Monday Miscellany, 1/19/26

The issues are now more than economic, with many Iranians demanding freedom and calling for the overthrow of the Shi’ite jihadist theocracy.  Crowds are chanting “Death to Khameini,” referring to the 86-year-old “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khameini.  Some are calling for the return from his American exile of Reva Pahlavi, the son of the shah, the monarch who was ousted in 1979 by the current regime.

Amid reports that the regime is crumbling, the Ayatollah shut down the internet, so that the dissidents could not contact each other and the outside world would not know what is happening, and set out to crush the protests by force.  Jihadist militias have reportedly killed thousands and made some 18,000 arrests on charges that bring the death penalty.

President Trump has said that the U.S. will intervene militarily to protect protesters, but that has not happened, though an aircraft carrier strike group is headed to the Middle East from the South China Sea, scheduled to arrive later this week.

Though the internet blackout makes it difficult to know what is happening inside the country, as of this writing, reports suggest that the protests have died down.  Perhaps the harsh retaliation has quelled the uprising, just as it has quelled earlier protests.

But, as Middle East expert Michael Doran observes, the Iranian government is crumbling even if it puts  down the revolt.  Its military proxy Hezbollah has been all but eradicated; its puppet government in Syria has been overthrown; its nuclear program and other infrastructure have been destroyed by Israel and the U.S.; it has lost the support of its people; and its economy has collapsed along with its currency.

Says Doran, ” The Islamic Republic may kill protesters and try to outlast the demonstrations, but the regime can no longer restore its authority. It enters 2026 weaker than at any time since its founding, and even if it manages to last out the year, it will be weaker still.”

Our Tariffs Are Increasing Production in China

Tariffs were supposed to reduce China’s exports and spur American manufacturing. But China’s exports are now higher than ever, while American manufacturing is in the doldrums.

China’s trade surplus for 2025 was a record $1.19 trillion.  Exports were up 5.5% over the previous year.  Though exports to the United States did decline by 20%, China more than made up for that with increased exports to the rest of the world.

China’s manufacturing is up 7%.  Despite the tariffs, U.S. manufacturing was up 2% for 2025, but it fell to a negative 0.7% in the last quarter of the year.

In an article for the Washington Post entitled Trump’s Promised Manufacturing Boom Is a Bust So Far, David Lynch offers some reasons:

The trade measures that the president said would spur manufacturing have instead hampered it, according to most mainstream economists. That’s because roughly half of U.S. imports are “intermediate” goods that American companies use to make finished products, like aluminum that is shaped into soup cans or circuit boards that are inserted into computers.

So while tariffs have protected American manufacturers such as steel mills from foreign competition, they have raised costs for many others.

President Trump’s decision to hit virtually all countries with tariffs, instead of specifically targeting China, has also been a factor.  Countries would rather trade with China than the U.S. And, as the Wall Street Journal‘s Jason Douglas reports, “His decision to target all trading partners with tariffs has, for some manufacturers, reduced the incentive to shift production out of China.”

College Students Who Can’t Read

Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence.  So reports Preston Fore in an article with that title for Fortune Magazine.

He quotes professor after professor, some of them from selective, highly-regarded schools, lamenting their college students–high school graduates all–being unable to handle reading assignments.

“I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” one professor said. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”

Fore cites a Prof. O’Malley, a theology teacher from Notre Dame:

Early in his career, O’Malley typically assigned 25 to 40 pages of reading per class —and students would either do it or admit they struggled.

“Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” O’Malley said—noting that many students instead just lean on AI summaries and miss the point of assigned reading.

Retired English prof that I am, I can relate to some of these frustrations, though I did not face this problem so much in my last decade or so of teaching graduates of classical schools and homeschools at Patrick Henry College and, more recently, at Luther Classical College.

I think the problem is partly the public schools’ repudiation of phonics instruction in favor of ineffective methods of teaching reading, which we have been blogging about.  And partly, even for students who have figured out how to read, an extremely short attention span–acquired from the reading that they do online–that makes reading 45 pages an overwhelming and daunting task.

Fore does mention one factoid that might help motivate people to read.  Though half of Americans have not read a single book over the past year and though Generation Z has the lowest rate of book reading for any other generation at 5.8 per year, one demographic goes against these trends:  “The habit remains popular among the ultra-wealthy. A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires released last month found that reading ranks as the top habit that elite achievers have in common.”