• POLICY_OBSTRUCTION: Coordinated and well-funded provocations aim to end all immigration enforcement by creating chaos and obstructing federal law.
• IDEOLOGICAL_DELUSION: Democratic leaders operate within media bubbles, falsely characterizing standard law enforcement activities as a generational struggle against fascism.
• INFLAMMATORY_RHETORIC: Prominent figures use extreme historical analogies, comparing immigration officers to Nazis and equating current events to the story of Anne Frank.
• FACTUAL_DISTORTION: Activists and politicians frequently rely on uncritically accepted propaganda and AI-generated misinformation to frame law enforcement encounters.
• LAW_ENFORCEMENT_REALITY: Incidents involving Renee Good and Alex Pretti are characterized not as random violence, but as consequences of activists physically obstructing officers.
• PUBLIC_DEMAND: A significant portion of the American public supports the deportation of illegal immigrants, while the majority of the Democratic party opposes such enforcement.
• SOVEREIGNTY_CONFLICT: Tensions exist between state and local governments that refuse to cooperate with federal officers and the necessity of maintaining the nation-state.
• ORDERED_LIBERTY: The maintenance of a functioning democratic republic requires respect for federal authority and the enforcement of established immigration laws.

---

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Victims of their own media bubbles, Democratic Party leaders across the country have convinced themselves that they are in the middle of a generational struggle against fascism in the United States. What is really happening is that proper enforcement of immigration law is being made widely chaotic and sometimes fatal by coordinated and well-funded provocations and obstruction, which has the explicit goal of ending all immigration enforcement entirely.

The clashes have pitted those who believe in democracy within the nation-state and those who reject both those things. Circumstances for confrontation have been created by state and local governments that, despite being elected by clearly defined populations, do not believe in such clearly defined populations, and therefore refuse to hand illegal immigrants to federal officers for deportation.

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In Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, the district attorney funded by billionaire George Soros, called Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers “Nazis,” and threatened “to hunt … down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades,” adding “we will find your identities. We will find you.”

In New York, television host Stephen Colbert went a step further, saying ICE officers are worse than Nazis because at least “the Nazis were willing to show their faces.” What a vile, stupid, and dishonest line of argument.

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) called President Donald Trump’s immigration policies “fascist,” adding this week, “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank.”

Each of these absurd comparisons becomes understandable once you know about the propaganda echo chamber that elected Democratic leaders live in. Everything activists have said about recent events in Minnesota has been believed uncritically by Democrats. They are frequently duped by obvious, outright fakery.

For Democrats, Renee Good was merely an innocent mother randomly pulled over by ICE officers before being shot in cold blood. In reality, she and her roommate were dedicated activists who used their thousand-pound vehicle to obstruct law enforcement and hit an officer while attempting to flee arrest.

For Democrats, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was targeted by ICE for arrest, detention, and deportation. In reality, ICE officers tried to arrest Ramos’s father, Adrian Conejo Ramos, who was with his son after he picked him up from school. But Ramos’s father ran when he saw the officers, abandoning his son, whom the federal officers looked after for a while. They took Ramos to McDonald’s before reuniting him with his father, at his father’s request, after he was taken into custody.

Democrats have depicted Alex Pretti as a “patient” and “calm” nurse who was just peacefully protesting ICE before being randomly executed by ICE officers. In reality, Pretti was part of an activist group that had been tracking and swarming ICE officers to prevent them from carrying out their lawful duties. There is a video of Pretti kicking and spitting at ICE officers. This does not mean he deserved to be shot, and his death must be fully investigated, but it does show his violence. When he got into a physical fight with federal officers, he was discovered to have a gun, which apparently went off in the scuffle. In these circumstances, it may be lamentable that he died, but it is also understandable that in a heated and confused ruckus that lasted just a few seconds, he was shot because he seemed to pose a threat.

The Democratic media bubble is pervasive. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), never the brightest bulb illuminating the upper chamber of Congress, showed the Senate a fake artificial intelligence-generated image of Pretti being shot. So strong were Durbin’s partisan blinders that he didn’t notice that one of the two ICE officers in the picture had no head.

Former President Joe Biden allowed about 6 million illegal immigrants to invade our country in four years. That was on top of the estimated 10 million who were already here. The public wants illegal immigrants deported, not just those who commit violent crimes. The problem for Democrats is that just 34% of their party agrees with this. That means two-thirds of Democrats think it is unreasonable for federal officials to arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants. They have every right to peacefully protest ICE efforts.

