzker: “We appreciate that he has now, five days after our daughter Sheridan’s murder, that he has finally spoken publicly about Sheridan. But Sheridan’s death cannot be reduced to a general ‘tragedy,’ nor can it be explained away by broad references to failures somewhere else. Sheridan was a daughter, a sister, and a young woman whose life was taken in a way that should never have been possible. This was not abstract. It was preventable.”

The family also had some strong words for Mayor Johnson who’s facing a lot of criticism, including from some folks in the crowd yesterday for unveiling the city’s new snow plow named “ABOLISH ICE” less than a week after Sheridan’s murder.

MAYOR BRANDON JOHNSON (D-CHICAGO): I want to take this moment to reiterate that Chicago does not want ICE on our streets, in our airports, nor in our city. Chicago believes in abolishing ICE.

On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese military officers murdered their president of nine years, Ngo Dinh Diem, and took control of the nation’s government. The American hand was invisible at the time, but regime change came to fruition only because of active encouragement by the U.S. ambassador, who believed that a coup would improve South Vietnam’s war effort. In the months that followed, however, South Vietnam experienced a succession of coups and countercoups, whose debilitating effects drew the United States further into the Vietnam war. As the crisis intensified, South Vietnamese and American participants raged against one another about the merits and consequences of deposing Diem. Although most of those individuals are no longer with us, the debate and some of its ardor have survived.
David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, who were covering South Vietnam for American newspapers in 1963, shaped the first account of the coup. Their version became part of the dominant American narrative of the Vietnam war, known commonly as the orthodox narrative. According to this account, the Diem regime was so weak and unpopular that its demise was inevitable. Considering that Diem’s successors fared so poorly, Diem’s frailty served as proof that the American project of preserving South Vietnam was doomed all along.
Revisionist historians, drawing on the observations of pro-Diem U.S. officials like William Colby and Frederick Nolting, countered that the Diem government fell not because of its own flaws but because of unrealistic American efforts to pressure Diem into rapid political liberalization. They depicted Halberstam, Sheehan, and other American reporters in Saigon as ill-informed neophytes whose follies helped precipitate the coup. In their estimation, South Vietnam could have survived in the absence of the coup, and the war could have ended far differently.
With Kennedy’s Coup, Jack Cheevers purports to change our understanding of the coup, and by extension the war. In the course of very extensive research, Cheevers obtained new materials from archives and the CIA, and interviewed witnesses whose voices have not been heard before. These sources add interesting new details to the story, but they do not shed significant light on the big issues, nor does Cheevers contend that they do. Instead, he seeks to shed new light by reinterpreting the great mass of long-established facts.
Although Cheevers does not adhere uniformly to the orthodox narrative, most of his book resembles it much more closely than its revisionist counterparts. By the spring of 1963, he states, “Diem’s government had hardened into a sclerotic family clique” that “had alienated virtually every segment of South Vietnamese society.” Cheevers lauds the American press corps in Saigon as “a fierce tribe of truth seekers” who skillfully exposed the errors and deceptions of the Diem government.
Continuing in the orthodox vein, Cheevers holds Diem culpable for the government’s mounting conflicts with Buddhist protesters in the spring and summer of 1963. Diem, he contends, could have averted the crisis had he made more concessions to the Buddhists and loosened restrictions on protest activities. Cheevers blames the pivotal pagoda raids of August on Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, asserting that Nhu raided the pagodas with his personal troops and used “iron-fist tactics that made even army commanders recoil.” He disregards numerous documents showing that South Vietnamese Army generals not only came up with the idea of raiding the pagodas, but also played leading roles in orchestrating the raids and hailed them afterwards as a great success.
Cheevers also accepts the orthodox view that the Diem government’s severe political deficiencies were matched by egregious military flaws. His cursory treatment of military affairs resembles those of prior orthodox historians, focusing on a small number of South Vietnamese setbacks. He ignores a much larger number of South Vietnamese victories, which revisionists have documented with the assistance of Vietnamese Communist histories that are conspicuously absent from Kennedy’s Coup. To give one of many examples, a March 1965 North Vietnamese assessment concluded that in the period following the overthrow of Diem, “The balance of forces between the South Vietnamese revolution and the enemy has changed very rapidly in our favor. … the bulk of the enemy’s armed forces and paramilitary forces at the village and hamlet level have disintegrated.”
