freedom and reason

As I have stated many times, one cannot change history, and bringing its ghosts into conversations about justice reflects a primitive ethic ill-fitted for modernity (The Ghosts of Conquest; The Matter of Collective Guilt; About Those Fifty-Nine Afrikaners). That said, history is not unimportant, and the accounts of those who appeal to it should be accurate and truthful.

Yet those who appeal to history often revise it to meet their present political ends. Revisionism is a means to ends—not always a legitimate means, of course, but a means, nonetheless. Therefore, if a debate is to proceed via historical appeal, then it is important to clear away the tangle of deceit to behold actual history. Live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak.

The left today appeals to an epistemological framework that promotes ignorance and permits those in the know to rationalize lying. This framework is most famously articulated in the work of historians such as Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History of the United States, which informs the teaching of history to American youth. Progressives long ago colonized Western institutions, and this is no clearer than in our education system.

Zinn argues that history is never neutral but rather is shaped by ideology—specifically, by the interests and perspectives of those in power. “Traditional history,” he contends, is a “top-down” view of the past, downplaying or ignoring the experiences of enslaved peoples, indigenous populations, farmers and workers, and other marginalized groups.

In his view, this selective emphasis (Zinn himself is highly selective in whom he counts among the marginalized) is ideological because it subtly reinforces the legitimacy of existing power structures by making them appear inevitable or universally beneficial. He wants to “reveal” a history “from below,” showing how inequality, resistance, and social conflict have shaped history. 

Zinn and his lot are often understood to be Marxists of some sort. However, the epistemology that shapes Zinn’s narratives is not to be confused with Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history. Whatever you think of his conclusions or his politics, Marx proceeds on objective grounds. There is a truth, for Marx. By contrast, Zinn’s radicalism is corrosive to truth in that it asserts that what counts as “history” depends on whose interests are being served and whose stories are being told—and this is the case whatever the sides in question.

It is not that revision is a problem of historiography. New facts emerge, and good historiography accounts for these facts without rationalization. Revisionism is a problem in the work of Zinn and his ilk. They are guilty of the very thing they decry. They do not decry traditional historiography because it is ideological per se. They reduce history to ideology. They decry it because it is not the ideology they seek to advance.

This finds historians of Zinn’s type participating in the same corruption of knowledge as critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. Like those standpoints, A People’s History of the United States is skeptical of “master narratives” that present a single, authoritative story of national progress. It emphasizes that historical accounts are constructed from particular perspectives rather than discovered as neutral facts. The emphasis on standpoint—especially the praxis of centering marginalized voices—aligns with postmodern and post-structural critiques of objectivity and power/knowledge relationships.

This essay is not about Zinn. I note Zinn because his work is illustrative, useful because he is well-known (even assigned reading), exemplary of the type of knowledge production that begins with presupposition, typically rooted in the irrationalism of unwarranted hatred, and then organizes historical materials as a means of valorizing irrationalisms to manifest in reality, the destructive and oppressive desire of activists left and right. In this way, the progressive telling of history is not at all unlike the manner in which Nazis construct history. With eyes open, one cannot avoid the hallmarks: identitarianism, an obsession with race, and the genetic attribution of designated evil.

Today, I am going to tell the true history of a territory in terms of what the French Annales school calls the longue durée. With antisemitism once again ascendant, on the left and the right in the West, and as always with the Muslims wherever they are, with the focus on the alleged injustice suffered by the so-called Palestinians, the story of what appears on many maps as “Palestine” is the case at hand.

The Islamic standpoint on this question is not just about driving the Jews out of the Middle East (and ultimately from the world). The Islamic telling, widely adopted by Western minds, is part of the Islamic project to finally conquer the world, which makes Islam useful to transnationalists, whose hubris convinces them that they can manage the outcome. Muslims have set their sights on the West because Western tolerance makes it vulnerable to Islamization.

The Blue Hat American Firsters are keen to tell us that putting America first does not entail concern for Israel—indeed, it requires rejecting the US-Israel alliance—but the threat posed by Islam compels an alliance between the United States and Israel. Concern for Israel’s future and security is America First. Islam is the common enemy. This is why preemptive action against Iran is just war. But Tucker Carlson and Mehgan Kelley are downplaying that threat, and condemning the war, going so far as to treat Muslims as if they are like Christians—and not at all like Jews, whom Carlson, Kelley, and their ilk see as the true enemy.

The conservatives expressing affinity to Islam, when pressed on the issue, can be expected to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamists. But Islamism is not a wayward branch or perversion of Islam. Originally, the term Islamism meant the religion of Islam. The meaning was changed in the late twentieth century after the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini. Western scholars and journalists revived the old word Islamism and narrowed it to mean political movements seeking to organize government or society according to Islamic principles or law. There are, thus, good Muslims and bad Muslims.

