On The Rosenberg Report, host Joel Rosenberg breaks down the global pressure on Israel to accept a Palestinian state. Rosenberg also unpacks newly released poll data revealing what Palestinians in Gaza and Judea and Samaria really think about a two-state and one-state solution.

Will the world force, successfully force, Israel to accept a Palestinian state when most Israelis, the vast majority of Israelis don’t want it? They don’t trust a Palestinian state to keep Israelis safe. Certainly not after October 7th.

This is a big question and pressure is mounting from multiple sides, including some you might not expect.

Hi, this is Joel Rosenberg in Jerusalem with a YouTube exclusive for the Rosenberg Report.

I want to look at this question about whether the world’s going to be able to successfully force Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

Now, you would have thought, pro-Israel Christians would have thought and and many others would have thought that no, it’s impossible in the in the post October 7th environment to imagine that the world would still think that a Palestinian state, a sovereign independent Palestine state with East Jerusalem as its capital and the whole thing would would even be something that the rest of the world would think was a good idea, right?

Because after all, didn’t Israel’s prime minister in 2005, Ariel Chiron, withdraw all Israeli soldiers and all Israeli civilians out of Gaza uh and and basically turn Gaza into a effectively effectively into a Palestinian state with no Israeli occupation whatsoever, and Palestinians free to build a Palestinian paradise. They had beachfront property. They had natural gas, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas off their coast. industrious uh smart uh people, why not go build a paradise, right?

But that’s not what they did. The Palestinian people of Gaza elected Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization, to lead them and they and Gaza has been led into ruin and apocryphal apocalyptic disaster, catastrophe by Hamas.

So that’s the experiment with a Palestinian government so far with no Israeli occupation whatsoever. It didn’t work. So why would the world push it? Well, it’s one of these ideas that just the the world leaders, diplomats, politicians all around the world just think this is the best idea. So in September, as we talked about right, Saudis and the French and the British and a few other [organized] nations came together at the UN and had a big conference about getting ready for a Palestinian state. We’re just going to make it happen.

Now, I sort of dismissed that as not that likely at the time because I thought, yeah, that that’s still what the world thinks, but the United States is so much against it.

But then I have to say that the Trump peace plan emerged. Now, the Trump peace plan, you know, recently that I heralded, much of it because it got all the live Israeli hostages out of Gaza and got and you know, we’re almost at all of the dead Israeli hostages, their bodies almost are all back now as I record this. Only a few more to go. Let’s pray that that happens. But in that deal which was just ratified and turned into international law, the 20-point Trump peace plan turned into law, international law, ratified by the UN Security Council just a few days ago, right? In that deal or in that agreement in that plan for peace, what is in there but a pathway to the possibility of a Palestinian state. Now it doesn’t say that… the plan doesn’t say definitively say that there will be a Palestinian state but that’s the premise that all the rest of this effort all these other 18 19 points is going to get ready… the region ready for a Palestinian state and that’s why so many nations at the UN security council supported it because President Trump was using the language of, you know, putting a pathway to a Palestinian state right in the language of a UN security council which hasn’t been done with US support for quite a while.

So I raised the question again as you know is that where we’re heading. Is that going to happen? And the answer is I don’t know because I think it’s not a good idea. I want Palestinians to have, you know, the freedom to run their own lives, but I don’t want them to have the the capacity to pose an existential threat to the nation of Israel. And it’s not just Gaza that’s been a disaster in Palestinian governance. The West Bank has been a disaster, too. Palestinian Authority is more peaceful and mild, let’s say, more moderate in a sense, than Hamas, to be sure. But even Palestinians don’t like the government of the Palestinian Authority. 80% in the most recent poll by a Palestinian polling company, the most credible among them, 80% of Palestinians want Mahmud Abbash, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to leave. They want him to resign yesterday, not just today, because they think he’s corrupt. They think he’s too old. They think he’s, you know, creating a corrupt and ineffective government in the West Bank. Now, when you have these two models, corruption and ineffectiveness and genocide and terror, these are the two models of modern Palestinian government, right? And they don’t work. I wish they did in the sense that I wish Palestinians had better lives.

But I will tell you how the the corruption of the Palestinian Authority under Abbas has led to a very popular sense that I mean.. meaning that Hamas is the most popular political movement on the West Bank. I want to just give you some numbers from the latest poll just came out at the end of October from this Palestinian polling firm. And I find these numbers interesting and I think you should too. And so my larger point is, yeah, I think it’s possible that the world is going to force a Palestinian… a sovereign independent Palestinian state on Israel somehow. I’m not certain about that. I don’t see such a state in Bible prophecy.

But I can’t rule out the possibility that because so much of the world wants it to happen that it might happen, especially if President Trump pushes Israel to it. Now, he’s not doing that yet. But he did put the language of a Palestinian state in his peace plan that got ratified by the UN. And I will add that one of the reasons he doesn’t want to shut down the idea of a Palestinian state is because President Trump had supported it in his deal of the century plan that he rolled out in January 2020.

That was very interesting plan which BB Netanyahu mostly embraced because he was pretty sure that Abu Mazan uh aka Mahmud Abbas the Palestinian president the president of the Palestinian Authority BB was sure Netanyahu was sure that Abu Mazin would never go for it. So BB Netanyahu didn’t have to worry. he could hug Trump and accept uh the Trump deal of the century plan to create peace in knowing that the Palestinians wouldn’t leadership would never accept it. So even though the the Trump plan included an actual independent sovereign Palestine state with East Jerusalem as its capital, demilitarized to be sure with land swaps so that Israel would get a bunch of Judea and Samaria, what the world calls the West Bank, we would be able to keep our settlements that we have built there on biblical the biblical heartland. But in return, the Palestinians would get large swaths of territory in the Negv desert and along the borders of Gaza. That was the plan that Trump offered. So in the end, the Palestinian state would be even larger than this territory that the Palestians oversee today, whether that’s the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, or Gaza. That’s the Trump plan. So Trump believes in a two-state solution. He doesn’t emphasize it much because he knows that is Israelis don’t like that and are not just they don’t like it they’re they’re worried that it’s we’re our lives are going to be endangered by such a state. Evangelical Christians in the United States which are a huge supporter of President Trump overwhelmingly don’t like the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state because they worry that October 7th will happen again and again and again. And I I share those concerns. They most evangelicals also uh look at the Bible say, “Look, we we want a good life for Palestinians, right? We’re supposed to love our neighbor. That’s what Jesus commanded us.” But does loving our neighbor mean creating a sovereign state that could endanger the Jewish state? No. We don’t think it that that those two things don’t have to go together. They don’t go together. But um some might say, “Well, didn’t Abraham make a deal with Lot, his nephew, when there was all kinds of tension in the land.” And Abram says, “Fine, why don’t you take the part of the land that you like and I’ll take the rest and and we’ll call it a day.” And what did what did Lot take? He took the the very fertile at that time very fertile productive agricultural epicenter of the Jordan Valley which is today what the world calls the West Bank what we would call Judea and Samaria. So you you there is a model biblically of hey let’s make peace you go over there you take that nice part of the land we’ll take the rest and we’ll call it a day. Uh so there is a case for that biblically. Uh but there’s another case in Joel, the book of Joel, the actual biblical book of Joel, not not one of my book, the biblical book of Joel. In chapter 3, in the first few verses, God says through the Hebrew prophet Joel, the ancient Hebrew prophet, God says, “I will judge all the nations that divide my land.” Okay? Yeah. Abraham and Lot divided the land, but that’s even before the actual establishment of the sovereign state, nation state of Israel, which came during the time of Jacob and beyond uh and Joshua, right? Not during the time of Abraham and Lot. So even if you want to lean just to be friendly uh to the creation of a even a demilitarized Palestinian state, evangelicals struggle with well that’s not the right thing to do. It might sound right, but it it but it’s not right if God is saying right there in black and white in the Hebrew scriptures that God’s going to judge every nation that divides the land of Israel. Well, you you even if it sounds like a good idea, it’s not a good idea because God is against it. And we don’t want to put ourselves in a position as as Americans, as Israelis, or anyone else in the world, including the Palestinians, to do something that God is expressly against. Now, all this talk, all this talk, even even uh Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the White House, he talked about I, you know, I support peace with Israel, normalization with Israel, but I need to see a credible path towards a Palestinian state, an independent sovereign Palestinian state. Now, he didn’t say it absolutely has to be created by the time he normalizes with Israel, but he did say there has to be a credible path. So that that’s all this building international effort even in in the Oval Office side by side with President Trump. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. We just have to find a way to make it happen. Okay. But this is interesting. All right.