In the sections on September and October 1963, Cheevers begins to diverge from the orthodoxy. Like some revisionists, he emphasizes that White House efforts to coerce Diem into liberalization inadvertently convinced the South Vietnamese generals to turn against Diem. In the meantime, U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had given up on Diem and was trying to unseat the South Vietnamese president behind Kennedy’s back. When Kennedy finally learned of Lodge’s machinations in late October, he tried to rein his emissary in, but he became the victim of his own political skullduggery. A few months earlier, Kennedy had sent Lodge to Vietnam to shift attention and potential blame to a Republican who could challenge Kennedy for the presidency in the 1964 election. Now Kennedy feared he would suffer political blowback if he fired Lodge, and therefore he could not pull the reins tight enough to keep Lodge from setting the coup in motion.
Cheevers describes in some detail how the generals abjectly failed at leading the country after the coup. The ineffectiveness of the initial junta led to a second coup three months later, and others followed in rapid succession, each one further damaging the government. Even coup proponents like Halberstam and Sheehan could not dispute that the generals failed to live up to expectations, which explains why the journalists so vociferously argued afterward that the war had essentially been lost before the coup.
Only in the final chapter does Cheevers make a clear break with the orthodox school. Invoking the pro-Diem officials who inspired the revisionists, he embraces their conclusion that the Diem government fell because of American diplomatic malpractice, rather than Diem’s inherent flaws. Cheevers faults Lodge and other State Department officials for promoting a coup with little comprehension of what would follow, and blasts Kennedy for letting them do so. He also chastises the Kennedy administration for trying to liberalize an authoritarian country in a time of war. “Kennedy would have been well-advised to stop hammering Diem to get rid of Nhu and let the brothers do their best to win the war,” Cheevers writes. “Free and fair elections could never be held, nor strong democratic institutions established, until the Viet Cong were largely cleared out of the country.”
Cheevers acknowledges that Diem’s successors deprived the government of the cohesion that had existed under Diem. On this basis, he concludes that Diem could have kept the government going after 1963, though he differs from revisionists in arguing that Diem would have needed to make substantial reforms to counterinsurgency programs to survive in the long term.
Thus, what is new about Kennedy’s Coup is that it arrives at predominantly revisionist conclusions based on a predominantly orthodox narrative. This novelty may have a certain value. But the conclusions would be more persuasive were they better supported by the narrative.
The book, therefore, would have benefited from greater incorporation of elements of the revisionist narrative. One such element is a deep skepticism of the Buddhist protesters. In revisionist accounts, the Buddhists are more dishonest, more sympathetic to the Communists, and more clearly intent on overthrowing the Diem government than in Kennedy’s Coup, and therefore they show Diem’s actions to be more reasonable, and his political standing to be stronger.
Cheevers would have bolstered his case for the staying capacity of the Diem government had he heeded the revisionist contention that South Vietnam had the upper hand in the war until the coup. He would have strengthened his case for the government’s long-term viability had he covered North Vietnamese deliberations after the coup. In December 1963, the Communist Party’s Central Committee ordered a transition from indecisive guerrilla warfare to decisive conventional warfare, on the premise that South Vietnam’s steep decline after Diem’s demise had made the country ripe for military conquest. That decision gives further reason to believe that if Diem had remained in power, South Vietnam might never have faced a life-threatening offensive, and would have been better prepared to cope with one had it ever come.
South Vietnam might thus have survived and evolved into a vibrant democracy like America’s other Confucian allies in Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The United States could have been spared from hundreds of thousands of casualties, massive financial expenditures, and decades of self-doubt and recrimination.
Kennedy’s Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America’s Descent into Vietnam
by Jack Cheevers
Simon & Schuster, 688 pp., $35
Mark Moyar holds the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and is the author of three books on the Vietnam war.
The post Coups and Consequences appeared first on .

