Should there be rules of war?

Yes, one: Engage in war if you are a free country that is physically threatened by an aggressor-state. And then take whatever measures are necessary to eliminate the threat. In such circumstances, one side is morally right and the other side is morally wrong.

This is not the principle by which various rules of war, such as those under the Geneva Convention, have been formulated. Those rules instruct both sides equally on what constitutes “legitimate” military actions. They instruct both sides equally about protecting “innocents” in war. The insidious evil of these rules is that they make no distinction between aggression and self-defense. In reality, however, no action taken by the aggressor is legitimate; and everyone it attacks, including the other side’s armed forces, is an innocent.

Iran is a dictatorship, willing to destroy the freedom of both its own citizens and the citizens of other countries. It has been a threat to freedom since it became the Islamic Republic. It is particularly hostile to America—the “Great Satan”—which has been the continuous target of its aggression starting with the hostage seizure of 1979. Iran has killed Americans in battle, and is the sponsor of jihadist terrorism across the globe. It is becoming an ever-greater threat with its acquisition of ballistic missiles and its development of a nuclear capability. Its victims, actual and potential, have every right to respond militarily, in self-defense.

America, therefore, should take whatever military action is necessary to remove that threat. It needs to crush the Islamic theocracy and to have it replaced by a government that presents no danger to us.

(See also an excellent discussion of this issue on the Yaron Brook Show

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Will civilians be killed in the process? Yes. Certainly, many of them are guilty of abetting and supporting their killer regime. But even the deaths of the genuinely innocent—say, the young children who might be tragic victims in this war—are entirely the moral responsibility of the Iranian government. They are the responsibility of the aggressor, who has made such tragedies necessary if we are to eliminate the threat it poses against us. This was the justification in WWII, for example, in our firebombing the cities of Germany and our dropping the atomic bomb on Japan.

Yes, we should be concerned with protecting the innocent. But that means protecting Americans—both troops and civilians—against an aggressor-state. To impose restrictions on our military so that Iranian civilians not be harmed, is to choose to increase the risk to American in order to decrease the risk to Iranians. What kind of perverse morality could justify sacrificing the citizens of an innocent country to the citizens of a guilty one? And if some of those Iranians are genuinely innocent, so are all of the Americans. Again, if the former have to become victims in order to protect the latter, the responsibility lies entirely with the dictatorial Iranian regime.

Earth Day is an appropriate occasion to examine what environmentalism actually stands for.

It is a movement that has become entrenched in our culture through an insidious misrepresentation. It depicts itself as a salutary force, as a kind of global sanitation department, with the non-controversial goal of cleaning up the dirt in our air and the pollutants in our water. It is regarded as a force intended to promote human welfare. When environmentalists talk about protecting the planet, it is widely assumed that what “benefits” the planet benefits man.

This is fatally false assumption.

The environmentalist ideology is not motivated by a desire to improve man’s life. To quote from my article “The Philosophy of Privation” (in Ayn Rand’s book Return of the Primitive):

“If one examines the conflicts between the interests of man and the ‘interests’ of nature, it becomes clear that the former are invariably sacrificed to the latter by environmentalists. Whenever there is a hydroelectric dam to be built, it is the welfare of the snail darter or the Chinook salmon that is inviolate, and the welfare of man that is dispensable. Whenever there is a choice between cutting down trees for human use and leaving them in place for the spotted owl, it is the bird’s home that environmentalists save and human habitation that goes unbuilt. . . . The most beneficial projects, from housing developments to science observatories, are halted if there is any danger to some piddling species.”

When environmentalists discuss the alleged dangers of industrialization—from draining swamps (or “wetlands”) and clearing jungles to mining for coal and drilling for oil—the demonstrable benefits are not mentioned. The millions of people whose lives are enhanced, or even just made possible, by the transformation of wilderness areas into livable space or by the production of abundant, reliable sources of energy, are deemed not worthy of consideration.

The fundamental premise underlying the environmentalist ideology is that nature must remain unchanged as an end in itself—i.e., that nature must be protected not for man, but from man.

