Rodin’s Thinker, originally created to represent Dante Alighieri contemplating his epic poem The Divine Comedy, has become a symbol of critical thinking and the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

In White Rose Magazine’s exhibit, The Thinker, we highlight six foundational thinkers who have helped formulate methodologies to pursue truth. The Aristotelian and Socratic methods devised disciplines, through questioning, deductive reasoning, and empirical observations to challenge assumptions and arrive at an objective truth. Plato, from the standpoint of idealism, formulated an external idea of “the Good.”

Similarly, Aquinas and Maimonides pursued similar methods for theological and scientific arguments, and Francis Bacon, known as the father of the scientific method, applied these techniques and others in creating his Baconian method.

These six thinkers helped lay the foundation of modern critical thinking methodologies.

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker (1880–1904). Bronze. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Bust of Socrates. Roman copy (first century C.E.), perhaps after bronze original by Lysippos (c. 390–300 B.C.E.). Louvre Museum, Paris.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
Socrates (c. 470–399 B.C.E.)

Bust of Plato. Roman copy (c. first century C.E.), after original (c. 370 B.C.E.) by Silanion. Capitoline Museum, Rome.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Plato (c. 428–c. 347 B.C.E.)

Bust of Aristotle. Marble. Roman copy (c. first century C.E.), after bronze original (c. 330 B.C.E.) by Lysippos. National Roman Museum of the Altemps Palace, Rome.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.)

Amadeo Ruiz Olmos, Maimonides Monument (1964). Bronze. Plaza de Tiberíades, Jewish Quarter, Córdoba.

Teach thy tongue to say “I do not know,” and thou shalt progress.

Moses Maimonides (1135 / 1138–1204)

Carlo Crivelli, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1476). Tempera on poplar panel. National Gallery, London.

The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him to truth.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)

Paul van Somer I, Portrait of Francis Bacon (1617). Oil on panel. Łazienki Palace, Warsaw.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

On March 26, 2026, Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old Barcelonan woman rendered a paraplegic after throwing herself from a care home window after having been gang raped twice by migrants, died by euthanasia after her father’s legal challenges failed. Her case passed through Spanish courts and reached the European Court of Human Rights. It was private, medical, legal, and familial all at once. That is why this matters.

Once the intentional ending of life is admitted into medicine under legal permission, the question does not remain confined to individual choice. The deeper question is what happens to institutions after they are given permission to make death part of care: how medicine begins to speak, how law classifies, how families imagine duty, and how quickly an exceptional act becomes normal.

I come to this question from more than theory. Mental illness in my family meant hospital corridors and the kind of vigilance that makes night feel unsafe. I have known people who wanted to die and later turned back toward life. I live with chronic illness myself, and I have cared for people with cancer. I have also seen palliative medicine relieve suffering without turning care into haste.

I have lived and worked in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, three societies that speak about suffering in different moral languages. Canada legalized medical assistance in dying and then widened it. The United Kingdom has not legalized assisted death, yet its courts have assumed major authority in end-of-life conflicts. Japan has no legal regime for assisted dying and remains, at least clinically, more committed to preserving life. Yet Japan has faced the same pressure in another form: the temptation to see dependent life through burden and utility.

In 2016, in Sagamihara, a former care worker murdered 19 severely disabled residents and claimed that lives like theirs were burdens without whom society would be better off. Japan condemned the act as murder. Sagamihara is not an analogue for assisted-dying law. It is a warning about a more primitive moral reflex: the temptation to see dependent life as a burden before seeing it as a life. In later debates about euthanasia, caregiving, and the strain of an aging society, more decorous versions of the same question recur: what becomes of lives marked by dependence and prolonged care when a society grows tired of carrying them?

These situations differ sharply, yet they gather around one difficulty: how modern societies treat vulnerability when it becomes costly, dependent, or hard to bear. I am less interested here in the dramatic case that dominates headlines than in the slower change beneath it. Institutions rarely announce that they are changing their nature. The shift arrives through routine such as revised forms, new protocols, and softer, more diplomatic phrases. What once seemed exceptional becomes administratively legible, then familiar, with unexpected speed.

Care and Killing

The first distinction should be stated plainly: palliative care and assisted dying are not the same kind of act.

Palliative medicine works within the fact that a person is dying. Its task is to relieve suffering and accompany the patient and family through the final stretch of life. Medication may carry risk. A person may die sooner than he or she otherwise would have. Even so, the physician foresees death without pursuing it.

Assisted dying has a different structure. Whether a doctor administers the lethal substance or provides it for self-administration, the act is ordered toward death. The intended result is the patient’s death.

This may sound technical, but the distinction belongs to the moral logic of medicine. Withdrawal of burdensome treatment, lethal injection, and allowing disease to run its course are not morally interchangeable acts. Language matters here because the actions differ.

Once assisted dying is legalized, the doctor’s role changes with it. Medicine is no longer confined to easing suffering within life. Under law, it acquires a second power. Eligibility then has to be assessed through diagnosis, capacity, consent, and judgment about suffering. Safeguards are meant to prevent abuse and haste, which is understandable given that the profession is now being asked to do something medicine did not previously authorize. The doctor must decide whether this person, in these circumstances, has reached the point at which death may properly be provided.

Supporters speak of compassion, often sincerely. A patient may be suffering badly, relief may seem impossible, and helping the person die can appear merciful. I do not doubt that pity is often real.

The larger change begins when a profession receives legal authority to end life as part of its work. That authority enters training, guidelines, reports, and conversations with patients. It alters what doctors understand their vocation to include. It also changes what patients hear when they imagine their future, and what families come to regard as reasonable. The law comes first, and the meaning of care shifts after it.

Canada and the Logic of Expansion

Canada shows this process with unusual clarity. The constitutional and legislative path from Carter v. Canadato the later widening of “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) has been described many times. The pattern matters more than the chronology. When the practice entered Canadian law in 2016, the eligibility rules were narrower. A competent adult had to be suffering intolerably, and natural death had to be “reasonably foreseeable.” Mental illness on its own was excluded.

In 2021, Parliament removed the “reasonably foreseeable” requirement and created two tracks. Access widened to include people who were not dying. The next line of expansion concerned those whose sole underlying condition was mental illness, though implementation was later delayed.

This did not arrive with fanfare. The language stayed calm, and public reasoning leaned on fairness, dignity, compassion, and constitutional consistency. The tone was measured, but the movement was real.

Over time, the exceptional loses its edge. Criteria are repeated often enough to feel natural. Documentation gives the practice weight. Assisted death begins to sound less like a rupture than one possible answer to suffering. The softer words help: one finds often in the arguments that promote the assisted death words such as assistance, dignity, relief, and mercy.

My point is simple. Once the law grants permission, a healthcare system can make room for intentional death with surprising speed. The deeper change is harder to locate. It begins before a law is invoked, in the patient’s anticipation, in the family’s fatigue, in the doctor’s sense of what can now be said aloud. Assisted death enters the range of thinkable options. After that, the central struggle is less about whether medicine may end life than about which cases count.

Spain sharpens the same point in a different legal setting. Organic Law 3/2021 legalized euthanasia under specified conditions, but one detail matters especially here. The law provides that death resulting from the “help to die” procedure shall be treated as a natural death for all legal purposes. That is more than administrative housekeeping. It shows how quickly law can move from permission to classification, and how language can help a deliberate ending of life pass into the ordinary categories of medicine and record.

The Spanish framework also shows how procedure normalizes what once stood outside medicine. Requests move through application, assessment, and review by the regional Commission of Guarantee and Evaluation. The act is made legible and verifiable within a clinical framework.

Castillo’s case made this visible. She had a history of psychiatric suffering, became paraplegic after a 2022 suicide attempt correlating with being raped repeatedly, and argued publicly that her suffering had become intolerable. The difficulty of her case should not be minimized. Her advocates could reasonably argue that her suffering was real, that her request was sustained, and that the law owed her the dignity of taking her stated will seriously. That is precisely why the case is valid. It does not present the crude image of coercion, but the harder modern form: a tragic, legally competent request moving through institutions increasingly trained to make death procedurally available.

Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the institutional form is striking: family resistance, medical approval, judicial review, and a lawful death came together inside a recognized clinical process.

Spain is not Canada, and its path is different. But it reveals another part of the same pattern. Once intentional death is legalized, it does not remain an exception floating above the system. It acquires offices, forms, review bodies, phrases, training, and eventually a place in ordinary professional expectation.

Britain and the Authority to Decide

Britain took a different route, but it belongs in the same discussion. The United Kingdom has not legalized assisted dying, and its end-of-life jurisprudence should not be collapsed into euthanasia. Its relevance lies in a narrower point: when patients lack capacity, the authority to decide whether life-sustaining treatment continues may move from family to court, hospital, and expert evidence.

In English law, when a patient lacks capacity, treatment decisions fall under the “best interests” test in the Mental Capacity Act (2005). In disputed cases, the Court of Protection may decide. When children are involved, similar conflicts can go to the Family Division of the High Court. The NHS states the matter plainly: if parents and clinicians cannot agree, the courts may determine what serves the child’s best interests.

That may sound procedural, but it is also a statement about where final authority lies. A hospital that judges continued treatment futile or harmful may ask the court to authorize withdrawal or limitation of life-sustaining intervention. This is now a recognized path in serious end-of-life disputes.

This belongs to a different legal category from euthanasia. The state is not authorizing a lethal injection. The legal description remains withdrawal of treatment and the allowance of death. Still, when a family faces the possible death of a child or incapacitated relative, that distinction does not remove the institutional fact. Final authority may no longer rest with them.

The case law traces the development. In Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland (1993), the House of Lords allowed artificial nutrition and hydration to be withdrawn from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. Feeding and hydration was treated as medical treatment, open to judgment, rather than as an unconditional duty. Active euthanasia remained prohibited. Yet the law had already assumed the power to say that continued life-sustaining measures could run against welfare.

In Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust v. James (2013), the U.K. Supreme Court sharpened the point. The question was whether continuing treatment served the patient’s best interests when the patient lacked capacity. Treatment had to justify itself.

The Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans cases (2017 and ’18) made this visible to the public. Hospitals argued that continued intervention offered no real prospect of improvement and risked prolonging suffering. Parents wanted treatment continued and searched elsewhere for options. The courts applied the best-interests standard and sided with the hospitals. Archie Battersbee’s case (2022) showed the same pattern under even more prolonged strain. After repeated appeals and international attention, the courts reaffirmed their authority to decide whether life-sustaining treatment would continue.

The language of protection does important work. “Best interests” is the law’s attempt to act for someone who cannot decide, and I take that claim seriously. The same language also confers power. The court stands in the place of the patient and decides what counts as welfare.

That transfer is significant. Parental love, faith, hope, and moral conviction remain present, but they no longer settle the case. They are translated into institutional categories such as evidence, benefit, burden, proportionality, and welfare.

The issue here is the scope of the authority now being exercised. A mechanism built in the name of protection has come to include the power to decide when continued life-sustaining treatment should stop.

Canada and Britain proceed by different legal forms, while Spain illustrates a third path. What they share is a growing institutional role in deciding where the threshold between continued care and accepted death will lie. That role receives less scrutiny than it should.

When Medicine Was Given the Power to Kill

I invoke Aktion T4 with care, and within narrow limits. It is not a moral equivalent to contemporary assisted-dying law. It belonged to dictatorship, coercion, secrecy, eugenics, and racial ideology. The relevance lies elsewhere: in what happens when medicine is formally authorized to treat death as an administrative outcome.

The point is not that Canada or Spain are moving toward T4. They are not. The point is narrower and more uncomfortable: T4 reveals certain institutional mechanisms in their naked form. Once death is authorized as a professional act, institutions must create language, procedure, categories, and distributed responsibility around it. Those mechanisms can appear under radically different moral and political regimes. The comparison is not of motive or regime. It is of institutional absorption.

In 1939, the German state authorized what became the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. I turn to it here because it shows, with horrifying clarity, what can happen when medicine is authorized to make death part of its work. Once killing is absorbed into administration, language and its professional role begin to change with it.

The decree itself was brief. Backdated to the start of the war, it authorized selected physicians to grant a “mercy death” to patients judged incurably ill. The language was clinical, and the administration was methodical.

Questionnaires went to psychiatric hospitals and care institutions. Three physicians who had never seen the patients reviewed condensed descriptions of diagnosis, behavior, and functional status. They marked forms, with a majority verdict granting the patient life or death. A red plus might mean transfer to a killing center and a blue minus could mean temporary reprieve.

The machinery was ordinary, even banal in one sense. Lists, transport, certificates, and letters to families citing routine causes of death—usually measles in the case of children—turned murder into sequence and administration. Responsibility was distributed across professional roles.

The justification combined pity with burden. The program claimed to relieve suffering and free resources for the war effort. Patients were reduced to bureaucratic categories and, in the most chilling formula, to lives “unworthy of life” (if not “useless eaters”).

That language did moral work. The program spoke as relief rather than cruelty. Doctors were invited to think of themselves as agents of mercy. The state presented killing as something done for the patient and for society. One lesson of the twentieth century is that once killing can be described as benevolence, moral resistance weakens inside the system.

The program widened. After public protest forced the formal suspension of the centralized, “clinical” gas chambers in 1941, decentralized killing continued by starvation, neglect, and overdose. Authorization had already done its work.

Modern assisted-dying laws are defended in the language of consent, rights, and individual suffering. The contexts, intentions, and political forms are radically different.

The echo is about what institutions learn to do once a new authority has been granted. Once the ending of life enters the medical profession’s authorized scope, language softens, death can be administratively reclassified, eligibility tends to widen, and moral weight moves from the physician to the form. These markers appear in Canada and Spain, too. Granted, consent, democratic legitimacy, and the absence of eugenic ideology are real and important differences. Even so, they do not prevent the institutional markers from emerging.

A medical profession can adapt quickly when the state gives it a new role in deciding when death may be provided. Doctors do not need to think of themselves as monsters. They may still see themselves as healers while procedure and softened language make the new authority easier to inhabit.

For that reason, the history belongs inside the argument. The differences are profound. Authorization still alters the institutions that absorb it.

How Procedure Makes Death Easier to Manage

Large institutions run on forms and procedures. They have to. Criteria, review mechanisms, and reporting help prevent arbitrariness. They can also drain moral shock from an act.

Aktion T4 showed this in the most terrible way. Questionnaires, transport lists, standard letters, and false certificates turned killing into paperwork. Responsibility was spread across offices and roles.

Contemporary systems differ radically in moral and political terms. The forms, however, have a family resemblance at the level of institutional effect. Procedure makes action easier to process. In Canada, assisted death is documented, reviewed, and reported. In Britain, end-of-life disputes move through hearings, expert evidence, written judgments, and orders. The machinery is orderly. Decisions become legible to administration.

Kafka saw something about this before bioethics existed as a field. In The Trial and The Castle, authority does not usually arrive shouting. It arrives through files, rules, offices, and reasoning that cannot quite be reached. The violence lies in distance and smoothness as much as in force.

That counts here. Once suffering is translated into criteria, prognosis into evidentiary weight, and welfare into legal standard, responsibility is redistributed. Something in the living encounter is thinned out.

Routine changes perception, until what once felt grave starts to seem administratively ordinary.

Procedure is, of course, necessary. Without it, medicine and law would become arbitrary. But procedure can also make grave decisions easier to handle than they ought to be. Once an act can be reported, audited, scheduled, and calculated, it begins to move through the system with less resistance.

The danger often begins there, in the smoothness that makes cruelty easier to miss.

The twentieth century left for us another warning. Historians of Nazi education have shown how mathematics textbooks taught schoolchildren to calculate the public cost of caring for institutionalized patients. One exercise stated that a mentally ill person cost four Reichsmark a day and then asked how many 1,000-Reichsmark marriage loans could be funded if the money spent on roughly 300,000 institutionalized patients were redirected (H. W. Koch, The Hitler Youth, 1975, p. 174).

That is what happens when care is translated into arithmetic. The mechanism is older than the technology that now amplifies it.

If assisted death becomes more deeply routinized in an age of optimization and algorithmic management, the danger will move beyond bedside judgment. What can be measured tends to enter systems of management. The older phrase “for your own good” may survive there, too, colder and harder to resist.

A system can remain polite, well-ordered, and professionally sincere while becoming less morally alert. It can begin to treat the successful processing of a case as if that were enough. In these matters, hesitation may be one of the last signs that conscience is still awake.

Dignity Beyond Autonomy

The argument for assisted dying is often anchored in autonomy. A competent adult who suffers should be free to decide how and when life ends. That claim carries force: consent matters, and so does refusal of treatment. But autonomy should not bear the whole weight of dignity.

Autonomy is morally serious, but it is not the source of human worth. If dignity depended on self-command, then the infant, the severely demented, the delirious, the depressed, and the unconscious would stand on thinner moral ground. After what the twentieth century revealed, they do not.

Many human beings either do not possess autonomy or do not retain it. Their worth does not rise or fall with their capacity to choose, explain, consent, or command themselves. Human value has to be deeper than competence, otherwise dignity becomes least secure precisely where protection is most needed.

Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, after surviving the camps, that human value does not depend on strength or usefulness. A person does not become less human through weakness or dependence. Illness does not cancel dignity. Neither does confusion.

This matters because suffering changes how life is perceived from within. Pain narrows the world. Fear and exhaustion can make dependence feel like shame. If dignity is tied too closely to self-command, the loss of independence starts to resemble the loss of value.

That is where burden-thinking enters. Its ugliest forms are easy to condemn; its quieter forms are harder to recognize. Dependence, severe illness, or prolonged care can begin to make death seem easier to justify than continued life. That is precisely why dignity cannot be reduced to autonomy, function, or cost.

Modern assisted-dying laws arise in a wholly different moral and political world from exterminationist regimes. They are built around consent and framed as a response to suffering.

The trouble begins when death appears inside medicine as a benefit under certain conditions. Someone must then decide whether suffering is severe enough, whether the condition is irreversible enough, and whether continued life still remains good for this person.

Those judgments may be careful and humane. They still alter the moral field. A person who already feels like a burden may hear something in that field long before any explicit pressure is applied. A depressed patient may interpret the existence of eligibility as confirmation. An elderly person may begin to wonder whether asking for continued care is an imposition.

Pressure does not always arrive as a command. Sometimes it is a lowered voice, a form left on the table, a daughter who has not slept, a patient who has begun to apologize for still being alive.

If dignity is intrinsic, it remains even where autonomy has faded. It remains in dependence and pain. A society can honor that and still withdraw futile treatment, relieve suffering, and acknowledge approaching death. What it should be slower to accept is the idea that death itself belongs among the remedies of care.

The Cultural Softening of Death

Law changes, and culture follows more quietly.

Where assisted dying is legal, public language tends to shift over time. Early debate is often juridical, concerned with rights, safeguards, eligibility, and constitutional lines. Later the moral tone changes. Assisted death begins to appear in public storytelling under gentler light.

A familiar scene recurs: the prepared room, the calm final hours, and the language of gratitude and peace. The death is made intelligible as a good death, or at least a beautiful one.

That development is understandable. Families may want language for what has happened. Journalists need narrative shape. Clinicians may speak sincerely about the mercy they believe the death contains. Through repetition, those stories acquire cultural force.

Then another question arises: what becomes of those who continue to live in pain, confusion, disability, or dependency, and what becomes of endurance itself?

Endurance is rarely photogenic. Chronic illness does not usually arrange itself into a moving scene. Dependency can be humiliating. Poverty makes ordinary days harder before it makes them tragic. To persist under such conditions may require courage, but it seldom looks like the composed final scenes through which assisted death is often made publicly legible.

In a culture that increasingly admires the controlled exit, survival can start to look like failure of nerve even when no one says so openly.

For that reason, I worry about beautification. A society may permit assisted dying under law. The graver habit is wrapping the act in so much admiration that continued life under severe hardship begins to look faintly embarrassing. The pressure here is atmospheric, and the vulnerable absorb it first.

A decent culture ought to preserve room for another form of dignity: staying alive through pain and dependence without being quietly judged for it.

The Obligation to Hesitate

Every society must decide what medicine is for when suffering becomes severe. It must also decide how much authority belongs to the patient, the doctor, the court, and the state when those claims collide.

These decisions are never merely technical. Over time, they teach a society what to notice, what to accept, and what to stop finding strange.

Modern assisted-dying regimes do not arise from sadism. They arise from pity and revulsion before pain, from sympathy, and from the wish to spare another human being further torment. Those motives are real. They do not deserve cheap caricature.

Across these different cases, decisions about death often appear under a benevolent sign: dignity, best interests, mercy, relief, compassion, peace. The hard question is who gets to define the good, how that definition hardens once it enters law and policy, and what becomes normal after that.

A society crosses a dangerous line when it grows comfortable describing the deliberate ending of life as a benefit.

Montaigne’s old question, Que sais-je?—“What do I know?”—still has force here. Judgment should be humbled, especially in matters of suffering and death.

Modern institutions are not built for humility. Legislatures have to legislate, courts have to decide, physicians have to act, and bureaucracies press ambiguity toward usable clarity. In cases where the result is irreversible death, however, clarity by itself does not amount to moral achievement.

Here caution matters. Hesitation has nothing to do with cowardice, sentimentality about pain, or the demand to keep the dying alive at any cost. It is a refusal to let the authority to end life become just another power that institutions exercise with increasing confidence. A people can lose something without noticing the moment of loss. In this case, what is lost is doubt: the discipline of remembering that human beings exceed the categories used to assess them, and that benevolence has often done dangerous work when joined to organized power.

The older discipline of medicine still has moral force: preserve life where possible, relieve pain, and stay present with the person who suffers. That discipline is harder than it sounds. It asks doctors and institutions to remain near suffering without converting death into a solution too easily offered, too cleanly processed, or too fluently defended.

Where the result is irreversible death, certainty should remain difficult. If a society stops hesitating in such cases, that should trouble us. It may mean less that compassion has deepened than that the machinery has become smoother.

Riefenstahl, Ishioka, Arbus: a Sadean discipline of looking

This essay is a walk through my own cabinet of curiosities, guided by a set of questions I would rather not ask: why a certain beauty moves me, what kind of hold it has on my body and my thinking, and how far that hold colludes with a smooth, amoral power that lets form shine while the screams stay offstage. I move between Leni Riefenstahl’s stadiums and reefs, Eiko Ishioka’s advertising and Olympic ceremonies, Diane Arbus’s deformed faces, the baroque crime tableaux of the television series Hannibal, and the intellectual circle around Susan Sontag. They share little on the surface except the ability to seize the eye and hold it longer than is safe. I keep the Marquis de Sade in the background as a discipline rather than a hero, a knife laid on the table to cut through the alibis that usually protect such pleasures. Riefenstahl stands here for beauty enlisted by power, Ishioka for beauty used as force, and Arbus for something more fragile that I can only name later. What follows is an attempt to let each of these figures speak, then to turn the same impolite question on them and on myself: who is enjoying what, and what has to be pushed out of sight to keep that enjoyment intact?

Opening the Pandora’s box

There is a kind of image that cuts me more deeply than I would like to admit.

A body held in clean light: an Olympic diver suspended in air, a Nubian wrestler, a swimmer inside a vertical shaft of blue. The framing is so strict that my eye obeys before thought has time to form. The arc of the back, the pale figure against a dark crowd, the rhythm of shoulders and flags: everything falls into line with a muscular calm.

My first response is pleasure. I am not ashamed of that, and I will not lie about it.

Only afterwards do I remember who made the image, and what it was serving.

Leni Riefenstahl is, for me, the clearest case of what I call the beauty of power: an eye that makes domination look luminous and inevitable, followed by decades of insisting that she loved only “form,” “harmony,” and “nature.” Eiko Ishioka, much later, lives out the power of beauty: a woman who falls for the same visual voltage, turns it toward Dracula, Tarsem Singh, Olympic spectacle and advertising, and then watches her own name dissolve into the credits. Diane Arbus stands on another axis: beauty with no request for permission, the beauty of those who never agreed to be acceptable in the first place. What moves me in her work is a different kind of connection, a brief, exposed sharing of meaning between photographer and subject, what I call the beauty of resonance.

Behind these figures I keep a fourth presence: Sade, less as a hero than as an instrument, a scalpel I have used more than once on myself. He strips away every noble story that says “this pleasure is for a higher good.” In his world there is no God, no History, no Revolution waiting to redeem what is done to a body. Pleasure and power meet directly. That lack of alibi is what I need from him.

When I speak of a “Sadean stance” here, I am not borrowing his cruelty or his politics. I am taking one discipline: refuse alibis for seduction. In Sade’s world, power is never washed clean by God, Nation, History, Revolution, or “the oppressed.” When someone hurts someone else, they do it because they want to, and he does not veil that fact with theology or dialectics. That refusal of consolation matters. For the purposes of this essay, a Sadean stance means that whenever ideology or moral rhetoric appears with beauty, I ask a narrow, impolite question: who is enjoying what, why, and what does that enjoyment need to ignore?

With that Sadean scalpel on the table, one I am prepared to turn on myself, I move through Riefenstahl, Ishioka, Arbus, Sontag’s circle, and my own responses.

Riefenstahl: the beauty of power and the seduction of the eye

Calling Riefenstahl (1902–2003) a mere technician would be comfortable. The Sadean discipline I have set myself does not allow that.

From Triumph des Willens (1934) and Olympia (1938) to The Last of the Nuba (1973) and the underwater photographs, the same temperament keeps surfacing: hard axes, clean diagonals, sculptural bodies, controlled space. Crowds are drilled into legible shapes. Torch processions and rallies are designed so that, from the camera’s height, individual bodies disappear and the mass resolves into pattern. In Olympia, the athlete is isolated as an object of worship: the diver in mid-air, the runner trimmed against sky, the discus thrower held just before release. In the Nuba sequences, dark muscle replaces Aryan flesh. Their outlandishly elongated, exquisite bodies carry a strange echo of the gorgeous creature of Giger’s Alien. In the late underwater films and photographs, human figures mostly recede. Shoals of fish, fans of coral, and drifting plants become the new cast—an ocean vivarium transformed into saturated Wagnerian bursts of pattern and light.

This is more than competent camera work. It amounts to a doctrine of form. Beauty appears where bodies or seascapes fall into proportion and noise is driven out of the frame. My own response is physical. My eye craves this symphony. That appetite is part of the danger and the temptation.

I also know that the framing acts as an aphrodisiac of power. The gratification lies in seeing disorder replaced by one rhythm: torches lifted together, columns in step, a leader fixed where all gazes converge, the Nubians glistening with sweat, the fish in an intoxicating orgy of existence. Power becomes lovable because it has been composed so elegantly. Seen with Sade’s question in mind, the scene is not complicated: someone is taking pleasure in the sight of bodies and creatures turned into obedient, breath-taking ornaments.

The television series Hannibal (2013–2015) adds another configuration of beauty and violence in this same field. Its crime scenes are arranged as tableaux: bodies turned into trees or totems, organs laid out with the care of a still-life painter, color graded like a scent advertisement. The murders revolt. And still, the images are sensuous, clever, deliberately delectable. That tension is not an accident. The show invites the viewer to admire the composition while knowing exactly what is being shown. My own response splits: part of me recoils, another part is charmed by the staging and the calm intelligence of the camera. The easy defense is “this is only fiction.” On the level of actual bodies, that is true. On the level of training the eye, it is less innocent. Beauty here does not serve the state, as in Riefenstahl, but it does serve a habit of mind: learning to separate aesthetic pleasure from ethical horror, and to keep both running at once.

John Fowles gives a harsher version of this unease in The Magus (1965). There is a cultivated Nazi officer who plays classical piano with real feeling and skill while torture goes on nearby. At a certain point, the protagonist hears music and screams together. The officer feels no contradiction. Bach and the cry belong to one aesthetic field. This is close to the space in which Riefenstahl moves. The scream is usually offscreen, but always nearby. My own reflex is to split them, to enjoy the music and file the other sound as “context.” In Sade’s terms, that reflex is simply pleasure defending itself.

Later, Riefenstahl speaks of herself as a kind of innocent. At times, she reminds me of a child who discovers that pulling the legs off a fly leaves an interesting figure on the table. The act is cruel; the fascination is fixed on the symmetry. Her post-war statements repeat the same line: she loved beauty and athletics; she was “apolitical”; she only filmed what was already there. From a Sadean angle, this is a coarse excuse. She knew enough about the project she was glorifying. She chose the pattern over the body.

Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1975) tears at this self-image. She tracks Riefenstahl’s lies about her proximity to Hitler, her claim that the Nuremberg rally of 1934 was not staged for the camera, her later repackaging as a neutral explorer of nature and the body, and the way fascist imagery reappears in Nuba and in S/M style. Sontag is sharp about the laundering of the aesthetic. What she does not linger on is the depth of the seduction. She lays out the machinery of allure but writes as if she herself were untouched by it.

There I part company with her. I know the pull. I feel it more clearly because of someone who seems, at first, far from Riefenstahl: Diane Arbus. Riefenstahl’s images present bodies eager to be accepted by power, to be chosen as its ideal ornament. Arbus will come back later as the opposite pole. For now it is enough to say that I feel the tug of both: Riefenstahl’s severe ordering of the ideal, and Arbus’s faces that refuse the ideal and stare back.

