• Test Flight Location: Small airplane in Griffith, Australia carries Q-CTRL quantum magnetometer for navigation test.
• Device Function: Lasers shine on rubidium atoms to measure Earth's magnetic field variations in real time.
• Navigation Method: Live readings compared to preloaded magnetic-field map to determine position without GPS.
• GPS Threats: Russia jams signals in Ukraine; China, North Korea have similar capabilities affecting military and civilian aviation.
• Pentagon Involvement: Defense agency funds Q-CTRL and Safran to improve quantum sensor robustness against vibrations and interference.
• Test Performance: Wingtip sensor achieves 620-foot accuracy over 80 miles, outperforming inertial system by over 10 times.
• Additional Tech: Q-CTRL develops gravity sensor; software removes aircraft interference from readings.
• Challenges Noted: Requires detailed maps, cost reduction for drones, and survival in extreme military conditions like rocket launches.

---

Reporting and photography by

Mike Cherney

14

---

Q-CTRL engineers prepare for a test flight of a device that could reduce reliance on GPS.

GRIFFITH, Australia—At a tiny airport in the Australian countryside last month, a small plane took off carrying a device that could transform how U.S. drones, aircraft and ships navigate across future battlefields.

The flight carried an instrument that shines lasers at atoms, which behave like compass needles to measure Earth’s magnetic field in real time. Readings from the device can be compared to a magnetic-field map, helping a user determine their location—and offering a backup to satellite-based navigation like GPS.

For the U.S. and its allies, finding new ways to navigate is crucial. In the Ukraine war, Russia is jamming and spoofing—blocking and faking signals—so frequently that satellite navigation isn’t dependable. Other potential adversaries, including China and North Korea, possess similar capabilities.

GPS spoofing by militaries has become a civilian hazard as well, presenting a risk to commercial aircraft.

“This problem hasn’t been as urgent until right now, when we are seeing the end of reliable GPS,” said Russell Anderson, a principal scientist at Q-CTRL, the Australian startup that ran the test flight. “It is the arms race of the current day, in terms of navigation.”

Scientists around the world are exploring whether harnessing the quantum properties of atoms can help navigate accurately in so-called contested environments. But it is still unclear whether the devices, which work well in labs and field tests, would perform reliably on actual military missions.

Satellite-Free Navigation

Earth's magnetic field has tiny variations from place to place. By comparing live readings to a detailed onboard magnetic-field map, an aircraft can determine its location without GPS.

Preloaded map

Position fixed

Magnetic field

Magnetic field

To measure the Earth's magnetic field, interference from the aircraft itself must be removed. Software does this in real time.

Software

activated

True signal

revealed

Magnetic

interference

Magnetic readings depend on a sensor head about the size of a finger that uses lasers and rubidium atoms.

2

A pump laser aligns the needles

A glass cell is filled with atoms that behave like tiny compass needles, which are sensitive to magnetic fields

1

Detector

3

A probe laser measures how the atoms change

The measurements are used to calculate the strength of the magnetic field

4

Atom

Earth's magnetic field has tiny variations from place to place. By comparing live readings to a detailed onboard magnetic-field map, an aircraft can determine its location without GPS.

Preloaded map

Position fixed

Magnetic field

Magnetic field

To measure the Earth's magnetic field, interference from the aircraft itself must be removed. Software does this in real time.

Software

activated

True signal

revealed

Magnetic

interference

Magnetic readings depend on a sensor head about the size of a finger that uses lasers and rubidium atoms.

A pump laser aligns the needles

2

A glass cell is filled with atoms that behave like tiny compass needles, which are sensitive to magnetic fields

1

Detector

3

A probe laser measures how the atoms change

The measurements are used to calculate the strength of the magnetic field

4

Atom

Earth's magnetic field has tiny variations from place to place. By comparing live readings to a detailed onboard magnetic-field map, an aircraft can determine its location without GPS.

Preloaded map

Position fixed

Magnetic field

Magnetic field

To measure the Earth's magnetic field, interference from the aircraft itself must be removed. Software does this in real time.

Software

activated

True signal

revealed

Magnetic

interference

Magnetic readings depend on a sensor head about the size of a finger that uses lasers and rubidium atoms.

A pump laser aligns the needles

2

A glass cell is filled with atoms that behave like tiny compass needles, which are sensitive to magnetic fields

1

Detector

3

A probe laser measures how the atoms change

The measurements are used to calculate the strength of the magnetic field

4

Atom

Earth's magnetic field has tiny variations from place to place. By comparing live readings to a detailed onboard magnetic-field map, an aircraft can determine its location without GPS.

Preloaded

map

Position fixed

Magnetic

field

Magnetic

field

To measure the Earth's magnetic field, interference from the aircraft itself must be removed. Software does this in real time.

True signal

revealed

Software

activated

Magnetic

interference

Magnetic readings depend on a sensor head about the size of a finger that uses lasers and rubidium atoms.

A probe laser measures how the atoms change

3

A glass cell is filled with atoms that behave like tiny compass needles, which are sensitive to magnetic fields

1

2

A pump laser aligns the needles

Atom

Detector

The measurements are used to calculate the strength of the magnetic field

4

Earth's magnetic field has tiny variations from place to place. By comparing live readings to a detailed onboard magnetic-field map, an aircraft can determine its location without GPS.

Preloaded

map

Position fixed

Magnetic

field

Magnetic

field

To measure the Earth's magnetic field, interference from the aircraft itself must be removed. Software does this in real time.

True signal

revealed

Software

activated

Magnetic

interference

Magnetic readings depend on a sensor head about the size of a finger that uses lasers and rubidium atoms.

A probe laser measures how the atoms change

3

A glass cell is filled with atoms that behave like tiny compass needles, which are sensitive to magnetic fields

1

2

A pump laser aligns the needles

Atom

Detector

The measurements are used to calculate the strength of the magnetic field

4

Notes: Diagram is schematic. Laser orientations can vary.
Sources: Q-CTRL, Berkeley National Laboratory
Roque Ruiz/WSJ

The Pentagon is hoping to solve that problem. In August, the research and development agency at the Defense Department launched a program to help make quantum sensors more robust.

The agency said the extraordinary sensitivity of the devices makes them fragile in real-world environments, where vibrations or electromagnetic interference can degrade performance. Australia-based Q-CTRL was selected to participate; another company, Safran Federal Systems in Rochester, N.Y., also said it was awarded a contract.

