Democrat projection justifies all manner of damage.

Mike McDaniel | June 7, 2026

Democrats excel at several tactics, among them: cheating in elections and projection. One can be certain that whatever Democrats are accusing Normal Americans of doing or intending to do, they’re already doing or are planning to do. A particularly common bit of Democrat projection these days is the assertion that political violence is a Republican tactic. Mostly peaceful but fiery Democrats are merely helpless bystanders and victims.

We’ve seen plentiful evidence of this sort of projection in the Minneapolis anti-ICE protests, and most recently in the New Jersey anti-ICE protests. We’ve seen it in the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the three attempted assassinations—there have likely been more of which we’re not aware—of President Trump. We saw it in the disruption of worship services in St. Paul. We see it in the lunatic rhetoric of Democrat “it” boy, Hasan Piker, justifying all manner of violence, including the murder of insurance CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione (allegedly). Piker justifies that murder, as well as shoplifting and looting, by claiming “social murder.” Anyone doing anything Democrats don’t like, such as making legal profits, may be justifiably killed, and become an object of female Democrat lust.

In the meantime, Normal Americans—largely but not exclusively Republican—go about their lives. They don’t have the time or inclination for protests, and they know very well that breaking the law for any reason will surely put them in prison. They adhere to Christian morality, so they’re not going to engage in political, or any other kind of violence.

At PJ Media, Aaron Hanscom reports Franklin Carmargo of Prager U interviewed denizens of Los Angeles about political violence. The results are as unsurprising as they are disturbing:

The college students he interviewed sounded like so many Western officials do after an Islamist terrorist attack, when they dismiss the ideology and blame it on mental illness. One young man said: “It’s like they’re just crazy people, and that’s the thing that unites these people who try to kill people. It’s not left or right. It’s just crazy.”

Another student said that he’s currently seeing more violence on the right. When asked by Camargo to name some examples, however, he fell silent. A young woman, after hearing the list of recent incidents attributed to leftist political violence, was asked whether she could identify comparable examples from the right. She at least managed an answer: “Not really.”

This interview was particularly chilling:

Another student said that he’s currently seeing more violencee on the right. When asked by Camargo to name some examples, however, he fell silent. A young woman, after hearing the list of recent incidents attributed to leftist political violence, was asked whether she could identify comparable examples from the right. She at least managed an answer: “Not really.”

This interview was particularly chilling:

Camargo then moved to a pro-communism rally in downtown Los Angeles. He first interviewed a man of senior citizen age and wearing a Che Guevara shirt. When asked by Camargo if there’s too much political violence, he chillingly answered: “Perhaps not enough.”

A Che T-shirt. Must have been one of those violent Republicans.

Camargo then mentioned his shirt and asked if he knows Che was a murderer. His answer sounded like something Luis Mangione groupies might say when justifying the assassination of Brian Thompson: “No, Che Guevara was a revolutionary who attacked the forces of the ruling classes.” He proceeded to claim that Guevara “did not execute a lot of people.” The truth, as told by Mary Grabar in a 2011 PJ Media article, is quite different: “Che’s delight was in shooting 240 defenseless victims, some as young as 15. Political prisoners say the real number is much higher. Che also delighted in having people and their children rounded up off the street and forced to watch executions.”

Projection. This is classic:

As would the next man interviewed by Camargo — also of senior citizen age — who wore a box on his head marked with pro-Palestine, pro-Cuba, and pro-Maduro messages. He offered his opinion on political violence: “I don’t think it’s coming from the left. I think it is something embedded in the society at the right.”

But this must have been cherry-picked editing, right? Not so much. This was downtown Los Angeles. OK, one is likely to find a preponderance of this kind of non-thinking in LA, and in much of California, but the point is one need not work very hard to find this kind of projection and communist/anarchist thinking in any Blue state, and certainly in portions of Red states. 

There’s no justification for violence, not unless in lawful self-defense. Republican men, reviled by Democrats as toxic, know one of the essentials of manhood is the ability to use violence when necessary while always keeping it otherwise under tight control. Political violence is particularly unjustified because it violates the social contract and strikes at the rule of law. It pushes us ever closer to civil war and the dissolution of Western Civilization. Who, trying to raise a family and pay their mortgage, wants that?

People wearing Che t-shirts and boxes on their heads, apparently.

Become a subscriber and get our weekly Friday newsletter with unique content from our editors. These essays alone are worth the cost of the subscription. 

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged European leaders on Saturday to remain vigilant against the threat of what he described as “dangerous ideologies” coming to the continent, invoking the lessons of D-Day to warn about modern-day immigration.   

“In the years since these beaches, much of the West, in some places, in some quarters, and in some capitals grew comfortable, we forgot that freedom is not free,” Hegseth said during remarks at Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

The Pentagon secretary was in France to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy during WWII, which ultimately enabled the U.S. and its allies to liberate western Europe from Nazi Germany.

“Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth said, adding that “boats and men” were arriving on the shores of Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.

“When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he continued.

His tone echoed the Trump administration’s sharp criticism of European nations for their handling of migration, which senior officials have argued poses an existential threat to the continent’s survival.  

Vice President JD Vance railed against mass migration in his first major international speech at the Munich Security Conference last February, saying that “no voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”

Vance, on Friday, blamed the death of an 18-year-old British student by a Sikh man on what he called civilizational decline and the failure to stop a “mass invasion of migrants.”

One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership,” Vance wrote on social platform X. “Anything else is an excuse.”