Now listen to this. How many Palestinians support a two-state solution? Okay. the latest polling from this very credible Palestinian research organization which is located in the West Bank, 53%, 53% of Palestinians are against the two-state solution. They’re against a Palestinian state. Only 44% are for it. So, it’s really interesting. It’s not like 90% of Palestinians want this or 95% or 99%, not even 80%, not even 70%. Only 44% of Palestinians want a Palestinian state. So why should the world go to so much effort to push to force Israel into a Palestinian state when less than half of Palestinians want it? 53% are against.

Okay. Now, it’s interesting because in Gaza, Gazans actually support the idea of a of a two-state solution more. Why? Because they’ve been under war and the horrors of Hamas and all this, you know. So, they kind of like the idea of a two-state solution. But those who live in the actual territory that the world calls the West Bank, we call Judea and Samaria, how many Palestinians in the West Bank where the heart of this Palestinian state would be, how many of them support a Palestinian state, an independent state? Not that many. 63% are against 63% of Palestinians in the West Bank are against a Palestinian state with these conditions, an independent Palestinian state, a Palestinian state with June 1967 borders, meaning before Israel won the six- day war, an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital that’s demilitarized and has these land swaps where okay, Israel will get some of the its settlements fine, but we get a bunch of other territory inside Israel.

63% of West Bank Palestinians are against that.

So why is the world working so hard to make it happen?

Few more things.

The latest survey by this Palestinian polling company finds that 41% of Palestinians support using violence or armed struggle to remove the occupation of Israel from what they call their land. 41% support violence. And that’s the highest number of any of the options. How do we end the occupation? How does Palestinians get .. their land back? That’s the way the question was framed. And there was, you know, diplomacy and international efforts and, you know, for.., but the high the the highest number, the the plurality of Palestinians support violence to achieve their objectives.

A few others.

When it comes to the actual Trump plan that was just ratified by the UN Security Council, it is interesting that 59% of people in Gaza support the Trump plan, which you know is a little bit confusing, right? Because on the one hand, they are they are looking things a little bit differently than Palestinians on the West Bank, but they want a two-state solution mostly in the West Bank or in Gaza, right? They want a two-state solution in Gaza these days, and they think that Trump is their champion to get rid of Israel and give them a better life and get rid of Hamas. But only 39% of Palestinians in the West Bank support that the Trump plan.

So there’s deep divisions within the Palestinian society.

Overall, if you mix everybody together, there’s 47% of Palestinians are for the Trump plan, 49% against.

Now, my last point is this. How many Israelis at this point support a two-state solution? Because the numbers have dropped dramatically.

In 2020, 42% of Israeli Jews supported a two-state solution. That’s back when the Trump plan, the road to peace or the the deal of the century plan got rolled out in January 2020. But even then, only 42% of Israeli Jews supported a two-state solution. Along the lines I just shared.

By 2022, before the October 7th invasion, the number had dropped to only 34% of Israeli Jews supporting a two-state solution.

Today, well, today, the most recent polling that I’ve seen was from late last year, 2024, only 21% of Israeli Jews believe in a two-state solution. And the reason that poll showed very clearly is because 93% of Israeli Jews believe that the Palestinian objective of the basic average Palestinian on the ground is genocide or expulsion. either you know about 63% of Israeli Jews believe that Palestinians want to kill every Jew and the rest of Israeli Jews. Most of the rest believe that at the very minimum Palestinians want to expel the Jewish people from the state of Israel.

So the question is will the world force Israelis to accept a two-state solution? I don’t think Israelis are going to accept that. Will the world make it happen? Force it to happen? They seem to be trying. I think that’s a mistake on biblical and geopolitical reasons and the fact that Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution and neither do Israeli Jews.

European civilization is dying.  The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy makes this clear.  It has squandered its post-WWII economic and military assistance from the United States by investing in centralized, socialist bureaucracies and expansive welfare States.  By chasing the “climate change” con as a means for European governments to justify total control over the drivers of economic growth, European nations have forsaken cheap energy exploration, private entrepreneurship, and technological innovation.  By depending upon the United States to defend its territorial interests, European nations have destroyed their military capabilities.  

In an effort to “juice” their economies with cheap labor and artificial demographic growth, European nations have opened their borders to tens of millions of foreign immigrants.  The natural result is that foreign cultures have steadily eroded and replaced millennia-old European cultures without much resistance.  The Trump administration believes Europe could be effectively “erased” within twenty years.

When living things die, they tend to lash out.  Europe is no exception.  Its political elites have decided to pretend that everything is okay and that the continent remains the life-force of the entire world.  In order to buttress this delusion, European governments have embraced censorship and State-approved propaganda on a scale as obscene as anything that might occur in communist China.  Controlling the “narrative” and silencing dissent are the last gasps of every civilization on its deathbed.

Every day some new horror story emerges from the United Kingdom in which an ordinary citizen is treated as a terrorist for merely expressing an opinion or defending a personal belief.  A recent example involves thirty-four-year-old mother of four Elizabeth Kinney.  It appears Kinney and a former friend were texting about a male acquaintance who had allegedly caused Kinney harm, and she called that man a “faggot.”  The former friend reported Kinney to the authorities because the “abusive and homophobic text messages” caused her “alarm and distress.”  

While Kinney was naked and in a bathtub, eleven police officers forced their way into her home and arrested her.  Kinney burst into tears as male officers denied her any privacy, and a female officer informed her that she was being arrested for “malicious communications and hate crime.”  “The Crown place this offense in the highest category of its type due to the effect related to sexual orientation and the greater harm because it had moderate impact,” prosecutors insisted.  Kinney faced ten years in prison, but her attorney begged for leniency.  She has been ordered to perform seventy-two hours of community service, attend ten days of rehabilitation, and pay a fine of several hundred pounds.