The work is taking on increasing urgency. Russia and China have advanced their electronic-warfare capabilities. European officials have accused Russia of widespread jamming of aircraft.

The problem with GPS is the signals are typically weak, making them easy to block. The U.S. has been rolling out a new, more powerful GPS signal for the military called M-code that is more resilient to jamming, but there has been a holdup in getting funding for the receivers needed to use it, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on defense strategy and space policy.

“The U.S. military now realizes future battlefields will be fully contested in the electromagnetic domain unlike anything we have seen before,” he said.

Quantum devices, potentially working together, could tip the balance, proponents say. Quantum clocks, for example, could boost the precision and accuracy of timekeeping. Another quantum sensor, also being developed by Q-CTRL, can navigate by detecting small changes in gravity.

“Quantum sensing is a priority,” said Tanya Monro, the chief scientist for Australia’s Department of Defence, which hosted a trial of the Q-CTRL gravity sensor on one of its ships. “There is an absolute, driving need to be able to operate with complete denial of GPS.”

The Q-CTRL device on the plane in Griffith, a city of about 27,000, is called an optically pumped magnetometer. It shoots lasers at atoms of rubidium, a soft, silvery-white metal, that are held in a gaseous form in a small glass vial. The lasers help measure changes in the atoms’ internal compass needle, which is used to calculate the strength of the magnetic field.

Q-CTRL’s software then removes interference from outside sources, such as the aircraft itself, producing an accurate measurement of the Earth’s magnetic field in that location, which can be compared to a magnetic map. Such maps show deviations from the average field strength over the surface of the Earth.

Michael J. Biercuk at his lab in Sydney.

“You can go out in the woods, and with a map and your eyes identify, ‘Well, there’s a hill and there’s a valley and there’s a stream, so I think I’m right here on the map,’” said Michael J. Biercuk, the American quantum physicist who founded Q-CTRL. “You can do exactly the same thing with these magnetic signals.”

Biercuk said there is no realistic way to jam quantum magnetometers or gravimeters from a distance, short of an energy pulse that would fry all the electronics on a plane and cause it to crash. He said Q-CTRL has subjected the sensors to shaking and dynamic maneuvers with good results—including more than 140 hours of continuous operation on the Australian ship.

In Griffith, Q-CTRL engineers tested three magnetometers in different locations on the airplane, given that the external interference in each spot is different.

The units were tested against a high-end inertial navigation system—which estimates position by using gyroscopes and accelerometers. These systems are already used as GPS backups and on submarines, which can’t access GPS when underwater. But inaccuracies build up over long distances.

All three locations performed comparably, Biercuk said. Over an 80-mile test window, a sensor on the tip of the plane’s wing resulted in an average position estimate within about 620 feet of the true position, and the margin of error didn’t increase with the duration of the flight, he said. The performance was more than 10 times better than the inertial navigation system.

GPS is still very precise, when it’s available. GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate to within 16 feet under open sky, according to one study.

A flight navigation map.

One of the sensors was placed at the tip of the plane’s wing for the test flight.

There are challenges with the magnetometer approach. One is the need to have detailed magnetic maps, which may not always be available or up-to-date. Another is to make the device inexpensive enough for cheap drones like those that have transformed military strategy in Ukraine.

“Quantum offers a lot of potential,” said Allison Kealy, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, who specializes in positioning and navigation. She noted, though, that “I think they’re like any other sensor. They have their strengths and weaknesses.”

Others are exploring different techniques. Advanced Navigation, a company in Australia that makes inertial navigation systems, is preparing to launch a sensor that measures an aircraft’s velocity in three dimensions by shooting lasers at the ground. That works in tandem with inertial navigation systems to improve accuracy over longer distances.

“No one solution fits all problems,” said Max Doemling, chief product officer at Advanced Navigation, which has collaborated with Q-CTRL in the past. Doemling said his company would be interested in using quantum sensors when the technology is ready.

Yuval Cohen inspects the wingtip unit.

In Griffith, not everything went smoothly at Q-CTRL’s flight tests. At one point, there was a communication issue involving the wingtip sensor, and it was swapped out for a different unit.

More work is ahead, some of the Q-CTRL scientists said, to show the sensors can handle different scenarios that a military platform might face.

“Can it survive a rocket launch? Can it survive a crash landing?” said Yuval Cohen, a Q-CTRL researcher. “You don’t really know, until you do the testing.”

Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the November 20, 2025, print edition as 'Militaries Try Out Alternatives to GPS'.

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Videos

• Minnesota Welfare Fraud Scale: Billions in taxpayer dollars stolen during Governor Tim Walz's administration through various fraudulent schemes in welfare programs.
• HSS Program Fraud: Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program costs escalated from $2.6 million estimate to $104 million annually, with vast majority fraudulent; 77 providers terminated for fraud allegations.
• HSS Indictments: Eight defendants charged, six from Somali community, involving fictitious companies and schemes stacked on other Medicaid programs.
• Feeding Our Future Scheme: $250 million fraud by nonprofit sponsored by Somali community members using fake meal counts during COVID-19; 56th defendant pleaded guilty.
• Autism Services Fraud: $14 million scheme led by Asha Farhan Hassan, also charged in Feeding Our Future, involving fake diagnoses and cash kickbacks to parents in Somali community.
• Somali Community Involvement: Multiple fraud rings, including at least 28 scandals since 2019, primarily perpetrated by members of Minnesota's Somali community, leading to skyrocketing program costs.
• Remittances and Terrorism Links: Fraud proceeds sent as remittances to Somalia via hawala networks, with millions funding Al-Shabaab terror group, confirmed by law enforcement sources.
• Political and Media Response: Allegations of media and Democratic officials ignoring fraud due to racism accusations and political ties; expected to impact 2026 elections.

---

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Our investigation shows what happens when a tribal mindset meets a bleeding-heart bureaucracy, when imported clan loyalties collide with a political class too timid to offend, and when accusations of racism are cynically deployed to shield criminal behavior. The predictable result is graft, with taxpayers left to foot the bill.

If you were to design a welfare program to facilitate fraud, it would probably look a lot like Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. The HSS program, the first of its kind in the country, was launched with a noble goal: to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing. It was designed with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Nonetheless, before the program went live in 2020, officials pegged its annual estimated price tag at $2.6 million.

Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.

On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow—six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”

Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program “operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.” The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing. He noted many owners of companies engaged in HSS fraud had “other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs, such as the EIDBI autism program, the . . . Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the . . . Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion . . . . program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.”

“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

On September 18, the same day that the HSS fraud charges were announced, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported that a man named Abdullahe Nur Jesow had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

Founded in 2016, Feeding Our Future was a small Minnesota nonprofit that sponsored daycares and after-school programs to enroll in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. The organizations that Feeding Our Future sponsored were primarily owned and operated by members of Minnesota’s Somali community, according to two former state officials with connections to law enforcement.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future received $3.4 million in federal funding disbursed by the state. In the months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, however, the nonprofit rapidly increased its number of sponsored sites. Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children. In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.

In reality, the money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya. In 2020, Minnesota officials raised concerns about the nonprofit’s rapid expansion. In response, the group filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination related to outstanding site applications, noting that Feeding Our Future “caters to . . . foreign nationals.”

“That’s the standard operating playbook for that cohort: when in doubt, claim racism, claim bias,” says David Gaither, a former Minnesota state senator and a nonprofit leader. “Even if the facts don’t point to that, it allows for many folks in the middle, or on the center-Left, to stay silent.”

Gaither believes the mainstream media, alongside Minnesota’s Democratic establishment, have long turned a blind eye to fraud within the Somali community. This, in turn, allowed the problem to metastasize. “The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither said. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”

The fraudsters have leveraged their growing political influence to cultivate close ties with Minnesota’s elected officials. Several individuals involved in the Feeding Our Future scheme donated to, or appeared publicly with, Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minneapolis. Omar’s deputy district director, Ali Isse, advocated on behalf of Feeding Our Future. Omar Fateh, a former state senator who recently ran for Minneapolis mayor, lobbied Governor Tim Walz in support of the program. And one of the accused, Abdi Nur Salah, served as a senior aide to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.

Just days later, on September 24, U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced his office’s first indictment in yet another fraud case. This time, the scheme involved federally funded autism services for children.

The accused is a woman named Asha Farhan Hassan, a member of Minnesota’s Somali community, who has also been charged in the Feeding Our Future scam. She’s alleged to have played a role in a $14 million fraud scheme perpetrated against Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program.

Hassan and her co-conspirators “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their children into autism therapy services. It didn’t matter, prosecutors suggested, if a child did not have an autism diagnosis: Hassan would facilitate a fraudulent one.

In a press release announcing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made clear that the alleged autism fraud scheme extended to a wide network of people. “To drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled,” the release reads. “These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child. The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave . . . and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”

Much like with the HSS program, autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023. Meantime, the number of autism providers in the state spiked from 41 to 328 over the same period, with many in the Somali community establishing their own autism treatment centers, citing the need for “culturally appropriate programming.” By the time the fraud scheme was exposed, one in 16 Somali four-year-olds in the state had reportedly been diagnosed with autism—a rate more than triple the state average.

“This is not an isolated scheme,” Thompson, the U.S. attorney, said in a press release. “From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”

What Thompson arguably hinted at, but left unsaid, should be obvious: this “network” of “fraud schemes,” which “form a web” that has stolen “billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” involved many members of Minnesota’s Somali community. The Feeding Our Future, HSS, and autism-services cases are far from the only examples. At least 28 fraud scandals have surfaced since Walz was elected governor in 2019. Most of the large-scale fraud rings, according to two former FBI officials who spoke with City Journal, have been perpetrated by members of the Somali community.

Kayesh Magan, a Somali-American who had worked as a fraud investigator at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, identified the problem last year: “We must grapple with something that is uncomfortable and true: Nearly all of the defendants in the cases I’ve listed are from my community. The Somali community.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Somalia fraud story is the scale, with total costs running into the billions of taxpayer dollars. That raises the question: What happened to all that money?

The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia. According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.

Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.

According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said.

Kerns’s investigation eventually expanded to Minnesota, where he realized the same thing was happening. “I worked on it for five years,” Kerns said. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well shit, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”

Kerns then investigated the hawalas in Somalia that were receiving the money transfers. He determined, primarily through human sources, that significant funds were being sent from America to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia. Whether the money was intended for Al-Shabaab or not, Kerns said, they were taking a cut.

A second former official, who worked on the Minneapolis JTTF, confirms the story’s general structure. This former official, who requested to remain anonymous, worked on two terrorism cases that intersected with Minnesota’s Somali community and has studied the flow of funds from Minnesota to Somalia.

“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”

A third source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the close links between the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Islamic terror groups abroad. Ten years ago, the source was recruited as an “independent contractor” for a three-letter agency investigation into the “Minnesota men” who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. That year, a Homeland Security task force report found that Minnesota led the nation in the number of Americans who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. Of the 58 Americans who had done so, nearly half came from Minnesota.

The relationship is ongoing. “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” the source said. “There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.”

Welfare fraud is likely to become a major issue in Minnesota’s 2026 elections. Governor Tim Walz, now seeking a third term, has presided over a litany of scandals and faces Republican Kristin Robbins, who has made fraud prevention central to her campaign.

Gaither, the former state senator, said “political blowback is brewing” in the state and that, as more information emerges from ongoing investigations, “it’s a real rough place to be if you’re the current administration.” He added that if you talk to law-enforcement officials and others close to the probes, “they will tell you off the record that we aren’t even close to being halfway there” in understanding the true scale of the fraud.

The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging it. By extension, that means recognizing the problem’s true source. So far, Minnesota’s governing class and its media establishment have failed to take that basic step. Minnesotans will have to confront the uncomfortable but unavoidable reality: members of the Somali community have played a central role in the massive fraud now engulfing the North Star State.

Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal_, and the author of_ America’s Cultural Revolution.

Photo by Abuukar Mohamed Muhidin/Anadolu via Getty Images

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• Purcell principle application: Supreme Court precedent advises against election interference near voting; similar stays granted in past cases like Merrill v. Milligan.
• Election timeline urgency: Primaries in March, filing deadline December 8, absentee voting soon, impacting candidates and military voters.
• Judicial and nomination concerns: Ruling by Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Ted Cruz nominee, criticized; calls for high-quality district judge selections to avoid such issues.

