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The Libertarian Institute
by Matt Wolfson
Sep 18, 2025
Empires, unlike revolutions, don’t have heralds; they work off quiet aggrandizements of power, not bold declarations of freedom. But America’s imperial class appears to have a member who’s missed that memo: the Zionist hedge fund manager William Ackman, a self-selected Patrick Henry of an elite that cannot want one. For the last few years, as his allies have quietly worked to curtail popular politics, Ackman has become a reliable articulator at any given moment of just what game they are actually playing.
In 2023 and 2024, as his allies subtly tried to float alternatives to conservative populism, Ackman endorsed and then unendorsed apparently anti-populist presidential candidates (Jamie Dimon, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dean Phillips, Jamie Dimon again) as if his rolodex depended on it. In 2024 and 2025, as his allies turned their attention to the campuses where students being trained to run Washington’s military-industrial complex were revolting against it, Ackman not only helped lead the rhetorical charge to quash the protests but clarified its underlying logic by explaining that the “real purpose of a university” was to decide “Who is going to manage society?” In 2025, as the New York Zionist financial community planned a response to the rise of the Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, Ackman publicly promised “hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani…(believe me, I am in the text strings and the WhatsApp groups).”
If there is a herald of the moves of the forces of the reaction, it is Ackman—so it was noteworthy when, a month ago, Ackman announced via an article in the news section of The Wall Street Journal that his new project would be acting as the public ambassador for a relatively unknown set of private schools. The Alpha School Network is described as “a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours.” According to the Journal, the school:
Sixteen Alpha schools are or will soon be operational: three in California, one in Arizona, five in Texas, three in Florida, two in North Carolina, one outside Washington DC, and now one in New York.
.
In 2014 Ackman donated $26 million to Harvard, $17 million of which would “catalyze the work of the university’s Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative…to explore the psychological, social, economic, and biological mechanisms that influence human behavior.” Effectively, judging by a report in The Harvard Crimson, Ackman’s donation allowed the Initiative to exist; according to the same report, the Initiative is “spearheaded” by a behavioral economist and:
.
The point of this initiative, it becomes clear on examination, is to fuse behavioral economics with biology and psychology to predict and influence human beings. In other words, it is a perversion of both economics (which is about market choice) and science (which is about the natural world) for the purposes of social control, which is the purpose of neither field. But this is of a piece with not only Ackman’s approach but with the approach of his powerful Harvard Zionist allies.
Among them is Ackman’s friend Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist and proponent of the computational theory of the human mind. In Pinker’s own description of his version of this view, “a theory of how the mind works that was built on the notions of computation, specialization, and evolution,” one which “holds that the mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation” or, more straightforwardly, “an evolved computer.” Leaving aside the inherent limitations with using an invention of the human mind to describe the human mind, Pinker has been criticized in his field for applying evolutionary biology reductively to human beings to the detriment of a real understanding of both evolution and people. (“Darwinian fundamentalism,” goes one such critique, “is a form of irrationalism that, left un-checked, erodes the very theory of evolution it embraces.”) But Pinker’s approach is perfectly consistent with, and in fact a precondition for, the Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative’s fusion of behavioral economics with evolutionary biology. It is also perfectly consistent with the Alpha Schools’ conception of kindergartners as computers, or machines, or aspirant robots: candidates for two-hour AI “crunch” sessions in the morning followed by five-mile bike rides “without stopping” in the afternoon.
So is the approach of Lawrence Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury and chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations. As president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, Summers rubbed faculty wrong for not only equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism but for applying behavioral genetics to gender disparities at university departments and mathematics and “rational choice” economics to political science. Critics called Summers an “intellectual imperialist,” and this gets fairly close to his and Pinker’s and Ackman’s project—using science and technology to replace critical thinking with “skill-based learning” and values formation with software-based cram sessions.