All rights are property rights.  The “lesson” that British authorities are trying to “teach” Kinney and other citizens is this: You do not own the thoughts in your head.  You do not own the words you express.  You do not own the private messages that you text to other private citizens.  When your thoughts, words, and texts violate officially approved government “narratives” and ideologies, you will be punished.  Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience do not exist under any government willing to use force to control how citizens think, speak, and text.

In Kinney’s case, British authorities have no problem re-traumatizing a woman who had already been physically abused by sending a dozen cops into her home and forcing her to be naked, vulnerable, and afraid in front of male officers.  Instead, the Crown is upset that Kinney used a gay slur to describe someone not even directly participating in her text conversation with another woman.  When the State is more concerned about insults to men who have allegedly harmed women than the privacy and dignity of women who have allegedly been harmed, the government is complicit in the abuse of its citizens.  

There are only a handful of reasons this kind of European totalitarianism hasn’t similarly consumed the United States: (1) America’s First Amendment, (2) Americans’ more resilient love for personal liberty and hostility toward overreaching government, and (3) the Democrats’ inability to flood the 2024 election with enough fraudulent mail-in ballots to pull off back-to-back steals.  Democrats have been criminalizing “hate speech” for decades.  The Biden administration actively censored Americans’ online speech and attempted to erect a permanent “Disinformation Governance Board” within the Department of Homeland Security.  

Europe’s totalitarian assaults on free speech are therefore an ongoing national security threat to the United States.  “Protecting” people from “hate speech” has always been a government-contrived Trojan horse for censoring dissent and controlling the flow of information.

Right now Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is whining about random Americans calling him a “retard” after President Trump labeled the governor “seriously retarded” in a Thanksgiving post on Truth Social.  If Americans don’t vigilantly defend the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, then a future Democrat president will no doubt follow Europe’s example by sending well-armed law enforcement officers to Mar-a-Lago to arrest President Trump for hurting Tim Walz’s feelings.  It’s not as if the FBI hasn’t raided Trump’s home with lethal force before.

Europe’s descent into tyranny must be resisted, but a firewall preventing Europe’s tyranny from spreading beyond the ruin of its own continent is essential.

French President Emmanuel Macron wants the authority to block all online content that the government deems “false information.”  Additionally, he wants to establish a news media certification system that would give the State the power to create a veritable “ministry of truth.”  

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his political operatives have apparently been using an elaborate web of taxpayer-funded initiatives, billionaire-funded NGOs, and covert propaganda campaigns to target and cripple conservative news outlets in the United States.  The prime minister’s chief of staff has been accused of running a “shadowy astroturf organization” meant to censor conservatives, punish freedom of expression, and eliminate dissent.  Among the U.K. operation’s various objectives, its key mission has allegedly been to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”

The European Union is so committed to destroying free speech on Elon Musk’s “X” that it has fined the social media platform hundreds of millions of dollars for violating the European Union’s new Digital Services Act.  The DSA empowers European bureaucrats and aristocrats to control most online information and allows the EU to elevate its preferred “narratives” over the opinions of common citizens.  

European governments are so afraid of Americans’ free speech that they are doing everything in their power to censor, fine, and criminally punish American citizens.  As Secretary of State Marco Rubio states plainly in a recent post on “X,” “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.  The days of censoring Americans online are over.”

Censoring dissent is a sign of political weakness.  It is a telltale sign of Europe’s looming demise.  Any civilization so vulnerable that it cannot withstand opposing points of view certainly cannot withstand anything more pointed or explosive than uncomfortable words.  Governments that fear the private thoughts of the people know that their days are numbered.

Americans should support those in Europe who still believe in freedom and personal liberty.  We should ally ourselves with the millions who wish to live their lives free from government’s choking grip.  We should not continue supporting the governments doing the choking.  We share no common cause with tyrants.  To liberate the oppressed, Americans must allow European totalitarianism to destroy itself.

J. B. Shurk, American Thinker

“We must not clean up the mess that Biden created. We must clean up the mess that created Biden.”

Yes.

And that mess may be too big even for a Donald Trump, as amazing as he is. Increasingly, it looks to me like we need a real revolution. The people will have to want it and be behind it. MAGA was an impressive start.

What would a revolution look like? For starters, prosecuting and punishing all known traitors of the USA. We know who they are. President Trump has been trying to indict them, but so far is getting nowhere; felons and traitors James Comey and Letitia James will of course walk free, because our corrupt federal judicial system (to say nothing of the “jurists” in socialist blue states) will protect their own. Trump is trying to reform a system that has morphed into a dictatorship whether Trump is in office or not — and Trump will be gone in 3 more years anyway.

Another important key to a revolution: Defund everything not specified by the Constitution. It will create mayhem and will have economic consequences — short-term. But restoring a free market and private property rights, with a severely limited government which includes phasing out the Federal Reserve, will make America into the greatest civilization yet. Defund the schools, defund the Green New Deal research, defund all the ridiculous programs DOGE exposes — billions and billions of dollars in them. For a time earlier this year, we exposed some of that spending but the spending is still there.

MAGA is only a rather small beginning. It’s an important start, but only a start.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Earlier this week, Anna Gallagher, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. (CLINIC) crooned: “As we enter the Advent season, we remember that the Holy Family themselves were migrants seeking safety.” It is a recurring motif to validate the resistance of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to curtailment of illegal immigration.

In November, the USCCB prepared for Advent by declaring war on the Trump administration with a “Special Pastoral Message on Immigration.” The insurrectionist tenor of this rare “special message” places the globalist conceits — and monetary interests — of the hierarchy ahead of the just laws of their own country.

Larded with scriptural citations isolated from historical context, the declaration erases distinctions between lawful immigration and waves of illicit, unvetted migrants. The term illegal does not appear. This is a calculated omission for emotional effect. Inaccurate wording disguises the USCCB’s self-interested opposition to the deportation of illegal immigrants by suggesting that immigration itself is under siege. The fear-mongering is deliberate.

Our bishops censure “the indiscriminate deportation of people.” But there is nothing indiscriminate about the process. The only people subject to detention by ICE are illegal aliens who have broken our immigration laws by choice.

Moreover, in May 2025, the Department of Homeland Security established generous protocols for travel assistance to aid self-deportation: a one-way ticket to a chosen destination, a $1,000 stipend, plus the opportunity to apply legally. Still, the USCCB hyperventilates about “vilification of immigrants,” “conditions in detention centers,” and “lack of access to pastoral care.”

“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. . . . Catholic teaching exhorts nations to recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons, including Immigrants,” the message states.

The bishops confer the endearment “our people” on illegal aliens but withhold it from taxpayers who subsidize mass migration. They offer lip service to secure borders and lawful immigration, but their hearts are elsewhere.

Where was concern for “dignity of all persons” and “access to pastoral care” during the Covid lockdown? Walmart stayed open while dioceses closed churches and restricted sacraments and funerals. There was no talk of “accompaniment” to the terminally ill in nursing homes. They died alone, deprived of any human touch. And often without the solace of last rites.