And environmentalists are at times open about this, but the public does not take them seriously. For example, when the cancer-fighting drug taxol was discovered years ago, environmentalists opposed its use. It had to be extracted from the Pacific yew tree, which meant a choice had to be made between the life of a tree and the life of a human being. As Al Gore described it in his book Earth in the Balance:

“It seems an easy choice—sacrifice the tree for the human life—until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. . . . Suddenly we must confront some tough questions.”

David Foreman, founder of the organization Earth First, presents the issue more fundamentally: “Wilderness has the right to exist for its own sake and for the sake of the diversity of the life forms it shelters; we shouldn’t have to justify the existence of the wilderness area by saying, ‘Well, that protects the watershed and it’s a nice place to backpack and hunt, and it’s pretty.’ “

If the wilderness has a “right” to exist for its own sake, however, then man does not. Man survives only by altering nature to satisfy his own needs. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by automatically adapting to the natural surroundings in which he happens to find himself. Man must transform the naturally given into a truly human environment. He must produce the values his life requires—he must grow food and build supermarkets, chop down trees and erect houses, mine ore and design jet planes, isolate organisms and manufacture vaccines. None of these values exist ready-made in nature. Man brings all of them into being only by transmuting his “natural environment.”

But if man lives only by a process of remaking the earth—what is the obvious implication of the environmentalist demand that he renounce this process?

As an Objectivist, I oppose the idea that self-sacrifice is the right way for people to deal with one another. I don’t believe you have a moral duty to subordinate yourself to others. Another person’s need should not create a moral claim against you merely because you are able to satisfy that need. Human relations should not consist of one person’s gain coming at the price of another’s loss. People should interact not through sacrifice but through honest trade, by offering each other value for value—whether material or spiritual—to mutual benefit.

It may surprise some to learn that I nonetheless applaud and admire the efforts of those in our armed forces. Not because they are performing acts of sacrifice, but the opposite: because they are acting to properly further their self-interest.

The term “sacrifice” needs to be correctly understood. To sacrifice means to endure a loss. It means to give up that which is worth more to you for the sake of that which is worth less. It means putting someone else’s needs above your own. It means doing without a new suit or a new car, so that your neighbor can get a subsidized mortgage, or his mother can get free health care or the inhabitants of Bangladesh can receive foreign aid. To sacrifice is to suffer so that others might benefit.

But this is not what characterizes, or should characterize, our military activities. In a free country, soldiers who fight against an actual threat to America are not sacrificing what is most important to them—they are upholding it. They are acting to preserve their freedom. They are risking their lives because they are unwilling to allow an enemy to undermine their way of life. They are acting selfishly­—in the proper, rational sense of the term. That is, they are concerned with their own well-being, which includes being committed to the political system—America’s system—under which human life flourishes. They are pursuing their own long-range interests. They value liberty and do not want to surrender it. They choose to fight because of their allegiance to their own ideals.

When America confronted the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II, those who voluntarily enlisted—and military service should only be voluntary—were not sacrificing. They went to battle in the name of their personal values. They refused to allow even the possibility of their having to live under some form of tyranny.

By contrast, when our soldiers are deployed on so-called humanitarian missions, they are sacrificing. When they are sent to intervene in some distant tribal conflict, a conflict that has no bearing on their own freedom, they are being treated unjustly by our political leaders. That is, they are being made to act selflessly.

In today’s world, it is plainly in our soldiers’ interest to combat the threat posed by Islamic jihadists. This is a battle not to protect other countries—but to protect America. It is a mission not of altruism but of self-interest, which is its only moral justification.

Our nation was founded on the tenet of individualism—the tenet that the citizen is not an object to be sacrificed and disposed of by the state, but a sovereign being with the inalienable right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness. So let us praise the legitimate efforts of our troops, and let us memorialize those who have died in the effort to preserve America’s founding principle. And the best memorial we can offer them is to stop calling their actions a sacrifice—and to insist that whenever our soldiers are asked to fight, it is for the selfish purpose of defending their freedom.

College students have been booing commencement speakers who dare to mention artificial intelligence. The boos were heard at the University of Central Florida, when Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, called AI “the next Industrial Revolution.” And at the University of Arizona, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned “the architects of artificial intelligence,” last year’s Time people of the year. And also at Middle Tennessee State University, when Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record executive, told graduates that AI is “rewriting the production process.” Boos, audible enough to be captured on video.

