Empires, unlike revolutions, don’t have heralds; they work off quiet aggrandizements of power, not bold declarations of freedom. But America’s imperial class appears to have a member who’s missed that memo: the Zionist hedge fund manager William Ackman, a self-selected Patrick Henry of an elite that cannot want one. For the last few years, as his allies have quietly worked to curtail popular politics, Ackman has become a reliable articulator at any given moment of just what game they are actually playing.
In 2023 and 2024, as his allies subtly tried to float alternatives to conservative populism, Ackman endorsed and then unendorsed apparently anti-populist presidential candidates (Jamie Dimon, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dean Phillips, Jamie Dimon again) as if his rolodex depended on it. In 2024 and 2025, as his allies turned their attention to the campuses where students being trained to run Washington’s military-industrial complex were revolting against it, Ackman not only helped lead the rhetorical charge to quash the protests but clarified its underlying logic by explaining that the “real purpose of a university” was to decide “Who is going to manage society?” In 2025, as the New York Zionist financial community planned a response to the rise of the Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, Ackman publicly promised “hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani…(believe me, I am in the text strings and the WhatsApp groups).”
If there is a herald of the moves of the forces of the reaction, it is Ackman—so it was noteworthy when, a month ago, Ackman announced via an article in the news section of The Wall Street Journal that his new project would be acting as the public ambassador for a relatively unknown set of private schools. The Alpha School Network is described as “a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours.” According to the Journal, the school:
“…which calls its teachers ‘guides,’ says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools…The schedule allows students to do hands-on activities in the afternoon, which the school says help them build life skills. These include 5-mile bike rides ‘without stopping’ for kindergartners, and exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans. The school also strives to keep the hot-button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely.”
Sixteen Alpha schools are or will soon be operational: three in California, one in Arizona, five in Texas, three in Florida, two in North Carolina, one outside Washington DC, and now one in New York. Gizmodo, the tech website, mentions that the schools’ curricula includes “a variety of workshops, some of which are based around leadership, some of which involve business education.” Gizmodo, which is not known for its focus on the humanities, also mentions a possible problem with this approach:
“History, art, and literature are intrinsically subjective (they require an interpretive lens)…How, exactly, do places like Alpha School teach children about the American novel without letting ‘political, social issues’ get ‘in the way’? From the outside, that part is unclear.”
And, of course, it is not just history, art, and literature where this is a problem. Also out in this model are civics, political theory, ethics, and philosophy—all of those subjects conceived as critical by the founders of this country and until fairly recently by those who governed it for the purposes of educating a citizenry capable of maintaining our freedoms. As one critic of the Alpha Network, speaking to The New York Times, said to this point, “If you think of the purpose of schools as to prepare people for the roles of citizenship…there’s lot of places where you aren’t trying to get kids to race as fast as they can.” Even purportedly positive testimonies from students at Alpha schools about how their classroom experiences help them “surpass A.I.’s knowledge base and come up with…unexpected and novel perspectives” support this general concern. According to one sixteen year old rising senior, speaking to The New York Times:
“To be a useful person in the age of A.I., you have to have unique insights that A.I. doesn’t really agree with. That’s the real differentiator. We are trying to beat A.I.”
Useful person or no, it seems safe to say that supporters of America First who objected to DEI’s framing of education around systemic oppression did not envision it being replaced by automated learning geared toward justifying human existence. Nonetheless Ackman appears to see opposition to DEI as clearing the field for whatever educational conceit crosses his path—and the fact that this particular conceit, education-on-autopilot, crossed his path is not a coincidence.
In 2014 Ackman donated $26 million to Harvard, $17 million of which would “catalyze the work of the university’s Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative…to explore the psychological, social, economic, and biological mechanisms that influence human behavior.” Effectively, judging by a report in The Harvard Crimson, Ackman’s donation allowed the Initiative to exist; according to the same report, the Initiative is “spearheaded” by a behavioral economist and:
“…supports interdisciplinary research in fields that range from biology to psychology to economics. It also facilitates the design and discovery of ‘cost-effective, scalable interventions that improve societal well-being.'”
The point of this initiative, it becomes clear on examination, is to fuse behavioral economics with biology and psychology to predict and influence human beings. In other words, it is a perversion of both economics (which is about market choice) and science (which is about the natural world) for the purposes of social control, which is the purpose of neither field. But this is of a piece with not only Ackman’s approach but with the approach of his powerful Harvard Zionist allies.
