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But the report fails to identify the cause of the rising censorship and public mistrust, and Yale’s special role in it: the intellectual assault on Western civilization. That academic attack, or “deconstruction,” is aimed at undermining the central commitments of Western civilization, including the pursuit of truth. And it has been going on at Yale and other universities since the 1980s, and arguably longer.

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She described her own son’s curiosity about Andrew Tate, which he had discussed with her Republican father, as “scary.” She said, “We’re working on legislation to hold tech companies accountable, to really provide all the best-in-class resources and support for youth so that they don’t go down this rabbit hole of very, very dangerous and limiting narratives around ultimately what it means to be girl and what it means to be a boy.”

There are good reasons to be concerned about the impact of social media on young people, but Siebel Newsom, despite her attempt not to be political, made clear her problem was with boys “moving to the right,” which is a very different concern from the ones being raised by Jonathan Haidt and others about the impact of social media on childhood.

And Siebel Newsom’s remarks come in the context of efforts by her husband to control and even censor information. In 2023, Newsom announced a state initiative for citizens to report disfavored speech (non-criminal “hate incidents”) they see online.

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But the Strait of Hormuz was a catastrophe waiting to happen. A few years from now, people will look back on this moment and find it incredible that the world allowed the global economy to be dependent on moving so much oil and natural gas through such a dangerous bottleneck.

Part of the solution is for the world to reduce its dependence on Persian Gulf oil and gas. That will require expanding production outside the Persian Gulf. Another part is to help Persian Gulf nations move more of their oil and gas through new or expanded pipelines to the Red Sea and perhaps even the Mediterranean. The faster the world builds those alternatives, the less leverage Iran retains.

Many believe that the United States must not allow Iran to control the Strait under any circumstances, and the instinct to fight for Hormuz is understandable. It has been a central artery of global energy for over half a century.

But instead of fighting to reopen the Strait, the world should build around it. The infrastructure to do so already exists in embryonic form. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, built during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, carries crude 750 miles across the kingdom from the Gulf coast to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, with a design capacity of 7 million barrels per day. The UAE’s Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline runs to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing the Strait entirely. And Iraq’s Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline connects to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.

Gulf states are already exploring a broader network of pipelines, railways, and roads, including the U.S.-backed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), that would create multiple export routes to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, which have no bypass pipelines at all, should build routes through Saudi Arabia or Iraq, argued The National, a UAE newspaper. And Japan, South Korea, and India should, the paper argued, invest alongside Gulf sovereign wealth funds.

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But dozens of oil and gas traders, executives, and shippers say that neither small individual nor large institutional investors have grasped the severity of the situation. “Investors believe that the Strait will be opened and Trump will prevail,” said the Carlyle Group’s Jeff Currie in a recent conversation with energy analyst Amrita Sen, “even though nobody’s articulated a plan of how they’re going to open it.”

The Strait of Hormuz normally carries about 20 million barrels per day, roughly a fifth of all the oil the world consumes. Iran can use cheap drones, floating mines, and missiles sent from long distances to attack oil tankers that defy its effective blockade.

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If governments would simply clear the regulatory obstacles to building solar farms, wind turbines, and transmission lines, the abundance argument goes, clean energy would flow so abundantly that fossil fuel dependence would become a choice rather than a necessity. “The miracles of solar and wind and battery power,” Klein told the Long Now Foundation, “have given us the only shot we have to avoid catastrophic climate change.”

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In a small village in the Punjab, a girl of about eight years old crouches over a clay stove, feeding it patties of dried cow dung. Smoke billows into her face. She coughs while feeding the fire. There is no reliable electricity. When the family gets a little extra money, they buy liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which burns cleanly, as natural gas does in stoves in the wealthy West. Unfortunately, that LPG just got priced out of reach for hundreds of millions like her.

The 2026 Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz were the triggers for the current energy crisis, but the underlying cause is the chronic underinvestment and underdevelopment of oil and gas resources by poor, developing, and rich nations alike over the last ten years. Policymakers diverted that money into green energy, which failed to prevent the crisis.

Zion Lights, the author of an essential new book, Energy Is Life, watched the above scene during a visit to her parents’ ancestral village in India. Her parents had emigrated to Birmingham, England, in the late 1960s and 1970s to work in factories. The factories gave them wages, dignity, and a foothold in the developed world. The family they left behind in the Punjab remained trapped in a poverty so total that it touched everything: health, education, opportunity, lifespan. At the root of it all is the lack of energy.

The energy crisis will hurt poor people in poor nations far more than anyone in the U.S. or the rest of the West. Asian countries receive 80 percent of their energy supply through the Strait of Hormuz. For Bangladesh, which sources 72 percent of its LNG from Qatar and the UAE, the supply disruption translates to an extra $760 to $830 million in monthly import costs.

“All poverty is energy poverty, when you think about it,” Lights said in our new podcast. “They’re living in 40-degree Celsius heat. No air conditioning. You can give them an air conditioner, you can give them money for an air conditioner, but how’s it going to work if you don’t have the electricity?”

It would be unfair to entirely blame the lack of oil and gas supplies on Western climate policy. Beyond the Iran war, governance failures, corruption, conflict, and infrastructure decay all play important roles. India’s power sector dysfunction predates any climate agreement. Pakistan’s circular debt crisis has roots in decades of mismanagement and subsidy distortions. Sub-Saharan Africa’s electricity deficit reflects bad governance, underinvestment, and the difficulty of building transmission infrastructure across vast, sparsely populated territories.

But climate policy has been the dominant priority in wealthy nations’ engagement with the developing world for two decades, and Western green NGOs have even blocked the construction of hydroelectric dams, which tend to be the first reliable source of power that poor nations develop as they rise the development ladder.