Yet, Islam is a political movement. And, so, the old term has been repurposed for subtefuge, to rhetorically differentiate between those who believe in Allah, in the way Jews do with Yahweh (setting aside the antisemites), and those who faithfully practice Islam with all its entailments, which are destructive and violent. This is a deception. Muslims are not like Jews. Judaism is a solid guide to the good life for peaceful people. Islam is a guide for aggressive war and totalitarianism.

It is worth noting that this differentiation came powerfully with the expansion of ecumenism beyond the tolerance developed among Christians for its many different sects. This gave rise to an interfaith project that welcomed Islam. Huge mistake. (See Defensive Intolerance: Confronting the Existential Threat of Enlightenment’s Antithesis.) The differentiation allowed Islamic propagandists and their allies to claim that Islamism is an unfair designation because it blurs the line between the faithful and the extremist. They’ve got us coming and going, don’t they? But Islam is an extremist belief system. Islam is Islamism. The best one can hope for is that Muslims don’t take their religion to heart. But hoping for the best can be suicidal, especially in this case. An increasing proportion of Muslims take matters to heart, and their growing numbers in the West—which should terrify all good and decent people—are emboldening them.

Muslims have a great many mosques in which to pray, but you may have noticed that they pray out on the sidewalks and streets, blocking traffic, disrupting the lives of the indigenous peoples of those countries they are colonizing. They even gather and pray on church grounds. In our law and institutions, they are establishing Sharia, the rules of Islam, demanding, among other things, that their dietary restrictions and other rituals be observed everywhere. They’re harassing people for eating during the days they fast. Be respectful, progressives chastize men of the West. In our communities, Muslims blare the call to prayer five times a day through megaphones from Mosque rooftops. They’re telling women how to dress—and using “immodesty” as an excuse to rape. They’re demanding we stop walking our dogs around them. They are holding non-Muslims accountable according to the blasphemy rules of their religion.

These are displays of aggression, and they’re often accompanied by violence. Muslims are telling us that they’re taking over the spaces of the host countries that have succumbed to the pathology of misplaced empathy and a warped sense of humanitarianism that tolerates extremist ideologies. They are using the freedoms and virtues of the West, our open-mindedness and tolerance, as well as Western concern for the downtrodden, and the gullibility produced by the postmodernist notion of standpoint, to subvert the West. And they’re amplifying antisemitism to conscript people on both the left and the right in the Islamization project, which we see in the pro-Palestinian crowd and the far-right that has rejected Trump and the Red Hat America First movement. We have but a generation to turn this around—if that. Some Western countries may be beyond saving.

I now turn to history, since if Muslims and their allies are going to appeal to it, it is important to ensure that historical truth is known—and understood.

* * *

The legitimacy of the Jewish claim to the territory is well established. The Jews are not only an indigenous people of the territory, but for millennia have been the dominant ethnic group there. It is an incontrovertible fact that the territory that came under British rule following World War I, then called “Mandatory Palestine” or the “British Mandate for Palestine,” administered under a League of Nations mandate system established after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, is the ancestral homeland of the Jews. And so, it remains today. The state of Israel is an established member of the international community. 

In a moment, I will get into how the territory came to be called “Palestine.” For the present, however, it is important to note the significance of other indigenous populations there—Bedouin, Samaritans, and others. If we go back further in time, we find living alongside the Israelites, groups known as the Canaanites, Philistines, and Phoenicians. Today, those calling themselves “Palestinians” are among the various groups presently identified, but there is no nation, either in ethnic or state terms, called “Palestine.” In the centuries before the establishment of the State of Israel, all the groups living in that territory were known as Palestinians, not because there were ethnic Palestinians, but because the name of the territory identified them as such. Jews were also Palestinians for this reason. If a state ever exists, called Palestine, it will not be rooted in anything organic. It will be yet another Arab state among many such constructs beyond the Arabian Peninsula.

Those identifying themselves as Palestinians today, in the sense of an alleged distinct national group, indeed speak Arabic, but they did not always. Before Arabization, which occurred around the Seventh Century AD, recent in terms of the longue durée, they spoke other Semitic languages. Arabization of Palestine is a late historical development, occurring with the spread of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula via conquest, colonization, and slavery. This history cannot be told separately from the spread of Islam. Within the Arabic-speaking and Islamic intellectual traditions, the Qur’an is widely regarded as the supreme model of classical Arabic eloquence and style. Its language had an enormous influence on the development, preservation, and standardization of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and literary culture.