Among them is Ackman’s friend Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist and proponent of the computational theory of the human mind. In Pinker’s own description of his version of this view, “a theory of how the mind works that was built on the notions of computation, specialization, and evolution,” one which “holds that the mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation” or, more straightforwardly, “an evolved computer.” Leaving aside the inherent limitations with using an invention of the human mind to describe the human mind, Pinker has been criticized in his field for applying evolutionary biology reductively to human beings to the detriment of a real understanding of both evolution and people. (“Darwinian fundamentalism,” goes one such critique, “is a form of irrationalism that, left un-checked, erodes the very theory of evolution it embraces.”) But Pinker’s approach is perfectly consistent with, and in fact a precondition for, the Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative’s fusion of behavioral economics with evolutionary biology. It is also perfectly consistent with the Alpha Schools’ conception of kindergartners as computers, or machines, or aspirant robots: candidates for two-hour AI “crunch” sessions in the morning followed by five-mile bike rides “without stopping” in the afternoon.
So is the approach of Lawrence Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury and chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations. As president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, Summers rubbed faculty wrong for not only equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism but for applying behavioral genetics to gender disparities at university departments and mathematics and “rational choice” economics to political science. Critics called Summers an “intellectual imperialist,” and this gets fairly close to his and Pinker’s and Ackman’s project—using science and technology to replace critical thinking with “skill-based learning” and values formation with software-based cram sessions.
Nor is Ackman the only Zionist financier pushing this project. On Friday August 22, according to The Wall Street Journal, Ackman “appear[ed] with Alpha’s co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home…moderated by the former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute’s Hamptons Dialogues.” Milken’s status as what the Journal discretely calls a “former financier” is the product of a plea deal over securities fraud with the U.S. Department of Justice thirty-five years ago. He is part of that cohort of Zionist financiers who mostly made their wealth beginning in the 1970s and 1980s (Michael Steinhardt, Charles Bronfman, Paul Singer, Stephen Schwarzman) and then went on in the 1990s and 2000s to philanthropic projects to boost Israel and the appendages of the military-corporate state. Among these philanthropic projects, their educational donations, which I have reported on in two recent investigations for the Libertarian Institute, are the largest and most instructive. Like Ackman’s, they involve supporting scientific research and emerging technologies and training a generation of elite managers via engineering schools, business schools, and computing schools.
Not coincidentally, achievement in these sectors is exactly how Israel has defined itself since the 1990s and 2000s, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose portfolio included time as Science and Technology minister and minister of Finance, and who is a graduate of MIT and former consultant at the Boston-based management consultancy Bain, used government policies and American private equity largesse to turn Israel into a “start-up nation.” As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute in the past, this has led to Israeli staffers occupying crucial rungs at Google and Meta. It has also led to Israeli surveillance tools being used in America by the U.S. government. And it has led, more quietly, to a reimagining at the hands of American Zionist philanthropists of our country’s educational priorities so that they better align with Israel’s aims—emphasizing management and technological skills in such a way that critical thinking gets supplanted in the name of “innovation” and “adaptation.”
This recognizably Zionist agenda is articulated on an intellectual level not just by Steven Pinker but, more starkly, by Yuval Noah Harari, arguably Israel’s most prominent intellectual and, along with Pinker, another friend of Ackman’s. As early as 2018, Harari was arguing that “‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality” but “a myth inherited from Christian theology” and that “confronting the challenge of AI and bioengineering” means “question[ing] the traditional assumptions of liberalism,” namely “ the belief in human liberty” which is based on free will. In its place, according to Harari, citizens should substitute the understanding that “every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.” Many people who do believe in free will would call what Harari is recommending “understanding context”—namely, appreciating the social, natural, and familial environments every person exists in, is affected by, and affects. But Harari’s project has nothing to do with understanding context, which almost everyone on some level already does. It has to do with questioning the politics of freedom in order to subordinate them to technology; in his words, to “develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.”
What, though, about those people who might object to some aspect of this project of automated managerial elitism—and criticize the people running it? For them, AI-based censorship is the order of the day. This is the flip side of management by technology: coercion by technology. It is a project that presents itself as opposing anti-semitism, referring to prejudice against Jews as an ethnicity and religion. But it then conflates anti-semitism with anti-Zionism, which is opposition to Israel, a nation-state. And it then conflates anti-Zionism with any protest against what it calls merit and those ethnic or religious groups it claims represent merit—with merit, crucially, defined as success inside the same American military-corporate complex that guarantees Israel.
An example which gives a sense of the real project at play comes in an article entitled “A Hindu Jewish Partnership” which recently appeared in Sapir, a Zionist American quarterly, and quoted Bill Ackman at length as part of its thesis. This article argued that, like Asian Americans and Jews, Hindu Americans are “‘model minorities’ who have made much of the American dream,” measuring what it called their “success” by the large proportion of Hindu and Jewish Americans whose household incomes are above $100,000. This metric, in turn, commonly denotes membership in what’s commonly called the “six figure club” and is commonly tied to positions in healthcare, technology, finance, and executive management: all, at this point, direct or indirect outgrowths of America’s military corporate complex.