I know nothing about primate anthropology, but I did know a primate anthropologist. She took me into the rainforests of southern Uganda, where we spent several afternoons lurking in the shrubbery and watching a troop of chimpanzees. When we got too close to the mothers and babies, the males chimped out. They got up on their hind legs, bared their teeth, howled like extras from Tarzan, and started bounding toward us. To avoid a savaging, we mimicked subordinate chimpanzee behavior. This requires no scientific expertise, though experience of male pattern baldness may help. You look down in shame and repeatedly stroke your pate from back to front as though trying to glue down the strands of a combover in a high wind. If that doesn’t work, run your other hand over your eyes and nose as though wiping that smirk off your simian face before you make one of the alphas come down there and do it for you.
The chimpanzees relented and went back to eating fleas off each other’s heads. Their response to our subordinate grooming suggests that chimps think humans are part of their family, and perhaps that they think I am a lesser kind of chimp. That I was in the middle of Uganda pretending to be a bald monkey to preempt being bitten in the face suggests I believed the same about our consanguinity, but also that, by dint of getting there and presuming to intrude into their bosky bower, I consider myself to be a superior kind of chimp. Our consanguinity is the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, even though Darwin himself was wary of going what he called “the whole Orang.” But what does “family” mean here? Like those surprise and distant relationships that self-swabbers discover from genealogy testers such as 23andMe, once your cousinhood gets beyond the fifth and sixth degree, you’re related to everyone, even Genghis Khan.
The surprise in Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth is that our relationship to the apes may be more distant than we think. The stakes are higher than when we play a round of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If we are closest to the apes above all creatures, then we must, the evolutionary logic goes, look back down our evolutionary track and find our image in theirs, not least because Darwin’s children insist that we are not going to find it in religion. Hence the search for our better nature in the more appealing aspects of chimp life: their resemblances of physiognomy, their ability to drink tea from cups and saucers, the male gorilla’s custom of alleviating the boredom of an afternoon at the zoo by publicly masturbating and throwing feces at the glass.
If, however, we are behaviorally closer to other creatures, then we might look sideways at a gallery of models who developed on parallel evolutionary tracks. This, Leaf argues, would allow us to develop a species self-image that would be more accurate. It would be good for science, and also good for us. Apart from enlivening the longueurs between our flea-grooming sessions, it would free us from the narrow notion that we are “apes wearing collared shirts,” and the attendant delusions that certain kinds of behavior are justifiable because they are true to our evolution. As Leaf’s skillful and well-sourced exploration of recent research shows, the truth about our evolutionary legacy is more complicated than we assume. As with all one-way journeys, where we are now may be more relevant to us than our point of origin.
Evolution, Leaf writes, does not resemble the popular cartoon of the “Ascent of Man,” which goes from a crouching ape to a standing one, and then an early hominid and Homo sapiens:
Dinosaurs led to birds, but they are also the ancestors of reptiles. The notion that humans should be like apes is based on a misunderstanding of evolution. Animals don’t display similar traits or behaviors because they have common ancestry but because they have the same evolutionary needs.
To think of us as primates is, Leaf writes, akin to driving past an airport, taking a quick look and assuming that the terminal is “a giant parking lot.” Humans may resemble chimps, but we did not evolve as they did to be tree-dwelling herbivores. If, as scientists say, our genome resembles a chimp’s more than a chimp’s resembles a gorilla, that is because gorillas and chimps diverged before chimps and humans. The Primate Myth is not an attack on evolutionary theory: Leaf affirms that we share more than 90 percent of our DNA with chimps. It is a refinement of the kind that the scientific method is supposed to encourage, and a call for what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift.”
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn showed how scientific paradigms formed into “normal science,” and then broke down as new research discovered anomalies and researchers identified professional opportunities in reexamining their assumptions. Leaf identifies a catalog of anomalies, but also a lack of professional incentives for a paradigm shift.
The chimp lobby has used human descent from apes to affirm that human behavior is ape-like. Its affirmations have always reflected political priorities. When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Karl Marx detected a familial resemblance between the mechanisms of Darwin’s theory, competition and specialization, and the values of the progressive middle class from which Darwin came: “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society, with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’ … in Darwin the animal kingdom appears bourgeois.”