Nor is Ackman the only Zionist financier pushing this project. On Friday August 22, according to The Wall Street Journal, Ackman “appear[ed] with Alpha’s co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home…moderated by the former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute’s Hamptons Dialogues.” Milken’s status as what the Journal discretely calls a “former financier” is the product of a plea deal over securities fraud with the U.S. Department of Justice thirty-five years ago. He is part of that cohort of Zionist financiers who mostly made their wealth beginning in the 1970s and 1980s (Michael Steinhardt, Charles Bronfman, Paul Singer, Stephen Schwarzman) and then went on in the 1990s and 2000s to philanthropic projects to boost Israel and the appendages of the military-corporate state. Among these philanthropic projects, their educational donations, which I have reported on in two recent investigations for the Libertarian Institute, are the largest and most instructive. Like Ackman’s, they involve supporting scientific research and emerging technologies and training a generation of elite managers via engineering schools, business schools, and computing schools.
Not coincidentally, achievement in these sectors is exactly how Israel has defined itself since the 1990s and 2000s, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose portfolio included time as Science and Technology minister and minister of Finance, and who is a graduate of MIT and former consultant at the Boston-based management consultancy Bain, used government policies and American private equity largesse to turn Israel into a “start-up nation.” As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute in the past, this has led to Israeli staffers occupying crucial rungs at Google and Meta. It has also led to Israeli surveillance tools being used in America by the U.S. government. And it has led, more quietly, to a reimagining at the hands of American Zionist philanthropists of our country’s educational priorities so that they better align with Israel’s aims—emphasizing management and technological skills in such a way that critical thinking gets supplanted in the name of “innovation” and “adaptation.”
This recognizably Zionist agenda is articulated on an intellectual level not just by Steven Pinker but, more starkly, by Yuval Noah Harari, arguably Israel’s most prominent intellectual and, along with Pinker, another friend of Ackman’s. As early as 2018, Harari was arguing that “‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality” but “a myth inherited from Christian theology” and that “confronting the challenge of AI and bioengineering” means “question[ing] the traditional assumptions of liberalism,” namely “ the belief in human liberty” which is based on free will. In its place, according to Harari, citizens should substitute the understanding that “every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.” Many people who do believe in free will would call what Harari is recommending “understanding context”—namely, appreciating the social, natural, and familial environments every person exists in, is affected by, and affects. But Harari’s project has nothing to do with understanding context, which almost everyone on some level already does. It has to do with questioning the politics of freedom in order to subordinate them to technology; in his words, to “develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.”
.
.
An example which gives a sense of the real project at play comes in an article entitled “A Hindu Jewish Partnership” which recently appeared in Sapir, a Zionist American quarterly, and quoted Bill Ackman at length as part of its thesis. This article argued that, like Asian Americans and Jews, Hindu Americans are “‘model minorities’ who have made much of the American dream,” measuring what it called their “success” by the large proportion of Hindu and Jewish Americans whose household incomes are above $100,000. This metric, in turn, commonly denotes membership in what’s commonly called the “six figure club” and is commonly tied to positions in healthcare, technology, finance, and executive management: all, at this point, direct or indirect outgrowths of America’s military corporate complex.
The article went on to urge Hindus and Jews to erect an “Intellectual Iron Dome” in imitation of Israel’s defense apparatus the Iron Dome “to safeguard the world from the regressive movement against merit”—with merit defined, again, as membership in the “six figure club.” This “Intellectual Iron Dome” would:
Instructively, a version of this “Iron Dome” is already operational, thanks to Sapir’s editor Bret Stephens’s friend Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner and ardent Zionist with lifelong connections to the financial and philanthropic networks that include Milken and Ackman. Kraft has lately engineered an AI-based “anti-semitism” detection scheme, the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, staffed by thirty people near the Patriots’ stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts. These thirty people “sift through one billion social-media posts daily using algorithms and artificial intelligence” tracking what they call anti-semitism (of which their main example is anti-Zionism), and then “create countermessaging, including social-media posts” and “share information with social-media platforms as well as colleges—including nearby Harvard University.”
.
.
Full article:
The Libertarian Institute
by Matt Wolfson
Sep 18, 2025
Empires, unlike revolutions, don’t have heralds; they work off quiet aggrandizements of power, not bold declarations of freedom. But America’s imperial class appears to have a member who’s missed that memo: the Zionist hedge fund manager William Ackman, a self-selected Patrick Henry of an elite that cannot want one. For the last few years, as his allies have quietly worked to curtail popular politics, Ackman has become a reliable articulator at any given moment of just what game they are actually playing.
