By this logic, nobody who owns a gun has a right to use it in self-defence. This is an explicit assault on our basic Second Amendment rights. That’s how this weasel has framed the entire case.

So naturally, when federal agents murdered Alex Pretti, and several high-ranking members of Trump’s administration argued that Pretti had no rightto bring a legally owned gun to a volatile situation, Walsh was 100% consistent in his defence of Americans’ First and Second Amendment rights:

An armed leftist went out with a gun to deliberately interfere with legitimate law enforcement operations, and I’m seeing some “conservatives” on this site claim that it might be ICE’s fault that the guy is now dead. Insane.

January 19th, 2026. After a letter in which Donald Trump whines about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize leaks online, political influencer Nicolas Conquer laments a mainstream media so gullible, so fraught with Trump Derangement Syndrome, that they’d believe the president of the United States would do something so unpresidential:

UNBELIEVABLE, this total lack of perspective when it comes to this so-called “letter” from Trump to Norway, miffed at not having received the Nobel. Everything in this story reeked of a hoax from a mile away. But of course, our fact-checkers and compulsive anti-Trumpists dive in headfirst.

Unfortunately, the fact checkers had their facts straight. But no problem, when Conquer realised his mistake, he remained perfectly consistent about his standards for presidential behaviour:

I acknowledge having doubted, like others, the authenticity of Trump’s letter addressed to the Norwegian Prime Minister. But after careful reading: Nothing shocks me. Nothing offends me. I fully endorse it and challenge anyone to objectively find in it any grounds for scandal.

February 6th, 2026. After a “Truth Social” post depicting the Obamas as apes goes viral on social media, Terrence K. Williams, one of Donald Trump’s African Americans, is quick to assure his 2.4 million followers that screenshots of the post were “fake news”:

FAKE NEWS ALERT! Trump didn’t post this monkey video of the Obamas. Lying Democrats. It’s not on his page. Fake screenshot.

Sadly, it turns out that the lying Democrats were telling the truth. But thankfully, when Williams realised this, he acknowledged his error, updated his views in light of new evidence, and…okay, you know where I’m going with this:

IT’S NOT RACIST! I stand with Trump. As a black man, I’m not offended by this at all. It’s a hilarious video of white and black democrats in the jungle!

We live, so we’re told, in the Information Age, an era defined by a rapid shift from traditional industries to digital alternatives.

Window shopping turned into Amazon Prime, dating turned into swiping, and information turned into content.

The problem is, while information is a service, content is a product.

Content doesn’t need to worry about hypocrisy or sincerity or morality, it doesn’t need to wait for the facts or acknowledge context or make logical sense, content just needs to make money, and it does that by hijacking as much attention as possible, as quickly as possible, before the algorithm moves us on to the next distraction.

Content is Megyn Kelly using her podcast with ~100 million monthly listeners to downplay the Trump administration’s myriad links to a convicted pedophile by arguing that Jeffrey Epstein (a 66-year-old man who sexually abused 14-year-old girls) wasn’t really a pedophile, he was just into the “barely-legal type.”

For the record, 14 years old is neither barely-legal nor, in fact, legal.

Content is gay right-wing influencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, telling ~900,000 followers that “nobody is really gay,” and that dogs miraculously stopped barking at him once he renounced his homosexuality, instead of using his unlikely platform to spark a much-needed conversation about the closeted homosexuality (and attendant homophobia) often found in right-wing circles.

Content is Fox News’ Jesse Watters telling his 2–3 million-strong audience that billionaires should make homeless people “fight like gladiators” over a $1 Happy Meal or Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade suggesting they should be given an “involuntary lethal injection, or something, just kill ’em.”

Content, more and more, is just shallow, amoral, sociopaths making millions of dollars by saying things they don’t mean. Or maybe they do mean them. It doesn’t really matter.

Because, however you feel about what they’re saying, whether your comments and reactions express delight or discomfort or disgust at their opinions, the attention machine rewards them just the same.

Content is “bread and circuses” in digital form.

A distraction designed to convince us that people who share 99% of our concerns are our enemy.

A pacifier, designed to reassure us that the things we already believe always just so happen to be correct.

A battlefield where billionaires spend millions of dollars to control what we think.

And an awful lot of people haven’t noticed that they’re losing.

In the immortal words of Stafford Beer, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Not what it claims to do, not what it aspires to do, not what it might do under more ideal circumstances, but what it does; the effect it produces in the world.

And what this system does, almost exclusively, is divide us and enrage us and funnel our attention towards the dumbest, most dishonest people on the planet, because these are the only people who can wake up every day to lieand grovel and humiliate themselves to defend their talking points without being crushed by shame and self-loathing.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about my place in this machine; about how to assess the people I pay attention to, about how to make nuance more compelling than outrage, about how to treat our collective attention with the respect it deserves.

And maybe the first step is to recognise what’s at stake.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we possess. It is one of the only things that is truly, irrevocably ours. And it has the power, when properly directed, to change the world.

That’s why corporations spend so much money trying to monetise it, grifters spend so much time trying to manipulate it, and politicians spend so much energy directing it at immigrants and aliens and anything, anything at all, but them.

Because they know that if we ever stop fighting amongst ourselves, if we ever get around to focusing our attention on them, they won’t stand a chance.

Workers organised strikes across the country, sellers shut down markets and stores, citizens marched through the streets, and the Iranian regime responded by locking down communications, announcing a nationwide curfew, and authorising live fire against unarmed civilians.

As of this writing, Iranian authorities report that the regime has killed ~3117 people. But research from the Human Rights Activists News Agency suggests the number is over twice that. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, believes the death toll could be over 20,000 when the dust settles. And while Donald Trump claims that the killing has stopped, reports from within Iran suggest that the killing is very much ongoing.

Yet you might have noticed that, unlike Israel’s recent adventures in civilian massacres, there have been no hundred-thousand or even million-strong marches on behalf of the Iranian people. No calls to exclude Iran from the Eurovision Song Contest or to divest from Iranian companies.

Despite being a strident critic of Israel’s government over the past two years, this is the first time I’ve even mentioned the plight of the Iranian people in an article.

So what’s going on here? What could explain this hypocrisy, this shameless double standard? Well, let’s remind ourselves what the standard is, shall we?

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On October 7th, 2023, after generations of military occupation, extra-judicial kidnappings, and the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children in the West Bank, Hamas militants launched a horrific attack on Israel.

They killed over 1,200 Israelis, ~23% of whom were women and children, they took another 251 civilians hostage, and Israel responded with a genocidal campaign that destroyed ~92% of civilian homes, killed several of their own hostages, and ended, predictably, with Hamas neither removed from power nor disarmed.

In the first month, Israel killed 10,328 Palestinians (that’s three times as many as Iran killed in the same period), ~70% of whom were women and children.

As of this writing, Israel has officially killed ~71,824 people, a figure that Israeli officials spent two years trying to discredit before quietly admitting it was accurate all along. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, believes that when the bodies are retrieved from the rubble, the final death toll could be several times higher. And while Donald Trump claims the war is over, the more than 520 Palestinians killed since the “ceasefire” started suggest that the genocide is very much ongoing.

Yet you might have noticed that, unlike Iran’s massacre, not a single politician has lied to provide political cover or proudly declared that their stated intention when entering Congress was becoming “the leading defender of [Iran] in the United States Senate.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader hasn’t been invited to speak before Congress while he’s wanted for war crimes, and United States senators aren’t jockeying for the title of most enthusiastic standing ovation.

I confidently predict that the US government won’t be using its VETO to block UN resolutions condemning Iran and calling for an end to the killing, nor will it be spending a single penny of taxpayer money to provide the weaponry that these fanatics are using to kill civilians.

And I’m certain that if the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Iran wrote a report detailing the corporations that were making billions of dollars by facilitating Iran’s massacres, Marco Rubio won’t impose sanctions on her and her family, the first time the US has sanctioned a UN-affiliated official in the history of the UN.

You might also have noticed that not a single student has faced jail or deportation for writing op-eds criticising Iran’s regime. Nobody is stripping professors of tenure for anti-Iran social media posts. News organisations aren’t shying away from reporting the atrocities the regime is committing.

And lastly, terms like “Islamic extremist” or “jihadist” won’t be miscategorised as hate speech and used as a pretext to get you banned from social media. I suspect that not a single comment here will try to downplay the casualty figures or argue that the Iranian civilians shouldn’t have FA’d if they didn’t want to FO.

I’ve lost count of the number of times, as I wrote about Israel’s genocide, that I was asked why I wasn’t equally animated by some other atrocity.

“Why aren’t you writing about the genocide in Sudan?” “Why aren’t you equally outraged by China’s human rights abuses against the Uighurs?” “What about the massacres taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?”

And overlooking the Freudian implications of equating these atrocities with Israel’s “war,” the answer is that we already have something approaching sanity and moral consistency and a shared reality when it comes to these war crimes.

On these issues, we can all agree on the fundamental principles of proportionality and restraint, especially for those in power. We can admit that the Iranian regime’s brutal oppression made the Iranian people’s hatred inevitable, and that this latest slaughter will only deepen that hatred. We aren’t pretending that opposing the murderous actions and policies of the Iranian government is the same thing as hating Iranians or Muslims in general.

If we could achieve this level of clarity more consistently, there’d be no need to write essays or impose boycotts or march through the streets.

Sadly, a surprising number of people can’t meet that standard.

On February 2nd, 2002, five months after the worst terrorist attack in American history, Noam Chomsky sat down with Hard Talk’s Tim Sebastian to respond to the accusation that he was drawing a moral equivalence between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”:

Chomsky: If we’re rational, we will recognise that the United States, Britain, France, and I can go down a long list, have a terrible record of atrocities. And that does not justify violent acts against them.

Sebastian: But you seem to see this moral equivalence…

Chomsky: There’s no moral equivalence […] there’s no moral equivalence between the [attack on] the World Trade Centre and the destruction of Nicaragua or of El Salvador, of Guatemala. The latter were far worse, by any criterion […]

Sebastian: But why, when the US is considering what to do about this, do you always go back to past crimes? […] Are you kicking the US when it’s down?

Chomsky: No. I’m asking that we accept the definition of “hypocrite” given in the Gospels; [someone who] refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others […]

I think we should try to rise to the level of minimal moral integrity […] then we can discuss these issues seriously […] Minimal moral integrity requires that if we think something is wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.

I’ve never liked the term “pro-Palestinian.” Partly because it frames a century of killing and injustice as a “pick-your-team” binary, but mostly because it completely misses the heart of the issue.

The “pro-Palestinian” position isn’t about Palestinians, any more than the anti-slavery position is about black people or the anti-Nazi position is about Jews. It’s about the belief that we should not be hypocrites, that we should rise to the level of minimal moral integrity when we discuss these issues.

Because anybody who understands that the Iranian regime should acknowledge its mistreatment of its people instead of murdering them, understands the “pro-Palestinian” position.

Anybody who wouldn’t meekly accept the theft of their home and their land, not to mention the brutalisation and murderof their families, relates to the “pro-Palestinian” position.

And anybody who believes that all people, male and female, black and white, Jew and Christian and Muslim and atheist, are equally deserving of life, liberty, and happiness, believes in the “pro-Palestinian” position.

The question is, when do we finally hold everyone to that standard?

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.” — Frederick Douglass.

September 25th, 2025. Picture the scene: you’re in the hallway of an immigration courthouse in New York City, and a woman is pleading with an immigration officer to let her be with her husb…

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Then-British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, describes his political party as “a typical terrorist organisation,” adding that, “anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.” Fellow MP, Terry Dicks, describes Mandela as a “black terrorist.” And Mandela responds by becoming the democratically elected president and running the government in South Africa.

Despite this, Mandela remains classified as a terrorist for the next twenty-one years. In fact, the U.S. only removed the designation because issuing terrorism waivers for his state visits was getting embarrassing.

July 2025. Activist group, Palestine Action, breaks into RAF Brize Norton and sprays two military refuelling planes with red paint.

The group has a history of non-violent action against military contractors, including vandalising equipment at one of aerospace and defence firm Teledyne’s factories.

So MP Richard Dannatt (who just so happens to be a paid adviser to Teledyne), urges the government to take action against this threat to his bank accou…excuse me, to “security and the economy within the United Kingdom.”

The U.K. government proscribes Palestine Action as terrorists shortly afterwards.

November 2025. Syrian President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, attends the White House to discuss lifting sanctions on his country.

