“If Trump was a king, do you think you would be allowed to protest here?”

This is a simple question I asked a “No-Kings” protester with which he responded, “Absolutely not.”

This very conversation crushes the entire point of the protest. “No Kings” protesters march for a movement that fights against a supposed tyrannical monarchy, while also enjoying the benefits of the first amendment that our very laws provide for them. However, it also creates a conversation. Because while you want to disagree with every point they make, it shows you how important it is to try and find common ground and agree on something.

In the wise words of Charlie Kirk, founder of TurningPoint USA, and one of the most influential patriots and martyrs of our generation, he told us, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.”

If you are a conservative student and have the opportunity to speak with someone who is opposed to your political beliefs, instead of debating them to win the argument, the goal should be to try to find shared principles.

Here are a few ways you can respond to claims made by leftists regarding the “no-kings” topic to create a conversation instead of engaging in heated discourse:

Ask them what issue they care most about

The first question I asked each protester was simple and straight to the point.

“I see you are out here protesting against no kings, what issues or policies specifically do you have an issue with?”

While this may seem like a “dumb” question, you would be surprised how many could not explain what they were protesting about. While many responded with having issues with the deportation of illegal immigrants, some shocked me in their response.

“I can’t think of any Trump policy I am in favor of.” or “Anything that Trump is for I’m against.”

I then proceeded to ask the question again nicely. Once you understand the root of the problem, then you can find the common ground within that issue.

Legal vs illegal immigration

The most common argument I heard about deportations was:

“How is it fair that someone who has been in this country for 5 or 15 years and is a good citizen and contributes to society be deported back to their home country?”

I responded from my own personal experience:

“How is it fair that my sister-in-law, who is Korean, had to wait in line for 9 years to come here legally, yet an illegal immigrant breaks the rules, skips the line, and gets to say in the country?”

This shifts from not having a lack of sympathy, but about following the law. It shows the person you are talking to that legal immigrants struggled too, but they followed the rules. Why would a person be allowed to ignore the law?

Were the Iran strikes unconstitutional?

Another common grievance raised at the protest involved foreign policy, specifically regarding military action in Iran. One lady cited Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, arguing that the President acted like a king by bypassing Congress and taking military action without a formal declaration of war. While only Congress holds the power to formally declare war, Article II, Section 2 designates the President as the Commander in Chief, which gives him the right to deploy military forces for specific, isolated, strategic strikes.

This is why it’s important to know the actual text and use that knowledge to move the conversation away from emotional accusations of tyranny and toward a factual discussion about the separation of powers.

The legality of deportations

Many protesters claimed the current administration is tyrannical by violating the 14th Amendment. It states that all people born or naturalized in the US are citizens. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they made a detailed list addressing all the claims the media made about “US citizens” who were supposedly deported.

For example, when it comes to children of illegal immigrants, the parents are given the choice to ‘self-deport’ and can bring their children with them or not, and it doesn’t have to come to violent separation. Another example would be college students from Columbia University, like Leqaa Kordia, who were arrested and deported. However, these students were deported because they were living in the United States past their visa expirations for years, therefore breaking the law. Many of these protesters simply read headlines and never research. By providing facts from trusted sources like DHS, you can present them with accurate information.

Chasing unity and truth

The next time you are in a debate with a protester or someone left-leaning about these issues, remember these tips to help find common ground and create unity. President Ronald Reagan said, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” It is vital to understand the laws of this country and know how to combat false narratives conveyed by the mainstream media.

For over forty years, Cliffe Knechtle had just been a preacher with a microphone, debating students publicly at any and every university, from Harvard to Berkeley. Over time, he has become arguably one of the faces of Christian apologetics on campus. His Christian apologetics debates, which once reached crowds of fifty students in person, now regularly rack up millions of views, without even counting short-form clips. He’s been featured on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, the Charlie Kirk Show, and the George Janko Podcast, among many others. He’s debated Alex O’Connor, Logan Paul, and more. As of early 2026, Cliffe’s ministry has exploded into a digital juggernaut, boasting over six million followers across YouTube and social media. Cliffe has moved from the campus sidewalk to the center of the global Christian conversation. Yet, despite being a viral sensation with a massive digital footprint, he still spends hours standing in the heat, sincerely listening to college students and answering the hardest questions of a skeptical generation, with his unique tone, cadence, and his trademark viral “Knetchle pose” that he does when the debate gets serious.

This past week, Cliffe Knechtle and his son Stuart visited Texas A&M to speak at Breakaway.

How my meeting with Cliffe happened was only by the grace of God. I was discussing with Cliffe’s wife possible alternative responses that Cliffe could’ve given in his open air dialogues. She then tells me, “You’ve got to tell Cliffe all this!” Afterwards, she sets up a time and place for us to work through common attacks against Christianity. The main purpose of our conversation was not to debate or criticize Cliffe, but to give him some extra “weapons for his arsenal,” so to speak. The main issues that we focused on were the Problem of Evil & Suffering, The Transcendental Argument for God, Slavery in the Bible, and more…

The Problem of Evil & Suffering

In our conversation, I acknowledged that I do think Cliffe handles this difficult issue well. The problem of evil & suffering attempts to create a contradiction in the premises, which typically goes:

1. God is all good

2. God is all powerful

3. Yet evil exists

Simply put: If an all-good and all-powerful God exists, we wouldn’t expect there to be evil and suffering in this world. What I proposed was that we need to add a 4th premise: “God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil & suffering that he has not revealed to us.” Now, prima facie this may seem like an unsatisfactory answer, but we must remember that the problem is an internal critique—meaning we are assuming Christianity to be true and testing its internal coherence. Therefore, when the critic attacks the Christian faith, they must also consider the 4th premise. Now that the Christian worldview is shown to be coherent, it is now up to the critic to offer a moral standard by which he accuses God of evil and suffering.

The Transcendental Argument for God (TAG)

TAG is a unique type of argument that attacks presuppositions rather than the traditional use of evidence to defend Christianity. TAG demonstrates that when an atheist/agnostic criticizes Christianity, they do so with certain assumptions or presuppositions that their worldview cannot account for. Transcendental argumentation argues that only the Christian worldview offers the necessary preconditions for knowledge—some examples I gave Cliffe were laws of logic, identity over time, and uniformity in nature. Very briefly put, these are the issues that the atheist/agnostic faces:

• Laws of Logic—Can laws of logic change? Can contradictions be allowed in the next couple minutes? Do laws of logic exist in space/time or are they immaterial? How do we ground an immaterial, invariant law in a constantly changing universe?

• Identity over time—If all that exists is the material world, then a person is defined by the molecules that make them up. If what defines us are our molecules, aren’t you a different person than you were 5 minutes ago because you’re now a new set of molecules? The problem of identity over time poses a threat to ethics. If a prisoner is not the same person as the one who committed the crime, what reason do we have for keeping him in prison?

• Uniformity in nature—In a world of random chance, what basis do you have in believing that the laws of gravity will continue to hold? Why are laws of physics consistent?

Slavery in the Bible

Another difficult issue that Christians often face is that God allegedly permits or even endorses slavery in the Bible. Again, I believe Cliffe has a great response to the issue, which essentially says that God was “tightening the noose” on slavery—in other words, God was slowly reforming the slave culture of the time. My only suggestion was that Cliffe use a concrete example, like that of an addicted smoker, to make the concept easier to grasp. In the case of the smoker, say he goes through 20 cigarettes a day. We don’t expect him to completely give up all 20 at once. We may begin by reducing it to 15, then 10, then 5 and so on. God operated in a similar fashion when dealing with a culture that was rampant with slavery.

Conclusion

It honestly pains me that Cliffe has lately received so much criticism. He is literally one of the most humble people I’ve ever met. I mentioned in the video how backwards it felt that he was taking notes of what I was saying… It should’ve been the other way around! Despite his busy schedule, Cliffe sat down with a college student and attentively listened and took notes for 45 minutes. This is not a man who is full of himself; he is a man who genuinely loves God and loves people.

Imagine if a conservative organization, say TPUSA, walked into the next Board of Regents meeting with the following demand: they ask the Texas A&M university system to use their taxpayer-funded payroll software, staff, and time to automatically deduct membership fees directly from faculty bank accounts every month, acting as their “free” payment processing system.

The Regents would reject this request immediately. Using public resources to act as a free collection agency for political groups is a clear violation of public trust. Yet, this exact privilege is enjoyed by progressive labor unions and professional associations, like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Texas State Employees Union all across Texas public universities.

By using the university payroll system to automatically deduct dues from faculty paychecks, taxpayers are footing the bill for these private groups, saving them millions in administrative overhead.

Legal experts argue this practice violates the spirit of the Gift Clause found in the Texas Constitution. The government is forbidden from giving public resources to private entities without a public purpose. When A&M processes these dues, it is effectively donating its administrative power to artificially prop up private political organizations.

Political money laundering

This administrative favor funds a massive political machine. According to a 2025 report by the Commonwealth Foundation, 86 percent of the money spent on national politics by the four largest national public-sector unions came directly from member dues rather than voluntary PAC donations. The partisan split of that spending is undeniable: 95.8 percent of those direct contributions went to Democrats, with just 4.2 percent going to Republicans.