The Trump administration warned in its 2025 national security strategy that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” if the European Union (EU) allows permissive migration policies to continue.

The EU’s three main institutions —the European Commission, the European Council and European Parliament — reached a deal this week to ramp up deportations and build detention centers abroad, according to The Associated Press, though it quickly faced pushback.

One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership,” Vance wrote on social platform X. “Anything else is an excuse.”

The Trump administration warned in its 2025 national security strategy that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” if the European Union (EU) allows permissive migration policies to continue.

The EU’s three main institutions —the European Commission, the European Council and European Parliament — reached a deal this week to ramp up deportations and build detention centers abroad, according to The Associated Press, though it quickly faced pushback.

“This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander, a spokesperson for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, told AP.

“It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse,” Welander added.

Sophie Brams, The Hill

Europe’s EU project has reached its limits: a centralized bureaucracy replacing politics itself, draining legitimacy, and pointing back toward sovereign, competitive states.

Europe has reached the end of an era. Not the end of its history, but the end of its false form. For decades, the European Union served as the great substitute project of a continent that no longer dared to think politically. It promised peace without power, order without a people, unity without roots, and prosperity without cost. That was its founding lie, and it was a lie from the very beginning.

Political order does not grow out of procedural routines, commission papers, or moral self-incantation. It grows out of peoples, interests, borders, loyalties, and the willingness to defend what is one’s own. Legitimate authority rests on a people and its consent, not on an apparatus and its expertise. That older idea—that government draws its life from the governed rather than from the competence of its administrators—is precisely what Brussels has spent two generations trying to administer away.

That is why today’s EU is not the high point of European history but its bureaucratic state of exhaustion. It is too centralized to be free and too artificial to be binding. It commands an immense body of rules and possesses no sustaining political soul. It has institutions, but not the kind of historically grown legitimacy that holds a community together across generations.

And so it answers every crisis with the same reflex: more centralization, more redistribution, more standardization, more discipline. What is sold as the solution is only the problem enlarged.

Europe is not failing because there is too little Brussels. Europe is failing because there is too much Brussels. It is failing because of a political class that no longer sees the continent as a historical space but as an object of administration. It is failing because of an ideology that treats every organically grown difference as a defect and therefore regards peoples, traditions, and national particularities as raw material to be processed. And it is failing because of a functional elite that has learned to disguise power as morality and to pass off its own interests as universal values.

There is a name for this kind of governance: the administrative state—the permanent, unelected layer that survives every election, answers to no voter, and grows whether the public wants it to or not. Brussels is that layer raised to the continental power and freed from even the inconvenience of a national electorate. There is no European demos to vote the managers out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

The real scandal of Europe today is not even its material mismanagement but its intellectual arrogance. The Union behaves as though it could suspend history—as though cultures could be harmonized like technical standards, as though political loyalty could be decreed the way one issues a packaging regulation. As though a continent of radically different historical experiences, economic structures, demographic trajectories, and security realities could be pressed into one standardized form without damage. Yet the damage is already visible. The EU is not unifying Europe. It is wearing it down.

To see why, it helps to return to a text that saw the whole thing coming. In 2011, long before today’s disruptions, the German social scientist Gunnar Heinsohn published an essay whose title I have borrowed and broadened here: “Europa 2.0: Neuzuschnitt der Alten Welt” (Europe 2.0: Recutting the Old World). It was written in the first panic of the euro rescues, and it has aged with uncomfortable precision.

Heinsohn’s argument was not, in the first place, a complaint about Brussels. It was an argument about arithmetic. He began with the chain of liabilities that the productive European middle class—the net taxpayers, the people who put in more than they take out—had quietly been made to guarantee. First, the bank rescues of 2008. Then the Greek bailout and the great euro backstops of 2010, which shielded bondholders and the comfortable classes of the periphery at the expense of taxpayers who were never asked. Then the implicit guarantees extended to the aging, shrinking states of the European East. And beneath all of it, an ever-growing domestic population to be supported for life. The decisive point was simple and merciless: when all these promises—upward, downward, and outward—come due at once, no one will be left to bail out the people who were made to do the bailing.

The mechanism is general. A government that collectivizes debt, anonymizes liability, and blurs responsibility will always end by taxing the people who never agreed to the bad decisions of others. Heinsohn merely showed that the European Union had written this principle into its very constitution. Any order that treats difference primarily as a financing problem must degenerate into a transfer machine. And a transfer machine is, sooner or later, politically hated—because it morally expropriates the productive and politically infantilizes the weak, rewarding neither virtue nor reform but only dependency. What it produces in the end is not solidarity but resentment: a bureaucratically managed exhaustion of the common good.

But Heinsohn’s deeper move was to set this fiscal machine on top of a demographic one—and here the argument becomes genuinely radical. The transfers are not merely unjust; they are mathematically doomed, because the population expected to honor them is collapsing. Across much of Europe, and most severely in the East, birth rates have run far below replacement for two generations. The productive base shrinks while the dependent base grows and ages. You cannot underwrite an expanding empire of guarantees with a contracting nation of guarantors. The numbers do not forgive ideology.

From this, Heinsohn drew a conclusion that polite Europe still refuses to say aloud: not all human capital is equal, and a civilization that loses its capacity to attract and cultivate talent does not stay rich for long. Innovation is decided at the top of the distribution, by the density of the highly capable, not by raising the average.