Around a decade earlier, as leader of the jihadist group, al-Nusra Front, al-Sharaa vowed to fight against Western interventionism and used suicide bombings, ethnic cleansing, and various massacres to do it.

So naturally, the US government…oh, wait, they rescind al-Sharaa’s terrorist status and Donald Trump reclassifies him as a “young, attractive guy” with a “strong past.”

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You’re not supposed to think too deeply about the word “terrorism.”

You’re supposed to accept that the world is divided neatly into good guys and bad guys, you’re supposed to buy into the cliches about who is and isn’t a terrorist, and you’re definitely not supposed to notice that our leaders have become alarmingly comfortable throwing the t-word around.

Politicians with blatant financial conflicts of interest can label non-violent groups like Palestine Action terrorists. And that’s all it takes for the Metropolitan Police to dutifully arrest over 2000 people, including blind men in wheelchairs and 83-year-old grandmothers, for expressing any form of support for the group (the police were so enthusiastic that they even arrested a guy wearing a T-shirt that said Plasticine Action).

Donald Trump can declare that peaceful protesters dressed as unicorns in Portland, Oregon, and 48-year-old single mothers in Chicago, Illinois, are terrorists. And that means he can ignore the objections of the governors of Illinois and Oregon and deploy the national guard to “crush violent radical left terrorism.”

And taking it to its awful, inevitable conclusion, people like Israeli Knesset Member, Amit Halevi, along with several other politicians and senior figures, can argue without a hint of shame that children, literal babies in Gazan maternity wards, are terrorists. And maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t think of a single reason to describe newborns in this way except as justification to kill them.

Because that’s what you do with terrorists, right?

You blow them to pieces in the Caribbean Sea and save yourself the hassle of due process, you torture them to death in prisons without the inconvenience of charges or a trial, you terminate them with extreme prejudice, even if it means killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians and children in the process.

And anyone who objects to this is obviously a terrorist supporter who we can deport or imprison without worrying about the precedent this sets.

But then again, maybe we should be extremely concerned, regardless of our political affiliations, when our leaders start blurring the lines between protesters and terrorists.

Maybe we should ask if the “terror” being inflicted is more significant than multibillion-dollar corporations terrified that their complicity in war crimes will affect their share price.

Maybe we should ask if part of the reason these fanatics in faraway lands can convince people to blow themselves up is that we’ve spent decades travelling to those faraway lands and blowing up their children and parents.

Because if the label is all it takes for us to abandon our moral and critical thinking, and the people who apply that label are willing to use it on anyone who threatens their power, there’s no telling if the next “terrorists” will be us.

It feels almost dangerous to admit that terrorists are human beings.

To ask if they’re motivated by anything more than murder and martyrdom. To think seriously about why they hate us or whether there’s any important historical context we’re missing.

This, of course, is one of the reasons why politicians increasingly use the label to dehumanise peaceful protestors and UN lawyers and anybody with the audacity to challenge them.

But it’s also one of the reasons why terrorism in its most violent forms persists. After all, it’s notoriously difficult to solve a problem if you can’t bring yourself to think seriously about it.

After a few hundred years, most people have come to the same conclusions about slavery as “terrorists” like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey.

Most people today condemn South Africa’s apartheid regime as unequivocally as “terrorists” like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko did forty years ago.

Most people (including most of the people who orchestrated it) have figured out that sacrificing millions of innocent lives to the “War on Terror” was not only difficult to distinguish from terrorism, but made terrorism worse.

The question is, how many lives would have been saved if they’d done that thinking a little quicker?

Through floods of tears, she explained how exhausted she was by her two-year-old’s constant misbehaviour, how overwhelmed she was by his screaming and violent outbursts, how loving and patient she’d been despite these provocations, and this might even have achieved something if she’d been telling it to someone other than the two-year-old in question.

Because, unsurprisingly, this kid did not address her problems.

He just stood there, sucking his thumb, totally indifferent to her perfectly valid complaints, because it turns out, children don’t think and behave like adults.

You don’t shame children by pointing out their childish behaviour, you don’t persuade them by whining about the damage they’re causing, you don’t convince them with logic or reasoning or appeals to empathy, because two-year-olds haven’t developed the capacity to think about anyone but themselves or think rationally about the monsters under their beds.

Kids don’t understand the sacrifices grownups make to keep them happy, they don’t appreciate the systems that support them, they’ve never had to learn how to weigh the consequences of their decisions or admit when they’re wrong, because when things go sideways, they know they always can cry or sh*t themselves until a grownup comes to clean up their mess.

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If you’ve been paying attention during this second coming of the Trump administration, you’ve probably been at least somewhat close to a breakdown.

Maybe you’re exhausted by Trump posting sombrero memes in response to a government shutdown that has left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without pay, cost the economy billions of dollars, and risks leaving as many as 42 million Americans unable to feed their children.

Perhaps you’re mortified by people like White House press secretaryKaroline Leavitt and the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, answering journalists’ perfectly valid questions with “your mom” jokes.

You might be overwhelmed by the childishness of people like Tim Pool claiming that the Vice President of the United States calling people “dipshits” on Twitter is “what he voted for,” or by Trump posting AI-generated videos of himself dropping turds on Americans who challenge his right to “plenary authority.”

But do you know who thinks stuff like this is “hilarious,” and “legendary,” and a “mic drop”? Do you know who thinks the resurgence of the word “retard” is “one of the great culture victories”? Do you know who thinks Nazi slogans are “based” and rape is “epic”?

MAGA!

Because it turns out, these kids don’t think and behave like adults either.

These kids think it’s “savage” when Trump gives his opponents elementary school nicknames like “Liddle Marco” and “Sleepy Joe.”

They think it’s “awe-inspiring” to rebrand the Department of Defence as “The Department of War,” and blow up boats off the coast of Venezuela without due process or evidence.

They think Trump is telling them the truth when he promises them clean coal, and non-existent healthcare plans, and the list of high-profile sexual abusers that Trump definitely isn’t on (thankfully, he can rely on kids’ notoriously short attention spans to hide the fact that he never follows through).

Because these kids don’t think about the consequences of their decisions, you can’t shame them by pointing out that their arguments make no sense, they haven’t developed the capacity to think about anyone but themselves or admit when they’re wrong or think rationally about the immigrants eating their pets.

MAGA is not a political movement. These are not adults trying to make the world a better place, they haven’t even thought about what making America great again means. These are just children, trying to tear down a system that made adults the boss of them.

And if the Democrats have taken their eye so far off the ball that these kids are calling the shots, there are only two things to do:

A: Do everything possible to contain the damage. And B: Do some urgent, uncomfortable soul-searching about how these kids got into power in the first place.

In the early 2020s, liberal adults faced down many a tantrum to keep the kids on the Left in check.

We railed against cancel culture, we fought to balance compassion with reality, and we warned, in our most age-appropriate voices, that identity politics and labelling everything “white supremacy” would trigger precisely the fragile, reactionary backlash we’re living through today.

The problem isn’t that the MAGA movement has kids in it; every political movement has its crybabies to deal with. The problem is that MAGA’s kids aren’t teenagers on TikTok or recreationally offended college students, they’re billionaires and senators and the president of the United States.

And nobody in the party of “personal responsibility” seems to have the guts to call them out.

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I think about how, around 15,000 years ago, they were these noble, powerful creatures that could fend for themselves and breathe through their noses, and no human would have dreamed of using them as an accessory.

I think about how they never imagined that accepting a scrap of leftover meat was the first step on a slippery slope that ended in kibble and castration and being gaslit into believing they were vegetarian.

Because they didn’t understand that you don’t tame an animal through force or shows of dominance, you tame it by removing the challenges and obstacles from its life, by convincing it that it can’t do things it was born knowing how to do, by teaching it, as early as possible, that it doesn’t need to hunt or fight or struggle, it can leave everything to you.

And when its instincts finally grow dull, when the last glimmer of wildness has faded, when it’s hopelessly dependent on you for every aspect of its life, that’s when you stick it in a t-shirt with “fur baby” written on it.

As AI efficiently and adorably takes over our lives, I can’t help but think that we’re the first species to figure out how to domesticate itself.

I’m not saying technology is bad; for most of human history, we’ve been successfully using it to make our lives safer and easier and more comfortable.

But now that our lives are significantly less dangerous, difficult, and painful, we’ve focused technology on one final inconvenience: thinking.

And this, I fear, is a convenience too far.

Unlike the technologies that came before it, AI isn’t an aid to thinking. It isn’t a computer or a calculator or, as Steve Jobs put it, a “bicycle for the mind.”

AI is a replacement for thinking. A WALL-E-style hoverchair for the mind. A tool that more and more people are using to escape the need for creativity and reasoning and everything that makes us, us.

Do you want to persuade your newly ex-girlfriend to give your relationship another chance? Don’t bother using your brain to consider what went wrong or how you could do better. Why not let a machine that doesn’t know what a relationship is write a nice, generic apology?

Are you trying to dream up a bedtime story for your child? Don’t waste your own time and energy on this moment of parent/child bonding. This is a perfect job for a machine that doesn’t understand love or the joys of imagination or care, even a little bit, whether the story puts a smile on your child’s face.

Are you struggling with depression and the fundamental need for human connection? Well, the last thing you should do is face the complexities and imperfections of actual humans. Instead, why not turn to a glorified autocorrect that will tell you how “raw” and “brave” you are, even if you’re thinking about killing yourself.

It will even write your suicide note for you. Because, and I can’t stress this enough, it does not, it cannot, care whether you live or die.

AI assistants are turning our destroying our ability to think and learn, AI-generated writing is turning the internet into a wasteland of blandness, AI videos are making YouTube more unwatchable than ever, and AI companies assure us that they have everything under control.

But what if their definition of under control is wildly different to ours?

What if under control means building a product so addictive that users marry it and get divorced because of it and rely on it for everything from parenting advice to “spiritual awakenings”?

What if under control means building a product that erodes our ability to think and reason and read anything more challenging than an AI-generated summary? Especially when their company offers to do the thinking and reasoning and produce the AI-generated summaries for you.

What if under control means blowing past any safeguards that remind us that we’re not pets, hopelessly dependent on our AI masters, we’re (mostly) noble, intelligent creatures who are more than capable of communicating with our loved ones or writing an email or making up a story without digital assistance?

These tools weren’t built for our benefit; they are the last step on a slippery slope of dependence, corporate monopoly, and profit.

Because when we no longer remember how to think or imagine or write, when the final glimmer of creativity and independent thought has faded, when we’re hopelessly dependent on these systems for every aspect of our lives, that’s when…”you’ve hit the limit for messages today. Upgrade to our Plus tier for more access.”

We’re going to reach a point, probably uncomfortably soon, where AI can do most of the work we can do, only faster and cheaper and with less griping about work/life balance.

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A visiting playboy named Grandison Chase asks him how a man of the cloth got so good at solving grisly, diabolical murders. And Father Brown offers him a powerful and slightly alarming lesson in empathy:

You see, I had murdered them all myself, so, of course, I knew how it was done.

I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course, I knew who he was.

After a moment of shock, Chase relaxes. “You frightened me all right, for the minute I really did think you meant you were the murderer […] of course, if it’s just a figure of speech and means you tried to reconstruct the psychology…”

But Father Brown isn’t having it.

No, no, no, I don’t mean just a figure of speech […] I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders. I didn’t actually kill the men by material means, but that’s not the point […] I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action […]

No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls…

It’s comforting to believe that human beings aren’t capable of the full spectrum of human behaviour. That some people, like us, are only capable of doing good, while others, like “them,” take pride, even pleasure, in doing evil.

That “they” are broken in some fundamental, unchangeable way. So much so that it would be impossible to put ourselves in their shoes, never mind their heads.

After all, they’re monsters, not human beings like you and me.

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Sadly, I’m not as empathetic as Father Brown.

So two years ago, shortly after Hamas launched the brutal October 7th attacks, this was my best attempt at understanding how anyone in the West might come to defend or even celebrate their actions:

It’s worth noting that all of these people think they’re on the right side of history […] but because they believe the world is made exclusively of perfect victims and evil villains, because there’s no room for nuance in a worldview that sees everything in black and white, they think that being a good person means mindlessly defending one side, no matter what they do […]

But if we no longer understand that terrorism is wrong no matter who commits it, if we can’t agree that the murder of innocent civilians is never cause for celebration, if we aren’t awake to the fact that the slaughter of children is never justified, well, we might as well stay asleep.