INVESTIGATE THE MINNESOTA SHOOTINGS

But they do not have the right to obstruct federal law enforcement, which is what Good, Pretti, and the groups they belonged to did. Law enforcement officers have every right to arrest and detain people who obstruct them in their duties. That is not fascism. That is law and order in a functioning democratic republic.

Standing up to ersatz fascism is not brave; it is delusional. The delusion is created and nurtured in the Left’s ideological echo chambers. Enforcing laws is the essence of ordered liberty, not tyranny. Democrats must abandon inflammatory rhetoric, respect federal authority, and engage in honest debate to preserve the republic they claim to defend.

The situation is familiar. Once again, we have a person — or now two people — killed during a confrontation with law enforcement, whose fate strikes a large number of Americans, especially those belonging to blue-city professional classes, as so morally outrageous that it threatens our national identity. All decent humans must respond … by hitting the streets in protest. The evil is so egregious, in fact, that it requires discarding previous standards and safeguards, such as cooperation between the federal and state authorities, enforcement of law, and the democratic process. It even requires that we deny common sense, such as that it’s asking for trouble to block law enforcement with your car, or showing up armed to confront federal officers in a chaotic, police-free environment. 

When these episodes of mass outrage get going, no nuance, reasonable objection or difference of opinion is allowed. And for Americans in the educated classes — those who, in a better world, would have the social and professional power to put on the brakes — the environment becomes coercive. If you’re a nurse in New York City, for example, this week a union strike-briefing turned into a harangue by the Democratic Socialists of America on how to resist ICE, with no regard for the participants’ politics.

It’s a dismaying turn of events: woke seemed to be on the wane from 2022 to 2025, but it has come roaring back in 2026 in a new form that’s both purified and more vicious. The Leftist freedom-fighters have cut out the middle man of the oppressed subject — African Americans in 2020 — and taken center stage themselves. It’s the natural evolution of the #resistance. 

To be clear about context of the new wave of protests: Americans have democratically elected a president who promised to close the border and deport illegal migrants, especially those with criminal histories. It was a popular plank of his platform. America also has laws regarding immigration, and a democratic process for changing those laws. At no point, even when Democrats have been in control, has wholesale naturalization of illegal immigrants or a legal open border been a political possibility. 

Thus, whether we like the tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the basic premise of the agency’s activities reflects the will of the people in a democracy. For Leftists to subvert it through direct action against law enforcement is illegal and anti-democratic. It is true that illegal migrants have died or been killed in government custody, and also true that bad things have happened to the people protesting arrests of such people — and these things are reason for criticism or compassion or distress. No one wants people to be killed with impunity in government custody, or a world in which law enforcement regularly guns down citizens for being really fucking annoying. And there is a single correct way to read the videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings — neither one appeared to be posing a danger to law enforcement at the time they were shot — but there’s no single correct view of the meaning of these events. Attempts to override democracy or the rule of law in their name are controversial at the very least.  

Yet at the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Because, just as in 2020, for an influential subset of the professional classes, it has become mandatory to signal outrage. 

In this sense, the anti-ICE protests currently roiling America look and feel very much like their Black Lives Matter predecessors. This is true in the way anti-ICE hysteria is shutting down the discourse: if you support the immigration authorities anywhere near Left-wing spaces, you will be abused at a pitch that feels newly foul. UnHerd’s own Sohrab Ahmari, for example, was called out online by a prominent labor organizer merely for talking about something other than Pretti’s death. Kat Rosenfeld, an UnHerd contributor, was called a “shitty coward” for a thoughtful Substack exploring Alex Honnald, Alex Pretti and the concept of “plot armor.” And the congregants at Catholic church service led by a Jesuit (more Left-wing than you’d think) that I attended in Brooklyn on Saturday, were told that those who failed to protest could not be expected to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Anti-ICE also resembles 2020 in terms of its fundamental delusion: protesters are unaware that their activities benefit them more than the people whose rights they’re supposedly championing. (Defunding the police work didn’t work out too well for low-income black communities, recall.) But this time around, the movement has burned away the elements that made its previous iterations subject to mockery and reemerged purified and perhaps stronger. Gone are the fake compassion (black lives matter); the abstruse theory (what is a woman?); the dopey therapeutic culture (training to become un-racist). Even the focus on identity is gone — notice that no one is really talking about the own-voices of the migrants, or new forms of speaking in order to show them the greatest respect, or how to actually solve their problems in a systematic, policy-oriented way. Woke 2.0 is just fighting to keep them here, undocumented. 