While liquor stores were deemed essential but churches not, the USCCB raised no challenge. But now, emboldened by Pope Leo’s distaste for immigration enforcement, it fights for open borders. Leo seconded the hostilities by denouncing U.S. policy toward illegal migrants as “extremely disrespectful.”

Promoting Law-breaking

The USCCB promotes a secularized version of love of neighbor that encourages law-breaking by “the poor” — a collective abstraction endowed with quasi-sacramental aura. In the Judeo-Christian moral system, neighbors do not steal from each other. But ideologues of a fabricated “preferential option for the poor” rephrase the battle cry of liberation theology as social justice. Only one side is obliged to act as neighbor. The other is entitled to take what it can.

The bishops were silent when then-President Joe Biden dismantled controls on illegal entry and invited mass migration through the southern border. They keep mum about the burden on border towns and cities flooded with foreign nationals claiming benefits that overwhelm local infrastructure and drain resources away from citizens.

Deflecting Scrutiny

Pontificating on “immigrant rights” deflects scrutiny into negligence by such bodies as USCCB’s Refugee Resettlement Program that works in concert with Catholic Charities’ Migrant and Refugee Services.

Our bishops have not accounted for the $449 million in taxpayer funds granted to the USCCB and Catholic Charities to monitor the safety of an alleged 450,000 minors (numbers vary) released to supposed sponsors. These “children” (the legal term for any minor under 18) fell off the radar. This July, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, stated that 90 percent of the addresses recorded for them were “fake, false, or abandoned.”

That our migrant epidemic is an orchestrated phenomenon is evident to everyone who witnessed caravans of illegal immigrants arriving in numbers calculated to disable border patrol. The USCCB, Catholic Charities, and their nexus of affiliates share culpability — however unintended — in the criminal predation that accompanied these organized and cartel-led caravans.

NGO Enablers

Among Catholic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) enabling illegal immigration, the USCCB has been a prime mover for decades. Add Catholic Charities, Caritas, Catholic Relief Services, and the Campaign for Human Development and their sub-contractors. The roster of facilitators is as elaborate as the Gaza tunnel system.

To illustrate: CLINIC, founded by the USCCB in 1988, is the largest nonprofit web of activist migration programs in the country. It maintains more than 400 Catholic and community-based immigration law providers in 49 states, offering legal representation and training defense lawyers in strategy before the courts. It boasts some 3,000 employees and serves about a half-million migrants a year.

The United Nations, too, is involved. In 2022, the Center for Immigration Studies reported that the U.N. Refugee Agency, which receives billions in U.S. taxpayer money, offers cash to U.S.-bound migrants, in addition to other assistance. It partners with Catholic NGOs, chiefly Catholic Charities and the International Catholic Migration Commission, which collaborates with the Vatican.

Catholic social services are not designed to solve the refugee problem. Rather, the labyrinth of NGOs enticing illegal migrants provides a framework for the trafficking industry.

In October, according to the latest available financial disclosure for 2023, the USCCB received more than 50 percent of its total revenues and more than 80 percent of its unrestricted revenue from the U.S. government. Unrestricted funds can be funneled anywhere, including back to the Vatican via Peter’s Pence.

That fund has a history of diverting monies from its charitable mission to bridge shortfalls in the Holy See’s budget. In July 2024, the Lepanto Institute marked Peter’s Pence as “Not Safe” for Catholic donations. Months later, the newly elected Leo solicited for the fund. (“Support the first steps of Pope Leo XIV. Donate to Peter’s Pence.”)

When diocesan agencies are federally funded, the USCCB has an incentive to maintain the migration pipeline. J.D. Vance was not wrong to wonder if the USCCB worried less about humanitarian concerns than “about their bottom line.”

Historical Differences

The social and economic realities of mass migration contradict the USCCB’s facile theologizing on open borders. Annexing of religious language is meant to convince the faithful that current sanctuary policy for illegals follows biblical precedent. It does not. It is agitprop that erases critical differences between today’s illegal aliens and the documented aliens and foreigners in biblical times. Guarded borders, writs of passage, and rules for expulsion were in effect in Abraham’s day. History subverts analogies between the Holy Family and today’s illegal migrants. Egypt garrisoned its borders. The Holy Family quite likely had to stop at a military post to request passage.

Yes, our own families came marked as “alien” on ship manifests. But they were legal aliens. They had waited in line in their native country for permission to enter. And they did not arrive in a welfare state. Entry was granted on condition that they would not become a burden on the public good.

USCCB dependence on government grants leaves American Catholics facing a crisis of authority. It pins them between deference to ecclesial leadership and respect for the just laws of an ordered nation. Thus does trust erode in the moral jurisdiction of our shepherds.

Maureen Mallarky, The Federalist

Vice President JD Vance just dropped a hilarious Oval Office story leaving the entire room cracking up.

President Trump glanced over the Resolute Desk at VP Vance and Secretary Marco Rubio and said, “You guys have shitty shoes.”

Right then and there, Trump pulled out a shoe catalog and gifted them 4 pairs of shoes. 🤣

Wait until the end of the story…

“Today I’m in the Oval Office with the President and Marco Rubio, and we’re talking about something really important. The President kind of holds up his hand and says, ‘no, no, no, hold on a second. There’s something much more important. Shoes.’”

“He peers over the resolute desk and he says, Marco, JD, you guys have shitty shoes.”

“He goes out and grabs a catalog. There happens to be another politician in the room I won’t say who, and you’ll find out why in a second. And he actually runs us through this incredible shoe catalog. The President is gifting us with four pairs of shoes.”

“He says, Marco, what’s your shoe size? And Marco’s apparently an eleven and a half. He says, JD, what’s your shoe size? My shoe size is 13. I asked this politician, who I won’t embarrass, what his shoe size is, and he says, seven. The President leans back in his chair and says, you know you can in his chair and says, you know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.”

Benny Johnson, X/Twitter

It starts with a call. A sore knee, a lingering cough, a changing mole – nothing urgent – but not quite ignorable. The receptionist is polite, but the first available appointment is three weeks away.

For millions of Americans, health care begins with a wait. For many, walk-in clinics have replaced family medicine.

“People have started to accept that,” Dr. Dorothy Serna, a primary care physician who left traditional practice for a concierge model, told The Epoch Times. “They think, ‘I can’t get my doctor, so I won’t even try. I’ll just go to urgent care. I’ll wait. I’ll Google it.’”

Such scenarios have become the norm rather than the exception. What was once a simple task—seeing your doctor when you need care—has evolved into a complex navigation challenge that requires strategy, persistence, and insider knowledge to overcome.

A Month, If You’re Lucky

More than 100 million people lack a regular primary care provider, a figure that continues to climb each year. New patients wait an average of 23.5 days to see a primary care doctor, often longer in cities. Even existing patients face significant waits, although generally shorter than those of new patients.

The problem continues to grow. A 2025 survey by AMN Healthcare found the average wait for a physician appointment in major metro areas has stretched to 31 days—up 19 percent since 2022 and nearly 50 percent since 2004. In Boston, patients wait more than two months, the longest wait time in the nation.