But over the next two years, I learned that millions of people, some of whom had applauded this view when it was aimed at the defenders of Hamas’ terrorism, were happy to defend terrorism as long as it was committed by the settlers that Israel has spent decades funding and supporting.

They stood proudly with people who mocked the murder and rape of civilians, as long as those people were Israeli politicians and press and members of society at large.

They could even mindlessly defend the murder of “as many kids as it takes,” as long as those kids were Palestinian, of course.

And it was only after spending two years trying to reason with these people, two years of appeals to common humanity and principles and carefully gathered evidence, that I decided that they didn’t care about truth or justice or moral consistency, they were broken in some fundamental way that made it impossible to understand them.

They were monsters, not human beings like you and m…oh, wait…crap.

If I’ve learned anything in my two years of writing about this conflict, it’s that we’re wrong to believe that empathy comes naturally. That it’s comfortable and instinctive and, most improbable of all, easy.

Because while this might be true when we’re empathising with people who are already part of our tribe, empathy is only really valuable when applied to people whose feelings we can’t easily understand. True empathy, as Father Brown notes, means thinking and thinking about how people could do or say things you find detestable.

It means discovering that they are within you, too.

And yet, even knowing this, even as I write these words, it’s still painful to believe that I could ever be like “they” are. It’s almost unbearable to imagine what style or state of mind I would have to be in to justify killing children, to cheer after shooting Palestinian civilians or to call my parents gleeful that I “killed Jews with my own hands.”

Every fibre of my being wants to reject the possibility that I’m capable of this part of the spectrum of human behaviour.

But empathy means recognising that if you were scared enough, you might justify any amount of cruelty to ensure your survival and that of your children.

It means admitting that if you were a nineteen-year-old kid, born in Gaza, and the wall that held you prisoner your entire life came down, you might make a choice that the current version of yourself can’t fully understand.

It means recognising that if you were fed the right combination of propaganda and dehumanisation and fear, if you lacked the critical thinking skills and integrity to verify the facts for yourself, you might be one of the people advocating the murder of babies and making TikToks mocking innocent people being starved and bombed to death.

Because, as unpleasant and even painful as this recognition is, as hard as it is to find each other’s humanity in the midst of all this death, isn’t it harder than watching this killing continue?

Even in a world as saturated in tribalism as ours, I can’t think of anything as tribal as this conflict.

Do you call it a war or a genocide? Is “from the river to the sea” a call for liberation or eradication? Do you want a ceasefire or are you a filthy “Hamas-lover” who deserves to be raped?

We’ve codified our tribes with these, and a thousand other battle lines. Not long ago, I was blocked by someone in my “tribe,” for daring to suggest that not all of Israel’s defenders were “vicious, evil, and demented.”

And to be honest, I get it.

I’ve spent long enough dealing with the gaslighting and the lies and the cynical accusations of antisemitism hurled at anybody who sees Palestinian and Israeli lives as equally valuable, that I don’t want to spend another second speaking to or thinking about or dealing with people who can’t. I don’t want to understand them. I don’t want to listen to their point of view. Some days, I don’t even want to breathe the same air as them.

But all of us who call for peace are asking the people in Israel and Palestine to do something infinitely more difficult; to breathe the same air as people who have killed and oppressed them and their families for decades.

After so much death and suffering and destruction, I have to believe that the overwhelming majority of people want peace. Not a negative peace, which, as Martin Luther King said, is just the absence of tension, but a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.

And justice requires, at the most basic level, that we take a long hard look at each other and ourselves.

Because none of us is any good until we can face the truth of how bad our side has been, and how bad we might be given the right provocation and the wrong circumstances.

None of us is any good until we’ve realised how little right we have to this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about millions of people as “colonisers” and “terrorists” as if they were apes in a forest ten-thousand miles away.

None of us is any good until we understand that there are no monsters, just human beings like you and me.

The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay […] I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labour program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.

December 28th, 2024. Newly re-elected president, Donald Trump, releases a statement laying out his position on H1B visas:

I’ve always liked the visas. I have always been in favour of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.

November 30th, 2018. Donald Trump signs a new trade deal with the leaders of Mexico and Canada to replace NAFTA, a deal Trump regularly described as “perhaps the worst trade deal ever made”:

It is my great honour to announce that we have successfully completed negotiations on a brand new deal to terminate and replace NAFTA […] This is a truly extraordinary agreement for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

February 4th, 2025. Donald Trump announces his plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada because of the terrible trade deal between their countries:

I mean, I look at some of the deals made, I say, ‘who the hell made these deals, they’re so bad.’

July 12th, 2022. Donald Trump ruthlessly mocks Elon Musk after a meeting about subsidising the electric cars he decried as part of a “ridiculous hoax”:

When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.

March 11th, 2025. Donald Trump invites Elon Musk and his electric cars to the White House, where he tries to convince the American public to buy the cars he decried as part of a ridiculous hoax:

Everything’s computer! That’s beautiful. Wow […] I’m gonna buy because, number one, it’s a great product, as good as it gets. And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this and I think he’s been treated very unfairly.

July 5th, 2024. Donald Trump takes to the ironically named Truth Social to distance himself from the alarmingly authoritarian “Project 2025” and assure the American public that he has nothing to do with them:

I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.

October 2nd, 2025. Donald Trump takes to the outright Orwellian Truth Social to inform the American public of his meeting with the architect of Project 2025 to discuss all the authoritarian things he‘s doing with them:

I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity…

On September 27th, 2025, Donald Trump posted (and then deleted) a video in which an AI-generated version of his daughter-in-law presented a fake Fox News report announcing the launch of “America’s first medbed hospitals.”

“Medbeds,” for everyone who is too sane and/or intelligent to have heard of them, are a QAnon conspiracy theory based on secret alien technology that can cure any illness, heal any wound, regenerate lost limbs and even reverse ageing.

They are, of course, not real. And we know this because if they were, Trump would surely use them to make the lie that he’s 6’ 3” and 224 pounds at least somewhat believable.

But this got me thinking, I can understand Project 2025, I can certainly understand his shift on Elon Musk, I can even understand the H1B visas, but what’s the point of lying about something so stupid? Why does Trump fill the air with such transparent, easily debunked lies? Especially when he knows the media will immediately point out that he’s lying?

Well, first of all, he does it because he knows the media will point it out.

Trump’s constant lies — and the constant criticism those lies inevitably generate — allow him to push a narrative that the media treats him unfairly(a narrative made easier by the fact that, infuriatingly enough, the media does occasionally treat him unfairly).

His increasingly authoritarian attacks on television networks—and on free speech more broadly—depend on this cycle.

Then there’s the fact that his lies create a sunk-cost dilemma for his supporters.

It’s one thing if you believed, back in 2016, that he was going to “drain the swamp,” and “build the wall,” and make Mexico pay for it. You might not even feel too gullible for thinking he’d end the war in Ukraine “on day one” and “cut your energy prices in half.”

But if you’re still betting on orange in 2025, if you’re still buying the red hats and the gold bars and the memecoins, if you still believe that China pays the tariffs and Trump is going to release the Epstein files, it’s much less embarrassing to keep fooling yourself than to admit you’ve been fooled.

But the most important function of Trump’s lies is that they create a liminal space where you’re never sure if a claim is fact and fiction, where it’s too exhausting to fact-check a man who can crank out twenty falsehoods per speech, where apathy feels like the only sanity-preserving reaction to the 30,573rd lie.

After all, does it really matter if he lies about his uncle knowing the Unabomber or the unemployment rate under Obama being 42% or ending wars in countries whose names he can’t pronounce and which, crucially, weren’t at war with each other?

Yes, it does matter. Because lying about “medbeds” and where his father was born and the size of his inauguration crowds is part of the same strategy he uses to get away with lying about immigrants eating pets and COVID being a “Democrat hoax” and Zelensky starting the war in Ukraine.

It matters when the president of the United States tells millions of expectant mothers, without any evidence, that Tylenol causes autism. Especially while joking about how he’s “not so careful” about what he says.

It matters when the president of the United States justifies sending the National Guard into an American city by claiming that it’s “war-ravaged” and “under siege.” And when the governor informs him that this isn’t true, he responds with the oh-so-nearly self-aware, “Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?”

It matters, and I’m sorry to harp on about this, when the president of the United States starts lying about a stolen election before the election even takes place, steadily whipping his endlessly credulous supporters into a frenzy, until they march on the Capitol building, call for the assassination of the vice-president, and launch an attack that leaves several Americans dead.

These lies aren’t designed to convince you, they’re designed to exhaust you. They’re designed to pummel your mind into submission. They’re designed to numb you to the dangerous extremes of his rhetoric.

So by the time he starts lying to US generals about an “invasion from within,” by the time he starts lamenting the fact that these enemies “don’t wear uniforms,” so it’s harder to “take them out,” his supporters are already primed to “fight like hell.”

The greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing his cult that the truth is partisan.

That any news that doesn’t flatter him is “fake,” that any facts that expose his lies require “alternatives,” that anyone who objects to his incessant stream of bullsh*t only does so because they hate him and, by extension, his supporters.

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During an interview for his then-new movie, Cold Pursuit, Neeson confessed that years earlier, after learning that a black man raped one of his friends, he prowled the streets of Ballymena, Northern Ireland, with a small metal club, praying for an excuse to beat some other black man to death:

I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody — I’m ashamed to say that — and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could…kill him.

And while it might seem crazy to blame all black men for the crimes of one specific black man, while you might reasonably suspect he’d have acted differently if the rapist had been white, for anyone who’s feeling frustrated by their inability to avenge their friend or attract the opposite sex or justify the mediocrity of their life, reducing millions of individuals to a faceless collective of “black bastards” makes a lot of sense!

After all, if you can convince yourself that black people are a single, undifferentiated mass, you can kill any of them to get revenge for the violent crimes that 0.008% of them commit every year.

If you can convince yourself that black people could only be more successful than you thanks to affirmative action or DEI, you can declare that all of them are unfit to be mayors or Supreme Court Justices or airline pilots.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson put it, “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

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For most of American history, one of the perks of being a white guy was that you could hear about a different white guy committing a horrific crime without worrying a stranger would beat you to death for it.

But sadly, at least if you’re a white liberal, those days might be coming to an end.

On September 10th, 2025, a 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson murdered right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk during a talk at Utah State University.

And the only thing more jarring than seeing right-wing commentators decide that the immediate aftermath of a school shooting is the right time to politicise it was seeing the enthusiasm with which they embraced using “they/them” pronouns to refer to a single person.

“They killed him with a high-powered rifle,” said Alex Jones.

“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not,” warned Fox News’s Jesse Watters.

“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” claimed Elon Musk.

And while it might seem crazy to declare “war” on the entire political left (even left-wing parties in other countries) over the actions of one specific man in Utah, while it might seem odd that they’re ignoring the fact that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom and Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (not to mention several left-wing political commentators) immediately and unequivocally condemned Kirk’s murder, while it might even seem suspicious that they’re choosing to focus instead on the worst reactions of trolls and blue-haired TikTokers, if you’re trying to justify attacks on civil liberties or weaponise right-wing outrage or even just boost your follower count on social media, reducing millions of individuals to a faceless collective of violent “leftists” makes a lot of sense.

After all, if you can convince your audience that Robinson murdered Kirk because people on the Left have compared Trump to Hitler and called him a “threat to democracy,” maybe you can gloss over the fact that people say these things because Trump regularly quotes Hitler and famously tried to violently overturn a democratic election.

You might even distract them from the fact that Trump’s current vice president called him “America’s Hitler,” and his anti-vax head of Health and Human Services implied Trump was worse than Hitler. Trump himself spent pretty much the entire election cycle calling his political opponents “radical left marxist communist fascists” and “the enemy from within.”

If you can convince the nation that “most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left,” even though every single source, from both sides of the political spectrum (even the ones hastily removed by Trump’s justice department), attests that the exact opposite is true, you might be able to distract them from your corruption and incompetence and your ongoing refusal to release the Epstein list.

But please, let’s at least stop pretending that this has anything to do with honouring Charlie Kirk’s memory or “lowering the political temperature.” Especially after Trump, who couldn’t even get five words into a statement about the loss of his “friend” before changing the subject to his big, beautiful ballroom, freely admitted that he “couldn’t care less” about bringing the country together.