Put another way: woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage, in a way that feels individual, atomized, and newly dangerous. Protesters physically interfere with law enforcement, spit and kick cars, track ICE vehicles and those belonging to conservative journalists, get phone numbers, doxx people, and send death threats. The threats are now going to phones and homes instead of social-media accounts. 

No longer “mostly peaceful,” protesters smash hotel windows without apology or disclaimer. And the internet is flooded with videos of random private citizens making grotesque threats. A Florida nurse wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that says “Trump sucks” announced that “as a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great pleasure” to wish Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,  “a fourth degree tear” during her upcoming labor. A Virginia nurse suggests that young women go on dates with ICE agents in order to put Ex-Lax in their drinks. In other videos, she suggests carrying needle syringes in order to inject the agents with a temporary paralysis drug or filling water guns with poison ivy and aiming for their faces and hands. Baby-faced young girls in rainbow hair clips give up saying anything coherent at all, instead yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

In this newly badass version of the #Resistance, every protester is the star of her own movie. And while the turn to sheer rage is no doubt sincere, it also represents an evacuation of content — the political cause, the political solution — and allows woke-ism to become the most perfect version of what it always in some senses was: a vehicle for the elite conception of self, and a very convenient one. If you have any doubt that it’s become all about professionals, look at who the movement’s martyrs are: not any one of the 32 people who’ve reportedly died in the custody of ICE custody last year, but Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

And the more it’s about the protesters, the more they think they should get their own way. This is not the America we want. Indeed. And they’re ready to take it by force, and feel justified in doing so. Nevermind that, as in the George Floyd protests before this, there is no goal that will help the victimized population beyond “stop enforcing the law.” 

This, of course, was always the problem with woke, and one of the reasons why it drove its rational opponents so mad. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, writing in his landmark 2024 survey, We Have Never Been Woke, contended that while a loose, historical meaning of woke was “an awareness of social injustice, and a commitment to rectifying it,” the movement’s claims to be operating on behalf of the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized have long been co-opted as a way for the elite to rationalize inequality.

In Al-Gharbi’s telling, this has always been delusional. The urban-protester demographic is the middle and upper-middle class. Anyone who resides in a household that makes more than $150,000 a year, he writes, is part of America’s top quintile, which controls a stunning 71% of the country’s wealth. This group benefits disproportionately from inequality; this group is the one that hoovers up services performed by mostly black and brown low-wage workers, who are often lacking legal authorization to work and thus vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. The top quintile’s attempts to blame “the 1%” are scapegoating and an attempt to deny its own guilt. “When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is in fact themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead,” Al-Gharbi writes. He adds that “progressive politics, in particular, seems to increasingly serve as a means through which highly educated, relatively affluent whites find purpose, transcendence and community in their lives.”

Al-Gharbi’s book is devastating in its depiction of the ways in which the wave of wokeness that began around the 2010s and peaked in 2020 made no impact on the “bread-and-butter” crises that afflict the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. Inequality continued to rise, and is rising still. Despite what people believe is a sincere commitment to social justice, he writes, their devotion to it comes primarily in the form of symbolic activity that takes the place of “sustainable, viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change,” while also mystifying the problem and making change harder to accomplish.    

In other words, all the protesting, Signal chats, cruising in your vehicle making videos, delivering casseroles, walking out of work, getting pepper-sprayed, and engaging in scuffles with authority won’t, fundamentally, allow the supposed beneficiaries of the activism to live equally as Americans. To do that would require real sacrifice and compromise, things that our increasingly violent political polarization, and demonization of each other, make ever less likely to come about. On the uglier side, the casseroles and scuffles will continue to allow migrants to be low-paid service workers for the people helping them stay. 

The new wrinkle of anti-woke, which gained real power in America mainly after Al-Gharbi’s analysis appeared, serves the same cultural function as woke, he writes. Once again, it’s a form of jockeying for power amongst an elite that has no intention of real reform. Following this logic, the deportation theater may be popular with Trump’s low income voters, but it’s also unlikely to change the conditions of their lives. 

The battle between ICE and anti-ICE, thus, even as it turns real, is still mainly symbolic. What’s needed in response is not more theater, or an ever more enraged doubling-down, but an attempt to see and inhabit a shared reality, and find a compromise. Some tactics are too much. Some humans are illegal (until we legally decide otherwise). If we don’t, we all may look back some day at woke 1.0 — the dumb yard signs, the vapid DEI power-points, the unserious death threats — with a kind of rainbow-hued nostalgia. 

