In Defense of the Litmus Test
Ideological conformity has become mandatory. Rejecting eliminationist hate and terrorism has become optional.
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Erez Levin
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic on his Substack, Holding the Line.
The Banality of Blood Libel
We arrived at this point because civil society’s moral immune system is broken.
Read Article »Only Principles, Not Tribalism, Can Save Us
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.
Read Article »The Moral Floor of Liberal Democracy
A system of laws does not produce human decency on its own; laws only work when they sit on an uncompromising moral floor.
Read Article »Condemning Violence is Easy; Condemning its Cheerleaders is the Real Test
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.
Read Article »An Open Letter to the Democratic Coalition
Criticizing the left to save the left.
Read Article »We Need to Talk about Islam
Why liberal democracy requires us to confront the one ideology we are forbidden to criticize.
Read Article »The Age of Cowardice
Why moral courage is the only antidote to our culture of silence.
Read Article »Dismantling “Stochastic Terrorism”
The First Amendment protects the speech we hate from the state; civil society must reject it.
Read Article »The Guardrails of Liberty: Cultivating a Collective Defense Against Illiberalism
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.
Read Article »Differences of Degrees + Kind
We have been conditioned to recognize bigotry by its costume. We are trained to look for the white hood, the jackboot, or the crude racial slur—the unvarnished, “low-status” hatred of a David Duke or a Nick Fuentes. Because these figures are social pariahs, we feel a sense of security in our ability to identify “the bad guys.”
Read Article »It’s Their Anti-Americanism, Stupid
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.
Read Article »The Dangerous Myth of “More Speech”
It is a stance that has inadvertently provided cover for the explosion of anti-Semitism and the virulent bigotry we see today—leaving us defenseless against those who use free speech as a shield for dehumanization and the endorsement of violence.
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