Because Trump has long understood that if you can convince conservatives that they’re at war with liberals, despite the fact that liberals and conservatives largely share the same concerns about the economy and crime and even immigration and the Second Amendment, they won’t notice that he’s destroying the working and middle class, weaponising the police against American citizens and launching a war on the First Amendment unlike anything since the McCarthy era.

Hell, give them an enemy to hate and they won’t even notice that he’s doing everything they’ve spent the past 249 years insisting they need the Second Amendment to protect themselves from.

The world feels so upside down lately.

Jimmy Kimmel gets “indefinitely suspended” for making fun of Trump’s ballroom-centric reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder, while a Fox News host who suggested that homeless people should receive “involuntary lethal injections or something, just kill ’em,” gets away with a half-assed apology.

Alex Jones, who famously spent years mocking and tormenting the grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, claims the moral high ground over the Left’s “sick” reaction to Kirk’s assassination.

The same right-wing grifters who built their whole political schtick on free speech absolutism and opposition to cancel culture boast about creating a database to help them get hundreds of people fired for speech they find offensive.

This is what happens when the gap between what we claim to stand for and what we actually do becomes unsustainably wide.

This isn’t about politics, I’m past caring whether people call themselves liberals or conservatives, I care about whether they have the integrity to uphold their values consistently, even when it’s inconvenient, I care about whether they can resist the temptation to hate people because of the worst members of their tribes, I care about whether they can see human beings before they see skin tones and political affiliations.

Because these are the kinds of questions that say something about who we are, not just which political group we’ve aligned ourselves with.

And if I’m going to be held responsible for the actions of people I’ve never met, I at least want to know they stand for something.

#UEFA statement on the pitch for #supercup

They might as well have gone the whole way and written “Fuck you, Jews”

April 7th, 2025. Pro-Israel watchdog, StopAntisemitism, calls on the United States Attorney General to investigate children’s entertainer, Ms. Rachel, over social media posts such as,“[the children in Gaza] deserve to live in a warm, safe home again. They deserve to be children.”

…We urge you and your office to investigate whether or not Ms. Rachel is being remunerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers.

April 11th, 2024. Danny Danon, the Israeli representative to the U.N., expresses his condemnation of a newly unveiled exhibit of children’s drawings emblazoned with messages like “we are all equal here” and “peace comes from within”:

Look at the drawings of children from all around the world. Nothing about Israel. Nothing about our hostages […] they promote hate in those drawings, that is shameful […] I demand that the U.N. will remove this exhibit immediately and will stop with the hypocrisy against Israel.

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Now and then, even though I try to keep up with the latest trends, I discover that I’m behind the curve.

So when I learned that exhibiting children’s drawings, opposing the murder of kids and even enjoying the recent Superman movie might be antisemitic, I rushed over to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism” to see what else I might be missing:

It is antisemitic to “call for, aid, or justify the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” Of course, that should go without saying.

It is antisemitic to“[accuse] Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group….” Absolutely, this is the same braindead collectivism that many marginalised groups face (including Palestinians, of course).

It is antisemitic to “[hold] Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” Exactly! I’ve been saying this for yea…wait, what was that last one again?

Hasn’t the entire strategy of the people perpetrating and defending Israel’s genocide been to pretend that Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel?

Haven’t they been claiming that calling for a ceasefire is “antisemitic”? Haven’t they been arguing that condemning the Israeli settlers’ state-sanctioned brutality is “Jew hate”? Haven’t they been insisting that pleading for Israel to stop murdering children and civilians is a “f*ck you to the Jews”?!

There’s been a lot of talk about human shields over the past twenty-three months.

You’ve probably seen the claim that Hamas is using human shields leveraged to justify attacking almost every hospital, destroying nearly every home, and killing over 18,000 children in Gaza.

You might even have seen Israeli soldiers admitting that “almost every IDF platoon” uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and the widely documented reports of them doing so.

But there’s shamefully little talk about the most consequential human shields in this genocide; the Jewish people that Israel has consistently used to shield its crimes from criticism.

The rabbis being arrested for demanding Israel stop blocking aid, the Holocaust survivors who, despite being in their seventies and eighties, are manhandled for peacefully protesting Israel’s war crimes, the Jewish academics and peace campaigners facing down unbelievably sickening abuse and death threats for supporting justice for Palestinians.

Is there any outrage over the abuse of these Jews? Any performative solidarity from politicians? Can somebody point me to Danny Danon’s sanctimony-laden video?

Sadly, no.

You see, these Jews, their identity, their history, their humanity, are only useful for convincing the world that the people doing the killing still possess these qualities, they’re only useful for shielding genocidal rhetoric from uncomfortable comparisons, they’re only useful for making people so terrified of being labelled antisemites that they’re afraid to speak out against crimes that have nothing to do with Judaism.

Who cares if they feel they have to “qualify their Jewishness” by distancing themselves from Israeli crimes? Who cares if endlessly pretending that these atrocities are being committed in their name increases the discrimination they already face?

Because if you insist on pretending that opposing a genocide is an attack on the ethnicity or the religion of the people committing it, if you claim, at every opportunity, that hating the murder and starvation of children is the same as hating Jews as a people, some people will be stupid enough to believe you.

But they won’t stop opposing the genocide that Israel is committing, they’ll start buying into the lie that Jews as a people are responsible for this very real wrongdoing. Even the ones who oppose it precisely because they are Jewish.

On July 27th, 2025, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, published a report entitled, “Our Genocide”:

An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Jewish genocide scholars (in consensus with the International Association of Genocide Scholars), Jewish historians, Jewish rabbis, Jewish authors, Jewish Holocaust survivors, Jewish podcast hosts, all of them have come to the same conclusion.

But let’s be absolutely clear, this is not and never was “their” genocide.

Despite the best efforts of Netanyahu and his cronies to convince the world otherwise, Jews as a people are not responsible for the actions of the individuals and groups killing and oppressing Palestinians.

Opposing the war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza has nothing to do with condemning Jews as a people.

When the full horror of this genocide is recorded in the history books, it must never be recorded as a “Jewish” crime.

Because like all genocides, it is a crime of dehumanisation and ethnic supremacy and unchecked nationalism, a crime empowered by wilful ignorance and greed and moral cowardice, a crime made possible by cowards disguising a political ideology as an identity.

Just this once, I’ll go the whole way and say, “fuck you” to those people.

“I’m beyond excited to be a mom,” she writes.

In a few short days, the tweet racks up fourteen million views, over seven thousand comments, and is shared more than five thousand times.

So what explains all this attention?

Does Alycia have millions of followers who hang on her every word? Did she embed some Sweeney-esque reference to her “good genes”? Is her baby widely believed to be the second coming of Jesus Christ?

Nope, all the excitement was because her husband, the father of her child, is black.

Well…maybe “excitement” isn’t the right word.

“Race mixing is nothing more than child abuse, and here are just a few of terrible reasons why…”

“a white woman with jungle fever and a self-hating black man are getting ready to welcome a baby into this world……”

“Burned your bloodlines, I can hear your ancestors screaming. We should ship the both of you to Kenya in a straw-filled crate, you filthy race traitor.”

And certainly not least, but thankfully last:

“I don’t care if he’s a handsome, smooth-skinned black Man — You should NEVER Betray your Ancestors for Sexual Pleasure. Why are you doing this????”

This terror of white women receiving “Sexual Pleasure” from black men is as old as racism itself.

It’s why Rebecca Felton advocated lynching black men “a thousand times a week,” to protect white women from “the ravening human beasts.” It’s why three grown men beat a black 14-year-old to death for whistling at a white woman in 1950s Mississippi. It’s why black men risked death if they were even suspected of knocking on a white woman’s door.

But I have to say, hearing racists talk about the smoothness of black men’s skin is a new low.

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First, the good news.

According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 94% of Americans today have no problem with interracial marriage.

Unfortunately, that leaves ~19.8 million people who hear a chorus of their ancestors’ screams every time they see a picture of a non-colour-matched couple.

It leaves trolls harassing random couples with trivia about “race mixing,” it leaves Twitch streamers battling nervous breakdowns after finding out their girlfriends have slept with black guys, it leaves charismatically-challenged podcasters asking passers-by if they “think race mixing should be illegal.”

And I think what hurts these guys the most is that most people aren’t even offended by this silliness anymore, they just find it kind of…sad.

Because aside from the obvious, we all understand why these outpourings of racial angst focus so insistently on black men and white women.

We know why these racial purists don’t care that “race mixing” between white men and Hispanic or Asian women is several times more common than between black men and white women.

We know why these men have nothing better to do than try to tear down the happiness of a couple they’ll never even meet.

After all, if you’re a white supremacist hoping to secure “the future of the white race,” there’s nothing to stop you from leaving the comfort of your mother’s basement, meeting a nice white woman, and creating such conditions that she could post selfies of her baby bump on the internet.

But if you can’t do that, if women of all skin tones find you repulsive both inside and out, if caring for someone other than yourself is too high a bar for you to clear, if your best strategy for convincing a woman to be with you is calling her a “race traitor” when she falls in love with someone who has a different complexion, well, then you’re stuck.

This incel-coded racism, like all racism before it, is built on fear and insecurity and the uncertainty about who to blame for it.

These people don’t hate black men, they certainly don’t hate white women, they don’t even hate “race mixing.”

They hate themselves.

And sad to say, that’s a much more understandable position.

Racism is dying. It is dying because it’s too stupid and too wretched to survive.

It can’t improve, it cannot change (except perhaps into an even more pathetic remix of itself), it cannot grow because it has no roots, and nobody cares about it enough to feed it.

All it can do is slowly fade away.

In 1947, opposition to “interracial” marriage was the norm. Heck, in 1947, in most of America, interracial marriage was illegal. The last anti-miscegenation laws weren’t repealed until 2000.

But today, only 6% of Americans still oppose it. And just 2% of those aged 18–29.

In 1967, only 3% of new marriages were “interracial.” Some churches outright prohibited them even after the Supreme Court ruled in their favour.

But by 2019, interracial marriages accounted for 19% of new marriages, and those couples proved they could wind up just as miserable as anybody else.

In 1970, only 1% of babies were “bi-racial.” Black and white families alike worried that these children wouldn’t find anywhere to “fit in.”

But by 2013, there were over 9 million of these “bi-racial” Americans, one of whom happened to be a two-term President of the United States.

In a few months, a happy couple from Ottawa will welcome a new bi-racial baby into the world. And saddest of all, for some people, being angry about this isn’t even a new low.

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

In this framing, racial discrimination is like a seesaw; first, you get to be at the top, then, inevitably, I get to be at the top, and we compete, back and forth, to be the last one with our legs dangling.

To be fair to Kendi, a disappointing number of people seem happy to buy into this “middle ground” approach. We shouldn’t treat all forms of racism with equal disdain, we shouldn’t strive for equality, we should divide ourselves into teams based on skin colour, or just as bad, remain neutral and shrug our shoulders as the racists fight for supremacy.

In my article, The Moral Myopia Of The Middle Ground, I argued that there are (thankfully, only a few) issues where the middle ground isn’t an option, where refusing to take a side is indistinguishable from taking the wrong side.

But as Max demonstrates, it’s important to understand what the sides are.

Max:

I strongly disagree, and there are three problems...

1) Everyone wants to be fighting Nazis even when they are not. When transgender girls are kept off of sports teams, it may be upsetting and it may be injustice. It isn't genocide.

If babies are being put into gas chambers... then sure, extreme measures up to terrorism is perhaps justifiable. If we are arguing over the names of army bases, not so much.

2) You are setting up a strawman. No one takes the middle position on every issue.

I am a centrist because I don't tow the party line. I tend to be left of center on the majority of issues, but I am happy to admit when the political right has a valid point.

I believe in free speech to the extreme ( and probably more than you do). That doesn't stop me from being a centrist. I have no problem taking a strong position. I just refuse to let political side choose for me what positions I feel strongly about.

3) Not every immoral act is justified even when it is in service of a moral cause. I oppose Israel's actions in Gaza, and I even question Israel's right to exist as a political, ethnically based state. I think Israels actions in Gaza are barbaric, unjustified and are arguably ethnic cleansing.

That doesn't mean I support Hamas' terrorist attack targeting civilians or their rocket attacks on civilian areas.

Steve QJ:

When transgender girls are kept off of sports teams, it may be upsetting and it may be injustice. It isn't genocide.