 

 

---

• Proposed Merger: SpaceX and xAI are planning to merge into one company, with SpaceX executives informing some investors of the tie-up.
• Valuation Gap: xAI sought a $230 billion valuation while SpaceX was seeking an $800 billion valuation in recent fundraising efforts.
• IPO Plans: SpaceX plans to go public this year in what could be one of the largest initial public offerings on record.
• Space Data Centers: The merger would support plans to build orbital AI data centers powered by solar energy, with SpaceX filing plans for up to one million satellites.
• Resource Sharing: Both companies already share resources and investments, including SpaceX's $2 billion investment in xAI and Tesla's $2 billion investment disclosed in xAI's latest funding round.
• xAI Performance: xAI has struggled to attract enterprise customers and individual users compared to competitors OpenAI and Anthropic despite government partnerships.
• Broader Consolidation: The merger fits a pattern of Musk consolidating his business empire, including previous mergers of xAI and X, with consideration of a broader holding company structure.
• Uncertainty: The merger may not proceed, talks could fall apart, or Musk could pursue an alternative path for structuring these companies.

---

By

Alexander Saeedy

and

Berber Jin

Updated Jan. 31, 2026 8:26 am ET

---

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off in March 2025. Aubrey Gemignani/NASA via Getty Images

Elon Musk’s rocket-maker SpaceX and artificial-intelligence startup xAI are planning to merge into one company, people familiar with the matter said, further consolidating the billionaire’s business empire.

SpaceX executives have started to tell some investors about the planned tie-up, one of the people said.

It is possible that a merger won’t happen and talks could fall apart or that Musk could decide on a different path.

Both companies are privately held, and the math of a potential deal wasn’t immediately clear. xAI sought to raise $15 billion from investors for a $230 billion valuation last year, while SpaceX was seeking an $800 billion valuation in a December tender offer, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Reuters reported earlier that SpaceX and xAI were in discussions to combine.  

Musk has launched plans to take SpaceX public this year in what could be one of the biggest initial public offerings on record. It also wasn’t clear how the rocket maker’s offering would be affected by merging with an artificial-intelligence startup and a social-media company. 

The Journal reported that Musk had decided to take SpaceX public in part to raise more capital to build data centers in space and to help xAI. And investors have long speculated Musk could combine more of his sprawling businesses, which also include Tesla, such as how he merged xAI and X last year. 

Operating data centers in space is an unproven concept that has grabbed the attention of executives like Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman. 

Musk has previously mused about a broader tie-up of his companies. Several years ago, he described the idea of forming a holding company for Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Co. as a “good idea.” 

Inside his empire, companies regularly share resources, including employees. SpaceX previously invested $2 billion in xAI, and on Wednesday, Tesla disclosed its own $2 billion investment in the most recent funding round for xAI.

SpaceX is a crown jewel of Musk’s businesses, advancing space technology and frequently handling high-profile missions. It is one of the highest-valued private companies in the world and recently interviewed banks for a summer IPO with aspirations to raise billions of dollars, the Journal reported. 

xAI, meanwhile, has struggled to attract as many enterprise customers and individual users as competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. It has announced some partnerships with government customers, including the Pentagon, which SpaceX also does business with.

The artificial-intelligence company has also found itself embroiled in a number of controversies, most recently including the dissemination of sexualized images of users produced without their consent.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Musk said last week that he believes the future of artificial-intelligence data centers is out in the stars, where they can be powered by the sun. His data centers around the Memphis area have had to contend with energy constraints and Musk brought in a number of portable gas turbines to power the facilities.

“The lowest-cost place to put AI will be space,” Musk said on a panel. “That will be true within two years, maybe three.”

On Friday, SpaceX said it wants to develop a network of orbital AI data centers consisting of up to one million satellites, according to filings at the Federal Communications Commission. The company will need to secure permission from the telecom regulator to deploy that fleet, addressing spectrum usage, debris risk and other issues.

Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com and Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 31, 2026, print edition as 'Musk’s SpaceX And xAI Look to Combine'.