The Darwinists were less liberal than Darwin. By the end of the 19th century, Darwinian descent meant racial theory, natural selection meant eugenics, and Nietzsche, despite only having read a second-hand summary of Darwin in German, was on his way to posthumous acclaim as a Darwinian anthropologist of permanent war. The resulting disaster discredited Social Darwinism, at least in the Western democracies. After 1945, evolutionary theory was caged in sociology, a demystifying discipline whose founder, Darwin’s contemporary Auguste Comte, intended it to put the therapeutic and organizing functions of religion on a rational footing.
When liberal society demanded an egalitarian, pacific compassionate human nature, primate anthropologists such as Jane Goodall supplied the raw material, and popular culture polished up the desired image. By the 1970s, scientists were teaching chimps to understand English, Planet of the Apes was on TV every Saturday morning, and sentimentalists were adopting chimp babies and getting their faces bitten off because they didn’t know the bald subordinate routine.
Leaf does not doubt the scientific consensus that chimpanzees and humans share traits. They and we use tools, display emotions, form social bonds, teach skills to our young, and form war parties to smash our rivals’ heads in with rocks. What Leaf doubts is the weight that the scientific consensus grants to these similarities. He presents a pile of recent research showing that we do not share many key traits with chimps—but we do share them with other mammals.
Chimps may be violent and sex-mad, but they are poor communicators. Dogs, dolphins, and some species of whales are cooperative hunters like us, but apes are more effective when hunting in packs than alone. We have flat nails like the apes and we can also climb trees, but apes do it better because they have prehensile feet and we do not. They are not herd animals, but we are. We have altruism, and so do dogs, but apes lack it. They build nests and live in trees. They eat little meat. They sleep far more than we do. They are “equatorial, forest-dwelling, herbivorous, tree-climbing knuckle-walkers who lack skills of speech and cooperativeness,” but most of us humans aren’t. It’s enough to drive you bananas.
Primate anthropologists, Leaf argues, have climbed up a tree and their professional dignity prevents them from climbing down and shifting their paradigm. The great apes are greater at being apes than we are, but our evolutionary development means that we are more like other species in key regards. Rats and dogs are faster learners than chimps and chickens. Dogs and dolphins laugh. Wolves, dogs, hyenas, elephants, and crows can all work together to pull on a strap in order to get a reward. The survival of a parent is more important for young whales and dolphins than for young chimps. A border collie can learn up to 1,000 words. Chimps struggle to learn 250 words, and they are slower learners. Then again, English tabloid newspapers have a core vocabulary of about 300 words, and the readers still get to vote.
Chimp homosexuality is, as in prison and the navy, a “means to prevent conflict” by “establishing hierarchy, preventing conflict, and defusing tension.” Plenty of other large-brained, herd-forming mammals exhibit “preferential homosexual ties” like this, including bottlenose dolphins, elephants, giraffes, and bison, but sheep and humans are the only mammals to express “exclusive homosexual attraction.” Twenty-two species of bats have been observed committing homosexual acts in the Wilde, and while bats are not herd animals like us, they are, like us, great vocalizers.
The evolutionary drives that made us what we are represent “a radical divergence away from a primate nature.” The drivers, Leaf argues, advanced on language and sociability, and not only because research suggests that “gay men tend to have a larger anterior cingulate gyrus and an expanded left occipito-temporal cortex,” which is the part of the brain that activates when we form words into lexical patterns. Apes use oral expression for “conveying threats and fending off competition.” Language creates abstract reasoning and complex social expressions such as religion and art. The most distinctive human behaviors could not exist without language: religious sacrifice, fashion trends, sports, preferential homosexuality, ostracism and slavery, nationalism, the veneration of priestly celibacy and monogamous mating.
If man is the speaking animal, then our real fellow-travelers on the evolutionary road are the chatty, clever cetaceans, the whales and the dolphins. Ultimately, however, Leaf believes that, like Charlton Heston at the close of Planet of the Apes, we must accept that we are alone. Leaf recommends that we reassign ourselves from the primate order to a “distinct family grouping,” or even a separate order, Homo. This has happened before. The primate order has five species, but for almost half a century, it had six. Tree shrews, native to South America, were recently reclassified in a separate order, Scandentia. They have prehensile feet like apes (and unlike us). But they have claws, not nails. Then again, they resemble us in being largely monogamous, with the male and female sometimes sleeping in separate nests. Does the male tree shrew snore?
The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature
by Jonathan Leaf
Bombardier Books, 320 pp., $21
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
The post You’re Not a Monkey’s Uncle appeared first on .