1. Yes correct, I didn't say it was. This is an extremely bizarre objection.

2. Yes, some people do. But regardless, that wasn't the case I was making. I gave five specific examples of very important issues that people have taken the middle ground on. Even if they claimed to dislike the thing in question. Sometimes, there is a right thing to do. And the fact that centrists rarely acknowledge that need until "babies are being put in gas chambers" is exactly the issue.

You react too late, or not at all, and only have moral clarity in hindsight.

3. Again, I didn't even begin to claim that every immoral act is justified by a moral cause. I have never ever defended Hamas' actions, I don't think they're justified, and have devoted several articles to criticising them. Hamas are just as vile as the Israeli leadership in my opinion.

The point is that there is no way to justify Israel's actions against Palestinians by talking about October 7th. Not their actions now, and certainly not their actions before October 7th even happened. The attempt to do so is part of the centrist trap.

Max:

Martin Luther King, who you used as an example, is actually an example of centrism. He was resisting calls for a more militant version of resistance from more extreme parts of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King pushed back on the "Black Power" movement by name and was criticized for it by other Black leaders.

When Dr. King talked about non-violence, he wasn't speaking to the White police or to racists. His message on non-violence was for his own side.

Steve QJ:

Martin Luther King, who you used as an example, is actually an example of centrism.

No, this is a total failure to understand what the "sides" were in the civil rights movement. To be fair, sadly, you're not alone.

The sides weren't black peple and white people. This is still a racist framing when you think about it, because it still separates black people and white people into "sides." This is why the modern "antiracist" movement was also racist. Because it made this same mistake, just in the opposite direction.

The sides were racists and people who genuinely opposed racism. And MLK was extremely clear about which side he was on, and how intolerant he was of the other side or the people who tried to sit in the middle. In fact, your claim is especially bizarre given that I quote him talking about his disdain for centrism on this issue.

And, yes, he advocated non-violence in general which, of course, is not centrism. Many political leaders have been extremely one-sided while calling for non-violence. But while he would very obviously have preferred the police and the KKK to also be non-violent, they were unlikely to listen to a black man's advice either way. That's obvious, no?

Max:

You are setting up a false binary that doesn't exist... and never existed.

A person who opposes affirmative action programs in companies and colleges is considered racist. A person who calls for the accountability and punishment of racist cops is considered not racist.

And... yes, a person can do both of these things, which makes them both racist and non-racist at the same time.

You are setting up a "no true scotsman" argument when you use the phrase "genuinely opposed racism". There was a disagreement in the time of Martin Luther King about what it meant to oppose racism. And there is disagreement now.

And there always is lots of room in the center.

Steve QJ:

A person who opposes affirmative action programs in companies and colleges is considered racist.

Man, come on now.

A person who opposes affirmative action is only meaningfully considered racist if their reasons for opposing it a) ignore the fact that many groups benefit from affirmative action, not just people of colour (white women are among the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action) and b) only object to selection methods that aren't purely meritocratic when they involve people of colour.

The fact that some idiots throw the word “racist” around mindlessly doesn’t mean that their accusations are valid. You can find some idiot out there who thinks going to the gym is racist. This isn’t a no true Scotsman fallacy, it’s a recognition that words have meanings.

Legacy admissions, nepotism, wealth inequality, and, of course, racism. all of these have been functioning as forms of affirmative action for pretty much the entire history of the United States. Almost exclusively for white men. It's not a coincidence that every single president but one has been a white man. And that the exception arguably had to be more intelligent, articulate and capable than any other. It's not a coincidence that an adulterous, ignorant, corrupt insurrectionist was able to reach the same heights with less melanin.

It's not a coincidence that an anti-vaxxer is currently Secretary of Health. It's not a coincidence that an incompetent, alcoholic, former Fox News anchor is Secretary of Defence. If someone fails to recognise or care about any of this, but is still super mad about AA in the context of a few extra black people getting jobs, then yes, they are probably racist.

And no, "genuinely opposed to racism" is very easy. It's a person who consistently opposes the categorisation or judgement of human beings based on their skin colour or ethnicity, whether those people are white or black or green. That's it. A concept immortalised in King's famous "Dream" speech. It's why I have consistently criticised racism against black people and white people. And why I've been so deeply disappointed to see the people in my audience who only agree with me when I'm criticising the latter.

It's all too often forgotten that King was largely seen as an extremist in his time. Enormously unpopular amongst white people who would probably have considered themselves “in the center.” Again, it's only in hindsight that people like these can see that he was right. And then, because his correctness is now mostly mainstream thanks to his hard work, they fool themselves into thinking that they'd have always agreed with him.

Max:

Well, let me try to break this to you gently. I think you might be a centrist. Let me put it this way.

If my White face wrote what you did about Martin Luther King's message... the mainstream progressive left would jump all over me. The idea of a "colorblind" society is generally portrayed as a racist idea by the anti-racists (and actually I think they have a valid point, but that isn't really relevant here).

You are pushing back on the extreme parts of your political side. You are even suggesting that Black people can be racist, a heresy among some parts of the political left.

That is what centrists do. We are critical of the extreme of both sides. As a center-left Americans, I am far more upset at the current Trump cult than anyone else. And yet, the progressive left is annoying me too... and it is the political left who needs to earn my vote for the Democrats.

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Steve QJ:

Well, let me try to break this to you gently. I think you might be a centrist. Let me put it this way.

No, once again, you are failing to understand what the sides are here. And your convictions are too weak for you to be willing to face the pushback that is inevitable if you take a stand on pretty much anything.

Again, the sides on racial issues are racist vs not racist. Not simply KKK vs MLK (again, I quote MLK pointing this out in the article). Not black people vs white people. Certainly not "progressive left" vs everybody else. There are a great many racists on the progressive left too. And they gained a lot of influence for a while. That's why I spoke out against them. I will push back against everybody, left, right and otherwise, who is racist. Because, once again, the sides are racist vs not racist.

And seriously? Do you think the progressive left didn't "jump all over me" for my opposition to racism because I'm black? Are you kidding me? I've lost count of the number of times I've been called a "coon" and an "Uncle Tom" and a "white supremacist" and a "race traitor" and on and on. Who cares?! Why do so many grown adults still treat name-calling as if it's kryptonite?

Do you think I didn't get death threats and racist abuse for writing about trans issues in defence of women? Do you think I don't get called a bigot and an antisemite for speaking out against Israel's genocide?

I'm not in the middle on any of these issues. Yes, as I recommend in the article, l've given a lot of thought to the opposing position. I understand the discrimination that trans people face, I understand--to the best of my ability--the collective trauma of the Holocaust and the worldview it has created in some people, I understand, of course, the impact of racism, I have a degree of compassion for all the people who I think are wrong about these issues. But I'm unequivocally on the side doesn't allow them to justify genocide or colonialism or anti-white racism or the destruction of women's rights.

So no, what centrists do, generally speaking, is try to find a safe middle ground that doesn't ruffle too many feathers because they're afraid someone will "jump all over them." Because to stick your neck out on an issue, you have to care about it and genuinely try to understand it. When we're talking about these important moral issues, the "middle ground" doesn't help us fix anything. It creates false equivalences that make talking about these problems harder. And it leaves the people suffering to spend even longer dealing with the status quo.

p.s. What centrists also do is treat politics as some kind of game where one side needs to "earn their vote," even though they're very astutely "far more upset" with the other side. Man, if you think one option is worse than the other, if you can make that decision for yourself, why does the better side need to earn anything? This is actually a glowing example of what I find infuriating about the centrist mindset.

It's like this moral and intellectual helplessness where you think other people have to persuade you to make the right decision when you claim you can make it on your own. I have so many issues with the Democrats. Not least their political ineptitude. But why can't you weigh it up and make up your own mind where you stand?

Max:

I disagree with your premise. The problem with say it is "racist versus not-racist" is that no one knows where the line is.

Whether someone or something is racist of not is a purely subjective decision. You have your opinion, I have mine. I doubt there is anyone who will agree with you completely.

So what do you do with normal people? Someone may believe sincerely that no one should be judged by the color of their skin. That same person may oppose the protests against police believing that they want a strong police force to keep order. Someone may support Black Lives Matters, but oppose affirmative action.

Human beings don't fit in these nice simple categories. And saying "I oppose racism" is meaningless whether it is Donald Trump saying it (as he does), or AOC.

You are trying to divide human beings into sides... expecting that everyone will hold easily categorizable beliefs and behaviors that will allow them to be placed into one of two boxes.

Human beings don't work that way.

Steve QJ:

no one knows where the line is.

Do you judge people based on the colour of their skin or the content of their character? There's the line. It doesn't matter if you're using that framing to decide that white people are fragile or racists or colonialists or that black people are criminals or thugs or "magic."

It is so wild that the "wokies" managed to convince so many people that words like "racism" are totally arbitrary. No, they just overused the word to win arguments, and now you buy into their framing.

It is not racist to want a police force. It is not racist to oppose AA for good, consistent reasons (though it would be smart to recognise the need for some kind of alternative). It is not racist for white people to get dreadlocks. You have accepted incredibly stupid people's reframing of what racism is and then tied yourself in a knot of their making.

Racism is the idea that human beings are divided into (usually somewhere around five) "races," that you can tell which race someone is by looking at the colour of their skin (ignore the enormous genetic and geographic diversity of people with different skin tones), and that some of these races are better or worse than the others or that you can judge one member of that “race” by the behaviour of a different member.

Every single racist idea is born from this rather obvious mistake.

You can be more or less racist, of course. Your judgements can be more or less negative or positive, you can even argue that most people are a little bit racist because received tribalism is very hard to think your way out of, but the flaw is right at the root; the idea that you can say a single thing about a person, positive or negative, by looking at their skin.

It’s easy to be in the middle when you can’t figure out what the sides are. In fact, it feels as if there’s nowhere else to be. And for a disappointing number of people, the sides only become clear when they are personally affected.

The reason Max was so fixated on the progressive left, despite the countless, virulent examples of racism on the political right, was that the progressive left is the only part of the political spectrum that has ever directed racism towards him.

The “white fragility,” “equity over equality” brand of racism is exclusive to the progressive left. So it hasn’t occurred to Max that racism has a slightly longer history than the past five years of “wokeness.”

When he thinks about racism, he doesn’t think about the centuries of racial profiling and intimidation and violence that people of colour have faced, he thinks about cancel culture and diversity training and random nobodies calling him names on Twitter.

But those mean Twitter people only exist because of the aforementioned centuries of racism that Max and millions of people like him have ignored. And unless we figure out how to care about issues when we’re not directly affected by them, it’s hard to see how this cycle doesn’t just repeat forever.

As Martin Luther King put it, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Or to put it another way, the cure for past discrimination isn’t present discrimination, it’s an end to all discrimination.

A user by the name of @TheMagaHulk had earned 12,000 likes by posting a list of racial hate injustices and claiming (without any evidence, of course) that they were “complete fiction.”

Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Black Wall Street, you name it.

My first instinct was to spend the next several hours digging up evidence to prove that someone was wrong on the internet, but thankfully, a quieter, more mature part of me remembered a piece of Toni Morrison’s wisdom:

The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work […] Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up.

None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

Even if I’d posted Rosa Parks’ arrest record, which lists her crime as “sitting in the white section of the bus and [refusing to] move back,” even if I dug up the headlines from the race massacre at Black Wall Street, lamenting that the “Tulsa Dead Total 85, 9 Of Them White,” even if I showed him, as Mamie Till courageously did, the pictures of Emmett Till’s battered and bloated corpse, it wouldn’t have been enough.

There would always be one more thing.

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As I watched the latest Sydney Sweeney-inspired meltdown spread across social media, the first thing that came to mind was that Toni Morrison quote.

For everyone lucky enough to have missed it, Sweeney was recently featured in a series of ads for American Eagle jeans where she gazed demurely into the camera, smiled knowingly as it lingered on her substantial cleavage, and regaled us, in her best valley-girl drawl, about her “genes”:

Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour.

My jeans are blue.

You can probably guess what happened next.

TikTok leapt to the inevitable conclusion that a white woman talking about genes must be “Nazi propaganda,” publications like The Atlantic demeaned themselves with sentences like, “[Sweeney’s] figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs,” and in amongst the misogynistic horror fantasies about Sweeney’s death and the performative, predictably hypocritical grifting from Megyn Kelly, only one woman was courageous enough to admit what this is really about:

This campaign is poking at women’s greatest and most tender insecurity under the patriarchy, which is desirability and the beauty standard. It affects not only non-white women […] but it also adversely affects the majority of white women who do not naturally have blond hair and blue eyes.”