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Redistricting battle across the nation

Texas and California take up gerrymandering fights.

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Gerrymandering has been a staple of the Republic since its beginning. The practice has such a storied tradition that it is named after Elbridge Gerry, one of our founding fathers who served as vice president under President James Madison. For decades, leftists attempted to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. Justice Anthony Kennedy could not make up his mind on the issue, so it languished until he retired. Fortunately for the Constitution, President Trump replaced Justice Kennedy — the Court’s swing vote for over a dozen years — with solid constitutionalist Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In 2019, thanks to Kavanaugh’s addition, the Court upheld partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause. Legislatures cannot gerrymander based on race, but they can do so based on partisanship.

Following Texas Democratic lawmakers’ return on Monday, President Donald Trump urged the state legislature to move quickly to pass a highly controversial redistricting bill, saying, "Please pass this Map, ASAP." (Sergio Flores/Getty; Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

Earlier this year, Texas did just that. Yet, a three-judge district court panel invalidated Texas’s map earlier this week and ordered that the map drawn by the legislature in 2021 remain in effect for the midterm elections. This ruling could cost Republicans five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The ruling claims that minority votes would be diluted were the new map to go into effect. It does not matter, according to the ruling, that the legislators who voted to redistrict never advocated in favor of discrimination on the basis of race. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. The 2-1 ruling was shockingly written by Texas U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown — handpicked by U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in 2019. U.S. Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, the adult on the three-judge panel, dissented.

It is imperative for the justices to stay the ruling using the emergency docket, a vehicle that permits the Court to pause rulings without full briefing and oral argument when extraordinary circumstances necessitate it. Here, the problem lies in the way courts have wrongly applied the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for decades. The current system allows DEI districts; that is, current law mandates majority-minority districts, explicitly requiring racial discrimination in redistricting. The justices are considering the proper interpretation of this statute in Louisiana v. Callais. Even if there might have been a time when such a scheme was permissible at the height of segregation when the Voting Rights Act was passed, that period has long since lapsed. Kavanaugh focused on this point during oral argument in Callais. It would, of course, be ideal for the court to hold that the scheme was never permissible, as Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch suggested during oral argument. Either way, the justices should release the Callais decision in short order so that legislatures can respond accordingly in time for the midterms.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is seen on Nov. 14, 2025 in Midlothian, Texas. (Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

It is almost certain that the justices have decided Callais and are crafting the majority, concurring and dissenting opinions. That decision undoubtedly will impact the way the Texas case is decided. If the justices know that they will be curtailing the Voting Rights Act to end mandatory majority-minority districts, they should not allow the ruling of the lower court to stand. In other words, Texas should not be forced to have districts in place that, if the court rules according to the Constitution, are unlawful.

FEDERAL JUDGES BLOCK TEXAS FROM USING REDRAWN CONGRESSIONAL MAP

There is a separate reason why the justices should stay the ruling of the lower court. In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the court held that federal courts ordinarily should not interfere in elections when the elections are about to occur. Based on this principle, the justices stayed a similar ruling to the Texas one in 2022. In Merrill v. Milligan, the court dealt with a district court ruling by a three-judge panel that had enjoined the implementation of Alabama’s new congressional map. The panel had issued its ruling about two months prior to the beginning of absentee voting in the Alabama primaries. In concurring in the grant of the stay of that ruling, Kavanaugh emphasized the closeness of the election, citing the decision in Purcell.

The Texas case presents a similar time crunch. The primaries will occur in March, and absentee voting will begin weeks before that. Military personnel overseas need extra time to send in their votes, as many are stationed in remote locations thousands of miles away, and others are in the middle of the ocean on ships or submarines. The filing deadline for the primaries is Dec. 8, only three weeks away. The ruling by the lower court has wreaked havoc; candidates had been planning their runs based on the newly-drawn districts. The justices must restore order to this chaotic mess that the lower court has caused.

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One more important point requires emphasis. Again, one of the two judges who invalidated the map is Brown. He invalidated a map on similar grounds in 2024 concerning Galveston County. The Fifth Circuit, with all 17 judges sitting (formally called en banc), reversed his decision in Petteway v. Galveston County. Brown, again, is a Ted Cruz pick. Presidents must pick district judges based on the recommendations of home-state senators. These senators wield veto power through an outdated tradition called the blue slip. Picking quality district judges is nearly impossible in blue states, where leftist senators will veto excellent candidates. Senators in red states, particularly deep-red states like Texas, must ensure that candidates of the highest quality are recommended for nomination. Brown was a clear miss by Ted Cruz.

Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group photo following the recent addition of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill on Friday, Oct 7, 2022 in Washington, D.C. Bottom row, from left, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Top row, from left, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

In light of the upcoming filing deadline, time is incredibly short. The Supreme Court rapidly must stay this incorrect order and restore the lawful map passed and signed into law earlier this year. The justices also must rule against continuing the practice of DEI districts by restoring sanity to voting rights jurisprudence. This decision also needs to occur quickly so that legislatures across the country can have time to redistrict prior to the midterms. There is no place for racial discrimination in elections, and there is no place for improper judicial interference in elections. The Supreme Court needs to put a stop to all of it now.

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Mike Davis is the founder of the Article III Project.

• Creative Writing Excellence: Gemini 3 produces coherent, natural book chapters with surprising phrasing, avoiding typical AI slop for genuinely good writing.
• Quality Consistency: Improvements reduce variability in output, making the model more reliable across tasks compared to previous spiky performances.
• Practical Impact: Differences may not show in routine tasks but emerge in complex reasoning and creative edge cases where other models struggle.
• Speed Efficiency: Delivers high intelligence quickly, outperforming GPT-5 Pro in regular mode without extended wait times.
• Direct Personality: Responds tersely and to the point, respecting user time by avoiding unnecessary verbosity or praise.
• Adaptable Styling: Follows specific prompt instructions for personas without reverting to default styles.
• Antigravity IDE Functionality: Provides a real development environment with useful browser integration, but requires user oversight for verification and error handling.
• Overall Reliability: Acts like a senior engineer delivering brilliant results when correct, positioned as a stable daily tool due to Google's infrastructure.