George Orwell, in his immortal 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” delineates a distinction between two types of attackers of intellectual freedom, both real but one in a sense more real than the other. “On the one side,” he writes, “are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.” This distinction is at least as useful in the age of Trump and social media.
The new book by journalist Jacob Siegel, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, is a structural and historical examination of the ways that in the information age, with the help of the right kind of journalists and officials working to craft narratives, the practical enemies of freedom triumph over its theoretical friends. And more ambitiously, it is an examination of the ways that information technology actually necessitates this process.
The internet, Siegel argues, has for practical purposes created a totally new form of depersonalized tyranny that is hard to understand in terms of Americans’ previous, legalistic notions of political power or censorship. After all, the most powerful entities today, in terms of shaping the public understanding of reality, are not usually government ones. As an American, for instance, I am theoretically protected from much government censorship by the First Amendment, and the norms of my society guard against government agencies doing too much overt domestic propaganda outwardly seeking to change my mind one way or another. But practically, as a modern information worker who spends hours online almost every single day, what I see and do not see as I seek to understand the world around me is determined in very large part by powerful forces whose interests and doings are not particularly apparent to me. Somebody in San Francisco could almost certainly cause me to become very worried about, say, the fact that men and women these days ain’t like they used to be, or the genocide in western Abkharia, or the rising threat of disinformation. That’s true even though there is no such place as Abkharia.
To explain how we got to a place where the most powerful forces in our lives are difficult to discern, Siegel tells a more-than-a-century-long story beginning in the Progressive Era in World War I. The original, capital-P Progressives, whose apotheosis was Woodrow Wilson, were deeply technocratic—they sought to put government policy outside of the scope of politics itself, and into the hands of credentialed and unelected experts. “What Wilson called administration and is often termed bureaucracy was the first great technology of political control,” Siegel explains, as he gives a useful history of the ways technocratic governance requires propaganda to bring the public along with what the administrators have decided is right. He does an admirably clear job bringing in the history of information theory and political philosophy—with regular invocations of thinkers like Max Weber and Jacques Ellul—without for a moment becoming boring or academic.
Alongside this essentially political story, Siegel tells the more obscure tale of how the technology of surveillance and control, which became our internet, developed. While it has been popular to describe the personal computing and internet era as originating in the garages of California entrepreneurs, it is more accurate, Siegel shows, to understand the tools of our information age as coming from the government. Specifically, personal computing and the internet are technologies that came from, and never really separated from, the American defense and intelligence departments. “War and machines evolved together,” he writes. In one memorable passage, Siegel explains how it was in Vietnam that the first attempt to map an entire physical space in real time digitally was conceived. One eventual descendant of that is your ability to use Google Maps, but another is that you can be tracked at virtually all times.
The point of the first half of the book is that technology should be understood almost like it seeks information of its own accord by a sort of bureaucratic logic that plays out without having to attribute its intentions to any one person or party. But most of that is, at this point, distant history. Where it becomes salient is in the second half of the book: Siegel gives the most exhaustive and unimpeachably sourced account of how—since Obama’s first term, say—the mature versions of information technology, whereby we “live inside the digital embrace,” have been harnessed in a way that amounts to a practical tyranny we live under often without even noticing it.
Usually, though not always, it has been wielded by Democrats. Most interestingly using the example of the panic around “disinformation” that gripped the media in the first Trump administration, Siegel describes “a new technique of governance that circumvented the normal legislative process by seizing the levers of the digital system to enact sweeping policy changes.” If the government is forbidden from directly practicing censorship, it is not forbidden from working closely with officially private and independent NGOs that work with a web of academics who work with tech companies who practice censorship.
Siegel shows how the triumvirate of the press, tech companies, and NGOs worked with the government to create a system of control that, sinisterly, worked first and foremost to obscure its own existence, even as it shaped the sense of reality of the citizens of the democratic world to its own ends. “By early 2020, with the next election approaching, the information state had metastasized into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching across continents and into every corner of American society as it took control of the Internet and worked to achieve nothing less than the eradication of harm and human error.”