If this is the situation in cities with the most doctors, rural patients can expect even worse outcomes. Only 9 percent of U.S. physicians practice in those communities, leaving patients to travel farther, wait longer, and often go without care altogether.

The problem is reshaping how Americans access health care. Primary care, traditionally the system’s front door, has become its biggest bottleneck. Routine problems escalate into emergencies, and preventive care gets delayed.

The shortage is structural. Nearly half of primary care doctors are older than 55, and few younger physicians are choosing the field. Only 15 percent remain in primary care five years after completing their training. The United States has 67 primary care doctors per 100,000 people—about half the rate of Canada. While many other wealthy nations devote 7 percent to 14 percent of their health budgets to primary care, the United States spends less than 5 percent.

Preventive medicine is collapsing into fragmented, reactive care, and patients are left waiting while disease advances.

The Specialist Referral Maze

Seeing a specialist presents its own set of challenges. Even after securing a coveted primary care appointment and obtaining a referral, patients face another round of lengthy delays.

Specialist wait times vary dramatically by field and location. New patients wait about two weeks for orthopedic surgery, a month for cardiology and dermatology, and six weeks for obstetrics and gynecology—and often longer in big cities.

The referral process itself creates additional friction. Insurance authorizations can add weeks to the timeline. Paperwork gets lost between offices. Some specialists require specific diagnostic tests before scheduling, adding another layer of delay.

Online patient forums overflow with stories of months-long waits for neurology consultations and gastroenterology appointments that stretch nearly a year.

Strategies for Gaining Access to Care

Whether it’s finding a new doctor, landing a specialist appointment, or just breaking through your provider’s backlog, the challenge is access. Some patients manage access by knowing how the system works. The following tactics won’t fix the shortage, but they can shift the odds in our favor.

Step 1: Finding a Primary Care Doctor or Specialist

Start With People

The fastest way to find a doctor isn’t online—it’s through people. A 2022 study in Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation found that most patients turn to family, friends, or trusted professionals.

Try these approaches:

• Ask for Specific Names, Not Just Practices: When you call, mention who referred you: “My friend Maria is a patient of Dr. Green and suggested I call.” Clinics often note these connections, which can move you up the callback list.
• Verify Fit Before Booking: Ask about insurance acceptance, after-hours options, and same-day visits. Research shows that these logistics often influence satisfaction more than credentials.
• Tap Professional Circles: Pharmacists, therapists, or other doctors often know who’s taking new patients or who communicates well.
• Combine Word-of-Mouth With Research: Once you have a few names, check online reviews for red flags rather than perfection. A consistent theme of poor communication is more telling than a few harsh comments.
• Keep a Running Short List: Save the contact info of doctors recommended by friends or professionals, even if you’re not looking right now. It can save weeks if you suddenly need care.

Go Digital

Hospital and insurer websites often have hidden scheduling tools—but you have to know where to look.

• Start With Your Insurance Portal: Log in and click “Find Care” or “Find a Doctor.” These directories usually show which providers are in-network and, increasingly, whether they’re accepting new patients. Some include direct links to schedule an appointment.
• Check Hospital or Health-System Pages: Look for a “Patient Portal,” “Book Online,” or “Schedule a Visit” tab. Large systems such as Mass General Brigham, Cleveland Clinic, or Mayo Clinic sometimes let patients view real-time openings and book directly, often without calling.
• Check Official Directories: State medical boards list every licensed provider, and state chapters of the American Academy of Family Physicians or internal-medicine societies often post searchable directories by region or availability. These sources verify credentials and can uncover clinicians not featured on commercial platforms.
• Use Third-Party Tools: Zocdoc, Healthgrades, and One Medical integrate with clinic calendars, allowing you to filter by specialty, insurance, and sometimes the soonest available appointment.
• Double-Check Listings: Online directories can lag by weeks. Once you find an opening, call or message the office through its portal to confirm.

Expand Your Definition of ‘Doctor’

When appointment backlogs stretch for weeks, the key may be to expand what “care” looks like.

• Look for Team-Based Clinics: Nurse practitioners and physician assistants can diagnose, prescribe, and manage most common conditions. They’re often easier to book than physicians, and Medical Group Management Association data show practices that rely more on team-based care are better able to keep wait times under control.
• Consider Direct Primary Care or Concierge Medicine: These membership models offer longer visits, direct messaging, and same-day scheduling in exchange for a monthly fee—usually $50 to $150.
• Explore Integrative or Naturopathic Care: ​​In 26 states, licensed naturopaths can diagnose conditions, order labs, and prescribe medications. Functional-medicine doctors—typically medical doctors or doctors of osteopathic medicine—combine conventional care with nutrition and lifestyle approaches. These options can offer more time and continuity, though insurance coverage varies.

Be Flexible About How–and Where–You’re Seen

When options are limited, flexibility can make the difference between waiting weeks and getting care today.

• Try Virtual Visits: During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth use by primary care doctors jumped to nearly 50 percent from 5 percent, and many patients plan to keep using it. Virtual visits aren’t a substitute for hands-on exams, but they can bridge gaps until you’re seen in person.
• Widen Your Search: Appointment backlogs don’t move in sync from place to place. A 30-minute drive to a nearby town or a different hospital system can sometimes mean being seen weeks sooner.

Step 2: Getting Seen Sooner

Once you’ve identified the provider or practice that fits your needs, the next challenge is securing an appointment. That’s where persistence, flexibility, and a few behind-the-scenes strategies can make all the difference.

• Work the System–Nicely: Staff work within limits, but your tone matters. “Create a sense of urgency,” Serna said. “Say, ‘I’m worried and would like to be seen sooner if something opens up.’” A little empathy goes a long way—schedulers often remember polite persistence.
• Call Early: Most offices hold a few same-day or next-day slots for urgent needs, but they go fast. Call right when the office opens to improve your chances of landing one.
• Join the Cancellation List: Ask the office to add you to their cancellation list—a roster of patients willing to come in on short notice if someone else cancels. Patients who are flexible often get the first call, and a quick weekly check-in helps keep your name visible.
• Ask About Virtual Options: For non-urgent issues that don’t require a physical exam, virtual care can be a quicker route. “It saves time for everyone,” Serna said. Many systems offer virtual visits within days, particularly for follow-up appointments or initial consultations.
• Bring in Backup: When care stalls, someone has to move it along. “Most people don’t know how to get past the scheduler to the clinical team,” said Serna. She sometimes makes those calls herself, reaching out directly to a specialist when a patient’s referral has hit a wall.

Ask whether your doctor’s office can do the same by contacting the specialist or testing center on your behalf. If that doesn’t work, an outside advocate may help. A 2024 review found that patients with advocates began treatment sooner in 70 percent of cases. The National Association of Healthcare Advocacy and the Patient Advocate Foundation connect patients with professional or nonprofit advocates.

Navigating From Within

The U.S. health care system may be slow and fragmented, but it is not impenetrable. With preparation, patience, and the right questions, it is still possible to find a way through. That might mean asking for multiple referrals, using portals to spot cancellations, or simply knowing how to frame urgency without panic.