The same pattern holds for the unions operating directly at Texas A&M. In August 2022, the American Association of University Professors merged with the American Federation of Teachers, becoming AFT Local 6741. Dues collected through A&M’s payroll system flow directly to the AFT’s national headquarters, which spent $16.5 million in political contributions in the 2024 election cycle, 99.89 percent of which went to Democrats. This pattern has been consistent every cycle since 1990, according to OpenSecrets data.

The Texas State Employees Union operates as CWA Local 6186 and routes member dues to the Communications Workers of America (CWA). OpenSecrets data shows CWA contributed $13.9 million in the 2024 cycle, with 98.77 percent going to Democrats.

By providing a free payroll deduction service, Texas A&M is subsidizing both organizations’ primary revenue streams and their political operations.

Funding those who hate us

Locally, Texas A&M is actively subsidizing the exact organizations that support and manufacture political scandals on our own campus. When the state legislature passed SB 37, the Texas chapter of the AAUP released a seven-page document with guidelines urging their members to “resist” their employers’ efforts to hold them accountable for classroom instruction, as reported by the Texas Scorecard.

The $50 million shortfall

When states like Arkansas and Florida banned automatic payroll deductions for unions, those organizations saw their revenues plummet by roughly 33% almost immediately. Many members simply stopped paying when the money was no longer automatically removed from their checks. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy calls this the “apathy gap.”

Applying that same 33 percent drop to the Texas pipeline reveals the true scale of the government subsidy. There are roughly 300,000 public sector union members in Texas. At a conservative average of $500 in annual dues, $150 million is currently being routed through government and university payroll systems every year. If Texas public universities and state agencies stopped acting as free collection agencies, progressive labor organizations would lose approximately $50 million in the very first year.

AFT and CWA together contributed over $30 million in the 2024 election cycle alone, almost entirely to Democrats. Banning this practice in Texas would cut off millions of dollars flowing to these national war chests, simply by ending a free administrative service that Texas taxpayers never agreed to provide.

Time to end the subsidy

During the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers attempted to ban this practice statewide with Senate Bill 2330. The bill passed the Senate but ultimately died in the House, leaving the current permissive laws in place. The Texas Legislature must take this up again in the 2027 session to strip private political organizations of their unearned access to taxpayer payroll systems.

However, Texas A&M does not have to wait for Austin. State law allows this practice, but it does not mandate it. The Texas A&M Board of Regents has the authority to vote tomorrow to stop collecting these dues.

Our university payroll department exists to compensate employees. It should not serve as the collection agency for private associations. If these organizations want to raise money, they should do it on their own dime, with their own software, and on their own time. It is time for the Board of Regents to cut the cord.

How do we know if Caesar crossed the Rubicon? If Alexander the Great conquered Persia? Or if Genghis Khan was a real historical figure? I don’t know about you, but I simply trust that the ancient books describing these events are generally factual, and I trust history nerds to keep the truth intact.

But when it comes to the Bible, people are way more skeptical. And rightfully so! Because the Bible, though it is a historical text, makes supernatural claims. Namely, that Jesus is God because He effected many miracles, most importantly His resurrection from the dead.

One of the ways that history experts, literary critics, archaeologists, and linguists try to understand a book’s historicity (the truth of its historical claims) is through textual criticism. This involves studying and comparing ancient manuscripts of the text in question in an attempt to reconstruct the original, whether it be the New Testament, Caesar, Alexander the Great, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, or the Quran.

Textual criticism is a vast topic that takes years of study across a variety of disciplines. Mastering it often requires knowledge in history, the Greek language, Church Fathers, manuscript families, scribal patterns, and more. In this article, my goal is to compile the most relevant and useful information in a manner that is understandable and beneficial for the average Christian.

The sheer volume of the evidence

When we talk of manuscripts, we are referring to handwritten copies, as we do not possess any of the original writings of the New Testament or any other ancient authors. However, the sheer volume of surviving biblical manuscripts is unprecedented and utterly unmatched by any other book in history.

While the original texts of the New Testament were written in Koine Greek, we have approximately 25,000 early New Testament manuscripts preserved across at least 11 main ancient languages. The most prominent languages in the manuscript record include:

• Greek: Over 5,800 manuscripts.

• Latin: Approximately 10,000 manuscripts, including both Old Latin and the Vulgate.

• Syriac: Roughly 350 to 9,300 manuscripts, including the Peshitta.

• Coptic: About 3,000 manuscripts, primarily in the Sahidic and Bohairic dialects.

• Armenian: More than 2,000 to 3,325 manuscripts.

• Old Church Slavonic: Roughly 4,000 manuscripts.

• Ethiopic (Ge’ez): At least 600 manuscripts.

• Other Ancient Languages: Smaller numbers exist in Georgian, Gothic, Arabic, Nubian, and Persian.

To put this in perspective, New Testament scholar Dan Wallace estimates that if we stacked up all the New Testament manuscripts, it would equal the height of four and a half Empire State Buildings.

The closest runner-up in terms of the number of manuscripts is Homer’s Iliad, of which we have close to 2,000. For Caesar’s Gallic Wars, we have 10 to a dozen known existing early manuscripts. These surviving copies are dated significantly later than the original, with a gap of nearly 1,000 years. But I bet you’ve never even questioned the fact that Caesar did fight in his Gallic Wars. The point is, how can we believe Caesar did so, and that Alexander did conquer Persia, but not believe in the historicity of the Bible?

The timeline of preservation

Another critical data point is how close the earliest copies are to the originals. For other works from around the New Testament time period, such as Homer, Plato, and Tacitus, there is an average gap of 500 to 900 years between the original and the earliest copy.

For the New Testament, that gap is drastically smaller. The earliest Greek manuscript of the New Testament is a small manuscript piece called P52, which contains portions of John 18 and is dated to as early as the year 125 AD.

This discovery was incredibly significant. Before P52 was discovered, some scholars would date the gospel of John to after the first century, some as late as 150 AD. The discovery of P52 pushed the date back into the first century. John was originally written in Ephesus (modern-day Turkey), while P52 was discovered in Egypt. This means the gospel of John was copied and made its way all the way from Turkey to Egypt within just a few decades, leaving only about a historically unprecedented 35-year gap between the original and the earliest surviving copy.

Other notable manuscripts include P66 and P75, both dated around the 200s, which contain large parts of the Gospels. The four great codices (meaning bound books as opposed to manuscripts), known as Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, are dated to the 4th and 5th centuries and contain substantial portions of the Old and New Testaments.

The Dead Sea scrolls

And for the Old Testament, we used to consider them more unreliable and corrupted until something out of a movie happened in 1947. A teenage Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib was searching for a lost goat in the cliffs of Qumran. He tossed a rock into a dark cave, hoping to scare the animal out, but instead heard the unmistakable sound of breaking pottery. When he and his cousins went inside, they found several tall clay jars. Most were empty, but one contained seven ancient leather scrolls wrapped in linen and sealed with pitch (tree resin). They didn’t realize their value, so the Bedouin reportedly hung the scrolls from tent poles for a while and eventually sold them to an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem for a few cents. Eventually, when a Hebrew University Professor called Eliezer Sukenik examined some of these scrolls in 1947, he realized they were written in beautiful biblical Hebrew and were over 2,000 years old, which was at least 1,000 years older than any known biblical text at the time. Once word got out, a frantic race began between Bedouin treasure hunters and professional archaeologists. Between 1947 and 1956, a total of 11 caves were uncovered, containing roughly 900 manuscripts.

This incredible finding proved that the Old Testament has stayed virtually unchanged for 1,000 years. When researchers compared the modern Hebrew Bible to the scrolls found in the caves, they found they were 95% identical word for word. No other ancient book in history has been preserved with that level of accuracy.

The 5% remaining textual variations

But what about the remaining 5%? It is this small number of variations that some skeptics, like Bart Ehrman, often point to. They say that there are 400,000 variants, that when you have scribes hand-copying a text, there will be significant differences or variants in their manuscripts. The New Testament has about 135,000 Greek words, meaning on average, there are three variants for every word. Sounds quite problematic, right?

However, what they fail to mention is that these 400,000 textual variants do not affect meaning. Over 99% of textual variants are simply spelling or grammatical errors. The less than 1% that do affect the meaning of a text do not affect any major doctrine. Even if a variant did affect doctrine, Christians can point to other passages that teach the same established truths.

To demonstrate this point, let’s say we have three manuscripts, A, B, and C, and we are trying to find what the original said.

For the 99% of variants, it looks like this:

• Manuscript A says: God ___ lovin.

• Manuscript B says: ___ is loving.

• Manuscript C says: Gud i s oving.

Despite bad spelling and missing words, we can easily identify that the original said, “God is loving.” You can imagine how a scribe copying a manuscript in a poorly lit room while in constant fear of persecution could make simple errors. Other harmless variants include occasional word order changes, which are flexible in Greek and do not affect meaning, or the use of early abbreviations for sacred names like God and Jesus.

For the less than 1% of variants, it looks like this:

• Manuscript A says: God is loving.

• Manuscript B says: God is merciful.

The textual variant here does affect meaning. Is God loving or merciful? This is what is meant by no major doctrine being affected. Whichever manuscript we choose will still reflect what Christians believe.

