Students prefer AI chatbots, until they know it is one

University of Cincinnati nursing professor studies AI chatbots in higher education advising

University of Cincinnati

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Dr. Joshua Lambert is an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing.

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Do chatbots have a role in higher education?

It’s a question Joshua Lambert, an associate professor and biostatistician in the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing, is pondering. He’s turned to a group of his students to find out their thoughts about the helpfulness and satisfaction of a custom AI education chatbot. 

Lambert piloted his custom chatbot by examining how a small group of Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students evaluated answers to a set of questions from three different sources: a professor, a graduate assistant and a chatbot. 

The results of the study have been published in the Journal of Nursing Education. This pilot project used a randomized, blinded, within-subjects comparison study with survey-based evaluation.

Seven doctoral students in the study submitted statistical questions related to their capstone projects and received blind responses from the professor, graduate assistant and chatbot. They rated each response on helpfulness, satisfaction and likelihood of use on a scale of one to five with the best being five. They then guessed which response came from the chatbot.

“Students first gave us their questions and then we gave them three responses back in a blinded and randomized fashion so students were unaware which response came from either the professor, graduate assistant or chatbot,” explains Lambert. “The students ranked each response in terms of helpfulness, overall satisfaction and guessed which of the three responses came from the chatbot.”

“The students rated the chatbot’s response the highest in terms of overall satisfaction and helpfulness,” adds Lambert.

The chatbot’s responses were preferred by the students, but Lambert thought the data offered a more nuanced story than originally thought. He found that when students were asked to guess what response came from the chatbot, the lowest rated responses in helpfulness and satisfaction were guessed as coming from the chatbot.

“Students preferred the large language model (LLM) chatbot’s responses when blinded yet demonstrated a bias against it when the source was suspected,” explains Lambert. “This bias is likely rooted in a lack of trust, and trust may influence AI adoption by both students and professors.

“The students rated the chatbot’s responses the highest yet consistently guessed the lowest rated response as the chatbot’s was very interesting and somewhat unexpected. Yet when we read the current academic literature on this topic, we found that user trust is an important component in almost all AI research right now,” says Lambert.

Other researchers in the study from the UC College of Nursing include Robyn Stamm, DNP, associate professor of clinical nursing; Shannon White, DNP, assistant professor in the doctor of nursing practice program; and Melanie Kroger-Jarvis, DNP, associate dean for graduate clinical learning programs. Bailey Martin, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, is also a co-author of  the study.

Researchers in the study acknowledge that while the small sample size is appropriate for a pilot study, it is insufficient for determining adequate effectiveness. They suggest that larger studies, replicated in multiple sites with additional qualitative and quantitative data are needed to thoroughly evaluate AI chatbot tools in nursing education and advising.

“For this reason, the descriptive results should be considered an initial ‘first step’ toward understanding how such a tool may assist in student learning and consultation,” the researchers wrote in their study.

Lambert says he considered using the chatbot because students, like others, are sometimes hesitant to ask questions to another individual, particularly a professor, that might seem silly or make them appear as not so smart.

However, the chatbot won’t judge you based on your questions, he adds.

“Sometimes the topics we cover are challenging or intimidating,” says Lambert. “Educators want something that will lower the barrier so students can ask any questions they like.”

Funding for the study came from an internal grant from the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing to support conference attendance, participant reimbursement and software fees. The authors of the study report no potential conflicts of interest.

Read the story on the UC website.

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Journal

Journal of Nursing Education

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Blinded But Biased: Students Prefer Chatbot Until They Know It Is One

Article Publication Date

1-Apr-2026

Teachers tend to help the same kids repeatedly when using AI-powered tutoring tools

North Carolina State University

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A new study finds teachers tend to provide assistance to similar subsets of students when using AI-powered educational tools, rather than touching base regularly with everyone in their classes. The findings could be used to develop tools that help teachers track their classroom interactions to ensure they are giving each student the attention they need.

