When 18-year-old student Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, a horrific local crime quickly escalated to international headlines due to a catastrophic law enforcement failure. Spurred by Digwa’s false accusation of racism, responding officers immediately handcuffed the mortally wounded teenager, even as he told them nine times that he could not breathe, and four times that he had been stabbed. That Nowak was arrested and treated as a criminal while taking his final breaths has shocked and appalled the United Kingdom.

Body-camera footage of his harrowing final minutes also caught the attention of the U.S. government. The State Department warned on X that “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline that must be rejected across the West.”

Two-tier policing refers to the public perception that British law enforcement operates under a double standard—treating suspects, victims, and protesters differently based on race, religion, or political ideology. The roots of this bias lie in the policies established by the College of Policing (the official national body that sets training standards) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which coordinates operational policy across all 44 U.K. police forces. These two bodies introduced the highly controversial and censorious “Non-Crime Hate Incidents,” which legally requires British officers to log and investigate citizens for lawful speech if anyone perceives it as motivated by hostility—even when no actual crime has been committed. 

In May 2022, in the aftermath of the global George Floyd protests, the College of Policing and the NPCC launched the Race Action Plan, explicitly designed to embed anti-racist training across the entire justice system. The plan’s 2025 update codified an even more racialized doctrine. Official guidance now states that a commitment to racial equity “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind.’” By abandoning equality before the law, the policy instructs British police to treat individuals differently based on their race in an attempt to engineer equal outcomes. With law enforcement having absorbed this radical ideology, officers have become selective enforcers of justice, failing to intervene for fear of being labeled racist.

This is not a fringe theory. A new survey by the research group More in Common found that one-third of Britons now believe police actively favor ethnic minorities over white people. The chronic mishandling of the Nowak case provides further evidence of a system that despises the majority of its own citizens.

Governed by an anti-racism doctrine, British institutions have traded the safety of their citizens for wokeness. The fatal cost of this ideological capture was laid bare in 2023 when Valdo Calocane slaughtered three people in Nottingham. He should not have been free. Psychiatric professionals had repeatedly refused to section the psychotically violent Calocane, citing concerns about the “disproportionate overrepresentation of young black males in detention.” Captive to the progressive view that any statistical disparity constitutes systemic racism, authorities left a violent, psychotic man on the streets rather than risk accusations of racism. 

Tragically, this stigma also contributed to the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017 following a concert by Ariana Grande. Kyle Lawler, an on-duty security guard, witnessed the bomber, Salman Abedi, acting suspiciously with a heavy backpack. But Lawler failed to intervene or raise the alarm for fear of being branded a racist. Abedi detonated the device minutes later, killing 22 people—predominantly children and teenagers—and injuring over 1,000.

The Nowak case illustrates the same dynamic. Public criticism from Washington, combined with mounting protests on British streets, prompted pushback from Downing Street. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and senior Labour politicians vehemently rejected the two-tier accusation, stating categorically that they did not recognize the State Department’s characterization of the British justice system, a sentiment echoed by Justice Secretary David Lammy. Starmer condemned the U.S. critiques, and even accused Elon Musk of overstepping diplomatic boundaries and attempting to stoke division on U.K. streets. 

But in 2020, Starmer had no such reservations about commenting on American internal affairs following the death of George Floyd. He publicly urged then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to address systemic racism directly with Donald Trump, openly criticized Trump’s response to Floyd’s death, and famously took a knee in a highly publicized display of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. 

Labour’s attempt at containment was exposed when Vice President JD Vance took to X. Echoing his powerful Munich Security Conference speech, Vance argued: 

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit…. He would still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

Vance’s warning came days after a Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder following a savage knife attack in Belfast, Northern Ireland—reported by the Telegraph as an attempted beheading. The victim, a man in his 40s, remains in serious condition after suffering significant injuries to his eyes, face, and back. Police stated the suspect is believed to have entered the U.K. by traveling from Dublin into Northern Ireland, where he had been granted leave to remain under a five-year visa.

The refusal to stem illegal immigration is a direct result of the policies of both main political parties. During the last six years of Conservative government, 128,000 undocumented migrants entered the country via the English Channel. Since Labour took power in July 2024, more than 70,000 illegal migrants have crossed into the U.K. on small boats. 