Those videos spread quickly on social media. The posts first cited the fact of the booing, which is undeniable. As that fact spread, others drew conclusions. NBC News reported that the term artificial intelligence proved “wildly unpopular” because it was “striking a sore spot.” The Wall Street Journal cited the boos as evidence that “The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam.” Fox News said the boos against Schmidt represented grads letting Schmidt know “exactly what they thought of AI.”

Watching the clips, and then the reactions, and then reading stories about the reactions, and then taking in blog-style, big-idea conclusions about what the reactions meant, I felt the internet drawing me toward an interpretation that was supposed to be obvious—that young people loathe AI, and that they hate AI because it and the power brokers who invented, wield, and praise it have stolen from them the last vestige of a future that those brokers had already stolen in large part before they did so by means of AI.

[Read: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing?]

But as a university professor and administrator, I also know that new graduates by and large love AI. The technology has already changed college students forever, I wrote at the start of this academic year. My colleague Lila Shroff and I discussed how AI had broken high school as well. Three years ago, the first year of AI college ended in ruin, as students raced to see what AI could do—and what they could get away with by using it—while professors and universities found themselves ignorant and unprepared. Even students at small, elite liberal-arts colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar, have found themselves wrestling with AI’s ability to help them cheat their way out of the bespoke, high-touch, and expensive education that made attending a small college appealing.

The public seems to want these boos to mean something definitive and specific—the way an AI chatbot is supposed to provide a certain answer, right or wrong. To me, the booing sounds more like a cosmic howl.

Artificial intelligence exposed the wicked problems in higher education that long predated AI: bureaucratic universities, transactional students, overburdened faculty, risk-averse administrators, and a culture obsessed with achievement. From up close, the crisis was never a single failure but an accumulation of compromises. Students gamed the rules. Professors cut corners. Administrators chased mandates and opportunities. All of them were responding rationally to institutions that rewarded ambition, efficiency, and advancement over learning itself.

I thought of this knotty mess when I watched the clip of Borchetta, the record-label CEO, getting heckled at Middle Tennessee State University. “Deal with it,” Borchetta said after the boos began. “It’s a tool,” he said of AI. “Make it work for you.” Borchetta had given $15 million to name the university’s college of media and entertainment, making him one of the types of people whose wealth and influence now drives academic policy.

Watched in isolation, the clip suggests a tidy story. A rich guy who got his sneers at students whose theirs he now threatens to automate away, while also lecturing those very same students that they better accept this future as both inevitable and desirable. Borchetta’s label, Big Machine Records, signed a young Taylor Swift in 2005, an accomplishment that later devolved into a spectacle of creative credit, ownership, and control after Big Machine sold her masters to Scooter Braun. How much more symbolism does one require to cast AI as bad news, and people such as Borchetta as evil overlords for wielding it with so little thought?

But listening to Borchetta’s entire speech—which I had to scroll past a Google AI overview of the controversy it supposedly summarized to find—I felt as if I were visiting an alternate universe. Borchetta told, in brief, the story of Napster, whose 1999 appearance caused record executives to “lose their minds.” They saw only the threat, and for that reason, Borchetta said, they could not see the future—which was music streaming. And that future was not great for recording artists. Record executives like him, and the artists he distributed, went from wholesaling albums for $12 or so to “literally chasing fractions of pennies around the world,” he said. Borchetta presented streaming as a foreign invader that was unwelcome but too powerful to defeat.

Whether Borchetta deserves praise for how he navigated this situation is debatable. In addition to signing Swift and growing acts such as Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts, Borchetta’s Big Machine also embraced digital marketing—including on Myspace—earlier than other labels, making him seem prescient. But the Swift dispute, which arose in 2019, during the $330 million sale of Big Machine, also made Borchetta seem like an executive who put his own interests ahead of the artists he also claimed to champion.