“AI-powered tools are increasingly common in K-12 classrooms, but teachers still play a critical role,” says Qiao Jin, first author of the study and an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University. “For this study, we wanted to examine how teachers who use AI-powered tools determine which students need help – and how those teachers actually distribute their time among their students.”

For this study, the researchers looked specifically at teachers using intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) to teach middle-school math. ITS are AI-powered software that responds to student activity to provide customized assistance through hints and feedback, as well as tracking student performance.

For the first part of the study, researchers interviewed nine middle school math teachers who used ITS in their classrooms. The interviews helped researchers understand how the teachers determine which students require an intervention (a teacher visit) and what kind of help the teachers provide.

“While teachers said it would be ideal to spend one-on-one time with every student, they noted that this is not possible,” Jin says.

Instead, the teachers made decisions about who to help based on many factors. Two of the most significant factors were whether a student had required assistance in the past, and a student’s “engagement state.”

“ITS can notify teachers when students have been consistently entering incorrect answers or have not interacted with the system for an extended time,” Jin says. “Those are engagement states called ‘struggle’ and ‘idle,’ respectively. And either of those engagement states might lead a teacher to touch base with the relevant students.”

To see how these teacher behaviors are reflected in practice, the researchers drew on data covering 1,437,055 interactions between students and an ITS. The data covers 339 students enrolled in 14 middle and high school math classes across 10 U.S. schools during the 2022-23 school year. All of the data the researchers looked at is data that the relevant teachers had access to via their ITS dashboards.

“We found that teachers are more likely to interact with students that they have interacted with before, even after considering who is engaged and disengaged in the classroom,” says Jin. “Basically, if a teacher has intervened to help a student in the past, they are more likely to intervene to help that student in the future.

“Teachers have their own definitions of fairness and their own understanding of student needs, based on their training and experiences,” says Jin. “We believe our findings can be used to develop software tools, such as dashboard features, that support teachers by giving them information they can use to make decisions about how they allocate their time in a way that is consistent with their definitions of fairness and student need.

“Teachers have a difficult job and developing better tools to help them do that job effectively is worthwhile.”

The paper, “Sticky Help, Bounded Effects: Session-by-Session Analytics of Teacher Interventions in K-12 Classrooms,” will be presented at the 16th Annual Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK26) being held April 27-May 1 in Bergen, Norway. The paper was co-authored by YiChen Yu of NC State; and by Conrad Borchers, Ashish Gurung, Sean Jackson, Sameeksha Agarwal, Cancan Wang, Pragati Maheshwary and Vincent Aleven of Carnegie Mellon University.

The work was done with support from the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, under grant R305A240281.

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Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Sticky Help, Bounded Effects: Session-by-Session Analytics of Teacher Interventions in K-12 Classrooms

JMIR Publications examines AI-driven discovery bottleneck: scientific evidence trapped in a predigital system

JMIR Publications

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Boon-How Chew, MD, MMed, PhD., JMIR Correspondent

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(Toronto, April 6, 2026) — JMIR Publications today announced the release of a timely new article in its News and Perspectives section, showcasing the urgent need to modernize the scientific record. The article, “Our AI-Powered Discoveries Are Trapped in a Predigital System,” details how shifting from a static, paper-based model to a data-native ecosystem can bridge the widening gap between rapid AI innovation and slow formal validation.

Authored by Dr. Boon-How Chew, JMIR Correspondent, the report highlights the growing chasm between the speed of evidence generation and the glacial pace of traditional scholarly communication. The study finds that while AI is accelerating diagnostics and drug discovery, the 17th-century publishing infrastructure has become a direct threat to the promise of data-driven medicine.

The Crisis of Trust and Speed in Global Research

Traditional academic publishing remains a significant bottleneck for digital health innovations, governed by an economic and structural model that creates profound access and equity issues. Beyond fragmented AI solutions, the report emphasizes that while a chaotic ecosystem of AI super-assistants like Paperpal, Elicit, and ResearchRabbit has emerged, these tools often only patch symptoms. They help authors write papers faster but do not change the fact that the final output remains non-interactive and largely unverifiable.