In 2023 and 2024, as his allies subtly tried to float alternatives to conservative populism, Ackman endorsed and then unendorsed apparently anti-populist presidential candidates (Jamie Dimon, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dean Phillips, Jamie Dimon again) as if his rolodex depended on it. In 2024 and 2025, as his allies turned their attention to the campuses where students being trained to run Washington’s military-industrial complex were revolting against it, Ackman not only helped lead the rhetorical charge to quash the protests but clarified its underlying logic by explaining that the “real purpose of a university” was to decide “Who is going to manage society?” In 2025, as the New York Zionist financial community planned a response to the rise of the Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, Ackman publicly promised “hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani…(believe me, I am in the text strings and the WhatsApp groups).”
If there is a herald of the moves of the forces of the reaction, it is Ackman—so it was noteworthy when, a month ago, Ackman announced via an article in the news section of The Wall Street Journal that his new project would be acting as the public ambassador for a relatively unknown set of private schools. The Alpha School Network is described as “a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours.” According to the Journal, the school:
“…which calls its teachers ‘guides,’ says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools…The schedule allows students to do hands-on activities in the afternoon, which the school says help them build life skills. These include 5-mile bike rides ‘without stopping’ for kindergartners, and exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans. The school also strives to keep the hot-button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely.”
Sixteen Alpha schools are or will soon be operational: three in California, one in Arizona, five in Texas, three in Florida, two in North Carolina, one outside Washington DC, and now one in New York.
.
In 2014 Ackman donated $26 million to Harvard, $17 million of which would “catalyze the work of the university’s Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative…to explore the psychological, social, economic, and biological mechanisms that influence human behavior.” Effectively, judging by a report in The Harvard Crimson, Ackman’s donation allowed the Initiative to exist; according to the same report, the Initiative is “spearheaded” by a behavioral economist and:
.
The point of this initiative, it becomes clear on examination, is to fuse behavioral economics with biology and psychology to predict and influence human beings. In other words, it is a perversion of both economics (which is about market choice) and science (which is about the natural world) for the purposes of social control, which is the purpose of neither field. But this is of a piece with not only Ackman’s approach but with the approach of his powerful Harvard Zionist allies.
Among them is Ackman’s friend Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist and proponent of the computational theory of the human mind. In Pinker’s own description of his version of this view, “a theory of how the mind works that was built on the notions of computation, specialization, and evolution,” one which “holds that the mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation” or, more straightforwardly, “an evolved computer.” Leaving aside the inherent limitations with using an invention of the human mind to describe the human mind, Pinker has been criticized in his field for applying evolutionary biology reductively to human beings to the detriment of a real understanding of both evolution and people. (“Darwinian fundamentalism,” goes one such critique, “is a form of irrationalism that, left un-checked, erodes the very theory of evolution it embraces.”) But Pinker’s approach is perfectly consistent with, and in fact a precondition for, the Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative’s fusion of behavioral economics with evolutionary biology. It is also perfectly consistent with the Alpha Schools’ conception of kindergartners as computers, or machines, or aspirant robots: candidates for two-hour AI “crunch” sessions in the morning followed by five-mile bike rides “without stopping” in the afternoon.
So is the approach of Lawrence Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury and chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations. As president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, Summers rubbed faculty wrong for not only equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism but for applying behavioral genetics to gender disparities at university departments and mathematics and “rational choice” economics to political science. Critics called Summers an “intellectual imperialist,” and this gets fairly close to his and Pinker’s and Ackman’s project—using science and technology to replace critical thinking with “skill-based learning” and values formation with software-based cram sessions.