Big claims, surely. The outlines of the stories Siegel tells about the tools of information warfare being turned inward, using his journalistic background as well as his experience as a U.S. soldier, are enough to make someone sound like a crackpot. Which is why it is so crucial and welcome that Siegel is careful and specific in providing the gory details.
And they are gory. Siegel names names, telling the stories of individual characters who rotate through the revolving door of presidential administrations, academia, U.S. intelligence, and NGOs to create the infrastructure for information control during a time when “the national security apparatus was reorienting away from foreign groups to focus on Americans and their activities online.” Readers of this publication will know at least much of what happened next, with social media companies and the Biden administration working to suppress stories unflattering to Democrats, like those about Hunter Biden, including in direct messages. Something called the Election Integrity Partnership, using the sleazy legal loophole that elided the First Amendment restriction on government censorship by using officially private cutouts working in concert with government, passed almost 22 million “takedown requests” for specific posts to social media companies via a “ticket” system that saw tech platforms responding, on average, in under an hour. Meanwhile the press practiced a double standard whereby the successful political use of social media by Republicans was an occasion for panic and by Democrats for celebration.
Together, these methods exemplify what had become “the ruling party’s power to instantly disappear countless discrete pieces of information across billions of screens while penetrating into people’s private communications.” They were also, largely speaking, legal. Which brings us to what is ultimately the deepest claim of The Information State, that “charting the structure of American politics in the twenty-first century require[s] a new set of terms.” The internet has, in a sense, created new practical opportunities for attacking liberty, yet we are still stuck in outmoded and theoretical conversations about what attacks on liberty look like.
Readers of the Information State, which is sure to become one of the most talked-about books of the year, will be armed with the vocabulary to describe and understand the world we have all been living in for some time.
The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control
By Jacob Siegel
Henry Holt and Co., 336 pp., $29.99
Nicholas Clairmont is an editor at The Free Press.
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Writing a novel after spending years writing nonfiction is no easy trick. Trust me, I know. My hard drive is littered with stories never shared. My next book, if I do finish it, will be another nonfiction tome. Completing a novel, or even a novella, feels to me a bit like becoming a ballet dancer after spending decades running cross country.
Yes, I admit, writing about actual people, places, and things provides excellent grist for the fiction mill. That is why so many first time novelists produce thinly disguised roman à clefs. “Write what you know” is the old saw, and young fiction writers almost inevitably follow it. With time, suffering, and exertion, a budding novelist can ripen into a writer with a rich imagination.
Max Watman is not a young fiction writer. He is 54 years old and published the first of his three nonfiction books in 2005. The subjects of Watman’s book have included horse racing, small-scale farming, and moonshine-making. If there is one word that describes his written work it is “reportage.” His books are loaded with facts and help readers see, hear, smell, and taste reality. Watman is a man who lives to experience things, which he has done as a farmer, silversmith, tutor, greenskeeper, warehouseman, cook, and musician.
So I was a little skeptical when I heard he had written a novel, and my dubiety rose higher when I learned it was historical fiction. I know, I know, Mr. Faulkner was correct when he declared, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And, sure, Watman does live in an ancient house in Powhatan County, Virginia, where General Robert E. Lee spent some time after his tail-whupping by Ulysses S. Grant.
But come on now, how could his fact-focused, contemporary reality-explaining brain imagine people who never existed living in antebellum America?
And yet somehow Watman has done just that.
Tomorrow, the War is a nearly 400-page epic filled with fine grain details that pull the reader into a world that was as imagined by Watman. Mostly it is the tale of two young men from Virginia forced to find their way.
It starts in 1846 with Jed, an adolescent living on Stokes Mountain, which is comprised of “three houses and a graveyard.” Jed’s family situation was complicated. As Jews, they were segregated from their downhill neighbors, and word was that Jed’s father had taken up with his wife’s sister and maybe she had done the same with his brother.
He was “a good boy, bright,” according to Preacher Thom, who Jed occasionally visited for lessons. Other neighbors thought he was feral. Preacher Thom, who had a soft spot for Jed, did not disagree. “The boy lived without intent. He lived within patterns.” He was like the other poor children in the area: “Superstitious savages who live in a world over which they have no agency and upon which they can have no effect.”
Less enviable still is the position of Raleigh, a teen slave living on a 1,000-acre tobacco plantation. His family life also is complicated. Unbeknownst to him, Raleigh and his sister Temple were fathered by Oliver Bodkin, the cold, calculating master of the house.
Master Mister Bodkin, as he was called, lorded over this empire and lived opulently off the backs of 200 black Americans. Raleigh and everyone else were terrified into obedience lest they end up like Little Edward. He slipped away from Bodkin’s property. He was returned in a ghoulish spectacle. Two men rolled a hogshead barrel