Among those Britain is importing are individuals who despise the West and seek to harm its citizens. In the final week of January 2026, a Sudanese illegal migrant was sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murder of Rhiannon Skye Whyte, a hotel worker whom he stabbed 23 times at a railway station. Less than a fortnight later, an Iranian migrant pleaded guilty to sexual assault. In March, an Afghan asylum seeker received a 15-year sentence for the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in a park.

For decades, uncontrolled immigration has been imposed upon the British public under the guise of multiculturalism, driven by successive governments in thrall to the liberal notion that diversity is a strength. This result has been social upheaval, rapid demographic change, and a society fractured into segregated cultural enclaves. Expanding hate speech laws has effectively criminalized questions and complaints, leaving a nation paralyzed by fear and fueled by anger. JD Vance is correct to call this the politics of self-hatred. 

An image from an infrared camera shows Russian soldiers fleeing a burning vehicle as a drone piloted by Lasar's Group closes in. Lasar’s Group/National Guard of Ukraine

Ukrainian drone maker Oleksiy Babenko knows that supercharging his weapons with artificial intelligence opens a Pandora’s box of killer robots. But the chief executive of startup Vyriy sees an even worse choice.

“Either robots will kill us in 50 years, or the Russians will kill us in a year,” he told a recent gathering of AI-arms makers in Kyiv. 

Of all the fields AI is upending, few have deeper ramifications for humanity than its role in warfare. Advanced algorithms have quickly swung from playing a supporting intelligence role to acting as agents of death. 

“Future combat will be largely robotic. It will be automated,” former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, who now invests in military-drone companies, said recently on stage at an expo. “It will be controlled by the laws of war.” 

Schmidt’s robot prediction draws little dispute. Less certain is whether last century’s rules can handle warfare’s future.

The war in Iran and AI advances have driven home the dizzying implications of military automation for Washington—and for civilians everywhere. The White House is racing to hammer out policies while the tech world and moral authorities chime in. The cacophony is yielding more questions than answers. 

Ukrainian drone maker Skyfall runs an attack drill in central Ukraine earlier this month. At the last moment the drone operator calls out, ‘Cancel attack.’ Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

President Trump this month issued an executive order on AI in national security that calls for aggressive use of the technology but requires it to operate “in accordance with applicable laws, government policies, and guidance.” 

The order, which directs the Pentagon to update AI rules adopted only three years ago, sought to bring clarity just as the administration amped up a fight with AI leader Anthropic, whose systems the Pentagon uses. That fight exploded in January over who gets to limit applications of AI in combat and surveillance, and escalated over the weekend. 

“The combination of AI and autonomous weapon systems demands an entirely new approach to risk analysis, risk mitigation, and risk acceptance,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who led the Pentagon’s first big AI application, Project Maven.

Throughout history, innovations including gunpowder, chemical weapons and airplanes have repeatedly rewritten rules of combat. Only the atomic bomb sparked a civilizational dilemma comparable to AI. And as with nuclear weapons, militaries have entered an automation arms race along a path they can’t foresee. 

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, left, in 2020. Office of the Secretary of War Public Affairs

Now, with algorithms controlling not just weapons but entire military networks, humans are ceding wartime judgment to machines on an unprecedented scale. What’s even more worrisome to many: Armed forces are making up the rules as they go along.

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Maven’s Legacy

AI entered combat in 2017, when Shanahan’s team used it to nab ISIS bombers attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. Maven’s success leveraging algorithms to scan reconnaissance images proved AI’s potential. Then efforts went quiet as the U.S. pulled back from foreign wars. 

Around 2023, drone makers supplying Ukrainian forces ramped up development of AI to lock onto targets, while commanders began to weave it into targeting systems. Israel, after the Hamas militant attacks that October, tapped AI to sift through mountains of intelligence. The Pentagon, meanwhile, deployed AI-based systems to streamline decision-making. China and Russia have also incorporated AI into military systems.

Today, AI-guided weapons can autonomously home in on objectives a controller picks. That selection generally happens when weapons approach a target, involving a few drones with limited firepower. 

Soon, though, swarms of drones will independently cross great distances by air, water or land to hunt down and strike targets without human intervention. And targets won’t necessarily be on a battlefield.