These recommendations aren’t shortcuts so much as survival skills—the small, persistent acts patients use to keep the system from shutting them out entirely. It’s about finding agency in a system that often rewards persistence over passivity.

What’s Next: Getting the appointment is only the first victory. Making it count is the next—something we’ll tackle in the following article.

Sheramy Tsai, Epoch Times

After successfully holding strong in the face of a Democrat-led government shutdown over Obamacare, a cabal of House Republicans is now waiving the white flag on the issue.

On Thursday, nearly three dozen Democrats and Republicans introduced a proposal to extend taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies. As Federalist Senior Contributor Christopher Jacobs has regularly reported in these pages, these Biden-era subsidies — which are set to expire at the end of this year — have been a complete and total disaster.

Spearheaded by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Jen Kiggins, R-Va., the measure “would extend and reduce the tax credits in a two-step process, requiring two separate votes by Congress,” according to The New York Times. While the first vote “would extend the tax credits for a year with some modifications, including the addition of a new income limit,” the second vote “would implement what the group described as ‘more significant reforms,’ including potentially eliminating $0 premiums, with exceptions for need-based support.”

During a press conference introducing the proposal, Democrat-turned-Republican Jeff Van Drew laid out his best case for forcing taxpayers to keep bankrolling this broken system. The New Jersey congressman’s explanation as a self-declared “conservative” was (naturally) unconvincing.

“I do not like the Affordable Care Act. … And it’s fraught with all kinds of problems, there’s a lot of corruption … But that’s not the point today, and that’s not the discussion for today,” Van Drew said. These subsidies haven’t “been good. But ladies and gentlemen, we have a responsibility. … So, I believe that we have two responsibilities. One, to have a bridge for the American people … that would allow them to keep their health insurance. I think the second responsibility we have is to do much, much better with health care.”

In just 28 days, the ACA subsidies expire.

The tax credits need to be reformed, no question about that.

But we need to extend them now so Americans stay covered while we work on a real fix to this broken system. pic.twitter.com/xhZ9yuGBBK— Congressman Jeff Van Drew (@Congressman_JVD) December 4, 2025

If you’re left wondering what should happen at the end of the next proposed subsidy extension, you’re not alone. As my colleague Eddie Scarry observed in response to Van Drew’s comments, “So you’re creating a ‘bridge’ by extending the subsidies but you have no plan for what happens when that extension again runs out? Literally a bridge to nowhere. Laughable.”

Perhaps the richest part of Van Drew’s remarks, however, is the part in which he whined about wishing lawmakers could’ve been working on health care rather than having “43 days off” because of the government shutdown.

Forty-three days? What about the 15 years Republicans have spent campaigning on “repealing and replacing” Obamacare? It’s 2025, and the GOP still doesn’t have a plan to revoke the disastrous law and institute a market-oriented solution that fosters competition and naturally drives down costs.

Fortunately, the Gottheimer-Kiggins proposal seems unlikely to make any significant headway, with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., shooting down the idea on Thursday. (House Republican leadership is reportedly expected to introduce its own health care package sometime next week, although it’s currently unknown if that proposal will include any extension of the Obamacare subsidies.)

But whether or not the “bipartisan” proposal passes is beside the point. That a group of Republicans would take it upon themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and hand Democrats exactly what they’ve been wanting is a disgrace.

Then again, it’s not shocking when considering that the Republican Party has no ability or interest in governing and no collective vision for what success for the country looks like. By every measure, it’s more useless than that raccoon that broke into an ABC store, got drunk, and passed out on the bathroom floor.

But according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, everything is just hunky dory. The Louisiana Republican recently claimed that the current GOP-run Congress is “the most productive and consequential Congress in our lifetime.”

If by “most productive and consequential,” he means squandering a rare opportunity to enact real and significant change for the American people, then he’s absolutely right.

Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist

https://artfuldilettante.com/the-democrats-are-nova-terrorist-organiztion/

Pete Hegseth is facing a calculated smear campaign because he threatens the entrenched establishment reshaping America’s military into something weaker and more political.

I have had enough. I can no longer sit still while the Deep State does its very best to smear Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and have him removed from his post via lies, rumors, propaganda, and innuendo. It feels exactly like version 2.0 of the “Trump/Russia Collusion” disinformation campaign, and it needs to be called out for what it is.

Enough.

I am here to defend the best Secretary of War/Defense since Caspar Weinberger.

What we have seen in the last few weeks is clearly an orchestrated, carefully constructed character assassination campaign against Hegseth.

The campaign began in the early days of November when the leaders of the Sedition 6 introduced legislation known as the “No Troops in Our Streets Act,” legislation clearly designed to undermine the roles of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth in the military chain of command. Then, of course, on November 18, the Sedition 6—led by Senators Mark Kelly and Elisa Slotkin—launched their infamous video calling (via innuendo and plausible deniability) for military members to disobey lawful orders they disagree with politically by pretending such lawful orders are “unlawful.” For the next eight days, the Deep State went into a full media onslaught that seemed designed to foment a military mutiny against Trump and Hegseth. Suddenly, these wannabe seditionists were forced to hit the brakes on their information operation, as on November 26 two West Virginia National Guard soldiers patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., in support of anti-crime operations were shot by an Afghan civilian with former ties to the CIA, and America saw an easy connection between that attack and the calls to undermine Trump, Hegseth, and the anti-crime mission.

But the Deep State never rests and was quick to shift gears and change the subject away from their own perfidy. On November 28, the Washington Post published its anonymously sourced hit piece on Hegseth, alleging that he personally directed war crimes, and in a matter of minutes, the entire Democrat hierarchy and its minions in the national media ran with Nancy Pelosi’s beloved “wrap-up smear” in a transparent effort to remove Hegseth.

We now know, of course, it was all a lie. The Democrats and the national media want you to believe that two “fishermen” survived a first strike on their drug-laden speedboat and were then floating in the water helplessly like Rose and Jack at the end of “Titanic,” and we gunned them down as helpless victims and in violation of the Geneva Conventions. In reality, the two narco-terrorists were back on board their partially damaged boat, seeking to conduct damage control and recover their WMD cargo. The narco-terrorists and their lethal cargo were lawful targets under all U.S. laws and all treaties to which the U.S. is a party. No war crimes were involved—just an effective and entirely lawful military strike on narco-terrorists who kill thousands of Americans annually. The Washington Post lied, as is its wont in any matter involving the Trump Administration.

But the damage was done, and too many Americans are still clinging to the lies. In fact, it was an opinion piece I saw today by the desiccated remains of George Will, published in that same Washington Post and uncritically repeating all of that tabloid’s original lies, that pushed me over the edge and caused me to rise to the defense of Pete Hegseth with this article.

As a veteran of the same wars Hegseth fought in and as a retired Army colonel who also fought the Beltway wars of the Pentagon, I take the attacks on Hegseth personally, as he is trying to fix all of the ills that I saw so clearly in my time in service. My sincere belief is that at this time in American history, Pete Hegseth is the perfect person to serve as Secretary of War.

I’ll explain why.