When we face a variant, we should ask if it is meaningful (does it change the meaning of the text?) and viable (is it early and widespread enough to possibly be in the original?).

A non-viable variant occurs if a verse only appears in manuscripts after the tenth century, for example. One example of a non-viable variant is 1 John 5:7 to 8, which gives us the closest we get to a definition of the Trinity in a single verse. Because this verse does not appear in our earliest manuscripts, it is identified as being added later and is often rejected by modern scholars, though the Trinity is easily proven without it. Finding a variant that is both viable and meaningful is incredibly rare.

Corruption allegations

The Bible is often misunderstood as being transmitted through a “telephone” game, where a message is completely distorted by the time it reaches the last person. This is not the case. The better picture is multiple people starting with a message and passing it along to many others simultaneously in writing. It would have been impossible to corrupt it, given the sheer number of manuscripts that were spread out across geographical locations. There was no point in history when one person or group gathered every manuscript to make a unified change. Any attempt to do so would have been immediately identified by the other thousands of circulating manuscripts.

Conclusion

The claims that the Bible is untrustworthy or corrupted are resolved by historical data. The allegation of the Bible being a translation of a translation is corrected by the massive number of Greek manuscripts from which we translate directly into modern languages. The claim about the Bible not being created until later is easily refuted by the extensive evidence of many earlier manuscripts.

When we speak of the Bible as we have it today, immense research of manuscripts in over a dozen languages has led us to reconstruct the originals with 99.6% accuracy. The remaining inaccuracies are irrelevant, since they do not alter important teachings. Scholars of textual criticism are extremely confident that we possess the original writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, and that overall, the Bible is the most historically reliable text of antiquity.

Today, the Bible is recognized by Guinness World Records as the best-selling and most widely distributed book of all time. With estimates of 5 to 7 billion copies distributed, translated into over 700 languages, it consistently remains a top-selling book annually. The ancient evidence simply backs up this enduring modern reality.

The Bible is the greatest and most influential book in the history of humanity.

Why don’t you dust yours off and give it a read?

Opinion: The views expressed in this article are the author’s and are published as commentary and analysis by The Aggie Standard. Responses and fruitful dialogue are welcome.

For decades, Americans have been sold a propaganda version of foreign policy that relies on fear, selective history, and blind trust in the so-called “experts” in Washington. The relationship between the U.S. and Iran is one of the clearest examples, where people are conditioned to think in slogans and caricatures instead of asking how this decades long conflict actually began.

Most Americans are told the story starts with the “Death to America” chants, a bunch of irrational genocidal mullahs, or some ancient religious feud. But the real history starts much earlier than just this century, with U.S. intervention in Iran and the decades of threats and pressure that followed. So, let’s take a look at the actual history of the U.S.-Iranian relations, and I will leave it to you to decide whether the foreign policy “experts” are telling the truth, or whether Iran has acted as any country would under similar pressure.

The 1953 Coup That Started It All

This is where the story of U.S. intervention really begins. In 1953, the CIA and their counterparts in British MI-6 helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whom they had previously supported in his rise to power, after he threatened British oil interests there, and restored the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as a pro-Western ruler.

The Shah’s rule became a brutal police state, enforced in part through their secret gestapo, SAVAK, which crushed dissent and used torture methods, while pushing a top-down Westernization many Iranians saw as foreign-backed and humiliating. For the 26 year rule of the Shah, Iranians learned 2 lasting lessons that shape their actions towards the West:

1. If the West backs a brutal dictatorship in your country, the people will start to associate Western ideals and influence with repression and subjugation, not freedom and national sovereignty

2. If you try to control your own resources and self-determination, the West will put an end to that through force

By the late 1970s, Iran was a country shaped by repression, social engineering, and the memory of a stolen sovereignty, which is exactly the kind of history that makes long-term stability impossible.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Blowback

The 1979 Iranian Revolution, led by Shiite Islamists under Ayatollah Khomeini, marked the decisive break from the United States and the Shah’s Western-backed order. The Carter administration, taking advice from the CIA and the State Department, gave the French the green light to allow the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini to return and effectively inherit the revolution. U.S. officials saw him as someone they could work with, and he was not new to the political scene either. Back in 1953, he had been part of the conservative clerical opposition to Mossadegh, helping build pressure against Mossadegh’s government before the coup that restored the Shah in 1953.

The Shah left on January 16, 1979 and the Ayatollah returned on February 1. It is important to note that this was not the cause of the infamous Iranian Hostage Crisis later that year in November. The nuance to that event is that President Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the United States for secret cancer treatment, despite the warnings from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Many Iranians took that as a sign that Washington might be preparing for another coup or counter-revolution move to bring him back. In that atmosphere, revolutionaries and student activists seized the U.S. Embassy, took hostages, and demanded the Shah be returned to Iran. That is what caused the Iran Hostage Crisis, not the revolution itself.

That crisis became the foundation of the hostility between Iran and the United States that has defined the relationship ever since, and many Americans still struggle to move past the Iranian overthrow of the dictator our government had no right to install in their country 47 years ago.

This is a prime example of what CIA analyst Donald Wilber called “blowback,” the unintended consequences of foreign intervention coming back later in a more violent and destabilizing form, from the U.S.-led intervention in 1953.

American Involvement in the Iran-Iraq War and the 1980s

The Shiite revolution in Iran was viewed as a threat by Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni-ruled Iraq, which invaded Iran in 1980. The United States tilted heavily toward Iraq to prevent Iran’s revolution from spreading. Washington backed Saddam diplomatically and strategically during the war, even as Saddam used chemical weapons, and approved western companies to help build a rudimentary 1980s-era nuclear weapons program in Iraq. For many Iranians, that was not a neutral policy, it was the United States helping arm and protect a regime that used horrific weapons against Iranians and later its own Iraqi Shiite population, killing 500,000.

American hawks demonizing Iran today still have to reach back to 1983 and the Marine barracks bombing by Iran-backed Hezbollah in Beirut to claim that Iran “attacked the United States.” But what they want you to forget about is that just two years later, the Reagan administration was secretly selling missiles to Iran through Israeli channels in the Iran-Contra Affair. So even U.S. officials at the time did not treat the attack as some permanently unforgivable act that made diplomacy impossible. And while the barracks bombing is always cited in isolation, it did not occur in a vacuum as the hawks lead you to believe. It came after the United States had abandoned any real pretense of neutrality in Lebanon and had effectively taken sides in a brutal civil war, making American forces part of a conflict that was already devastating civilian neighborhoods and killing innocent people. Even Ronald Reagan later wrote, “sending the Marines to Beirut was the source of my greatest regret and greatest sorrow,” a tacit admission that the United States never should have been entangled in that conflict in the first place.

But that is how this history gets used: one event is stripped of context and repeated by hawks for decades, and turned into a permanent excuse for more hostility, threats, and escalation against Iran.

The Post-9/11 Era and the Long Push Toward Iran

This takes us to the modern times of U.S.-Iranian relations. After 9/11, the focus among the neoconservatives in Washington, who recently hijacked American foreign policy, and the Israeli Likud Party, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, shifted from diplomacy to regime-change across the region, and Iran was always near the end of that road. You can see the outline in General Wesley Clark’s account of the post-9/11 plan to take out “7 countries in 5 years,” and also in the broader mindset in the Clean Break strategy that describes a break from the Oslo peace process framework to reshape the region through force and pressure to further Israeli interests and the United States’ constant influence in the region.

That is also the period where Iran was folded into the “Axis of Evil” narrative during George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address in 2002, even though the public was being sold a single moral story about terrorism while the real policy was a much wider regional project. Bush’s 2002 speech made that framing official, and from there, the long-term goal was not coexistence, but isolation, pressure, and eventually, regime change–its no coincidence Iran was the last country on the list of 7 countries after Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, all of which have met a similar fate of a U.S.-backed regime change.

And this is the time where sanctions become a central strategy. At their core, sanctions are economic warfare: they do not punish “a regime” in the abstract, they crush ordinary people first by wrecking currency, prices, jobs, banking, and access to basic national stability. Even U.S. officials have admitted the point of the policy was to break Iran’s economy, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bragging earlier this month that U.S. pressure created a dollar shortage, sent the currency into free fall, and helped drive the protests earlier this month. This matters because the Iranian people are not the same as the Iranian government, and American and Western rhetoric constantly blurs that line. In fact, directly after 9/11, ordinary Iranians held candlelight vigils and public memorials in Tehran for Americans killed in the attacks, which is the exact opposite of the cartoon image most people in the U.S. are given.

From here, the logic becomes a feedback loop: Iran is framed as the main obstacle to U.S. and Israeli regional dominance, so Iran builds deterrence through allies, proxies and defense, then the U.S and its allies hit those networks militarily and economically, and Iran then doubles down because it believes it is next–which it almost certainly is! Every step is then used to justify the next step, and the history that created the cycle gets erased while the latest reaction is treated as the beginning of the story.