Killing isn’t AI’s only military assignment. Its role is ballooning across all the less-visceral chores that militaries tackle, particularly in giving priority to intelligence for selecting targets. U.S. commanders say they are selecting targets at more than 10-fold the tempo in Iraq. In the Ukrainian National Guard’s Khartia Corps, automation has tripled the pace of missions, said its top drone engineer.

Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Drone specialists from Khartia Corps working on recent drone models near Kharkiv, Ukraine, in April. Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

As warfare automation increases, its use is being guided more by battlefield objectives than by codified rules of engagement. At one extreme, Russia is deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilians with both cutting-edge and traditional weapons, seeking to sow terror that no digital regulations will curtail. 

Ukraine, in contrast, lacks resources and wants to maximize each strike’s pain for the Kremlin, meaning collateral damage is often wasteful. For Kyiv, AI can boost efficiency.

At a Ukrainian drone unit called Lasar’s Group, where soldiers hunt high-value Russian targets on AI-enhanced computer images, the new technology is just another tool, said a seasoned pilot who goes by the call sign Sid.

“I understand that I’m setting fire to a vehicle with a crew inside,” said Sid. He isn’t bothered that automatic systems keep targets in his drone’s deadly clutches.

“It’s still a person who presses the button,” he said. “It’s a person who decides whether to activate the system or not.”

That role—dubbed “the person in the loop”—is at the crux of fears about combat automation. Where in the loop is that person? What role do they play? Can they keep pace with computers? 

Technology is advancing so rapidly that even the term itself has morphed into “the person on the loop”—a monitor more than a link in a digital chain.

Concerns over human interactions with AI this year prompted Anthropic to seek explicit Pentagon guarantees that its systems wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons, sparking administration backlash. 

Pentagon officials say fears are misplaced because weapons aren’t fully autonomous—and letting technophobia hamstring commanders’ use of AI poses a bigger risk.

“You always have the human who will analyze the situation” and make battlefield judgments on safety and tactics, said Defense Department Chief Digital and AI Officer Cameron Stanley, at the AI+Expo, a recent technology jamboree in Washington organized by a foundation created by Eric Schmidt. 

“The most dangerous course of action right now is to stand still and to remain in a human-driven world,” Stanley said. “The one thing that I am very worried about in war is trying to minimize mistakes.” 

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Humanity in War

International Committee of the Red Cross legal adviser Noa Schreuer isn’t sold. Standing in the AI expo’s trade-show hall, amid displays from Amazon.com, Meta and Microsoft, she questioned safety precautions for automated weapons.

“Would an autonomous drone abort a mission on its own, for example if a child enters the target area?” she asked.

A dog-like robot outside the International Red Cross Group's booth at the AI+ Expo in Washington in May. DanIEL Michaels/WSJ

Schreuer was staffing the Red Cross stand—the expo’s buzz-kill. Across its mock battle zone spread a big green sign reading “Humanity in War.” On one faux demolished concrete slab hung a poster-sized page from the Geneva Convention, with rules on protecting civilians. On another hung a fake traffic sign for drone operators reading: “Don’t Outsource Your Authority/Maintain human control and judgment.”

Child deaths in AI-age war aren’t an abstract ethical question. Early in U.S. attacks on Iran this year—as Pentagon officials boasted how new technology was letting them identify and hit targets faster than ever before—Iranian authorities accused the U.S. of striking a school, killing more than 160 people, many of them children. The Pentagon is investigating whether U.S. forces hit the school, which sits near an Iranian military compound, and whether AI was involved.

Automated targeting systems have drawn suspicion, and murkiness around their use means they risk getting blamed no matter what happened. If AI systems offered up the school as a target, investigators must understand what went wrong. If targeters didn’t consult their AI tools, which can instantly scan troves of intelligence, questions will focus on why they didn’t—and whether technology could have helped avoid the civilian deaths.

Israel’s use of AI has drawn similar suspicion, when local media in 2024 alleged that the military was using automated systems to select targets with minimal human oversight and in violation of existing international law, killing large numbers of civilians. The military denied the allegations and issued a detailed defense, saying the systems, code-named Lavender and The Gospel, “are merely tools” for intelligence.