“right up to the house and called everyone around. … Them men were grinning and spitting, dirty, smelling like whiskey. They cracked the top of that barrel off and poured Little Edward out onto the ground in a pool of blood, dead as a stone. They’d smashed all the whiskey bottles into the barrel, ’fore they shoved poor Little Edward into it. They nailed him shut in there with all that broken glass and rolled him along the road.”

Fate ejects both Jed and Raleigh from the only places they have ever known. Jed dreams of an adventurous life—backwoods Virginia’s equivalent of d’Artagnan of Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. He journeys to Richmond and on a lark joins the military to fight in the Mexican–American War. Glory eludes him. Jed sees no combat and goes AWOL with another soldier. They try becoming entrepreneurs by shooting and harvesting bison, but end up doing a lot of drinking and thieving.
Raleigh, for his part, aspires to survive, which is no easy thing for a young black man in a slave state. He makes his way to Louisville and finds work as a piano player on a riverboat. Life is better yet not fully his own. He earns money for his labor, buys what he likes, lays with a woman, and falls in love with another. But part of the deal for getting the gig required him to pretend to be someone else: Walter Raleigh Babenberg, who grew up in the courts of Europe.
Along the way, Jed and Raleigh each meet characters full of character: Percy the dissolute ne’er-do-well, Red Joe the elegant American Indian, Hyman the jaundiced entertainment troupe leader, Booth the burly barkeep, and Hale the pointy-headed Army captain.
Eventually, the separate threads of Jed’s and Raleigh’s lives intertwine in 1860, and they join forces to rescue a damsel in distress. (I won’t say more and spoil the story for you.)
In structure, Tomorrow, the War is a convergence narrative and a heroic quest with a just-deserts core. Each of the two protagonists face challenges and experience triumphs. But Watman does not peddle moralistic schlock. Decent men die. At a deeper level, the novel illustrates a Heraclitian truth: Change is relentless, thus each of our lives must contain multiple lives. “Nothing is set,” as Temple puts it.
We leave one life to start another. Sometimes fate forces it; sometimes our choices instigate the change.
Jed was a parochial, lonely, stunted youth; Raleigh lived in a gilded cage ignorant of who he was. Their identities evolved as they left their nest, experienced new things and challenges, and figured out what was meaningful to each of them. “I’ve been looking for my own life for a long time,” Jed observes, when asked why he risked his life to help two strangers.
This rebirth in life also happens for some of the book’s minor characters. Marie, for example, was a lustful, rebellious teenage girl who later “shed girlhood like a skin she’d outgrown.” Later in life she molted again. For years she “danced around what she knew” about her awful husband and their life. She refused to face facts in order to “preserve a way of life”—the life of the old, genteel South and her own posh life in it. Revelation brought rebirth. Marie left him to make her life anew.
Max Watman spent decades as a nonfiction writer. Now he is a novelist, and a very good one at that.
Tomorrow, the War
by Max Watman
Heresy Press, 408 pp., $32
Kevin Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of Beverages, Books, and More.
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The Washington Post is a Democrat rag. On Thursday’s front page, the below-the-fold headline on the left was “Democrats continue to reel in victories in special elections.” The subscribers surely loved it. 