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Everyone else is going to obsess over benchmark numbers. They're going to do that because the numbers are, frankly, insane... truly wild improvements across the board. But I'm not going to do that here. I've been living with Gemini 3 for the past few days; actually working with it, building things, writing things, seeing what it feels like in practice. The benchmarks might tell you what it can do (and it can do a lot); I want to tell you how it feels to use.

The Model

Let's start with the creative writing, because that's where Gemini 3 first floored me. GPT-5.1, which dropped last week, was already a noticeable jump from previous frontier models. But Gemini 3? It wrote book chapters I had to double-check weren't plagiarized from a real book. The voice was coherent. The pacing natural, the turns of phrase genuinely surprising. But most importantly, it didn't feel like the "AI slop" writing we all know just a little too well. It's really impressive... Gemini 3 doesn't just put out "good for AI" writing, it puts out genuinely good writing.

The improvements feels fundamental. Previous models had a certain spikiness... their quality varied wildly depending on the task. You could get brilliance on one task, followed by just-okay results on another. Gemini 3 is more consistent, less prone to those jarring spikes. My hunch is that Google has cracked something about reinforcement learning on non-verifiable tasks... creative work where you can't just check if the answer is right. The result is a model that feels more like a skilled collaborator than anything we've had before.

That said, here's an important note: for 80% of your daily work, you might not even notice the difference. Current models are already "good enough" for writing emails or making small changes to your webapp. So at first glance, Gemini 3 doesn't always feel like a massive leap. But that feeling is deceptive. The jump is there, it’s just hiding in the difficult 20%... the complex reasoning, the subtle creative choices, the edge cases where other models fall apart. When you really need that extra brainpower, it's there.

Another standout feature: it's fast for how smart it is. To understand this, we can think of a metric like "intelligence per second", and Gemini 3 is fantastic in this regard.

I probably shouldn't compare it to GPT-5 Pro directly since their Deep Think (~equivalent mode) wasn't available for early testing, but, impressively, the regular version of Gemini 3 often outperformed GPT-5 Pro. Outperforms it, and does so without a 5-10 minute wait. You get both the quality and the speed, which changes how you work.

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Personality-wise, it's a shift. Out of the box, Gemini 3 is less... ingratiating than most other models. It doesn't open with flowery praise, followed by three paragraphs of preamble. It's more terse. Direct. It gives you the answer and (mostly) stops. I prefer this. I don't need an AI to give me every little detail (if I need this, I'll ask); I need it to get to the point. With GPT-5.1, for example, I find myself scrolling through verbose explanations hunting for the actual content. Gemini 3 respects your time.

Other models have default "personas" and styles (UI, writing, etc.) that are very hard to escape; Gemini 3 just... listens and does what you ask. For example, if you prompt it to "write this like a cynical 1940s detective, but make it modern", it nails the specifics without fighting you and reverting back to the slop-styles we all know and hate.

The Antigravity IDE: Great, But Keep Your Eyes on It

The Antigravity IDE is impressive for a launch product. It feels like a real development environment, not a demo. The browser integration for testing sites is genuinely useful... it'll spin up a server, check if it acheived the goal it was working on, iterate without context-switching or human input. It's great.

But here's the thing: you have to babysit it. The model will sometimes glance at a log, declare victory, and move on while your build is still throwing errors. It'll screenshot a UI, say "looks good," and miss that the site wasn't even running in the first place. You need to keep the terminal open, re-run checks, and explicitly tell it to verify its work. Custom instructions help... "Keep reading the logs as you spin things up until you know it works." is a good one to add. For developers who stay engaged, it's powerful. For those wanting a magic button, it'll frustrate. That said, these are likely temporary issues that'll be patched via prompt updates on Google's side over time.

The Tradeoff

If GPT-5.1 is a solid junior engineer, Gemini 3 is a senior engineer who says "got it, done", and you better check that it's actually done. I keep reaching for it, not because it's perfect, but because when it's right, it's brilliantly, almost humanly right.

This is, without a doubt, my new daily driver. And with Google's computing power and ability to serve this cheaply and stably I'd bet this is going to be a winner.

Follow me on X for updates on Gemini, new models, and products worth using.
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• Warner Music Deal: Warner Music has agreed to a licensing deal with AI start-up Udio to enable a new streaming platform using its songs.
• Lawsuit Settlement: The agreement includes settling a lawsuit Warner had against Udio for using copyrighted recordings in AI training.
• Subscription Service Launch: Udio plans to introduce a subscription service next year for fans to create songs with licensed tracks.
• Artist Consent Required: Warner's artists must provide agreement for their music to be featured in the service.
• Upcoming Announcement: An official announcement of the deal could occur as early as Wednesday.
• Previous Lawsuits: Major labels including Warner, Universal, and Sony sued Udio last year over copyright issues in AI models.
• Universal's Involvement: Universal Music recently reached a similar deal with Udio to include its catalogue in the service.
• Additional Agreements: Warner announced a deal with Stability AI and anticipates more licensing pacts soon, aiming to address AI disruptions like past Napster challenges.

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Warner Music has struck a licensing deal with artificial intelligence start-up Udio to power a new streaming platform with its songs, according to people familiar with the matter, as major labels seek to set terms for payment in the AI era.

Warner, the world’s third-largest music company and home to acts including Charli XCX, Madonna and Ed Sheeran, has settled a lawsuit with Udio as part of the agreement, according to people familiar with the matter. 

As part of the deal, Udio plans to launch a new subscription service next year, allowing fans to create their own songs using licensed tracks. Warner’s artists would need to agree for their music to be included in the service, these people said. 

An announcement could come as early as Wednesday, said people familiar with the matter.

Warner Music, along with rivals Universal and Sony, last year sued Udio, alleging the company was illegally using copyrighted recordings to train its AI models.

Universal Music last month struck a deal with Udio to include its catalogue in the upcoming subscription service. 

Warner also announced a licensing deal with Stability AI, an AI music tools specialist, on Wednesday. The label is close to unveiling more agreements in the coming days, said people familiar with the talks. 

After the Napster crisis of the early 2000s, music companies are trying to get ahead of disruptive technology this time around. The labels have spent much of this year in negotiations with AI groups to hash out the terms for licensed products to create songs using their music copyrights — and ensure they are properly compensated.

However, many artists remain staunchly opposed to AI-generated music, fearing it could undermine the value of their work. 

Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and others have released a “silent” album to protest against the UK government’s recent changes to copyright law. The album’s track listing spells out the message: “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies.” 

Elliot Grainge, chief executive of Warner’s Atlantic Records, told the Financial Times in September: “Labels have a responsibility to negotiate the best deals for their artists — and they’re really good at that. They learned from their mistakes in the past.” 

Warner Music declined to comment and Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Conspiracy Theory Techniques: Theorists select supporting facts while overlooking contradictory evidence, shifting quickly between claims to avoid scrutiny.
• Tucker Carlson's Series: _The 9/11 Files_ presents unsubstantiated insinuations about 9/11 events, focusing on questions without concrete proof.
• Carlson's Ideological Shift: Previously criticized 9/11 Truthers, now promotes similar views aligning with far-right narratives.
• Absence of Evidence: Series avoids interviewing witnesses or presenting physical evidence, relying on vague allegations of prior knowledge.
• Popular Mechanics Investigations: 2005 report and subsequent books examined and refuted major 9/11 conspiracy claims, facing backlash from proponents.
• Pentagon and Flight 93 Claims: Assertions of hidden footage and lack of wreckage contradicted by photos, debris, and impact details.
• WTC Collapses and Thermite: Theories of explosives or thermite dismissed due to impracticality and lack of installation evidence; NIST report explains WTC 7 failure from fire.
• Foreknowledge Allegations: Claims of media errors, stock trades, and Israeli involvement lack supporting investigations, promoting LIHOP without detailing logistics.

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Effective conspiracy theorists need to be quick on their feet. To tell a persuasive story, they must focus our attention on the tiny number of facts that seem to support their theory, while ignoring the vast amount of evidence that contradicts it. An agile theorist therefore jumps from point to point like a hiker crossing a stream by leaping from rock to rock. The trick is to get listeners to forget about the river of facts that refute the conspiracy claims. Still, even the seemingly solid points supporting most conspiracy theories generally collapse under honest scrutiny. When that happens, the theorists rarely concede that their elaborate assumptions have been debunked. They simply jump to new, even shakier pieces of “evidence.”

Tucker Carlson uses this device, and many more, in his slickly deceptive new video series, The 9/11 Files. Carlson is late to the 9/11 conspiracy party. In fact, in the past he employed his considerable rhetorical skills arguing against the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, once calling its adherents “parasites.” But the former Fox News anchor has made quite an ideological journey in recent years. Today, he embraces the Truther worldview that was originally a hallmark of the anti-American Left. In recent years, such dark conspiratorial fantasies—including anti-Semitic tropes—have found new life on the very-online far Right.

In The 9/11 Files, released on the Tucker Carlson Network (and on YouTube), Carlson promises to prove that “what you have been told about 9/11 is not true.” Instead, the five-part series mostly rehashes familiar claims and unproven insinuations, albeit in a highly polished fashion. Reviving 9/11 conspiracy theories at this late date gives Carlson a chance to flesh out his increasingly blame-America-first outlook —while maintaining his “just-asking-questions” pose of deniability—and build bonds with the so-called Woke Right.

Producing this series two decades after the first spasm of 9/11 conspiracy mania also allows Carlson to sidestep some of the sillier assertions made by first-wave Truthers. His series focuses mostly on vague claims that he makes no attempt to substantiate. He interviews no firsthand witnesses who say they played a role in the alleged plot, nor does he uncover any tangible physical evidence. Instead, he raises leading questions (“What were they hiding?”) and makes broad allegations (“Foreign intel agencies, including those of allies, likely had detailed prior knowledge”). Then, before viewers have time to notice that he offers no real corroboration for these indictments, he leaps to the next rock, raising a new set of provocative, equally unsupported claims.

I’ve watched 9/11 theories evolve since the movement’s early days. In 2004, as editor of Popular Mechanics, I became curious about the growing popularity of such conspiracy claims and asked my team to investigate. Then, as now, most of those theories posited a shadowy alliance between Israel and the George W. Bush administration, both of which supposedly wanted a pretext to start wars in the Middle East. Beneath the geopolitical theorizing, however, all these theories rest on specific factual claims. For example, some theorists assert that a military missile, and not American Airlines Flight 77, struck the Pentagon; that the commercial jets that struck the World Trade Center were instead military tankers or drones; that the buildings themselves were prewired with demolition explosives; that the crash site near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, didn’t really contain the wreckage of United Flight 93—and so on.

Popular Mechanics put together a team of eight reporters to investigate these and similar claims and published its first in-depth report in February 2005. The report concluded that every major piece of evidence commonly cited by theorists was either incorrect, misinterpreted, or fabricated from whole cloth. The following year, we released a book-length version of our reporting, Debunking 9/11 Myths, which we updated and expanded for a second edition in 2011. September 11 Truthers often insist that they are only asking questions. For the first decade after the attacks, Popular Mechanics was the only major journalistic outlet attempting to answer those questions in good faith. The Truther community responded with predictable hyperbole: they accused us of working in the service of the Bush/Cheney administration, the CIA, Mossad, the Illuminati, or other supposed conspirators. Since we were part of the plot, the conspiracy fans concluded, our findings could be dismissed as propaganda. (I recounted this experience in a 2021 City Journal article.)

Still, the Popular Mechanics reporting had an impact. A few other journalists joined in, as did some capable amateurs. For example, the blog Screw Loose Change amusingly dismantled the many absurd claims made in the popular “Loose Change” series of 9/11-conspiracy videos. Gradually, the Truther movement became a target for parody on TV shows like South Park and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. As criticisms and ridicule mounted, many 9/11 conspiracy theorists retreated from their original bold allegations and migrated toward more indirect theories, typically ones that rely less on verifiable—i.e., disprovable—claims and more on broad assertions of America’s role as all-powerful global villain. In other words, as one factual claim after another was proved false, the Truther community quietly dropped or downplayed them. But its members never wavered in their conviction that the U.S. government was responsible for the attacks.

The 9/11 Files fits this pattern. “The official story is a lie,” Carlson says. And yet he artfully avoids any concrete description of the vast conspiracy he alleges. And, while he raises several hoary Truther claims—about missing jets and World Trade Center bombs, for instance—Carlson makes little effort to support those claims with evidence. He simply invokes the penumbra of those debunked theories to lull viewers into believing that our government was—somehow—complicit in the attacks.