Riefenstahl through Sontag; and Zox-Weaver, Onfray, Fallaci against Sontag

Since Riefenstahl is such a catalytic case of the beauty of power, I want to take time with one of her most notable critics, Susan Sontag (1933–2004). I will sketch how Sontag handled Riefenstahl, mainly relying upon Annalisa Zox-Weaver’s reading of Sontag herself, especially her reconstruction of Sontag’s drafts and notes in the UCLA archives, and finally bring in Michel Onfray and Oriana Fallaci—not as commentators who wrote on Sontag, but as two lines of argument I apply to Sontag’s stance.

Ishioka knew Sontag. She worked under an intellectual sky shaped in Paris and refracted through New York, a sky Sontag helped import and legitimize: Sartre, Beauvoir, Genet; later Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes. Sontag admired these Parisian caviar revolutionaries, their talents and militancy, their fusion of art and politics, and she enjoyed being the one who translated them for an Anglophone public.

Sontag did not begin as Riefenstahl’s prosecutor. As Zox-Weaver shows, Sontag in the mid-1960s first stages herself as a defender of the aesthetic realm. In an essay on style, Sontag argues that content is basically bait: a lure that brings the reader’s or viewer’s attention to the formal transformations in the work of art. That, she argues, is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works that would be morally repellent if judged only by subject matter. In that context she names Triumph of the Will and Olympia as “masterpieces.” The Nazi propaganda, she admits, “is there,” yet something else is there, too. In other words, the ideal spectator in this scheme is the one who sees “Hitler” rather than Hitler, the “1936 Olympics” rather than the 1936 Olympics, and rises above indignation or approval into pure contemplation.

It is hard to imagine a posture farther from Sade’s refusal of alibi. Here is a woman who saw the same films that trouble me, felt the pull, and turned her own susceptibility into a badge of higher intelligence. It is also a safe posture. This detachment costs Sontag nothing in her own circle. It demands no reckoning with her attraction to the images, and no friction with the intellectual world that surrounds her.

As Zox-Weaver shows, in Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” she performs a reversal. Triumph of the Will becomes “the most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made.” Riefenstahl’s Nuba book is treated as an extension of the same aesthetic into coffee-table exotica, and a slim volume on SS uniforms becomes a case study in the sexualization of Nazism. The argument is often persuasive. Sontag tears apart Riefenstahl’s lies about her proximity to Hitler, her claim that the rallies were not staged for the camera, and her rebranding as a neutral artist of “primal” bodies.

Now imagine three readers in the room with that essay: one real, Annalisa Zox-Weaver, and two imagined, Michel Onfray and Oriana Fallaci. From where I sit, all three, in different ways, are or would be irritated by Sontag’s shortcomings.

Of these three, Zox-Weaver is the only actual reader of Sontag’s drafts in the UCLA archive, and everything I know about those drafts comes via her 2025 essay “The Feminist, the Filmmaker, and the Führer.” She traces versions of “Fascinating Fascism” where an anxious preface briefly appears and then disappears. In those pages, Sontag admits that shifts in popular taste make judgments seem “dishonest, almost in bad taste,” worries about dark longings coming out into the open, and warns that silence about such changes leaves “us even more vulnerable than we already are.” (The wording I quote here follows Zox-Weaver’s transcription of Sontag’s fourth draft.) Then Sontag cuts that prologue. It revealed too much: concern about fascism, but also anxiety about her own attraction to Riefenstahl’s imagery and about the desires circulating in her milieu. The published essay opens instead like a court case: “First exhibit. Here is a woman…”

Zox-Weaver is brilliant at reconstructing this shift and the pride behind it. She calls out the self-importance, the envy, the self-shielding. She shows how Sontag moves from the risky admission “I am also susceptible to this” to the safer position “I am the one who diagnoses everyone else’s susceptibility.” What Zox-Weaver underplays, to my ear, is the timidity. Sontag chooses the safest object for her moral severity. She turns her full seriousness on an aging German filmmaker and on Nazi kitsch, while keeping a tactful silence about the Parisian theorists and radicals on whom she depended, whose own flirtations with violence, Maoism, pedophilia (in Foucault’s case), and elegant anti-Semitism (though not in Sartre and Beauvoir’s) would have been more dangerous to confront. She knows where the live wires are and keeps her hands off. That, I would add to Zox-Weaver’s file, is a form of cowardice.

Onfray, if we bring him into the same room, drags the background forward. His great labor is to refuse the idea that the Paris canon is sacred weather. He lines up Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and the rest like a gallery of compromised saints and knocks them from their plinths. He presents himself as speaking against the “court philosophers” who provided glamor for regimes and movements that crushed bodies, whether under Soviet Stalinism, in Maoist China, or in the various anti-Semitic currents they were willing to excuse. On that point, Sontag remains almost entirely silent.

If Onfray had read Sontag on Riefenstahl, he would not stay with Riefenstahl for long. He would ask why the same cold light is not turned on the friends, mentors, and idols whose names float through Sontag’s essays. He would see in her silence about that circle the classic reflex of an insider: the courage to condemn a distant emblem of evil, and the reluctance to expose the complicities of one’s own house. In his fashion he performs one operation Sontag never quite risks. He treats the sky under which she moves as an object of moral scrutiny.

Fallaci (1929–2006), the third reader, comes from another angle again. She does not grow up between lofts and seminars. She liked to recall that she had been “a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.” She spent her life interviewing presidents, dictators, revolutionaries, often at real personal risk. She was furious and stubborn, and, in her later years, wrote about Islam, anti-Semitism, and the West in a language shaped by the wound she carried from those early battles. She was also one of the first to warn that parts of the left-wing intelligentsia would flirt with, or even embrace, Islamist movements.

If Fallaci reads Sontag’s early defense of Triumph of the Will and later prosecution of it, I imagine her impatience would be simple. She would have interviewed Riefenstahl as well as Sontag and then asked both of them: “Where were you when it mattered? And where are you when it matters now?” For Fallaci, the idea that truth always sits in the middle is not sophistication but betrayal. Sometimes, she insists, truth gathers on one side; pretending otherwise serves those who hold power and guns. She grants no prestige to suspended judgment. In this sense, she is far from what is now called “politically correct.” The whole notion of the “ideal spectator” floats, for her, in an airless room. Images are not just for contemplation; they are tools regimes use to prepare real violence. Detachment at a safe distance from risk is not a higher form of ethics. It is what you can afford when you are not in the line of fire.

Set against that, Sontag’s fascination with which viewers may safely enjoy fascist imagery feels like a salon problem. Where Sontag presides over a séance of taste, deciding with which images the elite can play without moral contamination, Fallaci prefers the interrogation room. Her long interviews with Kissinger, Khomeini, Arafat, the Shah have one aim: strip away justifications, expose vanity, force the man in front of her to hear his own words. She is not beyond indignation and approval; she is fueled by indignation, and by a partisan memory of what fascism did to ordinary lives. She is willing to risk her own body for the questions she asks. Sontag, in contrast, risks reputation within a circle, but not the circle itself.

From my angle, all three—Zox-Weaver, Onfray, and Fallaci—reveal a different face of Sontag’s double talk around Reifenstahl. Zox-Weaver exposes the pivot from seduced viewer to moral judge and the pride that accompanies it. Onfray exposes the refusal to apply that same severity to Sontag’s own intellectual sky. Fallaci exposes the distance between salon courage and the kind that costs something. Together they make my own verdict harsher than Zox-Weaver’s cool irritation about vanity and envy. Facing Riefenstahl, Sontag is not just pompous: she is careful to aim her boldness where it will not endanger her affiliations.

And I am not exempt from their scrutiny. I am close to Sontag in education and habits, close to Onfray in my impatience with fashionable nihilism, close to Fallaci in my distrust of “political correctness” as a moral pose. I recognize myself in Sontag’s sentences, in Onfray’s bluntness, in Fallaci’s refusal to bend. I also enjoy standing at a slight angle to each of them, harvesting what I want without paying their full price. That, too, is a strategy of safety. The Sadean discipline demands that I name it as such: another form of enjoyment, another alibi I would prefer not to see.

Ishioka: the power of beauty and the cost of bracketing

Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012) enters as another worker of images, another woman intent on controlling the frame. For readers who do not know her name, you almost certainly know some of her work. The red armor and blue velvet gowns in Coppola’s Dracula (1992); the impossible white and crimson costumes that turn Jennifer Lopez into a moving icon in The Cell (2000); the gold-and-blood visuals of Immortals (2011); the candy-poisoned fairy-tale surfaces of Mirror, Mirror (2012); the massed drummers and scroll-like banners at the Běijīng Olympics (2008). All of that comes from the same eye.

She begins in Tōkyō advertising in the 1960s, jolting conservative visuals with muscular women, uncanny poses, disruptive compositions. From there she moves into theatre and film: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Dracula, The Cell, The Fall (2006), Immortals, Mirror, Mirror. She designs uniforms and outerwear for several national teams at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics, and later serves as director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the Běijīng 2008 Olympics, drilling thousands of bodies into a single, terrifyingly unified image. She creates album covers and posters that sink into a city’s visual memory. Her signature is a kind of aggressive clarity: bodies turned into living calligraphy, color pushed until it almost vibrates, silhouettes that claim the whole screen. In her memoir, she describes Riefenstahl as a woman driven by three passions—reverence for nature, creative fervor, and Eros—and she calls the twentieth century a time when women artists at last outran men. She clearly wants Riefenstahl inside that lineage. For Ishioka herself, the satisfaction lies in making images that dominate the field and feel unmistakably hers. Her life is a long experiment in the power of beauty.

Ishioka does not encounter Riefenstahl as a distant case study. She handles her work directly. First, she conceives a major Tōkyō exhibition of The Last of the Nuba and edits the Japanese Nuba volume, presenting Riefenstahl’s images of scarified, elongated bodies to a Japanese public as a kind of ultimate athletic beauty. Later, she curates a second show at Bunkamura devoted to Riefenstahl’s life and images, and brings Riefenstahl herself to walk through it. She moves inside those photographs with the confidence of someone who could have taken them. When she writes about Riefenstahl’s films, she reaches for a sports metaphor: other directors show off with little breaking balls, she says, but Riefenstahl throws a fastball straight into the viewer’s chest. That is the quality she admires, the unembarrassed directness of the appeal, the refusal of half-measures. In books and interviews, she speaks of Riefenstahl less as Hitler’s decorator than as a model of ruthless artistic will and of what a woman can force out of a hostile industry.

Here the political irony bites. Ishioka is moved by Riefenstahl’s Nuba images, by the beauty of those elongated bodies and scarified skins, and helps reintroduce them to Japan. Not long after, she lends her talent to the Běijīng Olympics, producing another kind of disciplined spectacle for a regime that, in the same years, is shielding the Sudanese government whose genocidal violence falls on peoples like the Nuba. The circle is not exact, but the echo is hard to ignore: one woman elevates a threatened African culture into icons of physical grace; later she helps choreograph the public face of a power that protects its persecutors. The beauty on the stadium floor does not mention any of this. It does not have to. Its task is to dazzle.

The appeal remains clear. Ishioka sees in Riefenstahl proof that a woman can seize the camera and dictate how bodies and space will look. In the macho environment she knew, that is almost intoxicating. Her implicit bargain is simple: “I will take the will, the discipline, the formal grammar, and hold the politics at arm’s length.” The self-flattery lies in believing that such a clean extraction is possible. Even when critics like Sontag revive the argument that any celebration of Riefenstahl is a form of collaboration, Ishioka recounts it as if it were a misunderstanding: audiences want clever, ironic “breaking balls,” while Riefenstahl simply throws what she believes in. The problem, in her telling, is the viewer’s taste, not the object of admiration.

I am very close to Ishioka here. The same charge runs through me when I look at Riefenstahl’s and Ishioka’s work. What grips me is not any love for the regime but the sense of someone bending the medium to her will. It would be easy to tell myself that I care only about this grammar and can carry it away, purified. The hesitation comes from knowing how often “pure beauty” has been invoked to hide what lies underneath. After the twentieth century, and after the recent carnival of anti-Semitic spectacle dressed up as justice, I no longer trust that phrase.

There is another, quieter brutality in Ishioka’s story. Riefenstahl never stops marking her work as hers. Ishioka’s authorship often dissolves. Directors, studios, and campaigns lift her inventions and present them as inevitable, as if they appeared by themselves. My earlier pleasure, as a viewer, was in spotting “Eiko traces” everywhere. Under Sade’s question—who gains when her name disappears—the picture shifts. Beauty still does its work, selling films and brands and prestige, while the woman whose eye created it is treated as a replaceable technician.

Among her many achievements, one work points in a different direction and will eventually bring us closer to Arbus. The Fall sits in a different light from her more openly spectacular projects. Co-created with her future husband Nicholas “Nico” Soultanakis and Tarsem Singh, in a position that gave her a reach beyond costume into the whole fabric of the film, it tells a small story about a suicidal stuntman in a 1920s hospital and a little girl who refuses to leave his side. He keeps her there with an extravagant fantasy tale; she answers by believing him enough to tie him back to life. When it was remastered in 4K and shown in Tōkyō in November of 2025, after nearly 20 years of relative obscurity, younger viewers received it not as a glorification of power but as a baroque relay for meaning, wrapped in beauty, in a world that offers very little of either. If Triumph of the Will stages beauty as an accomplice to harm, The Fall shows the same appetite for image harnessed to keep nihilism at bay a little longer. I will come back to that shift when I turn to Arbus and to a third kind of beauty.

Arbus: beauty of resonance

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) stands at the far edge of this field. If Riefenstahl shows the beauty of bodies drilled to serve power, and Ishioka spends her life testing the power of beauty, Arbus belongs to another line again. I think of it as a beauty of resonance. It is the small, stubborn echo that passes between two exposed beings who recognize themselves in each other’s unease and stay in the room.

Her photographs draw me with a different kind of force. They are breathtaking, yet they do not console. They are also not cold. The people in them are “freaks” in the old vocabulary, visibly different—wrong for the stadium, wrong for the ideal. The feeling I have in front of them is not curiosity about deformity and not admiration of defiance. It is closer to com-passion in the original sense: feeling with. A shared fever, a shared wound, a shared effort to stay standing in a world that has already judged.

The beauty in these images does not lie in smoothing anything over. Faces remain awkward, bodies remain strange, the rooms are often shabby. Nothing is softened. What matters is the way Arbus stands with them. She enters their space and lets the same hard light fall on all of them, herself included. There is no balcony, no safe distance. The gaze is level. Her subjects look into the camera, and, by extension, at us, without apology and without any gesture of “take me in.” The picture holds the moment where two discomforts meet and neither retreats. That is the shape of resonance I mean.

Before I stay longer in these rooms, I want to mark a small constellation of lives and fictions that sit closer to Arbus’s side of the field than to Riefenstahl’s: Stefan Zweig, C. S. Lewis, Salinger’s Esmé, and, on another register, The Fall.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), a Viennese Jew steeped in European high culture, watches the rise of the regime Riefenstahl served. His chosen beauties are books, music, private decency. As that world collapses, he goes into exile and finally kills himself in Brazil. His last letters carry a flat, drained grief. He does not turn disaster into a “tragic sublime” or frame his suicide as a meaningful gesture. He lets beauty fail. In a field where Riefenstahl fuses beauty to political power and turns it into a narcotic, Zweig stands for a very different relation: beauty that is powerless against the state, and a writer who refuses to convert that powerlessness into a consoling myth.

In 1939, C. S. Lewis tells nervous students at Oxford that “favourable conditions never come.” People have always tried to think and create while the world burned somewhere: war, plague, invasion. If one waited for safety, there would be no thinking at all. There is a kind of quiet beauty in that stance, the image of a small circle of minds continuing their work while bombers cross the sky. At the same time, Lewis is careful not to treat this as heroism. He does not aestheticize war or baptize it as a purifying ordeal. He is describing a discipline rather than staging a spectacle. Where Riefenstahl offers beauty as an amplifier of power, Lewis presents a modest intellectual constancy that neither glorifies power nor pretends to stand outside it. His position is simple: carry on, without turning endurance into theater.

J. D. Salinger’s For Esmé—with Love and Squalor (1950) works at a much smaller scale. A damaged soldier, a cheap room, the letter of a child who barely knows him, and a slight loosening of the knot in his mind. The beauty here sits in a minimal gesture of care, almost nothing in outward form. The pleasure is modest, the relief of not being entirely alone. There is no claim to redemption, no stadium, no myth, only a tiny increase of meaning in one life. The Fall, which Ishioka helped shape far beyond the wardrobe, does something similar on a different scale: a man who wants to die keeps living just long enough to finish a story for a girl who believes him. Beauty here is neither stadium nor freak-show. It is a relay for meaning against the pull of nothingness.

All four mark a different weather from Riefenstahl’s stadium. Here beauty neither intoxicates crowds nor redeems history. It gives one mind just enough resonance with another to keep going a little longer, or, in Zweig’s case, to show that even when that resonance fails it need not be dressed up as glory. This is the climate in which I place Arbus.

Sontag, in On Photography (1977), chose to see Arbus as a connoisseur of freakishness, a voyeur feeding on the damaged. It is worth remembering that Arbus was another woman she did not like. There is a narrow truth in her accusation: someone is always looking, and the one who holds the camera has more freedom than the one who holds still. Yet the verdict misses the temperature of the work. The passion in these photographs is not the sadism of the spectator. It is the fire and hurt that pass between sitter and photographer and settle into the frame. Pain is there, but it is not isolated as a specimen. It is recognized. Arbus does not decorate it, does not redeem it, does not hide it. She stays in the room with it.

If I bring Sade’s question here and ask who is enjoying what, and what has to be ignored to keep that enjoyment intact, the answer shifts. My pleasure in Arbus is not the pleasure of looking at the other from safety. It is the jolt of recognizing that the line between “freak” and “normal” is thin, and that the unease in their eyes is also mine. There is still a risk of self-flattery, the comfort of believing myself to be on their side, against the stadium. I do not want to pretend that risk is not there. Even so, I cannot read these pictures as mere exploitation. The photographer has put herself into the same harsh light. The images feel less like trophies than records of a fragile communion.

In the larger pattern of this essay, Arbus anchors another corner. Riefenstahl’s beauty is the beauty of submission to an ideal that belongs to someone else. Ishioka’s beauty is the beauty a woman tries to wrest back into her own hands, only to see it often stripped of her name. Arbus’s beauty is the beauty of resonance: two human beings standing in a bare room with no alibi, no myth of health or nation to hide behind, and enduring the look together. Whatever power there is in these images comes from that com-passion, not from the humiliation of the person seen. In that sense she belongs to the same small family as Salinger’s Esmé and The Fall, where a man and a child keep each other alive a little longer through words and images. Beauty appears there, as in Arbus’s rooms, as a relay passed between exposed beings so that neither has to face the void entirely alone.

Where I stand, without alibi

What remains is the question of why any of this matters: what, if anything, such fragile resonances and refusals have to do with beauty, and, beneath that, what kinds of meaning with which a person can still bear to live.

My pleasures are not pure. I enjoy Riefenstahl’s images at the level of eye and nerves. I relish Ishioka’s transformations, the way she drags that grammar into new myths and surfaces. Arbus’s faces draw me with the sense of standing in the room with them. The perverse elegance of Hannibal’s crime scenes attracts me, along with my own discomfort in that attraction. I also take pleasure in seeing through the excuses of Sontag’s milieu and the French theorists, and through the current radical chic that turns anti-Semitic excitement into moral theater. I enjoy the feeling of holding all this in view without collapsing.

I protect these pleasures with useful stories: that I am only analyzing, that my distance from every tribe keeps me honest, that knowing how seduction works makes me less seducible. I calculate that tracing the mechanisms gives me a margin of freedom, while admitting that it does not cancel the appetite.

Since Riefenstahl built her fame on glorifying the man who ordered the camps, it seems right that at least one voice here should come from someone who saw them from inside. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) stands at an angle to all this. What Salinger sketches in miniature—a cracked mind held together a little longer by a child’s letter—Frankl tries to name as a law. In the camps he concludes that a person’s main concern is not simply to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but to find meaning, and that life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or for power, but a quest for meaning. People will sometimes endure suffering not because it becomes acceptable, still less beautiful, but because they can still fasten it to a task, a promise, a responsibility, or to someone they refuse to abandon.

Here “beauty” has nothing to do with the camp itself. It clings instead to small, stubborn traces of value that refuse to die: a remembered line, a scrap of music hummed under the breath, the decision not to let every sense of worth be extinguished. That is a kind of beauty of resonance, a faint echo between an inner image and a possible future self, enough to keep someone from dropping into nothing. It does not redeem the horror. It keeps one human thread from snapping.

Somewhere between Esmé and The Fall there is also that tiny stop-motion film Lost & Found (2018): a crocheted dinosaur unravelling itself to drag a knitted fox out of danger, thread by thread, until nothing of its own body is left but a heap of yarn. Then comes the frantic, clumsy work by the fox of knitting it back together. The film withholds the easy consolation of a restored creature. The attempts fail, again and again, and we watch the fox go on knitting, stubbornly. Even if the fox were to succeed, what reappears would be necessarily imperfect: crooked, scarred, nothing like the original toy. That outcome is not the point. The beauty here does not lie in restoring an ideal form, but in the decision to come apart for the other and in the imperfect labor of trying to remake something that can exist again. That is the same beauty of resonance I feel in Esmé’s letter, in The Fall’s dying stuntman and stubborn child, in Arbus’s rooms, and in Frankl’s “will to meaning.” It has nothing to do with the beauty of power or the power of beauty as spectacle; it is simply a refusal to abandon the other to nothingness.

Riefenstahl and, often, Ishioka find beauty in purification: mess pressed into pattern, conflict dissolved into form. The stadium, the reef, the Běijīng ceremony, the crimson silhouettes in Dracula all offer the same reassurance. Whatever chaos lies behind them has been tamed into a single rhythm in which the eye can rest. The figures gathered around Arbus, Esmé, Frankl, and Lost & Found live in the opposite condition. Their beauty stands inside an unsolved mess and refuses to pretend it is anything else. That is the terrain where I place the beauty of resonance.

Jacques Zylberberg (1939–2010) gives that messy terrain another name: complexity. For him, complexity is not a knot to be cut through or disentangled, but an au-delà, a horizon that always recedes, held, when we are lucky, by a fragile triangle he called sagesse, lucidité, liberté: a kind of wisdom that still holds after horror has stripped away illusions, lucidity as the refusal of comforting lies, and freedom in the small, stubborn acts that still defy circumstance. In that light, the beauty of resonance is simply what appears when someone stands facing that horizon without editing it into purity: Arbus in a cramped room; Frankl trying not to let the inner eye go blind in the camp; the fox knitting on; the rare spectator who does not let the pattern drown out the scream. Set against that, my own position is narrower. This essay lives mostly in lucidity. It reaches, where it can, toward wisdom. As for freedom, it does very little. I know that, and I go on writing anyway, because I am not willing to give up the pleasures this position protects.

From Sade’s vantage, I am simply another person whose tastes and conscience cross in an untidy way and who would rather not examine the crossing for long. I am not outside the field I am describing. If this essay has a protagonist, she is neither Juliette nor Justine, but a woman sitting in the blue light of a screen, trying to make sense of the “unravelled” threads of these three lives.

I see myself now as the fox in Lost & Found, fumbling with the yarn of Riefenstahl’s symmetry, Ishioka’s vibrant armor, and Arbus’s exposed faces. I am knitting them into this text, not to restore them to some original, “pure” beauty, but to see if they can hold together a different kind of meaning. It is a clumsy, imperfect labor. The result is crooked, scarred by the history of the twentieth century and the complicities of the twenty-first.

I keep the Sadean scalpel on the desk because I need to remember the price of the patterns I admire. I am the spectator who has opened her own Pandora’s box and refused to close it. I go on knitting these sentences in the dark, well aware that the most impolite question is the one I must keep asking until the thread runs out: Who is enjoying what? What am I refusing to see in order to keep this beauty intact?

My own name belongs in that inventory along with everyone else’s.

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 around its most grotesque allegation, rather than on the Commission’s report.

That imbalance is consequential because the two texts do not belong to the same evidentiary order. Kristof’s column rests on 14 conversations (12 of them anonymous to the reader), partial corroboration, activist intermediaries, and the authority of the Times. The Civil Commission report represents two years of work, more than 430 testimonies and interviews, more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, and over 1,800 hours of visual analysis. Kristof’s column does not merely lack the evidentiary architecture of the Commission report; it shows how prestige media can turn a politicized sourcing chain into a public grandstand, where accusation performs as evidence before scrutiny can begin.

The timing also sharpened a lexical inversion. Kristof’s column appeared under the title “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” The following day, the Civil Commission released Silenced No More. Before the report could publicly define silence as the erasure of Israeli victims, Kristof had already turned the same moral keyword in the opposite direction. The effect was not merely rhetorical. It helped prepare the conditions in which the report would be received: as the Israeli counterpart to an accusation already placed before the public, rather than as a major evidentiary record demanding examination in its own right.

The title of the Commission’s report is therefore not incidental. Silenced No More announces an effort to restore the voices of victims whose suffering had been doubted, minimized, or treated as politically inconvenient. Kristof’s column, whatever its intention, helped reverse that work. By placing its own accusation before the report entered public discussion, it made the victims of October 7 easier to silence again through false equivalence.

The Civil Commission is an independent Israeli civil-society initiative that gathered, organized, and assessed evidence concerning sexual violence committed during the October 7 attacks and against hostages. Its report is not an op-ed, a polemical brief, or a newspaper investigation. It is structured as an evidentiary archive, with attention to testimony, visual material, forensic context, geolocation, source hierarchy, and cross-referencing.

Most readers will not open nearly 300 pages of documentation. They will absorb the easier pattern: Kristof alleges sexual violence against Palestinians; the Civil Commission documents sexual violence against Israelis; both sides accuse each other; both are political; both can be dismissed into the fog of mutual claim-making.

The danger lies there. A serious evidentiary report can be made unreadable before it is refuted. It need not be defeated by counter-evidence. It can be neutralized by the terms in which it is received.

Kristof cited Ehud Olmert, who said he believed such abuses happened and that war crimes were being committed in the territories. But Olmert did not corroborate the specific claims in the column, still less its most lurid allegation. Placement did the work that evidence had not done: it made a general statement by a former Israeli prime minister appear to authorize a set of particular accusations. Around the Civil Commission report, the same problem appears at scale. A serious document is not answered. It is absorbed into a symmetry created elsewhere.

The issue is methodological: how evidence was gathered, classified, cross-referenced, archived, and made available for scrutiny. What follows is a study of two architectures of credibility.

I. The Civil Commission’s Architecture of Evidence

The Civil Commission’s report makes grave claims. It concludes that sexual and gender-based violence was “systematic, widespread, and integral” to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath. It argues that such violence occurred across multiple locations and phases of the assault, including abduction, transfer, and captivity. It further claims that recurring tactics of sexual abuse and torture formed part of a broader operational method.

Those conclusions are attached to an evidentiary structure. The report states that its investigation reviewed more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to more than 1,800 cumulative hours of visual analysis. It also says the Commission conducted more than 430 formal and informal interviews, testimonies, and meetings with survivors, witnesses, returned hostages, experts, and family members.

The methodology is not merely quantitative. It includes site visits to attack locations such as Kibbutz Be’eri, Nir Oz, the Nova festival site, and Route 232; visits to the Abu Kabir National Forensic Center; forensic pathologist assessments; and review of body conditions. Its visual and digital materials include Hamas body-camera footage, surveillance footage, live text and audio recordings, and geolocation verification.

The report also describes the structure of its archive. Materials are logged, coded, mapped across time and geographic locations, and integrated into a database on sexual and gender-based crimes. It refers to a formal open-source investigation program drawing on news articles, documentaries, parliamentary hearings, official documents, social media, and geolocation databases.

The report declares a hierarchy of evidence. Its source structure gives primacy to perpetrators’ own video and body-camera footage, followed by survivor and witness testimony, then verified media and investigative reports. The Commission states that its factual determinations are cross-referenced across multiple independent sources and that no finding rests on a single source.

The reader need not accept every legal conclusion. The essential point is that the report gives the reader, the critic, the court, and the historian something to examine. Its claims are attached to an archive, a method, a hierarchy, and a declared process of cross-reference.

This is why the lazy response that the report is “Israeli propaganda” is insufficient. The report emerged from a wounded society. Of course it did. Its credibility depends on whether its claims are attached to testimony, images, chronology, forensic context, legal reasoning, and a method that can be tested.

No perspective removes the obligation to corroborate accusation with evidence.

II. Kristof’s Architecture of Accusation

Placed beside that structure, Kristof’s column is a different kind of text. It is not a report, archive, or legal submission. It is an opinion column written with the authority of a famous reporter and published by the most influential newspaper in the United States.

Kristof says his reporting is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. He explains that he found these alleged victims by asking lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers, and Palestinians themselves. In many cases, he says, it was not possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in full. Partial corroboration came through family members, lawyers, social workers, or others in whom they had confided. In other cases, he says, corroboration was not possible at all.

Those accounts warrant investigation. They do not justify the status Kristof gives them, still less the sweeping indictment he builds from them. Fourteen conversations, many anonymous or only partially identifiable to the reader, do not amount to the same evidentiary structure as a two-year project built from hundreds of testimonies, extensive visual analysis, site visits, forensic consultation, geolocation verification, archival indexing, and a declared source hierarchy.