The analysis reveals several breakthrough insights:

• The High Cost of Access: Top-tier research universities report annual subscription expenditures exceeding $10 to $15 million, while author-facing processing charges can range from $5,000 to over $11,000 per article.

• The Reproducibility Crisis: The foundation of scientific evidence faces ongoing threats, with estimates suggesting that 50% to 90% of published research findings are not reproducible across various disciplines.

• The Static Article Constraint: By focusing on opaque narrative summaries that decouple claims from underlying data, the current system makes verification nearly impossible for complex AI models.

"The black box of a clinical AI model cannot be built on the black box of a nonreproducible study," says Dr. Chew. "We need a new operating system for science that is dynamic, transparent, and data-driven."

Transitioning to a New Operating System for Science

While a chaotic ecosystem of AI tools currently offers fragmented help by optimizing the creation of traditional manuscripts, the article argues that the future unit of publication must move toward enriched dynamic research objects. In this new model, data, methods, analysis logs, and peer validation are structurally and permanently linked to ensure rigorous reporting and transparency by design.

"The technology is almost here," adds Dr. Chew. "What is required now is the collective will to build, adopt, and apply a publishing model that is worthy of the future."

Please cite as:

Chew B

Our AI-Powered Discoveries Are Trapped in a Predigital System

J Med Internet Res 2026;28:e96018

URL: https://www.jmir.org/2026/1/e96018 

DOI: 10.2196/96018

 

About JMIR Publications News and Perspectives

JMIR Publications is a leading open access publisher of digital health research. The News and Perspectives section is the newest addition to its portfolio, established to bring the rigor and integrity of academic publishing to scientific journalism. The section features well-researched, expert-driven content from the Scientific News Editor, Kayleigh-Ann Clegg, PhD, and a network of specialist JMIR Publications Correspondents to keep the digital health community informed, inspired, and ahead of the curve.

About JMIR Publications

JMIR Publications is a leading open access publisher of digital health research and a champion of open science. With a focus on author advocacy and research amplification, JMIR Publications partners with researchers to advance their careers and maximize the impact of their work. As a technology organization with publishing at its core, we provide innovative tools and resources that go beyond traditional publishing, supporting researchers at every step of the dissemination process. Our portfolio features a range of peer-reviewed journals, including the renowned Journal of Medical Internet Research. 

To find out more about JMIR Publications, visit jmirpublications.com or connect with them on Bluesky, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

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The content of this communication is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, published by JMIR Publications, is properly cited.

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Journal of Medical Internet Research

DOI

10.2196/96018 

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Commentary/editorial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Our AI-Powered Discoveries Are Trapped in a Predigital System

THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERIKA

Trump officials invoke racist scholars and white supremacists in major push to end birthright citizenship

Alex Woodward
Mon, March 30, 2026

THE INDEPENDENT UK


Critics warn that Donald Trump's attempt to deny citizenship to American-born children of certain immigrants is relying on century-old legal arguments from white supremacists and a former Confederate officer, a move that could upend long-settled law granting citizenship to most people born in the country.

Donald Trump’s attempt to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution to determine who gets to be an American is relying on century-old legal arguments from white supremacists, a former Confederate officer and a case that denied citizenship to Native Americans, critics have warned.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments April 1 over the president’s executive order that attempts to deny citizenship to American-born children of certain immigrants, a far-reaching attempt to upend long-settled law that grants citizenship to most people born in the country.

In their briefs to the court, Trump administration lawyers cite several scholars who campaigned against birthright citizenship in the 1800s, a movement fueled by anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism in the aftermath of Reconstruction and a rise in anti-immigrant views.

Among them are Alexander Porter Morse, a former Confederate officer whose arguments led to the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896 that legalized Jim Crow. The administration quotes Morse in a brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that the children of “foreigners transiently within the United States” are not deemed U.S. citizens.