They “do not replace the intelligence analyst,” the Israeli military said. 

But even if AI doesn’t supplant intelligence analysts, can it influence them, or soldiers and commanders? 

That question vexes former Royal Netherlands Air Force Apache attack helicopter pilot Roy Lindelauf, who is now a professor of data science in the department of intelligent systems of Tilburg University. Working from a converted 19th century Dutch locomotive-assembly hall, he and colleagues are trying to mesh this century’s technology with military thinking from the last one. 

“There are so many levels to decision-making,” and how AI figures into them isn’t well understood, said Lindelauf, who also teaches at the Netherlands Defense Academy. 

One concern: People tend to trust what computers tell them, a phenomenon known as automation bias that is being reinforced by lifelike and apparently authoritative digital interfaces. “Even if AI is only a tool, how the human mind works should be taken into account to address biases,” he said. 

In other words, while we think we’re controlling AI, it may actually be controlling us. 

Ukrainian drone maker Skyfall tests their AI-powered drone by aiming for a mannequin target in central Ukraine earlier this month. Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Skyfall pilots demonstrating their drones’ capabilities. Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Designing responsible AI was the focus of a report former Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof launched at the U.N. General Assembly in September. The Netherlands in 1899 hosted a watershed conference, on Laws and Customs of War on Land, that laid the foundation for modern laws of war.

How AI fits into those aging rules puzzles commanders. Estonian defense adviser Eva Sula works with military leaders across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who pepper her with questions nobody can answer. A common one: If I make a mistake because of AI, who is responsible?

“A war crime in the digital space? No country can prosecute it,” said Sula. “They don’t have the laws.”

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Human and Machine

For now, many practitioners are improvising. 

Ukraine accepts battlefield risks linked to AI because “the ethical framework is just now being developed,” said Danylo Tsvok, chief executive of the Defense Ministry’s AI warfare center, A1.

Ukraine’s fighters are learning automation’s limits amid combat’s unpredictability, said a serviceman who is part of a team developing AI tools to analyze reconnaissance more quickly. AI can’t yet respond to unconventional situations, he said, and for now “waging war is an art—intuition.”

Stanley, the Pentagon digital and AI officer, said he wants to account for the mistakes that humans and machines can each make alone: “What I am trying to implement is the best human-machine team possible.”

But AI experts foresee surging capabilities and are worried. Pope Leo recently issued an encyclical on AI that built on the work last September of a panel of Nobel laureates, tech specialists and other luminaries the Vatican had assembled. They offered principles and red lines, including a plea that “AI systems must never be allowed to make life-or-death decisions, especially in military applications.” 

Illuminated drones light the sky during the 'Grace For The World' concert in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Stefano Spaziani/ZUMA Press

The conclave was part of a bigger Vatican event that concluded with a free concert in St. Peter’s Square and a light-show of more than 3,000 drones in the night sky.

Panel member Marco Trombetti, chief executive of AI-translation company Translated, said the group’s 18 members agreed that “if these things get used for war, they cannot be stopped.” 

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Appeared in the June 20, 2026, print edition as 'AI Warfare Is at the Point of No Return. What Now? AI Warfare Opens a Pandora’s Box on the Battlefield'.

By

Christopher Mims

Startup Material Hybrid Manufacturing is working to 3-D-print batteries inside SkyRaider drones. Joe Ailinger

There’s a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight: The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device. This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots.

The way the world manufactures batteries has changed hardly at all in 30 years. Almost all the innovations we regularly hear about—from cheaper, tougher electric-vehicle batteries to “Holy Grail” solid-state batteries—are about changing the chemistry of batteries.

The promise of battery-tech 3-D printing (aka additive manufacturing) is simple: What if batteries could fill any available space, even structural elements of our gadgets, rather than always taking a rigid shape like a pouch or cylinder?

The new approach has obvious appeal. The entire airframe of a drone could be filled with energy storage for increased range. Smartglasses could have sleek battery-packed frames, so they look like everyday eyewear rather than “Revenge of the Nerds” props.

One of the biggest advantages of 3-D printing is that it works with any battery, regardless of its cell chemistry. It could advance today’s lithium-ion as well as emerging sodium-ion and solid-state tech.