The contrast is not only one of scale. Kristof cites no publicly examinable physical or forensic evidence capable of sustaining the column’s central accusation, much less its most grotesque allegation.

He cites no visual or digital evidence comparable to perpetrator footage, surveillance footage, geolocation-supported material, or structured visual analysis. He does not describe a formal evidentiary hierarchy. He does not clearly distinguish among first-hand testimony, activist reports, second-hand confidences, organizational claims, legal advocacy, and inference.

Nor are his institutional sources equivalent in evidentiary function. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, B’Tselem, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Save the Children are different kinds of organizations, with different mandates, methods, and political positions. Their appearance under separate names does not automatically create independent verification.

Advocacy alone is not the issue. Some of these sources belong to an information ecology in which accusations against Israel travel easily, while Hamas’s violence and coercion are treated evasively or not at all. Euro-Med, in particular, should not be treated as a neutral evidentiary channel, and Kristof’s mild description of it as an advocacy group “often critical of Israel” does not tell readers enough about the source he is asking them to trust. A detailed critique by Gerald M. Steinberg, president of the database NGO Monitor, in Quillette has traced Euro-Med’s role in Kristof’s column, its April 2026 report, and the earlier circulation of the “dog-rape” allegation. Institutional variety is not the same as independent verification. In Kristof’s column, corroboration often appears cumulative rather than structurally independent, with organizations already moving in the same accusatory direction made to resemble separate evidentiary checks.

Kristof’s column does more than report allegations. It turns under-corroborated claims into a public indictment, then lets the obscenity of the accusation conceal the evidentiary void beneath it. It turns those accounts into a claim of widespread Israeli sexual violence across institutions. Such a movement requires a stronger foundation than the column provides.

The dog-rape allegation is the clearest test. Kristof gives the reader an accusation of exceptional grotesqueness, then leaves it without the support such a claim demands. Its evidentiary status is never made proportionate to its symbolic force. A detail capable of transforming the accusatory force of the entire column is offered with no physical evidence, no forensic evidence, no visual evidence, no named witness available to the reader, and no clear independent corroboration. Nor does Kristof give readers enough information to test the allegation themselves: no documents, no dates precise enough for verification, no identifiable investigative record, no chain of custody, no forensic report, no source hierarchy.

The more extreme the allegation, the more disciplined the verification must be. In Kristof’s column, extremity is allowed to do work that evidence has not done.

Allegations of sexual violence can and should be reported when the evidentiary basis is clear. An allegation of this extremity, presented without publicly examinable corroboration, enters a different symbolic register. It begins to function less as evidence than as sexual rumor shielded by moralistic posture.

The dog allegation is central because it is not simply an under-corroborated claim. It belongs to a recognizable genre: sexual atrocity rumor attached to Jews, circulated before evidence can be tested and carried forward by righteous display.

Edgar Morin’s study of the Orléans rumor showed how sexual accusation can circulate as communal knowledge even without verifiable evidence, especially when it condenses fear, disgust, and moral panic into a single story. In 1969, Jewish shopkeepers in the French region of Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. No missing woman was ever found.

The history of anti-Semitic violence gives this failure a particular weight. Pogroms have often begun not with official decrees but with hearsay granted the status of moral knowledge: rumors about violated women, kidnapped children, hidden bodies, poisoned wells, ritual blood, and sexual corruption.

Such accusations do not need evidence to begin their work. They need circulation, credulity, and a public prepared to experience suspicion as virtue. Hearsay about sexual violation is never harmless in the history of anti-Semitism. Kristof’s dog allegation belongs to a history in which lurid sexual rumor does political work before verification can catch up.

Kristof cannot show that extraordinary scrutiny took place because the column provides no publicly examinable basis for it. The allegation is not evidence in any meaningful public sense. It is not anchored in documents, forensic material, identifiable records, named witnesses, or independently testable corroboration. Its function in the column is atmospheric: it supplies obscenity and turns rumor, in Morin’s sense, into a posture of moral authority. Through that movement, Israel is made to appear violent, obscene, and sexually monstrous before evidence has been made available for examination.

III. How False Equivalence Makes Evidence Unreadable

Sexual violence is too grave to be handled as tribal evidence. Any credible allegation deserves investigation, whoever the accused and whoever the victim. Consistency requires more than distributing suspicion evenly. It requires applying evidentiary standards evenly.

Equal scrutiny does not flatten the two texts. It reveals their difference.

Kristof’s column obscures that difference. Palestinian accusation is allowed to acquire evidentiary force through anonymity, partial corroboration, activist mediation, and the authority of the Times. Israeli evidence, by contrast, is received as already compromised by politics, even when it comes attached to an archive, a method, and a declared process of cross-reference.

False equivalence does not give both sides the same burden. It lowers the burden for accusation against Israel, then raises the burden for evidence produced on behalf of Israeli victims. Serious documentation is made to look like one more partisan claim, while a column built from accusation is allowed to behave like proof.

The necessary questions are basic. Who gathered the evidence? How was it preserved? What is direct testimony? What is inference? What has been cross-referenced? What is publicly available? What remains sealed? What is stated as fact, what is stated as probability, and what is being smuggled into the reader’s imagination through rhetoric?

These questions do not obstruct moral inquiry. They belong to it.

IV. Why the Difference Matters

Most readers will not parse these distinctions without help. They will not compare methodology sections, archive descriptions, source categories, evidentiary thresholds, U.N. references, legal conclusions, or source hierarchies. Instead, they will receive a cruder message: Kristof says Israelis sexually abuse Palestinians; the Civil Commission says Hamas sexually abused Israelis. Each side has victims, reports, and politics. Therefore, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The truth is not found halfway between a documented atrocity and an under-corroborated accusation. To call that middle ground “balance” is to abandon judgment while pretending to exercise it. Evidentiary credibility is the relevant measure here. One text gives the reader a method, an archive, and a trail of corroboration. The other asks anonymous accusation, partial corroboration, and tabloid obscenity to carry a national indictment. Treating them as equivalent reduces a serious investigation to one more partisan exhibit.

A related inversion now operates around the Commission report. In Kristof’s column, under-corroborated accusation is elevated into evidence-like authority; around the Commission report, substantiated testimony is reduced to partisan hearsay. Rumor rises, evidence sinks, and the public is invited to mistake the result for balance.

This is why the Commission report’s near-invisibility is not a side issue. The report does not merely add “the Israeli side” to a controversy. It was built to resist erasure, denial, and the reduction of documented sexual atrocity to partisan claim-making. Yet the frame Kristof helped install makes such a document easier to ignore. The more serious and demanding the report is, the less likely most readers are to enter it. It becomes, in the public imagination, one more exhibit in the fog of mutual accusation rather than evidence to be examined.

The Civil Commission report also makes strong claims about patterns, systems, and legal responsibility, and those claims should not remain abstract. It identifies 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, sexual torture, mutilation, deliberate shootings to the genital area, forced nudity, restraint, public display, digital dissemination, threats of forced marriage, sexual violence against boys and men, and kinocidal sexual violence, in which family bonds themselves were weaponized as instruments of terror. These claims may be debated at the level of legal classification and interpretation, but they are presented as findings arising from a documented corpus.

Kristof’s column moves differently. It collects accounts, attaches them to a language of system and policy, and ends by conscripting October 7 into its own accusation. Its final paragraph says: “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.”

The structure of that sentence matters. First, Kristof invokes October 7. Second, he invokes sexual violence against Israeli women, a subject with a documented evidentiary history, including survivor testimony, witness accounts, perpetrator footage, forensic debate, U.N. inquiries, and now a major Civil Commission archive. Third, he transfers the moral and evidentiary gravity of that history onto allegations for which his column does not provide a comparable evidentiary architecture. Israeli suffering becomes a credential for an under-corroborated indictment.

Whether or not this was intended, the effect is clear. Kristof’s column has helped make the Civil Commission’s rigorous report less visible, less readable, and easier to dismiss. It has placed an archive built for scrutiny inside a fog of reciprocal accusation, where evidence is made to look like counter-accusation and rigor is reduced to politics.

The answer to Kristof’s defenders should be clear: yes, scrutinize the Civil Commission report. But do not pretend that the evidence of sexual violence on October 7 has lived in some protected chamber of automatic belief. It has been questioned, parsed, challenged, minimized, and attacked almost from the first day after the massacre. The Civil Commission report enters a field already saturated with doubt, denial, U.N. inquiries, forensic debate, survivor testimony, perpetrator footage, and hostile interrogation.

Its answer is method: it preserves materials, identifies sources, describes its archive, states its categories, and makes its evidentiary structure available for examination. Those who call for equal scrutiny should accept that invitation rather than use “scrutiny” as a polite word for dismissal.

Kristof’s column deserves the same seriousness. Why were 14 conversations, many concealed from the reader, and drawn through a heavily politicized information ecology, allowed to support a sweeping claim about widespread Israeli sexual violence? Why were claims that could be corroborated only in part, and others that could not be corroborated at all, arranged into a national indictment? Why was aggregate corroboration from organizations moving in the same accusatory direction allowed to stand in for independent verification of individual accounts? Why was the most grotesque claim in the column published without publicly examinable extraordinary verification? Why was an opinion column allowed to behave like an evidentiary report while avoiding the disciplines such a report must bear?

If this is not named, serious evidence will keep losing to spectacle before it has even been read. The Civil Commission report is built to withstand rigorous examination. Kristof’s column asks accusation to masquerade as evidence. Under the cover of compassion, it performs the work of cancellation.

The dead and the raped are owed more than a freak show of accusation, more than the double erasure of what was done to them. They are owed the cold discipline of evidence.

“Jude.” “Parasite.” “Race defiler.” “Profiteer.” “Subhuman.” “Corrupter.”

It started with language. 

What began at the political fringes preceding the Holocaust, gradually entered mainstream institutions. Jewish businesses were boycotted, while newspapers, universities, academics, and political movements helped normalize exclusion and hate followed by acts of violence. 

These ideas were further reinforced through eugenics, a morally corrupt racist theory that justified anti-Semitism as a rational scientific approach. Psychiatry and academia both lent intellectual legitimacy to theories portraying Jews as a social problem to be managed and eliminated. These ideas ultimately paved the way for the mass murder of six million Jews. 

“Colonizer.” “Oppressor.” “Zionist.” “Baby killer.” “White supremacist.”

The words have changed, but the scapegoating, moral exclusion, and abject hatred are chillingly familiar. 

Once again, Jews are recast not as individuals but as a uniquely malevolent collective threat, blamed for the world’s injustices and stripped of humanity. 

We are living in frightening times again. The latest variant of anti-Semitism, “anti-Zionism,” is a hate movement and ideology aiming to eliminate the only Jewish nation, Israel. Anti-Zionism draws on the cycle of anti-Semitism seen throughout the ages, repackaging libels and conspiracy theories into modern political language. In this latest iteration, Jews and Israelis are marked as uniquely oppressive or dangerous. Decades of disinformation filtered into the West has normalized this inversion, pushing ideas once considered extreme into the mainstream. 

The current academy, the mental health field, and many other arenas reflect a remarkable similarity to pre-war Germany. Informed by Soviet and Islamic anti-Zionism, this newer Western embodiment characterizes Israel, Israelis, and the Jewish people as powerful evil-doers.  

This is happening despite the formal codes of ethics developed in the mid-twentieth century to protect individuals from the harms that emerge when ideology overtakes clinical judgment, truth, and humanity. They emerged in part from the moral reckoning that followed World War II, when the world confronted the extent to which physicians, psychiatrists, and academics had participated in or remained silent about Nazi medical crimes and eugenic programs.

Soviet psychiatry offers another warning. Political dissenters were at times diagnosed with fabricated disorders masking ideological disagreement as mental illness. When psychiatric authority merges with political ideology, diagnosis can become a tool of repression rather than care.

Conversion therapy also offers a cautionary example. For decades, some clinicians attempted to alter patients’ sexual orientation despite mounting evidence that the practice was psychologically harmful. Ethical standards eventually recognized that therapists must not impose ideological or moral frameworks onto clients under the guise of treatment.

In recent years, a new illustration of this phenomenon has emerged. Ethical language has increasingly been used and distorted to advance political frameworks that extend unrelated to clinical care. When professional ethics are used to legitimize ideological positions, the purpose and efficacy of those codes is lost. 

In social work, particularly with the 2021 revision to the NASW Code of Ethics emphasizing social justice as a core principle, a marked shift occurred, compelling therapists to integrate activist frameworks not only in community organizing contexts but also directly into the treatment room.

Now, training programs, supervision, and professional guidance increasingly emphasizes naming systems of power, privilege, and oppression as central to clinical formulation and intervention. Social work has always grounded attention to context in the concept of Person-in-Environment. Reflected in the bio-psychosocial model, this framework asks therapists to consider social forces such as culture, systems, racism, poverty, and community as influences on a client’s experience, not as determinants of identity or moral worth.

What was once intended as a contextual lens for understanding clients has become hardened into a rigid ideological framework. Ironically, practitioners are engaging in the very thing they warn against. To use their language, they are “colonizing” the treatment space with their own projected assumptions. In this era of anti-Zionism in mental health, these therapists feel emboldened to judge who is deserving of care. This is dehumanizing, unethical practice.

Politicized approaches like decolonizing therapy will welcome Jews as long as they adhere to anti-Zionist ideology. Since the majority of Jews are Zionists, this places Jewish clients in an extremely vulnerable position. They will only be accepted for treatment if they sever part of their identity. These litmus tests have emerged both in treatment and professional spaces in ways that would not be acceptable toward any other group of people. 

Consider a client seeking care for depression, anxiety, and/or relationship issues. A therapist who believes “therapy is political” may deliberately redirect the focus of treatment to a rigid binary, rather than honoring a client’s lived experience and their connection to identity, nation, and culture.

Like the pseudoscientific eugenics movement that once shaped psychiatric practice and the conversion ‘therapies’ of the past, politicized ideological therapies can pressure clients to adopt ideas that have little to do with why they sought care. The results can be harmful by fostering anger, confusion, or self-loathing rather than healing in clients.

Some therapists insist that questioning the integration of a therapist’s personal politics into the treatment room means you are “right-wing” or morally suspect. Others frame the critique as if we are advocating that therapists should sit with a “blank slate.” Both claims are misleading and false.

Ethical practice has never required the absence of self. It requires restraint, care, and what therapists often call the “use of self.” The issue is not neutrality; it is the unethical practice of imposing ideology onto clients.

Some therapists openly describe their approach as “de-colonial” and “anti-Zionist.” How might a Jewish or Israeli patient be treated in such a space? Would they even be accepted as a patient? This is harmful practice that colonizes the treatment room with ideology and ego rather than honoring the patient’s identity and right to self-determination.

In spaces meant for learning, some clinicians present propaganda as fact. In one example, a clinician and professor presented a diagram of “the colonized mind” at an international Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) conference. Within this image of a brain, Zionism is equated with mental illness, fascism, misogyny, homophobia, rape culture, colonialism, and the worst social pathologies of our time.

The individuals who spread this disinformation use a contrived distinction between Zionist and Jew as a kind of “cover.” Meanwhile, there is no empirical research that shows efficacy or positive outcomes of decolonial therapy. Despite that, it and other political therapy approaches have been embraced by the academic and mental health institutions writ large.

These politicized frameworks paint Jews as a hyper-white race who are oppressors themselves. Because Jews are not a race but an ancient ethnicity that predates the seventeenth century invention of race as a social construct, they do not fit neatly within contemporary anti-oppressive models. 

The founders of modern psychotherapy like Freud and others are portrayed by decolonizing therapists as Eurocentric white supremacists. One popular proponent of decolonizing therapy, a licensed psychologist, calls herself a “rage doctor” and accused two contemporary Jewish founders, Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems) and Francine Shapiro (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), of misappropriation. The attempted erasure of Jewish contributions to mental health is well underway. 

Most social work graduate programs do not include the Jewish lived experience or Jewish history within their core curricula as is done with other groups. In some graduate programs, decolonizing and liberation-oriented approaches are included as required coursework. Texts and articles by extremist radical theorists that discuss or justify forms of violent resistance are sometimes assigned as legitimate course material, and anecdotally, it does not seem to be intended for critical analysis. In some cases, there appears to be theoretical endorsement of this kind of perspective as a valid form of social justice. 

Another reported incident took place when a social work professor took her graduate social work class to the Holocaust museum only to exclude Jews from their own history. The professor lectured her class on the horrors of the Shoah without naming the mass extermination of the Jewish people, instead focusing exclusively on other groups who were targeted and killed during this period, completely erasing Jewish victims. Experiences like this shape what students come to understand as ethical and historically accurate.

Relatedly, there have been incidents in some professional spaces, including listservs, of membership questions or informal expectations regarding political alignment on issues related to Israel. Disagreement with the dominant narratives in these spaces, in some cases, has led to mocking, exclusion, or professional ramifications. 

When two employees of the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lishinsky and Sarah Milgram, were shot to death in a terror attack outside the Jewish Museum, Jewish social workers posted on the NASW listserv about shock and grief. They were met not with sympathy or empathy but with accusations of genocide, calls to “Free Palestine,” and other libelous rhetoric. Therapists have been kicked out of this and other collegial groups without rational discourse if they push back on anti-Zionist narratives. 

Similarly, on another occasion, a benign acknowledgement of Jewish Heritage Month on NASW’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages were immediately plastered with Nazi inversion, abuse, and objectifying statements about Jews and Israelis. This scenario has been common. 

In practice, many Jewish students and clients have reported feeling marginalized and highly distressed in many mental health spaces. There is a growing body of literature that examines and documents concerns related to anti-Semitism, identity-based exclusion, and reported harms experienced by Jewish professionals, students and clients alike.

The Jewish Social Work Consortium (JSWC) was founded in response to concerns regarding the dehumanizing rhetoric, identity-based harm, traumatic invalidation directed at Jewish social workers and clients, and lack of institutional responsiveness within the profession. Some of the most disappointing revelations was discovering that even our governing bodies, who would presumedly speak to the breach of core ethics, would collude with their silence. 

Over a two and a half year period, our professional organization, National Association of Social Work (NASW), leadership has not responded to our countless individual letters, organizational missives, petitions, and more. These communiques were written as pleas regarding NASWs Jewish members who, as stated earlier, had been subjected to threats, insults, and mockery on their own listserv and in other public social work institutions and spaces.

In February 2026, NASW issued a public statement against the proposed expulsion of the Israeli Union of Social Workers from the International Federation of Social Workers. The vote was set in motion by the Ireland, Hellenic, and Spanish social work unions who clearly had other reasons for excluding the Israeli union. The proposed vote for expulsion was not grounded in any documented ethical violation; rather, it effectively singled out an Israeli institution. 

NASW’s public statement followed our petition that garnered over 13,000 signatures, along with media coverage and Jewish legacy organizational support and pressure. While NASW rightly finally spoke up against the potential vote of exclusion, subsequent requests for follow-up dialogue and meetings remain unanswered. Something foundational in our field has become cruelly inverted, and it’s increasingly reflected in social work academia, language, and professional attitudes.

Anti-Zionism has become increasingly normalized. There have been “Zionist lists,” which include the names of Jewish therapists projected as “Zionists,” often added because of a Jewish sounding surname. The message: Do not refer prospective clients to “The Zionists” (read: Jews).

Current anti-Zionist mental health frameworks replace older anti-Semitic libels with white-coding, portraying Jews as hyper-white oppressors. In this inversion, “Zionists” become the “bad Jews,” recast as the new Nazis. This is what former United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt describes in her horseshoe theory: political extremes that appear opposite yet ultimately meet in the same place, each relying on libels and conspiracy theories to spread Jew hatred.

While liberation psychology and decolonizing therapy may have been born with good intentions, these approaches have increasingly been co-opted into rigid frameworks that categorize entire groups, such as Jews or Israelis, a “the other.” Some liberation psychologists argue that it is ethical, or even required, under professional codes to confront clients who they might deem “fascist” complicit in injustice.

Anti-Zionist bias in many mental health professional and clinical spaces can drive this practice. Therapists may see themselves as morally obligated to “correct” or “comfort,” echoing earlier historical movements such as eugenics that presumed moral or scientific authority to enforce ideological visions.

Ethical therapy requires therapists to sit with curiosity. Listening deeply to clients’ lived experiences and exploring the interplay of culture, nationhood, race, and personal history. In social work this is called practicing cultural humility. Ethical practice resists ideological imposition and instead fosters space for clients to articulate their experiences and make meaning of their identities.

The therapeutic relationship depends on trust, openness, curiosity, and cultural humility. Clients should not have to wonder whether they must adopt a therapist’s ideological framework in order to be understood or supported. Ethical practice requires therapists to examine their own biases without projecting them onto clients, creating space for people to articulate and make meaning of their own experiences rather than being subjected to political enforcement.

When ideological conformity begins to replace curiosity and human complexity, history doesn’t feel so distant anymore. Indeed, as one walks through the halls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum it’s difficult not to feel alarmed. While we are not in the Holocaust, one can’t help but feel a chill of recognition at what unfolded during those years prior to the mass extermination of Jews and others: the dehumanizing language, the moral exclusion, the socially accepted hostility toward Jews, the groupthink. 

We know from history that hatred rarely begins with violence. It begins with rhetoric, mockery, collective blame, and most dangerously, the normalization of treating a targeted group as undeserving of empathy.

What we are seeing now feels like an echo of those earlier years. Jews and Israelis are facing harassment, intimidation, assaults, the targeting of synagogues and businesses, and deadly acts of violence. The language may have shifted from “the Jew” to “the Zionist,” but the dynamics are recognizable. In fields meant to center healing, reflection, and care, the normalization of abandoning our most basic ethical commitments and respect for human dignity reveals the danger of this moment. 

If mental health, social work, and psychology are truly committed to these principles, our institutions must take heed from the halls of history and recalibrate before further damage is done.

Mayor Mamdani, 

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.

You frame opposition to Zionism as principled criticism, but you’re denying the Jewish people’s right to exist as well as their self-determination. When Israel alone is denied the rights afforded to every other nation, such denial ceases to be legitimate policy disagreement and becomes discrimination. 

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism! 

By any reasonable standard, the world, horrifyingly, is not suffering from a shortage of human-rights crises. From authoritarian repression to a host of unimaginable atrocities, countless populations endure violence that rarely captures international attention. In modern political discourse, some causes dominate headlines and activism while others remain largely invisible. Your double standard isn’t subtle, it’s evident in your relentless  and unjustifiable demonization of Israel. 

Just recently, vile protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side waving Hezbollah flags, chanting “Death to the IDF,” rejecting any two-state solution, and openly calling for the destruction of Israel. They tried to push through police barricades, and threatened Jews simply for attending a synagogue event.

And yet, instead of unequivocally condemning the intimidation, hatred, and glorification of terrorism outside the synagogue, you chose to condemn the event taking place inside it. This is a profound moral failure.

When mobs wave terrorist flags, harass Jews in the streets, and celebrate violence, the issue is no longer politics or policy disagreement: it is anti-Semitic intimidation. No community should be expected to tolerate threats, incitement, or support for terrorist organizations outside its houses of worship or anywhere.

Opposition to Israeli policy is a defining feature of your political and personal identity. Supporters view your advocacy for Palestinian rights as principled and morally urgent. Your rhetoric, however, reduces a deeply complex conflict into simplistic false accusations aimed exclusively at the world’s only Jewish state. Why is your activism intensely focused on Israel while no attention is paid to the severe abuses around the globe, including in Uganda, the country of your birth?

You identify as Ugandan, you were born in Kampala, Uganda, and you have said that you’re proud to be Ugandan. You retain dual nationality, having been born in Uganda and naturalized as a U.S. citizen. You started a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine in 2010 during your first year at Bowdoin College, while unspeakable horrors were unfolding in Uganda.

That contrast raises a broader and more deeply troubling question.

In Uganda, as in many countries, credible and long-standing human rights concerns have been repeatedly documented by journalists and international organizations. These include allegations of political repression, unlawful detention, torture in unofficial detention facilities, and systematic intimidation of opposition figures. Reports have also described the harassment of journalists, restrictions on political dissent, and escalating violence and discrimination against vulnerable communities, including LGBTQ+ Ugandans following the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023.

Mr. Mayor, you continue to direct false narratives and propaganda at Israel, repeating accusations as fact while social media amplifies distortion, selective reporting, and outright fabrication.

Israel is facing relentless threats from terrorist organizations that openly target civilians and glorify violence. Israelis are people who love life and want to live in peace. They raise families, build communities, and defend themselves in an environment where terror groups and their enablers spread misinformation as part of a deliberate strategy.

Yet you and others continue to ignore that reality while giving credibility to manipulated narratives designed to inflame hatred and erase context.

Propaganda has become a weapon. Terrorist organizations and their supporters have elevated deception into a strategy, using emotional imagery, fabricated stories, and misinformation to manipulate public opinion and justify violence.

Spreading libel is not activism, it is propaganda.

Meanwhile, genuine atrocities and abuses committed in other parts of the world receive far less outrage or attention, Uganda, for example. Horrific crimes against civilians are tragically real and well documented, yet your outrage, and much of the global outrage, remains selective and inconsistent.

For many Jews, your rhetoric echoes some of the oldest and most dangerous anti-Semitic tropes in history, including accusations that demonize Jews collectively and portray Jewish self-defense as inherently criminal. You, along with Hamas and its supporters, have long relied on a cynical strategy: to accuse Israel of the very brutality, extremism, and disregard for civilian life that these terrorist organizations themselves openly embrace. When you repeat or legitimize those narratives, you do not advance peace or human rights. You deepen division, inflame hostility, and further endanger Jews around the world.

By spreading false claims of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, you are endangering Jewish communities everywhere, especially New York  Jews , whom you are supposed to protect.

Israel is the indigenous and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, a nation rooted in the land for over 3,000 years. Israel was born in 1021 B.C.E. Through exile, persecution, massacres, and centuries of displacement, the Jewish people never abandoned their connection to their homeland. In 1948, after generations of struggle and the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel was reborn as a sovereign Jewish state.

New York City is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel. You, as mayor, have a responsibility to protect Jewish New Yorkers, not to amplify rhetoric and legitimize hostility, leaving Jewish residents feeling isolated, targeted, and unsafe. We deserve leaders who apply the language of human rights fairly and universally, not selectively.

Criticism of governments is legitimate in any democracy, including Israel’s. But, when that criticism becomes obsessive, one-sided, and untethered from historical context or moral consistency, it ceases to be principled activism and instead fuels hostility toward Jews as Jews far beyond the Middle East.

While the crimes of dictatorships, terrorist movements, and brutal governments are minimized, excused, or quickly forgotten by the likes of you, Israel alone is subjected to constant scrutiny, demonization, and demands to justify its very right to exist. No other country is forced to defend its existence so persistently in the court of global opinion.

Human rights are not credible when applied selectively. Moral consistency matters.

But the larger issue extends beyond any one politician or conflict.

Jewish New Yorkers do not ask for special treatment. We demand the same moral clarity, protection, and solidarity afforded to every other community. Human rights lose all credibility when they are applied selectively, and anti-Semitism becomes especially dangerous when it is rationalized, excused, or repackaged as political virtue.

Mr. Mamdani, you do not get to inflame hostility toward Jews, excuse intimidation, and legitimize extremist rhetoric and then deny responsibility for the consequences. History has shown repeatedly that when hatred toward Jews is justified in the service of a political cause, it does not remain rhetorical for long. It escalates into intimidation, harassment, threats, and violence.

Jewish New Yorkers are now watching mobs glorify terrorism outside synagogues, wave Hezbollah flags in our streets, and openly target Jews while you respond with excuses instead of moral clarity. Your rhetoric has helped create an environment in which extremists feel increasingly emboldened and Jewish New Yorkers feel increasingly isolated, vulnerable, and abandoned.

New York cannot claim to oppose bigotry while treating anti-Semitism as uniquely negotiable. We demand equal standards, equal protection, and equal condemnation of hatred.

When anti-Jewish intimidation is excused or downplayed by public figures, the consequences are real, and history has already shown where that road leads.

In July of 2024, twelve children stood on a soccer field in a Druze village in Israel, near Mount Hermon.

They weren’t soldiers.

They weren’t political.

They were children.

They were laughing, talking, passing a ball—living in the simple, sacred rhythm of childhood.

And then, in a single moment, everything changed.

A rocket fired by Hezbollah landed in the middle of that field.

All twelve were killed.

That moment has haunted me for the last 20 months.

I think about those children often. I think about their names, their faces, their families. I think about what that field must have looked like just seconds before impact—joyful, alive—and what it became after.

At the time, I had an idea. I wanted to design a mural on behalf of those children. But the timing wasn’t right.

The politics were too raw. The emotions were too fresh. So I waited. Fast forward to today.

As I was praying, thinking, and meditating on what to create next—what to draw, what to design—I felt a quiet but undeniable prompting. As if the Lord was tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me of those twelve children.

Not once.

Not twice.

But over and over again.

At the same time, I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing in Iran.

Every day, the news tells a story that the world still struggles to fully grasp. Since 2022, thousands of children have been killed by the Islamic regime. The exact number is hard to pin down—conservative estimates place it somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000.

Children who were murdered.

Silenced.

Different countries.