The Question We Should Be Asking

None of this is meant to defend the actions taken by the Iranian government or their proxies, nor as an attack on American citizens who support intervention because they have been given a narrow version of history. It is a call to step back, look at the full chain of events and decisions that have brought us yet again to the very brink of a wider war with Iran here in 2026, and ask the question Washington never asks: How would Americans react if Russia or China had overthrown our government, installed their own dictator over us, backed our enemies, strangled our economy, and then called our response “irrational?” If we cannot honestly ask that question, then we are not doing foreign policy analysis at all, we are just repeating propaganda and destined to repeat the very mistakes that have seen entire countries devastated, millions killed and displaced, trillions of dollars printed, and tens of thousands of our bravest men killed and injured, which is a price that is simply not worth paying.

Main Citation: Horton, Scott. Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism. Libertarian Institute, 2021.

USS Gerald R. Ford on the Caribbean (U.S Navy)

Opinion: The views expressed in this article are the author’s and are published as commentary and analysis by The Aggie Standard. Responses and fruitful dialogue are welcome.

Yesterday morning, the USS Gerald R. Ford entered the Mediterranean. The largest aircraft carrier ever built, carrying upwards of 70 aircraft and enough firepower to rearrange a country’s geography, is now pointed somewhere between Israel and the Gulf of Oman. In the past 64 hours, 48 F-16s, 12 F-22 Raptors, 18 F-35As, surveillance aircraft, and over 40 aerial refueling tankers have been repositioned to bases across the Middle East and Europe. THAAD and Patriot missile defense batteries have been quietly redeployed. The USS Abraham Lincoln is already in the Arabian Sea. There has not been this kind of American military concentration in this region since the opening salvos of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. This would be a devastating military campaign serving interests other than our own.

On February 17th, American and Iranian negotiators sat across from each other in Geneva for the second round of nuclear talks in less than a week. Both sides called it productive. Iran signaled it was willing to pause enrichment for two to three years and give up roughly a third of its highly enriched uranium stockpile in exchange for sanctions relief. A framework, cautiously, seemed to be forming. And then, before the delegations had even made it home, Vice President Vance stepped in front of cameras and gave Iran two weeks to meet American demands or face consequences. Iran responded by closing part of the Strait of Hormuz for war games and filing a NOTAM for ballistic missile tests over the Gulf of Oman. That is the state of diplomacy as of today. Signs are pointing towards war.

What Iran Will and Won’t Give

Iran’s position has been consistent throughout these talks: nuclear program and sanctions relief are on the table. Its ballistic missile program and its regional proxy network, the Houthis, Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, Hamas, are not. Tel Aviv wants all of it, Washington has been willing to settle. Iran has said no and has not wavered.

This is being reported as Iranian stubbornness. It might be more accurately described as rational self-preservation. Eight months ago, in the middle of the last round of negotiations, Israel launched preemptive strikes which lasted close to two weeks and ended with, B-2 stealth bombers striking nuclear sites, Fordow and Natanz. Along with American submarines launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan. Washington declared Iran’s nuclear program destroyed. Tehran said otherwise. The truth is probably somewhere between those two claims, significant to moderate damage, not total elimination, which is precisely why we are sitting at another negotiating table right now, with two carrier strike groups in the water.

For a country that was bombed while talks were ongoing, the insistence on keeping its missiles and its regional leverage is not obstinance. It is the only deterrent Iran has left. The nuclear hedge program follows the same logic, and it is the same logic, incidentally, that explains why North Korea still has a government and Muammar Gaddafi does not. Iran looked at that history and drew the obvious conclusion.

Whose War Is This, Exactly?

Here is a fact worth sitting with: every country in the region with real skin in the game, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Iraq, is pushing hard for a negotiated settlement. The economic consequences of a war, the energy market shock of a closed Strait of Hormuz, the refugee flows, the regional spillover, none of these countries want any part of it. The United States says it prefers a deal. Iran, within clear limits, appears willing to discuss one.

And yet the demands currently on the table are structured in a way that makes a deal functionally impossible. Full nuclear dismantlement. Complete abandonment of all proxy groups. Elimination of the ballistic missile program. These are not negotiating positions, they are terms of unconditional surrender. No Iranian government, hardline or moderate, could accept them and remain in power for a week. The question worth asking is: where did those demands come from, and whose interests do they actually serve?

The answer is not difficult to find. Israel’s objective has never been a nuclear agreement. Netanyahu has made that clear. The goal is the permanent elimination of Iran as a regional power, regime change dressed up in the language of nonproliferation. That is a coherent Israeli strategic interest. What it is not, when examined honestly, is an American one.

Last June, while negotiations were still active, Israel struck Iran, triggering the Twelve-Day War and pulling the United States into direct military action it had not planned to take at that moment. The pattern is now well established: Israel escalates past the point diplomacy can hold, and America is left holding the consequences. The casualties would be American. The bill would be American. The decade of entanglement that follows would be American. The strategic benefit, a neutered Iran, a cleared regional chessboard, and total hegemony of one of the most resource rich region in the world, would be Israel’s. At some point, Washington must decide whether it is conducting American foreign policy or Israel’s.

Iran Is Not Iraq

There is a comfortable fantasy in some corners of Washington that Iran can be bombed into submission, that a sustained air campaign breaks the regime, the population rises, and the Islamic Republic collapses into something more manageable.

Iran is a country of 90 million people. Its missile stockpile exceeds 3,000 weapons, with an estimated 300 produced every month. During the Twelve-Day War, Iranian salvos came close to exhausting Israel’s interceptor supply, and Israel is one of the most missile-defended countries on earth. Iran possesses long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching Europe and, by multiple assessments, hypersonic weapons as well. Its combined military force approaches a million. Its facilities are hardened and buried into underground missile cities. It is not Syria. It is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It is not Venezuela, where a single night’s operation ended everything.

Airstrikes can damage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. They demonstrated that last June. What they cannot do is produce regime change, and regime change, if we are being honest about what Israel is asking for, is the actual end goal. Achieving that would require a ground invasion of a mountainous, nationalistic, heavily armed country exceeding any power we have seen in that region before. This would be a devastating military campaign serving foreign interest.

And before the first bomb drops, Iran could mine or block the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which 31% of the world’s seaborne crude oil moved in 2025. The global economic consequences of that alone would be severe. A war with Iran does not stay contained to Iran. It never would.

Two Weeks to Get It Right

The ultimatum expires in two weeks. Iran will submit written proposals. A third round of talks is tentatively on the calendar, although chances are this will not happen with the intensifying military buildup in the Middle East. Whether the gap between what Washington demands and what Tehran can politically survive is bridgeable in that window is close to zero. The structural conditions that produced the Twelve-Day War, stalled talks, hardening positions, Israeli pressure for outcomes that preclude any deal, American military assets accumulating in theater, are all present again, in the same configuration.

A realistic agreement exists. A credible enrichment cap, real verification mechanisms, phased sanctions relief, something that neither side loves but both sides can live with. That deal would serve American interests. It would not satisfy Israel’s objectives at all, which is perhaps the most telling thing about why it hasn’t happened yet. Israel does not want a deal. It has never wanted a deal. What it wants is an end of the Islamic Republic, full regime change. And for the better part of a year, Israeli pressure has shaped American foreign policy and negotiating positions to make a deal structurally impossible.

Whatever happened to “no new wars”? It was supposed to distinguish a new American posture from two decades of endless entanglement, bloodshed, and borrowed money, a promise that this country had spent enough rearranging the Middle East and had nothing to show for it. And yet here we are again, carriers in the water and jets in the air. Twenty years of Middle Eastern intervention and the only winner has been Israel. It is time America takes back its foreign policy and starts fighting for American interests.

The United States does not need another open-ended war in the Middle East. The defining strategic competition of this era is in the Pacific, with China, over Taiwan, over trade and technology and the balance of power in Asia. Every carrier, every F-22, every diplomatic hour spent managing an Iranian conflict is a resource diverted from the place that actually determines America’s future.

Why are people scared of deflation?

Many critics of a deflationary economy argue that in a deflationary environment, nobody buys anything and people “hoard” their money. If you knew you could buy a car next month for 30% less, why would you buy it now? Why would you buy anything at all in fact? You would just sit on your money and not engage in the economy, right? They argue that if things aren’t always increasing in price, no one is ever incentivized to do anything today, and the economy grinds to a halt. Now these points may seem to make sense at first, but the moment you actually think about it, the argument falls apart.

If someone is going to make the claim that in a deflationary environment, no one ever buys anything, they’re not just speaking in abstractions–there have been deflationary environments before, even in the United States. Is it true that during these times, no one ever bought anything? Of course not. This is just an odd excuse to defend the Federal Reserve and the inflationary economy, which is a completely government-created phenomenon.

Time Preference

First, for the question “Why would anyone buy anything if we lived in a deflationary economy?” The obvious answer here is time preference–how much people prefer present things to future things. For example, “Why would you buy a car now if a car is going to be cheaper in a month from now?” The answer to that is you need one this month! Of course, I am not arguing that no purchasing patterns would be altered by things going down in price, but we can all think of examples of things that people still need and aren’t able to postpone purchase for.

Take electronics for example. To get a big, flat-screen TV 15 years ago cost maybe $4,000 and was a heavy lift and a pain to move around. Today, you can get a flat-screen TV that you can carry out of the store in one hand for like $300. The quality is way up and the price is way down.