Several months after 9/11, far-left French writer Thierry Meyssan published a book claiming that the Pentagon was hit by a military missile, an attack that “could only be committed by United States military personnel against other U.S. military personnel.” Today, fewer truthers stand by that theory. There are simply too many photographs showing debris from an American Airlines Boeing 757 around the Pentagon. Carlson avoids claiming that a missile hit the building, but he insists that U.S. officials must be hiding something. “Why did it take the government five years to release footage of the Pentagon [attack]?” he asks. Carlson doesn’t answer the question. (The video footage was temporarily withheld because it was part of the evidence in the prosecution of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.) Nor does he mention the vast amount of physical evidence—airplane parts, luggage, human DNA—collected inside the Pentagon itself.

Carlson employs a similar sleight-of-hand in discussing Flight 93. “Why wasn’t there substantial wreckage of Flight 93 at its supposed crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania?” he asks. Again, he sidesteps the answer: the aircraft hit the ground going 560 miles per hour, creating a 30-foot-deep trench which contained most (but not all) of the wreckage. _Popular Mechanic_s interviewed the county coroner who had the grim task of identifying the bodies. “We were told the crash of that aircraft was so powerful that it vaporized the aircraft’s hull,” Carlson goes on. “And yet the hijackers’ passports were found intact at the site. How does that work?”

Here, Carlson employs a classic conspiracy theory technique: when evidence confirming the conventional view of an event is scanty, conspiracists will claim that absence is proof of a conspiracy. But when evidence supporting the mainstream account is found, they will argue its presence also confirms the conspiracy. It’s just too convenient, they say. The evidence must have been planted. In reality, the airplane was thoroughly shattered (not “vaporized”) on impact, but some aircraft components and many of the passengers’ personal effects were found somewhat intact.

Carlson also takes an indirect approach to the longstanding claim that the World Trade Center buildings were professionally demolished. Originally, 9/11 conspiracy theorists argued that the Twin Towers must have been wired top to bottom with explosives. But that scenario is hard to defend. Rigging such a demolition job would have taken months and been visible to thousands of office workers. Instead, many Truthers moved on to a more recondite theory: that the World Trade Center buildings (including the Twin Towers and/or the nearby World Trade Center Building 7) were felled by packets of thermite powder. Thermite, a highly reactive mix of aluminum and iron oxide, can heat up enough to melt steel in certain applications, such as welding. However, demolition experts say the compound would be a wildly impractical tool to use in the demolition of large buildings.

Nonetheless, the thermite theory took off in 2009 when a physicist published a paper in a fringe science journal. It claimed to show the presence of “nano-thermite“ in dust samples collected in lower Manhattan. Note that the material in question consisted of a few flakes of aluminum and a bit of ordinary rust—hardly a surprising discovery after the world’s biggest building collapse. The thermite theory allows Truthers to sidestep the embarrassing lack of evidence for a conventional controlled demolition. After all, since no one really knows how this imaginary thermite demolition process would work, it’s harder to prove that it didn’t happen. (Of course, in a rational debate, Truthers would still have to explain how the 9/11 plotters could install thousands of pounds of thermite without anyone noticing.)

Carlson cites the 2009 paper and suggests that “thermitic material” might explain the collapse World Trade Center Building 7, the final building to fall on 9/11. But he doesn’t linger on the thermite question for long. In fact, in a rare nod to a counterargument, he mentions an engineering report that explains why thermite “would be an unlikely substance for achieving a controlled demolition.” Then, just like that, he jumps to a different explanation. Maybe it was some other type of explosive. The documentary then cites a single eyewitness who believed he heard an explosion. (True to form, it doesn’t mention the hundreds of other witnesses who heard nothing.) As Carlson leaps from rock to rock, it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t provided evidence for any type of intentional demolition. But he has nudged the viewer from wondering whether home-grown conspirators engineered the collapse of WTC 7 to asking which demolition method was employed.

Carlson devotes much of an episode to the WTC 7 collapse, a focus that reflects another Truther climbdown. After all, claims that the Twin Towers were professionally demolished face lots of reasonable pushback, even with the thermite variation. But the collapse of WTC 7, which was “never hit by a plane,” as Truthers constantly remind us, was a legitimate mystery—at least initially. Damaged by falling debris from the North Tower, the 47-story building burned ferociously for nearly seven hours. Investigators assumed those fires weakened the structure to the point of failure, but it took them years to establish the exact mechanism that led to its collapse. Conspiracy theorists happily flooded that zone of uncertainty. In their view, this less well-known building—which housed various government offices, among other tenants—would have been easier to demolish surreptitiously. The government must have wanted to destroy records housed in a CIA office in the building, they suggested. (With typical disdain for Occam’s razor, they don’t explain why rigging a huge building for demolition would have been easier than simply removing the files.) Since not much was known about the collapse, it was harder to rebut the conspiracy claims with facts.

This gap in knowledge has made WTC 7 a magnet for conspiracy buffs who want to appear level-headed: one can claim to be agnostic about the wilder 9/11 theories while insisting that something suspicious happened to Building 7. For example, Rosie O’Donnell once told her cohosts on The View that it would have been “physically impossible“ for Building 7 to have collapsed from fire alone. “I do believe that it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel,” she famously said. “I don’t know,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told journalist Peter Bergen in 2023, whether al-Qaida was responsible for 9/11. After all, “There were some strange things that happened” involving Building 7. Carlson follows this line of thinking, asking, “Why did Building 7 collapse after just seven hours of burning in a way that no steel-frame building anywhere in the world has ever collapsed?”

Today, thanks to a detailed analysis by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we know fairly precisely how WTC 7 fell. But Carlson doesn’t buy the NIST analysis. Instead, he shows a video that he insists shows “the building coming down symmetrically all at once at free-fall acceleration.” The NIST report explains why it appears that way: WTC 7 had an unusual design that put particularly heavy loads on three vertical columns. Thermal expansion caused by the fires made one of those columns fail between floors 5 and 14; the rest of the building’s internal support structure on those lower floors soon collapsed as well. Now unsupported, the tower’s upper floors—the ones visible in the video—then fell as a unit. It was an extraordinary event, but hardly inexplicable.