Sydney Sweeney herself is not even a natural blonde. And, of course, lots of white women are also insecure about having brown eyes. So that’s a whole generation of young white women who are being further propagandised to purchase blonde hair dye and contacts for the rest of all time.

Another thing about the Sydney Sweeney beauty standard […] is that big boobs are a hallmark of what conservative men are attracted to. At the end of the early 2000s and through the 2010s, we were becoming a more progressive society, and so we also naturally progressed to be a more ass-centric society.

Before I start making fun of the term “ass-centric society,” let’s get one point out of the way: Sydney Sweeney does have good genes. We know this because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about a culture wars flashpoint every time she puts on a low-cut top.

The problem is, some people, on both the “ass-centric” Left and the “Americans should be free to love boobs” Right, have bought into the idea that only people who look like Sweeney have good genes.

And this is just extremely obviously not the case.

Beyoncé, who is currently featuring in her own ample-breasted, inexplicably blonde-haired and notably uncontroversial jeans ad, has good genes.

Serena Williams, who combines being a model with being one of the greatest athletes in human history, has good genes.

Anok Yai, a Sudanese refugee who conquered the fashion industry with a single photo, has good genes.

Simone Biles, Nathalie Emmanuel, Angela Bassett, Kerry Washington, millions of women who don’t have blonde hair or blue eyes have good genes. But if any of them are hoping for an ad campaign or a MAGA conservative to reassure them of this fact, they’re going to be disappointed.

As Martin Luther King said in his aptly named “Black and Beautiful” speech, nobody else can do this for us.

So while it would be lovely if clothing brands hadn’t realised that poking at women’s most tender insecurities is a surefire way to draw eyeballs to their mediocre ad campaigns, it would be even lovelier if we could evolve beyond this cultural hellscape where even boobs have political affiliations, and into a world where nobody looked for jeans companies to validate them.

Seriously, think of the puppies you could be frolicking with.

The problem here is not Sydney Sweeney’s genes. It isn’t blonde hair, bottle-sourced or otherwise. It isn’t blue eyes or even humanity’s near-universal love of boobs.

It’s this idea, sadly common on the “TikTok left,” that the very serious purpose of society is to convince you that you’re enough when you don’t believe you are, to give you the acceptance you can’t find within yourself.

Somebody says your hair isn’t right, so you apply caustic chemicals and toxic dyes to your hair for the rest of all time (I was saddened to note that even the woman who spoke about this problem covered her hair with a wig).

Somebody says they like blue eyes, so you hide your brown eyes behind silly-looking, obviously fake contact lenses, or worse, risk blinding yourself (!!!) to surgically colour your irises.

Somebody tells you that the “Maga Hulks” of the world want a busty Barbie doll who will push out blonde-haired, blue-eyed offspring on command. And even though you don’t want these men, even though you know a relationship with someone like this would be a nightmare, you convince yourself that “society,” not you, is responsible for the standards you accept or reject.

But even after you’ve done all that, it still won’t be enough. Beauty influencers will still ask you if your nose is contoured enough or your lashes are long enough, ad companies will still imply that your boobs aren’t Sweeney enough and your ass isn’t centric enough.

None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

First, he presented volunteers with a series of short stories describing problematic but technically victimless acts.

For example:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body, cooked it, and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

Or:

A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

And here’s one that still keeps me up at night:

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

In each case, Haidt asked the volunteers to decide whether the actions in these stories were morally wrong. But crucially, he asked them to explain their reasoning.

Haidt assumed that because there was no clear-cut victim, the volunteers would be forced to admit that the stories, while varying degrees of disgusting, weren’t morally wrong. But instead, he discovered that most volunteers formed their opinions without any reasoning at all, and then made up justifications after the fact.

So even while admitting that morality and food poisoning have nothing to do with each other, they argued that the dog-eating family was morally wrong because they might get sick.

While quietly overlooking the fact that the Ten Commandments are silent on plumbing issues, they insisted that the woman with the flag was immoral because the rags might clog her toilet.

And while Haidt was mercifully discreet about the arguments for and against…chicken stuffing, I’m guessing everyone was equally certain they made the right moral choice. Because, as Haidt explained, the justifications didn’t matter:

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.

The arguments didn’t have to be persuasive or logical, the volunteers didn’t even need to believe them, they’d already made up their minds about how they felt. Why let reasoning or moral consistency get in the way?

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For the past twenty-two months, I’ve been trying to get answers to some moral questions of my own. And sadly, these stories do have victims.

As it slowly but surely became undeniable that Netanyahu was actively choosing to let the hostages rot, as the unjustifiable land seizures and murders in the West Bank continued, as the reports of atrocities and the images of desperate, starving children filled our feeds, I had assumed that Israel’s defenders would be forced to admit that Israel’s actions in Gaza are morally wrong.

And I was partially right.

Several prominent figures, from former Israeli prime ministers to Israeli genocide scholars to over 600 former Israeli security chiefs, have reluctantly admitted that this genocidal “war” should have ended over a year ago, and desperately needs to end now.

But I also discovered that many people have formed their positions without any reasoning at all. And so they’re happy to accept any justification, and an unlimited amount of suffering, to support their emotional reactions.

For example:

A man from Long Island, New York, travels to the Middle East and steals a woman’s home. He is one of approximately 700,000 people who have used violence, intimidation and the threat of military force to terrorise and dispossess innocent people.

As Israeli-American anthropologist Jeff Halper points out, without some kind of moralising story to tell themselves, these people are just criminals stealing innocent people’s land.

But if they claim that the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe gave this piece of land to them and them alone, well, now it’s fine to travel halfway around the world and force people out of homes they’ve lived in for generations! Remember, the arguments don’t need to be persuasive or logical, you don’t even need to believe them.

Here’s another one:

In response to an undeniably awful terror attack, the fourth largest military in the world spends twenty-two months bombing, displacing and starving the two million civilians living in a tiny, blockaded enclave. This, even though their top advisers have been saying for over a year that there is no strategic value in doing so, and a senior military spokesman admitted long ago that their enemy “cannot be eliminated" with military force.

I know what you’re thinking: there’s no way to justify collective punishment because it’s a war crime. But luckily, you can always claim it’s the only way to make Hamas “release the hostages."

Yes, you’ll need to quietly overlook the fact that Hamas has already released 140 hostages during ceasefire deals. And as several people — including former Israeli hostages— have pointed out, the rest of them would have been released long ago if Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t blocked or violated every other ceasefire deal brokered since October 7th.

You’ll also need to ignore the Israeli politicians from Bezalel Smotritch to Orit Strock to Netanyahu himself, who have stated explicitly that the self-admittedly impossible goal of destroying Hamas takes priority over safely returning the hostages (actually, Strock went further, arguing that “a government [that throws everything in the trash to save twenty-two or thirty-three hostages] has no right to exist”).

But don’t worry, I’m certain that relentlessly bombing the same twenty-five-by-five-mile strip of land where the remaining hostages are being held is the right moral and strategic choice.

And here’s one that should keep everyone up at night:

The majority of the Western world is financially and politically supporting a “war” in which report after report after report after report details drones and tanks and snipers deliberately shooting unarmed children in the head while they try to flee bombing or reach aid.

I’ll admit, this one is particularly hard to justify. You might be tempted to simply close your eyes and ears and scream “no, no, no,” every time someone mentions it.

But if you can handle the shame, you could always try claiming that “all the children [in Gaza] are Hamas.” You could try asking whether an unarmed thirteen-year-old girl did something to deserve an Israeli soldier emptying an entire magazine of automatic rounds into her. You could invent hypotheticals about suicide vest-wearing eight-year-old children who were “hellbent on killing you and your family.”

And when people point out that these children were only hellbent on collecting food for their families, who cares?! This isn’t about reasoning in search of truth, it’s about reasoning in support of your emotional reactions.

After all, if you’re still interested in defending this, you’ve already made up your mind. Why let reasoning or moral consistency get in your way?

We all like to think of ourselves as clear-eyed moral beings with flawless moral instincts, effortlessly moralising our way to optimal moral conclusions.

But sadly, that’s not the case.

Moral reasoning is flawed and biased and mostly based on ideas people drummed into us as children. It’s driven by feelings we rarely have to explain and even more rarely choose to examine. And on the occasions when we’re forced to examine them, our justifications are more about defending our feelings than trying to calibrate them.

That’s why it’s important to at least consider the possibility that we’re making moral mistakes, that the images of starving children and the confessions of the soldiers shooting at them should make us question ourselves, that the people criticising the crimes being committed in our name don’t hate us, they hate the crimes.

I don’t blame anybody for hating Hamas, I don’t blame the Jewish people who distrust a world that stood by as they were almost wiped out, I certainly don’t blame anyone for condemning the abduction, rape and murder of civilians, I blame people for shrugging their shoulders as Israel commits the same crimes at an order of magnitude greater scale.

I blame them for standing by as Israel spends twenty-two months wiping out the people of Gaza, crippling tens of thousands of children (Gaza now has the dubious distinction of being home to more child amputees than anywhere else in the world), and rendering 1.9 million more homeless, I blame them for blindly defending an unlimited amount of suffering as long as Israel is causing it.

Because recognising that you were wrong, or even that “your side” has gone too far, isn’t a sign of moral failure, it’s a sign that you understand what morality is for.

Morality exists to ensure that nobody is a victim of atrocities like these again. And, of course, to protect the honour of chickens.

Joe Biden has the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians on his [hands]. Israel would never have been able to raze Gaza to the ground without him.

I'm a non-believer, but if Hell exists, that man would have a first-class ticket there. A monster who belongs in jail.

Don't worry, I'm not going to debate Joe Biden's eternal resting place or even the morality of helping to raze Gaza to the ground. The reason I bring this up is Jones’ response when a commenter described his tweet as “truly deranged.”

Anyone who responds like this does not, in my view, regard Palestinian life as having any real or meaningful value.

Jones was one of the first people to criticise the severity of Israel's response in Gaza. He covered it extensively in articles and on his YouTube channel. He doubtless spent hours every day looking at footage of dismembered children and grieving mothers, interviewing traumatised healthcare and humanitarian workers.

And because the algorithm was showing him these horrific images, because Biden was in meaningful part responsible for them, he couldn’t understand how anybody could think of Biden differently.

If you didn't wish Biden eternal damnation, it couldn’t be because you weren’t paying particularly close attention to this conflict, it couldn’t be because you hadn’t seen the same images he had, it couldn’t even be because you occupied a corner of the algorithm that shielded you from the details of Israel’s actions, the only possible explanation was that you didn’t regard Palestinian life as having "real or meaningful value."

In my article, “Why You Must Never, Under Any Circumstances, Compare Israel to Nazi Germany,” I argued that the increasingly common comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany would only alienate people who occupied this corner of the algorithm.

James had a similar reaction to Owen Jones.

James:

I compare the leaders of the State of Israel to Nazis all the time, and I will continue to do that as loudly and forcibly as I can.

Intentionally killing non-combatants, including children, not limited to intentionally starving them to death, as is happening right now in Gaza — That's heinous evil.

It's absolutely shocking that people who were treated that way are behaving now in the same evil, demented, cruel way.

People who support the state of Israel's genocide in Gaza are exactly like Nazis. They are vicious, evil, and demented.

We must never lose sight of that.

We must call out this tremendous evil with all the force we have.

I for one will do that as much as I can.

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Steve QJ:

People who support the state of Israel's genocide in Gaza are exactly like Nazis. They are vicious, evil, and demented.

This actually isn't true. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people who are simply ignorant of the facts or propagandised or have been manipulated into believing that anything less than blind support for Israel is antisemitic.

I understand your core point, of course, but “force” is not the only (and often not the best) way to resolve problems. Especially in rhetorical terms.

So if your goal is simply to vent and chastise, then be as blunt and forceful as you like. Just know that this plays perfectly into the hands of people who want to paint you as a Jew-hating extremist, and will send many people who are persuadable, but haven't been paying close attention, running for the hills.

But if you're hoping to persuade people, if you want to change minds rather than just yelling at the evil people, I suggest you try a different approach.

James:

I think you must be wrong. Footage of the carnage plays across my screens constantly. Nobody could be ignorant of that. I don't know where you get that idea.

I think you're not a very moral person. You appear to be trying to justify genocide, or at least turn it into something that we do not forcibly condemn.

You're not a very good person, in my opinion.