Different circumstances.

But a shared reality.

So I designed the banner.

Not knowing if it would be approved.

Not knowing if the timing was right.

Not knowing if anyone would say yes.

But something deeper told me: this needs to exist.

And then I looked at the calendar.

In just a short time, the world’s attention will shift. The FIFA World Cup is coming to the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The eyes of the world will be watching. And, suddenly, the connection became undeniable.

A soccer field.

Children.

A global stage centered around the very game they were playing.

It felt like more than timing.

It felt like alignment.

I sent the design to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

A man with whom I’ve worked—Dan Oryan—reviewed it, approved it, and passed it along to the leadership in Majdal Shams.

I got on a plane to Israel. But when I arrived, I didn’t know if anything would happen. No confirmations. No clear plan. Just silence.

I sat in a hotel room, waiting. Praying. Wrestling with uncertainty.

The plan in my mind had been simple: Unveil the mural in the Druze village on April 29… Then unveil it again in another city on April 30 (maybe Kfar Maccabiah).

But none of that came to pass.

No one got back to me.

And for a moment, it felt like everything might fall apart.

Then something shifted.

A friend reached out—someone I can only describe as a quiet force of strength. A Jewish woman whose courage doesn’t announce itself, but reveals itself through action.

Her name is Justine Zwerling. She drove to Tel Aviv to meet me for lunch. I told her everything—the confusion, the frustration, the uncertainty, the complexity of navigating politics and approvals.

She listened. And then she said something simple: “This is ridiculous. We’re going to make this happen.”

She got on the phone. Within hours, she connected me to one of the leading spiritual figures of the Druze community: Sheikh Rafa Halabi… from the Druze community on Mount Carmel in Israel.

Director of the Jerusalem Office of the International Organization for Human Rights and the Defense of Public Liberties and President of the Organization of Distinguished Captains-Gentlemen of the Islamic World. He heard the story. And he personally invited me to Majdal Shams. When I arrived, everything changed.

I met the people.

I saw the village.

I felt the weight of what had happened there.

And then I met a mother. Her name is Naila Fakhr al-Din. She is the mother of Alma Fakhr al-Din—one of the children killed on that soccer field.

I sat with her.

I listened.

I saw the artwork in her home, the memories, the pieces of a life that was taken too soon.

I went to the field itself—the place where the missile landed.

And I cried.

Not loudly. Not outwardly.

But internally, deeply.

Because standing there, you realize something: This is not abstract. This is not political theory. This is real.

When it was time, I presented the first draft of the banner. They looked at it carefully. They gave feedback. Honest, thoughtful, constructive.

And then something remarkable happened. Both Sheikh Rafa and Naila said: “This must go up. Not just in Israel. But in the United States. And not just anywhere—but in connection with the World Cup.”

At that moment, I realized: What started as an idea… What nearly fell apart… What sat in uncertainty just days before… Was now carrying the blessing of a family and the support of a spiritual leader.

The Mural: “A Mural Honoring Children Lost to Violence by the Islamic Regime + Its Proxies”

At its center is a simple, universal image: A soccer match between children. On one side: Twelve Druze children in green—honoring those killed in Majdal Shams on July 27, 2024. On the other: Children in red—representing those killed in Iran since 2022.

They are not enemies.

They are children—facing each other in a game that should have been played in peace.

Above them stands a referee: Zahra Azadpour—a young Iranian female footballer killed during the massacres of 2026.

She represents courage.

She represents defiance.

She represents a generation that refused to be silenced.

Behind them, two worlds converge: Nabi Shu’ayb (Jethro’s Tomb)—a sacred Druze site of faith and continuity. And Azadi Tower in Tehran—a symbol of a people longing for freedom. Between them stands the Lion and Sun—an ancient Persian emblem, reborn here as a symbol of resilience and identity.

The rising sun behind it signals hope: Even in darkness, light remains possible.

What Comes Next

I am back in the United States now. And I am going to do what I have always done: Pound the pavement. Because now, I’m not just carrying an idea. I’m carrying a blessing.

If you ask me what I’m really praying for… I’ll tell you plainly: I want this mural shown before matches at the World Cup.

At stadiums across America—

From Seattle…

To the Bay Area…

To Los Angeles…

To Kansas City…

To Miami…

To New York.

I want the world to see.

Not just the beauty of the game—but the reality behind it. The innocence of children. And the brutality that took them… namely the Islamic Regime of Iran.

God performed a miracle to get me to Majdal Shams. Not one miracle—many. And I believe He can do it again.

This is an intense mission. At times, a lonely one. But I have to believe that His hand is on it.

And maybe—just maybe—people of influence will see this. Leaders in sports. Voices in media. Decision-makers in governments. Those connected to FIFA.

And they will recognize what this is.

Not just a mural.

But a message.

A message the world can no longer ignore: “Woman. Life. Freedom.”

All eyes on Iran.

A Final Word

There was a moment in this journey when I was completely lost. Completely alone. Sitting in a hotel room, not knowing what would happen next… not knowing if any door would open… not knowing if this mural would ever see the light of day.

So I did the only thing I knew to do: I prayed. And not just me—others were praying with me.

People standing with me.

People listening.

People who, in that moment, could hear God more clearly than I could.

And, through those prayers, two things became very clear:

A spiritual stronghold needed to be broken. And God needed to send someone—not just a Good Samaritan… but an extraordinary one. And He did.

When I think about the very best of Israel… When I think about the goodness of its people in a moment like this… One name rises above the rest in my mind: Justine Zwerling.

She didn’t hesitate.

She didn’t overthink.

She didn’t make it about herself.

She acted.

She stepped in at the exact moment I needed help most—and she became a living, breathing answer to prayer.

A bridge.

A catalyst.

A force of courage and conviction.

Sometimes, miracles don’t look like lightning from the sky.

Sometimes, they look like a person who shows up at just the right time… with just the right heart… and changes everything. And, in this story, Justine was that miracle.

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.

Not only what happened.

But how it was allowed to happen and how its underlying forces persist.

There is a difference between hearing and listening, and in Judaism that difference is everything. 

The opening word of the Shema Yisrael prayer* (“Hear, o Israel”) is often translated simply as “hear.” But the Hebrew word shema demands far more. It is not passive. It does not allow distance. To shema is to listen with intention, to internalize, and ultimately to act. It’s about as close as language gets to closing the gap between belief and behavior. In this sense, shema does not merely ask for attention, it commands responsibility. This distinction reverberates far beyond prayer. It echoes, urgently.

The Shema is far more profound than any summary can capture; it is the central declaration and cornerstone of Judaism.

“Never again” is the phrase that has come to define Jewish historical consciousness after the Holocaust.

At first glance, “never again” sounds like memory, a vow to remember what was lost, to preserve the past against denial or distortion. But, like Shema, it is not passive. It is not about recollection alone. It is a demand for action.

Six million is a number too large to grasp. It resists comprehension, slipping beyond the limits of human imagination. But Jewish memory has never relied on abstraction. It insists on particularity, on names, faces, voices. One family torn apart. One child taken. One life extinguished. The enormity of the Holocaust does not diminish when reduced to the individual—it becomes real.

“Never again” is not a slogan of grief. It is a call to action.

In the years after the Holocaust, this phrase began to take on a deeper, internal meaning. It was not only a response to external threat but to internal vulnerability, the quiet dangers of silence, passivity, and disbelief. It marked a turning point, a commitment to survival not as endurance alone, but as agency.

To say “never again” is to refuse complacency. It is to recognize that evil rarely announces itself fully formed; it grows in the margins, in the tolerated slur, the ignored warning, the rationalized injustice. The command is not only to remember the past but to remain alert in the present, to hear, in the earliest echoes of danger, a call to respond.

It persisted internally, in the voices that diminished their worth, in the trauma that reduced identity to victimhood. “Never again” became a refusal to accept that inheritance. It was, and remains, a reclamation of self, a declaration that Jewish existence is not defined by destruction, but by continuity, creativity, and resilience.

The most unsettling truth about the Holocaust is not only the scale of its brutality. It is the proximity of ordinary people to that brutality, and their decision, in different ways, not to resist it. The curated version of history suggests that atrocities are carried out by a small circle of fanatics, while everyone else remains essentially innocent.

It is a reassuring narrative. It is false.

The Holocaust was not sustained by ideologues alone. It was enabled, stabilized, and normalized by millions who saw enough to understand that something was wrong and chose not to act. Anti-Semitism was not incidental to this process, it was foundational. It was a hatred so deeply embedded that it could be accepted, ignored, or quietly accommodated by those who did not consider themselves extremists.

That is what should disturb us most.

Anti-Semitism did not end in 1945. It adapted.

The phrase “silent majority” implies neutrality, as though silence stands apart from moral responsibility. It doesn’t. In the presence of anti-Semitism, or any hatred, silence is not passive, it is complicity. What makes this truth so unsettling is its simplicity. It requires no monsters, only ordinary people.

Self-deception comes first. People convince themselves that what they are seeing is exaggerated, misrepresented, or not their concern. Anti-Semitic rhetoric becomes just words. Conspiracy theories become just opinions. Harassment becomes just politics. These rationalizations are not absurd, they are deeply human. And that is precisely why they are dangerous. They allow individuals to accommodate prejudice without acknowledging their role in sustaining it.

Then there is obedience. Modern societies function through hierarchy, through trust in institutions and narratives. But obedience is not morally neutral. When individuals surrender judgment to authority, whether political leaders, media ecosystems, or social consensus, responsibility does not disappear; it becomes obscured. As Hannah Arendt argued, some of history’s greatest evils are carried out not by fanatics, but by ordinary individuals who stop questioning their role.

And then there is indifference. Not ignorance—indifference.

Anti-Semitism today rarely announces itself in the same forms as it did in the past. It appears in distortions, in double standards, in selective outrage. It emerges in moments when violence against Jews is minimized, contextualized, or quickly forgotten. Many people recognize it, at least partially. But recognition alone is not enough. Empathy demands action, and action carries risk, to reputation, to comfort, to belonging.

 A calculation is made… better not to engage. Better not to disrupt.

This is how hatred persists, not only through those who promote it, but through those who tolerate it.

Most like to believe that they would have acted differently. That they would have spoken out, resisted, refused. But that belief is only meaningful if it is reflected in how we respond now. Because today, we are not uninformed observers. We are saturated with information. We witness anti-Semitic incidents, rhetoric, and violence in real time.

And yet responses are inconsistent, selective, and fleeting.

This is not a failure of awareness. It is a failure of attention, and of will.

Many people care intensely about some injustices and barely at all about others. Not necessarily because one is worse, but because one is more visible, more politically convenient, or more aligned with our assumptions. Anti-Semitism often falls into the category of what is acknowledged, then absorbed into the background.

The pattern is not new… awareness without sustained engagement… empathy without consequence.

The uncomfortable truth is that moral failure rarely begins with cruelty. More often, it begins with adaptability, the ability to live with what should feel intolerable. People adjust. They rationalize. They learn how to coexist with prejudice without confronting it.

That was true then. It is true now.

If remembrance is to mean anything, it cannot end with memory. It must extend into behavior, into what we challenge, what we refuse to normalize, and what we are willing to disrupt.

In this way, Shema and “never again” are not separate ideas. They are expressions of the same moral structure. Both reject passivity. Both insist that to truly hear is to be changed, and to act on that change, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. It leaves no room for partial engagement. And “never again,” if it is to mean anything, demands the same. Not occasional remembrance, but sustained vigilance. Not symbolic gestures, but moral courage.

There are no neutral bystanders. There are only participants, some active, some passive, all consequential.

The question is not whether we would have been different then. It is whether we are willing to be different now, especially when anti-Semitism does not come as a shock but as something quieter, more familiar, and far easier to ignore.

* Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.

Last October, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, sponsored a public lecture: “Understanding Gaza.” I’ve been thinking about that lecture ever since. That’s way too long, wouldn’t you say? I’m hoping that by writing about it I can finally get the gobbledygook I heard out of my head.

My rabbi, the only one left in Springfield, told us about the lecture. Since Wittenberg is the community’s local college, he encouraged congregants to attend. Before going to the lecture, I did a brief online search of the speakers. The moderator was a local Methodist pastor with a long history of pro-Palestinian activism. The guest speakers were university educators. The first speaker was a Palestinian Christian who grew up in Canada, but now lives in the U.S.A. The second was an American, a practicing Jew, wears a yarmulke, pro-Zionist, democratic socialist, and a pro-Palestinian activist. I went to the lecture knowing that the deck was stacked. To use another gambling analogy: the house always wins.

Walking into the Bayley Auditorium, I first noticed the usual suspects: a handful of students, a larger number of shabbily dressed—worn-out corduroy-jacket-with-leather-elbow-patch—professors, and a small number of business casual outsiders. Near the entrance was an attendance sheet for the students to sign, I suppose, for class credit. Bouncing around the room, making last-minute adjustments, was the event’s organizer, a white male keffiyeh-wearing Wittenberg professor. 

The “moderator” wasn’t much of a moderator. Really, just another speaker. He talked about his years ministering to beleaguered Palestinians. The first speaker talked about his personal background and activism, but had little to say about his academic background or research, and briefly denounced Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Then, for the next 40 minutes, he pummeled us with what seemed like hundreds of PowerPoint slides documenting the destruction in the Gaza strip.

War porn, really. Like sexual porn, eventually war porn is more numbing than stimulating, so you crave ever more intense imagery. The first one’s free, boys and girls. There were also some slides of casualty figures, and statistics about Israel’s disproportionate military strength. Many slides included unattributed quotations. No discussion or slides of what the Palestinians did to Israelis on October 7. Little historical context about the “past,” as promised by the flier. The gist of his stupor-inducing presentation was that October 7 need not be understood in a broader historical context; that, even if Hamas had weapons in schools and hospitals (which he found doubtful), it didn’t give Israel the right to bomb Gaza; and, the destruction is “unprecedented” in human history. More important to understanding his thesis, though, was how carefully he curated his images to make us feel sympathy or rage rather than engage our critical thinking. The calculus is easy enough to understand. Hamas: bad. Israel: worse. Palestinians: eternal victims.

Two points need to be made about this presentation. To say the destruction in Gaza is unprecedented is, at best, hyperbole; or worse, intellectually disingenuous. The long-term environmental and human mutagenic damage, in Gaza, is unlikely to be worse than, say, what we still find in Southeast Asia, caused by Agent Orange. An April 2026 study in The Lancet reports an estimated total casualty figure, Gazans and Israelis, of 80,000 dead and 170,000 injured. According to the Bulletin of the Union of Atomic Scientists, the estimated combined initial deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was 110,000. As bad as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the speaker would do well to familiarize himself with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey following WWII, a carefully documented empirical study. It identifies one raid on Tokyo (March 9, 1945) as the single most destructive event in human history. The speaker would also do well to familiarize himself with why the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended that PowerPoint presentations not be used to disseminate technical information.

The first speaker left the second with little time to make an adequate presentation of his material. (Academics are notorious microphone hogs.) The second speaker, nevertheless, like the first, spent more time talking about his personal history and anti-Israel activism than his academic qualifications or research. He denounced the October 7 attack, then quickly moved on to how Israel has provoked and oppressed the “Palestinian people.” The gist of his presentation was that, while a proud Jew and Zionist, he denounces the current Israeli government as “right-wing,” “racist,” expansionist, and Prime Minister Netanyahu is the devil incarnate. And, once again, recent events need not be contextualized in the broader sweep of history, such as the fact that Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005, despite no change in the Hamas charter regarding the eradication of all Jews and the erasure of the State of Israel; immediately after occupying Gaza, Hamas began firing rockets into Israel; or, prior to 1967, the Palestinians did not refer to themselves as such, nor even as Arabs, but as Jordanians and Syrians.

The second speaker did, nevertheless, make some insightful observations. For instance, he says that, in the past few years he’s noticed a misguided (my term) change in Jewish students on American college campuses. Soon after arriving, many shed their Jewish identity, denounce the State of Israel, and uncritically support Hamas. 

Misguided, as in receiving bad guidance, is the operative word here. The question is, is the misguidance from the parents or those in loco parentis?

There wasn’t much time left, so the moderator announced he would take questions from the students. Time permitting, he would then take questions from the general audience. Long silence. At the risk of idealizing my salad days, it seems that today’s college students have fewer questions, and are loath to challenge. As if the Tide pod challenge of 2018 wasn’t proof enough of a generation-wide inability to think independently.

Eventually, two or three students asked questions. Or rather, made statements, posed as questions, designed to signal their complete agreement with everything everyone on the dais had said. The token Jewish student seemed especially desperate to have the speakers’ approval. Long silence. Finally, a few general audience members were allowed to make statements of agreement posed as questions. 

But who can blame the students? With their keffiyeh-wearing professor on vigil, and attendance being taken, they knew their cards were dealt from the bottom. When I was a graduate teaching assistant, we were constantly warned about the unequal power relationship between teacher and student, and how to avoid imposing our ideologies on students. Clearly academe has moved beyond such petty concerns.

There was one exception. A gentleman in the back asked about Iran’s and Qatar’s role in supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and in orchestrating October 7. The first speaker ham-handedly tried to evade the question. It was like watching a cat trying to walk on freshly waxed linoleum. The moderator rescued the speaker by calling time. 

The second speaker graciously offered to stay and talk with audience members. He seemed genuinely eager. A mensch. I told him that the panel did not announce their unified sympathies with the Gazans, and lack of sympathy with Israelis. The students, being undergraduates, could not be expected to recognize that there was no dialectic. (Roland Barth refers to such omissions as “myths” intended to obscure ideology; and, photography as one of the most pernicious vectors of myth.) Therefore, the panel robbed the students of the ability to arrive at their own conclusions, disagree, challenge, or even ask the panelists intelligent questions. Indeed, there were no questions from the students, only the obsequious statements of agreement. 

The Jewish professor thought for a moment about what I said to him, then agreed it was an unfortunate oversight. He countered, nevertheless, that the opposition has no one worth inviting. A representative from the Israeli embassy, he said, would just provide the usual stock statements. His lack of self-reflexiveness, that his statements could be characterized as no less pat, put me on my heels. I assured him we could find someone locally, such as the person who asked about Iran’s and Qatar’s support for Hamas. Again, he had the intellectual integrity to acknowledge my point, while reiterating that he was not the organizer. He then handed me his card and asked me to contact him.

The panel utterly failed to live up to the promise to contextualize Gaza in “the Past, the Present, and… the future,” focusing just on the present. What about the “Palestinians”’ repeated refusals to compromise, such as in 1948, or renounce their intent to destroy Israel, even after being given Gaza in 2005? What about Arab Muslims’ active support of the “Final Solution”? Or Mahmoud Abass’ insistence that there was no Holocaust (Shoah)? The silence on such issues was deafening. 

I don’t blame the two speakers. They did what they were asked to do. I blame the organizer who violated the sacred responsibility of an educator to set aside his own biases in order to help his students become independent thinkers. His right to wear a keffiyeh does not outweigh his responsibility as one in loco parentis. I blame Wittenberg for its feckless failure to maintain academic standards. 

Looking back on this event, months later, I’m glad I went. I learned a few things. More importantly, it gave me some comfort: the knowledge that I am not the only parent to have failed to fully inoculate my children against an illiberal education.

Imagining What Doesn’t Exist

Having been a Beatles fan and then a fan of John Lennon since I was a boy, there’s something almost unfair about criticizing “Imagine.” The song is so earnest, so melodically beautiful, and so obviously genuine in its longing for peace that pushing back against it feels like I’m kicking a child’s stuffed teddy bear. But that protective feeling is in itself worth examining because it is precisely the song’s emotional armor that has allowed its philosophical weaknesses to go largely unchallenged for more than fifty years.

“Imagine” isn’t a bad song. It is a genuinely powerful piece of music. But it’s a terrible argument for crafting reality. When we treat art as argument as “Imagine” invites us to do, then its ideas deserve the same scrutiny we would give to any serious claim about human nature. “Imagine,” therefore, is a complete failure as any kind of moral guidance and vision for the future.

The Central Mistake

The song’s deepest flaw is also its most seductive one: it assumes that conflict comes from the outside in, absolving people of their own personal responsibility for the goodness—or badness—of society.

Lennon asks us to imagine away countries, religion, and possessions as though these constructs are the cause of human violence, and then he makes the leap that their removal would leave something calm and generous in their place. But this gets the causality backwards. Countries, religions, and property systems aren’t the origins of human conflict. They are the imperfect attempts to manage the human drives that predate all of them: the drives for status, power, security, revenge, tribal belonging, and the fear of scarcity as manifested by greed.

When you remove nations and people form factions; remove religion and people create new belief systems just as capable of fanaticism; remove private property and people compete over the control of resources with equal ferocity… what do you have? Nature abhors a vacuum. If we consider the Soviet experiment, we see that it abolished private ownership in theory and produced a system in which party membership, bureaucratic rank, and political loyalty became the new currencies of power. Sure, the structures changed… yet the underlying human dynamics did not. “Imagine” mistakes the container for the contents and asks everyone to believe that this mistake is actually true.

The Five Failures Around Which the Song Cannot Sing

First: it is selectively subtractive. “Imagine” removes the pathologies of institutions and asks us to forget their benefits. While religion is replete with historical abuses, it has also provided moral scaffolding, meaning, charity, and consolation to billions of people over thousands of years. Nations, for all their capacity to wage war, also provide law, order, shared identity, and structures of accountability and responsibilities associated with citizenship. Property rights, for all their tendency to generate inequality, also underwrite personal responsibility, economic incentive, and protection from the collective. Lennon throws the engine of civilization out with the exhaust fumes and calls the empty garage paradise.

Second: it confuses aspiration with argument. “Imagine all the people living life in peace” is genuinely moving on the surface. Who wouldn’t want universal peace? But being moved by a melody and a dream is not the same as being persuaded by logic and data points. The song never explains why peace would follow from the removal of these institutions. It does not trace a causal chain that can be verified. It simply issues an invitation and calls that invitation a conclusion. That’s closer to a prayer than a theory, and prayers, however beautiful they may be, do not bear the weight of deeply explored philosophical arguments.

Third: it assumes sameness is the solution. The song points toward unity through subtraction: no religion, no countries, and no possessions. But one of the more durable insights of political and moral philosophy is that genuine peace doesn’t come from erasing differences. It comes from learning to live with deep differences under negotiated law, through social and spiritual forgiveness, and across moral limits both societally recognized and systematically maintained. A world made peaceful by homogenization is not a human world. It is an engineered one. And the song never asks who does the engineering (or why anyone would listen to them).

Fourth: it buries a coercion problem under a piano melody. If hundreds of millions of people don’t wish to surrender their religion, their national identity, or their property (and most of them, across history and across cultures, demonstrably do not) then how does this world come into being? Voluntarily? History regularly demonstrates otherwise. Every major attempt to widely abolish these structures has required force on a catastrophic scale. The song describes a peaceful destination while deliberately ignoring the violence that every attempt to reach that destination has actually produced.

Fifth: it mistakes the vessel for the cargo. “And no religion, too,” is Lennon’s lyrical suggestion that religion is the source of human fervor rather than just one of many vehicles for it. But when you remove religion, secular ideologies fill the same function with equal or greater ferocity. The twentieth century’s great atrocities were not committed in the name of God. They were committed in the name of History, Country, Race, Party, and even the Individual. Fanaticism is a feature of human psychology, rather than a product of theology. The song takes aim at the symptom and leaves the disease untouched to continue to grow and consume its host.

Taking the Song, Line by Line

Because “Imagine” offers its vision in verse, it is worth following the argument as it actually unfolds, which reveals that the weaknesses are not incidental. They are core to Lennon’s premise.

“Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try.”

No, it isn’t easy, and the claim that it is easy reveals something telling. For a vast portion of humanity, belief in heaven is not a neurotic comfort but a foundational understanding of reality, meaning, and justice. To call the removal of heaven effortless is not inclusive, it is dismissive. More substantively: strip away transcendent accountability and you do not simply free people from false consolation. You also remove one of the frameworks that has historically given weight to the idea that justice ultimately matters. The line assumes the loss of heaven is purely a gain for humanity.

“No hell below us / Above us only sky.”

Hell, philosophically, is not merely a scare tactic. Belief in transcendent judgment has functioned as a source of moral seriousness and a check on behavior when no earthly consequence seemed likely, however imperfectly. “Above us only sky” is elegant poetry. As philosophy, the song simply asserts a materialist worldview without defending it and without asking what becomes of moral accountability when the sky is all there is.

“Imagine all the people living for today.”

This may be the song’s most quietly dangerous line. Living for today can mean liberation from anxiety, sure, but it can also mean indifference to future generations, erosion of long-term obligation, and the atrophying of duty. Civilization is substantially a project of people not living for today: parents who sacrifice for children they will not outlive, scientists who work toward discoveries they may never see, and citizens who build institutions for a future they can only imagine. The present-mindedness the line romanticizes is, in excess, another name for negligence.

“Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do.”

Again it is, in fact, actually quite hard to do. Human beings organize themselves into political communities such as tribes, cities, kingdoms, and nations with a consistency that looks less like a correctable historical accident and more like a feature of social life. Countries are imperfect, often terrible, and sometimes catastrophically so. But they also provide the structural conditions for law, for citizenship, for organized collective defense, and for the very civil rights movements that protest their failures. Remove them, and the question of what fills the void is not answered by the song. The absence of formal political structure does not produce harmony. It produces a power vacuum, and power vacuums are never empty for long.

“Nothing to kill or die for.”

At first this might sound like welcome relief. But let the line sink in. Some things may genuinely be worth dying for: the protection of people who cannot protect themselves, resistance to genuine tyranny, or the defense of truth under pressure. A world in which nothing is worth dying for is also a world in which nothing is worth defending to the death. Yes, sacrifice can be waste but it can also be nobility. The song conflates the two and leaves us with a world in which the moral seriousness required to say this matters enough to cost something has been dissolved along with everything else. We’ll come back to this.

“And no religion, too.”

This is one of the song’s boldest strokes and one of its most philosophically careless. The history of religion is, undeniably, a history that includes violence, persecution, and the weaponization of the divine. But it is also a history that includes the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, the founding of hospitals and schools and orphanages, the preservation of philosophy and art through dark centuries, and the moral formation of countless people who might otherwise have had no formation at all. More fundamentally: abolishing religion does not abolish the human need for ultimate meaning, for moral authority beyond the merely personal, or for community held together by shared commitment to something larger than convenience. Abolish the church and the Party moves into the same psychological space. The song removes one expression of human longing without considering the longing itself.

“Imagine all the people living life in peace.”

This is the conclusion towards which the song has been building, and it arrives with genuine emotional force. The problem is that it hasn’t been earned. None of the preceding premises logically guarantee peace. Stripped of its music, the argument goes like this: remove religion, remove nations, remove metaphysical belief, and remove possessions… then peace will follow. But conflict arises from pride, from fear, from envy, from the drive to dominate, from grief, from ideology, from misunderstanding, and from many other causes. It arises, in other words, from inside human beings, not merely from the institutions they build. Remove the institutions and the interior life remains. It’s complicated, competitive, capable of extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary love, and stubbornly resistant to the idea that subtraction is the same as solution.

“You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one.”

This is the song’s most rhetorically effective move and its most philosophically evasive. By preemptively labeling skeptics as narrow realists and framing itself as morally elevated solidarity, it insulates the dream from examination and the dreamer from criticism. But a dreamer is not inherently virtuous. It depends entirely on what the dream is. And the fact that many people share a vision does not make that vision sound. History is full of widely shared dreams that ended in catastrophe.

“And the world will live as one.”

Unity is presented here as an unqualified good. But unity under what authority? With what preservation of individual conscience, local loyalty, and irreducible human difference? A world living as one could mean the harmony of free people who have learned to coexist across profound disagreement, but it could also mean the enforced homogeneity of a system that has simply run out of tolerance for dissent. The song does not say. It cannot say, because it has never grappled with the question of mechanism: how any of this comes about, what it looks like in practice, who arbitrates it, and who pays when it goes wrong.

What the Song is… + Isn’t

None of this is to say “Imagine” should be condemned or forgotten. As poetry, as a lament against unnecessary cruelty, or even as an expression of the genuine and permanent human longing for something better, it is moving and real. It works on those terms.

However, it fails when we take it as a serious proposal about how human beings actually live and what peace actually requires. On those terms, it is a seductive evasion: emotionally resonant, philosophically thin, and absolutely protected from scrutiny by the very sincerity that makes it so appealing.

The sharpest version of the critique is this: “Imagine” assumes that if you erase the structures within which people fight, you erase the reasons they fight. That is a comforting thought. It is also, by any serious accounting of human nature, untrue.

What we need is not the abolition of imperfect institutions but the cultivation of the harder, slower, and much less photogenic work of living inside the existing one better: with more justice, more forgiveness, more restraint, more moral seriousness. That vision is less singable. And it asks more of us; it takes seriously what the song prefers to imagine away: that the problem, in the end, lives not in our structures but in ourselves.

Human Nobility + Sacrifice

I want to examine the line “Nothing to kill or die for” a little more deeply. Perhaps no line in the song reveals its moral hollowness more completely than this. Lennon presents the idea as liberation: a world so perfected that sacrifice becomes unnecessary. What he does not acknowledge is that a world in which nothing is worth dying for is also a world in which no one is worth dying for. The willingness to lay down one’s life for a child, for a friend, for the defenseless, or for truth under tyranny is not a symptom of the world’s dysfunction. It is one of the highest possible expressions of human love.