And as we all know, over the last 15 years, nobody bought TVs because the price was going down, right? Why would you buy a TV when they’re just going to be cheaper and better in a few years? Well because maybe you want to watch something between now and then! If you knew groceries were going to be down 30% next year, why would you buy groceries this year? Because eating this year means something to you too! You care about the time when you receive the goods you want to buy. This is exactly what time preference means and why it’s important in economics.

Inflation eventually catches up

Now, imagine you had a car that was well-functioning and you wanted to get a brand new car, and then you found out that they’re slashing prices next year. That might encourage you to wait a little bit longer on that purchase. But the same is true in reverse! That if the price of the car is going up, you might buy it earlier than you otherwise would have, which may not be the best thing for you at that moment. Obviously, anticipating a price being lowered or a price being raised could change your consumption behavior in one way or the other. If you were in the position of “I am not going to get a new car this year because I can get one next year for even cheaper, or an even nicer car next year, so I am going to wait,” why is that worse than “I don’t really need a new car but I am going to buy one now because this is the last time I am ever going to be able to afford one?” Isn’t it obvious that the latter is a bigger problem? Inflation catches up to present consumption eventually. Again, inflation incentivizes present consumption, whereas deflation incentivizes saving and more long-term thinking. If you want to argue against that, good luck.

Deflation is objectively a good thing.

Maybe not a massive amount all at once or you might have a steep recession, but in terms of “should we be targeting 2% inflation” versus “should we be targeting 2% deflation,” in one scenario, things get more and more affordable, in the other scenario, they get more and more expensive. This is how we’ve come to find ourselves in an “unaffordability crisis.” Which do you think is better for poor people? If things get more expensive or if things get cheaper?

Behavioral effect and time horizons

Deflation means people delay gratification and choose to save instead, which means they can make bigger, more important purchases later because they’ve actually built up their balances. And on a more behavioral level, if you know your money will be worth more in the future, you get a healthier mindset–people won’t feel pressured to think “my wealth is being stolen from me so I need to spend it now before it’s worth less.” Instead, they start thinking, “I want to buy a house someday, so I’ll save. Maybe I won’t go out and drink this weekend, it’s not worth blowing extra bucks at the bar if I can buy a car later this year when cars are cheaper.” So all of a sudden, you’ve got people thinking on longer time horizons, forward-looking, planning their lives, their savings, and their future investments rather than just making impulsive decisions.

Inflation rewards debt and punishes saving

Now, we’ve got an economy where the message is basically, “we need people to go out and spend.” This is a short-sighted mindset; spend everything now, borrow against future earnings, and keep everyone in debt. That’s the pathology that comes with overinflated prices; where we’re always trying to pull more money in to keep the wars going, the bubbles afloat, and the illusion that we’re richer than we actually are. Who can honestly look at the American economy and say the problem is too much saving? That “everyone is saving too much, there isn’t enough spending, consumption, or debt? Everybody is just at a surplus here?” In what world is that a problem? George W. Bush may have been the one who explicitly said, “go shopping” as the answer to the early 2000s recession, but the policy instinct has been the same ever since: inflate, stimulate, and keep spending up; under Trump and Obama with the stimulus and Fed money-printing, and under Biden with the Covid spending response. And now, Trump’s pressuring the Fed to cut rates, doubling down on cheap credit, trying to outrun the bust.

Deflation is the market, and inflation is the government

What this all becomes is an excuse to keep the inflationary economy going. Sure, most critics don’t want Biden’s 17% inflation, they just want the Fed to hit its 2% target: 2% of your wealth being quietly stolen every year (keep in mind it compounds). But the deeper problem is that it’s a fatal conceit. The moment you concede that deflation is bad and inflation is good, you’ve basically conceded the whole framework and you’re most of the way to socialism. Because deflation is really just the market, and inflation is really just the government. In an advancing economy, mild deflation is the status quo as progress raises efficiency and quality. So this whole argument is really a defense of today’s status quo, which is a system where the elites, if left unchecked, rob from the little guy.

How about this: I work hard, make money, and keep the money without it being worth less in the future?

Manufacturing a trap

Professor Martin Peterson had been teaching his PHIL 111 Contemporary Moral Issues required core class unbothered for years. We have access to his Fall 2021, Fall 2023, and Fall 2024 syllabi. Despite claiming in his email to the department head that he only made "some minor adjustments", here are the intentional and malicious changes he made:

1. He renamed the previous module from “Race and Gender issues” to “Race and Gender Ideology,” which is the exact same phrasing of Policy 08.01, knowing that it would inevitably get flagged.

2. He added the Plato readings which were not there in any of the previous years’ syllabi.

So not only did he purposefully rename a module with the exact title of the restricted political topics, but he threw Plato under the bus to make it look like restrictions on academic indoctrination were going too far.

Here is his Fall 2021 syllabi and required readings:

Yes, crazy expensive, I know. Taking advantage of

Here is his Fall 2023 syllabus:

Here is his Fall 2024 syllabus:

And lastly, here’s his flagged syllabus:

And here is the added online Plato reading he added:

As Adam Kainer noted in his sharp article: “Five minutes of tinkering with an old syllabus to use intentionally inflammatory language is not an exercise of academic freedom. It’s just dishonesty”.

Peterson’s legal brief, his coworker, and FIRE

If we keep going, and take a look at the email in which he responds to the demand, he literally says “I hereby submit my syllabus for mandatory censorship review” (emphasis mine). Did he know it was going to be censored? He also cites multiple Supreme Court precedents, such as Keyishian v. Board of Regents and Sweezy v. New Hampshire. To be honest, this reads more like a prepared legal brief than a neutral professor who really just loves Plato so much.

Let’s also take a look at the Philosophy dept head who is enforcing the restrictions. Kristi Sweet has been a member and subsequently the Chair of the Climate and Inclusion Committee:

And she has also received a “Cultural Enrichment and Diversity Grant”.

With that, she invited Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, to speak at TAMU in 2013. This is interesting because it means Sweet knew FIRE before the Plato scandal happened. So it might be that they had already established contact, and since FIRE was one of the first organizations to jump to defend Peterson, even using similar talking points, could they have given them some advice?

Following the union playbook

Peterson’s actions also appear similar to some recommendations outlined by the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-AFT). A recently leaked seven-page letter from the union advised Texas A&M faculty to “resist” their employers by refusing immediate compliance and using grievances to force administrators to document their actions, effectively slowing down university leadership. The instructions also tell government employees to use encrypted platforms and avoid work emails for coordination, since these can be requested through the Texas Public Information Act.

Neutral academic, or progressive activist?

Furthermore, taking a quick look at Peterson’s CV, we find evidence that he might not be as neutral as he portrays himself to be.

1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). He co-authored and was Co-PI (principal investigator) on this paper titled “Diversity, inclusion and equity in the engineering curriculum: Evaluating the efficacy of a new teaching module”. In it he talks about “Stereotype, Prejudice, Discrimination, Implicit Bias & Gender, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer individuals.”

   1. This was funded by an NSF grant worth $371,000 titled “The Ethics of Diversity-Fortifying Ethical Infrastructure to Prevent and Address Sexual Harassment in STEM Research & Practice Settings” (NSF award 1835178). On page 57, this paper says, “We aspired to place DI&E concepts at the forefront of the curriculum (Page 57)”. I filed a TPIA to look at the budget. It showed that Martin Peterson’s FTE (full-time employed salary) is $13,158 per month, which is about $157,896 per year.

      

      For this DEI study specifically, he earned $20, 942 for 1.5 months of work. Of course, he wants to defend DEI and Academic Freedom, which really means he wants to keep earning six-figures and even more extra taxpayer cash through “research” like this.

2. In 2015-17, he was a Member of the Climate and Inclusion committee.

3. On Abortion & Religion In a 2011 op-ed in Swedish titled “We do not want to restrict women’s right to abortion,” he and his co-author explicitly say: “We do not want to limit women’s right to decide over their own bodies.”

   1. “We are not involved in any lobbying activities, and we are not part of the Christian right.” “How can it be wrong to give more power to the individual woman...?”

4. On Right-Wing Swedish Political Parties: Beyond the classroom, Peterson’s political writings in Swedish demonstrate a strong desire for anti-democratic strategies to censor opposition. In 2010, he advocated for a "cordon sanitaire" to isolate right-wing parties, saying they are “xenophobic” and that just because 400,000 citizens voted for a right-wing party, “it does not follow that the most extreme opinions should also be allowed to participate.” In a second article, he even proposed the creation of an "anti-party" to systematically cancel out the votes of the right-wing party. This history of advocating for political censorship and cancellation makes his current stance as a champion of "viewpoint neutrality" appear inconsistent at best.

5. Trump hit piece The philosopher Kant and the lying president (NSD, 2017). In this article, he says Trump “lies forward and backward, without any scruples whatsoever” … “whenever it serves his own interests.”

6. In 2009 he put out an article talking about Plato being controversial and extreme in his views on democracy, assimilating him to some far-left party, but argued that he should still be listened to. This shows he was already thinking about Plato and freedom of speech for years…

7. More recently, here’s a talk he gave at Texas A&M, where he uses his philosophical outlook on ethics, like “racial justice and equity,” and applies them to some technologies (see last sentence).