Nor is Ackman the only Zionist financier pushing this project. On Friday August 22, according to The Wall Street Journal, Ackman “appear[ed] with Alpha’s co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home…moderated by the former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute’s Hamptons Dialogues.” Milken’s status as what the Journal discretely calls a “former financier” is the product of a plea deal over securities fraud with the U.S. Department of Justice thirty-five years ago. He is part of that cohort of Zionist financiers who mostly made their wealth beginning in the 1970s and 1980s (Michael Steinhardt, Charles Bronfman, Paul Singer, Stephen Schwarzman) and then went on in the 1990s and 2000s to philanthropic projects to boost Israel and the appendages of the military-corporate state. Among these philanthropic projects, their educational donations, which I have reported on in two recent investigations for the Libertarian Institute, are the largest and most instructive. Like Ackman’s, they involve supporting scientific research and emerging technologies and training a generation of elite managers via engineering schools, business schools, and computing schools.
Not coincidentally, achievement in these sectors is exactly how Israel has defined itself since the 1990s and 2000s, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose portfolio included time as Science and Technology minister and minister of Finance, and who is a graduate of MIT and former consultant at the Boston-based management consultancy Bain, used government policies and American private equity largesse to turn Israel into a “start-up nation.” As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute in the past, this has led to Israeli staffers occupying crucial rungs at Google and Meta. It has also led to Israeli surveillance tools being used in America by the U.S. government. And it has led, more quietly, to a reimagining at the hands of American Zionist philanthropists of our country’s educational priorities so that they better align with Israel’s aims—emphasizing management and technological skills in such a way that critical thinking gets supplanted in the name of “innovation” and “adaptation.”
This recognizably Zionist agenda is articulated on an intellectual level not just by Steven Pinker but, more starkly, by Yuval Noah Harari, arguably Israel’s most prominent intellectual and, along with Pinker, another friend of Ackman’s. As early as 2018, Harari was arguing that “‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality” but “a myth inherited from Christian theology” and that “confronting the challenge of AI and bioengineering” means “question[ing] the traditional assumptions of liberalism,” namely “ the belief in human liberty” which is based on free will. In its place, according to Harari, citizens should substitute the understanding that “every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.” Many people who do believe in free will would call what Harari is recommending “understanding context”—namely, appreciating the social, natural, and familial environments every person exists in, is affected by, and affects. But Harari’s project has nothing to do with understanding context, which almost everyone on some level already does. It has to do with questioning the politics of freedom in order to subordinate them to technology; in his words, to “develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.”
.
.
An example which gives a sense of the real project at play comes in an article entitled “A Hindu Jewish Partnership” which recently appeared in Sapir, a Zionist American quarterly, and quoted Bill Ackman at length as part of its thesis. This article argued that, like Asian Americans and Jews, Hindu Americans are “‘model minorities’ who have made much of the American dream,” measuring what it called their “success” by the large proportion of Hindu and Jewish Americans whose household incomes are above $100,000. This metric, in turn, commonly denotes membership in what’s commonly called the “six figure club” and is commonly tied to positions in healthcare, technology, finance, and executive management: all, at this point, direct or indirect outgrowths of America’s military corporate complex.
The article went on to urge Hindus and Jews to erect an “Intellectual Iron Dome” in imitation of Israel’s defense apparatus the Iron Dome “to safeguard the world from the regressive movement against merit”—with merit defined, again, as membership in the “six figure club.” This “Intellectual Iron Dome” would:
“…harness the powers of AI as a force multiplier in the arsenal against Hinduphobia and antisemitism. An AI-based system can be designed to monitor and examine trends in antisemitism and Hinduphobia online and predict problems before they manifest. Such a system could be equipped to disseminate counter-messaging for threats to meritocracy, free speech, and the dignity and safety of Jews and Hindus. A complementary system could create and disseminate indices that rate bias by individuals and institutions, to help the public make informed decisions in choosing vendors and organizational partners.”
Instructively, a version of this “Iron Dome” is already operational, thanks to Sapir’s editor Bret Stephens’s friend Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner and ardent Zionist with lifelong connections to the financial and philanthropic networks that include Milken and Ackman. Kraft has lately engineered an AI-based “anti-semitism” detection scheme, the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, staffed by thirty people near the Patriots’ stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts. These thirty people “sift through one billion social-media posts daily using algorithms and artificial intelligence” tracking what they call anti-semitism (of which their main example is anti-Zionism), and then “create countermessaging, including social-media posts” and “share information with social-media platforms as well as colleges—including nearby Harvard University.”
.
.
Full article:
