Ethics

October 2026:Ideological conformity has become mandatory. Rejecting eliminationist hate and terrorism has become optional.

October 2026:It was Dawkins’ denial of agency that split modern liberalism fully off from classical liberalism, whether he intended that or not.

October 2026:We arrived at this point because civil society’s moral immune system is broken.

October 2026:A free society depends upon people who can make judgments, but it also depends upon people who understand that judgment is not the same as certainty, that conviction is not the same as knowledge, and that being morally serious does not require pretending to know what we do not yet know.

October 2026:Did the moral order exist before it was recorded, or did it emerge over time? Is the moral law eternal, or does it change in the afterlife? Is the religious leader inside the moral order, or outside of it? Does the moral order ever change on the fly? And finally, how many moral orders are there within each religion?

September 2026:If Cenk Uygur had a shred of decency, he would change his network’s name.

September 2026:In a free, diverse society with competing factions, differing priorities, and clashing interests, conflict is inevitable. The only way a pluralistic democracy survives that friction is by agreeing in advance on neutral principles to balance those competing demands.

September 2026:The political left-right spectrum still stands with totalitarianism on the extreme left, and anarchy on the extreme right. This spectrum only captures one aspect of political philosophy, but it is the most important one as it is the one that distinguishes types of government based on power.

September 2026:In a 2016 interview with NOI minister Don Muhammad, Allah spoke of working at a retail store owned by “a Jewish guy that’s got short arms and deep pockets.”

September 2026:A system of laws does not produce human decency on its own; laws only work when they sit on an uncompromising moral floor.

September 2026:I can remember the nearly 3,000 people behind the pieces of paper that flew with the wind across the river, even if I never knew their names. And I can outright refuse to turn victims into distorted abstractions or perpetrators for that matter. I can call something what it is when the words matter.

September 2026:A political movement cannot govern indefinitely through disruption. A wrecking ball can clear a condemned structure, but it cannot become the foundation of the building that replaces it. Eventually, a movement must decide how it will govern when in power.

September 2026:George could have expressed sorrow for October 7, then moved at once to a denunciation of Israel. This has become the approved syntax of celebrity compassion: Jewish suffering is briefly acknowledged before Israeli guilt takes possession of the argument. The initial sympathy merely licenses the accusation that follows. George refused that sequence.

September 2026:Removing the 24-week limit authorizes aborting viable infants, which the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a life-long Democrat, characterized as infanticide.

September 2026:For most of my life, I took the stability of our civil society for granted, as I think most Americans did, unaware that our entire system was held up by an unwritten social law: a nation and every one of its institutions and communities are ultimately defined not by what they preach, but by what they and their leaders tolerate—because whatever is tolerated is eventually normalized.

August 2026:Dolly Parton died this week at the age of 80, and in the flood of tributes that followed, people quite rightly talked about the songs, the movies, the outrageous wigs, the one-liners, the philanthropy, and the extraordinary ability she had to make almost everyone feel as though she somehow belonged to them. Republicans loved Dolly. […]

August 2026:I wrote you an open letter in July out of concern about the direction you were taking on Israel. I strongly disagreed with you, but I assumed you were acting within what you considered to be good faith. I thought you were getting pulled into a political movement that was becoming increasingly hostile to Israel, and that perhaps you did not fully appreciate from where some of the arguments you were repeating came.

August 2026:I’d say “Mr. Vice President,” but I respect you the same way you respect the intelligence of the American people. You see, I despise liars. And since becoming vice president, all you have done is lie and obfuscate issue after issue.

August 2026:I recently listened to Ronald Reagan's remarkable speech at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

August 2026:Criticizing the left to save the left.

August 2026:The recent violent disruption of Shabbat services at Central Synagogue was not an isolated incident—it was the visible culmination of an escalating environment of intimidation. Across New York City, Jewish residents face verbal attacks, harassment, and overt discrimination on public transit, university campuses, K–12 schools, sidewalks, and workplaces. This crisis is not confined to houses of worship; it compromises the daily safety and fundamental rights of individual New Yorkers in every public space.

August 2026:Violent extremism is neither the inevitable product of circumstance nor the unconstrained exercise of individual choice. It emerges where human vulnerability, social context, and ideological narratives intersect.

August 2026:Why moral courage is the only antidote to our culture of silence.

August 2026:In the face of so much evidence that should, at a minimum, raise doubt about the factual basis of Kristof’s screed, you invoke rabbinic authority with apparent indifference to the effects of your words on the Jewish condition generally and the situation here in Israel specifically.

July 2026:These “educators” are hiding something much worse: Arabs and Muslims, kin to the Palestinians, still own black slaves today.

July 2026:Justice requires decisiveness, but it also requires the humility to recognize that every human judgment is necessarily incomplete.

July 2026:Your friend Charlie Kirk believed Israel needed to make its case to young American conservatives. Now you are treating Israel’s decision to follow that advice as evidence of something sinister.

July 2026:A free society is stabilized not by a shared vision of what is positive, but by a collective agreement on what is intolerable.Cohesion must be anchored in a consensus on the intolerable—not what a populace collectively aspires to achieve, but what it collectively refuses to endure.

July 2026:Was Marx actually a Satanist? Some might say he was just a romantic youth, and it is hard to say one way or another with absolute certainty, but whether or not Marx literally worshiped Satan, his imagination was satanic in the older Christian sense: rebellion against God, hatred of the created order, and the promise that man can become his own creator. He certainly saw man the way Satan would, offering something Satan would have known could never actually work while knowing that the attempt to implement it would kill on a scale even smallpox could not match.

June 2026:Do you remember, in the days of yore, when an Irishman happily served as the President of Israel for a decade? Chaim Herzog, born in Belfast, raised in Dublin, was Israeli President from 1983 to1993. Since then, Israel-Ireland relations have become, shall we say, rather dodgy.

July 2026:Humans love violence and chaos. Leave us alone long enough, and we will find something to squabble about. That is why sports are so remarkable: instead of clubs, spears, or rifles, they let us settle differences and grievances in a (mostly) non-bloody way—except when we revert to our baser instincts and tribalism takes over, resulting in a sports riot.

May 2026:The deeper question is what happens to institutions after they are given permission to make death part of care.

May 2026:Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column on alleged Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians appeared on May 11. The following day, the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children released Silenced No More, a 297-page report on sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 and against hostages in captivity. Yet public discussion quickly centered on Kristof’s column and the controversy […]

May 2026:“Jude.” “Parasite.” “Race defiler.” “Profiteer.” “Subhuman.” “Corrupter.” It started with language.

May 2026:I am writing to you as a New Yorker and as a Jew who feels increasingly abandoned by leaders who claim to stand for human rights while applying those principles selectively. What makes this especially painful is your willingness to distort or dismiss Israel’s reality and even the right to exist in service of your political ideology.

April 2026:In the days following Yom ha-Shoah, remembrance risks becoming ritual. People pause, mourn, repeat the phrase “never again.” Then, almost imperceptibly, daily life resumes, unchallenged by the question remembrance is meant to provoke.

April 2026:“Imagine” isn’t a bad song. It is a genuinely powerful piece of music. But it’s a terrible argument for crafting reality.

April 2026:The great mistake of the modern observer is believing we are witnessing a series of disconnected cultural fires. We look at campus encampments, the partisan bickering of the duopoly, or the rise of fringe groups like the DSA or the “groypers,” and we see a dozen different wars.

April 2026:There is a moment when art stops asking permission. This is that moment. The 27th mural is not polite. It does not soften itself. It does not adjust for comfort. It says something people don’t want to hear.

April 2026:There is a particular kind of grief that rarely announces itself as grief. It does not arrive with ceremony or sympathy. It comes quietly, through a failed login, a blank screen, a terse notification that an account has been disabled.

March 2026:Now we are not only Christ-killers, but also “settler colonialist, white supremacist Zionists.” We are the ones who commit genocide and murder Palestinians babies. The sad thing is that many people, not just “ordinary” folks, but nutty academics, artists, and intellectuals do believe this, or, at least, do not question the veracity of these horrible accusations.

March 2026:When corporations coordinate to dominate a market, regulators intervene. Anti-trust law exists to prevent concentrated power from distorting competition.

March 2026:Recognize the pattern. What begins as a reset of national politics involving a power-sharing deal with radicals leads to stochastic terrorism that gives way to an entirely new sociopolitical order.

March 2026:Conversations that once encouraged exploration begin to feel like tests of moral alignment.

March 2026:We are at the peak of a public education crisis that can no longer be called accidental. Less than half of children in the U.S. are proficiently literate. And the state with the lowest literacy rate is not Mississippi, Louisiana, or Kentucky. It is California, the wealthiest state in the Union by GDP.

February 2026:A professional neutrality standard would protect students without policing belief.

March 2026:This is how propaganda works when it succeeds. It does not merely persuade. It restructures the categories through which people interpret reality.

February 2026:One of the lessons of history is that catastrophes happen by increments.

February 2026:On November 19, 2025, NPR interviewed “Palestinian comedian” Mo Amer in conjunction with his Netflix special Wild World. The host, Leila Fadel, claims that the special “explores free speech and the absurdities American Arabs and Muslims face while navigating life in the U.S.” I have not seen the special.  What I find interesting and disturbing is […]

January 2026:The United States is six months away from celebrating its 250th birthday—making it the oldest democracy in the world. Its first few birthdays were kicked off by kicking out a British monarch who took far too many liberties with his American Colonies without granting his subjects anything approaching actual liberty. There were stubborn edicts, stifling censorship, imperious tea and stamp taxes, Red Coats rifling through personal effects, incarcerations without being charged, juries never convened and trial dates that never materialized. 

January 2026:The Bill of Rights is one of the most important foundations of our country, defining things that no government at any level can ever do, even in pursuit of its legitimate powers. The most important amendment in the Bill of Rights is the first, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

January 2026:In the legend of Camelot, the Holy Grail was not discovered by the greatest knight, nor by the most wise, nor even by the most visibly pious. It was not found by those who spoke most eloquently about virtue, nor by those who cloaked themselves in sanctimony. 

January 2026:For much of the last decade, American political discourse has rested on a comforting illusion: that extremism moves in straight lines. That the far left and the far right occupy opposing moral universes. That anti-Semitism, when it resurfaces, must belong clearly to one camp or the other—identifiable by familiar slogans, aesthetics, or historical references.

January 2026:National defense is one of the primary responsibilities of any federal government, but when our founders wrote the Constitution, they were thinking about invading armies more so than invading narratives. The United States is too powerful militarily for any nation to consider invading, so warfare today is asymmetrical.

November 2025:Israel exists. You don’t need to debate its right to exist or defend it. It is a sovereign state, legally created and internationally recognized, home to millions of people, who do not disappear because someone objects to them. Its existence is a reality, not a belief system.

November 2025:As soon as the truce in Gaza went into effect, reports began to emerge of armed factions confronting Hamas and, soon after that, of Hamas’s reign of terror. The fighting was described as a rebellion against Hamas or as Hamas’s revenge against those who had betrayed it. No one who has watched Gaza closely could be surprised. Violence is endemic to Arab politics.

October 2025:Two documents tell the story of how Israel’s war in Gaza came to an end. They are written in different languages, for different audiences, and they describe two entirely different realities.

October 2025:Courage, however, when fueled by anger, can turn inward, and anger, even when righteous, can cloud judgment.

September 2025:Afzal Masih and his cousin Harris Tariq Masih were among a group of Catholics who were in a passenger van en route to the annual Feast of the Nativity of Mary shrine in Mariamabad, Sheikhpura District. They were attacked by Muslims with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, said Aurangzeb Peter, a member of the traveling group.

September 2025:Every day is marked by somebody or some organization claiming that Israel is committing genocide and perhaps a slew of other war crimes. There are several definitions of genocides, so anybody can pick and choose to indict a person or state.

September 2025:An open letter on recognition, justice, and survival: Gaza was the test; the U.N. learned nothing. Gaza in 2005 already tested the two-state promise. The unilateral land-for-peace disengagement produced rockets, tunnels, indoctrination, and, on October 7, the deadliest massacre of civilian Jews—including babies, pregnant women, people with disabilities, and the elderly—since the Holocaust. To officials, editors, […]

July 2025:Islam was not revealed; it was reverse-engineered. It is not the fulfillment of divine truth, but its calculated inversion. Islam is not even a religion so much as a tool for conquest wrapped in the language of faith.