A 3-D-printed battery component made from simulated moon dust and astronaut waste. ESTRELLA/The University of Texas at El Paso

In 2025, researchers published around 25,000 papers about 3-D printing of batteries and their components, yet only a handful of startups have even proposed commercializing the technology.

Attempting to beat existing battery giants has doomed many a company to the graveyard. New battery tech must compete on lifespan, durability, energy density, safety and cost—which is dependent on massive scale.

Some are trying to use 3-D printing to create efficiencies in existing battery manufacturing systems. A brave handful of startups are pursuing radical new designs and approaches. They’re starting with defense applications, where cost and scale are less of an issue.

The airspace less traveled

Gabe Elias, chief executive of Miami-based 3-D-printed battery startup Material Hybrid Manufacturing, was an engineer on the Mercedes-AMG Formula One team for six years. During that period, the team won several championships led by driver Lewis Hamilton.

Elias was tasked with figuring out how to squeeze batteries into small and unlikely places—including directly under Hamilton’s seat. He couldn’t do it with existing tech. Years later, he was introduced to Christopher Reyes, who developed a battery printing tech for his doctoral thesis at Duke University, and the two founded the company.

Material's custom-built, hybrid 3-D-printing machine for making batteries. MATERIAL

Material has already 3-D-printed test battery cells in the lab, using a variety of ingredients, to prove the tech works with different chemistries. “Our approach is, instead of innovating on the chemistry side of things, let’s innovate on the way that the batteries are made,” says Elias. “Chemistry innovation is happening all across the industry.” 

Material recently announced a $7.1 million seed investment round and a $1.25 million contract with the U.S. Air Force.

By the end of August, the company plans to hit the next milestone in its Air Force contract by creating prototype batteries for Teledyne Flir’s SkyRaider drone. The drone maker could only cram in four packs of conventional lithium-ion batteries. By printing the batteries into the same space, Elias says the drone could get a 35% increase in energy storage.

A better process

At Silicon Valley-based Sakuu, the approach is more conservative than Material’s, but has the potential to show up in commercial batteries much sooner. Rather than trying to 3-D-print whole batteries, the company is working on replacing one of battery manufacturing’s biggest pain points, says Arwed Niestroj, Sakuu’s chief operating officer, who is also a nuclear physicist and former head of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America.

Sakuu is developing a dry process for manufacturing electrodes intended to replace a costly industry-standard system. Sakuu

Existing battery assembly lines include football-field-long ovens for drying layers of material that have been dissolved in solvents. This requires a huge amount of energy and is a significant contributor to manufacturing costs, a big reason EV batteries aren’t cheaper.

Sakuu’s process, under development for years, uses additive manufacturing to lay down key battery components without solvents, eliminating the need for ovens, says Niestroj.

Sakuu is currently working to commercialize this tech with a major battery manufacturer—Niestroj didn’t say who, or when those cells would go on the market. Previously, Sakuu said it had a joint development partnership with Korean battery giant SK On to bring this system to market.

Radical designs

The world is full of battery designs that can make traditional lithium-ion look like the D cells in a 1980s boombox. But most are stuck at the laboratory stage.

Alexis Maurel, a researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, has published fundamental research on this topic. In support of NASA’s push to return to the moon, he proposed a radical technique using lunar regolith—literally, moon dust—to print batteries for future moon bases.

Maurel says it typically takes about 20 years from the conception of a new battery technology to its commercialization. He’s already been at it for 10. But he’s excited by what’s to come: A number of auto manufacturers are hard at work on “structural” batteries, which means the battery pack itself helps hold the vehicle together.

Cylinders within the Wright Electric aluminum-air batteries, which achieve many times the energy storage capacity of traditional lithium-ion. Ben Hertzberg

For Malta, N.Y.-based Wright Electric, 3-D printing was key to enabling the manufacturing of an exotic battery type known as aluminum-air.

Aluminum-air batteries have off-the-charts storage capacity but can’t be recharged. They’re useful for remote military applications, where soldiers can use them to recharge an ever-growing array of electronic devices. (Used packs are either tossed or returned to base to be remanufactured.)