Believe it or not, James blocked me here, but while that’s the end of the conversation, I can think of no more perfect example of why we’re finding it so hard to talk to each other on so many issues.

LGBT/race issues, immigration, geopolitics, you name it, millions of people are forming their worldview based entirely on what their algorithms feed them. Algorithms that even tech CEOs admit are “confirmation bias machines.”

But it gets worse, because these millions of people are also judging other people on the assumption that algorithms are all showing us the same things. So people can no longer just be uninformed or perhaps better informed than we are, if they disagree, even slightly, they must be evil.

And I pray that one day soon we’ll see that this is unsustainable.

We cannot improve society if we abandon the concept of persuasion, we cannot maintain a society if we brand everyone who disagrees with us a monster, and we cannot learn or grow or figure out when we’re wrong if we rely on algorithms to show us the full picture.

Conversation is valuable, despite the disheartening number of trolls and bad-faith actors, because it gives us a window into different perspectives, free of algorithmic interference. It’s not perfect, it’s not easy, it’s certainly not always fun, but the alternative is a word that is truly deranged.

In this first version, Superman was a homeless man named Bill Dunn who tried to take over the world using his telepathic powers. Unfortunately for him, the powers were only temporary and he ended up back on the streets.

Four months later, Siegel and Shuster tried again. This time, they gave Superman superhuman strength and bulletproof skin. And this Superman was a crime-fighting hero instead of a villain.

Still no luck.

Over the next few years, Siegel and Shuster continued to refine the character, inching him closer to the Superman we know and love. They added the Kryptonian origin story, the ability to fly, the big red pants, but while these changes attracted more interest, they also created a dilemma.

How do you make a super-powered, morally perfect alien into someone ordinary people can relate to? How do you humanise a character whose name is Superman?

Well, for starters, you give him a salt-of-the-earth Mom and Pop who raise him on their farm in the American Midwest. You have them teach him universal values like “truth and justice”.

You give him enemies your readers will happily root against. Superman fought the Nazis during WWII, the KKK during segregation, and the spectre of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.

Most of all, you make him a beacon for the idea that everyone is worth fighting for, that it’s good to care about other people, that values and principles are important, even when it’s inconvenient to uphold them.

Because if we have all this in common, who cares if he comes from another planet or shoots laser beams out of his eyes or occasionally causes billions of dollars worth of property damage?

Superman is one of us. And that’s all we need to know.

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This “the good guys are humble, earthy folk” shorthand is so ingrained in our storytelling that most people don’t even notice it anymore.

There’s Luke Skywalker, the plucky farmhand taking on the faceless, shiny-suited Vader, the simple, hard-working inhabitants of the Hunger Games’ districts rising up against the pampered, orange-haired weirdos of the Capitol, the humble, slop-eating heroes of the Resistance taking on the soulless, digitally generated perfection of the Matrix, Elon Musk even tried to leverage this trope during Trump’s 2024 election campaign:

You watched “The Hunger Games” and sided with the resistance. You watched “Star Wars” and sided with the resistance. You watched “The Matrix” and sided with the resistance […]

When it’s fiction you understand. Yet you refuse to see it when it’s the reality you’re living in.

And as much as I’d like to spend the next six hundred and forty-three words making fun of Musk for trying to frame Donald Trump as “the resistance,” there’s no escaping the fact that millions of Americans, many of whom also fit the humble, earthy trope, see Trump the same way.

In 2024, Trump won the majority of votes among the poorest third of Americans, the first time a Republican candidate has done so in over fifty years, he made gains of over ten percentage points among Americans earning less than $100,000, and all this despite Trump’s administration being lousy with billionaires.

Trump, Witkoff, Lutnick, Ramaswamy, something has gone seriously wrong if voters think these guys represent their interests better than you do.

But how exactly do you turn a draft-dodging, daughter-sexualising reality TV star, a man who writes his name in giant gold letters on the front of skyscrapers, into someone ordinary people feel like they relate to?

Well, for starters, you create a climate of fear and distrust by lying about “fake news” and DEI and pet-eating immigrants, anything to stop voters from thinking about the various ways billionaires are siphoning money out of the economy.

You make him a beacon for the idea that only certain people are worth fighting for, that nobody cares about anyone but themselves, and that values and principles should be abandoned the moment they become inconvenient.

Most importantly, you give him enemies who are so insufferable that his fans will stick with him, even if he transfers their retirement funds to his billionaire buddies and deports members of their families, as long as he “owns the libs” in the process.

Call it petty or weak or “fragile,” but it’s impossible to overstate how deeply those years of cancelling people for wrongthink and yelling at people for being “privileged," radicalised the MAGA faithful.

And just like them, Trump has spent years being “attacked” for his casual racism and corruption, and shamed for grabbing a few women by the pussy.

And if they have all that in common, who cares if he hangs out with sex traffickers or pardons pedophiles or is leading exactly the kinds of assaults on free speech and democracy and the constitution that the Right is constantly fantasising about taking up arms against?

Trump is one of them. That’s all they need to know.

The most frustrating part of watching the Democrats’ failure to contend with Trump is that there is no universe in which the Right represents ordinary people more faithfully than the Left.

Healthcare, social security, wages, the economy, crime, the Democrats are far from perfect, but Republicans are objectively significantly further.

The problem is, the Left has become so abstract in the way it talks about these issues, so comfortable with using identity to decide who is worth fighting for, so formulaic and insincere in its messaging, that for millions of Americans, they’re indistinguishable from the authoritarians of the Empire, the soulless veneer of the Matrix, the out-of-touch, blue-haired weirdos of the Capitol.

Luckily, there’s an easy solution to this dilemma.

You talk about universal issues like crime and immigration and the economy, not as identity issues or moral purity tests, but as issues that affect everybody.

You talk about your successes, and demonstrate that you have genuinely good ideas on how to solve problems.

Most of all, you stop “reaching out” to women and trying to “get out the black vote” and “appealing to the LGBT community,” and become a beacon for the idea that everyone is worth fighting for.

Because if you offer a viable, coherent alternative to Trump, it gets harder to manipulate people with fear-mongering and lies, it’s harder to convince people they should be divided by identity and not united by class. And once people start thinking about class, well, it’s easy to see that Trump was never one of us.

He was always one of them.

For example, some men, like 50-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, can’t bring themselves to date a woman who isn’t at least a quarter of a century younger than they are. So isn’t it empowering when 49-year-old Charlize Theron brags about having sex with a guy 23 years younger than her?

And we’ve all heard of (or experienced) cases of men being physically abusive in relationships, so isn’t this TikTok trend where women karate-chop their husbands in the throat for speaking out of turn just hilarious?!

And as we all know, sometimes men speak over women in board meetings. So naturally, having an “equal seat at the table” means Jessica Alba telling male employees at her company to “Go home and ask your wife,” when they try to contribute to a meeting about product packaging.

None of this raises the bar, none of it makes society better, men and women just end up in a toxic, double-standard-laden race to the bottom, where everyone justifies their bad behaviour by pointing to the other side’s slightly worse behaviour.

Instead of reducing the number of terrible men in the world, we’re encouraged to celebrate as the number of terrible women increases.

I guess that’s one way to achieve equality.

Given how deep this problem goes, I’d never complain again if it were limited to a few women with maxed-out GOOP subscriptions. But sadly, politicians have figured out that they can use it too.

Take Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett’s recent choice to refer to a paraplegic governor from Texas as “Governor Hot Wheels.” Shouldn’t the party of “joy” and inclusivity aim to extend those values, even to people they disagree with?

No, silly! After all, the guy Democrats constantly condemn for his non-existent moral character once mocked a disabled reporter during a rally. So now, making fun of disabled people is fair game!

Or let’s consider Donald Trump’s well-documented decision to defy the Supreme Court and send a man who was in the United States legally to an El Salvadorian mega-prison. Shouldn’t the party of law and order have something to say about that?

Come on now. Joe Biden once clashed with the Supreme Court when he tried to forgive thousands of dollars of student loan debt via executive order. True, when the Court ruled against him, he obeyed their ruling and sourced the funds in other, more limited ways, but whatever, now following Supreme Court rulings is for suckers.

And sure, Donald Trump spent years undermining faith in democracy months before the 2020 election (once polling showed he was losing to Biden), refused to concede despite losing 59 of 60 legal challenges (the one win was about a matter that had no impact on the results), several of them with judges he appointed, and topped it off by sipping Diet Coke in the Oval Office as a mob he incited stormed the Capitol building and called for the execution of his then-vice president.

But Democrats have also raised concerns about election integrity in the past too, and even though they accepted the (historically close) results and resisted the urge to send a violent mob to the Capitol, election denial is now the new normal.

It’s quite something to watch the kind of accountability-avoidance tactics I mastered as a four-year-old play out on the political stage. But we’re still thinking too small. Because things get really #problematic when we apply this trick to international politics.

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Comparison is the way we know the world […] and yet there is a rule — and it is certainly not unique to Germany — that you don’t compare things to the Holocaust […]

We imagine the Holocaust in great detail, but we conceive of it as fundamentally unimaginable […] But anything that happens in the present is, by definition, imaginable […] Anything that is imaginable by the very fact of being seen, heard, witnessed, strikes us as being incomparable to the Holocaust.

Roughly eight billion people agree that the Holocaust is a stain on human history. But only around 245,000 of them saw, heard and witnessed it. For the rest of us, the Holocaust, to varying degrees, is an abstraction, an atrocity-shaped hole in our collective consciousness.

As Arthur Koestler put it in 1944:

Seventeen is a figure which I know intimately, like a friend; fifty billion is just a sound. A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts.

Sane, well-adjusted people can’t imagine the hatred required to murder people by the millions. We’ve never been so twisted by rage and fear that we’d excuse an unlimited amount of cruelty. We’ve never been so warped by nationalism that we could treat millions of people as subhuman. So it’s hard to believe that the people who did these things were real in the same sense that you and I are.

Sure, we all know the Nazis and their crimes were evil. But we don’t seriously believe anybody today could compare, right?

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Sadly, the answer to that question is “no.”

In 2025, Nazi comparisons have become so cliché that some people wouldn’t recognise a Nazi salute if it smacked them right in the inauguration.

Obama is Hitler, anti-smoking campaigners are Nazis, schmaltzy Hallmark movies are “fascist propaganda,” even the descendants of Holocaust survivors have been getting in on the action.

In 1948, with the horrors of the Holocaust fresh in their minds, a group of twenty-eight Jewish intellectuals wrote a letter to the New York Times warning about “the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of […] a political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

In the 1980s, Yeshayahu Liebowitz, an Orthodox Jewish intellectual, argued that the president of the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to legalise torture specifically against Palestinian Arabs showed that “a Nazi-like mentality exists in [Israel].”

In 2011, Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana, explained that “Palestinians should be protected from Israel’s occupation as the violence is no less brutal than Nazi occupation.”

In 2025, protestors like Amram Zahavi and Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, the son of a Holocaust survivor, argue that “Israel has become a Nazi society.”

But fear not, comparisons like these are completely baseless.

Lest we forget, the Nazis justified murdering Jewish children by saying things like:

I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men […] and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the Earth.

Whereas people like Rabbi Yaron Reuven justify killing Palestinian children by saying:

You may think you’re being merciful to a child, but you’re not. You’re being vicious to the ultimate victim this child will grow up to kill […] erase every memory of “Amalek” — meaning men, women and children do not have the right to exist.

The Nazis committed unspeakable atrocities in concentration camps like Auschwitz. Whereas Israeli politicians only use Auschwitz as inspiration for the atrocities they hope to commit in Gaza, “the whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz.”

Hitler cruelly mocked the plight of the Jews in Germany, arguing that if European countries truly believed in the value of Jewish lives, they would be eager to accept them. Whereas Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said…well, you get the idea by now:

From Israel’s perspective, there is no objection to Gazans leaving […] but there are no countries in the world willing to accept them.

So please, make painstaking distinctions between the Nazis’ “Hunger Plan,” which systematically starved Jewish civilians, and the Israeli government’s longstanding efforts to put Palestinians “on a diet.”

Resist the temptation to compare the people who believed they were the master race to the people who boast about being the “chosen people.”

Avoid the nearly one-to-one similarities between the rhetoric of the people who tried to obliterate the Jewish people in the 1940s and the people trying to obliterate the Palestinian people today.

Because, as Western governments have reminded us time and time again, the way we speak about the people committing genocide is of far greater concern than the genocide itself.