We need to go back in time to understand the situation, especially to understand how that territory came to be called “Palestine.” Before then, it had another name: Judea, which was a Jewish nation. Like many kingdoms, its historic borders shift to-and-fro for various reasons beyond the scope of this essay. But that it was an established place of successive Jewish kingdoms is beyond dispute. I pick up the history of imperial control over Jewish territories under Rome.

In the middle of the last century BC, the Roman general Pompey conquered Judea, bringing the region under Roman influence. Initially, Rome governed indirectly through client kings rather than direct imperial administration. One of the most significant of these rulers was Herod the Great, who ruled from roughly 37 BC until 4 BC as a Roman client king.

I digress here to elaborate on a point I made in a May 2024 essay (Is the Progressive Left Flirting with Christophobia?) regarding Herod’s son Herod Antipas. Herod’s family background was not traditionally Judean-Israelite in the narrow ethnic sense. His father, Antipater, was an Idumean, or Edomite, from a neighboring Semitic people who lived south of Judea. In the Second Century BC, the Hasmonean rulers conquered Idumea, compelling, or at least encouraging, the population to adopt Judaism. As a result, Herod’s family became integrated into the Jewish political and religious world of Judea. Some historical sources also suggest that Herod’s mother may have had Nabataean ancestry. Technically, perhaps not ethnically Jewish as such things are reckoned (through the mother’s line), Herod was born a Jew culturally and religiously. He did many things for Jews, including the expansion of the Second Temple.

After a period of political instability following Herod’s death, Judea was reorganized as a directly administered Roman province governed by Roman prefects and procurators, including Pontius Pilate, mentioned in the New Testament (whom I discussed in that earlier essay). Crucially, all this was centuries before Muhammad plagiarized the Old and New Testaments in the Seventh Century AD to produce Islam. Indeed, this was centuries before the Arabic language took its classical and recognizable literary form, a process that did not begin until the Fifth Century AD.

As an aside, Muhammad claimed the archangel Gabriel dictated the scriptures to him, which he then dictated to somebody else, since Muhammad was illiterate. I note this because I find it fascinating how this parallels the story of the North American Christian cult leader Joseph Smith, who claimed that the ghost of an ancient prophet, Moroni, delivered the revelation that became the Book of Mormon to Smith, which, like Muhammad, he dictated to scribes, who wrote it down. Like Muhammad, Smith was a polygamist who included juveniles among his wives.

During the First Century AD, tensions between Rome and the Jewish population intensified, and in 66 AD, the First Jewish–Roman War erupted. The conflict culminated in 70 AD, when the Roman general Titus captured Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, which had been rebuilt in the Sixth-Fifth Centuries BC and, as noted, later expanded by Herod (the father) in the first century BC. The area known today as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the site where the Second Temple once stood. After the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 638 AD, the area came under Muslim rule, and over time, major Islamic religious structures were built on the platform.

Several decades after the destruction of the Second Temple came the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Second Century AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. After suppressing the revolt, Hadrian undertook measures intended to diminish Jewish association with the land. This is a crucial fact of history, for among these actions was renaming the province from Judea to “Syria Palaestina,” the term “Palaestina” derived from earlier Greek terminology associated with the Philistines, an ancient people who had lived along the southern coastal region centuries earlier. This Roman renaming is the origin of the later geographic term “Palestine.” When pro-Hamas activists share older maps of the region that identify the territory as such, they do not tell of this history. They leave this part out because it affirms the territory as the Jewish homeland.

The Roman province of Syria Palaestina encompassed what is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as portions of modern Jordan. Depending on the administrative period and how historians define provincial boundaries, it may also have extended into parts of present-day Lebanon and Syria. The region’s borders changed repeatedly under Roman and later Byzantine administration. All this is crucial to understanding the present conflict—if history matters.

Returning to the matter of Arabization, before the Islamic conquest of the Levant, the region the Romans called Syria Palestina was home to multiple Semitic-speaking populations. Languages commonly spoken included Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew (there were other regional dialects). Arabic, when it emerged centuries later, was spoken primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, though some northern Arab tribes and trading groups interacted with Levantine populations before Islam. 

I noted earlier that the classical form of Arabic began emerging in the Fifth Century AD. By the Seventh Century, around the time of Muhammad, Classical Arabic had developed into a highly standardized literary language. The Qur’an was thus written in a recently codified language and itself substantially codified that language. Following the early Islamic conquests that spread outward from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa, and beyond, many local populations gradually adopted the Arabic language and culture.