Wright Electric CEO Jeff Engler says his company, like Material, focuses on the military as the best customer for the expensive, still-nascent “ultra high-performance” 3-D-printed batteries.

The drone-centric wars popping up all over mean a need for more lightweight craft like those already in use in Russia, Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz, says Engler. At the same time, militaries are also seeking ways to maximize space and minimize weight in larger aircraft, he adds.

Long before our consumer gadgets are built with fully customized energy-storing materials, 3-D-printed batteries will evolve in one of history’s most reliable tech incubators: the military.

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Although the results are not yet fully in, it seems likely that Janeese Lewis George will be the next mayor of Washington, D.C. With 65 percent of votes counted as of this writing, Lewis George leads fellow city council member Kenyan McDuffie by 16 percentage points; she may even clear the 50 percent threshold required to avoid a run-off. That’s a decisive conclusion for a race that pitted the more moderate McDuffie against Lewis George, an endorsee and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). If the down-ballot results hold up, last night looks to have been a route for the Left in general, and the DSA in particular.

Assuming she wins, that will make Lewis George yet another DSA member running an important American city. She’ll be added to the list with not just New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, but also Seattle mayor Katie Wilson. There are other aspirants, including most notably council member Nithya Raman, the DSA member who unexpected bested reality star and right-wing insurgent Spencer Pratt to take second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. (Raman is unlikely to beat incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the run-off, although the betting markets give her better odds than they gave Pratt.)

These new, openly socialist mayors have a certain allure to more traditional Democrats. With their party’s popularity in the pits, and its leaders increasingly aged, more moderate Dems see the obvious appeal to the hot new force in local politics. The DSA electeds also form their coalition from politically activated Americans under 50—a must-win group among Democrats, but also one increasingly dissatisfied with the party. The fact that some of these mayors have at least nominally leaned into pro-housing YIMBYism makes it all the easier for some on the “abundance” center-left to wonder if they’re better aligned with the socialist than they are with the establishment.

That’s all understandable. But the DSA’s electoral success should not be confused for policy success—much like the establishment Dems they replace, the DSA mayors are confusing class warfare for actual solutions to the affordability crisis. And in embracing them, mainstream Democrats also risk welcoming in an organization that has quietly grown disturbingly radical, a fact that could prove politically disastrous in the long run.

The wave of DSA mayoral candidates—and local candidates more generally—is the product of careful planning. It in part reflects Mamdani’s upset victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, which proved that a socialist could win a mayoralty in a city as significant as New York. But it is also the result of a concerted effort on the part of the DSA to establish itself as a separate power center in blue-city politics.

For example, as Michael Lange wrote recently, the New York City DSA has moved to muscle out the city’s unions, embodied in the Working Families Party. That looks like the current primary in New York’s seventh congressional district, which features WFP-backed Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a fight for his political life against DSA-backed insurgent Clare Valdez. Mamdani is consciously building his “machine,” New York Magazine’s David Friedlander writes—a machine that includes his “Office of Mass Engagement,” an officially sanctioned activist wing of City Hall.

The DSA’s strategy is built on a distinct electorate. Traditional Democrats—like Bass, Cuomo, McDuffie, and Bruce Harrell, whom Wilson defeated in Seattle—tend to rely on the backing of the institutional Democratic machine to turn out votes. That machine, in turn, often relies on working-class voters activated by unions and by the party’s infrastructure.

The DSA generally has no access to the latter, and is not necessarily influential in the former, though some unions are increasingly divided between traditional and socialist factions. What it has instead is a cohort of thousands of ideologically committed young(ish) adults, willing to knock on doors to get out the vote for its candidates.

DSA candidates’ priorities are often shaped by the concerns of these constituents. Mamdani’s affordability messaging, as Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam has argued, was tailored to the concerns of credentialed but downwardly mobile Millennials—people who feel the city is too expensive to afford them the kind of life they expected. Wilson, Lewis George, and Raman have similarly emphasized housing affordability. At the same time, many of these candidates tell a consistent story about why costs are too high: greed on the part of their cities’ ultra-wealthy, who are unwilling to pay their fair share, and of whom punitive taxation is therefore appropriate.