Importing large numbers of low-skill dependents, he argued, costs billions and replaces not a single first-rate mind, while a society that selects for ability—as the Swiss and the Danes already do—renews itself. Strip away the provocation and a plainer proposition remains: a serious country runs immigration in its own interest, as a selective system, choosing the people it needs rather than absorbing whoever happens to arrive. A civilization unwilling to reproduce itself has, in any case, already mortgaged its own future. Whatever one makes of these claims, Heinsohn’s 2011 essay reads today less like a period piece than like a forecast.

What, then, is the alternative? Heinsohn’s answer was not “more Europe,” and it was not “back to the nation-states of 1914.” It was a recutting—a deliberate sorting of the continent into political spaces that can actually function, each organized around two hard criteria: a currency that is genuinely sound and a society genuinely attractive to the talent it needs.

His model for both was not an abstraction. It was a sort of Switzerland.

Consider what Heinsohn admired in it. Its central bank does not monetize the debt of badly run governments; it will not take their paper as collateral and will not buy it—which is exactly why a country of fewer than nine million can hold a reserve-grade currency. Sound money, enforced by the refusal to bail anyone out. Its cantons do not subsidize one another into permanent dependency; there is no grand equalization scheme shuffling money from the competent to the connected. Instead, the cantons compete—for innovative firms, for capable workers, for investment—and grow their revenue by winning that competition rather than by lobbying for a larger share of someone else’s. Tax competition, fiscal discipline, and federalism as a sport rather than a shakedown. And immigration authority sits at the local level: it is the communes, not a distant central ministry, that decide who settles where—which is why the children of Swiss immigrants tend to perform like Swiss children rather than like a permanent underclass parked wherever a bureaucrat finds room.

The list of features is easy to state: sound money, decentralized authority, local control over who settles where, tax competition in place of redistribution, and a central government that coordinates only the few things that genuinely must be coordinated and leaves the rest to the level closest to the decision. The European word for this is subsidiarity. Heinsohn’s quiet provocation was to note where it actually survives—not in the European Union, but in the small, stubborn confederation that the Union spent two decades trying to fine, pressure, and squeeze into compliance.

American Greatness

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied soldiers clambered aboard heaving landing craft and braved six-foot swells, waves of machine-gun fire, and more than 6 million mines to claim a stretch of sand at a place called Normandy. Their mission was to carve out an Allied foothold on the edge of Nazi-occupied Europe for the army of more than one million that would follow them in the summer of 1944. This army would burst forth from the beachhead, rolling across Europe into the heart of Germany, liberating millions, toppling a genocidal regime, and ending a nightmare along the way. But it all began on this beach in France, with an army of teenagers on a day called D-Day. (link)

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).

As we here at the IFB remember the 81st anniversary of this monumental historical event and the valor of those brave men who made up those liberating forces – the spearhead to liberate millions from Nazi oppression and tyranny – I cannot help but think of another highly significant day in the history of mankind which changed the course of mankind FOREVER.

On this Day of days, all was laid on the line for the rescue and liberation of all humanity from the tyranny and oppression of Lucifer (Satan), who is the demonic fascist and oppressor of all the world (Luke 4:5-6; Ephesians 2:1-3; Hebrews 2:14-15). Fallen humanity had been taken into captivity by Lucifer and enslaved in their transgressions. The horrible effects and consequences of Adam’s fallen race are deadly and devastating and we all were in great need of rescue from the ETERNAL consequences (Romans 6:23a, 7:24).

The Son of Almighty God debarked of all His DEITY and His ETERNAL glory to bear the Cross of sin and shame for ALL of Adam’s fallen race.

Oh, on this day – The Day of all days – the Lord of Glory, the ETERNAL Son of Almighty God, the Word made flesh; debarked to bear the Cross of sin and shame for ALL of Adam’s fallen race (Rom. 5:12-19). He counted not His life precious unto death. He gave His last full measure (Isa 53, John 10:11, 19:30; Philippians 2:5-8; Hebrews 12:2)! He paid the FULL price for you and me so that through Him we might be LIBERATED from the oppression and tyranny of the devil (John 8:36; Acts 10:38; Heb. 2:14-15), and DELIVERED from this present evil world (Isaiah 53, Galatians 1:4; Eph. 2:2-3) and from sin and death (Psalm 103:12; 1 Cor. 15:53-57)! AMEN!

Jesus gave His life that you might live and be free!

HIS infinite love, HIS selflessness, HIS steadfastness, HIS faithfulness, HIS righteousness, HIS commitment, and passion made possible our redemption and justification (1 Cor. 1:30; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 2:9-10, 12:2). He opened wide the doors of Heaven that ALL might enter in who put their ABSOLUTE TRUST in Him (John 1:12; Acts 16:31; Heb 10:19). AMEN!

The Victory of All Victories!

On the third day, He arose victorious from the grave and He defeated our arch-foes – Lucifer, the evil world system, and sin and death (Gen 3:15, 1 John 4:4, 5:4-5; 1Cor. 15:54-57)! He now sits at the right hand of Almighty God to testify and to make intercession for ALL who put their trust in Him (Psalm 110:1; Heb. 1:3, 7:25, 10:12)!

Oh, Glory! Oh, Praise and Laud to the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29, 1 Peter 1:18-21, Revelation 5)!

HE ALONE has fought and worked to liberate you from your transgressions, sins, and bondage!

Do you know the Great Liberator and Savior of the world as your personal Lord and Savior? HE ALONE has fought and worked to liberate you from your transgressions, sins, and bondage! HE ALONE can liberate you from the tyranny and oppression of sin and Satan!