The Nabataean Kingdom, centered around Petra in present-day southern Jordan, illustrates the linguistic complexity of the ancient Near East. I have been to Petra twice and have seen the proto-Arabic scripts myself. Nabataean inscriptions include Aramaic, Greek, and early forms of Arabic script, reflecting the multicultural and multilingual character of the region under Hellenistic and Roman influence. My point here is not to deny the origins of the language and culture, but to show that it is not original to the Levant.

The process that began with the Islamic conquest occurred over centuries and did not necessarily involve large-scale population replacement. Instead, many indigenous peoples of the Levant adopted Arabic while retaining significant genetic and ancestral continuity with earlier populations of the region. Most of those who speak Arabic today in the region were not originally from the Arabian Peninsula, nor did their ancestors speak Arabic. They would have spoken other languages in ancient times and been the subjects of various Jewish kingdoms. (For perspective, ancient history ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth Century AD, long before the Arabization of the Levant.)

To be sure, modern populations in the Levant—including Bedouins, Druze, Jews, Samaritans, and those calling themselves Palestinians, along with various Christian communities—often show deep genetic roots connected to ancient populations of the region. However, while those identifying as Palestinians today largely speak Arabic and identify culturally as Arabs, historians and genetists describe them as descended from earlier Levantine populations who became linguistically and culturally Arabized over centuries following the Islamic conquests. 

The genetics of the people in this region are often used to argue that Palestinians have a right to the territory. This typically comes with the claim that the European background of many Jews living in Israel means they are colonizers. However, most Jewish diaspora groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, etc.) share ancestry with ancient Near Eastern/Levantine populations. Jewish communities remained relatively endogamous for many centuries, which preserved an identifiable shared ancestry. Ancient DNA studies comparing modern Jews with remains from the Bronze Age and Iron Age Levant show measurable genetic continuity. Are there differences? Of course, admixture affects all populations. No modern population is identical to ancient peoples.

The significance of this history is that had Jewish rule not been overthrown by Roman imperialism, all these populations, even if not Jewish by ancestry, would have been Judean subjects and citizens. Jews have historically tolerated non-Jews, and many Israeli citizens today are not Jews, yet fully participate in Israel’s political and social life. This history is apparent in geography. Major cities in Judea included Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, and Jerusalem. Under Herod, Judea included Samaria (today northern West Bank), Galilee (northern Israel), Coastal plain cities (e.g., Jaffa), and Perea, which is east of the Jordan River, in today’s Jordan. People of many ethnicities dwelt in these cities—and still do.

After the decline of Roman rule and the later Byzantine Empire, the territory once known as Syria Palaestina passed through the control of numerous dynasties and empires over more than a millennium. In the Seventh Century AD, the region was conquered by the early Islamic caliphates following the Muslim Arab expansion out of the Arabian Peninsula. Control later shifted among several Islamic powers. During the medieval period, parts of the region were seized by the Crusaders. Muslim control was later reestablished under various leaders. In 1517, the Ottoman Empire conquered the region and ruled it for roughly four centuries until World War I. After the Ottoman defeat, Britain occupied the territory, eventually leading to the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine under the League of Nations in the early 1920s.

We can now leave the longue durée and move to recent history. After the 1948 war between Arabs and Jews, which the Arabs initiated following the establishment of the State of Israel, the West Bank came under Jordanian control. In 1950, Jordan formally annexed the territory and incorporated it into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Many Palestinian Arab residents of the West Bank were granted Jordanian citizenship as a result (although, given the terms of the kingship system, they were and are more properly identified as subjects). This is why it is often said that the so-called Palestinians, who refused to be part of Israel, already have a country, namely, Jordan. Jordan retained control of the West Bank until the 1967 Six-Day War, also initiated by the Arabs, when Israel captured the territory.

From that point onward, Jordan no longer had control over the West Bank, and Israel established military occupation there. Unfortunately, Israel did not annex and incorporate the West Bank, a mistake currently, albeit slowly, amid international opposition (shaped by Third Worldism), under rectification. In any case, in 1988, Jordan formally renounced its claims to the West Bank, ceding its administrative and legal ties to the territory and recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people. Founded by the Arab League, the PLO was charged with the “liberation of Palestine” through armed struggle. The PLO is not the only terrorist organization pursuing this goal. Hamas emerged in 1987 during the First Intifada, originating in the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The story of the Gaza Strip is crucial to this history. In ancient times, Gaza was a coastal city-region known as Philistia, controlled by various powers over the centuries. The Philistines were a major rival of the ancient Israelites. This was long ago, between the Eleventh and Tenth Centuries BC. The Philistines gradually disappeared as a distinct people between roughly the Seventh and Fifth Centuries BC. Those claiming to be Palestinians today have no relationship to this ancient people.