In spite of this, the DSA’s willingness to seize on the affordability narrative—especially on housing—has made them appealing to the pro-housing “abundance” wing of the Democratic Party. That’s helped by DSA electeds’ and candidates’ willingness to endorse moderate reforms to permitting and other minor barriers to housing—as, for example, in Raman’s platform or Mamdani’s SPEED reforms. Against the sclerosis of the Democratic establishment, an apparent bias for action may make the DSA appealing to more moderate Democrats eager for change.

To be sure, concessions on permitting reform are welcome, no matter whom they come from. But the high cost of living in America’s major metros are not simply the result of minor procedural hurdles, but of a more comprehensive opposition to allowing the market to supply what is demanded. And the DSA’s open hostility toward the people who do the supplying is incompatible with actually existing abundance.

This hostility manifests itself in policy. Mamdani’s administration has worked to seize property from landlords while pushing the city’s business community out. Lewis George has promised to strengthen D.C.’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which gives tenants the right of first refusal to purchase—and which has helped cripple the city’s housing market. Wilson has dismissed millionaires fleeing Seattle—even as they are taking with them the tax base needed to sustain her promised expansion of government—and “abundant” construction using union-built social housing. Raman has taken meaningful steps toward reform, like pushing to fix Measure ULA, but she also emphasizes the need for new housing to be built by “well-paid union labor”—a dogwhistle for preserving prevailing wage standards.

This ideological posturing can have real economic consequences. Permitting reform can only get you so far if investment dries up and no one wants to build for fear that their property will be seized in a questionably constitutional taking. Cities are subject to exit-based vetoes—scaring off talent and capital risks killing the golden goose.

Even if they weren’t so explicitly appropriative, these mayors would still be hemmed in by their unwillingness to target ideologically inconvenient cost drivers. As my colleague Eric Kober has written, Mamdani’s housing aspirations are limited by his unwillingness to attack destructive policies like Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the requirement that “a sizable percentage of units in new buildings in rezoned areas be offered at below-market rents.” Raman and Wilson’s nods to union-built housing similarly indicate that they still feel beholden to organized labor—a major driver of housing costs.

At its best, DSA YIMBYism gives with one hand while taking with the other. That’s a political strategy that’s palatable to their voters, but it’s not one that gets at the root causes of our affordability crisis, which is government’s comprehensive chokehold on the private sector.

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But the biggest question about the rise of the DSA mayors is not so much their approach to policy as it is the organization with which they are aligned. In 2020, many moderate Democrats found themselves in rooms with true radicals—people who had for years pushed police and prison abolition, and who took the opportunity to advance their goals when the time came. Making bedfellows with the DSA today runs the risk of the same dynamic emerging in the Democratic party tomorrow.

To be sure, Mamdani has tried to present a more moderate image in office. But other DSA electeds are not so circumspect. As my colleague Stu Smith has reported, DSA members in other local positions have been quite open in their willingness to use public office to advance their political interests, including rerouting public funds to activist-led “mutual aid” efforts and picking fights with Democrats to their right.

Meanwhile, the national DSA—the group with which all these mayors are ultimately affiliated—has veered further and further into extremism. As Smith has reported, the DSA just passed a platform that calls for abolishing the Department of War and “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state” among other policy initiatives. It has also begun building a “self-defense” wing in part charged with preparing for a “national uprising,” and put a pro-political violence self-identified Maoist on the committee in charge of that effort. And it’s increasingly found common cause with groups likely funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and worked to advance the interests of the regime in Cuba.

Not every member of the DSA endorses these priorities, of course. But that supporters of political violence and sympathists for hostile foreign powers hold sway in the DSA’s institutional infrastructure is a reason to ask: are these really the sort of people to get in bed with?

One of the worst habits of the respectable liberal is to see in the far-left ideologue something admirable, however disagreeable. The center-left’s flirtation with DSA politics is not new; it is a repetition of an age-old pattern in American political life. Historically, Democrats embrace of radical Leftism has ended not in bold change, but electoral tears. But maybe this time will be different.

No surprise, Sunday’s article about 10 possible fixes for American healthcare sparked lots of reader suggestions, from minor to radical. I may run a second list with your ideas (or host a chat to discuss the issue).

But I was struck by how many of you pushed one seemingly simple change: requiring open pricing for medical procedures, services, and drugs whenever possible. This suggestion came up more than any other, even restricting drug advertising.