LOOK UNTO Him today (Isaiah 45:22)! He will NEVER turn anyone away. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound!” (Rom. 5:20) CALL UPON Him today for deliverance (Psalms 18:3, 55:16, 116:13). You will never be the same!

The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!

The Ignorant Fisherman

It’s a typical afternoon in Saint-Denis, the narrow streets packed with people whose faces you cannot see. The women move in niqab, shapes without features, eyes that do not meet yours. The shop signs are in Arabic, the smell of cumin and lamb fat rises from every doorway, thick and permanent, as if the street itself has been marinated in another world. From three directions at once, the call to prayer cuts through the air. Al-lahu Akbar. God is great. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.

Even the French police do not enter without backup. Ambulances request escorts before responding to calls. In the lost territories of Marseille, law enforcement officers disguise themselves as Muslims before making arrests. France’s own intelligence service has mapped 150 such districts across the country. A former senior official of French foreign intelligence put it in numbers: these enclaves exist in 859 cities, and four million people — six percent of France’s entire population — live inside them.

There was a time when Paris was the most romantic city in the world. You could stop on the banks of the Seine at dusk, buy a baguette and a bottle of wine from the corner shop, sit on the stone steps above the water, and feel, without irony, that life was generous, and civilization was real. The light on the river. The smell of bread. The sound of French — that particular music of a language that assumes beauty is worth the effort.

That Paris is gone. This is the story of how it fell. This is the story of the fall of France.

In April 2024, a classified document landed on Emmanuel Macron’s desk. Seventy-three pages, stamped Secret Défense. The document had one purpose: to answer the question that French politicians had been avoiding for twenty years. What is actually happening to this country — and who is making it happen. Macron read it and locked it in a drawer.

For months, the report sat classified and untouched while the streets of Saint-Denis continued to empty of French faces, while the mosques of Marseille continued to fill, while the call to prayer continued to replace the sound of French in neighborhoods that were, on every map, still France. The president of the Republic knew the answer. He chose not to share it.

Then it leaked. In May 2025, Le Figaro obtained the full document and published it. It was a detailed, deliberate, patient, funded, and coordinated plan across borders. A plan to take over France, not by force, but from the inside. Neighborhood by neighborhood, school by school, sports club by sports club. The name of the document, “Frères Musulmans et Islamisme Politique en France,” – The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France.

This is the plan, detailed, Stage by stage, neighborhood by neighborhood, for the Islamic conquest of France by the Muslim Brotherhood:

Stage One: The Prey.

Every conquest begins by choosing the right target, and the Muslim Brotherhood chose with surgical precision to start with the poor, the forgotten, the people who feel angry and lost. The playbook is elegant in its simplicity; you do not approach it with a Quran. You approach with a job offer. You offer a sense of community and belonging. A Brotherhood-affiliated temp agency calls back when no one else does. A community sports club gives people somewhere to be on Thursday nights. A personal development workshop, run by a soft-spoken man who quotes the Prophet between practical advice about CV writing, makes lost people feel cared for, for the first time, that someone sees them.

By the time the religious identity arrives, and it always arrives, the young man is already inside the ecosystem. The mosque is not a recruitment center; it is a homecoming. He does not feel he has been converted; he feels he has been found. And the man who found him now has something that no government program, no integration policy, and no French republican value has ever managed to give him: he has his complete and total devotion.

Anonymous

High schoolers are still going to college, but seem skeptical of its value.  

May 28, 2026 Sherman Criner

In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier. What are Americans, particularly those concerned about the state of higher education, to make of these findings? Are they just one of many societal indicators of an “empire in decline,” or are they more localized signs of a defect in the American system of higher education?

To answer this question, one must first understand that this skepticism is not exactly borne out in the decisions of these young Americans. Data on immediate college enrollment rates of American high school completers—provided by the National Center for Education Statistics—demonstrates a fairly constant trend of high schoolers enrolling in college from 2002 to 2022. Though it is true that 3.2 percent fewer high school graduates immediately enrolled in college from 2002 to 2022, these numbers are rather deceptive. High schoolers are not systematically abandoning college as an option.

More high school completers immediately enrolled in colleges before the pandemic in 2019 than in 2002, 66.2 percent to 65.2 percent, respectively. This indicates that high schoolers are not systematically abandoning college as an option. Rather, when read in conjunction with the Pell Institute’s findings, they seem to believe that higher education has less of a comparative advantage. This suggests that the Pell Institute’s findings are more reflective of a general pessimism towards college amongst the nation’s youth than the impending collapse of the American university marketplace. 

So why, if young people are still enrolling at consistently high rates, are they so skeptical?

Pundits typically cite ideological bias, social disaffection, rising costs, credential inflation, and poor labor market returns. Each contributes something, but none has been quite as ignored as this: the internet has effectively dismantled the cultural bottlenecks that historically upheld the fiat value of a college education.

Historically, the prestige of higher education relied on a form of geographic and information monopoly. In 2002, the narrative surrounding a teenager’s future was tightly managed by local gatekeepers—parents, high school guidance counselors, and FCC-regulated television networks that uniformly reinforced the traditional American Dream. If these gatekeepers insisted that a bachelor’s degree was the sole gateway to a middle-class life, a teenager had few tools to verify or challenge that claim. The cultural value of the degree was artificially protected by a lack of visible alternatives.Higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy.