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Videos

• Minneapolis protests pattern: Recent Minneapolis protests are generating emotional responses similar to 2020, with saturated, performative, and reality-detached messaging across social media platforms.
• Social media broadcast: Instagram and similar platforms display extensive captions about trauma, declarations of unprecedented moments, and messaging that viewing passively constitutes moral failure.
• Widespread participation: Emotional excess extends beyond activists to lifestyle accounts, parenting feeds, wellness spaces, and commercial brands typically avoiding political discourse.
• Corporate statements: Companies including Whole30 and The Well-Trained Mind posted emotionally charged statements characterizing government actions as murder and terrorism on their business accounts.
• Parental emotional modeling: Parents teaching children about current events from infancy are modeling anxiety as moral engagement, causing children to absorb emotional overwhelm as virtue rather than regulation need.
• Medical validation: Healthcare professionals document patient symptoms including insomnia and physical stress from consuming Minneapolis news coverage, framing these responses as evidence of moral seriousness rather than disproportionate distress.
• Legislative consequences: Emotional messaging omits factual details about appropriations bills, with influencers urging defunding of ICE while overlooking that DHS funding discussions involve FEMA and Coast Guard allocations, contributing to government shutdown risk.
• Cyclical pattern: Similar emotional-over-analytical approaches occurred during COVID-19, Black Lives Matter era, Gaza conflict coverage, and gender ideology debates, with each cycle reinforcing conformity and preventing substantive reckonings.

---

News pouring out of Minneapolis these last few weeks is generating a strange sense of déjà vu.

Once again, protests in that midwestern city are saturating Americans with emotion — intense, performative and increasingly untethered from reality.

On social media, in particular, it feels like 2020 all over again.

Check out Instagram and you’ll see a rolling broadcast of distress: long captions about trauma, solemn declarations that this moment is unlike anything we’ve seen before and constant reminders that to look away is to fail.

Well-meaning people of all political persuasions, women above all, have succumbed to an irrational empathy that’s strangling any hope of reasoned debate on law enforcement and illegal immigration.

It’s not just a few overheated activists or fringe influencers: Lifestyle accounts, parenting feeds, wellness spaces, and for-profit brands that normally stay well away from political discourse are caught up in the emotional excess. 

“It’s OK if meal planning feels hard today,” went a post this week from Whole30, a company that offers guidance on elimination diets. “We just watched our government brutally murder a man in the streets.”

“Surely a great nation can enforce its immigration laws without terrorizing the innocent [and] without playing with racial hatred like a child with a lit match,”  the homeschool curriculum The Well-Trained Mind ranted on its Instagram account.

These statements, and countless more like them, are serving as emotional cues — making it clear that any response short of outrage is a moral failing.

The goal isn’t persuasion, but manipulation.

Among very-online parents, emotional dysregulation is increasingly framed as virtue.

Mom blogger Nina Caviggiola  wrote that she’s been teaching her children “about immigration, displaced people, minorities, people of color . . . since they were babies.”

“Children, especially ages 3–5, feel what’s happening in the world,” she warned. “They notice shifts. They sense fear, tension, injustice.”

Nonsense. Children don’t feel the news; they feel their parents.

When Mom or Dad models anxiety as moral engagement, kids absorb the message that emotional overwhelm isn’t something to regulate — it’s something to embrace. 

Professional validation of this spiral is deepening the problem.

Physician Lucy McBride writes about how her patients, unable to stop watching “the violence unfold in Minneapolis,” are suffering insomnia, tension headaches, racing hearts, skipped medications, and collapsing routines — all due to their “collective trauma.”

But she makes no suggestion that their distress might be disproportionate or unhealthy; she presents their symptoms as evidence of moral seriousness.

Emotional collapse isn’t a problem to address, in McBride’s telling, but proof that you care.

On her “Relatable” podcast, author Allie Beth Stuckey warned that America’s women are being trained to “feel their way through politics.”

Emotion replaces analysis. Anxiety is mistaken for activism.

The strongest feelings are assumed to be the truest ones.

Once this emotional groundwork is laid, political actors enters the picture, often with misleading messages.

So it’s no surprise that progressive influencers are increasingly urging followers to contact their representatives and demand they “defund ICE” by stripping funds for the Department of Homeland Security from a must-pass appropriations bill.

Ignorantly or intentionally, these posts omit the fact that the annual DHS funding bill under discussion doesn’t touch the locked-in budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but instead risks the $64 billion allocation for agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard.

But the legislative facts matter not at all when emotional urgency is at stake — and thanks in part to the groundswell, a Democrat-driven government shutdown is once again in play.

Feel first. React loudly. Ask questions later.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2020, when COVID-19 emerged, fear rapidly replaced reason and dissent became socially unacceptable.

The Black Lives Matter era overlapped with the pandemic, as slogans overwhelmed scrutiny and institutions competed to signal their virtue.

The conflict in Gaza has been judged largely through social-media feelings about warfare and the plight of suffering Palestinians, rather than sober analysis.