America’s military spent 20+ years engaged in a GWOT battle that, after its first few years, became a predominantly political, economic, diplomatic, and law enforcement mission where the military was not the right tool in the DIME-FIL* toolbox. “Nation building,” ridiculously restrictive, JAG-inspired rules of engagement, social justice experimentation, Military Transition Teams and Security Force Assistance Brigades, and the bastardization of combat arms units away from their mission-essential tasks all created a U.S. military that was risk averse to a crippling degree, lacked adequate training and equipment readiness levels for high-intensity conflict, had broken morale and poor retention/recruiting, and was more concerned about DEI than closing with and destroying the enemy.

The military that Donald Trump inherited from Joe Biden in January of this year was a broken shell of the military that entered the GWOT in 2001. It had lost its focus on lethality, valued skin color and genitalia more than warfighting competency, and was not even able to fully recognize its own missions in a world rife with peer competitors bent on high-intensity global or regional domination, such as China and Russia. Yes, low-intensity conflict was still on the menu in places like Yemen, Syria, and the battles against narco-terrorists, but a military trained for high-intensity conflict can adjust to low-intensity conflict quickly, but it does not work so well the other way around.

As Donald Trump took office, what America needed was a Secretary of War who was intimately familiar with these failures—somebody who had fought those GWOT battles and understood our failings deep in his or her soul. Such a person could not be one of the Perfumed Princes who engineered and would repeat our failures. Instead, it needed to be someone with muddy boots who had experienced the mess we had become at a deeply personal, tactical level.

Moreover, it needed to be someone who understood information operations and the climate of global, instantaneous messaging that is our new day-to-day.

This person did not need to have a comprehensive understanding of military procurement and the military/industrial complex that accompanies Beltway jockeying with Congress and defense contractors—those skills are widely available and could easily be obtained by hiring effective subordinates with the shared vision of a military that needed to be once again focused on lethality.

What might such a person have looked like?

Well, he or she would need to have the following qualifications:

A military career that involved killing the enemy up close and personal in the most efficient manner possible. An infantryman, if possible. A Combat Infantryman Badge would be double plus good. Muddy boots experience leading troops in direct combat in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Deep experience in leading one of the failed coalition training missions in Iraq or Afghanistan. Someone who shared the dark personal struggles of every veteran who had come home from our endless wars. A final military rank that meant he or she was never a Perfumed Prince and was never polluted by the Beltway mind virus that seems to infect every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, or Guardian who ever pins on a star. Deep experience in information operations, such as being a best-selling author on military affairs or being a military expert on a major news network. Those are the qualifications that were needed to turn America’s military around and restore it to once again being the premier warfighting force in world history. We did not need more of the same. We did not need a former Raytheon board member. We did not need a former congressman who cared more about politics than winning wars. We did not need yet another retired general who was an architect of our useless, endless wars. What we needed was someone who truly understood the errors of the GWOT, understood that the mission of the U.S. military is to close with and destroy the enemy in the most violent and expeditious manner possible, and who had the chops in the 24/7 modern information environment to wage information warfare just as effectively as his opponents.

One American and one American only had those qualifications: Pete Hegseth, and that man is doing everything I could have ever hoped for to restore the pride and skill we have lost. His focus on lethality and warfighting skill is the one and only antidote to the intentional failures that have scarred veterans like Hegseth and me over the past 24 years.

Please realize this: Hegseth is a threat to anyone who prefers the Obama/Biden vision of an impotent social justice military. He is a threat to anyone who thinks R2P** is a core competency of the American military. He is a threat to anyone who thinks enriching the military/industrial complex is more important than winning wars. Basically, he is a threat to anyone who sees the military as a politicized force and not an effective warfighting endeavor. In other words, Hegseth is a threat to the Beltway defense establishment that has exchanged failure for dollars since the days of Robert McNamara.

Which is why it is so very, very important that the same defense establishment (elected, unelected, and media) smear him in every way imaginable and at every opportunity. When you see and hear the abject lies of the Sedition 6 and their ilk, and when you see and hear wholly fabricated, libelous stories like the “Kill Them All” Hoax, realize why this is happening. These fake news stories are designed to attack and defeat an existential threat to the leftist vision of a social justice American military that exists to enrich defense industry campaign contributors.

Like Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth is an existential threat to the leftist evils that nearly defeated America and the Constitution via Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

It takes a strong man to withstand the onslaught of the Deep State, with all of its lies, libel, and propaganda. Donald Trump is one man who withstood that fire of infamous defamation. Pete Hegseth is another.

We all owe Pete Hegseth our gratitude for the personal cost he is enduring in the name of freedom. He could be sitting at home enjoying his writings and his Fox News appearances. Instead, he is enduring the cowardly slings and arrows of powerful liars as he strives to fix the ills that have long beset our nation’s military.

The disgusting disinformation campaign against Hegseth needs to be challenged vigorously, and I encourage all of you readers to help lead the counterattack.

Cynical Publius, American Greatness

Conservatives interested in higher-education reform often ask themselves where things went wrong. Answers usually range from the radicalism of the 1960s to the rise of social media or the triumph of critical theories in various departments and then the university as a whole. True, but the problem lies deeper, as well.

Few are willing to trace today’s ills to the rise of the Progressive University or, what is the same thing, the making of higher education in the image of the modern research university. The modern research university is a source of pride among modern peoples. Commercials for universities during football games emphasize how universities contribute to scientific progress, vanquishing diseases and engendering more prosperous living and economic growth.

American universities and universities worldwide (especially in Germany) have contributed much to the storehouse of scientific knowledge. Research universities have produced, collected, and organized knowledge for the relief of man’s estate. Yet, when the research university becomes the model for all fields of knowledge, intellectual corruption is not far away.

The Progressive University seeks to achieve progress through socially organized intelligence. Classical colleges, in contrast, were keepers of our civilizational flame. Frederick Rudolph’s fascinating Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (1977) celebrates the rise of this new vision of university life. Before the research university, American colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and William & Mary were small classical colleges with fewer than two dozen faculty members each. Each designed its own admissions standards, and students interested in applying might attend “prep” schools to prepare for entrance exams. A fixed classical curriculum emphasizing Latin, moral philosophy, mathematics, and natural philosophy awaited students.

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Putting the Progressive University in the Dock

Higher education has not always been like this.

Dec 5, 2025 Scott Yenor

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Conservatives interested in higher-education reform often ask themselves where things went wrong. Answers usually range from the radicalism of the 1960s to the rise of social media or the triumph of critical theories in various departments and then the university as a whole. True, but the problem lies deeper, as well.

Few are willing to trace today’s ills to the rise of the Progressive University or, what is the same thing, the making of higher education in the image of the modern research university. The modern research university is a source of pride among modern peoples. Commercials for universities during football games emphasize how universities contribute to scientific progress, vanquishing diseases and engendering more prosperous living and economic growth.

Few are willing to trace today’s ills to the making of higher education as the modern research university.American universities and universities worldwide (especially in Germany) have contributed much to the storehouse of scientific knowledge. Research universities have produced, collected, and organized knowledge for the relief of man’s estate. Yet, when the research university becomes the model for all fields of knowledge, intellectual corruption is not far away.