July 2025:While the West had the moral courage to end slavery and then feel ashamed of it, the Muslim world has never done any such thing. In fact, the atrocity continues to this day.

July 2025:Traditionally progressive causes like environmentalism, feminism, and LGBT rights have now taken a backseat to Islamism, being fully subsumed in the name of “Palestine.”

July 2025:Trump’s decision, taken at the height of Israel’s impressive campaign, literally saved the Ayatollahs’ regime, called by the U.S. State Department the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, 39 years in a row, since 1984.

July 2025:Bangladesh’s slide into becoming an Islamic state was inevitable. Its creation owed to the disgruntlement of undivided Pakistan’s Bengali Muslims against the ruling Pakistani elite, which was—and is—overwhelmingly Punjabi Muslim.

July 2025:In 2024, around the world, 4,476 Christians—more than 12 a day on average—were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,744 Christians were arrested or illegally detained, and 7,679 churches and other Christian institutions were attacked, often destroyed.

May 2025:Tucker’s shift into woke identity politics is neither a reaction to losing his throne at Fox nor a clever business ploy but an unveiling of sorts—a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into Tucker’s true self.

May 2025:Tucker Carlson uses revisionist claims, not for historical debate, but to reshape political power and manipulate public opinion, mirroring tactics seen in the Obama-era Democratic Party, aiming for sectarianism within the Trumpist movement.

May 2025:Anti-Semitism has resurfaced, disguised as fashionable resistance, and divorced from its historical context. It’s a dangerous trend where cruelty is masked as conscience, with real-world, violent consequences.

May 2025:The rise of anti-Western, isolationist conservatives erode America’s greatness across the spectrum—and will only embolden the woke far-left.

May 2025:A “woke right,” exemplified by figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, promotes conspiracy theories and chaos, significantly influencing the MAGA movement and pushing racial and religious nationalism into mainstream discourse.

May 2025:The woke world has, improbably, widened. Its cultural virus has discovered new pathogens, and even a new host. The ultra-nationalist, uber manly, and shamelessly fascistic alt-right has now, suddenly, found its woke groove.

January 2025:Caleb Gannon's attack on a pro-Israel activist is tied to the ideology of "settler colonialism," which demonizes Western democracies and legitimizes violence. This ideology, fueled by Hamas's October 7th attack, drove Gannon's actions and destabilizes civil society.

November 2024:Diaspora Jewry’s worst fears have been realized: an incompetent, Western establishment left-wing is too beholden to woke politics to defend its most ardent supporters from institutionalized Islamism.

November 2024:The press demands, hectors even, public servants to make themselves accountable to the people by giving interviews to the press, knowing full well it is a suicide mission.

September 2024:The Enlightenment was more instrumental in our founding than any other single event. It was the operating system for liberal democracy, and it provided the foundation for our own democratic self-governance.

September 2024:Ben Poser describes the Democratic Party’s shift towards pro-Islam and anti-Israel policies, highlighting instances where key figures like Obama, Biden, and Harris have appeased Islamic hate-mongers and terrorists while undermining Israel’s security and neglecting the threat of the Islamic regime occupying Iran.

September 2024:This article discusses the Democratic Party's shift towards censorship. It highlights Bill Clinton's criticism of conservative media and the subsequent embrace of censorship by the left. The rise of social media and Big Tech's collaboration with the government furthered this trend. While legal solutions exist, political will is necessary to restore First Amendment rights.

September 2024:This article discusses the lack of journalistic ethics in today's media. It argues that journalistic bias, particularly favoring one political party, is a major ethical breach. The author emphasizes the importance of impartiality, accuracy, and fact-based reporting, and suggests that the media's failure to uphold these standards is a serious problem for democracy.

September 2024:Gary Branfman argues that the modern Democratic party has abandoned classic liberal values in favor of Marxist policies. It criticizes the Democratic Socialists of America, Kamala Harris, and other leftist politicians for promoting an anti-liberal agenda that includes censorship and the abolition of political freedom of choice.