Today, those bottlenecks are gone. With teenagers spending an average of eight and a half hours a day consuming decentralized digital media, the local gatekeeper has been entirely bypassed. In this informational vacuum, higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy against hyper-charismatic, highly relatable creators who operate with zero institutional overhead.

The result is a direct challenge to higher education’s fiat value. A fiat currency only holds worth because an institution mandates it, and the public collectively agrees to believe in it. For decades, the bachelor’s degree enjoyed this exact privilege. But the decentralized internet introduced alternative currencies of success.Where previous generations dreamed of being astronauts, today’s aspirational figures are different.

The most popular streamers on the live streaming platforms Twitch and Kick—figures such as Adin Ross, IShowSpeed, Jynxzi, Kai Cenat, all of whom gross millions of views (and sometimes dollars) per month—center their content around gaming, gambling, cryptocurrency, and all sorts of “get rich quick” schemes that bypass traditional credential-based career routes. These are, for millions of young Americans, the most visible and compelling models of adult success available. 

This helps explain the aspirations of American teenagers. According to a 2021 poll, American boys ages 13-17 now most commonly list YouTuber and professional gamer as two of the top jobs they “want to be when they grow up.” Where previous generations dreamed of being astronauts, today’s aspirational figures are different. The streamer in his gaming chair was a teenager not long ago. He is accessible, relatable, visibly wealthy, and he got there without a diploma.

The culture has effectively lowered the horizons of an entire generation by handing young people, without limitation, a window into a world that makes a college education look boring and slow by comparison. And if colleges were delivering an experience so transformative, so intellectually galvanizing, that it could compete with that window, perhaps the damage would be limited. But too many of them are not.

Sherman Criner is a recent graduate of Duke University, where he majored in history and public policy. Originally from Wilmington, North Carolina, Criner will enroll in Stanford’s history PhD program upon graduation, with plans to study nineteenth-century American political history.

most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

The rate at which AI models improve is accelerating. The length of tasks that they can reliably complete on their own has been doubling roughly every four months, up from an earlier trend of doubling every seven months. In March 2024, Claude Opus 3 could complete software tasks that take humans about four minutes to complete. A year later, Claude Sonnet 3.7 managed tasks that took about an hour and a half. A year after that, Claude Opus 4.6 managed 12-hour tasks.1 If this trend holds, tasks that take a skilled person days could come into range this year. In 2027, AI systems could be capable of tasks that take a person weeks.

The same pattern appears on coding and research benchmarks. Benchmarks measure the performance of models in a given domain, and they’re “saturated” when models achieve close to 100% performance.2 SWE-bench is a standard test of real-world software engineering: it hands a model an actual open-source codebase and a real bug report, and asks it to write a code change that fixes the issue and passes the project’s own tests. Models have gone from scoring in the low single digits to saturating the benchmark in two years.

CORE-Bench tests whether a model can reproduce existing research, a prerequisite for them to conduct original research. It gives an AI model the code and data behind a published paper, and asks it to rerun everything and confirm it can replicate the paper’s results. AI systems went from succeeding at reproducing the results roughly 20% of the time in 2024 to saturating the benchmark fifteen months later. METR, which runs the benchmark measuring how well models can complete long-duration tasks, found that Claude Mythos Preview could work for “at least” 16 hours and was “at the upper end of what [METR] can measure without new tasks.”

Public benchmarks say a lot about the capabilities of these systems. But they can’t reveal the impact AI systems are having on speeding up AI development itself. For that, we need direct evidence from within AI companies like Anthropic.

Across both engineering and research, the picture is consistent. In engineering, Claude can be handed an underspecified problem and figure out how to solve it; humans supply the goal, but they no longer need to supply the method. In research, Claude can already match or outperform skilled humans at executing a well-specified experiment.

As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude.3 Before Claude Code launched in research preview in February 2025, this number was in the low single digits. That shift also shows up in the amount of output per engineer. Lines of code merged per engineer per day stayed constant through Anthropic’s first four years (2021-2024), then began to climb upward in 2025 when Claude began to run code rather than just suggesting it for an engineer to copy and paste. The slope steepened again in 2026 when models began to work autonomously over longer time horizons. These two inflection points are shown in the chart below. In the second quarter of 2026, the typical engineer was merging 8× as much code per day as they were in 2024.4 This is because much of the code is written by Claude, with the engineer directing and reviewing, rather than typing it themselves.

The code that Claude writes is “good” and improving. “Good code” means two things: it works, and it is written in a manner that allows another engineer to understand it and build upon it. On the first criterion, the evidence is clear. The rate at which Anthropic staff correct, redirect, or take over mid-task from Claude has been falling steadily for a year, including on the most complex and open-ended tasks. This means problems with no clear specification, where the engineer isn’t sure what the answer looks like. This is evident in Claude’s success rate over time on tasks of different difficulties, as shown in the graph below. Claude writes code that works.

On the most open-ended tasks, Claude’s success rate reached 76% in May 2026, up 50 percentage points in six months. To give an example of tasks in this difficulty tier, a routine upgrade began crashing tens of thousands of training jobs. An engineer pointed Claude at the live incident with little more than some text content and cluster access. Working through the running jobs and testing one environment setting at a time, Claude isolated the single obscure debugging flag that was triggering the crash, reproduced it reliably, and confirmed a fix. In about two hours, Claude delivered what would normally be two to three days of work.

The second criterion is writing code that another engineer can understand and build on. Here the gap between humans and AI persists, but is closing fast. There isn’t full consensus among staff at Anthropic, but many believe that the Claude-written code was still worse in quality than human-written code at Anthropic in late 2025, and is roughly at parity today. We expect it to be better within the year.

This has changed the way that Anthropic now reviews its own code. Proposed changes to our codebase are now read by an automated Claude reviewer that looks for bugs, security flaws, and other defects before it can merge. Using this tool, we ran a retrospective analysis, and found that an automated Claude review of every change to our codebase would have caught roughly a third of the bugs behind past incidents on claude.ai before they ever reached production. The engineers who wrote that code are among the best in the world at building these systems. Claude is now catching the mistakes that they missed.

What might the future of work at Anthropic look like?

The evidence suggests that the human role is narrowing at each step in the AI development process. Once human- and AI-authored code quality reach parity, humans will stop writing code entirely, and shift to only reviewing it. But if they can’t review code as quickly as Claude can generate it, human review will become the bottleneck to AI development. Similarly, once Claude can run experiments, the question shifts towards “Which of these experiments is worth running?” Put simply: the doing (i.e., writing the code, running the experiment, producing the result) now costs almost nothing in human time, even if it still has costs in compute.

An area of human comparative advantage, for now, is research taste and judgment, including choosing which problems matter, which results to trust, and when an approach is a dead end.

---

“On days where everything works well, I can’t help but think nothing I do matters, everything is automated and better and faster than I ever will be. But then there are days where everything breaks and I don’t understand why and I realize I have no idea what I’ve been up to anymore.”

---

Even if we suppose that Claude never achieves good research taste, a conservative reading of our evidence still implies compounding acceleration. If humans spend most of their time on the single-digit fraction of work that is direction-setting, while Claude handles the rest, that means each engineer or researcher is steering far more work than before. The evidence we see suggests that people at Anthropic are both moving faster and covering a broader surface. In practice, this means that AI already makes Anthropic move much faster than it did before the advent of effective AI tools.

The less conservative reading is that the early evidence on Claude’s improving research judgment—narrow as it is today—is an indicator that this capability is improving as well. “Research taste” might be just another AI capability that AI systems fail at for a time, then get good at. We’ve seen a similar pattern with other qualitative skills, like AI systems being able to explain why a joke is funny, demonstrate theory of mind, and solve linguistic riddles.

Possible futures

What happens next depends on two things: whether the trend continues, and what we choose to do if it does. We can imagine at least three future scenarios:

1. The trend stalls, but today’s AI capabilities are widely diffused.

2. AI labs continue to see compounding efficiency gains.

3. AI systems themselves become capable of full recursive self-improvement, and begin building their successors.

What should we do?

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures.

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner.

A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. Due to the unique characteristics of AI systems, the detectability (a lower standard than verifiability) element of this arms control problem is much more challenging than with other technologies. Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates.

None of this is necessarily impossible in principle—the world has built verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. We don’t have that long. A unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately, but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.

In the coming months, we will organize conversations where policymakers, researchers, civil society, and other AI companies can help answer some of the questions this piece raises, especially around full recursive self-improvement and how to create better options for coordination and deliberation. We’ll publish what comes out of it. The window to investigate the questions together is here, and people outside AI companies should be involved in this deliberation.

---

Marina Favaro and Jack Clark co-authored this piece, with editorial support from Santi Ruiz. Shan Carter, Romello Goodman, and Nikki Makagiansar created the visuals from data collected by Brian Calvert and Jun Shern Chan. Daniel Freeman, Jim Baker, Max Young, Sarah Pollack, Francesco Mosconi, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Jones, Kevin Troy, Anton Korinek, Meg Tong, Andrew Ho, Dan Altman, Drake Thomas, Jack Shen, Sasha de Marigny, and Avital Balwit provided feedback.

Just when you think the Henry Nowak murder couldn’t get any worse, it does. In such a horrific way.

By now, most of you know what happened to an 18-year-old university student, who was stabbed by a violent Sikh, pleaded for help, and was ultimately left to bleed out on the street by cops who should’ve helped him.

You have to wonder why the police officers involved haven’t been charged.

Dr. Dan Keown MCEM Lic. Ac.:

Nowak was alive for 64 minutes before the police arrived after being stabbed.

He was conscious, talking and sitting up when they arrived.

He was dead three minutes later with his hands cuffed behind his back.

There are no words for this.

Apart from manslaughter.

And sadly, it’s so much worse than we thought.

As more footage and court details come out, the full horror of Henry’s final moments is becoming more painfully clear.

What we’re learning now isn’t just that Henry was attacked and stabbed by a violent Sikh… it’s so much worse than that. While young Henry was desperately trying to survive, the Sikh who stabbed him spent his time chasing and filming him while taunting and mocking Henry as he slipped closer and closer to death.

Honestly, this is almost impossible to comprehend. It’s like a horror movie. We want to warn you: what you’re about to read is highly disturbing.

Tommy Robinson:

Horrific details laid out by the judge at Digwa sentencing.

As follows;

Digwa used his own mobile phone to film his victim attempting to escape by climbing onto a commercial rubbish bin and over a fence, while Digwa taunted: ‘You’re not going to get away with this big man.’

Sentencing Digwa, Judge William Mousley KC said: ‘You continued to make films of Henry suffering, ignoring much of his desperation at having been stabbed. You told him that had not happened, no doubt to convince others who were nearby.’ These clips have not been released.

Henry managed to land on top of a car parked in front of number 68, on the other side of the fence he jumped over. Digwa went on to take close-up photos of the incapacitated Henry lying on the ground.

In footage from a home security camera, Henry was heard saying ‘I am dying’, with Digwa replying, ‘you’re not dying bro’.

Ten minutes later, Henry said ‘you stabbed me’, with Digwa responding, ‘no, I didn’t’, and, ‘you were recording me thinking you’re sick’, which is slang for ‘tough’.

In that ten-minute period, Digwa did not call an ambulance – but did film Henry for a full five minutes.

This clip was not played in court for being ‘too disturbing to be shown’. The court heard the attack was not witnessed but neighbours heard Henry say he had been stabbed and was dying.

The image of an 18-year-old fighting for his life while repeatedly telling the truth, only to be mocked, filmed, and ignored, is something many of us will never forget.

But in the midst of these horrific details, it’s important to remember that Henry is more than his “murder” and the headlines.

He was a young man with a bright future, a family, and people who loved him dearly.

Justice For Henry Nowak:

This is Henry Nowak.

He was 18 years old. A first-year accountancy and finance student at the University of Southampton. He played football for two clubs. He was walking home from a night out on 3 December 2025 when a stranger carrying a 21cm blade approached him on Belmont Road.

He was stabbed five times. He tried to climb a fence to escape. He collapsed on the pavement.

When Hampshire Police arrived, his killer told them Henry had attacked him. They believed it. They handcuffed Henry as he lay bleeding. He told them, repeatedly, that he had been stabbed. An officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

He died there. Saying “I can’t breathe.” Saying “please, brother.” Telling the truth to people who chose not to believe him.

This is the boy who was failed.

By a man who chose to carry a knife he did not need. By a family that hid the weapon and lied to emergency services. By police officers who handcuffed first and listened second. By a Prime Minister who took 180 days to find his name. By a media class that decided his story did not fit the script.

But not by his family — who have carried him with grace through six months of grief no parent should know.

Not by his sister, who looked her brother’s killer in the eye and said: “If you had known him, you would never have hurt him.”

Not by his father, who stood outside a courtroom and refused to let the institutions off the hook.

And not by the thousands of strangers across the world who learned his name, refused to let it fade, and have raised over $101,000 for the charity supporting the people he left behind.

This is Henry Nowak.

He was loved. He is missed. And he will not be forgotten.

Forever 18. 🤍

It’s unthinkable that this violent Sikh was legally allowed to carry the “ceremonial knife” that he used to murder young Henry.

Skscartoon:

In the UK, members of protected minority groups can carry a literal sword, while ordinary British citizens can go to prison for carrying a Swiss Army knife.

I understand there shouldn’t be an ‘Us and Them’ in our society, but politicians have turned it into ‘Us vs Them’.

There’s a new video clip making the rounds online, claiming to be the man who murdered Henry, brandishing a sword while threatening others.

The Patriot Oasis:

🔥🚨 BREAKING — Video has now emerged of Vickrum Digwa, the killer of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, brandishing a sword while threatening others in a road rage encounter.

The footage provides additional context into Digwa’s behavior before the fatal December stabbing.

It’s important to know if this violent man was known to police.

But we can’t forget what really matters most in this horrific story.

Henry was more than just a talking point. And he wasn’t just a horrible UK statistic. He was a son, a brother, a friend, a student, and a young man who should still be here today.

The case has gone international, and Team Trump has sent their condolences to Henry’s family.

Eric Daugherty:

NOW: The Trump-Rubio US State Department sends condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and DEMANDS the United Kingdom REJECT “two-tiered policing”

SPOT-ON. 🙏🏻

“Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline. They must be rejected across the West.

The United States sends our condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and the people of the United Kingdom at this troubling time.”

S Meanwhile, Britain’s lousy leadership is only focused on managing the political backlash. They’re trying to run cover for their twisted policies that help cause this nightmare.

Basil The Great:

🚨WOW. Can Keir Starmer sink any lower?

He is now blaming the reaction to Henry Nowak’s murder on @elonmusk

Absolutely despicable

This is the man who took the knee during BLM and now he asks for calm?

Elon exposes Starmer’s appalling behaviour to the world

That’s why he doesn’t like him That’s why Starmer keeps blaming him

The British people are sick of Keir Starmer’s excuses, we never wanted him anyway.

He will be remembered as one of Britain’s worst ever prime ministers

Keir is worried about getting too “political,” huh? Keep in mind, this was Mr. Starmer after career felon George Floyd died.

Henry and all of the UK deserve better than Keir Starmer.

As for Henry’s family, each new detail must feel like ripping a festering wound. Their grief must be unimaginable.

As the full horror story continues to come out, Henry deserves to be remembered not for how he died, but for who he was… a young man with his entire life ahead of him, taken far too soon.

Revolver News

Another media global warming team has been terminated, this time the National Public Radio climate desk. This is what happens when “journalists” keep reporting about a dead horse. Eventually the public realizes the horse has perished and there’s nothing left to talk about. Or that there was no horse to begin with.

NPR is the third media outlet to rein it its diehard band of Democratic Party scribes dedicated to exaggerating climate fears, following the Washington Post and CBS News. The former was sawed roughly in half while the latter was, to our grand delight, “gutted.”

Unfortunately, taxpayer-funded radio won’t entirely stop yapping about a non-event, as, according to NPR chief climate editor Neela Banerjee, climate coverage will be “folded into the national desk.” But there will no longer be a separate section from which to harangue, screech and wail about the evils of the dominant driver of the world economy, the burning of fossil fuels for energy, while at the same time reaffirming NPR’s leftist listeners’ narrow and uninformed — yet ever sure of their “knowledge” — worldview.

