Reprinted with permission from The Jason Jones Show substack.
“Our children are being indoctrinated,” says Senator Ted Cruz after the latest poll showing young Americans’ growing opposition to the Israeli government (He carefully picked one with a forced binary choice between Israeli forces and Hamas – obscuring the general thrust of young people’s moral revulsion to Israel’s violence visible in numerous polls). Daily Wire influencer Jordan Peterson says he’s “sickened” by the trend, which he flatly frames as “the rising tide of antisemitism.” (He chose to make his case as a defense of “Judeo-Christian” values, but in the same post quickly makes clear he is defending the literal state of Israel). Peterson jeers at young people’s “oh-so moral” reasons for opposing Israel and calls its critics “despicable,” adding: “The fate of Israel at the hands of the Islamists is the fate of the West.”
“Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens!” these Zionists might say, calling for the death of the Gadfly. But they’re about to learn it doesn’t pay to sentence Socrates to death.
Outwitting the Heart
To listen to a certain stripe of cynical ideologue (a stripe that runs through both the major parties, especially when it comes to foreign policy), you’d think that young Americans had suddenly become a pack of heartless Nazi or communist authoritarians – eager to tear down Western Civilization just out of spite.
What’s more, we’re told the spite is unprovoked and almost inexplicable. After all, nothing of significance has happened over the last three years…
It’s not like young people have spent their formative years watching video after viral video of unarmed men, women, and children being mangled and buried under rubble by the thousands in a livestreamed, U.S. taxpayer-funded genocide.
And it’s not like there’s been an artificial intelligence revolution that threatens the future well-being and employability of the youngest generations just as they enter the workforce.
And it’s not like AI is being used to surveil, to target, and to kill – while some of the American tech oligarchs behind the biggest AI firms openly talk about tracking anti-Israel speech online, and others openly defend the genocide.
And it’s not as if the president young men voted for in historic numbers just over a year ago – in part due to promises that he’d reject “stupid wars” – was then maneuvered into another disastrous war in partnership with the nation guilty of that genocide. A war that has worsened the economic prospects of the young even further, to say nothing of its cost in terms of human life.
It’s not as if on Day 1 of that war, in a moment that was decidedly not lost on young Americans, the U.S. military struck a girls’ school in Iran, killing over 100 people, most of the victims being schoolchildren… a disastrous crime that, according to widespread reports, may have been due to the Pentagon’s use of AI for targeting.
And finally, it’s not as if, with more elections around the corner, the vice president just revealed that Israeli operatives are working to scuttle the Trump administration’s efforts to end this war – all while yet another well-funded Israeli propaganda campaign targets young Americans in an effort to avert their wariness of even further military cruelties already planned by Israel.
‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing’
I’m sure you see what I’m getting at. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist’s brain for trivial knowledge to see what’s wrong (and not trivially wrong) with this picture. It only takes a heart.
As the Catholic poet Alexander Pope once wrote, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” There’s a difference between those who learn truths piecemeal in service of their own ends and those who devote themselves to the truth for its own sake.
In fact, it’s significant that so many of those who dismiss young people’s moral outrage today do so by calling the young stupid. They’re idiots, the cynics say, because they haven’t studied the lessons of history. They don’t know about the Holocaust. About the mathematical impossibility of socialist economics. That’s what makes them a threat to public order. To Western Civilization!
But here’s the irony. By going so far afield from the urgent moral crises of the moment and instead focusing on the machinery of things – of rocket science, of reason, and even of the outline of Western thought – these people are showing themselves to be totally ignorant of the heart of Western thought.
For all the “critical thinking” these elders claim young people lack, “critical thinking skills” without a grasp of first principles is called “sophistry” – the kind of smarts that proved to be the nemesis of Socrates’s philosophy.
This is the kind of thinking that has brought us a long series of patent offenses against Western Civilization – injuries to which the corrupt elders of our Athens have added the insult of calling them “defenses” of that civilization. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which soon led to youth-led mass protests against nuclear bombings, the use of unjust means against civilian targets in the Vietnamese War – also widely opposed by the young, the use of lies to drum up support for the Gulf War – decried by yet another youth movement. The list goes on, through the Iraq invasion under George W. Bush, the inhuman drone strikes that killed civilians in Yemen and Libya under Barack Obama, and, of course, Israel’s current genocide and today’s Iran War.
Far from a sudden heartless love of spiteful communism or Nazism, what moves young people today is what has moved young people from age to age since the time of Socrates: the supranatural law on which Western Civilization was founded: the law that scripture says is written on the human heart. A law that seems always to have the power in particular to give young people (they not yet having had the chance to become corrupted like so many denizens of Washington, D.C. are) a heartfelt hatred of dehumanizing violence.
But just as the foolish politicians of Athens preferred the thinking of the sophists, which could bend any truth against the public and toward the “public interest,” today’s Zionists and so-called “establishment” figures prefer the brand of “Western Civilization” to the real thing.
And they show that they’ve forgotten what the death of Socrates brought about: it changed the course of history – bending it against his enemies and toward justice. It’s from Socrates, together with his student Plato and his student’s student Aristotle, that we have inherited Western philosophy. Blended with Christian revelation, the Socratic tradition became the basis by which we applied the law revealed in Scripture to public life.
In short, those who today claim to be defending Western Civilization by attacking the moral instincts of the young are in fact attacking that civilization.
The Undoing of the Sophists
But in the end, it may be that the cloud of Zionist rhetoric today has a silver lining: It serves as a reminder that many of those who have held political sway during recent decades are woefully unschooled in the principles they now claim to champion, that it’s young people who carry those principles in their hearts, and that there is therefore reason to hope for Western Civilization to be carried forward and revived in the near future.
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