When the research university becomes the model for all fields of knowledge, intellectual corruption is not far away.The Progressive University seeks to achieve progress through socially organized intelligence. Classical colleges, in contrast, were keepers of our civilizational flame. Frederick Rudolph’s fascinating Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (1977) celebrates the rise of this new vision of university life. Before the research university, American colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and William & Mary were small classical colleges with fewer than two dozen faculty members each. Each designed its own admissions standards, and students interested in applying might attend “prep” schools to prepare for entrance exams. A fixed classical curriculum emphasizing Latin, moral philosophy, mathematics, and natural philosophy awaited students. Faculty were called professors (e.g., professor of moral philosophy and belles-lettres), but they did not belong to formal departments and did not have anything like PhDs. They were intelligent amateurs, in love with their subject matters and deemed acceptable by the rest of the faculty. There were no majors, no accreditors, no electives, no professional organizations, and no departments. Well fewer than five percent of Americans attended such schools, though the institutions had an outsized influence on American politics through preparing statesmen, community leaders, and ordinary politicians.

Other educational institutions existed during the heyday of the classical college. Academies arose locally to prepare people for professions. Agriculture, trade, and engineering academies, for instance, staffed by intelligent practitioners in those areas, trained future practitioners. Professional schools in theology, law, and medicine would admit and train graduates from classical colleges or others able to pass entrance exams. Common schools gave citizens a good enough education for purposes of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Prep schools would get students ready for entrance exams for colleges. Societies of amateurs arose to pursue scientific knowledge, making no few advances over the course of time.

The somewhat haphazard American system of higher learning was not, under the classical model, harnessing educational institutions for the advancement of knowledge and the relief of man’s estate, as other systems around the world had begun to do. Germany was late to the big-power competition in Europe, but it caught up with a more dedicated form of national pride and a super-competent system of education with the research university at its apex. Americans borrowed liberally, but not slavishly, from the German idea of the university as they built the Progressive University.

It took generations for the new model to fully conquer American higher education. The Progressive University is organized around specialized and professionalized departments with an overarching and increasingly professionalized administration. Curricula revolve mostly around departments. Departments conduct hiring. Hiring is increasingly specialized and credentialed, such that a department will hire PhDs only from acceptable degree-granting departmental programs. Departments grant tenure and promotion, based on discipline-specific publications. Remnants of the old classical idea persisted for a generation in general education, but increasingly specific departments now offer it.

Less than a third of faculty in higher education had PhDs in 1900. Still, in 1903, William James, a mere amateur, penned “The PhD Octopus,” critical of the coming necessity that all future college professors have PhDs. “America is,” James wrote, “rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him.” He hoped to “cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency” lest America, like other nations, “suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease.” The “institutionalizing on a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive,” he warned, “always tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.”

We are five generations into an experiment in which the higher-education system is dominated by PhDs.Slowly but surely, the demand for PhDs increased as more were produced. First, in the early 1900s, major universities aspired to have department chairs with PhDs. A half-century later, a majority of faculty in the hard sciences had PhDs. By the 1960s, most faculty in the humanities had PhDs, too. What the PhD indicated, however, was the rise of the academic discipline or department as the central organizing principle of higher education. Students major in a discipline. Departments provide classes for general education. Departments staff the university. PhD programs produce professors, not “men of letters.”

Where classical colleges were strong, the Progressive University is weak.We are, in a sense, five generations into this experiment in which the higher-education system is dominated by PhDs and departments. We can conduct a postmortem on the Progressive University’s living body.

On one hand, aspects of the Progressive University are powerful and attractive. In theory, faculty focusing on one area of knowledge in research and teaching contributes to the project of conquering nature by obeying and understanding it. The more faculty in the hard sciences focus on medical research or oxidation, the more likely they are to go deep and make discoveries into the secret workings of nature. Much evidence exists that physics, biology, medical, and nursing faculty make precisely such advances. Students benefit from learning about science from such experts. America’s polytechnic and engineering programs are envies of the world, as evidenced by how many foreigners attend American engineering schools.

“The ignorance and general incompetency of the average graduate of American Medical Schools,” wrote Harvard’s Charles Eliot in the 1870s, “is something horrible to contemplate. The whole system of medical education in this country needs thorough reformation.” And medical schools were reformed, in part through professional associations dedicated to improving specialties, in part through the hiring of faculty capable of producing and knowing the latest research, and in part by the building of standardized medical schools with real admissions standards. No one would repeat Eliot’s critique of medical schools today!—where universities contribute to progress and technical training with the real stuff of nature: atoms, mechanical structures, or the human body.

Real downsides exist for the Progressive University, however. Where classical colleges were strong, the Progressive University is weak. Universities trade depth and specialization for breadth and wisdom. Faculty were more attached to their colleges than to a discipline under the classical model. Faculty were intelligent generalists hired for their ability to teach and inspire, not for their ability to conduct research. Faculty often grasped the wider swath of Western Civilization, being knowers of philosophy, history, literature, and theology—or what was once called “belles-lettres.” The backward-looking understanding of our civilizational roots was front and center, while the progressive and technical branches were to be learned elsewhere.

Nearly all of the non-hard-science “disciplines” now adopt the research methods of the hard sciences, as if the social sciences or the humane “disciplines” are just different versions of physics or biology. The center of gravity on the Progressive University is toward the hard sciences. Political science, for instance—my discipline—no longer aspires to understand the regime or offers a diagnosis of our political situation with a remedy but makes itself irrelevant to politics through “positivistic” research methods borrowed from the natural sciences. Other social sciences, even less grounded in reality, are simply dominated by ideological thinking.

Consider, for a moment, the plight of the many civics centers being established around the country—something reformers put much faith in. Each civics center is trying to do something bigger than a department. They are trying to restore some understanding of the classical college in a part of the Progressive University. However, they must all use the tools of the Progressive University to do so. They must find scholars who have earned a PhD in a specific discipline, who conduct ongoing research in their field of study, who are well-published through the peer-review process, et cetera. Each genuinely classical faculty member is a kind of miracle, surviving as a generalist in an age of extreme specialization and scientism. “Where will we find aligned faculty?” is the question on the lips of every administrator in civics centers.

Must practically every university have, mostly, the same administrative and curricular form (as they do today)?Higher-education reformers should put the Progressive University—the university designed to produce organized social intelligence through modern research methods—in the dock. The Progressive University is, according to its supporters, something liberating and powerful. There is something to that. Nevertheless, we should revisit questions long thought to be settled: Can different disciplines coexist easily on campuses? Is organizing curricula around disciplines a salutary development, or does it hamstring reformers’ efforts to preserve our civilizational heritage? Must we have PhDs teaching all university courses? Must practically every university and college have, mostly, the same administrative and curricular form (as they do today)?

No simple return to the classical college is possible. We will have research universities, and we should. We will have big medical schools, and we should. But the Progressive University is not an unmixed blessing to the cause of civilization. The Progressive University cannot and should not be simply destroyed. Instead, we should painfully, deliberately peel back the assumptions on which our Progressive University system has been built and reconsider.

Scott Yenor is director of the Kenneth B. Simon Center for American Politics at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a professor of political science at Boise State University.