And the moral absolutism surrounding gender ideology has brought relentless language policing as even private hesitation was cast as harm.

Each episode reinforced the same lesson: restraint is suspect, nuance is dangerous, and emotional conformity is rewarded.

Yet once the emotional peak of each new crisis passes, there is no reckoning — just a pivot to the next one.

Declaring oneself traumatized by secondhand exposure to information one has chosen to consume on repeat is nothing but moral cosplay.

Real strength isn’t found in broadcasting despair. It’s found in resisting the pressure to join in.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.

• School Model: Alpha School operates private and charter campuses across multiple US cities with no traditional teachers, two-hour daily academic instruction via AI-powered tablets, and four hours of "life skill workshops"
• Tuition and Cost: Annual tuition ranges from $10,000 to $65,000 depending on location, with approximately 25% of students receiving scholarships funded through tuition and donor contributions
• Academic Structure: Students complete individualized learning plans through AI algorithms that adapt to each child's pace, with "guides" (non-certified staff paid ~$150,000 annually) providing motivation rather than direct instruction
• Learning Outcomes Claimed: Alpha reports students learn twice as fast and score in the top 1%-2% on MAP testing for reading and math growth, though state standardized test scores have not been publicly shared
• Support System: When students struggle (claimed to occur in less than 5% of cases), academic coaches from TimeBack (mostly located outside the US) conduct remote calls; guides provide 30 minutes weekly one-on-one time per student
• Physical Environment: Students work in flexible spaces including bean bags, long tables, and individual enclosed "pods"; the school uses a Pomodoro Method (25-minute work/5-15-minute break cycles) for the two-hour academic block
• Leadership and Backing: Co-founder MacKenzie Price partners with billionaire Joe Liemandt (worth $6.6 billion); the school has received attention from Education Secretary Linda McMahon and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman
• Expansion and Controversy: Alpha operates approximately 15 schools nationwide with additional planned openings; concerns raised by educators and health professionals regarding screen time effects on mental health and the absence of traditional teacher-student relationships

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A private school that’s opening campuses from New York to California uses AI bots to teach kids their academic subjects in just two hours a day – claiming its Silicon Valley methods could shake up the future of US education.

Alpha School – a chain of private and charter schools founded in Austin, Texas in 2014 – opened its campus in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District last fall. In California, it opened schools last summer in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Lake Forest in Orange County. There are no teachers, no homework – and tuition can run a stiff $65,000 a year.

Inside, students spend just two hours a day learning language, math, science and other key subjects like history – clicking through lessons on tablets and laptops with the help of human “guides” that roam classrooms. The rest of the day is devoted to “life skill workshops,” which can mean climbing 40-foot rock walls, assembling a piece of IKEA furniture or solving a Rubik’s Cube.

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Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price speaks during a roundtable event at Alpha’s Austin campus in September. Getty Images for Alpha School

The company is led by MacKenzie Price – a 49-year-old, Stanford-educated entrepreneur who regularly churns out videos to her 1 million Instagram followers, claiming Alpha can teach students twice as fast as conventional schools.

Price speaks the language of disruption, warning that traditional schools have “poisoned” young minds. Alpha staffers, she says, strive to instill a “growth mindset” – a hustle-culture phrase often used by tech bros – as they encourage kids to set their own goals and challenges.

“Teachers aren’t going to be replaced, they’re going to be transformed, and it’s such an exciting time for them,” Price told The Post in an interview.

Some critics are wary of Alpha’s placement of screens at the center of its daily program versus conventional teachers, questioning whether it amounts to a high-tech experiment that could put kids’ mental health at risk.

Doctors and psychologists warn that overuse of technology can have damaging effects on young kids – and make teens more likely to suffer from social anxiety, low self-esteem and depression.

“I believe it’s dangerous to wipe teachers from classrooms,” said Joe Vercellino, a Detroit Teacher of the Year and founder of The Lion Heart Experience, which brings mental health programming to schools. “What I worry about is what it will take away from our human development.”

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Billionaire Bill Ackman encouraged his nearly two million followers on X to look into Alpha School. JASON SZENES/ NY POST

Price – who last summer schmoozed with billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman at a Hamptons event and has appeared on LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s podcast – leans heavily into tech startup culture.

In a recent Instagram post, she wrote: “Report cards are basically useless at this point. Instead, we put students in charge of their own accountability process.”

“I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time to be a 5-year-old than there is right now,” Price told The Post.