After the 1948 war, Gaza came under Egyptian military administration. Egypt governed the territory but did not annex it, and Gaza’s residents were not granted Egyptian citizenship. This arrangement lasted until 1967, when Israel captured the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War, ending Egyptian control. Unlike the Sinai Peninsula, which was later returned to Egypt under the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, Gaza was not included in any such agreement. Egypt did not formally cede Gaza in a treaty; rather, it had administered the territory until 1967 and then did not regain it afterward. Thus, it fell under Israeli administration. In 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israeli civilians were evacuated. All Israeli soldiers left before the year was out. Hamas assumed control in the wake of Israeli withdrawal, which, in hindsight, was a grave error.

Taken as a whole, the historical record of the region reveals a long, continuous sequence of demographic, political, and linguistic transformations, rather than a single, stable national identity unchanged across millennia, except for the Jews. The land has been governed by successive empires, inhabited by overlapping populations, and repeatedly redefined by conquest, administration, and cultural change, but, throughout it all, the Jewish character of the land has remained.

Within the longue durée framework, and even narrower historical frames, the Jewish connection to the territory appears not as a recent political construction, but as an ancient and persistent historical reality that predates later imperial overlays. At the same time, the region’s complexity is shaped by the layering of subsequent populations and languages, particularly following the Arabization of the Levant after the Seventh Century AD. All this may be admitted. But it does not change the central claim. Israel is yet another instance of Jewish political organization on their indigenous lands.

Betraying his concern for indigenous populations, Howard Zinn was sharply critical of Israeli government actions toward Palestinians, particularly military occupations and large-scale military responses in Gaza and Lebanon. He ostensibly framed the conflict through his broader antiwar philosophy: that state violence and retaliation tend to perpetuate cycles of suffering rather than resolve them. In interviews and essays, he compared some Israeli policies to apartheid and argued that Palestinians were denied basic rights and self-determination. In these works, he accepted the historical revisionism of Islamic propagandists, which we might say is unbecoming for a professional historian, except for those operating from his epistemological frame. Still unbecoming, on second thought.

The point I wish to make is that, if modern political claims cannot be meaningfully separated from the deep historical processes that produced the present demographic and cultural landscape, then those who oppose Israel’s existence lose their appeal to history. Any serious account of justice or legitimacy in the region on these terms must engage with the full historical depth rather than selectively compressing or simplifying it. The continuity of Jewish historical presence, alongside the later regional transformations, forms the essential backdrop against which contemporary claims and political arrangements are meaningfully and validly understood. 

Ironically, this exposes the pro-Palestinian crowd as genocidal in intent. When pro-Palestine activists chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” what they mean is the elimination of Jews from the territory Arabs now claim as their own, justifying their eliminationist sentiment on the false claim that the Palestinians are a people colonized by an external force, which presumes they are a people.

The land upon which Israel is established is not indigenous Arab lands. The pro-Palestine movement is, therefore, not merely a colonial movement that seeks to assume control of the territory by Arabs—it is colonialism to be sure—but a genocidal project to eradicate the Jews in the Middle East. The rhetoric of genocide used to delegitimize the Jewish state is thus a projection by those intent on continuing the Judaicide that marked the Nazi horror. Indeed, as I have shown on this platform, the Arabs not only admired Hitler’s eliminationist ambitions but also explicitly allied with him in the project to cleanse the world of Jewish presence.

Helen of Troy appears in director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic mythological film, The Odyssey. Academy Award-winner Lupita Nyong’o plays both Helen and her sister, Clytemnestra, in the film. For those unfamiliar with Nyong’o, she is black. Helen was white. Objections to her casting are met with various rationalizations, chief among them: actors can play any role; objecting to Nyong’o performing the role is rooted in white supremacy; and Helen was a mythological figure, euhemorized into history, so what does it matter?

If Helen of Troy were a historical figure, given where she was purportedly from, what do you think she’d look like? Have you read descriptions of her? She’s described as especially white. It was her most remarkable feature. She would have stood out among the olive-skinned people around her. It wasn’t as if Sub-Saharan Africans were unknown to the peoples of the Mediterranean. If Helen were black, we’d have known about it.

Many of us know that Helen was fair-skinned and likely had blond or reddish-blond hair, but some people will watch this movie and walk away believing Helen was an African woman. The choice of actor distorts history—and the distortion is for political reasons. It would be the same with depictions of Jesus. If Jesus were a historical person, he would have been male and Caucasian. Depicting Jesus as a woman or an African would rightly be seen as an ideological move.