8. Lastly, despite saying that he takes a neutral approach and does not advocate any ideologies in his class, Prof. Peterson has been consistently twisting Plato’s actual beliefs to fit his political agenda. He’s repeated multiple times that “Plato said there were more than two genders, at least three, and that homosexuality is fully natural, fully normal, nothing problematic”. The Aggie Scorecard will publish an article soon debunking this serious misrepresentation of one of the most important philosophers of Western Civilization.

If anyone is “lying to serve his own interests” like Peterson accuses Trump of doing, it might be himself.

Even Plato himself rebukes what Peterson is doing: “Plato famously reproached the Sophists for manipulating language to make the weaker argument seem stronger. When one considers the facts, one cannot escape the conclusion that Peterson is a sophist himself”, as Adam Kainer, Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word, states here.

It would be reasonable to suggest that left-wing faculty coordinated all this.

To conclude, here’s Prof. Kaiser again:

“If Peterson cared about the ethics of free speech and academic freedom, he could have assigned excerpts from Book X of Plato’s Republic, where Plato famously talks about censoring the poets… [instead] Peterson replaced the race and gender ideology readings and the excerpts from Symposium with a New York Times article about his case. One would think the complete removal of race and gender issues from an ethics syllabus would be criticized, but the social justice crowd has been silent. All of this is magnified because Peterson serves as chair of Texas A&M’s academic freedom council. When the chair of the academic freedom council uses their academic freedom in bad faith, other academics should call this out. The absence of dissent is deafening.”

This entire trap was manufactured to misinform people into opposing common-sense academic accountability. To learn more, read our previous article: Marxism, Sexuality Parties, and Gender for Toddlers: What Academic “Freedom” Protesters Are Really Defending.

Gig ‘em,

Justino Russell ‘26

Student, Founder, Editor

The Aggie Standard

The American university, which once used to be a diverse marketplace of ideas, has become a leftist monopoly. While this has been statistically undeniable for more than two decades, the most recent and largest faculty survey ever conducted was done by the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2024, with 6,269 respondents from 55 institutions.

It proved that 60% of university faculty are liberal, while only 16% are conservative, giving us a 5 to 1 liberal to conservative ratio.

This completely flips when we look at self-censorship: 55% of conservative faculty report hiding their political beliefs to keep their jobs, compared to only 17% of liberal faculty.

To prove the bias further, when asked if a liberal would be a "positive fit" for their department, 71% of faculty said yes, while only 20% said the same of a conservative.

This is a systemic issue of underrepresentation. Where does this lead us? Below is the inevitable result of this ideological monopoly. A review of the WGST department’s actual syllabi conducted by Robert Montoya from the Texas Scorecard reveals curriculum less concerned with authentic education and more focused on explicit political advocacy.

Inside the WGST Curriculum: Marxism and “Menstruation Parties”

Here are just a few of the classes from Montoya’s review:

1. “Introduction to LGBTQ Studies” taught by Koyel Khan, whose syllabus studies the “histories of and theories regarding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ+) identities and communities,” and “the institutional ways in which homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia are systematically deployed.”

2. Dr. Pamela Edens’ “Psychology of Women” honors course treated gender as a “social construct” and even included a scheduled “Menstruation Party” and a “Celebration of Reproduction/Sexuality” party on her syllabus. Her assigned textbook, Gender: The Basics, references a fictional world where individuals are not classified by sex, a radical departure from biological reality.

3. Dr. James Francis’s “Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies” required students to read The Gendered Society by Michael S. Kimmel, which asserts that “only white people in our society have the luxury not to think about race every minute of their lives” and that “only men have the luxury to pretend that gender does not matter.”

4. Juan Quiroz’s “Introduction to Gender and Society” utilized a textbook titled Social Theory which featured writings by communists Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong. While the editor of the textbook claimed earlier authors were dropped because their theories “have not endured the test of time,” the inclusion of the architects of communism suggests the department viewed these destructive ideologies as enduring truths.

Opponents claimed that closing the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) department was an attack on “knowledge.” But these are the politicized perspectives the university has chosen to move away from, only the ones that courses replace critical thinking with Marxist theory and “menstruation parties.”

The university recently completed a massive curriculum review aimed at upholding the value of Aggie education. Of the over 5,400 syllabi reviewed, only six courses (approximately 0.11 percent) were canceled. Texas A&M University has taken a decisive step toward restoring balance and viewpoint diversity so that students are actually able to think critically and be exposed to different ideas, as an attempt to fix the monopoly outlined by FIRE and by the Texas Scorecard.

Additionally, in its 150th-year anniversary, the university made the historic decision to close its Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) department, a program with only 25 majors and 31 minors.

The “Academic Freedom” Protest

In response to these common-sense reforms, the local faculty union (AAUP) organized an “Academic Freedom Protest.” However, a review of the speakers and their rhetoric suggests the event was less about academic freedom and more about protecting their ideological monopoly and their ability to advocate for their political ideologies in the classroom.

Below is a list of most speakers, and their beliefs, in their own words:

1. Beck Bale (Texas State Employees Union): The protest’s MC was Beck Bale, a man with a deep voice who led chants while wearing a skirt and Muslim head covering (see image below). When asked if professors should be allowed “to teach whatever they want,” Bale refused to answer and walked away, dismissing the inquiry as a “hit piece”. He represented a union that previously condemned the firing of a Texas Tech instructor who had called for the “overthrow of the bloodthirsty US government”.

   

2. Joshua Cirotto (Socialist Equality Party): Cirotto, a Classics senior, explicitly called for students to “force socialism” and “organize walkouts”. He labeled President Trump a “dictator,” referred to ICE as a “paramilitary Gestapo,” and identified “capitalism” as the source of this “attack” on education.

3. A professor of sociology and part of the WGST department, who introduced herself with pronouns as “she/her” and said “ I have a sexual identity and gender orientation as a cis-straight-woman”. She complained about the LGBTQ+ minor being eliminated last year, and cited an indian philosopher whom she described as an “anti-colonial activist,” who said we have to “agitate to challenge the status quo” and “organize to achieve social justice.”

4. Cameron Samuels (Students Engaged in Advancing Texas): Introduced himself with they/them pronouns, and runs a far-left organization that has filed lawsuits against Texas AG Paxton, and is “committed to ensuring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in its culture, hiring practices, programs, and services”.

   

   Cameron Samuels, second from the left, front, at Houston Pride, wearing a Pride flag as a cape.

   • His policy director, Hayden Cohen, testified before the Texas Board of Education in 2024 that “Jesus’ life and miracles are ‘mythical’, and ‘completely fictional’ just like Roman pagan gods, and should be treated as such in Texas’ K-5 English Language Arts curriculum. Below is a picture of Cohen, who also was named Most Prominent Youth LGBTQ Activist of 2024 by Outsmart, Houston’s LGBTQ magazine.

     

5. Professor Martin Peterson: Peterson, who has manufactured the entire Plato “scandal”, claimed in his speech that he isn’t trying to “indoctrinate anyone,” but immediately followed that by stating “Plato told us 2,500 years ago that there are more than two genders, and same sex relationships are normal and fully okay”, which is blatant twisting of Plato’s teachings in his Laws, Book I, 636c. He also asserted, “We are the experts. We know what we should talk about in classrooms”, echoing COVID-19 era authoritarianism.

   

   Martin Peterson, front, while Prof. Leonard Bright is speaking in front of General Lawrence Sullivan Ross’ statue.

6. Joan Wolf (Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty): She unironically complained that “they only want you to learn skills that will help you in your profession and make you a better citizen”, and then asked the crowd, “How can we not talk about sexual orientation? It’s an impossible policy to follow!” She read a statement from a former student who claimed she “no longer wears my Aggie ring”, suggesting that an Aggie ring’s value is tied solely to the ability to teach transgender ideology.

7. The president of the Queer Empowerment Council and as a representative of three other queer organizations: Aggies TRANScend, Queer Graduate and Professional Aggies, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Aggies. She defended “inclusivity” at Texas A&M. She unfortunately struggled to pronounce the word “unanimously” when complaining about the Regents’ vote to pass Policy 08.01. Her speech appeared to be written by ChatGPT. She said the new policies “censored identity”, yet Melissa McCoul was fired for trying to promote that identity to children as young as three.

   

Defending the Indefensible

The protest was primarily organized to oppose the firing of instructor Melissa McCoul. While protesters framed her termination as an attack on free speech, they seem to have purposefully omitted the specific content she was teaching.

McCoul was terminated after it was revealed she was advocating for teaching gender ideology concepts to children between the ages of three and twelve. Her class material explicitly told her college students that “childhood is the time for figuring out how to be a boy, girl, man, woman, or another gender”.

Another one of her slides said, “Isn’t [talking about queerness] way too ‘adult’ for little kids? Well, no”.

She also taught that children need to be included in “discussions of queerness,” and included material on “queer melancholia theory”, among many other things.

The protestors also backed Former President Mark Welsh, who was fired for initially refusing to fire McCoul and defending the political material. In a recording, Welsh told the student that firing McCoul “is not going to happen”, and defended the inclusion of LGBTQ studies for aspiring “psychiatrists” or “school superintendents,” arguing there was a “professional reason” for these transgender advocacy courses.

Education or Indoctrination?

