It was on July 4, 2025, that Kamala Harris received her first true “3 a.m. phone call” as President. The time was 3:26, in fact, and on the line was the Director of National Intelligence (and Harris’s fellow Californian) Adam Schiff. “Madam President,” Schiff began, his tone instantly telegraphing the direness of the situation, “we have some urgent intelligence from Russia.” Given the circumstances, “urgent” was an understatement.
Minutes earlier, the US Intelligence Community had received word from the Kremlin that a group of radical climate activists calling itself Extinction Now had infiltrated the central-control station at Russia’s newest nuclear plant, in Kaliningrad. The group’s demand was as simple as it was psychotic: Russia, along with all other developed nations, had to cease the production and consumption of fossil fuels and nuclear energy within 24 hours.
Failing this, they would shut down the reactor coolant and “set off a nuclear explosion that will make Chernobyl look like child’s play”. Yes, a blast of such magnitude would do “some environmental harm” but “if it means helping eradicate the pandemic of human life that has plagued our little, blue gem of a planet, so be it.”
This was not merely a European headache; the White House soon received word of similar infiltrations at nuclear facilities in France, Canada, China — and the US. Ditching the old green mantra, Extinction Now thought (and acted) globally.
Harris’s political life flashed before her. She wouldn’t be in the White House had it not been for Trump’s third-party challenge to the GOP nominee, Ron DeSantis, which had divided the Right. Moreover, a polarised public hadn’t indulged her with the honeymoon period new presidents expect. And her legitimacy was under a permanent cloud, owing to dramatic changes to US electoral laws, including votes for illegal immigrants, imposed by executive order by her predecessor and ex-boss, Joe Biden.
But why should she be sorry for that decision? Media, academe, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, corporate America and the nation’s professional class as a whole all adored her. What did it matter to her that a smattering of malcontents — whose conspiracy-laden views were increasingly invisible to the non-deplorables, thanks to the efforts of Messrs. Dorsey and Zuckerberg — objected to the new regime?
Meanwhile, there were other burning questions blazing that night at the White House residence: how had America’s top-flight spy agencies missed the threat from Extinction Now? Why hadn’t the Russians, let alone allies such as Britain and France, warned Washington? Was there some scientific or technical solution? If not, was there a military option? If the West were forced to meet the Extinction Now demand, how should she level with the public?
No one among the Cabinet members and other high officials assembled in the White House Situation Room could give the President a straight answer. It fell to a nerdy-looking National Security Council staffer, standing in the pews surrounding the principals’ table, to voice the grim truth. This staffer seemed to have sensed that something truly apocalyptic was afoot, and so felt bold enough to unburden himself of opinions that under normal circumstances would have almost certainly ended his career.
He began to read from hastily jotted notes on a pad. “Madam President,” he said, as a hush fell over the room, “the reason America’s Intelligence Community missed the militarisation of Extinction Now and other extreme green groups isn’t complicated: the vast majority of our spooks spend their days analysing their identities along intersectional lines of race, gender and sexuality.
“As you know, the CIA now specifically recruits for people with gender-identity and anxiety disorders. Madam President, the last time our office requested a CIA report on jihadist groups operating in the Sahel, they protested that the Council was racist, xenophobic, fascist and triggering. Six employees requested indefinite compassionate leave as a result of our request.
“As for Russia and our allies,” the staffer went on, “the other great powers have been trying to warn you about the rise of hard-line greens. The trouble is, they can’t get through. You’ve put Karen Attiah in charge of European policy, remember? Before joining your administration, she had a knack for enraging the French by knocking out ill-informed jeremiads applying the parochial obsessions of US wokesters to global problems. She cast Macron almost as a fascist! The French — and not just the French — now see critical race theory as a tool of American imperialism designed to undermine their national cohesion; trust is low.
“And it was you, Madam President, who as Vice President oversaw the reorganisation of the Intelligence Community, installing a directorate for diversity, inclusion and equity at each agency. And the DIE directors at the various agencies have been working overtime to filter any intelligence from Russia, France, Britain and the like out of your daily briefings — on the grounds that these powers cling to the ‘dark vestiges of the past’, as you yourself put it in your Inaugural Address.”
The staffer explained that a scientific-technical solution was out of reach: “Given the direction of grant money these days, our top physicists now devote most of their energies to exploring the connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness and to interrogating the use of terms such as ‘black holes’ among mostly white, heterosexist scientists. And our scientists are increasingly — how should I put this delicately? — inadequate, their departments flooded with race-and-gender theorists since the elimination of selective testing.
“And Madam President, you might as well forget about a military solution. Many in the top brass, as you can probably guess, have been busy naming and renaming bases — Guantanamo Bay has been renamed Naval Base Mumia Abu Jamal, though its, er, mission has hardly changed — and redesigning flags and insignia to remove any trace of the stars and stripes. The generals love CRT. As for the specific infiltration units we’d need for this particular job, those guys have been working remotely since the rolling Covid lockdowns became the norm. They haven’t trained for years and are frankly hideously overweight.