The rule is not unconditional. Black performers participated in the production of Jesus Christ Superstar. That was a rock opera where vocal performances were centered. This is not the same as producing a historically-based drama where accuracy is integral. In that case, it compels the dramaturgist to contradict the integrity of his field for the sake of diversity. It is not that non-Jews cannot play the role of Jesus, but casting a Chinese man in the role would signal an agenda. 

To be sure, movie studios can cast anybody they want in their movies. But when studios use the medium to push historical revisionism for ideological purposes, they should be called out for it. The controversy over the lack of diversity in The Promised Land arose from a tense exchange during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, rather than from broad audience criticism of the film itself. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen and director Nikolaj Arcel were confronted with the question and responded appropriately with astonishment. The discussion largely focused on the tension between Hollywood’s diversity standards and the historical realities of European settings. But the movie is set in eighteenth-century Denmark.

https://t.co/OpwJjl9QDV

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) May 21, 2026

Part of movie magic is the ability to suspend disbelief. Taking liberties with characters is particularly hard when the subject matter is historical and well-known. Knowing that Helen and Jesus were Caucasian would make it impossible for somebody who knew these stories to participate in the magic.

This is true for movie roles in many different ways. When Robert De Niro depicted Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, the actor bulked up to look like a middleweight and even put on 60lbs to portray the older LaMotta. Those of us who follow boxing history would have found a skinny De Niro unconvincing in the role. Suppose a black actor was cast as LaMotta? Sounds absurd, but this is where diversity rules take the industry.

Something must be said about hypocrisy here. Suppose Martin Luther King, Jr. were played by a white man? Ben Kingsley was criticized for portraying an Indian in Gandhi, specifically accused of “brown face”—even though Kingsley was of Indian ancestry on his father’s side and both the English and the Indians are Caucasian. A white man portraying King would be scandalous. I would not think to ask why it matters that King is played by a white man. I know why it matters. And knowing why something like this matters is not a matter of racism on my part. If racism is to be found here, it is to be found among those who are erasing the racial identity of historical figures for the sake of an identitarian agenda.

Far-right influencers have swarmed social media to tell us that fifth-generation farmer and decorated war fighter Ed Gallrein, who just clobbered former tech industry insider Thomas Massie in the Republican Primary for Kentucky’s 4th District, could only win because Jews bought the seat for him. We are now the “United States of Israel,” the far right declares. They also claim the election was stolen. They’re so deluded that they believe Jewish machinations defeated Massie. Since Trump endorsed Gallrein, the President is part of the conspiratorial web organized by Israel. More accurately, they depict the President as a puppet worked by the Jewish hand up his backside.

Those of us who live in the real world know that Massie lost in Kentucky because the good people of that state want a Congressman who will advance the President’s agenda, not disrupt it. Gallrein is the man to advance the Trump agenda in Congress. Gallrein campaigned as an “America First” conservative, emphasizing border security, deregulation, and tax cuts. Crucially, he does not fixate on Jeffrey Epstein, the hustler who committed suicide in federal prison in 2019. Massie is obsessed with Epstein. This endears him to the far right, who believe that the “Epstein files” contain evidence of a Jewish pedophile ring controlling the United States. But the public has seen enough to know that Trump was not involved in Epstein’s crimes. Moreover, they’re smart enough to know that, if there was anything there, it would have dominated the 2024 campaign. And they aren’t dumb or deluded enough to believe that Jews control the scene.

Massie co-led a bipartisan push with Rep. Ro Khanna to force the Department of Justice to release the files, using a discharge petition to bypass House leadership. Why Massie decided to join the Democrats in whipping up hysteria over the “Epstein files” goes to character, and this makes the man unacceptable to the America First movement. Thomas Massie has repeatedly voted against aid packages for Israel, the bulwark of Western sensibilities in the region. He was also the only House member to vote against a 2023 resolution equating denial of Israel’s right to exist with antisemitism, arguing that it blurred legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Is denying Israel’s right to exist legitimate criticism of the only Jewish state in the world? He has often opposed or been the sole Republican “no” on various pro-Israel resolutions, including BDS-related measures and other symbolic statements supporting the US-Israel alliance. The answer to the “why” question is that Massie harbors deep-seated anti-Israel sentiments, and slapping the label “libertarian” on antisemitism cannot disguise a worldview.