In the same spot on Friday was “Young conservatives’ bigotry has GOP on edge: Radicalization of youth on the right has set off bitter debate in the party.”

Democrats love a “bitter debate” on the other side.

The online headline was similar, but the subheadline was more specific: “Many Republicans dismiss such party members even as white supremacists like Nick Fuentes gain popularity, but there’s growing unease at their presence in the rank and file.”

Let’s not deny the Republicans have a problem with antisemites in their ranks. Reporter Hannah Knowles quotes Sen. Ted Cruz: that he has seen more prejudice against Jewish people “in the last 18 months on the right than at any point in my lifetime,” and that “it is gaining real purchase, especially with young people.”

But surely Knowles and the Post is not unaware that “groyper” Nick Fuentes has been out there raging against Trump. On March 16: “He needs to go. Like, I really believe that he needs to be impeached under the Democrats. And I don’t even want him to be removed from office because I don’t want Vance to become president either. I want Vance to burn down with all of it.”

On December 28, 2025, Fuentes posted on social media that he’d vote for Gavin Newsom over “fat subhuman” Vance for president in 2028 “100x over just because he’s handsome.”

Why is this nowhere in the story? Because the Post is a Democrat rag.

There was a brief spot in the Knowles story for an official White House rebuttal of their partisan thesis:

Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House, said Trump “has zero tolerance for anti-Semitism” and accused Democrats in Congress of “being taken over by anti-Semitic and anti-American radicals.”

He pointed to Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), who have drawn rebukes from Republicans as well as some Democrats. The lawmakers’ offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Post has covered Omar sympathetically as the victim of barbs from “creepy” Trump. She’s not ruining the Democrats.

Knowles based her story on a Turning Point USA conference, and had to admit:

An official straw poll of attendees at the conference found that 87 percent of respondents viewed Israel as an ally, drawing a stark contrast with Fuentes, who rails against Israel.

But the tension over their rise was front-and-center, in the sniping between speakers and the questions coming from the audience.

This isn’t the first time the Post has been excited about the potential of Fuentes wrecking the GOP. Here’s the headline from last November 8: “Far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes is triggering a MAGA civil war.” At least that came before Fuentes endorsed handsome Gavin Newsom and Democrats impeaching Trump and removing him from office.