“Madam President,” the staffer was winding up, “your best bet is to level with the public and tell the people you’re going along with Extinction Now. We can hope a pre-emptive US surrender will dissuade them from blowing up our reactors, at least. Turn the Russians into the villains here and insist democracy itself is at stake.”
Within hours, more than half of American residential homes and small businesses would lose power. Gas queues would stretch for miles. Shoppers fighting over basic supplies in grocery stores would resort to armed struggle. Riots would break out in red states and blue, though the federal government and media would strictly refer to the latter as “social-justice gatherings”.
Americans, and the West as a whole, would be foolish to underestimate the security risks posed by woke ideology to our societies — even setting aside the important question of its origin: whether it represents the working out of liberal principles or some foreign ideological invasion, from a source extrinsic to liberal order itself (I believe it’s mostly the former).
Wokeness serves two functions for today’s ruling elites. The first is a kind of ideological control directed against Western working classes: wokeness covers over concrete class and economic injustices — massive wealth inequality, health precarity, stagnant wages and so on — with a thick fog of mystification. It creates an impression of furious change and even revolutionary activity. Yet what is in fact taking place is mostly intra-elite competition and redistribution: a disabled trans woman may be on the board, but workers still have to relieve themselves in bottles for lack of sufficient breaks. Wokeness, moreover, is a powerful regulatory mechanism for the HR department, replacing the old factory discipline with a far more invasive psychological apparatus having to do with workers’ use of language and, in essence, their manners.
But there is a second function, and it’s this one that threatens to upset the whole applecart. As Oliver Bateman has astutely argued, woke censorship also serves to insulate elites themselves from reality. The owners of capital and the dull-witted “meritocrats” who service them would prefer not to be exposed to the discontents of workers — but also to other realities that call their rule into question, whether diplomatic or environmental or military. The system must go on. Wokeness creates a filter for uncomfortable facts.
To take a real-world example: US elites spent decades courting China and inviting the Beijing regime into the international economic order, often at the expense of workers in the American heartland. Then it turned out that the Chinese may have been responsible for unleashing a novel virus that cost millions of lives and untold economic damage (much of it borne by the Western poor).
But rather than face this reality and all it implied head-on, elites deployed wokeness as an insulating mechanism. Linking the virus to its origins was xenophobic in the early days of the pandemic (witness the World Health Organisation’s virus-naming agonies), and suggesting the possibility of a lab leak was likewise racist and “unscientific” to boot. Facebook aggressively censored any lab-leak claims, including a column in the New York Post, where I work. Economic interdependence with China is paramount, and wokeness helps block elites’ own view of its downsides.
You can see how easily this principle, taken to its logical conclusion, could usher in the next cataclysm, one far more serious than Covid-19.
Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It
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SubscribeAll this goes back to two stupid political decisions – by the Conservatives under Major to make the Polytechnics universities (we now have over 140 Higher Education Institutions !) then by New Labour under Blair to try to get half young people to go to university.
Agreed Covid, treating students as “customers”, rampant grade inflation, chasing far eastern students as cash cows, overpaid administrators, and free speech issues have contributed, but it all stems from these two events. The university sector, especially the self-styled Russell Group, have made it worse with their self-satisfied arrogance (my friend calls it “smugplacency”) but it’s all part of a long term trend.
The China Virus is not University’s problem. It’s their leftist-indoctrination culture, which is not only itself destroying the student’s brain but supplants useful courses that might guarantee later employment. That, and academe’s fanatical, estrogen-saturated Social Justice Warrioring, have driven a great many ambitious young men to do what they are doing vis à vis dating and mating as well: walking away.
This essay was well written and a fun read. And it did touch – tangentially – on most of the great litany of reasons why our tertiary ‘education’ institutions largely deserve to be treated with contempt – ” higher grades for less effort; the gamification of learning in place of reading books; safe spaces in which they can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas” etc etc etc. But by framing all this within what is essentially an ephemeral side issue (the Covid hysteria time), it ends up seriously underplaying the scale of the civilisation-wrecking disaster that those institutions have become.
By far the greatest ‘political’ error of the post-war era was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on ‘cleverly’ unpicking the threads that once held our Western civilisation together. And the massive late 20th c. expansion of the tertiary sector put this disaster on steroids….. by compounding the existing pervasive Lefty groupthink of the academia intelligentsia with hoards of new ‘students’ wholly unsuited to a life of academic intellectual inquiry.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias: “Most of the craziest outcomes of the West’s post-60s embrace of its ‘social justice’ religion – the ones that people scratch their heads about in dismay – mostly originated in the groves of academe. Things like white self-loathing-by-proxy, the fetishisation of sexual dysphoria and pseudo-therapeutic psychobabble began as fictions and fixations hatched in its humanities and social science petri-dishes.”
A recovery now of anything that could be called a heathy academic intellectual climate would need a scorched-earth approach to most of its non-STEM faculties. Shrink them by around 70% and basically start again…. wised up to the academic/intellectual disaster that the past 60 years has been.
A few years ago, I came across the claim that the absolute number of STEM students was unchanged from the early nineties in spite of doubling the number of total students. I’ll try and find the source for the claim, although I don’t doubt that it is broadly correct.