“Greater love has no one than this,” the Gospel of John tells us, “than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The instinct to place something or someone above your own survival is the precise opposite of the selfishness of Lennon’s vision. His utopia insidiously inverts it.

In a world with nothing to kill or die for, the only life guaranteed absolute protection is your own. And that is not the dream of a peacemaker. That is the dream of a man who has decided, without quite admitting it, that nothing beyond himself is finally worth the cost. Dressed in the language of universal brotherhood, it is one of the most self-enclosed visions in the popular canon.

It is no coincidence that this flavor of utopia, which dissolves every obligation that might demand genuine sacrifice, has always found its warmest welcome on the political left, where the nobility of self-giving tends to be rebranded as an injustice to be corrected rather than the highest virtue to be honored.

Why Hasan Piker and David Duke are two sides of the same bigoted coin

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.”

But when the same eliminationist energy is dressed in a designer hoodie, broadcast from a high-end gaming chair, or couched in the academic language of “decolonization” and “liberation,” we hesitate. We are told that a Twitch streamer with millions of followers or a mainstream political commentator is “different.” We are told that because they don’t use the specific vocabulary of the 1940s, or because they claim to be “fighting for the oppressed,” they belong to a different category of human being.

This is a dangerous category error. It mistakes a difference in degree—style, reach, and social status—for a difference in kind.

The Eliminationist Floor

At the heart of our most vital social taboos is a simple “tripwire”: the rejection of eliminationist bigotry. By “eliminationist,” we mean rhetoric that reduces a collective group of people to a biological or moral pestilence that must be removed, silenced, or “dealt with” for society to function.

When David Duke speaks of a racial threat, the eliminationist intent is overt. But when Hasan Piker describes those with whom he disagrees as “inbred” or “rabid pigs,” or when he glorifies the “heroism” of Hamas—an organization whose very charter is built on the literal elimination of Jews—the intent is no less present. The difference is merely the aesthetic. One uses the language of the “master race”; the other uses the “vernacular of resistance.” But if the end goal of your rhetoric is a reality where millions of people are subjected to genocide, expelled, or stripped of their humanity, you are not a “different kind” of person than the man in the hood. You are simply a more popular version of him.

The “Laundering” Fallacy

We must also confront how this bigotry is sanitized for the mainstream. This is the process of information laundering: the act of taking a radioactive idea from the fringe and passing it through the hands of a “respectable” proxy until the public can no longer see its original, toxic source.

The standard defense for this laundering is the phrase: “I don’t agree with everything he says.” In the context of eliminationist bigotry, this is not a defense; it is a confession of moral cowardice. To be a journalist or a civic leader is to have the courage to name the “tripwire.” If you platform a bigot, you have a professional obligation to state, explicitly, which of their hateful taboos you oppose. If you refuse to name the bigotry—if you treat it as a mere “difference of opinion” in a wider conversation—you are not conducting an interview; you are providing a sanitation service.

The Partisan Pass: The Utility Trap

This failure is a bipartisan affliction. We see it in the mainstream defense of Piker, where candidates for high office campaign alongside him because “he talks to the young voters we need.” We saw it when Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation defended Tucker Carlson as a “close friend” even as Carlson laundered the views of extremists like Nick Fuentes. We see it in the continued alliance between Vice President Vance and Carlson, where popularity is treated as a substitute for character.

When a movement decides that the degree of a surrogate’s popularity outweighs the kind of their rhetoric, it is dismantling its own immune system. This pursuit of “energy” is a strategic hallucination. While a candidate might gain the loud enthusiasm of a fringe audience, they do so at the cost of the stable support of the moderate middle. Just as a previous generation of conservatives recognized that one could not be “a little bit friendly” with David Duke without becoming morally compromised, today’s civil society must apply the same standard to those who normalize Piker or Carlson.

The Distinction of Dissent

It is important to clarify that this is not a demand for ideological uniformity. One can be a fierce critic of Zionism or a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights—as seen in the work of thinkers like Shadi Hamid or the high-stakes interviewing of Piers Morgan—without crossing into eliminationist bigotry.

While I may disagree with their specific conclusions or the “degree” to which they challenge their guests, Hamid and Morgan remain on the right side of the “kind” distinction. They do not glorify organizations committed to mass slaughter, nor do they use the language of dehumanization to describe an entire ethno-religious group. They operate within a framework of civic discourse where the humanity of “the other” is a baseline, not a debatable concession. They prove that it is entirely possible to be a rigorous dissenter without becoming a taboo-breaker. The difference between a Shadi Hamid and a Hasan Piker is not just a matter of opinion; it is a fundamental difference in the kind of world they are willing to validate.

Conclusion: The Duty of Civil Society

This is not a call for state censorship. As a free speech absolutist, I believe the state has no business deciding who can speak. But civil society has every business deciding whom we respect, whom we fund, and whom we allow to represent our values.

The “taboo” is the only thing that separates a civilization from a mob. It is the invisible floor that allows us to have radical disagreements without descending into dehumanization. When that floor is breached, it is the duty of the community—the donors, the voters, and the peers—to enforce the boundary. We must stop being distracted by the costumes of hatred. Whether it is a hood, a suit, or a ring light, the kind remains the same.

To save our culture of discourse, we must be willing to defend its borders. We do this by recognizing that some ideas are not merely wrong in degree, but incompatible in kind—and by holding the line to protect the moral floor upon which a free society must stand.

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.

In reality, these are symptoms of a single, terminal pathology: the elevation of resentment over civic fidelity. For years, radicals have dictated the frame, forcing us into policy debates that mask a deeper indictment against the existence of the United States. To defeat these movements, we must move the fight to their greatest vulnerability. It’s their anti-Americanism, stupid.

The Inevitable Conclusion of Resentment

This radicalization is the fruit of a “long march through the institutions.” By installing a simplistic oppressor vs. oppressed binary as the default lens in our schools and media, we have traded critical thinking for tribal resentment.

When you label Western liberal democracy as the primary engine of global oppression, “Death to America” is not a fringe deviation; it is the inevitable logical conclusion. You cannot spend years teaching a generation that their foundations are irredeemably tainted and then act shocked when they chant for the collapse of the structure.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Demagogic leaders weaponized this rot for quick influence, but history shows they cannot steer the fire once it’s lit. Robespierre was devoured by his own Terror, and modern leaders who try to “deal” with the establishment are often purged by the very base they radicalized.

Successful moderation is an historical freak occurrence—like George Wallace’s post-assassination-attempt repentance. We cannot wait for a “life-changing event” to moderate today’s radicals. In a world of algorithmic outrage, these leaders cannot lead; they can only run fast enough to stay ahead of the mob, or be devoured by it.

Tactical Acceleration: Forcing the Choice

We should not fear this escalation; we should accelerate it. We must force these movements to reach their logical conclusion as quickly as possible. When the illiberal fringes are forced to loudly declare “death to America,” the “strategic ambiguity” used by mainstream politicians vanishes.

This is not an attempt to incite the fringe, but to strip their camouflage. Transparency is a pro-social value; strategic ambiguity is a pro-radical value. By forcing every activist, pundit, and politician to get off the fence and choose a side, we gain the clarity needed to know who seeks to improve our nation and who seeks to burn it down.

Two Faces of Anti-Americanism

We must be clear-eyed about the anti-Americanism on both fringes, even as they manifest differently.

On the far left, the anti-Americanism is often explicit: they burn the flag and chant for our destruction. We should appreciate their honesty and respond with the social ostracism they earn.

On the far right, anti-Americanism is often deceptively positioned as a defense of America. We must distinguish between three distinct threats:

1. The Taboo Violators: The Nazis and white supremacists who march for a racial nation. They claim patriotism while violating the fundamental constitutional values of liberty and equality for all.
2. The Norm-Breakers: Those willing to flout laws or constitutional due process in a “zero-sum,” adversarial game to defeat the other side.
3. The Sanitizers: The politicians and pundits who don’t cross the taboo line themselves but coddle these groups to appeal to their energy and votes.

We must be firm: the process is the country. If you destroy the Constitution to “save” the nation, you have saved a geography but killed the America. There is no “necessary evil” that involves destroying the foundation you claim to protect.

The Framework of Accountability

To restore our society, we need a framework to determine who should face direct social ostracism and who should have their moral credibility harmed. This isn’t about the subjective label of “un-American”; it is about anti-American hostility.

• Tier 1: The Civic Taboo. Some lines are uncrossable. Cheering for dead American soldiers, advocating for a racial ethno-state, or explicit “death to America” rhetoric are violations of the civic peace. Those who cross this line—and those who explicitly sanitize or defend them—should face professional and social ostracism. This is the enforcement of a universal moral floor.
• Tier 2: Illiberal Means. This applies to the “norm-breakers.” When a leader argues for policy ends by flouting the law or the Constitution, they forfeit their standing as a credible defender of the American project.
• Tier 3: The Enablers. We judge leaders by who they allow in their tent. A politician who associates with Tier 1 or Tier 2 radicals must make it undeniably clear that they do not subscribe to those views. There must be no confusion amongst their audience that they find such views acceptable. If they fail to draw that line, their moral credibility must be systematically discredited.

The Voter’s Dilemma

I recognize the dilemma we face. Our current system is so corrupted that almost nobody is fully immune to these pressures. In most races, politicians play a “smart” game, attempting to appeal to the middle without losing the hardcore partisans.

I don’t want to tell you which fringe is definitely “worse.” Both are existential threats. What I ask is that you assess candidates based on this question: Who is more likely to hold firm and resist the anti-American extremists on their own fringe? There is no reliable heuristic that one political party is better than the other in this regard; it is a candidate-by-candidate assessment. Your vote should go to the leader with the courage to maintain what you believe should be the moral boundaries of their own “big tent.”

Drawing the Line

We are drifting toward the extremes because moderates have failed to draw an explicit line. We can no longer let them straddle it. We must pressure them with a simple message: “You must align with the true defenders of America and our Constitution, or you will align with those who seek its destruction.”

The faster the fringes make their anti-Americanism explicit, the faster candidates will be forced to choose. This is not a partisan purity test, but the restoration of a universal civic floor. If your side cannot survive without the support of those who cheer for our nation’s downfall or the subversion of its laws, then your side has already lost.

You can hate our policies, but you cannot hate our existence and expect a seat at the table. By exposing anti-Americanism as the Achilles’ heel of these movements, we force a choice: Are you for America or against it?

It’s their anti-Americanism, stupid.

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:

They, the Islamic regime murderers, blind women. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Physically.

Eyes destroyed. Faces targeted. Lives split into before and after. And still—the outrage is not over the act.

It’s over the word. The word is “gouge.” People recoil. Too harsh. Too aggressive. Too much. But what exactly is too much? The word? Or the truth it refuses to dilute?

This is where courage begins. Because it takes real courage to make a mural like this.

Not the kind people celebrate on panels or in galleries. Not the kind that gets applause.

The other kind. The kind where the room goes quiet. The kind where people who supported you yesterday suddenly step back. The kind where you realize—very quickly—who is willing to stand in truth, and who isn’t.

And here is the part no one talks about:

When you make art like this, most people become cowards. They don’t say it out loud. They don’t confront you directly. They just soften. They hedge. They rephrase. They suggest you tone it down.

Not because they don’t see it. But because they don’t have the courage to say it.

For years, reports from organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented what happens in Iran when people rise up. Security forces fire at close range. Faces. Eyes. Heads. Doctors have described it. Witnesses have confirmed it. Women have endured it.

This is not speculation. This is not exaggeration. This is reality.

And still—people want softer language. Safer language. Language that allows them to nod without feeling. Language that keeps everything just distant enough.

But the 27th mural refuses distance. Because, after 26 murals, you understand something:

You can hide behind beauty. You can hide behind symbolism. You can hide behind words that sound powerful but don’t actually say anything.

And when you stop hiding—when you say it plainly—that’s when the courage is tested. Not just yours. Everyone’s.

Raheleh stands at the center. Not as an idea. Not as a symbol you can reinterpret. She confronts you.

The bird covers her eye—not to beautify the image, but to sharpen it.

To force the question:

What does it mean to lose your sight for standing up? And what does it mean for us—watching from a distance—if we are more disturbed by the word than by the act?

Courage is not loud. It doesn’t announce itself.

It shows up in moments like this—when you refuse to soften the language. When you refuse to edit the truth. When you refuse to make it easier for people to look away.

And, in those moments, something else becomes clear:

Most people won’t stand with you. Not fully. Not when it costs something.

They will say they support you—as long as the message is abstract. As long as it’s poetic. As long as it doesn’t force them to take a position.

But the moment the message becomes direct—the moment it becomes undeniable—they step back.

And, suddenly, you’re alone with the truth.

This mural is that moment. Not just for the viewer. For the artist. For everyone around it.

There is another word that gets used to shut down conversations: “Islamophobia.”

But a phobia is fear of the unknown. What do you call it when someone speaks from experience? From being born into it. From knowing it. From seeing it up close.

You can disagree. But you don’t get to dismiss reality with a label. Not when the stakes are this high.

This is now a matter of life or death.

And again—this is where courage divides the room. Because it’s easier to repeat a word than to confront a truth.

It’s easier to stay silent than to risk being misunderstood. It’s easier to soften than to stand firm.

But this mural does not soften. It does not bend. It does not negotiate with comfort.

If the word “gouge” makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why. Is it because it’s wrong? Or because it’s right enough to make you feel something you don’t want to feel?

Art evolves. If it’s real, it has to. It becomes sharper. More direct. Less concerned with approval. More concerned with truth.

The first mural opened the conversation. The 27th mural removes the filter.

And, with that, something else becomes unavoidable:

Courage is lonely. Because, when truth gets sharper, support gets quieter.

You can criticize this mural. You can reject it. You can call it “too much.” But you cannot say you don’t understand it.

Because, this time, the message is not hidden:

Stop softening reality. Stop hiding behind language. And have the courage to see what is actually happening.

This is not decoration. This is not diplomacy. This is a wall built on truth—and the willingness to stand in it, even when no one else will.

Thank you to Frank Gaffney for having the courage to raise this banner in Austin Texas on April 7, 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.

No explanation. No mechanism for appeal. No recognition of what has actually been lost.

We are often told that social media is trivial, interchangeable, even corrosive. But that judgment tends to come from those whose lives are already rich with accessible, physical connection. For others, those whose worlds have narrowed due to illness, caregiving, or circumstance, these platforms are not distractions. They are lifelines.

I am one of those people.

For years, my online presence was a space of advocacy, challenging false narratives about Israel, and confronting anti-Semitism, work that became even more urgent in the aftermath of October 7. But it was never only that. It was also where I built continuity, conversations that unfolded over time, relationships that deepened, a rhythm of showing up and being seen.

When my account disappeared, what vanished with it was not vanity, it was substance. A body of work grounded in history and context. It was a sustained effort to counter distortion; alongside it, something equally irreplaceable: my community.

These were not abstract connections. In a life shaped by my husband’s serious illness, where mobility is limited and unpredictability constant, that digital world became something profoundly real. It was where I participated in life beyond constraint. It was where I still felt present. Connection. Community. Continuity. 

At first, I was angry… angry at the lack of transparency… angry at the absence of accountability… angry at a system that can erase years of connection without explanation, as though both the work and the relationships behind it were disposable.

But anger, without recourse, does not hold. It settles into something quieter. Heavier. A steady awareness of absence.

The threads of connection we build over time are fragile. When they are cut abruptly, they cannot simply be reconnected elsewhere. People scatter. Algorithms move on. The burden of rebuilding falls entirely on the person who has already lost something they never chose to relinquish.

This is the asymmetry at the heart of our digital lives.

Platforms invite deep investment—emotional, social, even professional—while retaining the unilateral power to sever those investments without meaningful explanation. Users are expected to abide by rules that are often inconsistently enforced, while the platforms themselves operate without comparable standards of transparency or accountability.

These spaces are increasingly shaped by forces that exploit that very lack of accountability: bots, coordinated campaigns, and bad actors who manipulate narratives and erode historical context. Those who engage seriously, who challenge, contextualize, or dissent, often find themselves silenced.

Perhaps what cuts deepest is the invisibility of this loss.

There is no shared language for it. No acknowledgment that something meaningful has been taken. No recognition that, for many, these spaces are not secondary to “real life”; they are where life happens.

Especially for those whose physical worlds have narrowed.

This is not just about one account. It is about a system in which entire social ecosystems can vanish in an instant, with little recourse and even less regard for the human cost.

If we are to take seriously the role these platforms now play in our lives, then we must also take seriously the responsibilities that come with that role. Transparency should not be optional. Due process should not be elusive. The people who build their lives, piece by piece, within these spaces should not be treated as disposable.

When these digital bridges collapse, what follows is not just silence.

It is isolation.

And that silence is anything but virtual.

Picture the devastation not as a headline, but as a moment that unfolds in real time: a girls’ school in Iran, filled with ordinary life—chalk dust in the air, whispered conversations between friends, and the quiet rhythm of a day that should have been unremarkable. Suddenly, it is all shattered by an explosion that turns desks into splinters and futures into lost promises. In the aftermath, there is the chaos we have learned to recognize all too well: smoke curling into the sky, parents arriving in panic and rescuers digging through concrete with bleeding hands, hoping against reason to find someone still alive beneath the ruin. And before grief is even allowed to settle into something human and recognizable, the narrative hardens, accusations circulate, and outrage ignites with incredible speed.

Within hours, voices across the political left demand that the United States and Israel halt their campaign against Iran, insisting that any action which results in civilian death, especially the death of children, is morally indefensible and must be abandoned immediately. The left attempts to present this response as compassion, even as moral clarity, but, beneath its urgency, lies a deeper and more troubling logic, one that mirrors a phenomenon long recognized in another context. This is not simply protest; it is an insidious geopolitical adaptation of the Heckler’s Veto, in which the presence of suffering (often shaped, manipulated, or even deliberately engineered by violent regimes) is used to silence those attempting to stop the root cause of the violence in the first place.

What makes this dynamic so powerful is not merely its emotional force, but the way it bypasses the questions that actually determine moral responsibility. The argument doesn’t linger on who initiated the conflict, or on the deliberate strategies employed by regimes like Iran and their proxies, who have repeatedly embedded military infrastructure within civilian populations precisely because they understand how such images will be received around the world. Instead, it collapses all complexity into a single, devastating (and false) assertion: if innocent people are dying, then those who are fighting must stop. In doing so, it transforms tragedy into a veto, granting moral authority not to those seeking to end violence, but to those who have made violence inseparable from civilian life.

This is not an abstract concern or a theoretical pattern; it is a strategy that has been refined over years of political protest and conflict. Organizations like Hamas, and increasingly Iranian-backed forces throughout the region, have demonstrated a consistent willingness to place civilians directly in harm’s way, not despite the risks, but precisely because of them. Command centers are constructed beneath hospitals, weapons are stored in schools, and fighters operate from within densely populated neighborhoods, all with the understanding that any response will produce images capable of shifting global opinion. In this environment, the human shield becomes more than a physical barrier; it becomes a political instrument, one that converts the moral instincts of democratic societies into leverage against their own efforts to act righteously.

The result is an inversion that would be almost unthinkable if it were not so familiar. The regime or organization that creates the conditions for civilian suffering by embedding itself within those civilians, then benefits when that suffering occurs, because the outrage it generates is directed outward, toward those attempting to destroy the threat. The question shifts from “Why were civilians placed in danger?” to “How dare you respond at all?” and, in that shift, responsibility is obscured, diffused, and ultimately reassigned.

Nowhere is this inversion more apparent than in the uneven distribution of moral outrage that accompanies it. When the United States or Israel conducts military operations, often under constraints that attempt to minimize civilian casualties, any resulting tragedy becomes a focal point for global condemnation. Yet when Iran’s regime executes its own citizens, crushes dissent with lethal force, or funds militias that deliberately target civilians across the region, the response from many of the same voices is noticeably absent. 

If civilian lives are the true measure of moral urgency, then the question becomes unavoidable: why does that urgency not extend equally to the tens of thousands who have suffered under Iran’s own brutality, or to the civilians deliberately targeted by its proxies? Why is grief so immediate and forceful when democratic nations act, yet so restrained when authoritarian regimes perpetrate violence as a matter of policy? The answer is difficult to ignore. The outrage that fuels the modern Heckler’s Veto is not distributed according to the scale of suffering; it is directed in ways that exert pressure on those most likely to respond to it: the parties who are acting with the greatest moral authority.

We saw this pattern unfold with painful clarity in the aftermath of October 7, when Hamas carried out one of the most deliberate and brutal attacks on civilians in recent history. The initial horror of that day with families murdered in their homes, children taken hostage, and entire communities devastated, briefly united global attention around the terrorists. Yet as Israel moved to dismantle Hamas’s operational capacity, the focus shifted with remarkable speed, away from the intentional nature of the original violence and toward the consequences of stopping it. Because Hamas operated within civilian populations, critics argued that a sustained military response would inevitably produce unacceptable harm, and therefore should be abandoned altogether.

But embedded within that argument is a precedent that extends far beyond any single conflict. If the use of human shields can effectively prevent retaliation, then the most ruthless actors acquire the greatest protection, and the incentive to exploit civilians actually increases. The logic does not discourage brutality; it rewards it. It does not protect the innocent; it places them in greater danger over time by ensuring that those who threaten them can continue to operate with relative impunity.

The same underlying structure appears, in less dramatic but still consequential ways, in domestic debates, where the possibility of harm is often elevated to a level that precludes action entirely. Policies related to law enforcement, energy development, or economic growth are frequently contested not only on their merits, but on the grounds that they might produce negative outcomes, even when the failure to act carries its own, often more severe consequences. In each case, the argument functions less as a weighing of trade-offs and more as a veto, asserting that because harm cannot be eliminated, action itself must be avoided.

Yet the real world does not offer the luxury of consequence-free decisions. Inaction is not neutral; it is itself a choice, one that allows existing conditions, whether they involve criminal activity, economic stagnation, or geopolitical aggression, to persist and, in many cases, to worsen. When applied to international conflict, this principle becomes even more pronounced. To refrain from confronting regimes that actively destabilize regions, fund violence, and suppress their own populations is not to preserve peace, but to defer and often magnify the costs of addressing those threats later.

To collapse those distinctions, or to apply pressure exclusively to the side attempting to restrain violence, is not an act of principled neutrality. It is a form of moral asymmetry that shapes outcomes in predictable ways, granting strategic advantage to those least constrained by ethical considerations.

The images from that shattered school in Iran are real, and they demand a response: not only emotional, but intellectual and moral. They should prompt grief, anger, and a renewed commitment to protecting innocent life. But they should also prompt a harder question, one that resists the immediacy of outrage: who created the conditions in which that tragedy became possible, and what would it mean to prevent those conditions from persisting?

If the answer to that question is continually deferred—if the instance of suffering is used to halt the very efforts aimed at dismantling the systems that produce it—then the result will not be fewer tragedies, but more of them, repeated across time and geography.

The Heckler’s Veto, whether expressed through shouted disruption or through the strategic amplification of suffering, ultimately rewards those who can generate the most effective falsely moral pressure, regardless of their role in creating the underlying harm. To yield to it in the context of global conflict is to allow violence, not justice, to set the terms of engagement.

And if that becomes the standard, then the future will belong not to those who seek to reduce and ultimately eliminate suffering, but to those most willing to use it.

Why Greg Lukianoff, Rikki Schlott, and FIRE’s crusade against “Cancel Culture” disarms society against its worst impulses and incentives

I was an early and eager convert to the gospel of The Canceling of the American Mind. In the aftermath of October 7, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s work felt like a necessary sanity check. They pinned down exactly how a toxic “cancel culture” allowed radical “oppressor vs. oppressed” ideologies to hijack our institutions. Their work personally moved me to stop whispering; it gave me the push to lean into taboo topics where one-sided, radical perspectives were spreading without a hint of pushback.

But lately, that revelation has curdled. I’ve come to see their approach as fundamentally lopsided. While they’ve built a brilliant case for a “Free Speech Culture,” their nods to “freedom of association” feel like anecdotal afterthoughts. By demanding a near-absolute resistance to social consequences, Lukianoff, Schlott, and FIRE are effectively calling for unilateral disarmament. 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.

1. The Trap of “Suicidal Empathy”

There is a massive difference between granting grace and granting immunity. We should have empathy for the person who stumbles into a sensitive “minefield” or makes an honest mistake. But a “Free Speech Culture” that drifts into suicidal empathy—a virtue so detached from reality that it refuses to penalize those who show a clear, unrepentant intent to harm—is a danger to itself.

The current debate is stuck because we’ve conflated social jail with social death. Cancel culture is a mob seeking “social death”—the total, permanent destruction of a person’s life, often over clumsy or negligent behavior, or an offense signaled by a hyper-sensitive fringe. That is cruel. But the response shouldn’t be to abolish the police.

A healthy society needs a “social jail”—a situational ostracism for those who violate our universal moral taboos. This isn’t about political tribalism; it’s about a shared refusal to tolerate the rejection of someone else’s humanity or the endorsement of discrimination and harm. We need to distinguish between a clumsy mistake and a revealed intent to destroy. One deserves grace; the other—once confirmed after a fair chance to pivot is rejected—requires a stay in social jail.

2. The Rationalist Fallacy

The central flaw here is the cozy belief that bigotry is just a debate. It isn’t. Overt, hateful bigotry is rarely a set of “propositions” looking for a counter-argument; it is an assertion of power.

Greg often asks, “Am I safer for knowing less about what people think?” Of course not—I want to know exactly who the bigots are. But we can monitor the fire without letting it burn in the living room. Information is for awareness; social consequences are for protection. Granting an unrepentant bigot the same professional standing and platform as those who uphold our shared humanity isn’t “openness”—it’s a subsidy. Suggesting that “more speech” is the only remedy for eliminationist rhetoric is like suggesting the cure for a physical assault is “more movement.”

This is the Paradox of Tolerance: if you extend unlimited tolerance to the intolerant, the tolerant end up destroyed. We have to reserve the right to refuse “debate” with those whose starting premise is to set the debating floor on fire.

3. Stigma as a Principled Necessity

“Cancel culture” is a clumsy term for a broken process, but we can’t let it kill an essential social function: the taboo. Cancel Culture is the illiberal mob—erratic, performative, and often focused on minor infractions. But a Social Taboo is a shared moral agreement that certain behaviors—overt hateful bigotry, dehumanization, or the endorsement of discrimination and harm—are simply beyond the pale.

We need a principled approach to stigma that is resistant to the excesses of the mob. This means the lines we draw must be non-tribal and based on universal standards rather than shifting political winds. History shows that such stigma is more effective than “more speech” could ever be. The KKK wasn’t defeated by a superior syllogism. It was marginalized because society made the hood a source of unbearable social shame. We didn’t “debate” the hood off the Klansmen’s heads; we made it too heavy to wear.

4. Beyond Jurisdictional Confusion

FIRE often argues they are merely protecting the legal rights of public employees. That’s fine for a courtroom. But their cultural advocacy goes much further, pushing for a universal norm where we never use professional punishment.

By blurring the lines between legal protections and cultural norms, we’ve created a vacuum. We need to stop pretending that “freedom of association” only protects the speaker. It must also protect the community that wants to exercise its own freedom to dissociate from hate. The solution to bad standards isn’t no standards—it’s finding a principled, consensus-based way to draw a line in the sand.

My Asks for Greg and Rikki

If this movement is going to lead us through the current crisis, its leaders need to clarify the boundaries:

• For Greg and FIRE: Where is the line between legal defense and cultural license? Does a private business owner act “illiberally” when they fire an unrepentant bigot, or an employee who endorses political violence, to protect their staff and their values? At what point does bigotry stop being a “viewpoint” and start being professional misconduct?
• For Rikki: How do you personally assess the morality of the people with whom you associate? If you judged someone to be dangerous or unrepentantly hateful, would you remain in their circle? Would you stay friends with David Duke’s golf buddy, or would you finally draw a line?

Conclusion

A truly free society doesn’t require us to be indifferent to the destruction of our fellow citizens’ dignity. We shouldn’t use the law to silence hate, but we absolutely must use our social power to marginalize it.

If we dial back our retributive impulses against hate entirely, we aren’t creating a culture of free speech. We are simply leaving the gate unlatched for those who would use our own virtues to burn the house down.

We are raising a generation in a country that can no longer disagree without trying to destroy someone.

You can hear it in the way ordinary conflict now escalates—how quickly a debate becomes a moral inquest, how readily a person is reduced to a label, how easily the language of “harm” and “safety” is recruited to justify punishment rather than persuasion. Once that frame takes hold, restraint starts to look like weakness, and the slow work of argument is replaced by the faster satisfactions of denunciation and exile.

Everyone has a theory for why this civic fever has spiked. Social media turns outrage into currency and nuance into a liability. Political polarization tells us every question is existential. Economic anxiety keeps the nervous system permanently lit. Local institutions that once trained us in the boring, necessary art of living among people we did not choose have thinned, leaving us alone with our feeds and our factions.

All of that is real. But it is also incomplete, because it ignores the most stubborn fact about civilization: civility is not automatic. It is formed.