In another instance, the government cites Francis Wharton, an attorney who once wrote that granting citizenship to insufficiently “civilized” Chinese immigrants would invite “foreign barbarism” into the country.

The Trump administration’s defense of an executive order to redefine the 14th Amendment’s clause that decides who gets to be a citizen relies on century-old arguments promoted by racist scholars, critics say (AFP via Getty Images)More

The 14th Amendment plainly states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” For more than 100 years, the Supreme Court has upheld the definition to apply to all children born within the United States.

In the late 1800s, Wharton and other legal minds advanced the argument that the 14th Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excluded the children of Chinese immigrants.

Attorney George D. Collins argued Chinese immigrants are “utterly unfit” and “wholly incompetent” to receive citizenship.

Justices are set to hear oral arguments on whether children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents will retain citizenship. The decision could impact long-standing legal interpretations and affect hundreds of thousands each year.

“Are Chinese children born in this country to share with the descendants of the patriots of the American Revolution the exalted qualification of being eligible to the Presidency of the nation?” Collins wrote to the Supreme Court alongside then-solicitor general Holmes Conrad in 1898.

“If so, then verily there has been a most degenerate departure from the patriotic ideals of our forefathers; and surely in that case American citizenship is not worth having,” they added.

The Supreme Court was unpersuaded. A landmark decision in the case of United States v Wong Kim Ark held that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to virtually everyone born in the country.

In that case, the justices determined that a man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco was a U.S. citizen, effectively enshrining birthright citizenship as the law of the land, with exceptions for children of diplomats and invading militaries.

The Trump administration’s legal defense is “built on a racist foundation,” attorney Justin Sadowsky with the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance wrote to the high court.

His organization cites at least 19 instances in which the government invokes arguments from Collins and others that were shut down in the Wong Kim Ark case.

The arguments today are “entirely recycled” from cases that were rejected more than 100 years ago, according to Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and a lead counsel in the case.

The reliance on what were once fringe right-wing scholars that pull from century-old arguments are part of a “broader effort to reshape the demographics of this country, and to try to redefine what it means to be an American,” he said.

Administration officials contend that those scholars have been repeatedly referenced by the court, and that their views were shared by other prominent thinkers who did not share racist views.

“The Supreme Court has the opportunity to review the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and restore the meaning of citizenship in the United States to its original public meaning,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to The Washington Post, which analyzed the administration’s reliance on legal arguments from racist scholars. “This case will have enormous consequences for the security of all Americans.”

Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, which he signed on his first day back in the White House, would deny citizenship to newborns if their mother was “unlawfully present” or had “lawful but temporary” status, and if the father “was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

Legal scholars who advanced white supremacist views were cited by the Trump administration in briefs to the Supreme Court at least 19 times, opponents say 

Critics have warned that allowing the president to effectively rewrite a core component of the 14th Amendment would create a patchwork system of constitutional rights and citizenship benefits, including the right to vote.

Tens of thousands of newborns would be denied citizenship every year under Trump’s order, opening the door for stateless families with mixed citizenship status and uneven constitutional rights, according to the plaintiffs.

“Right now, having a baby in the United States is straightforward. The hospital fills out a form, and within days, your newborn has a Social Security number and a birth certificate recognizing their citizenship,” Wofsy said. “That system works because it's simple and universal. This executive order would end that and create chaos for all of us.”

Ama S. Frimpong, legal director with immigrants’ advocacy group We Are CASA, which launched one of the challenges against Trump’s order, said families and pregnant immigrant mothers are worried about their children’s birth certificates and “the basic rights that every U.S.-born child has been guaranteed.”

“Allowing this executive order to stand would create chaos, undermining long-standing systems that rely on birthright citizenship, and potentially leaving children stateless or vulnerable to deportation by their own government,” she told reporters last week.

Trump’s executive order would deny citizenship to newborns of certain immigrants, which could chaos ‘chaos’ and a patchwork of constitutional rights for immigrant families, critics fear (AFP via Getty Images)More

Two days before the Supreme Court heard arguments over his executive order, Trump raged at the justices on Truth Social and claimed birthright citizenship was about “BABIES OF SLAVES,” echoing other legal arguments from his administration stating that the14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was written to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children.