A conflict between an artist and a record label is not a new story (Prince versus Warner, George Michael versus Sony, and the Beatles versus Capitol are but a few precedents). But the Swift-Borchetta dispute took place at a moment of ambiguous and massive cultural change, when “creators” began overtaking artists as the owners and operators of their own work and catalog. And part of the change was the emergence of artists who advertised themselves as executives, which is exactly how Swift came out of the fiasco—as a billionaire who found the balance between label power and individual power.

“What will be the stories we tell from this turbulent moment in time?” Borchetta asked his audience. He leaned on commencement-safe aphorisms such as There is no limit to what you can do to encourage the graduates before him. He told them to “be fearless.” He urged them not to let the entertainment industry convince them that “there are no seats left at the table.”

It is always easy for a wealthy and successful person to present their own success as deliberate and replicable rather than accidental, and Borchetta certainly delivered that message. But on the whole, over the 15 minutes he spoke, Borchetta did the job he was assigned. He encouraged graduates to believe in themselves, to chase their dreams. The line that “AI is rewriting production” came at the end of this message, as the latest in a line of changes that had included streaming and social media as prior examples. When the time for the boos came, Borchetta’s unrehearsed response, “Deal with it,” seemed like a concurrence with the student view rather than a rebuke of it.

I wasn’t in the room, and I can’t speak to the intentions of the students who booed. But they may have been expressing dissatisfaction less against AI in particular than against the complex problem of how to be a creative person in the second quarter of the 21st century. “Then do something about it,” Borchetta finally said to the AI boos. In context, Borchetta was not a clueless AI booster hawking the tech to college graduates who can’t stand it. “Invest in the skill and the art of creation,” he said in conclusion. “AI is not going to change that.”

After watching the actual speech, rather than the clip extracted from it and posted to TikTok or broadcast on cable news, I felt a tug of discomfort. This pang has become familiar as I’ve thought, written, and lived in this new era of AI: that the harm the technology is accused of bringing about—a slurry of automated thought and expression built of approximated, statistical sentiment rather than considered, individual judgment—motivates AI detractors as much as proponents. That “AI thinking” is now all thinking, and that it amounts to not thinking much at all.

The whole notion of opposition to or support of AI has started to seem irrelevant. A host of conditions—among them handheld computers and social media, cable news and supermarket tabloids, technological opportunism and historical ignorance—produced a situation in which “The Class of 2026 Hates AI” emerged as a convenient headline, one compatible with the social-media music-discovery process that Borchetta accurately explained.  

[Read: The AI backlash could get very ugly]

And, you know, maybe the class of 2026 does hate AI. Surveys suggest that it is widely unpopular in the United States, and for good reason. AI is not yet responsible for the wholesale collapse of the job market, but companies have certainly used AI as an excuse to cut jobs or not fill new ones. The entry-level-job market is worse than it’s been in almost four decades, and those are the opportunities that today’s graduates were promised when they were coaxed to strive toward the accomplishments that got them into college in the first place.

Whatever pressure AI is exerting on opportunity seems doomed to make students even more focused on aspiration and success. That pressure will only worsen the state of affairs in colleges and universities, which are also beset by the financial chaos of the second Trump administration, a cascade that may threaten the very idea of American college life. The boos don’t mean nothing, but they probably don’t mean something easily summarized, either.

So an easy answer is: Just blame AI anyway. If the same forces of power and control that turned Napster into Spotify, and Google into Gemini, would stop turning the screws yet again, and even more tightly, on the torture machine that has been constricting us for years and decades, then we would be free. I suppose that is true, but it is also a fantasy. And the future is built not from a fantasy but from the present, and the present is given to us in its current form.

This is different from saying AI is here, so deal with it. In the ideal version of the college classrooms of 2026, a topic such as this would be given the time, space, and attention to unfold slowly, deliberately, and systematically. “It’s complicated!” the ideal version of a professor like me would say, and the student would want to learn more, and would exit the classroom and cross the quad talking about it, and would come to office hours and write a thoughtful paper and be inspired to pursue a calling or invent an idea or just reverberate inside the complexity of the question, and by extension the complexity of most questions, or most good ones, anyway. I wonder if such a future can still exist for college students (or professors, or writers), or if it has already been abandoned. I worry that this time, the answer is a simple one.