And one of the most powerful instruments ever devised for forming it—especially in the young—is great literature. Not because literature makes people “nice,” but because it enlarges the reader’s capacity to imagine other interior lives, to hold complexity without panic, to see a human being where a slogan would prefer an enemy. This essay is not an argument against diverse reading lists. It is an argument against something more specific and more corrosive: a pedagogical narrowing—an interpretive monoculture—that increasingly trains students to approach texts, and then people, primarily through a single template of group power dynamics. 

A society that trains the young to see only power should not be surprised when power becomes the language everyone reaches for.

Civility is learned, or it is lost

A pluralistic society is not sustained by rules alone. It depends on citizens who have learned difficult habits: to restrain retaliation when it is tempting, to interpret others charitably when it is inconvenient, to separate a bad idea from a bad person, to admit uncertainty without collapsing into cynicism, to tolerate ambiguity without demanding a scapegoat.

Those habits do not arrive by instinct at eighteen. They are learned—by families when families are strong, by communities when communities are thick, and by schools whether schools intend to teach them or not. Schools cannot neutralize every cultural force that pushes toward dehumanization, but they can strengthen a counterforce. They can create a place where the inner life is taken seriously, where mixed motives are expected, where moral growth remains imaginable, where “opponent” does not automatically mean “enemy.”

That is why the curriculum matters, not as a partisan battleground, but as a site of formation. What we repeatedly ask students to practice is what they become good at.

Literature is our most reliable training ground for the interior life

We understand training when the stakes are obvious. We put pilots in simulators because the cost of learning midair is catastrophe. We train surgeons on models because bodies are not practice material. We run case studies and controlled drills because we know that when reality carries consequences, practice matters.

But when it comes to the highest-stakes human skill of all—living among other human beings without hatred, cruelty, or the reflex to punish—we often behave as though practice is optional. We throw young people into social and political conflict and hope they’ll develop wisdom by instinct, while the surrounding culture trains the opposite: speed over patience, certainty over curiosity, denunciation over understanding.

Literature is not the only way to encounter other lives, but it remains one of the few places where you can inhabit a mind in extended time, watch motives form, see rationalizations assemble themselves like armor, feel consequences ripple outward. A video can show you what someone did; an argument can show you what someone claims; a story invites you into why someone became the kind of person who does such things and says such things.

This is not merely a poetic claim. Researchers who study social cognition have tried to measure what fiction reading can do to perspective-taking and “theory of mind.” The findings are modest and debated, but suggestive: a large pre-registered meta-analysis reported small cognitive benefits from reading fiction in experimental studies (and explicitly notes the field remains under debate. And when we zoom out beyond fiction and into empathy itself, there is robust evidence that empathy is positively associated with prosocial behavior in general populations—again, not as a magic lever, but as a meaningful relationship.

Even if you set the statistics aside, the mechanism is plain. Reading is not passive. You don’t simply receive a narrative; you collaborate with it. You build the world inside your mind. You supply tone and pace, the weight of a pause, the way a room feels at night. In that collaboration, your imagination becomes an engine of empathy. The training happens inside you precisely because you are not being commanded to sympathize—you are being invited to inhabit.

Narrative is what keeps you inside long enough to change

This is why “empathy training” so often fails. People can smell moral instruction. They resist it, or comply outwardly while remaining unchanged inwardly. A lecture tells you what to think; a checklist tells you what to say; neither reliably rewires reflex.

A strong narrative does something subtler and more powerful. It doesn’t ask your permission to form you. It lures you in through the magnets of attention—curiosity, suspense, dread, beauty, voice. It makes you care what happens next, and once you care, you remain inside another person’s world long enough for the hard work of perspective-taking to occur: you begin to understand how a choice makes sense to the chooser. Not to approve it. Not to excuse it. To understand it.

That distinction—understanding without surrendering judgment—is the foundation of adult citizenship. You cannot disagree well with someone whose mind you refuse to enter even briefly; you will argue with a caricature, and you will punish a phantom.

Literature trains the opposite posture. It gives you practice dwelling with complexity until you can no longer pretend that human beings are simple. A reader can follow Macbeth into ambition and feel its intoxicating logic even while seeing the ruin it brings. A reader can inhabit Ellison’s invisible man and feel how a society can both ignore a person and use him, all while congratulating itself on virtue. A reader can live with Okonkwo’s pride in Things Fall Apart—its dignity and terror—and recognize how a man can be destroyed by the very virtue he worships.

Without narrative, you can teach concepts. With narrative, you expand what a person can imagine. And what a person can imagine determines what kind of citizen they become.

What mercy looks like when a story earns it

Consider the scene in Les Misérables that never leaves you once you’ve read it. Jean Valjean, newly released from prison, has learned the world’s lesson: take what you can, because the world will take from you. He steals from the bishop who shelters him. He is caught. The police drag him back, expecting condemnation.

Instead, the bishop gives him the silver and tells him—quietly, firmly—that he forgot the candlesticks too. Mercy in that moment is not sentimental. It is terrifying strength. It breaks the script. It makes a new kind of life possible.

That scene doesn’t merely teach “be kind.” It shows mercy as civilization’s last line of defense against the logic of permanent condemnation. And because the story has built the moral world so completely, mercy lands not as a slogan but as a force—something weight-bearing enough to compete with shame, strong enough to turn a life.

If we want fewer enemies and more fellow citizens, we should want students to carry images like that into adult life.

This isn’t a Western canon argument; it’s a human one

If great literature forms moral imagination because it tells the truth about human beings, then the curriculum should prove that truth belongs to no single civilization. Gilgamesh wrestles with grief and the limits of power. The Bhagavad Gitastages a moral crisis so vivid it still burns: duty, fear, conscience, the agony of acting when every option carries pain. The Tale of Genji moves through longing and beauty and moral cost with unsettling precision. Chinua Achebe gives us dignity and collision, pride and tragedy, not as propaganda but as human weather.

Different worlds, different gods, different languages—yet the same civilizing work: learning to see persons, not cartoons.

So this is not “keep Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare.” It’s: keep Shakespeare because he is an anatomist of envy and guilt, tenderness and self-deception—and because those forces still blow through our lives. Keep him, and keep the others, and add more giants beyond the West, because a serious curriculum is not a museum. It is a moral and intellectual training ground.

The real problem isn’t diversity; it’s narrowing

Here intellectual generosity matters, because defenders of “anti-bias” and “social justice” frameworks are responding to real problems. Many students historically didn’t see themselves in curricula. Literature classes sometimes taught canonical works as though they floated above history, untouched by social reality. Some teachers used “universal themes” as a way to avoid discussing injustice at all. The cure was prescribed for genuine ailments.

But cures can become distortions. The danger is not that teachers acknowledge context, power, or injustice—those are often necessary. The danger is that one lens becomes the lens, a template becomes mandatory, and the student is trained to read every story primarily as a map of identity power, while other kinds of reading—moral, psychological, theological, aesthetic—are treated as secondary, suspect, or irrelevant.

And this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is visible in widely circulated, teacher-facing frameworks packaged as best practice.

Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), for instance, publishes Social Justice Standards divided into four domains—Identity, Diversity, Justice, Action—and describes them as “a road map for anti-bias education” with a structure educators can use to guide curriculum development. Their facilitator materials explicitly train educators in integrating the standards and building implementation goals. 

You can then see these standards and related “equity framework” approaches referenced in district-level curriculum evaluation materials—such as an “Equity Framework for Adopted Curriculum Materials” that lists the Teaching Tolerance/LFJ Social Justice Standards among the resources used to inform curriculum review. You can also see the standards described in school-facing pages within major districts (for example, an LAUSD school page describing them as tools teachers can use to guide curriculum development and administrators to make schools “more just, equitable and safe”).

Meanwhile, teacher-facing publications in mainstream education media explicitly frame ELA as a vehicle for social justice instruction. Rethinking Schools features an essay in which a teacher describes making English classes “a sustained argument against inequality and injustice.” Edutopia offers guidance on developing ELA units where students read about marginalized experiences and explore “systems of oppression” through anchor texts.

None of this proves that every classroom has become a monoculture. It does show that a “power-first” interpretive approach is professionalized and widely circulated. And once it becomes default, a subtle shift follows: texts begin to function less as moral laboratories and more as evidence exhibits; the point of reading becomes less entering another mind and more unmasking a structure. That approach can yield genuine insights. But when it becomes the master lens, it trains suspicion as reflex and reduces people to positions.

A brief note about the “are classics being removed?” question: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and sometimes the change is more about fragmentation than outright disappearance. The Florida Shakespeare controversy in Hillsborough County, for instance, involved plans to teach Shakespeare largely through excerpts rather than full plays amid concerns about state rules and sexual content; subsequent reporting clarified complexities and pushback from state officials, but the episode still illustrates how politicized pressure can reshape what students actually encounter. 

Here the causal chain deserves honesty. We do not yet have clean longitudinal data that traces English-class interpretive habits directly into civic behavior years later. But the bridge is not mystical: fiction reading is linked—modestly—to social cognition; empathy is linked to prosocial behavior; and schools, through what they reward and repeat, shape habits students carry forward. If you repeatedly train students to interpret the world as a battle of domination in which the highest moral act is exposure and the highest civic act is action against enemies, you should not be surprised when that posture appears outside the classroom.

What we should do

If the problem is narrowing, the remedy is not nostalgia. It is breadth, complexity, and pluralism.

1. Re-center great literature as a core and teach whole works when possible. A training ground works only when you stay inside it long enough for it to change you. Excerpts can be useful, but a civilization that increasingly trains students on fragments should not be shocked when their thinking becomes fragmentary. And if reading stamina has declined, that is not an argument to give up; it is an argument to rebuild stamina, the way we rebuild any muscle that has atrophied.
2. Broaden the canon without replacing it with ideology. The answer to a narrow canon was never to build another narrow canon with a different political flag. A serious curriculum can include Shakespeare and Morrison, Achebe and Sophocles, Dickinson and the Gita, Ellison, and Tolstoy—not to satisfy a quota, not to perform virtue, but because the principle is moral depth, aesthetic achievement, and the capacity to tell the truth about human beings.
3. Reject DEI as the organizing ideology for the humanities and replace it with viewpoint pluralism. Keep the moral aim—human dignity, fairness, inclusion—but reject any machinery that turns identity categories into the master structure of reading. Teach multiple lenses: moral, historical, psychological, theological, aesthetic, political. Let them compete. Require evidence. Reward interpretive charity.
4. Build classroom cultures where intellectual humility is safe. “I don’t know” should be treated not as weakness but as the beginning of honest thought. Students should be allowed to revise in public, to discover that changing your mind is not a humiliation ritual but a mark of maturity. The habits we want in civic life—curiosity, restraint, principled disagreement—must be rehearsed somewhere. Schools can be that rehearsal space.
5. Teach the hard parts honestly. Classic texts contain slurs, blind spots, inherited prejudices. Pretending otherwise concedes the classroom to cynicism; preemptively condemning everything teaches students that the past is only a crime scene. The adult approach is guided confrontation—context, moral reasoning, careful discussion of the difference between depicting evil and endorsing it—because this is precisely the kind of work that forms students capable of living in a complicated world without either denial or frenzy.
6. Finally, restore the virtue question as legitimate. After analysis, ask what a story invites a reader to become. Not because schools should preach a single creed, but because every curriculum forms someone, and a civilization that stops asking what kind of people it is producing will eventually learn the answer the hard way.

The stakes are not literary; they are civic

When a culture loses the ability to see opponents as human, it begins to treat them as objects to be managed. It becomes comfortable with cruelty, with permanent condemnation, with force dressed up as righteousness.

The bishop’s gift in Les Misérables is not just a memorable scene. It is a picture of civilization itself: justice that does not forget mercy, truth that does not abandon redemption, moral clarity that still believes a person can change.

So yes—fix the algorithms, repair local institutions, address the economic pressures. But do not ignore the quieter work, the formation work, the work that makes citizens capable of living together.

Turn the empathy machine back on. Put great literature back at the center. And stop teaching our children to read one another as enemies.

Why non-profit oversight needs to be modernized

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

But when non-profits coordinate to dominate public debate, there are virtually no comparable guardrails.

Across media, academia, philanthropy, and government, inter-connected non-profits can align funding, research, messaging, and advocacy in ways that create the appearance of widespread consensus. Dozens of organizations may release similar studies, circulate identical talking points, or launch synchronized campaigns, often backed by the same funding ecosystem. What appears to be independent agreement can instead reflect strategic coordination.

This is how non-profit ecosystems can function like de facto monopolies in the marketplace of ideas. Seemingly separate entities amplify one another across institutions, reinforcing the same conclusions until repetition itself creates legitimacy. Alternative perspectives struggle to gain traction not because they lack merit, but because the dominant narrative already feels settled. Competition becomes compromised.

Non-profits are essential to civic life. Many advance education, public health, and humanitarian causes. But when affiliated entities act in concert while maintaining the appearance of independence, influence expands while accountability diminishes. Power concentrates quietly, without the scrutiny typically applied to corporations or political actors.

Campaigns can take many forms: coordinated research, synchronized media messaging, directed grantmaking, or collaborative advocacy across multiple states. Well-resourced networks can advance initiatives rapidly, sometimes reaching lawmakers or ballot measures before genuine public debate unfolds. What appears to citizens as broad civic alignment may instead reflect the coordinated design of a single network.

These structural dynamics are not confined to any one ideology. From criminal justice reform to immigration, environmental policy, and international affairs, aligned non-profit ecosystems increasingly shape how issues are framed across institutions. When similar narratives appear simultaneously across research centers, media commentary, and advocacy campaigns, it can become difficult to distinguish organic consensus from coordinated amplification. That ambiguity underscores the need for transparency so policymakers and the public can evaluate influence with clarity.

In modern governance, influence functions like currency. Networks that fund research, shape regulation, and advise decision-makers can turn coordination into lasting institutional power: expanded authority, sustained funding, and a central role in shaping policy outcomes. The returns may not resemble corporate profit, but the concentration of power can.

Unlike corporations, non-profit networks operate with minimal oversight. Existing laws such as the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act and the Lobbying Disclosure Act were not designed to address coordinated influence operating across institutions. As a result, organizations with significant sway over funding, regulation, and public debate can remain largely invisible.

Congress should consider a Non-Profit Transparency and Accountability Act applying core anti-trust principles to non-profit networks. A narrowly tailored reform would clarify that tax-exempt status does not shield organizations from oversight when coordinated activity materially affects funding or cross-state decision-making. Such legislation would not restrict advocacy or suppress debate. It would ensure transparency when structurally unified networks operate as concentrated power centers.

The reform rests on two principles: legal accountability for aligned activity affecting governance or funding, and enhanced disclosure so policymakers and the public can identify coordinated action.

Transparency restores integrity to the civic marketplace, the arena where ideas compete for influence. In a healthy democracy, power should be earned through persuasion and open debate, not manufactured through coordinated amplification. When networks are visible, disclosure allows arguments to be judged on their merits.

By modernizing oversight, Congress can ensure that organizations exercising outsized influence over policy and law do so openly and fairly—preserving accountability, protecting democratic discourse, and maintaining public trust while leaving advocacy, debate, and innovation fully intact.

Accountability should follow power wherever it concentrates.

Monopoly power does not disappear simply because it calls itself non-profit.

The enemy has been inside the gates for some time, but now that enemy is in power. They dominate one of two major American political parties and have installed a man who once openly supported Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, et al., as the chief executive of America’s cultural capital. Even now, that man continues to apologize for Islamism à la Sadiq Khan.

There are those who will deny that is the case. Possibly because their ideology demands that they continue to see themselves in an oppressed, dramatically asymmetrical position. Put another way, they have adopted more than just a set of beliefs. Ego itself demands that they view their “oppression” as an absolute reality lest they be forced to call their identity, papery thin as it is, into question.

It might also be true that the enemy understands that maintaining this façade is critical to the total success of their revolution, the stated goal of which is “the total eradication of Western civilization.” Those words are attributable to QUAD, an organization led by Mahmoud Khalil, a close ally of the current mayor of New York City. So, what was once a fifth column (a clandestine movement working from within a society to subvert it) has become a pillar of a new society that seeks to unmake America—first by drowning her spirit in doubt, self-hatred, and division. 

That former fifth column replicates itself in the way such movements always do—by spreading hatred for a conveniently selected other. The “evil” of that other is then used to justify a myriad of actual evils—up to and including acts of terrorism and mass murder. It was the Democratic Party that officially welcomed the Democratic Socialist-Islamist coalition or “red-green alliance” into the American political mainstream during the 2024 presidential election while knowing full well that said alliance is pro-terrorism, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western.

That alliance was allowed to turn the 2024 Democratic National Convention into one massive demonstration against Israel’s war on Hamas—itself a justified response to October 7. “Ceasefire Now” pins and keffiyehs dominated the front row as Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination. Harris even went so far as to promise to force a ceasefire (a move that would have guaranteed Hamas’s survival) should she win the election. Sincere or not, she was pandering to the anti-Jewish wing of her party. The Democrats’ conscious decision to bring the red-green alliance out of the political cold repeats another familiar pattern: that of a seemingly benign political entity joining forces with radicals in order to shore-up their power. Hindenburg did so when he named Hitler chancellor of Germany. In that position, Hitler laid the groundwork for the total takeover of Germany by his Nazi Party.

Said groundwork was laid not just with fiery speeches, but with stochastic terrorism. Brown Shirts became an everyday fixture of German urbania and, in no time at all, they went from being above the law (in the course of openly terrorizing Jewish businesses in the name of their anti-Jewish boycott and without legal repercussions) to becoming the law.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.

Those who recognize that pattern take so-called “homegrown terrorism” more seriously than those who simply view that terrorism as a bug of some new global reality. Here in Seattle, many shrugged their shoulders when it was announced that the city would not prosecute to the full extent of the law 33 individuals who committed close to $1 million in property damage belonging to the University of Washington to “protest” what they call the university’s “complicity in the genocide in Gaza.” Those of us who did not shrug are able to recognize that the Antifa members (self-identified) who face either a charge of criminal trespass or no chargers at all have in connection with the Super UW occupation of UW have enjoyed the protection of the Seattle and Washington State political establishment since at least 2020 when their comrades were allowed to occupy Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, barring law enforcement and emergency services from it for weeks on end. 

The city continued to foster that occupation even while men armed with automatic weapons, some belonging to the John Brown Gun Club and others belonging to a criminal street gang, guarded the perimeter of the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” (CHOP). Those men would eventually shoot and kill a child, mistaking him for a rival gang member. They were caught on video searching for a shell casing in an effort to cover up their crime. The killers were never brought to justice, but a jury did force the City of Seattle to pay the victim’s family $30 million for ceding control of Capitol Hill to their child’s killer. Which brings me to my most important point: in this context, stochastic terrorism serves the purposes of those who wish to dramatically redistribute power and thereby radically reimagine entire socio-political systems by first setting fire to the contract that exists between society and a system of governance that can only lose the confidence of a people when it ceases to provide them with basic security, not to mention an economy that works.

But what are we to make of those who seek to accomplish that redistribution and reimagining from inside the halls of government and who incite the intellectually weak and desperate to acts of political violence while doing what they can to ensure that “protesters” and “activists” will not be prevented from acting in increasingly brazen manners by the police and courts? Too many of us make nothing of them at all because seeing them for what they are requires us to overcome a certain level of denialism and the fear that keeps that denial in place. 

But, were we to make something of them, we would understand that they are not American in any way that matters and should be looked upon in the way General Washington and his men looked upon King George and the army that served British corporate interests perhaps more than it did the British Crown or even in the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer looked upon Hitler and the Reich following his realization that had he and others like him not hidden behind German civility and Christian pacifism during the Nazis’ rise to power, then something could have been done sooner. Before the Brown Shirts overwrote the collective consciousness of Germany, causing her to forget her true intellectual and spiritual heritage, a heritage that included more than one defeat of Rome in battle and the full embrace of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. And the clock that ran out for Bonhoffer (not to act period, but to act soon enough) is running out for American patriots now. No one should be calling for another Operation Valkyrie just yet, but resistance is overdue.

The most effective forms of control rarely begin with force. They begin with narrative.

When a narrative is repeated often enough, especially in emotionally charged environments, it begins to shape how people interpret the world around them. Over time, it can do something even more damaging: isolate individuals from the people who once grounded them, family members, close friends, and trusted communities.

This transformation rarely happens dramatically. It unfolds quietly, through subtle shifts in trust, small seeds of doubt, and the deterioration of shared reality.

Isolation is the mechanism through which influence grows. When people become convinced that those closest to them are misinformed, morally compromised, or incapable of understanding “the truth,” relationships begin to fracture. Conversations that once felt natural grow tense. Topics are avoided. Loved ones measure their words carefully, unsure what might trigger conflict.

Eventually, individuals drift away from the very relationships most capable of challenging or correcting the narratives that they believe.

Many parents today describe a particularly painful version of this dynamic. For generations, children grew up engaging with their parents’ values and perspectives, sometimes agreeing, sometimes rebelling, but usually within a shared framework of dialogue. Increasingly, however, some parents feel the dynamic has inverted. In order to maintain a relationship with their children, they feel pressure to soften or silence their own views.

The fear of losing connection is powerful. Parents avoid certain questions or concerns, to refrain from being perceived as insensitive, ignorant, or morally suspect. Conversations that once encouraged exploration begin to feel like tests of moral alignment.

People who love one another start speaking entirely different languages of interpretation. Facts are filtered through competing narratives. Emotional certainty replaces shared inquiry. The purpose of discussion quietly shifts from understanding to moral positioning.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in conversations about Israel.

For many young people, the primary source of information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not historical scholarship but social media, particularly short-form platforms such as TikTok, where complex geopolitical conflicts are compressed into emotionally charged clips lasting less than a minute.

In that format, nuance disappears. Context is stripped away. Historical timelines spanning more than centuries collapse into slogans.

Within this ecosystem, misinformation spreads easily. Selective video clips, fabricated statistics, and decontextualized images circulate rapidly, often delivered with confident narration that frames them as unquestionable fact. 

Increasingly, artificial intelligence and digital manipulation further blur the lines between documentation and invention.

The effects are not confined to the Internet. They appear in classrooms, friendships, and at family dinners.

College campuses have long served as arenas for intellectual exploration, places where students encounter difficult ideas and learn to evaluate evidence critically. Ideally, they function as forums of curiosity and debate. Yet discussions surrounding Israel have become increasingly without challenge in academic environments. 

The consequences do not stop at campus gates.

They ripple outward into families already struggling to communicate across widening generational and informational divides.

What remains is fragmentation.

People who love one another interpret the same events through entirely different moral frameworks. Dialogue becomes difficult, not because disagreement is new, but because the foundations of shared understanding have eroded.

Meaningful debate requires intellectual honesty and historical literacy. 

When misinformation replaces understanding, the damage is extensive. It erodes trust between friends, strains the bonds between parents and children, and leaves people feeling as though the world they once shared with those closest to them has splintered into incompatible realities.

Analysts increasingly describe today’s online environment as a war of narratives, a torrent of competing claims, viral imagery, and emotionally charged storytelling amplified by algorithms designed for engagement rather than accuracy.

In that environment, outrage spreads faster than verification, and certainty travels faster than truth.

Rebuilding shared understanding will not be easy. It requires slowing down conversations that social media accelerates. It requires returning to primary sources, historical scholarship, and good-faith dialogue.

Most importantly, it requires remembering that the people on the other side of these disagreements are not enemies to defeat, but relationships worth preserving.

Narratives shape how societies understand themselves. But when narratives sever the relationships that anchor us to one another, the cost is no longer merely political.

It becomes deeply human.

About a year ago, my son asked about post-modernism. “It’s just a type of art,” he insisted, dismissing the idea that it exists in any other form. That conversation turned into a long one as post-modernism really did begin in art, but did not stay there. It moved from art into literature, from literature into philosophy, and from philosophy into activism.

Once upon a time, my son would have been right that post-modernism really was just a school of art. It emerged in the late twentieth century as a reaction against modernism, rejecting the belief in artistic purity, universal progress, or a single authoritative meaning. Instead, it embraced pluralism, irony, appropriation, fragmentation, and the blending of high culture with the popular, the commercial, and even the profane.

I’m not an artist, but I dabble in poetry, and I approach it as if I’m taking photographs of emotions. When I write a poem, I want the reader to feel what I felt in the moment that moved me to write. I assume that I can convey my emotions to others.

Post-modernist poetry rejects that assumption. It does not treat authorial intent as important, and it rejects the notion that meaning can be fixed. Language, in this view, is layered with cultural and historical baggage, with all meaning produced in the interaction between text and reader. 

A poem becomes less a photograph and more a collage. Post-modern poetry consists of fragments, references, irony, and competing interpretations. Where I seek clarity, post-modernism seeks ambiguity. Where I seek to convey meaning, post-modernism questions whether meaning can ever stand independently of the structures embedded in language and embodied in the cultural bias of the reader.

From there, the idea expanded. Words can have multiple meanings. Sentences multiply interpretive possibilities. Paragraphs expand them further. By the time you reach a book, the possible interpretations are almost limitless.

Up to that point, the observation is fair. Words do carry nuance, and texts invite discussion. But post-modernism takes an additional step, treating the existence of multiple interpretations as proof that there is no objective way to judge among them.

That leap works inside an art studio or a poetry reading, but it breaks when applied to the world around us.

Moby Dick is not a book about elephants. It is about Captain Ahab’s hunt for a particular whale, told through the eyes of Ishmael. We can debate symbolism, theology, obsession, or industry, but there are boundaries that reason and evidence establish.

The same is true of the world beyond literature. Our senses may be imperfect, but they are not useless. There may be multiple interpretations of events, but only some align with observable facts. Interpretations that do not fit the facts can and should be discarded.

The original post-modern philosophers did not deny that interpretations are constrained by context and structure. Post-modernism, however, escaped from philosophy just as easily as it escaped from art, eroding confidence in shared standards of rational judgment.

In its activist form, post-modernism does not just entertain multiple interpretations; it downgrades facts into personal opinion—you have your truths, I have mine. Whose facts count depends on who says them within a framework in which perceived oppression grants political power.

Post-modernist activism also blends well with other forms of identity politics.

The mainstream media tends to lean left, treating post-modernist activism with kid gloves even when it breaks down into violence and rioting. The resulting anti-American political propaganda is so effective that our adversaries now help guide our propaganda rather than making their own, begging the question of how we got where we are, as well as that of how to find our way back to reason.

Post-modernism did not begin with René Descartes, but the philosophical conditions against which it reacts did.

In the seventeenth century, Descartes confronted radical doubt. Perhaps our senses deceive us. Perhaps a “malicious demon” feeds us illusions. Descartes introduced skepticism not to dissolve truth, but to secure it to a point that nobody could argue, what we now call “common ground.” From this undeniable starting point, Cogito ergo sum, he attempted to rebuild knowledge, reason, and his belief in God, on stable foundations.

The Enlightenment embraced Descartes’ reason. Truth was assumed to be discoverable, objective, and universal.

In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche questioned whether what we call “truth” might instead reflect perspective and power. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger emphasized that human beings are never detached observers, but are situated within language, history, culture, and bias. Later thinkers such as Jacques Derrida examined how texts resist fixed meaning, while Michel Foucault analyzed how institutions produce knowledge in ways intertwined with hierarchy and power.

Post-modern philosophy did not claim that reality is imaginary. Rather, it questioned whether claims to universal, objective truth can ever stand outside the frameworks that produce them.

At roughly the same time, Marxism faced a crisis. Classical Marxism had predicted the internal collapse of capitalist societies and the rise of proletarian revolution in industrialized nations, with what would be World War I, the first war that killed at an industrial scale, as the main trigger. Unexpectedly, that revolution did not occur in the West, with the very “workers” on whom the theorists had depended for their “world revolution” voluntarily rushing to the trenches for king and country in 1914, and then settling back into their civilian jobs once the war ended. “Scientific socialism” was disproved: instead, when revolution did come, it came to Russia, the most politically primitive and least “capitalist” of European states, and the last one Marx would have expected.

Twentieth-century communist regimes that did take power in the Soviet Union under Lenin and then in China under Mao revealed severe economic dysfunction and massive human suffering. This was repeated in Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, and various other places, all of which failed to deliver anything resembling Marx’s vision.

By the late twentieth century, Marxism as an economic system appeared empirically dead.

Into that intellectual environment, some communist theorists shifted emphasis. Rather than grounding critique in deterministic economic collapse, attention moved toward culture, language, ideology, and institutional power. This shift was influenced by the broader tradition of critical theory, which had already begun expanding Marxist analysis beyond economics.

Critical theory operates by identifying structural divisions within society and subjecting them to sustained critique. Over time, that method migrated from class analysis to analyses centered on race, gender, and identity. When institutionalized, this form of critique can intensify social fragmentation rather than analyze it, making everyone, as a member of some identity group, feel oppressed by the whole.

Here is where post-modern thought proved useful.

If knowledge is socially constructed, and if truth claims are shaped by power structures, then failures of communist regimes need not invalidate the broader critique of capitalism or hierarchy. One could argue that the perceived “truth” about those failures was produced within dominant Western narratives, reflecting a “Eurocentric” world view. This shifts the debate away from empirical prediction, and toward a framing around perceived oppression in which the Western nations are inherently guilty. Economic systems are suddenly viewed based on perceived morality, independently of the outcomes they may produce.