Massie didn’t lose a close election on May 19. The eight-term House member was blown out. It’s not as if Massie supporters didn’t see this coming. The best polling data predicted Gallrein would win by a huge margin. And so he did. In the end, he prevailed by a whopping ten points. The election wasn’t stolen; Massie was crushed. And he is not the only Republican to destroy his political career over Israel. Marjorie Taylor Greene made a similar decision to join the hysteria over the Epstein files. She gave up her seat when she realized that turning against Trump would mean that voters would be tossed from office. Massie decided to lose his seat in a humiliating defeat. In defeat, he made sure the public knew he was an antisemite by joking about having to phone Gallrein in Tel Aviv to concede the race. It will likely be the last thing we will remember about the man.

Did AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACs contribute to Gallrein’s campaign? Yes. Like many lobbies representing the interests of other nations, pro-Israel forces are involved in US politics. However, most of Gallrein’s financial support came from other sources. But what won Gallrein the opportunity to represent Kentucky in the House, aside from the voters’ frustration with Massie, was Trump’s endorsement. Trump has had a remarkably strong run in the 2026 Republican primaries so far, especially in the highest-profile contests. His endorsed candidates won several major races this week. In addition to Kentucky, Trump-backed candidates performed well in primaries in Alabama, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. The voters are sending a clear message to the Party: no more establishment Republicans.

The power of Trump’s endorsements and the America First base will likely result in the defeat of other politicians who are more interested in pursuing their historic role as controlled opposition, prioritizing the interests of their wealthy donors over the interests of the American people. Trump’s endorsement of Ken Paxton over obstructionist John Cornyn in the Texas Senate Primary race spells doom for the four-term establishment operative. Cornyn served as Mitch McConnell’s Republican Whip from 2013 to 2019. Kentucky RINO McConnell is another creature of the donor class whose only good deed was preventing Barack Obama from putting another progressive on the Supreme Court. Cornyn ran to succeed McConnell as party leader but was ultimately defeated by John Thune, yet another establishment Republican obstructing the America First agenda. There is some suggestion that JD Vance assume his constitutional power as President of the Senate and take control of the Republican agenda. Sounds like a plan. That and continuing to drive RINOs out of the party.

Feigning astonishment, the far right is asking, “Who is Ed Gallrein?” They know who he is, but they want you to pretend along with them that they don’t. They need you to believe that an agriculturalist and decorated war fighter is a Trojan Horse for Israel. If they didn’t know who he is, then they aren’t very patriotic. Before entering national politics, Gallrein dedicated his life to military service as a Navy SEAL officer. He retired from service after thirty years and returned to his family farm in Kentucky. Now he leaves his Kentucky farm to serve his country again and advance America First priorities in Congress. It’s a résumé that would excite a Founding Father. Massie fades away as a nonentity. Good riddance. We need to see the fake America Firsters out the door, as well. Anti-Jewish antipathy has no place in the Republican Party. Leave that ancient hatred and loathing to the far right, the left, and Islam—and return them to history where they belong.

I watched the video the teens made of the shootings and suicide. I don’t recommend it, but you can watch the livestream on an X account that was following in real time. I share a screenshot below. It does not show the teen committing suicide. The teen in the image, Cain Lee Clark, is shooting the other teen, Caleb Liam Vazquez, in the head (he shoots him twice off-camera), then shoots himself in the mouth. Both expressed suicidal intent, so I don’t think this was an instance of betrayal. It was murder-suicide.

Notice the Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) symbol on Clark’s chest. Vazquez was also wearing the symbol on his left breast. Clark’s symbol is sewn to his vest. Vazquez’s appears to be tacked on. This symbol is popular among neo-Nazis in Ukraine, for example, the Azov Battalion. But not just Ukrainian Nazis. It is a favored symbol of neo-Nazis globally. The teens carried other neo-Nazi symbols, including the SS insignia. In their writings, the teens blame everything on the Jews, a group they characterize as the “universal enemy.” They blame Jews for degeneracy, immigration, and wars. They believe Jews control world finance and describe the Holocaust as a hoax.

The two coauthored a 75-page manifesto, which appears to rely heavily on AI and far-right writings. The manifesto is too polished; I find it difficult to imagine that teenagers are capable of this level of sophistication in their writing. According to news reports, analysts have isolated separate contributions. Clark was focused on accelerationist and nihilistic themes. He described himself as an ecofascist. Ecofascism is rooted in eugenics and genocide. In a section attributed to Vazquez, the teen states that he does not hate Muslims, but rather sees Islamization as part of a Jewish plot to destroy the West. Anti-Muslim sentiment on the far-right is often rooted in antisemitism, albeit many antisemites, e.g., Tucker Carlson, are finding an affinity with Islam in their shared hatred for Jews.