Critics argue that restricting WGST and gender ideology will harm “critical thinking” or “restrict the pursuit of knowledge.” But is it “education” to teach students that biological sex is a social construct? Is it “knowledge” to deny the reality that every single cell in the human body is distinctly male or female? Is it “critical thinking” to tell your students that ““childhood is the time for figuring out how to be a boy, girl, man, woman, or another gender?”

The protesters at Texas A&M demand “academic freedom,” but they remain silent on “academic responsibility.” True education prepares students for citizenship and the workforce, a goal that WGST faculty member Joan Wolf openly mocked when she complained that the administration “only want[s] you to learn skills that will help you in your profession and make you a better citizen.” To her, “How can we not talk about sexual orientation? It’s an impossible policy to follow.”

Texas A&M exists to educate students, not to provide a taxpayer-funded platform for activists to advocate for teaching three-year-olds how to question their gender.

Gallery

During a casual debate with my friends not long ago, I was confidently presenting my case for freer markets, as I always do, until one asked me to define “capitalism” in a single line. My dad has always instructed me that when talking to skeptics, it suffices to substitute the term with “innovation,” and while that works surprisingly well, I felt the concept ran much deeper. Over the past year, I realized that true capitalism is not an invented system but the default economic system of human nature.

What follows are the core elements I distilled after much thought, not as a defense of the regulation-ridden, quasi-socialist hybrid we currently mistake for capitalism, but an effort to articulate the timeless, universal principles of the real thing.

1. The only system consistent with individual rights

If you start from the premise that every human being possesses the natural and absolute right to life, liberty, and property, then it simply follows that only a system grounded in voluntary exchange can represent the non-negotiability of those rights.

The moment any form of coercion enters the picture, be it a mob, a mafia, or a government, those rights are no longer inherent and inviolable, but conditional, essentially on loan from the state. Without the violations of taxation, regulation, and conscription, people remain free to build and trade on their own terms. This is simply what it means to have inalienable, individual rights as the starting point of any moral order.

2. Capitalism is built on the “economic means” instead of the “political means.”

Sociologist Franz Oppenheimer described two ways to acquire wealth: the economic means (working, trading, giving, helping) and the political means (theft, robbery, coercion, conquest). Genuine capitalist exchange is built entirely and exclusively on what he called the economic means.

On the other hand, the state is entirely built on the political means. So, when I use the term capitalism, I am referring solely to the moral economic means; anything gained through coercion is simply, by definition, not capitalistic. The political means only seize and reallocate wealth; they don’t create it. True wealth is only created through the economic means, never through force.

As Javier Milei put it in his speech at Davos: “The state does not create wealth; the state destroys it. The state can give you nothing because it produces nothing, and when it attempts it, it does so poorly.”

3. The famous “double thank-you-moment” and scale

Capitalism creates what John Stossel famously calls the “double-thank-you moment,” where both sides thank each other because both sides benefit. In capitalism, by definition, no one benefits at the expense of another since all the economic transactions are voluntary. This is the most profound aspect of capitalism; two people create new value from essentially nothing, and that dynamic always holds, no matter how large the economy becomes.

In contrast, every alternative economic system relies on some degree of armed coercion, theft, and violence under the euphemism of “wealth redistribution”. and have historically always fallen apart because, as Margaret Thatcher put it best, “you eventually run out of other people’s money“.

Capitalism outperforms the alternatives because the same win-win logic behind a simple trade between two consenting individuals is the exact same principle behind the remarkable prosperity that emerges when the economy scales up to a macro level.

4. Capitalism does not need to be enforced

Following from that, another profound quality of capitalism is that it doesn’t need to be enforced by a central authority; it works on its own. If two people both have something the other wants, they simply trade. There is no great machinery or bureaucracy needed to force or authorize a natural, voluntary, human exchange. All that is required to set a market economy in motion is the basic impulse for improvement and innovation that all of us inherently have as human beings.

5. It allows for voluntary alternatives to coexist

Finally, capitalism is the only economic framework that allows coexistence with every other economic arrangement for anyone who actually wants to live that way. Be they communes, socialist commonwealths, or worker co-ops, capitalism doesn’t require suppressing alternatives, and, as mentioned above, cannot suppress them without ceasing to be capitalism since suppression requires coercion.

Such arrangements are compatible only if people join by choice. If alternative systems were actually superior, they wouldn’t need any sort of coercion to convince people; people would opt in immediately. But as history made clear in 1989, people run to the free world when the wall comes down; every other system needs a wall to keep people from leaving.

Closing thoughts

Capitalism shouldn’t be a nebulous term. It is simply and beautifully the natural, logical extension of human action, i.e., the default setting of humanity, and the only manner in which wealth increases and innovation skyrockets. And once you see it that way, it becomes very hard to unsee.

So to all the communists, please just let us “live and let live”.

Thomas Cole (1801–1848). The Consummation of Empire (left) and Destruction (right), oil on canvas. Text added.

One of the strongest proofs for the existence of God is found in the human conscience. It is called:

The Moral argument

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

2. Objective moral values do exist (e.g., rape, murder, and genocide are objectively wrong).

3. Therefore, God exists.

Preference vs. fact

The first premise is often misinterpreted. By “objective moral values,” we simply mean “mind-independent”. Regardless of what I think in my mind, the reality is that I am typing this on a computer. That is an objective fact.

The opposite of objective is subjective: a personal preference. For example, whether pineapple on pizza is better than pepperoni, or whether chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla. Neither of us is “wrong” if we disagree; we just have different tastes.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that secular society tries to ignore: If God does not exist, moral judgments are nothing more than subjective preferences like pineapple on pizza.

If we are nothing more than the accidental byproduct of a cosmic fart, if we are just biological matter that evolved from slime, then saying “murder is wrong” is simply a personal taste. Biology does not determine morality. A lion is not “evil” for killing a gazelle; it is just surviving. If we are just advanced animals, why is it “evil” for a human to kill another human?

The “harm” and “human flourishing” counterarguments

Many naturalists and atheists try to avoid this conclusion by pivoting to “harm,” arguing that anything causing physical or mental harm is wrong, or citing “human flourishing” as the source of morality. This perspective sounds solid at first, but it collapses in the real world.

First, physical harm isn’t always “wrong.” Consider the difference between a surgeon and a mugger. Both might cut you open with a knife and cause massive trauma. Why is one “healing” and the other “evil”? It comes down to intent and consent. Or look at boxing: two men beat each other into concussions for money, yet we call it a sport, not a crime. If you pull your child’s ear after he seriously disobeys you, that’s causing suffering, but it’s not wrong. Physical harm alone is not the standard. You need a higher moral framework (which naturalism cannot provide) to tell you which physical harm is “suffering” (bad) and which is “justice” or “medicine” (good).

Second, who gets to decide what is “harm” or “human flourishing”? Leaving it up to societal consensus, to mob rule, is terrifying. To quote Ben Franklin, it’d be like letting “two wolves and a lamb vote on what is for dinner”. In the Jim Crow South, they decided that segregation wasn’t “harm,” but the natural order. Because that society agreed on it, by the naturalist definition, they weren’t strictly immoral. The same goes for the dehumanizing propaganda in Nazi Germany; their society decided that viewing Jews as a “disease” was necessary for national health.

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro all believed they were working for “human flourishing”. They thought that the way to help humanity prosper was to eliminate specific groups of people: Jews, political dissidents, or the wealthy. In the 20th century alone, this logic led to the deaths of 80–100 million people. When Che Guevara killed homosexuals in his concentration camps, that was his understanding of “human flourishing”.

If God does not exist, who are you to say they were wrong? You can say their actions were “unpleasant.” You can say you “don’t like it.” You can say they “caused suffering”. But that’s not enough. But if there is no higher authority than man, then Hitler was just “living his truth” and doing what he thought was best for his tribe. Without God, his actions were no different than a chimpanzee killing a rival primate. It’s your word against his.

The “is-ought” problem

This brings us to the biggest philosophical problem in naturalism. Science and biology can tell you what the world is like, but they cannot tell you what it ought to be like. There is a gap between those two things that logic alone cannot bridge.

1. The “Is” (scientific fact): “If you stab a man in the chest, he will die.”

2. The “Ought” (moral claim): “Therefore, you ought not stab a man.”

The conclusion doesn’t actually follow from the premise. The fact that he will die is just a biological description. To get to “you shouldn’t do it,” you have to smuggle in a hidden value judgment: “And human life ought to be preserved.” But a naturalistic worldview cannot prove that hidden premise. It can explain how a human dies, but it cannot explain why murder is objectively wrong.

Evolution gave us lots of impulses. We have a natural impulse to avoid suffering, sure, but we also have natural impulses for tribalism, aggression, and sexual promiscuity. All of these behaviors historically helped ancestors pass on their genes, prevented suffering in one way or another, and even caused our flourishing.

The point is, if you rely purely on “what nature gave us,” you have no way to pick and choose which of these instincts we ought to follow. Why is the instinct to “care for the tribe” good, but the instinct to “crush the rival tribe” bad? They are both natural.

The inescapable conclusion

This leads us to the second premise: Objective moral values do exist.

We all know deep down that the Holocaust was not just “unfashionable” or “evolutionarily disadvantageous.” It was evil. It was a moral abomination that violated the sanctity of human life.