“There's a bit of irony in some of the Trump administration's arguments on this, seen in the briefs and heard from the president — the claim that the citizenship clause was only for citizenship for Black Americans, and not for anyone else. But the text of the clause says all persons born,” Wofsy said.

“That’s true for a lot of civil rights legislation, that it may have initially been motivated by an impetus to redress some of the horrors inflicted on Black Americans, but that Congress has used universal language to make sure that everyone is protected,” he said.

The Trump administration now invokes that civil rights language to advocate on behalf of white litigants with claims of racial discrimination.

Trump’s White Nationalism Will Only Lead to Division, Poverty, and Mass Violence

The advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of colonialism is monstrous, both morally and in practical terms.


Peter Cvjetanovic (R) along with neo-Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists, encircle and chant at counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA on August 11, 2017.
(Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Juan Cole
Mar 12, 2026

TomDispatch

Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of white nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as “white,” while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power.

Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline” because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product]—down from 25% in 1990 to 14% today.”

A Mayor Named Khan

As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is exemplified in Trump’s National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today’s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn’t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as “shithole countries,” has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe’s share of global GDP.

In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe’s supposed economic degradation doesn’t bother him nearly as much as another issue: “This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” thanks to Europe’s migration policies. In short, Trump’s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming “migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,” along with “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

The only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.

Trump claims that he’s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington’s “reliable allies.” That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, “If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.” And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren’t just coming from the Middle East, “they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.” In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.

Of course, he’s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe’s future reliability, Trump has already said that he “can’t trust” Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won’t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.

Aryan Reliability

The underpinnings of Trump’s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he’s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recently asserted that “they’ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.” Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having restored British-US diplomatic relations after years of strain.

In reality, studies show that socioeconomic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term “immigrants” in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that 9 of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as “major non-NATO allies” are Muslim majority.

His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germany’s because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump’s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler’s thinking—that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler’s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump’s NSS.

“Mongols and Negroes”

Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrès wrote, “Today, new French have slipped in among us… who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.” He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. “The name of France might well survive,” he commented, but “the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.” Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrès denounced the famed French novelist Émile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as “not French” but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.

Fifty years later, the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957) coined the phrase “Great Replacement.” An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by “Mongols and Negroes”—that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn’t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized white Europeans.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.”

Sadly enough, Binet’s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his 21st century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us” (and President Trump called the assembled protesters, as well as those who opposed them, “very fine people”). Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump denounced the verdict and launched the slogan, “Free Marine Le Pen.” Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954-1962) that killed between half a million and a million Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was surrounded by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.

Forget 1776 and All That

The central concerns of that National Security Strategy now animate the Trump administration’s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once termed the White Man’s Burden, crowing that “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.” He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction, and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II alone, for instance, instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as 10 million people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist utters, “The horror! The horror!”

After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a Europe in ruins contracted. “Half of it,” he added, “lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.” He mourned that “the great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

He also displayed a striking mixture of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia—and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main communist led. After all, the United States launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early 19th century by Simón Bolívar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonialized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.

Marco Rubio’s mixing of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime’s most insistent demands in the late 1930s, and dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.

Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of mobilization. The first was “social mobilization,” which involved urbanization, industrialization, and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.

And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets demanding independence. And while the Netherlands did fight viciously to roll back Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out. The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by military force. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, twisted French President Charles De Gaulle’s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and Communism.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche

Given that history, the advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global South is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face Japan’s dilemma of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.” As for the white nationalist pronatalist dream of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it’s a chimera given the electoral power of women in today’s Europe (and the United States).

In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s cruel, heavily ICED anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy and Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country’s disastrous 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won’t be aided by the present assault on Iran either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.

In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump’s white nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty, and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.

And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase “the white man’s burden” a grim new meaning.


© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Juan Cole
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.
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