Post-modern skepticism did not invent Marxist politics, nor were all post-modern thinkers Marxists, but the tools developed by post-modern philosophy—such as suspicion of universal truth, a focus on communication as a tool of power, emphasis on power in knowledge production, etc.—integrated perfectly with critical theory.

The struggle then shifted. 

Instead of focusing on economic class, newer academic movements began emphasizing race, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity. In fields such as feminist theory, post-colonial studies, and later critical race theory, standpoint and lived experience were treated as just as important as, if not more important than, actual proof.

We hear this in common language. Whenever people say, “I feel that,” followed by something that sounds like a fact, they are putting feelings ahead of facts.

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, elements of these academic frameworks migrated beyond universities into broader social movements. In this popularized form, certain themes became dominant:

• Knowledge is shaped by social position.
• Power structures influence what counts as truth.
• “Truth” is personal and subjective.
• Lived experience carries epistemic authority.
• Claims to neutrality conceal structural advantage.
• Systems such as capitalism are framed as inherently exploitative or colonial in character.
• Language is treated as an instrument of power rather than a neutral tool of communication.
• Social identity becomes the primary lens for moral and political evaluation.

In activist contexts, these ideas take on explicit political force. Disagreement may be interpreted through the lens of power and harm rather than through empirical debate. Objectivity may be treated not as a neutral aspiration, but as a contested concept embedded in historical dominance.

Where Descartes used doubt to rescue certainty, post-modernist activism uses doubt to challenge it. For political movements disillusioned with failed economic predictions, skepticism about universal truth offers a way to relocate the struggle from material collapse to cultural and discursive transformation.

This does not mean post-modernism was designed to save communism, but it does mean that, in the aftermath of Marxism’s visible failures, post-modern critiques of truth, objectivity, and power provided intellectual resources for reshaping communist theory, and that was exactly what Marxism needed.

From a philosophical or artistic perspective, Marxism and post-modernism are separate, but, from an activist lens, the two movements are the same.

This raises another question: if post-modernism destabilizes confidence in truth, how do we regain reason?

The answer cannot be to deny human bias. We are limited creatures with imperfect senses. Our institutions can be (and have been) corrupted. Power does influence which voices are amplified and which are ignored. Post-modernism is not wrong to observe these things.

Where it goes wrong is in moving from humility to surrender.

Human imperfection does not imply that there is no truth, and nor does the fact that interpretations vary mean all interpretations are equal. The existence of bias does not eliminate the possibility of correction, and, in fact, it makes correction much more necessary.

Descartes started with Cogito ergo sum. We need some kind of shared truth that is just as unassailable.

We now have that.

Zohran Mamdani announced recently that New York City has a $12 billion deficit. This is not new information. Former Mayor Eric Adams announced that deficit, and told us the reason—that it is the cost of taking care of migrants in a city that has been asking for more migrants to come. 

Similar cost overruns are occurring in other sanctuary cities and states around the country. We also have rampant welfare fraud in Minnesota, California, Michigan, Maine, and likely many other locations around the country, much of it related to migrants and covered up by politicians currying the favor of those groups. 

Those locations are beginning to tax their residents to pay for those costs, and the residents don’t like it. Reality is pushing back.

Bad ideas do not bring good outcomes, but those with bad ideas never seem to be held accountable for the outcomes they produce. When public officials conceal fraud, when institutions protect criminal behavior for political reasons, when leaders evade accountability under partisan protection, those people need to be prosecuted. If proven guilty, they need to go to jail.

If truth is merely a construct of dominance, then there is no neutral ground from which to challenge it. There is only counter-power. The argument shifts from “Is this true?” to “Who benefits?”, and when politics is dominated by identity, the answer is never “we all do.” It is always that some are asked to pay so that others can benefit, but there is no limit to the amount the government can spend, and eventually the bills come due and reason is forced to emerge.

The pain bad policy causes is universal.

Reason is not the enemy of the marginalized. Properly understood, reason pushes back against oppression.

Shared standards of evidence prevent authority from defining reality unilaterally. If truth depends solely on social position, then those with greater leverage will always determine what counts. This will always lead to more oppression (not less), and people don’t like being oppressed, so eventually reality pushes back.

The Enlightenment was not perfect. It overestimated human rationality and underestimated the persistence of bias, but it recognized that there exists a reality independent of our interpretation, and that careful inquiry can approximate that reality over time. Post-modernism, when healthy, tells us to question that reality, but with an eye toward making it more complete and more correct. Post-modernism, as a philosophy, does not make reality go away. Only its activist arm does that.

Descartes doubted radically, but he did so in order to rebuild. He stripped away what could not be defended so that something could stand. Post-modernist activism kept the doubt but abandoned the rebuilding. To regain reason, we must recover that second step.

The path back to reason is not dramatic, but disciplined. It requires institutions that value evidence over narrative, media that distinguish reporting from activism, universities that prioritize inquiry over ideology, and citizens willing to question their own assumptions before questioning their neighbors.

An angry public now faced with paying the bills will demand those changes.

We will never eliminate bias. We will never interpret the world perfectly. But that is not the standard.

The standard is whether we believe correction is possible. And it is.

We do not regain reason by denying the insights of post-modernism. We regain it by placing those insights within healthy limits. Yes, perspective matters. Yes, language influences thought. Yes, power can distort discourse.

But inverting the power structure does not change any of those things. It only changes who gets to oppress. The answer is not to change overlords, but to end all oppression through universal standards of liberty, and through equality under the law.

Facts remain stubborn. Gravity does not change with identity, economic policy produces measurable consequences, and historical events happened in particular ways regardless of how we frame them. 

My daughter is a high school English teacher and a progressive, but she’s become much more practical since she bought a house and started paying her own bills.

My son is still in college and is becoming more of a post-modernist every day. My message to my son is the lesson my daughter learned, and it is the same message I have for those reading this article: reality pushes back, and it will keep pushing harder and harder until we get along side of it.

Reality will eventually push post-modernism all the way back into the arts, and once it does I can visit it with my son, in a museum, where it belongs.

For many years, I hosted Friday night Shabbat dinner debates with my two kids and my two step-kids. The topic could be anything from “Should parents monitor their kids’ social media?” to “Is it the government’s responsibility to pay for college?” Often the kids, now all in their twenties, would request a different topic (“Do video games cause violence?” was a favorite), and I typically relented. The topic didn’t matter. My role, much to their frustration, was always the same: devil’s advocate. No matter the issue, I took the opposing view.

Over time, I realized I wasn’t teaching them how to win arguments. I was teaching them something far more important: intellectual humility—an appreciation for what they don’t know or can’t know. That capacity is especially essential at a time when many professors, high-school teachers, and social media “influencers” promote sweeping social theories and present their opinions as unquestionable truths.

When a high school administrator, for example, confidently announces that norms such as promptness or objectivity are “white supremacy values” (if you doubt this, consult the website of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union), they are offering an opinion—a poorly reasoned one—dressed up as certainty. There is no shortage of analogues on the political right, where conspiracy theorists, entertainers, and podcasters pretend that they, too, have a monopoly on wisdom. 

So how can we teach our kids to think critically, account for cognitive biases, know what they don’t know and wrestle with complex issues?

What follows are arguments I’ve had with my kids, lightly fictionalized in dialogue with a daughter, Ariella, an intellectually precocious university freshman. These examples illustrate the habits of mind that cultivate intellectual humility and the pursuit of truth.

1. Steelman the Opposition

ARIELLA: Dad, this super-conservative guy Jeremy at school says Trump is right to send in ICE after undocumented immigrants. He infuriates me.

DAD: What’s his reasoning?

ARIELLA: His reasoning is he hates immigrants. The cruelty is the point, Dad.

DAD: I bet he has a better argument than that. Remember Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory? Liberals tend to emphasize compassion and fairness. Conservatives add loyalty, respect for tradition, and a sense of the sacred.

It sounds like your moral intuition is that people facing oppression or distress deserve the chance to stay in this country. His intuition might be that unlawfully entering the country violates his sense of fairness and our national sovereignty, which must be protected.

ARIELLA: So I have to buy into his moral assumptions?

DAD: Of course not. But you should know what they are and the strongest version of his argument. You may find he’s not such a bad guy, and it will sharpen your own thinking.

ARIELLA: Sometimes I just get so tired of your both-sides-ism. 

DAD: The alternative is one-side-ism, where you stop examining multiple perspectives and just accept the first one that feels right.

2. Think Like a Bayesian

ARIELLA: Dad, you’re a big free trader so you must hate Trump’s tariffs.

DAD: I’m not a fan, and I’m worried. But who knows? Maybe they’ll work.

ARIELLA: Come on, Dad! You know refusing cheaper imports causes inflation.

DAD: I do think that. But what probability would you assign that tariffs might have some long-term positive effect?

ARIELLA: Ugh. Fine—30%, max.

DAD: So you’re acknowledging a 30% chance we’re wrong. I’d say 20%. Either way, we’re admitting uncertainty. Our economy is complex, and we might be missing something.

ARIELLA: Okay, then what are the chances you’re wrong about DEI being harmful?

DAD: There are studies that show that DEI programs fail to achieve their stated goals and actually generate resentment. But it’s largely a question of values, and such perspectives aren’t easily quantifiable. It’s like asking the odds that a human embryo has moral rights. One’s answer depends on moral assumptions that aren’t empirically testable or falsifiable. I’ll argue my view vigorously but I can’t assign it a percentage.

ARIELLA: The answer is zero, Dad.

3. Understand Tradeoffs

ARIELLA: I’m sick of drug companies bilking us. The price of insulin in the U.S. compared to Europe is disgusting.

DAD: I agree that we pay too much. But let me ask you something: Why does the U.S. invent so many more drugs than Europe, close to twice as many?

ARIELLA: What does that have to do with insulin prices?

DAD: Quite a lot. One reason we innovate more may be that companies know they can recoup R&D costs. Europe benefits from American medical research while its consumers pay less. You want more cancer drugs, don’t you?

ARIELLA: So we should just let drug companies get away with highway robbery?

DAD: I am not saying that. I want you to grapple with the tradeoffs. When we discuss price controls, we need to weigh the negative effects. We want affordability without killing the incentive for new breakthroughs.

4. Avoid Snap Judgments: “What Would Change Your Mind?”

ARIELLA: Dad, Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza. It’s horrible!

DAD: I saw the reports. But let’s not jump to conclusions.

ARIELLA: What could ever justify bombing a hospital?

DAD: First, we don’t know who caused the explosion. And if Israel did, we don’t know the intent. We don’t know whether Hamas used the hospital for military purposes. Let’s wait for verified information.

ARIELLA: Fine. But suppose the IDF did deliberately bomb a hospital.

DAD: I doubt that, but if solid evidence emerged, I’d be outraged. The point is to hold off until facts, not the shock of the initial horrific scenes, guide our judgment.

ARIELLA: I still don’t think it’s ever justified to bomb a hospital.

DAD: What would it take to change your mind?

ARIELLA: Two things. I would have to learn that Israel didn’t do it or that there were no patients in the hospital, just terrorists shooting from it.

DAD: Let’s wait and see, then.

5. There Can Be More Than One Cause

ARIELLA: Dad, in my sociology class, we learned that more than a third of incarcerated people are black even though black Americans make up only 14% of the population. That’s pure systemic racism.

DAD: Why assume the disparity is solely due to systemic racism?

ARIELLA: What else could it be?

DAD: Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson argues that in many inner-city neighborhoods, a small minority of residents—around 15%—generates a disproportionate share of violence and disorder. He calls it “endemic violence.”

ARIELLA: So he’s blaming black people for their oppression.

DAD: No. He’s offering another factor that contributes to violence and therefore incarceration rates. If you rule out cultural differences entirely, then structural racism becomes the only explanation by default for any disparity. But reality is often multi-causal.

ARIELLA: So which is it, culture or structure?

DAD: Probably some of both. Serious thinking requires parsing competing explanations, not settling with one.

6. Lived Experience is Not Enough

ARIELLA: When we deny one people’s claims of oppression, people will deny Jewish claims, too. 

DAD: First, no group is monolithic. Not all black Americans or all Jews or all Latinos make the same claims. You’re hearing from a small sample at school.

And second, it’s okay to question lived experience—ours or anyone else’s. If reliable survey data show that young Americans are more supportive of Jews than I thought, I want to know. Lived experience matters, but it cannot automatically override every other form of evidence.

7. Some Things Actually are True

ARIELLA: My English professor has us deconstructing all kinds of texts. She challenges the idea of objective truth and says what we call “truth” is really shaped by language, culture, and power. She even argues that a lot of what we consider “knowledge” is just white men protecting their status.

DAD: You like your air fryer, don’t you? Or is that just a social construct?

ARIELLA: Seriously, Dad.

DAD: I am serious. Building an air fryer requires an accumulation of scientific knowledge like thermodynamics, circuitry, and materials science. If all knowledge were just a power play by elites, why would anyone develop technologies that help everyone, including poor people? Rational thought and the scientific method aren’t mere social constructions. They’ve produced massive improvements in human well-being.

ARIELLA: Fine, but you’re ignoring something. For centuries, universities and scientific societies were open almost exclusively to white men. They controlled who could publish, who got credentials, and who had access to labs. That dictated what was considered “real” knowledge.

DAD: You’re right that powerful people have shaped the boundaries of knowledge in self-serving ways. Your professor is giving you a valuable lens for understanding how institutions work. Just remember that it’s one lens even if she treats it as a one-size-fits-all explanation. It’s useful for spotting bias and exclusion, but it’s not a complete explanation of how knowledge is created. Don’t settle for a single tool in your intellectual toolbox. Use all of them.

Conclusion

Intellectual humility isn’t about doubting everything or watering down our convictions. It’s about recognizing the limits of our own understanding. The skills of intellectual humility—steel-manning arguments, assigning probabilities, identifying trade-offs, resisting snap judgments, acknowledging multiple causes, weighing lived experience against evidence, and distinguishing socially constructed ideas from actual truths—isn’t innate. It must be taught and practiced.

In a polarized age that rewards outrage, over-confidence, and absolutism, raising children who can pause, question, listen, and think is one of the most radical things we can do.

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.

California is also home to the California Teachers’ Association, the Oakland Education Association, and United Teachers Los Angeles. All condemned Israel when, after October 7, she declared her intention to end Hamas in Gaza and set out to do precisely that. A number of these condemnations were issued at professional gatherings that were devoted more to the “decolonization of public education” and to Red-Green politics in general than they were to subjects that relate directly to education.

All of these organizations decried California Assembly Bill 715, which defines outright opposition to the Jewish right to self-determination in the Jewish homeland as a manifestation of anti-Semitism. The authors of the bill argue that “anti-Zionism,” which reframes a will to genocide as a justice-oriented belief in the rightness of “restoring” all of “historical Palestine” to “Palestinians,” be treated as racial hatred and not be tolerated within the confines of schools and other public institutions.

Among all of California’s teacher’s organizations and unions, United Teachers of Los Angeles was loudest in its opposition to AB 715—due no doubt to its belonging to the “BDS Movement,” the aim of which is the elimination of Israel and the dispossession of Jews whom “pro-Palestinian activists” deem too Western and European to stay on in a future “Palestinian” state. Putting that aside, imagine how much better California would be if its educators were obsessed not with Jews but with teaching children how to read and write at grade level so that they might become fully literate adults.

But a good education is about more than teaching hard skills. In order for an education to be good, the person delivering it must be able to distinguish between education and indoctrination, and take care never to impose a non-universalist and partisan belief system upon an impressionable mind. Just as importantly, students receiving a good education will be taught that truth is not subjective, relative, or strictly personal, but wholly objective. In other words, it exists independent of the mind. And because truth, in its ultimate form, is pre-existent and waiting to be discovered, it transcends the political, which is almost always composed of partial and/or manmade “truths.”

For that reason, a society based on ultimate or objective truth will be invulnerable to the level of political and cultural polarization that is as toxic to conservatism as it is to liberalism—in their true and complimentary forms, that is. Just as importantly, such a society will be capable of transcending anything and everything that must be subordinated to the truth, which has, dare I say, a supernatural way of pointing us toward what is in our best interest. Not just individually, but at the societal level. Conversely, when a society indulges in too much untruth in the course of maintaining the power of the few by distracting, numbing, and deranging the many, an unraveling and rivening will follow. Up to a point, it will be possible for a society to reconcile itself to the truth, provided there are those who are willing and able to destigmatize it and suffer the abuse of those who would call degeneration progress. 

Before I go any further, I will state an ugly truth. America’s public school system was not designed to produce an independently-minded, interrogative citizenry. By working through bodies like the General Education Board and funding education directly at a time when tax dollars were not normally used to fund education, John D. Rockefeller sought to stunt the intellects of Americans while acculturating them to life in the American factory so that they might better serve the interest of capital. Still, Rockefeller was less about pushing a particular narrative and more about molding children into passive albeit productive workers. Per Rockefeller’s model, the children who emerged from America’s new schools were to be educated, but not too educated. Communists who rebranded themselves as “anti-capitalists” and entered the American political mainstream after capturing the Democratic Party have taken a page from Rockefeller’s book. But, where Rockefeller was careful to maintain the appearance of agenda-free philanthropic generosity, many of today’s administrators and educators say out loud that their reason for working in education is to produce the next generation of left-wing political activists. And because the American left has been taken over almost completely by the democratic socialist movement, that means that American children are being taught self-hatred and legal positivism; or the theory that Western morality and the values and laws that proceed from it are socially constructed (man-made) and should be deconstructed as part of a larger effort to dismantle capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc. By keeping the revolutionary focused on these terms and what they represent (grievances), collectivist puppeteers have long prevented the polyeznyiy (useful) idiot from predicting what shape the post-revolutionary order will take.

Many among us might be surprised to learn that we have been here before. Communists have been working for decades to capture the American school system. In fact, the political divide between rural and urban America is due largely to the infiltration of urban school systems by activists who view the world purely in terms of class struggle and reject aspirationalism. For proof of this, one need only look to the following story: throughout the 1930s, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) sought to control the New York City Teachers’ Union and thus how the city’s poorest children were educated by infiltrating one local after another. CPUSA became a victim of its own success when the American Federation of Teachers expelled New York City’s Local 5 for its radicalism, which it dressed in civil rights activism.

CPUSA’s end goal was to turn public schools into places of communist indoctrination and their graduates into American Trotskys and Lenins. Mind you, this was before the Cold War, but during the first “red scare,” which, in truth, did not weigh heavy on the mind of the average American. The concern then, which should be the concern now, was that radicals were working through public institutions to accomplish goals that were fundamentally opposed to the mission of those institutions, which should be taken as an effort to undermine the will of the people, whose tax dollars fund those institutions. Almost a century later, the enemy is once again at the inner-gate and certain that their victory over the Judeo-Christian tradition (a tradition that values truth and reason above all) is imminent.

But that victory depends entirely upon what you and I do now. Will we not only say that 2 + 2 = 5, but come to believe it, or will we listen to the voice that comes as much from the heart as it does the head? Will we put down Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates and pick up Henry David Thoreau and reacquaint ourselves with an individualist philosophy that is, to those who truly understand it, as rugged as it is soft?

We must all realize that collectivism has no warmth at all, and that its most enduring symbols will always be the Siberian Gulag and the freezing barracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But should some of us continue to believe that freedom, the sacred individual, and personal responsibility (all of which can only exist in a reality that contains concrete truth and untruth) are social constructs that should be forgotten so that all goods can be transformed into collective goods, then there must come a time in the not too distant future when our level of tolerance for that worldview reaches zero.

And it is only at that level of zero tolerance for untruth can absolute truth reawaken and rearm the American spirit.

The question sounds deceptively simple: What is a fact? For centuries, the answer seemed straightforward. A fact was something verifiable, supported by evidence, observable in the world, documented through reliable methods. It existed independently of opinion. Disagreement did not alter its status. The Earth orbited the Sun whether anyone believed it or not.

When Galileo Galilei advanced the heliocentric model of the solar system, the resistance he encountered was not simply scientific skepticism, but a profound threat to entrenched authority and prevailing world views. The Roman Inquisition tried Galileo for a second time in 1633 and found him “vehemently suspect of heresy,” sentencing him to house arrest. He spent his final nine years (1633–1642) at his villa in Arcetri near Florence. 

The Church’s response was not merely theological alarm. It was political calculation. It threatened an already fragile order. That dynamic should feel uncomfortably familiar. Today, the institutions differ—universities, research foundations, professional associations, corporate media—but the underlying tensions often echo the past.

Modern dissenters are unlikely to face house arrest. Still, the penalties of our age—professional ostracism, loss of funding, digital vilification, reputational erasure—can exert their own quiet force. The instruments have evolved. The human impulses behind them have not.

In modern media culture, the word “fact” has become unreliable. It is invoked constantly, defended aggressively, and dismissed just as quickly. The debate is no longer merely philosophical. It sits at the heart of journalism, objectivity, and education.

Traditionally, objective journalism rested on a disciplined understanding of facts. Reporters gathered information, verified it through multiple sources, attributed claims clearly, distinguished reporting from commentary, and corrected mistakes publicly. Objectivity did not mean journalists lacked perspectives; it meant they followed professional methods designed to minimize personal bias. The commitment was procedural rather than personal.

Today, that model faces profound strain.

Political polarization has fractured public discourse into competing biased realities. The same event may be described in radically different ways depending on ideological predisposition. Social media algorithms amplify outrage and emotions. Misinformation networks spread falsehoods at a pace corrections rarely match. Meanwhile, many media outlets increasingly tailor content to niche audiences, reinforcing confirmation bias rather than challenging it.

In this context, skepticism toward “objectivity” has grown. Some critics argue that neutrality is an illusion—that every editorial choice reflects subjectivity.

Rejecting the fantasy of perfect neutrality is not the same as abandoning standards. Methodological objectivity remains achievable. It requires rigorous verification, fairness in representation, intellectual honesty, and transparency about uncertainty. It means clearly separating fact from interpretation and evidence from advocacy. These principles are not about claiming moral purity; they are about maintaining disciplined practices that reinforce public trust.

Professional codes of ethics emphasize precisely this distinction. Journalistic responsibility relies on seeking truth and remaining accountable. The goal is not to eliminate perspective but to subject it to verification.

A parallel debate is unfolding in education.

For much of modern history, schools and universities in liberal democracies aimed to teach established knowledge, present multiple perspectives on contested issues, and cultivate critical thinking. The ideal was not to tell students what to think, but to equip them with tools for thinking. Trust in educational institutions depended on the perception that inquiry came before advocacy.

An educational system that truly prepares students for leadership must be anchored in intellectual rigor: an unwavering commitment to evidence-based reasoning. Its role is not to prescribe conclusions, but to cultivate the virtues of curiosity, skepticism, and analytical precision, that enable individuals to think independently and behave responsibly. In an era defined by complexity, polarization, and rapid change, effective leadership requires the capacity to evaluate competing claims, question assumptions, synthesize diverse perspectives, and revise one’s views in light of credible evidence. 

Yet educational institutions today, whether through systemic bias or open inquiry, risk betraying this mission. The focus shifts from nurturing critical, self-directed thinkers to encouraging conformity and unexamined allegiance. At a moment of deep social fragmentation and eroding institutional trust, the consequences are profound. If education is to serve as a stabilizing force rather than a catalyst for division, it must recommit to pluralism, vigorous debate, and the disciplined pursuit of truth, forming leaders capable not merely of persuasion, but of principled, reflective, and courageous judgment.

The tension is not trivial. On one side, defenders of traditional objectivity argue that institutions must avoid ideological indoctrination. Presenting multiple viewpoints fosters independent thinkers, preserves institutional legitimacy, and keeps debate open. On the other side, advocates of value-driven education maintain that preparing students for civic life requires moral engagement. Addressing historical inequities and social problems, they argue, is not activism—it is responsibility.

Both journalism and education now wrestle with the same underlying dilemma: Should institutions aim primarily to neutrally present information, or actively promote particular social and political values?

The answer may reside in distinguishing between facts and frameworks. Facts are claims supported by verifiable evidence. Frameworks are the lenses through which those facts are interpreted. Societies may disagree vigorously about frameworks—about policy, morality, and priorities. But, without shared standards for recognizing facts, meaningful disagreement becomes impossible.

The challenge today is not redefining facts. It is rebuilding confidence in the methods used to establish them. In a divided world—where trust is fragile and incentives often reward outrage over accuracy—this task is neither simple nor glamorous. Yet it is fundamental.

A fact remains what it has always been: a claim supported by verifiable evidence. The real question is whether institutions can sustain the discipline required to defend that definition or even have the will to do so.

The debate over objectivity will not disappear. Nor should it. But if shared standards erode completely, the argument itself loses meaning. Without facts, there is no common ground from which to argue about justice, policy, or progress.

We must restore a fact-driven culture and embrace critical thinking, fostering the next Galileo rather than cancelling him.

A professional neutrality standard would protect students without policing belief

Classrooms are meant to be laboratories of thought. Increasingly, they have become platforms for political influence. When a teacher uses instructional time to advance personal ideological views, students are not simply exposed to ideas; they are subject to pressure from an authority figure they cannot reasonably challenge. That is not education; it is a misuse of professional power.

Lawmakers have tried to address this problem by banning “political speech” in schools, and these efforts routinely fail. Courts reject content-based restrictions under the First Amendment because regulating ideas is neither constitutional nor workable. This failure points to a deeper insight: the problem is not what teachers believe; it is how they behave while exercising instructional authority. The courts are right—you cannot regulate ideas—but that does not mean you cannot regulate professional misuse of authority.

Every licensed profession already understands this distinction. Lawyers are disciplined for misconduct in court, judges for bias on the bench, and doctors for unethical treatment of patients. None of these standards regulate belief; they regulate conduct in a professional role. Teaching, which involves daily authority over minors in a captive setting, has oddly been exempt from this framework. Unlike other licensed professions, teaching lacks a clear, enforceable neutrality standard tied to licensure itself, leaving students with fewer protections against coercive misuse of authority.

For K–12 education, the principle should be explicit. Students must be free from pressure to adopt a teacher’s personal political or ideological views. Teachers automatically hold authority over their students by virtue of their role. Students naturally assume that what is presented in class is correct, expected, or endorsed. When educators present contested political positions as the “right” way to think, students are steered toward conformity rather than independent judgment.

Neutrality here does not mean value-free teaching; it means procedural fairness, presenting disputed political questions without pressuring students toward a preferred conclusion.

The risk becomes acute when the subject matter is politically charged, redefines core social concepts, or edges toward justification of harm or violence. If ideas are not presented as neutral debate or exploration, then whether the ideology is left, right, or center is beside the point. The misuse of authority itself undermines trust in education.

What is missing is a professional standard governing instructional conduct. A Teacher Professional Neutrality Standard would treat the use of classroom authority to promote political positions unrelated to approved curriculum objectives as professional misconduct. It would not ban ideas or limit private speech. Instead, it would regulate behavior while teachers are performing their professional duties. Discipline would hinge not on the topic discussed, but on demonstrable use of instructional authority to advocate rather than educate.

Such a standard could be enforced the same way other professional norms are. State licensing boards could discipline teachers who cross the line and school districts could embed neutrality in evaluations. Teacher preparation courses could provide training, and accrediting bodies could ensure compliance. Federal oversight would focus on procedural adherence rather than ideology. Certification and eligibility for federally funded programs would hinge on adherence to neutral instructional conduct, not on political viewpoint.

This approach is legally defensible, enforceable, and non-partisan. It preserves academic freedom while protecting students from coercive influence. Civic education would not be silenced; it would be strengthened. Teachers would remain free to present multiple perspectives, foster debate, and encourage critical thinking—including robust discussion on controversial issues—without turning classrooms into political platforms.

The premise is simple. Behavior, not belief, matters. Teachers are free to believe anything, but when they are in the classroom, their role is to educate, not impose beliefs on students. Students deserve classrooms, not campaigns. If we want young people to think for themselves, we must hold those entrusted with their education to the same professional standards we demand everywhere else.

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

—Mark Twain  

The dissemination of news from institutions to the public, once trustworthy, has transitioned into the biased rhetoric of those with platforms. The loss of objectivity in the media has evolved over centuries, with technological advancements in communications serving as their catalyst.

It is not the loss of objectivity that irks me; it is the denial of bias. Objectivity contradicts human nature. We do not see the world through rose-colored glasses. On the contrary, our intrinsic filters of personal bias skew our view. These filters blur objective reality and transform truthful certainty into existential doubt. Our environment, life experiences, successes, failures, and the influence others have had upon us establish our “objectivity” in our assumptive world.

Loss of objectivity is not the problem. The problem is the false claim of objectivity by those with power, influence, and a platform from which to broadcast their opinions. Data and facts are easily manipulated to support pre-existing beliefs.

The solution is actually quite simple. Confess your partiality, give us your opinion, and move on. 

What is a fact?

From an etymological perspective, “fact” (from the Latin term, factum) refers specifically to a completed task or deed. So, for example, “the sun set last night” is a fact. “The sun will rise tomorrow” is not a fact. Yet we can agree that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Today, we use the term “fact” to describe “a thing known to be true,” even if it has not yet happened. The question is, who gets to decide what is known to be true?

Case and point: It was a fact that Pluto was officially a planet, until the International Astronomical Union decided on August 24, 2006, that it was actually a “dwarf planet.”