When you see an injustice and feel that righteous anger, when you scream that something should not be, you are admitting that there is an objective standard of Right and Wrong that transcends human opinion. You are admitting that “Good” is a real thing, not just a social construct.

And if objective Good exists, there must be a source of that Good.

We are not the products of blind chance, forced to build our lives on a “foundation of unyielding despair,” as the atheist Bertrand Russell believed. On the contrary, the existence of our conscience proves that we are the sons and daughters of the Most High. We have been given free will so that we might choose to do what is good.

So, the next time someone tells you that morality is just a social construct, ask them if they believe murder is really wrong, or if they just “don’t prefer it.” Their answer will lead them directly to God.

Objective moral values exist. Therefore, God exists. It is as simple as one plus one equals two.

Justino Russell,

Student, Founder, Editor

The Aggie Standard

You’ve all seen the headlines: The New York Times, Forbes, KBTX, Houston Chronicle, from our friends at the Battalion, the radical AAUP, even FIRE; all are pushing a narrative that Texas A&M has banned Plato. They say The Regents are “restricting… foundational philosophical texts,” “silencing 2,500-year-old ideas,” and “betray[ing] the mission of higher education.” They claim Texas A&M is “abandon[ing] its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust.”

These are really strong accusations. But are they really true? Not at all. It’s fake news. I analyzed the 2025-2026 Course Catalog and found that Texas A&M has 66 courses dedicated to Ancient Philosophy, the Western Canon, Ancient History, the Bible, and the foundations of Western thought. Take a look.

So what actually happened? Professor Peterson was explicitly using Plato in a module on gender ideology. A quick glance at his syllabus proves that his class was politically biased to the left. It lists topics like “gender issues,” “equality and discrimination,” “economic injustice,” and “climate ethics.” He frames the course around “themes of power, authority, privilege, oppression and discrimination” and explicitly wants students to “recognize practices conducive to discourse in a multicultural and globalized society.” These are liberal social issues, framed in Marxist language.

Yet Texas A&M, out of all the biased political topics he included, only told him to “remove the modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.”

It has nothing to do with Plato and everything to do with the class module being literally titled “Race and Gender Ideology” (see end of page 3), a direct violation of the restrictions on using taxpayer money to teach race and gender ideology.

The accusation that conservatives are the ones “erasing history” is pure projection. The past 50 years of evidence prove that it is the Left that has systematically purged the Western canon for being too “white”, “eurocentric”, “racist”, “colonialist”, and the usual meaningless insults. It’s always replaced with more “globalized”, “multicultural” and “diverse” subjects. This is not debatable and is not new.

A landmark report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) documents this: (Keep in mind it was done in 2011, and the erasure has only increased in the past 15 years, especially after 2020)

• In 1964, 20% of the top 50 U.S. universities required a Western Civilization course, and 82% offered it. By 2010, zero of those top 50 universities required it, and only 32% even offered it as an option.

  

• The situation was no better at public institutions. By 2010, out of 75 prominent public universities surveyed, only one (1.3%) required a Western history course.

  

• Even for history majors, Western Civilization requirements have been obliterated. In 2010, 90% of the top universities had no specific Western Civ requirement for their own history majors.

  

This would be like Mexico not teaching Mexican and Spanish History, and their foundational texts, that got them where they are today. If you don’t know who you are and where you come from, how can you know what to do and where you’re going?

So it’s a lie that Plato or The Western Canon is being censored. As Matt Poling, the president of the Texas Rudder Association, said: “We wouldn’t allow a faculty member to advocate for slavery or pedophilia using [Plato’s] writings.” If a professor were teaching that the earth was flat, we wouldn’t allow it, whether he was using an ancient philosopher or not. If they were teaching lobotomies, we wouldn’t either. The same goes for any other pseudoscience, like gender ideology. The fact that we’re even having this conversation about allowing students to be indoctrinated into believing that the earth is flat or that there are more than two sexes is preposterous. It’s all about stopping the teaching of lies with our taxpayers’ dollars and starting the teaching of the truth.

As you can see, this had nothing to do with Plato himself, with the Western Canon, or anything of the like. It was all about lying to you, so that you’d be against the restrictions of race and gender.

But these common-sense restrictions are about breaking the chains of politicized academia and freeing us up for an American Golden Age. For far too long, we have been engineering our own decline by replacing truth with fake history, white guilt, and harmful pseudoscience. America was not built on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It was built on truth, hard work, and patriotism.

I can’t even begin to explain how thrilled I am for a future of real human achievement that liberates us: rocket travel anywhere on Earth in under an hour, permanent bases on the Moon, missions to Mars, cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s, inexhaustible clean nuclear energy, and exponential AI-driven productivity. A future where the suicide, depression, the anxiety, and the crisis of meaning that are far too common today becomes a thing of the past. I sincerely believe we can accomplish all that, and sooner than we think, if only we leave DEI, woke ideology, and pseudoscience behind us and instead renew an American Dream that is only possible with serious education rooted in excellence, merit, and truth.

Let’s make it happen!

Justino Russell,

Student, Founder, Editor

The Aggie Standard

If everything was created, then who created God?

You’ve heard this before. It’s one of the first arguments anyone hears against theism, and it stumps far too many Christians. But this question isn’t new. People have been asking some version of it for well over two thousand years. From ancient Greece to the Islamic Golden Age, to Hindu and Chinese philosophy, thinkers across cultures have asked whether reality can be explained by an endless chain of causes, or whether there must be a first, uncaused source of all things. Again and again, they came to the same conclusion: reality requires an uncaused cause.

Because of this, it’s ironic that the question still circulates today as if it were some devastating objection. In fact, even famous atheists have acknowledged its failure. Quentin Smith once called it “the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought” because it misunderstands the very definition of the terms being used.

By the word “God”, we do not mean a powerful being inside the universe. We mean the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, the cause of all being itself—the one who exists outside of space, time, and matter. If God were bound by space, time, and matter, He could not have created them, because He would simply be part of the creation. God never began to exist. Logically, He is the cause of existence itself.

Only things that begin to exist need a cause. The universe began to exist, which means the universe requires a cause outside of itself. This is at the core of the Cosmological argument. To say that someone had to push the first domino for the domino chain to begin is basic logic. It would be logically impossible to believe that nobody ever pushed the first domino, or that it’s been going on eternally in the past, as the theory of Infinite Regression incorrectly proposes. If you’re hiking in the mountains and stumble upon a well-built cabin, you know a builder built it. If you’re standing by a railroad track and passenger cars keep flying past you, even if you can’t see the beginning or the end, you would never believe there’s no engine pulling the train, or that it’s just an eternal line of boxcars. Yet that’s exactly what atheism asks you to believe. That is the logical fallacy, the special pleading. They are the ones that are cheating the system when they admit that everything around us, from your phone to a beautiful painting, has a cause, yet insist that the entire universe, which is infinitely more complex and ordered, somehow had no cause at all.

At its core, this objection is a contradiction in terms. It’s like asking, “Who created the uncreated?” “Who married the bachelor?” Or “What’s north of the North Pole?” The question only sounds compelling if God is incorrectly imagined as just another object within the universe.

The same confusion appears in the familiar middle-school gotcha question: “If God is all-powerful, can He create a stone so heavy He cannot lift it?” This is just another contradiction in terms. Can an all-powerful being be not all-powerful? Can black be white? Can you see how ridiculous this sounds?

So the next time someone asks you, “If God created the universe, who created God?”, just ask them back: what do you mean by God? Or even more simply: can whatever created space, time, and matter be made of space, time, and matter? Who married the bachelor?

Once the definition is clear, the objection disappears.

I hope this helps. God bless, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Justino Russell

Student, Founder, Editor

The Aggie Standard

For too long, The Battalion, the official newspaper of Texas A&M, has been seized by only one side of the political spectrum. In that capture, countless facts, lines of logic, and uncomfortable truths have been sidelined or quietly left out. The wisdom and virtue of our ancestors, who built this great university and our great state, have been condemned. The values of faith, family, and freedom, held by the majority of the student body of one of the most conservative campuses in the nation, according to student surveys, have been systematically ignored.

I encountered this problem head-on myself.

After a Texas A&M professor was fired for teaching the “gender unicorn,” and the university president was later forced to resign after gaslighting the student who reported it, The Battalion published an anonymous letter from a liberal professor addressed to the student body, condemning the firing. I found that letter to be misleading, dishonest, and harmful, perpetuating many of the problems that higher education faces. In response, I wrote and submitted a rebuttal to that professor (titled Dear Anonymous Professor). After two weeks of following up, The Battalion finally responded, only to reject my submission, citing that it was “polemical” and “not in line with our current editorial priorities”.

That made me suspicious, so I decided to do some research. After reading all the opinion section articles from November 2024 to November 2025, I found that The Battalion’s opinion section had a staggering 17-to-1 ratio of leftist to conservative content (and that’s only the opinion section!). This story was later featured by Texas Scorecard and The College Fix as their most-read article of the month.

If college is meant to be a marketplace of ideas, then even more is a subsidized official university newspaper. But when only one side is permitted to speak, that is an ideological monopoly.

But that monopoly ends now.

Welcome to the new standard: The Aggie Standard.

Gig ’em,
Justino Russell
Founder & Chief Editor, The Aggie Standard

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