But Carlson isn’t interested in engineering nuances. Having concluded that the “official” explanation of the collapse must be a coverup, he leaps again to the next rock. On the afternoon of September 11, a BBC reporter mentioned on camera that WTC-7 had fallen half an hour before it actually collapsed. “Did the BBC have advanced word that the building was coming down?” Carlson asks. Truthers are obsessed with finding cases in which someone seems to have had prior knowledge of the attacks. After all, if one could prove that some group outside al-Qaida knew the attacks were coming, it would seem to be a priori confirmation of a conspiracy.

But the BBC? Does Carlson really think that an ultra-clandestine group not only secretly wired Building 7 for collapse but also made sure to notify the news media? In fact, the BBC reporter was simply repeating an incorrect report in the midst of a horrifying, chaotic day. But Carlson doesn’t give his audience a chance to reflect on the laughable idea that the BBC was part of the plot. Once again, he’s off to the next rock: “If the media did have foreknowledge of the events that day, they weren’t alone,” he says. Then Carlson trots out some repeatedly debunked Truther chestnuts: prior to the attacks, some investors bet that stocks in United and American Airlines would go down. (A massive Securities and Exchange Commission investigation found no evidence that anyone traded on the basis of prior knowledge.) And what about the five Israelis spotted watching the towers burn who seemed to be “celebrating the event,” Carlson asked. (The immigrants, who were reported to authorities by a jittery neighbor, were hapless laborers who heard about the attacks and, like thousands of others, went to a vantage point to observe the historic event.)

According to The 9/11 Files, lots of people knew the attacks were coming. The series quotes former CIA operative John Kiriakou asking, “Why didn’t Germany warn us? What about the Israelis?” Now Carlson is getting to his sweet spot: “The Israeli government stands out in particular,” he says. Several weeks before hosting professional Jew-hater Nick Fuentes on his program, Carlson was setting the stage to blame Israel for facilitating the attacks. The 9/11 Files quotes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer opining that, “The Israelis are always for the Israelis first. They don’t like the United States, except, for the most part, our money.” The message is clear: Jews, money. This is more than a dog whistle. Carlson knows that anti-Semitic tropes provide an electric thrill to fringe elements on the right. In The 9/11 Files, he’s making a bid for that audience.

Carlson’s focus on Israel’s supposed foreknowledge of the attacks reflects another trend in conspiracy thinking. Today, many Truthers have given up trying to find tangible evidence of a conspiracy. They simply maintain that Israeli intelligence, the Bush administration, the CIA, defense contractors (among many others) knew about the attack in advance and “let it happen on purpose.” This “LIHOP theory” has one great advantage: Truthers can simply list every screwup made by our security establishment—and there were many— and attribute them to an insidious master plan rather than to complacency, incompetence, and inter-agency rivalry.

Carlson devotes much of his series to this approach. The 9/11 Files documents a maddening series of fumbles and oversights on the part of the CIA and other agencies. The CIA’s failure to notify the FBI about al-Qaida agents it had been tracking was especially egregious. And Carlson is correct that many of the officials responsible for those lapses were never properly investigated or called to account. But at no point does he quote a witness who can attest that he or she knew the attack was coming and was ordered to stay silent. He produces no documents or other evidence attesting to a coverup. Nor does he explain how a broad LIHOP conspiracy would have worked. How many people in the CIA would need to have been complicit? How many in the White House? In the FBI? Were airport security agents ordered not to stop the hijackers (as Carlson implies)? By whom? The documentary notes that the Clinton administration also passed up chances to stop bin Laden. Were they in on the plot, too? In short, even a LIHOP conspiracy would have required hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conspirators.

The conspiracy grows even more implausible when Carlson implies that everyone involved in what he calls the “official story” must be part of a massive coverup. Does that include the roughly 90 people who worked on the 9/11 Commission report? The hundreds of investigators who examined the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon attack for FEMA, NIST, and other agencies? The recovery workers at Shanksville and the Pentagon? How is it that none of these people have come forward to get this terrible secret off their chests? And what about the media—not just the BBC, but all the large and small outlets that spent years investigating 9/11 without finding a trace of the conspiracy Carlson claims is “hiding in plain sight”? What is stopping even one of those reporters from spilling the beans? It would be the scoop of the century.

Carlson doesn’t grapple with such commonsense objections to his vision of a global conspiracy. He’s not trying to win over the undecided. He’s preaching to an audience predisposed to see the U.S., Israel—and, really, the West in general—as the ineluctable perpetrators of injustice in the world. The first wave of 9/11 theories appealed to the far Left for the same reason. Followers of anti-American and “anti-colonialist” authors Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky naturally loved seeing George W. Bush, Mossad, and big business cast as the real villains of 9/11. Left-wing politicians (former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney) and celebrities (Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson) helped spread the conspiracy gospel. Progressive radio stations gave out “Loose Change” DVDs during fundraising drives.

Today, however, animosity toward American institutions, and sympathy for America’s enemies, burns strongly on the fringe Right. As Commentary’s Abe Greenwald points out, the so-called Woke Right has become almost indistinguishable from the Woke Left. “They share the left’s hatreds, heroes, and self-pitying worldview,” he writes. Carlson now flatters Vladimir Putin, defends Tehran, and praises Venezuela dictator Nicolás Maduro. His recent talk show guest Fuentes calls himself an “admirer” of Soviet mass murderer Joseph Stalin. In promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories to this audience, Carlson is pushing on an open door.

Challenging left-wing orthodoxies has lost its thrill. For Carlson and his ilk, attacking the Republican Party (now including the mainstream MAGA movement) brings much greater rewards: online buzz, surging subscriptions, and the clout that comes from playing the role of disrupter. If that requires embracing a worldview Carlson used to abhor, he seems willing to make that trade.

In 2012, Carlson was surrounded by a group of 9/11 conspiracy buffs outside a political event. The video of the encounter, shot by one of the Truthers, is a time capsule from a different era, one showing a very different Tucker Carlson. As they badger him for his views on “Building 7” and other conspiracy tropes, he engages them with good humor, showing the easy charm that made him a successful broadcaster. But when the Truthers ask him what he would say to the families of 9/11 victims, he becomes withering. “Parasites like you make it much worse for them,” he says. “In order to imply that there’s a conspiracy behind 9/11, you ought to have some evidence,” he goes on. “And you have none. So you should stop.”

Things have changed.

James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal_, and the former editor of_ Popular Mechanics_._

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