On her Instagram account, a 10-year-old Alpha student boasts he is a successful Airbnb manager, while a teenage girl announces she has founded her own app. 

Alpha is quickly growing. Its new Financial District campus opened its doors in September, just weeks after its three California campuses. There are about a dozen additional sister schools in cities like Miami, Austin, Texas; Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

In August, Ackman encouraged his nearly two million followers on X to contact Price about enrollment, calling it a “truly breakthrough innovation.”

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon meets with students at Alpha’s school in Austin, Texas. Getty Images for Alpha School

Price and a rep for Ackman declined to comment on whether Ackman has a child enrolled at Alpha. Price said he is not an investor in Alpha and has not discussed plans to invest.

Alpha’s Austin, Texas, campus got a visit in September from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who hailed the innovative use of AI and argued it “will be critical to … preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce.”

At Alpha schools, students can work anywhere in the building, lounging in bean bags or sitting together at long tables.

Peeks inside Alpha’s campuses also have sparked alarms – including a video on Price’s Instagram last May that showed middle-school-aged boys curled up with laptops inside a row of cramped, phone booth-like enclosures the school calls “pods”.

“We started putting these boys in pods for 2 hours every day at school,” a caption on Price’s Instagram reads.

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Some young boys at Alpha are shown curled up in tight, glass phone booths in a video on Price’s Instagram. @futureof_education/Instagram

Social media users were aghast, with one calling the images “terrifying,” saying Alpha appeared to be “isolating the students in a freaking pod while having them intersect with an AI.”

“This is almost inhuman, even if it’s for two hours a day,” the user added.

Alpha told The Post it is up to students where they want to work, and some prefer the pods because they are quieter with fewer distractions.

The school claims its K-12 students learn twice as fast at its schools and score in the top 1% to 2% on MAP testing, a nationwide measure of growth in reading and math. The school hasn’t shared student scores on state standardized tests.

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Workshops often include physical activities. @futureof_education/Instagram

Alpha said its AI algorithm enables students to succeed with highly individualized learning plans. An app spits out a unique series of questions, which they need to answer correctly to “graduate” to the next grade – meaning kids can learn at different paces in the same classroom.

“Our apps allow us to say, ‘OK, Susie actually needs to go back to second-grade math,'” said Tasha Arnold, 43, head of Alpha’s New York City school and a longtime public school teacher.

Students who get questions wrong more than three times are prompted to review past lessons or watch a video on the topic. But they can’t raise their hand to ask the teacher, since there isn’t one.

Instead, Alpha employs “guides” – many of whom have no professional training in education, instead coming from careers as sports coaches or tech founders – and pays them salaries of roughly $150,000.

“I’m not there to try to teach them fractions or capitals. I’m there to help them find ways to find answers themselves,” Liam Stanton, 34, an Alpha guide who taught at international schools in China and Colombia for a decade, told The Post.

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Billionaire Joe Liemandt joined Alpha School as a business partner and principal. YouTube / Invest Like The Best

The guides are placed in classrooms to help motivate students – but they’re not there to help with specific questions about academic material. Asked what happens when a child is truly struggling, Arnold said that’s when an “academic expert in that topic will jump on a call with you.”

Alpha claimed this happens in less than 5% of cases. When it does, guides will set up a call with a “scholar” at TimeBack – Alpha’s software development arm, which employs education experts and programmers who work on its “2 Hour Learning” model.

A list of the 31 Alpha scholars provided for the 2023-24 school year included at least 27 who live outside the US, from the Philippines to Colombia, according to Wired. 

Alpha declined to comment on this list, though it said 21 of its current 31 academic coaches live outside the US.

Price has grown Alpha School with the backing of Joe Liemandt – a Stanford dropout worth $6.6 billion, according to Forbes. After enrolling his own kids at Price’s school, Liemandt joined the staff as a principal and brought on his company, Trilogy Software, to help develop Alpha’s AI-driven curriculum. Alpha has since pivoted to its own development team at TimeBack.

“We’ve been able to develop this school, my partner and I, have been able to do this so far on our own,” Price told The Post when asked about Alpha’s funding, referring to Liemandt.

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Nine Alpha students spoke at a Ted Talk event last May. Alpha School

While AI-driven efficiency may have some advantages, removing the in-person, human element from the core of the process could have consequences, Vercellino warned. An important part of school, he argued, is learning to ask for help from teachers – even ones you might not like – and scooting your chair over to help a fellow student with a problem. 