I agree. Open pricing may seem like a small change, but in fact it would have major philosophical and practical benefits.

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(I’m committed to transparent pricing for Unreported Truths! Click to see!)

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Our $5 trillion system encourages consumers, aka patients, to think of care as free — while setting up a maze of hidden financial incentives and honeypots that providers and administrators spend huge amounts of time navigating and fighting over.

Pretending medicine isn’t about money hasn’t made medicine less about money. It has just distorted the system in deeply destructive ways.

Even if doctors do not let financial incentives drive treatment decisions for individual patients (and some clearly do), profit drives every structural decision in American medicine, from where hospitals open satellite clinics to the drugs pharmacy benefits managers push to how quickly patients are discharged.

The list is endless.

Yet at the most crucial point of contact, we simply hide the price of treatments. Among other distortions, this fiction encourages patients to overconsume medical services. We implicitly assume we do not need to discourage people from seeking out healthcare. We imagine most healthy people will not go to doctors if they do not have to, so we do not have to regulate access to care.

But in the United States in 2026, that assumption no longer seems to hold.

We have an ever-increasing number of chronic conditions, often driven by unhealthy lifestyle choices, as well "sort-of" diseases with a strong psychosocial component. Drug company advertising fuels patient demand for the costliest possible treatments for all these conditions. (To a lesser extent, so does hospital and physician group advertising.) Under the circumstances, even completely healthy people may feel almost compelled to use the system, if only because they pay so much into it and get nothing back.

Meanwhile, the lack of open pricing discourages competition on price (obviously). This cartel-like behavior is particularly harmful because many procedures, particularly imaging and blood testing, have very low marginal costs. And routine imaging doesn’t always require expensive new equipment. Cheaper, older machines can deliver more than adequate results.1

In other words, independent providers may have more flexibility on price than patients (or even they) realize, especially for cash payors where insurance overhead isn’t a major cost.

As one reader wrote:

An absolutely crucial fact--that almost no one with conventional insurance even realizes--is that most day-to-day, routine medical tests, procedures, and drugs are very inexpensive. That's especially so in markets like Las Vegas, where I live, where there are many cash-pay customers. A chest X-ray is $23; a standard MRI is about $125; I had a CT scan 2 weeks ago that cost $103…

Of course, there are any number of conditions, medical emergencies, and specialized drugs that are astronomically expensive--that's why we all need some form of catastrophic insurance. But for the day-to-day, routine stuff, the less any 3rd party (insurance company, employer's benefits manager, government, hospital corporation) is involved, the better off everyone is.

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Try a one-time donation!

It’ll save you money in the long run once we fix medicine!

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And so we should require transparent pricing for a broad array of routine services — in doctors’ offices, in outpatient and urgent care facilities, in testing labs, even in hospitals where possible. Doing so will encourage price competition. It may also convince some people to start paying for routine services themselves and switch to higher-deductible insurance plans.

Most importantly, it will encourage people to think of routine medical care as simply another service — and help restore their agency over not just health, but the healthcare they consume.

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Another reader put the problem — and the solution — in a larger context:

The core problem in American healthcare is not simply cost. It is complexity, and more importantly, the velocity of complexity.

Rules, reimbursement structures, compliance requirements, coding systems, network rules, and incentive structures change so rapidly that only very large institutions can realistically keep up. Hospitals, insurers, private equity groups, pharmaceutical companies, and large regulatory/compliance infrastructures adapt because they have armies of administrators and lawyers. Independent physicians and patients cannot.

That instability itself becomes a mechanism of control.

Direct physician-patient relationships, transparent pricing, and simple market feedback become harder and harder to sustain because the system is constantly shifting underneath everyone. The result is opacity. And opacity is where fraud, waste, abuse, and rent-seeking thrive.

The public can understand simple ideas:

* transparent pricing,

* aligned incentives,

* direct accountability,

* same rules for everyone,

* and reducing unnecessary intermediaries.

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Implementing four out of those five suggestions would require massive structural changes that are essentially politically impossible in the current system.

But transparent pricing? That’s hard to argue against. That’s at least theoretically possible.

And maybe moving towards it will eventually help drive the rest.