Beginning in the early 2010s and accelerating sharply after the 2015 Paris Agreement, Western development banks, private financial institutions, and national governments began systematically restricting financing for oil, gas, and coal projects in the developing world. The stated rationale was climate change. The practical effect was to deny poor countries the energy infrastructure that every wealthy nation used to climb out of poverty.

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But nobody goes to war over solar panels for the same reason nobody goes to war over candles: they cannot power the things that economies, civilizations, and wars run on. A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds. That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations not superiority.

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But California’s $5.86-per-gallon gasoline price exceeds the national average of $3.95 by nearly two dollars because Newsom has systematically dismantled the state’s energy supply infrastructure. Washington and Hawaii, the next most expensive, trail California by more than a dollar. Texas drivers pay $2.70. while leaving demand largely intact. California imports roughly 63% of its crude oil from foreign countries, despite having at least 1.7 billion barrels of proven reserves. Its oil production fell by more than 75%, from over 1 million barrels per day in the 1980s to 246,000 barrels per day at the end of 2025.

California made itself into an energy island, isolated from the continent’s abundant oil and natural gas resources by regulatory choice rather than geographic necessity. Where California used to be one of America’s largest oil producers, most of the state’s crude now arrives by sea. “Because Gulf Coast refiners can access domestic crude through pipelines,” notes Robert Rapier, “Persian Gulf barrels are not evenly spread across the country. A disproportionate share of those Saudi and Iraqi imports ends up in PADD 5, the West Coast refining district, precisely because California lacks pipeline access to Permian supply.” And California’s refineries aren’t set up to refine domestic crude but rather foreign imports.

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But their track record tells a different story. In February 2024, Google’s Gemini AI generated images of America’s Founding Fathers as black men and women, depicted racially diverse Nazi soldiers, and created images of a female Pope and Asian Vikings. When users asked Gemini to create images of white people, it refused. The system had been programmed to inject diversity language into prompts, so that a request for a picture of a German soldier in 1943 would produce, as NPR reported, images of nonwhite people in Nazi uniforms.

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And yet the apocalypse described in these warnings bears little resemblance to the one revealed by the data. In 2024, approximately 16,753 people died from natural disasters globally, well below the twenty-year average of 65,566, continuing a long-term decline of roughly 90 percent over the past century. U.S. crop yields set records in 2024. Rockström’s planetary boundaries lack any objective biophysical threshold and instead reflect subjective political judgments about how much of nature humans should use. A NASA-funded study found that between 25 and 50 percent of the world’s vegetated area has grown greener over the past four decades, with CO2 fertilization accounting for approximately 70 percent of the greening. Global warming projections have fallen from 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2015 to 2.6 degrees.

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Tyler Robinson confessed to killing Kirk in a text message and a note to his trans-identified romantic partner. His defense team may now be able to use Kent’s allegations that the government is suppressing evidence and did not do a proper investigation to their advantage.

Kent said he knew that he might be called as a witness before he made his statements that a “foreign nexus” may have been involved in Kirk’s assassination. “I was definitely warned of that over and over again,” said Kent. “If I end up having to play that role, then I’ll do it. It’s not something I’m seeking.”

When pressed that his testimony could help the Robinson defense, Kent said, “Then, honestly, so be it. If it gets us to the truth… That’s obviously the risk I’m taking.”

Neither Robinson’s attorneys nor the prosecuting attorney responded to requests for comment from Public.

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It’s probably the right conclusion. The evidence for foreign interference in U.S. elections was always thin, the response to it was wildly disproportionate, and the infrastructure built to “counter” it did far more damage to American democracy than the interference itself ever did. As I testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023, and again in November 2023, the “foreign interference” narrative became the predicate for a domestic censorship operation of extraordinary scope, one that Alex Gutentag and I have spent three years documenting at Public, and which we named the Censorship Industrial Complex. Removing the topic from the threat assessment is a long-overdue correction. Gabbard should have said so plainly and directly.

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But the underlying reason for this crisis is a lack of LNG plants. We didn’t need more natural gas infrastructure, said the media, Democrats, and climate advocates, over the last 15 years. Every new LNG terminal was, they said, a “climate bomb.” Groups including Reclaim Finance, Rainforest Action Network, Bill McKibben’s 350.org, and Greenpeace waged a coordinated campaign to cut off financing for LNG terminals. They staged die-ins outside Bank of America. They cut up credit cards at Chase branches. They captured $130 trillion into the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. They published annual scorecards shaming any bank that lent to LNG developers. The divestment movement boasted that $39.2 trillion in capital had been “blocked” from fossil fuels. The groups succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Biden paused new LNG export approvals in January 2024 under direct pressure from climate groups. Investors have underinvested in LNG ever since.

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Where solar produces power roughly 25% of the time, and wind 25 to 35%, often unpredictably, the US nuclear fleet operates for over 90% of the time. This is essential, notes analyst Madi Hilly with Radiant Energy Group, in a new podcast with Emmet Penney at the Foundation for American Innovation, because “data centers must remain online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of the season and regardless of market conditions.”

And yet many Democrats, progressives, and others on the Left are working to block data centers, as well as new nuclear. Anti-nuclear groups shut down Indian Point nuclear plant north of New York City and are now resisting its rebuild, notes Hilly. Senator Bernie Sanders, who helped shut down a critically important Vermont nuclear plant, has called for a national moratorium on data center construction. Democrats in Prince George’s County in Maryland paused all data center development amid intense local opposition. As a result, a new analysis estimates that 30 to 50% of data center capacity expected today may not arrive on schedule.

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The announcement comes after decades in which government agencies said they were no longer studying the phenomenon.

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