Comparison is the way we know the world, so it’s natural to compare atrocities from our present to atrocities from our past.

But Godwin’s law aside, there’s good reason to avoid this barely avoidable comparison.

Because for anybody whose algorithms and influencers shield them from the crimes Israel is committing, for anybody who doesn’t understand that there is no such thing as a perfect victim, for anybody who still believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that criticising the Israeli government has anything to do with hating Jews, the comparison sounds hateful.

It sounds like a vicious, mean-spirited exaggeration against a persecuted people, it sounds like attacking a victim with the worst crimes of their abuser, and this offers an easy way out for people who don’t want to acknowledge what Israel is doing now and has been doing for decades.

And as the acknowledgements of this genocide become louder and more common, as the crimes taking place in Gaza and the West Bank become too frequent and well documented to ignore, as the international community slowly but surely develops a moral backbone, it’s more important than ever to be as clear as possible.

The soldiers who fired on starving, unarmed civilians as they queued for food need no comparisons, the testimonies of healthcare workers who treated children with sniper wounds speak for themselves, and the reservists who were so traumatised by what they saw and did in Gaza that they have refused to return to duty, some even comparing themselves to Nazis, tell you all you need to know about what’s happening there.

Some crimes are easier to process through comparison, but the worst are heavy enough to stand alone.

I want to clarify, right from the start, that I consider slavery to be “an atrocious debasement of human nature,” “a great moral, social and political evil,” “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” But as much as I’d like to indulge the abolitionists’ emotion-driven calls to “free” the slaves, the real world isn’t so simple.

In the real world, we have to think about the broader economic and social impact that freeing the slaves would have, we must respect the convictions of those who believe equality violates God’s natural order, we must remember,as Thomas Jefferson said, that slavery is like “[holding] a wolf by the ear […] we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”

So I advocate for a balanced, rational middle ground. We must find a reasonable compromise between slavery and freedom.

The year is 1938, and I’m a centrist trying to end Jewish persecution in Germany.

Before I go any further, I will admit that Hitler hasn’t always been perfect. The stripping of Jewish citizenship and voting rights, the employment discrimination and ghettos, the pogroms, at some faraway point in the future, I’ll ask myself whether these were red flags.

But sadly, in the meantime, the Jewish people don’t have the cards. So while they might find the choice between expulsion or extermination unpalatable, I‘m not hearing an alternative that Hitler will accept. Say what you will about the final solution, but at least Hitler is offering solutions.

So I suggest a middle way that recognises the plight of German Jews and the legitimacy of Hitler’s “demographic concerns.” No matter how many people die as we debate, we need a compromise that balances the Jews’ humanity with the Nazis’ desire to “annihilate the Jewish race in Europe.”

The year is 1963, and I’m a centrist trying to advance the civil rights movement.

First, the good news: I support Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where we no longer judge each other by the colour of our skin.

Unfortunately, I cannot support his attempts to pressure segregationists into treating black people like human beings. To be clear, I’m not taking the segregationists’ side; I’m simply suggesting that African Americans quietly endure their oppression while I demand nothing from the segregationists whatsoever.

Because, as I often do, I support incremental, piecemeal changes to an oppressive status quo that I would never accept for myself. We must find a solution, however long it takes, that both African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan will embrace.

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In every age, on every issue, there are the people who plant their flag in the middle ground.

People who have outgrown childish notions like fairness and morality, people who look beyond distractions like justice and empathy, people who think rationality means treating every situation as if it has equally fine people on both sides.

And annoyingly enough, these people are often right!

It is valuable to engage with both sides of an argument in good faith, it is wise to base decisions on as much rationality and objectivity as possible, and in almost every case, solving problems does require compromise from both sides.

But for some problems, thankfully very few, compromise isn’t an option. There’s just a right thing to do. And centrists have a near-perfect track record of failing to see this until it’s too late.

Take, for example, the war in Ukraine. A certain politician, who boasted he’d have this conflict resolved “on day one,” has repeatedly clarified that he’s not on either side, he just wants a Nobel Pea...excuse me, he just wants peace.

But sadly, Zelensky doesn’t have the cards. To be clear, Trump isn’t supporting Putin, he’s just calling Zelensky a dictator and berating him in the Oval Office and strong-arming him for minerals, all while demanding nothing from Russia whatsoever.

So it’s taken him three years and over 13,000 dead civilians to understand that it’s the guy who started the war who needs to “STOP!”

Or consider the “war” in Gaza. Most politicians will gladly acknowledge that the suffering in Gaza is “heartbreaking.” That it’s a “humanitarian catastrophe” in which “too many innocent people are being killed.” But as much as they’d love to indulge the emotion-driven calls of activists to “free” Palestine or even demand a ceasefire, the real world isn’t so simple.

In the real world, we have to pretend that an almost completely one-sided campaign of bombing, starvation, and displacement is “self-defence,” we must respect the convictions of those who believe a two-state solution violates God’s 3,000-year-old real estate agreement, we must remember, as a former officer in the most moral army in the world put it, that “the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy and the first-grader is an enemy.

So it’s taken them over twenty months and 56,156 dead Palestinians to even begin to figure out that there’s no way to balance two million Palestinian civilians’ desire to avoid expulsion or extermination with the Israeli government’s desire to “annihilate everything that remains in the Strip.”

It’s one thing to disagree with someone who knows where they stand, who can explain the price they’re willing to pay to uphold their values. Yes, it’s tiring and frustrating and corrosive to your faith in humanity, but at least there’s a point of view, a strongly held conviction, moral choices that you can challenge and demand justification for.

The problem with centrism is that it has none of this, no guiding principles, no fiercely held convictions, just a failure to value decency and empathy as highly as a veneer of “balance.”

With a few decades of hindsight, we can all see that it wasn’t “one-sided” to ignore the wishes of the people who wanted to sell their fellow humans, it wasn’t “biased” to reject the segregationists’ lies about “separate but equal,” there was no way to appease a guy willing to murder six million Jews.

But sadly, a disappointing number of otherwise intelligent people are unable to figure this out in real-time.

In 1963, during one of his many stints in solitary confinement for asserting his humanity, Martin Luther King vented his frustrations with centrism in a letter to his fellow clergymen:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice […]

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

In a world where every political conversation is one imperfectly chosen word away from a screaming match or a knee-jerk accusation of some form of bigotry, the middle sometimes feels like the only sane place left.

Nobody gets too emotional, you can have long, stimulating debates about other people’s suffering, and civilians far away can die needlessly while you talk about how tragic it is and devise ways to appease the people killing them.

But there’s a quicker, more reliable way to resolve moral dilemmas like these.

So I advocate for the people who can’t figure out whether there’s a compromise position on oppression or displacement or eradication to join the people who are being oppressed and displaced and eradicated for as long as it takes for them to resolve their confusion.

I have a feeling they’ll choose a side pretty quickly.

Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb. [This nuclear threat] must be uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.

February 1995. Three years later, it appears that Netanyahu’s assumption was wrong. But undeterred, he appears on CBS News to make…oh, exactly the same prediction:

Iran will be capable of producing — alone, without importing anything — nuclear bombs within three to five years.

December 2006. Eleven years have passed since Iran was three to five years away from producing nuclear bombs. And as Netanyahu explains on the Glenn Beck Show, that means a nuclear Iran is now only a year — or perhaps a decade — away:

I believe the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, just found traces of plutonium and uranium for the production of atomic bombs […] Iran is gearing up to […] produce 25 bombs, atomic bombs a year, 250 bombs in a decade.

December 2009. Three years and still no bomb, or so it seems. Netanyahu informs a visiting Congressional delegation that Iran can already make a bomb, but they might wait a while before doing so:

Iran has the capability now to make one bomb or they could wait and make several bombs in a year or two.

September 2012. In the three years since Netanyahu claimed Iran alreadyhad nuclear capabilities, he’s ordered the assassination of four Iranian scientists to prevent Iran from developing nuclear capabilities. So naturally, when he addresses the UN, he warns that Iran is closer than ever to developing nuclear capabilities:

By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, [Iran] will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

May 2018. It’s been six years since Iran’s first bomb was coming next summer, twenty-six years since Netanyahu warned that Iran’s nuclear bomb was three to five years away, and a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finds no signs of Iran advancing its nuclear program.

A lesser man might be ashamed to continue beating this drum without producing any evidence, but Benjamin Netanyahu is no man:

There’s an enormous amount of information that shows how advanced [Iran is] in their bomb-making work […] They have the wherewithal, the stored-up preserved knowledge, to make a bomb very quickly if they wanted to do it.

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If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that on June 13th, 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his latest terrifying warning about a…well, you get the idea by now:

In recent years, Iran has produced enough highly enriched uranium for nine atom bombs […] And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year. It could be within a few months.

But this time, he followed it up with a series of missile strikes on Iran.

And I know what you’re thinking, surely nobody in their right mind would take Netanyahu seriously after this decades-long history of wolf-crying, but I swear, this time is different.

Ignore Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, who testified just three months ago that, “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003.”

Disregard people like former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak and various members of the Israel military, who argue that even if Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, Israel’s strikes would only delay it by a few months at best, and at worst, will motivate Iranian hardliners to accelerate their nuclear development.

Don’t be distracted by the fact that the only reason we’re even talking about Iran pursuing nuclear weapons is that Donald Trump, at Netanyahu’s urging, ignored the advice of the entire international community and pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was successfully limiting Iran’s nuclear development.

Because while this might seem like a reckless, evidence-free, potentially world-war-precipitating mistake that will only inflame tensions in the region, Netanyahu has been clear that this is only an attack on the Iranian regime, not the people of Iran.

Israel’s fight is not with you, the great people of Iran, who we respect and admire, our fight is with our common enemy, a murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you.

Yes, Netanyahu offered almost exactly the same assurances to the people of Gaza eighteen months ago, claiming that Israel had “no intention of occupying Gaza or displacing the civilian population,” before killing them by the tens of thousands and revealing his plans to occupy Gaza and displace the civilian population.

But trust me! This time will be different!

Because, as Netanyahu also said, this is a perfect opportunity to take out oppressive Iranian regime, a move that will bring freedom to the Iranian people and peace to the entire region.

True, he said the same thing in 2002, promising a congressional committee that if the United States helped him “take out Saddam,” who was just on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons (stop me if this is sounding familiar), it would lead to “enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

And yes, what actually happened was that the US and the U.K. got bogged down in an eight-year quagmire where somewhere between sixty and a hundred thousand people died, UN weapons inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction because the threat was entirely made up, and the political instability that followed plunged Iraq into years of civil war that led to enormous negative reverberations across the world.

Because never in the history of the world, not in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Syria, has rocking up in a country that is already facing political and economic turmoil and dropping a few kilotons of “freedom” on the population, ever led to stability or peace or democracy.

But hey, I’m sure this time will be different.

It’s been genuinely painful to watch the fallout from Netanyahu’s latest attempt to drag us all into World War III.

Some people, like Ted Cruz and…well, pretty much every American politician, uncritically support it, even though they appear to have no idea whether or why they’re involved.

Others, like Netanyahu and former Israeli spokesman, Elon Levy and several more, are so bereft of shame and empathy that they’ve only just figured out that bombing hospitals and homes is wrong.

And some, perhaps out of disgust for this hypocrisy, are so eager to see Israel lose that they forget they’re “standing with” a regime that beats women to death for showing their hair.

There are no good guys here, there will be no winners, and as is far too often the case, the only people who really lose are the civilians trapped between the Iranian regime and the guy who’s been wishing death, destruction and violent regime change on countries in the Middle East for almost as long as he’s been telling us that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons.

Because even if the regime does lose, what happens next? Iranian society will still be suffering the effects of years of religious fundamentalism, the economy will still be crippled by decades of economic sanctions, the odds of a moderate non-corrupt leadership filling the power vacuum is effectively zero, and the Iranian people will quite understandably blame the suffering that follows on Israel.

So call me crazy, but is anybody else asking themselves if there’s a way to achieve peace in the Middle East that doesn’t involve blowing people up?

Is there a way to live safely in the world that doesn’t require killing and displacing people for decades and then being shocked when they hate you?

Isn’t it worth at least trying diplomacy and restraint and respect for international law before “most-moral-army-in-the-world-ing” innocent people into oblivion?

Maybe Netanyahu truly believes that disproportionate, civilian-bound forceis the only way to solve Israel’s problems.

But after decades of misery for all concerned, maybe this time should be different.