In what the Media Research Center called “a somber eulogy for her eco-woke department,” Banerjee said she had “rarely been as inspired or happy as I was working with the nine other journalists on NPR’s Climate Desk, and I feel so very lucky to have helped you — and learned from you.”

What did she learn? What was she taught? What did she, as head of the climate desk, teach others?

We ask because the entire global warming narrative is based on disinformation, misinformation, junk science and raw, rotten politics that further the hard-left agenda the Democrats have adopted. That the NPR team was a “prize-winning enterprise,” as described by Banerjee, shows just where we are in today’s world of journalism —the prizes almost always go the reporters and outlets that are doing the best job of disseminating propaganda for the left.

The media have been primary offenders of climate nonsense, happily accepting without journalistic skepticism the claims made by Al Gore, the United Nations and countless others who have pushed a story filled with unnecessary alarmism, witch hunts, sermons, mob behavior and ruses designed to deflect attention away from the real goal: busting capitalism, consolidating political power, controlling population growth, exercising religious zealotry and finalizing the civilization-crushing revolution that the left has been agitating for for more than a half century.

So it’s rewarding to see their edifice built on deception and fearmongering begin to crumble. What for now looks like a drip will, we hope, turn into a cascade as the public begins to understand just how much it’s been manipulated by a media invested in deceit.

Issues and Insights Editorial Board

Far-left politicians want to annihilate property rights. A large share of young voters are buying into it – a red flag that our school systems have become socialist indoctrination factories.

On Monday, one of the far left’s agenda setters, Sen. Bernie Sanders, called on the federal government to confiscate half the value of each of the nation’s largest artificial intelligence companies. He’s targeting OpenAI, Anthropic (creator of Claude), and xAI for starters.

Making his announcement on Facebook and in a New York Times opinion piece, Sanders said he’ll introduce a bill in Congress to slap these companies with a 50% ownership tax – literally grabbing company stock without paying anything for it – in shocking defiance of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s straight out of the playbook of Lenin, Castro, or another communist dictator – expropriating private property for government use.

Here’s Sanders’ flimsy argument: “Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.”

Sorry, Senator. All inventions and breakthroughs are built on the knowledge we already have. That same argument could be used to demand half the stock of a biotech company that produces a cancer cure, or a musical composer who writes a hit.

Who would invest or invent if the government could swoop in and take half?

Sanders’ bill is going nowhere while there’s a Republican majority in Congress.

But ignore it at your peril. It’s a warning. Confiscating property is the left’s latest talking point to remedy inequality and pay for ever-expanding public benefits.

Sanders borrowed the idea from two law professors: Jeremy Bearer-Friend of the George Washington University School of Law and Sarah Polcz of the University of California at Davis School of Law. Lawyers, can you believe it?

The Constitution’s “takings clause” – Bill of Rights, Amendment Five – bars government from taking property without providing “just compensation.”

Ivory tower universities like to reward faculty for their imaginative proposals, not for sticking to what the law allows. Polcz and Bearer-Friend admitted their idea would be challenged in federal court as unconstitutional. Sanders couldn’t care less.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani agrees. He warned at his inauguration that he was going to introduce New Yorkers to the “warmth of collectivism.” His new “Block by Block” housing plan proposes transferring building ownership from current owners to what he calls “responsible stewards”; this includes handing buildings over to tenants. Another outrageous attack on property rights.

Pay attention to how fast Democratic Socialists of America candidates spouting collectivism are making headway. Last week’s primaries produced outright wins or runoff advancements for more than a dozen candidates in five states backed by the DSA.

Who likes these ideas? Gen Z voters who have a rose-colored view of socialism, communism, and collectivism.

According to a Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports poll at the end of 2025, nearly 60% of likely voters aged 18 to 24 want a democratic socialist in the White House in 2028.

Mandani captured 78% of under-30 voters in November, according to an ABC exit poll.

The DSA – at one time the haven of radical retirees – is now powered by the young. It saw the average age of its membership plunge from 68 to 33 in less than a decade.

The leftist indoctrination in K-12 schools, as well as universities, is largely to blame for the youth vote’s enthusiasm for socialism and communism. A staggering 62% of voters ages 18-29 hold a favorable view of socialism, and 34% favor communism.

That’s what they’re taught in school. CoolKid Facts, a popular education website, teaches students that communists believe “the state should provide every citizen with their basic needs … and no one is above anyone else.” Sounds utopian. No mention of the brutalities, starvation, and mass murders committed in the name of communism by Lenin or Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, Castro or Che Guevara.

In New York state social studies classes, communism and socialism are presented as two economic systems that make things more equal and fair, with no historical references to the atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes, confiscating property.

Wisely, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new law last year requiring that public school students in Florida be taught “the brutal realities of life under communism.” Texas passed a similar law. That’s one way to counter the heavy-handed indoctrination by the teachers’ unions.

Let’s make sure students also learn about the takings clause and why protecting property rights is essential to economic growth. Confiscating capital is the fastest way to kill an economy.

Sanders’ AI confiscation scheme is just the beginning. Allow that industry to be nationalized, and the left will soon target others, destroying our economy and our personal liberty. The best defense – the only defense – is an educated electorate. Considering the misguided attitudes of many Gen Z voters, there’s no time to waste.

Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and Chairman & Founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.