We delegate our news media, politicians, pundits, and children with the task of distinguishing fact from fantasy and objectivity from opinion. We must understand their interpretation of the message, and the objective of the messenger.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan postulated that “The medium is the message.” He theorized that the means in which information is dispersed determines the perception of the message, fundamentally manipulating human thought, action, and interaction. Different delivery mechanisms have different effects on the impartiality of a message. The audience’s reaction to a message received by newsprint is influenced by the writer’s style, font, and placement on the page. The same message delivered by radio is manipulated by the pitch, volume, rate, and resonance of the broadcaster. A television address is swayed by the appearance, attire, facial expressions, body language, and the newscaster’s  surroundings. According to McLuhan, factors peripheral to the message have more influence than its content.

Observed in every new generation are the benefits of technological advancements in mass communications. Innovative breakthroughs have the common goal of imparting information quickly and efficiently to larger audiences. The unintended consequences are the ease at which mass distribution of misinformation and disinformation can be dispersed. 

While populations strive to obtain objective information, institutions strive to influence and persuade the masses. In 59 B.C.E., Julius Caesar distributed postings of information in public places. Although Caesar’s declarations were sacrosanct, objectivity was not his intent. In medieval England, the lack of objectivity among kings was designed to consolidate control in pursuit of personal glory.

In grade school we were taught the “fact” that, in 1430, Johann Gutenberg’s introduction of the movable type printing press introduced mass dissemination of printed information. Although his breakthrough was indeed remarkable, long before Gutenberg’s birth, Bì Shēng in China developed movable type printing techniques made from baked clay, completing the whole set of character blocks by 1048. Metal movable type originated in Korea. A collection of Zen Buddhist teachings, the Jikji, was published and widely distributed long before Gutenberg began churning out Bibles. The correct answer in grade school to the printing press question was Guttenberg. Was this an objective interpretation of history, or the biased favoring of Western civilization’s accomplishments while suppressing those of Asian influence? When Gutenberg’s Bible was mass produced, the information it presented was promoted as objective and factual. Four centuries later, Charles Darwin bravely questioned the objectivity of Creationism, theorizing evolution as an alternative. More than two centuries earlier, Galileo’s heliocentric model questioned the objectivity of the established doctrine based on Biblical interpretation. As a result of these two outliers, faith-based objective factuality was transformed into scientific skepticism.

Two centuries after Gutenberg, the “printing revolution” was initiated in Antwerp with the first distribution of a weekly newspaper. By 1729, Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was mass   produced. Objectivity was not his intent. He published a smorgasbord of personal viewpoints, using his platform to shape public opinion and promote political causes. But these were not hidden agendas.

Rapid distribution of mass-printed information was delayed by the arduous nature of transportation. In America, the Pony Express carried newspapers with an express delivery time of 10 days, pending no unforeseen natural disasters or intervention by outlaws.

In 1917, Ford introduced his first official delivery truck easily adaptable to newspaper delivery. Unfortunately, his preferred newspaper was the Dearborn Independent.

In 1920, Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Circulated under the delusion of fact and objectivity, his sources included the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The New International Encyclopedia. Ford’s work was translated into 12 languages and was available throughout America and Europe. His intended consequence of inflaming anti-Semitism globally disguised as objectivity and fact was a success.

In 1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors issued its Code of Ethics or Canons of Journalism. It states that “Sound practice makes clear distinction between news reports and expressions of opinion. News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.” It goes on to declare that “A journalist who uses his power for any selfish or otherwise unworthy purpose is faithless to a high trust.”

In 1949, when news dissemination shifted from the written word to broadcasting, the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” was issued. This required licensed radio and television broadcasters to present balanced, contrasting viewpoints on controversial public issues, seeking to prevent broadcasters from using airwaves for one-sided agendas.

Throughout history, inventors have scrimmaged to overcome the problematic handicap of vehicle-driven news delivery. In 1886, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves. In 1895, Aleksandr Popov demonstrated a radio-wave receiver while Tesla and Marconi sparred over bragging rights for the invention of the radio. In 1901, radio broadcasts first crossed the Atlantic, and, in 1906, Reginald Fessenden enabled radio transmission of the human voice. In 1937, Samuel Morse introduced the Telegraph, followed almost immediately by 80% of U.S. households owning a radio.

In 1938, the CBS Radio Network aired Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. This landmark in media history demonstrated the disastrous effects of “fake news.” Listeners who tuned in late missed Welles’ introduction of his show as a classic work of science fiction. Without context, listeners heard a news report detailing a devastating alien invasion. The report featured a “live report” from a rooftop in Manhattan, describing citizens fleeing from poison smoke, until the “correspondent” coughs and falls silent. According to acclaimed producer, actor, and director John Houseman who witnessed the production and its aftermath, writing in his 1972 memoir Run-Through, “…millions of people accepted it—emotionally if not logically.”

When deceitful broadcasters lacking both objectivity and truth, use their platform to declare that President Trump is Hitler, and ICE agents are the Gestapo, is it any surprise that they get attacked, run over by trucks, and shot at?

Meanwhile, during the advent of radio, television systems were being dreamed of. In 1926, John Baird demonstrated the first working black and white television. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated the first electronic television system in 1927, and Vladimir Zworykin contributed his “Iconoscope” camera tube in 1930. In 1953, industry-standard color television broadcasting began in America.

In 1960, the first televised presidential debate, Kennedy vs. Nixon, was aired to 65 million viewers. Their messages were altered by the merriment of this milestone in mass communication. Those who listened to the radio were more likely to vote for Nixon. Those who watched the debates on television were more likely to vote for Kennedy, resulting in Kennedy’s razor-thin win of 0.2% in the popular vote.

As a 1973 Mass Communications Major at the City University of New York’s Queens College, my  studies were designed to prepare me to “Research, create, and distribute information to large, diverse audiences through various media channels like television, radio, and journalism.”

And then came 24-hour news.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

—Aldous Huxley

CNN was launched in 1980, breaking the traditional, scheduled news model of ABC, CBS, and NBC. CNN’s 24‑hour TV news format placed increasing pressure on their anchors to fill the airtime. So, logically, they filled it with opinions.

In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, removing the legal requirement to present balanced views on controversial issues. 

In 1996, both MSNBC and Fox News took to the airways. These stations, like CNN before them, originally aimed for neutrality and impartiality, blending technology, traditional news, and  objectivity. All networks gradually shifted from news to opinion programming, some to the right and most to the left, as polarization of television news became the norm.

And then came the Internet.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, introducing the immediate dissemination of information to a limitless audience. A decade later, by incorporating technology invented and patented by Jewish Heddy Lamar, along with composer George Antheil, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS were introduced.

And here we are, in the Digital Age of Internet-enabled interactive, instantaneous, and viral transmission of information. The Internet provides disingenuous individuals with the ability to disseminate their opinions disguised as fact in an immediate fashion with no limit to audience size.

In cyberspace, individuals form and join groups, panels, interactive podcasts, and massive virtual communities. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X (previously Twitter), and others place insurmountable pressure on the malleable minds of our youth.

In social psychology, “pluralistic ignorance” is defined as the collective delusion in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own. This results in members of a group going along with a view they do not hold because they think (incorrectly) that most other people in the group hold it. Many Americans who supported President Trump publicly condemned him in public due to pluralistic ignorance. Polls showed Harris to be the clear favorite. Yet, when no one was watching, Trump scored a decisive victory.

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes demonstrates the power of pluralistic ignorance. In the story, two con artists claim to make the finest clothes for their Highness. These garments are so special that they are invisible to those unworthy. Out of fear of being judged, the emperor’s court and townspeople remain silent about seeing nothing. The story presents the danger of ignoring reality due to fear of social pressure or authority. It serves as a cautionary tale of the dangers of blind obedience.

“When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

—Mark Twain

Pluralistic ignorance is closely related to “mob psychology” which involves individuals in a group losing their self-awareness and adopting the collective irrational behavior of the crowd. Pluralistic ignorance and mob psychology involve fear of social exclusion, leading to conformity. Both situations cause individuals to act against their own best judgment, allowing false norms to persist. Mob psychology was recently exemplified when a band of violent protestors, equipped with tactical gear and weapons, attacked a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s facility in Texas, shooting a local law enforcement officer in the process. Depending on the bias of the networks, some condemned the incident as heinous, while other recognized it as “understandable.”

Most adults still depend on television as our main source of breaking news and historical events. The objectivity of the presenter is determined by their assumptive world. The validity of the information provided to us is contingent upon the honesty, integrity, and the sincerity of the messenger’s attempt to be impartial. 

Before we process and share the information we receive, we must know the messenger to understand their message. With a bit of skepticism, cynicism, source checking, and logic, we can separate fact from fiction.

While disingenuous influencers and malicious bots become more sophisticated and sinister, our naïve, gullible youth rely on cyberspace for awareness of current events and confirmation of historical happenings. According to a Pew Research Center survey, most teenagers use social media and nearly half say they’re online almost constantly.

Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and others were not intended to be reliable sources of objectivity and factuality. They are entertainment media, not news media. Facebook was designed for college students to communicate privately with “friends.” Instagram was a way to connect people who travel, by way of “check-ins”; Twitter (now “X”) was a message service for quick status updates; and TikTok was a dance-centric lip-syncing platform for teenagers (despite being created by communist China). Sadly, they have evolved into contentious cesspools of purulent propaganda, fabricators of fake news, and goldmines of gossip.

We have the responsibility of at least trying to guide our children into a life of objectivity, honesty, ethics, and morality. Don’t expect Facebook, the government, or their teachers to do our job for us.

“Holy was my pursuit,”
The client responded to the attorney.
The judge nodded and added,
“It’s all part of a lifetime’s journey.”

“No judgment will be rendered,”
“No crime was committed.”
Strict Justice remained silent,
As the client was acquitted.

“You never called me to testify,”
From the gallery Truth spoke out.
“Your pursuit was not intended for me,
Nor for Justice was this about.”

“We hold you in contempt,”
Said the Judge while slamming down the gavel.
“That’s the first truthful thing to be stated,”
Truth retorted, as the decision began to unravel.

Truth continued, “If you don’t ask the correct questions,”
“And the court has been corrupted,”
“Your statements and testimony are stricken,”
The dishonorable Judge interrupted.

Truth replied, “Strike, twist, and distort.”
“Ignorance will not suffice.”
Truth will always overcome,
“So ‘think’, is my advice.”

“I’ve seen the repercussions,”
“As I’ve been here long before.”
“Your guilt will ultimately be on display,”
“And this can’t be ignored.”

Many atheists do not understand the nature of belief. They tend to assume that all religions are equally false and equally irrelevant. Many would prefer religion did not exist at all.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are, to the atheist, simply three groups worshiping a sky god.

My father was an atheist. My mom still is. My children lean that way as well. They get bored when I try to explain that different religions produce different moral systems, or when I suggest that, without some way of placing morality above the society it serves, morality becomes subjective. I tell them that, because of the moral relativism that comes from subjective morality, the less there actually is a God, the more we need one.

To me, this paradox is a pretty good reason to believe in God, but, to the atheist, tying morality to religion makes about as much sense as tying economics to the Tooth Fairy.

Many atheists are also progressives, and many of them view Islam not as a religion so much as a minority group they must nurture and protect. To the degree that Islam encourages anti-Semitism, and that nations like Qatar fund anti-Semitic propaganda, it can appear that progressivism and Islam are working together to propagandize the world in what some call “red-green propaganda.” Others say the idea of a “red-green alliance” is simply a conspiracy theory.

Theory or not, the impact is real. Red-green propaganda did not merely distort political debate. It inverted the West’s moral instincts.

Israel was invaded on October 7, 2023, by men who filmed themselves butchering civilians, burning families alive, dragging girls through the streets, and taking children hostage, all while joyously screaming “Allahu akbar!” The footage spread across the world within hours, and YouTube videos showed crowds in London train and subway stations cheering the carnage.

The streets of Western cities filled with crowds waving the flag of the attackers. University campuses erupted in chants and encampments, harassing Jewish students and staff and calling for the destruction of Israel, while professors who once lectured about human rights suddenly excused slaughter as a noble—even “exhilarating”—form of resistance.

Marxists who once promised liberation suddenly defended the most rigid religious law on earth.

Feminists who once marched for women’s freedom marched beside men who would stone women for defiance. Gay activists who once demanded tolerance shouted in support of regimes that imprison or execute gay men.

“Colonialism” is used to condemn the return of a people to their ancestral land, while praising empires built through conquest. “Oppression” is shouted by crowds living under the protection of the freest societies in history, while the same people cheer movements that crush dissent wherever they rule.

These contradictions sit in plain view, yet nobody involved feels the need to resolve them.

This did not happen overnight. The changes grew year by year in lecture halls, newsrooms, cultural institutions, and schools. Children were taught that the West is uniquely wicked and that victims are righteous regardless of what they do.

And Islam has been defined as one of the victims.

When activists reached the streets, they did exactly what they were designed to do, repeating the slogans they had already been taught. 

Activists frame every conflict through the same moral script: oppressor and oppressed. Once that script was applied, the details no longer mattered. The identities determined who was righteous and who was evil.

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

Once those categories are accepted, atrocities can appear as justice and self-defense as genocide. When justice is redefined that way, cheering the murder of civilians no longer feels monstrous. It feels righteous instead.

The power of this moral framework, cultivated over decades, is that it turns ordinary people into defenders of the indefensible while allowing them to believe they are standing on the side of virtue. The result is one movement built (originally) on class hatred and another built on religious submission, marching beneath the same banners, shouting the same slogans, and attacking the same enemy. The political left has become beholden to this unholy convergence, and now portions of the political right are merging with the alt-right to spread an anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic message from the other side.

The propaganda has been so effective that when Israel and the United States killed Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, a CNN poll showed that 59% of Americans disapproved. Within Iran, countless millions of people celebrated the death of this horrific figure and the promise of freedom they hope will follow; but, in America, much of the public posted about Khamene’i as if in mourning—like his own demented followers—either unaware or indifferent to the fact that the Iranian people wanted out from under his regime.

The propaganda has not merely been effective. It now appears to be in control, as if the standards of evil have been inverted to turn the West against itself.

But is the red-green propaganda conspiracy real?

Conspiracy claims are often impossible to prove, but actions and incentives are not. When different groups behave in similar ways that match their shared incentives, often at the expense of other incentives that are not shared, something real is usually happening, whereas when actions do not align, the theory is likely false.

Let us examine the red-green alliance through such a lens.

This theory holds that global progressivism (red) is working with global Islam (green) to spread both.

We will examine progressivism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian West they seek to replace as moral systems. Each defines good and evil differently, and those definitions shape their incentive structures. Then we will look at what progressive and Islamic actors are actually doing to see how closely their actions match.

The Judeo-Christian moral order can be reduced to the two rules Jesus used to summarize God’s moral law: love God above all things, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40, Mark 12:29–31, Luke 10:27). Love sits at the center of Judeo-Christian morality and leads us to exalt one another through the natural rights of the individual.

This belief sits at the center of the Enlightenment. It took the merger of the Judeo-Christian moral order with Greek philosophy to produce it, but once that merger occurred, the Enlightenment was inevitable.

Islam calls for total submission to Allah’s law (Qur’an 3:19, 5:44), and it exalts those who force others to submit (8:39, 9:29). Forced submission is considered deeper than theological agreement, which is why dying in jihad is treated as the only guarantee of paradise (Sahih Bukhari 2795, Sahih Muslim 1876).

Murder, torture, rape, terrorism, theft, and many other acts the Judeo-Christian tradition calls evil can be justified, even glorified, if they serve the purpose of forcing submission to Sharia (Qur’an 8:12, 9:5, 47:4).

Western “excesses” (everything that does not conform to Sharia) are considered evil under Islam (Qur’an 5:44, 9:29). The United States is called the “Great Satan” across much of the Islamic world specifically because of what Islam sees as American excess, the political center of the West.

To Islam, civil rights represent a license to reject Sharia (Qur’an 5:44, 33:36). Nothing could be more evil than that. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God loves us and offers communion with Him for eternity (John 3:16), but we are free to accept or reject the offer (Joshua 24:15, John 7:17).

Islam reverses that structure. It calls for total submission to Sharia and glorifies the use of force to make others submit against their will. Islam is evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is evil under the tenets of Islam.

These traditions are diametrically opposed. They cannot, and, in the long run, will not, coexist.

That does not mean Christian and Muslim people cannot coexist. Of course they can as individuals. The ideologies themselves, however, define one another as evil, making it impossible for a society to merge them into a cohesive whole.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, evil is the conscious violation of moral law (John 3:4, Romans 7:7). That law is fixed, revealed by God, and rooted in His unchanging nature (Exodus 20).

In the Judeo-Christian world, evil originates in the heart (Mark 7:21–23), not in social circumstance. A person who is kind, honest, and generous is considered good even if they come from privilege. A person who lies, cheats, or steals is evil even if they come from poverty or oppression.

Judaism and Christianity both teach that all people are sinners (Ecclesiastes 7:20, Psalm 14:3, Romans 3:23). None are righteous by their own merit (Romans 3:10). Redemption comes through grace rather than achievement (Ephesians 2:8–9), and no sin places someone beyond forgiveness (Isaiah 1:18, 1 John 1:9). Judaism and Christianity recognize that people commit evil, but they do not define the person by it (1 John 1:9).

Progressivism turns this structure on its head by rejecting fixed moral law.

Progressivism denies original sin but embraces collective guilt, defining evil by group identity rather than individual behavior. People are judged less by what they do than by the power they are believed to hold.

Progressives often equate speech with violence while excusing actual violence. A white person who cites factual data may be accused of doing harm. A rioter who sets a building on fire may be defended or even celebrated.

For Jews and Christians, evil is something we all carry (Romans 3:23) but can overcome (1 Corinthians 10:13, Romans 6:14). In the progressive worldview, evil is something others carry and can never shed. One system holds that truth rises above power. The other insists that power dictates truth. They are not compatible.

Islam and progressivism are often grouped together because of their authoritarian tendencies, but the comparison collapses once you examine how each defines evil. They are not the same. They are not even close.

Halal and haram are not open to debate. To violate Sharia is to rebel against God, and such rebellion is evil by definition (Qur’an 5:33, 16:116, 33:36). The rules are strict, often brutal, but they are stable, rooted in the belief that good and evil exist independently of human feeling.

Progressivism rejects that idea entirely. It does not recognize objective morality. It denies that good and evil are fixed categories and instead defines morality through lived experience, emotional harm, and power dynamics. Under progressivism, evil is not what violates an external code, but what offends the wrong person or disrupts the current narrative.

What is moral today under progressivism may be immoral tomorrow, and what is condemned today may be celebrated a year from now. The only constant is obedience to the current narrative.

Islam believes truth is handed down from above (Qur’an 2:2, 16:102, 26:192–193). Progressivism believes truth is constructed from below, shaped by the feelings and identities of those who claim oppression. In Islam, blasphemy is evil because it insults God (Qur’an 9:65–66, 33:57). In progressivism, blasphemy is evil because it makes someone feel unsafe.

Both systems suppress dissent, but they do so for entirely different reasons.

Both systems also enforce submission, but Islam defines evil as defiance of divine law (Qur’an 4:13–14, 5:44) while progressivism defines evil as defiance of the shifting social consensus, especially when that consensus is presented as the voice of the oppressed.

From the outside, the results may look similar: censorship, fear, and conformity. The internal logic, however, is the opposite.

Islam, incidentally, considers progressivism evil. It aligns with the progressive movement only because progressives treat Muslims as an oppressed minority to be elevated, and that posture serves Islam’s central objective of spreading Islam by force.

Western elites, soaked in post-modern delusion and utopian fantasy, believe they control this convergence. They imagine themselves as architects, using each ideology to reshape society. In reality they are accelerating the collapse of the only structure that restrains these forces from devouring one another, and then devouring us.

If Islam and progressivism truly formed a single ideological alliance, their actions would consistently reinforce one another’s long-term goals. They would build the same institutions, pursue the same legal structures, and defend the same moral framework. That is not what we see. 

What we see instead is a pattern of overlapping incentives that occasionally produce the same political behavior.

Progressivism works to weaken the moral authority of the West by redefining it as the primary source of oppression in the modern world. Western institutions, Western history, and Western identity are all recast through this lens, teaching generations to view their own civilization as uniquely guilty and uniquely corrupt. 

Islam benefits enormously from this process. Every institution progressivism delegitimizes is an institution that once defended the Judeo-Christian moral order, and every historical narrative it tears down removes another cultural barrier that once resisted Islamic expansion.

Progressivism does not intend to advance Islam. Its objective is to dismantle the West. 

Islam does not intend to advance progressivism. Its objective is to replace the West. 

In the short term, those incentives overlap. Progressives defend Islamic actors because their moral framework defines Muslims as an oppressed minority, while Islam accepts that protection because it weakens the societies most capable of resisting it.

The result is a convergence without a true alliance. Progressivism erodes Western confidence in its own moral legitimacy, while Islam exploits the vacuum. Progressives defend regimes and movements that would criminalize their own beliefs, because their ideology defines the West as the greater evil, while Islamist movements tolerate progressive activism inside Western societies even as they suppress it everywhere else.

Each movement is using the other to weaken a common enemy. Their goals diverge, but their incentives occasionally align, and that alignment is enough to produce the appearance of cooperation. The moment the common enemy disappears, that convergence will disappear with it, as Islam and progressivism only share the same battlefield.

There is no red-green alliance so much as a progressive rot that Islam exploits. These are not allies. They are rival executioners, momentarily aligned against a common victim, with Islam playing progressivism as a fool.

What looks like a red-green alliance sits inside that confusion. Sometimes cooperation is deliberate. More often it is simply the result of incentives aligning against a common enemy.

When propaganda reaches this level of influence, people begin to doubt their own eyes, even when the evidence is undeniable. That is how crowds end up cheering men who butcher civilians while condemning the societies that protect their freedom to protest. That is how gay people champion those who would like nothing more than to shove them off the tallest building in town.

The red-green alliance may not be a conspiracy in the sense of a single movement acting in concert, but, unlike the Tooth Fairy, the threat is real.

And by the time progressives wake up to the danger, it may already be too late.

How Hooman Khalili’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” Walls in Indianapolis and Austin Turn Art into Prophecy

In two American cities hundreds of miles apart, two murals now stand as part of a growing global visual movement. One rises in Indianapolis, Indiana, the other in Austin, Texas—both created by international muralist Hooman Khalili.

Both murals have a flag in the background reminding the world that it is not a fair fight in Iran—“In Iran, only the bad guys have guns,” as Khalili says. Therefore, the text on the red flag reads: “President Trump: Arm the Women of Iran”—asking the president to help balance the scales, giving the women and men of the Iran a chance to defend themselves against those who slaughtered them in their untold tens of thousands.

Together, these murals form part of Khalili’s expanding “Woman, Life, Freedom” mural series, a body of public art dedicated to the women of Iran and to a broader spiritual narrative that Khalili believes connects ancient Persia, the Jewish people, and a modern revolution led by women.

The murals are not quiet works. They are confrontational, theological, political, and deeply symbolic. They carry images of resistance, scripture, Persian history, and contemporary protest.

Khalili does not describe them simply as paintings. “They are declarations,” he often says. “Declarations that the struggle of the Iranian people is being witnessed.”

A Movement Painted Across Continents

Over the past several years, Khalili has produced more than two dozen “Woman, Life, Freedom” murals across Israel and the United States, with Mural 24 unveiled in Indianapolis and 25 in Austin.

The project began as a response to the Iranian women-led protest movement that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, whose killing ignited worldwide demonstrations in 2022. The movement’s rallying cry—“Woman, Life, Freedom”—became the thematic backbone of Khalili’s work.

For Khalili, the murals pursue three goals:

• Inspire the women and people of Iran to keep fighting

• Give a voice to those who have been silenced

• Remind the world of the ancient spiritual relationship between Persians and Jews

Each mural incorporates symbols drawn from Persian history, Biblical narrative, and contemporary Iranian resistance. The works unveiled in Indianapolis and Austin represent two of the most striking examples of this philosophy.

Indianapolis: The Valley of Dry Bones

The Indianapolis mural was unveiled in February at 802 South West Street, transforming an industrial wall into a monumental narrative of death, resurrection, and defiance.

At its center stands Nika Shakarami, the 16-year-old protester whose death in 2022 became one of the most haunting images of the Iranian uprising.

In Khalili’s rendering, Shakarami is not depicted as a victim but as a figure of spiritual defiance—standing upright, unbroken. Behind her stretches the Valley of Dry Bones, a reference to one of the most powerful visions in the Hebrew Bible.

In the Book of Ezekiel (37:1–14), the prophet is brought into a valley filled with scattered human bones. God asks him a question: “Son of man, can these bones live?”

As the prophet speaks, the bones begin to reassemble. Tendons form. Flesh appears. Breath enters them. What was dead rises again.

For Khalili, the image represents both mourning and hope.

He has linked the valley to the tens of thousands of Iranian men, women, and children who were reportedly killed during violent crackdowns on protest movements. But, like Ezekiel’s prophecy, the mural suggests resurrection rather than defeat.

“This is not a mural of despair,” Khalili has said. “It is a mural of resurrection.”

Seeds of Persia

Scattered across the landscape of the mural are pomegranates, one of the most ancient symbols shared between Persian and Jewish cultures. In both traditions, the fruit represents life, fertility, and blessing. In Persian art, it is associated with abundance and renewal. In Jewish tradition, it is sometimes said to contain 613 seeds—symbolically echoing the commandments of the Torah.

In the mural, the pomegranates serve as visual counterpoints to the valley of bones. Where the bones represent death, the seeds represent rebirth.

Flowing through the composition is a river, another symbol chosen intentionally. Rivers in Biblical imagery signify renewal and continuity—history moving forward even through catastrophe.

Eagles and Kings

Above the mural soar seven eagles, symbols Khalili describes as representing vision, protection, and divine covering. Behind the central figure rises the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian ruler who liberated the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C.E.

Cyrus is one of the rare non-Jewish figures described in the Hebrew Bible as a divinely appointed instrument—even mentioned as being “anointed” in Isaiah 45:1.

For Khalili, Cyrus represents the historical bond between Persians and Jews—a relationship he believes predates modern politics. “This is a reminder,” he says, “that the story between these two peoples is ancient.”

A Verse of Judgment

Across the top of the Indianapolis mural runs a passage from Book of Deuteronomy (32:35): “Vengeance belongs to the Lord, I will repay; in time their foot will slip; for the day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly.”

The verse is meant not as a call for human revenge but as a declaration of divine justice—a reminder that tyranny, in Khalili’s view, cannot last indefinitely.

Austin: The Rider

If the Indianapolis mural is a vision of resurrection, the mural unveiled in Austin, located at the Hope Outdoor Gallery (near Austin Airport), centers on motion.

The centerpiece is Diana Bahadori, known online as “Baby Rider,” a young Iranian woman whose social media presence showed her riding motorcycles—an act many Iranian women consider a symbol of independence. Her videos, according to followers, radiated a simple but powerful message: freedom could be lived, not just demanded.

In Khalili’s Austin mural, she stands at the center of the composition as a representation of a younger generation of Iranian women who refused invisibility.

Where the Indianapolis mural centers on death and rebirth, Austin emphasizes courage and movement.

The Esther Connection

The Austin unveiling was intentionally scheduled just before Purim, the Jewish celebration commemorating the Biblical story of Queen Esther.

The story of Esther takes place in ancient Persia, where a Jewish woman in the royal court ultimately saves her people from annihilation. The moment of crisis leads to a royal decree allowing the Jews of Persia to defend themselves.

Khalili sees a parallel between that story and today’s Iranian struggle. “Esther was Persian,” he often notes. “And, in the Bible, the Persian Empire ultimately allowed the Jewish people to stand and defend their lives.” His murals, therefore, often carry the phrase “Esthers of the World, Rise Up.”

A Reversal of History

In Khalili’s interpretation, the murals symbolize a reversal of the ancient story.

In the Biblical era, Persia allowed the Jews to survive and rebuild Jerusalem under King Cyrus. Now, Khalili suggests, Jews and Israelis are among the strongest voices supporting Iranian women seeking freedom.

For him, the murals are meant to illustrate a spiritual reciprocity between the two peoples.

Controversy as Intention

Both murals have drawn attention for their bold imagery and their willingness to engage directly with the politics of the Iranian regime.

Khalili does not avoid controversy; he embraces it. Public art, he argues, should confront injustice rather than decorate walls. “Art that never risks controversy,” he says, “is rarely art that changes anything.”

Murals as Prophecy

Ultimately, Khalili’s work operates at the intersection of activism, theology, and public art. He does not present the murals merely as memorials to tragedy. They are, in his view, prophetic statements. Visions of a future in which the people of Iran are free.

The murals speak to three audiences simultaneously:

• To the women of Iran who continue to resist

• To the global public being asked not to ignore their struggle

• To a deeper historical narrative connecting Persia, Israel, and biblical prophecy

Standing in Indianapolis or Austin, viewers encounter not just a painting but an argument—that history moves in cycles, that oppression eventually collapses, and that the bones of Ezekiel’s valley can rise again.

And, above both murals, echoing across continents, remain the three words that ignited a movement: “Woman, Life, Freedom.”