August 2024:A suicide letter by a survivor of the Nova Music Festival massacre. The original letter was released by his sister in Hebrew.

August 2024:Sharia is not a system which any Western person would—even should—perceive as morally recognizable.

August 2024:Dmitri Shufutinsky argues that Islamists and Marxists have conquered social movements in the US and the West, using them as vehicles to promote their ideologies and undermine Western democracy. He calls for a return to focused social movements that avoid being co-opted by unrelated causes.

August 2024:Jake Novak argues that the Jewish edict of 'dina d'malchuta dina', requiring adherence to secular laws, has been a key factor in Jewish success. It fosters engagement with the non-Jewish world, leading to intellectual and cultural exchange that drives achievement. This contrasts with the insularity and regressiveness of societies that insist on Sharia law.

June 2024:The 1930s have, in part, returned; and while there are many more dangers, just as then, little is being done to combat them. And what complicates any plan of response is that so much of what seeks to conquer the West comes from within.

June 2024:That the left has forgotten that Jews originated in Judea and that every group that arrived in the Roman colony of Palestine during and after the first century should only be regarded as colonial transplants is Orwellian.

June 2024:In many ways, Russia, China, and Iran are enemies with conflicting political, economic, and military goals. But, sometimes, the orbits of these three highly undemocratic and repressive regimes converge and produce either intentional or unintentional cooperation. Actually, it’s better to call it “collusion.”

June 2024:Despite being rooted in empathy, this coddling fantasy is the height of racism. It denies Arabs and Muslims—who, these days, serve as stand-ins for blacks or native Latin Americans—of their agency and keeps it in the hands of Eurocentric Westerners.

June 2024:The layered approach to conquest taken by Islamism was made possible by Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, which made a religion of Nazism in the same way that Islamism disguises its political agenda as a religious one.

April 2024:This cultural export—the Hollywood Western—framed a perception about the people who lived on the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean. It was an image of frontiersmen of quiet dignity, a people who could think for themselves and possessed the self-sufficiency to go it alone. Rugged nonconformists.

April 2024:The essence of activism and advocacy isn’t a fundraising and marketing game. It isn’t staying up to date on the latest social media trends. It isn’t avoiding certain truths as to not lose donor dollars, and it isn’t a popularity contest. It is knocking on G-d’s door.

April 2024:Hamas, as a triumphalist idea of ridding the world of Israel and Jews, may never be defeated. But it’s at least possible that it can be roundly defeated as an armed entity aiming its Iran-supplied weapons at the heart of Israel. Hamas as an idea, like the Hydra, may grow more heads when its head is cut off. But those heads, without a body—a functional infrastructure of war—will be de-fanged.

April 2024:The rabbis say that the gates of repentance always stand open. And I hope and pray that one day you will walk through them, and realize the error that drove you to moral depravity and useful idiocy.

March 2024:There were too many fact-based condemnations of Hamas’s sadistic barbarism on October 7. The left-wing and lesbian feminists could stand it no longer. They finally had to speak out against what they call the “weaponization” of rape by those who dare to oppose Hamas.

March 2024:The threat Candace Owens presents is tangible. She has millions of followers and has decided that her main targets are the Jews. She is a channel for Nick Fuentes and his call for an America First, Christian Nationalist "holy war against Judaism."

February 2024:I did not hear these pro-Hamas marchers, especially the lesbian, “queer,” and feminist ones, calling for an end to rape, woman-battering, or the persecution of homosexuals and “queers” in Gaza. I saw no signs that condemned honor killing or polygamy. No one called for reproductive freedom for American women or for an Equal Rights Amendment.

December 2023:It is overly simplistic to refer to “the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Hamas belongs to the Islamist “resistance” camp, whose ideology began to leave its stamp on the Islamic world in general, and Palestinian society in particular, during the first half of the 20th century.

November 2023:As one honest Jordanian editor noted, “fake news has a long and distinguished pedigree in the Arab world.”

November 2023:Hamas is not interested in living in peace with Israel. Hamas wants Israel’s 7 million Jews to rest in peace and establish an Islamic state on the ruins of the Jewish state.