This occurred during Blair’s drive for a new high tech “knowledge based” economy. I was young, naive and bought the snake oil*. The “knowledge based” economy really became the higher education sector itself and not the industries it should be supporting with its services.
The lack of discipline in taking students on is really quite damning of the university. The obvious solution in being more liberal in fields with high demand and more discerning in those with low demand was ignored and we got the exact opposite.
And here is the heuristic – if universities provided graduates that benefited the economy to the tune of the cost of their education, there would be no need for fees. The need for fees is a tacit acknowledgement that they are not providing the economic benefits claimed.
*In fairness a computer science degree has been pretty good to me: fees paid up and mortgage paid off.
Whatever universities are “for”, we definitely don’t need so many of them.
My head of humanities in the mid 90’s was pretty hardcore left. I would never have known from his behaviour on campus. Professional through and through, he judged essays on their argumentative coherence, and was brutal when confronted with intellectual short cuts and laziness. He would point out facts outside of your knowledge, quite normal from a 50yo to a teenager, but without prejudicing your capacity to reason, without humiliation, without rancour. He was a bloody good teacher, knew what his mission was, where it began and where it ended.
We have lost something essential since Blair. The same applies to the civil service generally speaking for that matter. We have encouraged people in positions of power to politicise public missions quite openly. They have become a tribe whose existence depend on the very taxpayers whom they openly despise. Their interests are profoundly divergent from the majority feeding them, in my case, very much against my will.
I appreciate the essay but still think that Covid was an accelerator of trends which pre existed long before the crisis, in this matter as in many others.
I think universities have a much bigger illness than institutional long covid. The biggest change they need is to rid themselves, or at least take control, of the disastrous influences of post-modernism and identity politics.
Sneaky little granny killers killing grannies on the exhale. Tru$t the $cience!
Interesting read – sadly the claimed demise of UK’s “universities” is untrue. There are enormous numbers of pseudo graduates with pseudo degrees. The tell-tale is that many can’t read or write in English so could not have attained the degrees my generation worked so hard to achieve. I cannot see that changing anytime soon because it’s a result of the regime’s pseudo-Marxism. I believe this point was made in the recent US election: If you print more money you are not richer. Because the amount of goods and services remains about the same prices simply rise. If you print more diplomas the number of intelligent and dilligent students remains the same. So you simply devalue everyones’ qualifications at a stroke.
Having recently completed an MA course as a mature student: full-time in one year; what struck me most was that universities and tutors have abandoned telling students what to do, in favour (and with catastrophic consequences), of asking them what they’d like to do. The real world doesn’t, or shouldn’t function like that and even supposed academic enterprises will crumble on such an unstable premise. What is then taught, or not taught, is a whole other ball of wax.
John Kanefsky, you are so correct! John Major most definitely started the rot with a huge imposition – the conversion of polytechnics into universities. This was a short-sighted blunder by a PM who himself had not attended university. The polytechnics represented a valuable element of higher (i.e. tertiary) education and fulfilled an important role in providing programmes more closely aligned with industry and technical employment. At a stroke the arrogant Major destroyed this valuable educational asset and most of the institutions that became jumped-up universities abandoned their vocational programmes and in their place often adopted non-subjects like womens’ studies, LGBTQ++ studies, racism studies, gender studies, media studies, etc.
And then Blair compounded the crisis by extruding 50% of pupils from their school factories into ‘university’ education. This massively diluted the status of universities and produced a couple of generations of graduates with totally useless degrees in the sorts of subjects highlighted above. These are the generations who have now come to maturity and who have been the vanguard of the Woke madness that has engulfed our world, driven by Gen Z elites from the Oxbridge machine who have understood that Woke is the route to seizing and maintaining power.
Britain used to have an outstanding university sector. No longer. It now instructs students what to think, not teaching students how to think. Even supposedly ‘neutral’ degree like medicine have become infected and corrupted by Woke ideology. I know. I used to be a senior lecturer at one of the older universities in the UK; and both my children did medical degrees.
What has been done to and done by the UK university sector has been shameful and seriously damaging far beyond the empty lecture halls as students study ‘at home’ and their teachers teach from home. ThankGod I was able to retire from the madhouse!
I worked as sessional tutor at a university (in Australia) a number of years ago.
I taught a course (statistics) that had a high failure rate. Unlike other subjects, answers were either right or wrong – you couldn’t fudge your way through.
The second semester i taught it, knowing it would be a struggle for many, i spent the first part of the first tutorial running through a 7-8 point guide for students. The message was clear: do these things (stuff like attend all tutorials and lectures, engage during class, do weekly exercises, etc) and you’ll pass. Simple.
I wanted to present a positive message, and my feeling was that the students received it well.
Later that day i received a call from the course coordinator. A young adult had attended the class, interpreted my message as ‘this is hard, you will fail’, gone home, cried, and had her mum call the university to complain.
Once i explained what happened, the coordinator told me not to worry and that he’d look after it. I believe there was a formal process involving the student union, but it didn’t progress far.
I wonder whether universities are only a symptom of a broader societal problem.
The silver lining is that kids like this are likely to be too frightened to ever have sex, so won’t be procreating.