The article went on to urge Hindus and Jews to erect an “Intellectual Iron Dome” in imitation of Israel’s defense apparatus the Iron Dome “to safeguard the world from the regressive movement against merit”—with merit defined, again, as membership in the “six figure club.” This “Intellectual Iron Dome” would:
“…harness the powers of AI as a force multiplier in the arsenal against Hinduphobia and antisemitism. An AI-based system can be designed to monitor and examine trends in antisemitism and Hinduphobia online and predict problems before they manifest. Such a system could be equipped to disseminate counter-messaging for threats to meritocracy, free speech, and the dignity and safety of Jews and Hindus. A complementary system could create and disseminate indices that rate bias by individuals and institutions, to help the public make informed decisions in choosing vendors and organizational partners.”
Instructively, a version of this “Iron Dome” is already operational, thanks to Sapir’s editor Bret Stephens’s friend Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner and ardent Zionist with lifelong connections to the financial and philanthropic networks that include Milken and Ackman. Kraft has lately engineered an AI-based “anti-semitism” detection scheme, the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, staffed by thirty people near the Patriots’ stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts. These thirty people “sift through one billion social-media posts daily using algorithms and artificial intelligence” tracking what they call anti-semitism (of which their main example is anti-Zionism), and then “create countermessaging, including social-media posts” and “share information with social-media platforms as well as colleges—including nearby Harvard University.”
Not surprisingly, Alan Garber, Harvard’s Zionist president and an intimate of Lawrence Summers (who, nonetheless, has publicly pressured Garber for “slow-walking” investigations of anti-semitism) has embraced this project. Also not surprisingly, the general idea of this project has recently been endorsed by Benjamin Netanayhu, who said that because of “the deception, the lies…[which resemble] the way in the Middle Ages Jews were accused of killing Christian children for their blood…You…have to do something about the algorithms of the social networks…”
Sapir, where the template for Kraft’s operation appeared, is funded by the Maimonides Institute, a Zionist philanthropic foundation, and edited by Stephens, the Zionist, former Jerusalem Post editor and current New York Times columnist who in 2019 wrote a controversial Times column entitled “The Secrets to Jewish Genius.” This column said that “Anti-Zionism has taken the place of anti-Semitism as a political program directed against Jews” and concluded, “What’s not secret about Jewish genius is that it’s a terribly fragile flower.” This, of course, is a claim for a version of DEI policies for the special protection of a group based not on a history of marginalization but on its purported “merit” and the purported “resentment” generated by this purported “merit.”
This elitist, and defensive, conception of Jews put forward by Stephens in his Times article and in the article in his journal Sapir has always been an extremely minoritarian one within the Jewish community (younger Jews relate to it not at all). But it has always been popular among a very limited sector of operators, to the point of justifying the exclusion of other Jews deemed not to make the “model minority” cut. In 1938, before Zionism began defining itself with references to the horror of the 1940s, Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s future president, said the following about the land that was not yet Zionist:
“Palestine cannot absorb the Jews of Europe. We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.”
When Weizmann wrote, Zionism was a project of a minority of financiers with links to the British Empire. Today it is the project of a minority of financiers with much deeper ties to the American empire, but its elite outlook remains the same. As Tablet, the prominent Zionist magazine which appears to be funded by an organization, the Jewish Communal Fund, which is chaired by the manager of Bill Ackman’s family office, recently said about the disagreement between the American Jewish majority who support humanitarian aid in Gaza and those American Zionists who do not: “[it is] a choice between pandering to Jews defined by their unease or standing with the untroubled few who will carry Jewish life forward.”
This division of Judaism between “the Untroubled few who will carry Jewish life forward” and the Jewish majority “defined by their unease” is not different in kind from Weizmann’s division of Judaism between the “best” or “educated” who belonged in Palestine and those six million others from the “low-grade ghettos” of Europe who were “dust on the wheels of history.” The point, in other words, of the original Zionist project, and of the “education” and censorship that powerful Zionists are pushing in America today, is not to protect Jewish Americans or Hindu Americans or anyone else who might face prejudice or discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity or religion. Nor is the point to promote learning, which is above all about (just as the Judaic tradition is above all about) critical thinking and introspection.
The point is to use technology to inculcate with the “right” values and then insulate from public scrutiny in the name of anti-discrimination an aspirant ruling class. These “best” and “educated” and “untroubled few” will ingest AI-generated information in the morning and take five-mile bike rides in the afternoon and identify with Israel “the start-up nation” while leaving questions of liberty or democracy or encroachment of power securely off the table. Those who object to their approach or their power will be accused of bigotry and monitored via AI “equipped to disseminate counter-messaging for threats to meritocracy.” The Zionist project of creating and insulating this new imperial elite is a corruptive co-option of both Judaism and constitutionalism and it should be resisted on, among others, Jewish and constitutional terms.