“As I often tell families, education is not a race to condense, it’s a journey filled with relationships, self-discovery,” said Kirsten Horton, an education consultant in Raleigh, North Carolina, where an Alpha school is slated to open this fall.

“For tuition of $40,000–$75,000 a year, families should expect not just efficiency, but the richness of a full ecosystem: drama departments, sports teams, counselors and a web of human relationships that guide children into adulthood,” Horton told The Post.

“Our program is really focused on what is best for children,” Arnold said in response to such concerns. “It’s not about what’s best for teachers or teacher’s unions, it’s not about what makes parents necessarily feel nostalgic about the way they learned.”

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Alpha students playing pool, as seen in an Instagram video. @futureof_education/Instagram

Alpha says its guides spend at least 30 minutes of one-on-one time with each kid weekly, helping them set personal goals or discussing troubles in their personal lives. Guides are also required to pass an FBI-level background check and score 90% or higher on the CCAT, a pre-employment test that measures problem-solving abilities. 

“Unlike in the traditional teaching industry, where teachers are leaving the field in droves and they’re struggling to find high-quality candidates, we’re not having this problem,” Price said.

Despite warnings from health professionals, laptop and screen use has continued to soar in schools across America, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.

US students in grades one through 12 now spend an average of 98 minutes a day on school-issued devices during the school year – reaching a peak at two hours and 24 minutes daily in sixth grade, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

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Alpha claims that its students learn twice as fast and score in the top 1% to 2% on MAP testing. Alpha School

Alpha pointed to this statistic repeatedly as proof that its two hours of daily screen time isn’t so outlandish. 

“Our students actually get more time to connect with their peers as well as their teachers than students in a traditional school environment do,” Price told The Post.

But traditional schools spend an additional five or six hours on academics from a human teacher – while Alpha students squeeze their academic studies, like reading novels and completing math lessons, into that daily two-hour blast on tablets.

They follow a time-management system known as the Pomodoro Method: studying on the apps for 25 minutes to earn a 5-minute break, then another 25 minutes for a 15-minute break, and so on until they hit two hours.

Wade Driscoll, 19, now a student at Parsons School of Design, graduated from Alpha’s Austin campus and said his classmates used the full two hours of learning time most days.

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McMahon argued AI “will be critical to…preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce.” Getty Images for Alpha School

“A lot of times I found that [we] would get really into the subject and work and work through that five-minute break,” Driscoll told The Post.

Alpha students learn language, math and science on the AI apps. Other subjects that would typically require a standalone class, like history, are folded into the reading program. Alpha said this is because the standard history curriculum takes less time to teach.

It also personalizes reading material. If a third grader is reading at an eighth-grade level, they’re “still reading about unicorns, but it’s complex vocab. If they’re fifth grade but need a lower level, it’s still age appropriate,” Arnold told The Post.

The AI algorithm can also plug in information to make material more interesting for students, so they can learn math via the sales of Taylor Swift’s latest album instead of baseball stats, for example.

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Alpha is quickly growing – adding its New York City campus this year to about 15 sister schools. Alpha School

When asked whether students ever read off real pages, Alpha said its kindergarten and first-grade classrooms are full of bookshelves and physical books, but they’re not part of academic requirements. 

Its unusual tactics have drawn attention online, including a currency the school has developed for rewarding high test scores it calls “Alphas.” Each Alpha is worth about a quarter, but it appears they quickly stack up – redeemable for arcade-like prizes including stuffed animals or a Nintendo Switch.

This “2 Hour Learning” model is also used at the company’s other non-Alpha schools, including some virtual charter schools and NextGen Academy, a private middle school in Austin with a curriculum that includes video games like Fortnite and Rocket League.

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About four hours of the day at Alpha are spent on “life skill workshops.” Alpha School

Alpha markets itself as an alternative school for kids who struggle in traditional environments, whether they’re far more advanced than their peers or struggling to keep up.

About 25% of students across the Alpha system are on scholarships, which are funded through a combination of tuition dollars from other families and donors, the school said. While a family in Brownsville, Texas, might pay $500 a year and have the rest of the $10,000 tuition bill covered, the New York school is not yet offering aid for its $65,000 tuition.

Driscoll, the Alpha alum, said he switched to the AI school after unsuccessfully trying new school after new school.

“In public school, I felt really held back by the other students,” he told The Post. “I used to, like, tell my mom every day that I was feeling sick.”

But once he started at Alpha, “there was an immediate shift,” said Erin Driscoll, 51, Wade’s mom. 

“All of a sudden he had something to work for. He could be as challenged as he needed to be.”