Both of the shooters were enamoured with Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who perpetrated the Christchurch mosque killings in New Zealand that left 51 dead and 40 others wounded. They consider themselves his “sons.” They dressed like Tarrant, right down to the Schwartz Sonne. They were also admirers of Adolf Hitler. The fascination with Hitler is a perennial theme among teen shooters. One of the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, was an admirer of Hitler and Nazi symbolism. “I love the Nazis,” he wrote. “I fucking can’t get enough of the swastika, the SS, and the iron cross.” He went on to write of Nazis, “I love their beliefs and who they were, what they did, and what they wanted.” Dylan Klebold (Jewish on his mother’s side) participated but appears less deeply fixated with National Socialism.

There are reports that classmates identify the San Diego teens as being in a relationship, with one possibly trans-identifying. I took down a Facebook post I made yesterday about this because I have been unable to verify this. Others claim the teens are incels, and Vasquez writes about that subculture. Their writings describe women as “the most evil creature in this world” after Jews. Incel culture emerged after Columbine (which occurred in 1999), but the evidence suggests that the Columbine shooters can be retroactively identified as such. Both Columbine shooters (who also committed suicide) were virgins and expressed frustration with women. Klebold wrote extensively about his sadness of being unsuccessful with women. Harris wrote graphic, violent heterosexual fantasies involving rape, torture, and even cannibalism themes involving females. Both were nihilistic and self-loathing.

* * *

As for the suggestion that Clark and Vaquez were intimate, it would not be improbable for incels to be in a same-sex relationship. This may be why classmates assumed trans identification was involved, especially given Clark’s effeminate appearance. Whether authorities confirm this or not, the possibility of a same-sex relationship is something that many will find unusual if both teens are heterosexual. But same-sex relations among teen boys are not that unusual. Surveys find that same-sex relations among heterosexual males are three times more frequent than same-sex attraction.

These relations are situational and transient. The situational piece comes in when males don’t have access to females (this also occurs in the military and in prisons). The transient piece involves sexual development and same-sex experimentation. Teen boys are not alone in situational and transient same-sex relations. Such relations among teen girls and young women are two to three times more likely than among teen boys, though less stigmatized. Due to the social stigma associated with same-sex relations among males, researchers are convinced that such relations are underreported.

While most teen males who have sex with other males are not gay, it is expected that some of their classmates would portray their relationship as such (even those who themselves also engage in same-sex relations) and infer trans identification. In their writings, the San Diego shooters say they don’t have a problem with gays per se, but rather with perversion. Having said all that, sexual intimacy between the teens, if true, is not an explanation for their actions. What ultimately motivated their crimes is antisemitism and a fascination with far-right politics. The anti-Islam element is an entailment.

Antisemitism is a serious problem on the right (just as it is on the left). The shift of prominent social media influencers, such as Nick Fuentez, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others towards antisemitic tropes should disturb everybody. We have a duty to call this out. Their rhetoric provides immature and alienated young men with a motive. Thankfully, most proponents of right-wing views do not perpetrate violence, but such beliefs are a risk factor.

There are important lessons to learn here: pay attention to what your children are paying attention to. And keep your guns locked in a safe and the combinations and keys away from them.

* * *

I talk about the phenomenon of murder-suicide in my criminology classes when I lecture on the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Some mass shootings—especially school shootings involving adolescent or young adult males—are closely tied to suicidal intent. A substantial share of mass shooters either die by suicide during the attack or expect to be killed by police, which is known as “suicide by cop.”

Cases involving pairs of young men, such as the Columbine High School massacre and the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, fit a pattern researchers sometimes describe as “dyadic” or “peer-reinforced” violence. The typical scenario is two alienated teenagers or young men mutually intensifying fantasies of notoriety, manufactured grievances, nihilism, and an obsession with extremist ideology. Over time, violence becomes a shared project. They seethe over perceived slights, conjuring the spirits of revenge and retaliation. (Durkheim would classify this as “egoistic” suicide.)

Fascination with prior mass shootings, identity crisis (teenagers and young people are prone to this, especially in the absence of status transition rituals), social isolation, and suicidal ideations, the dynamics of male bonding around aggression and status that entrain them—the perpetrators in such cases are not merely homicidal but fundamentally self-destructive. The pair dynamic lowers inhibitions because each participant validates the other’s worldview (if we can even call it that; they are young, their brains are not fully developed, so their gaze remains much like that of a child), and this creates a sense of destiny or performance. I assure students that this phenomenon remains statistically rare, even among troubled young men. That doesn’t bring any comfort to the families affected by it.

Social media accounts exploit the San Diego tragedy to call for the critics of Islam to tone down the rhetoric. Even though, as noted above, no pattern of anti-Muslim terrorism has been established, unlike anti-Jewish violence, which is rampant and rising. The incident is used to silence criticisms of Muslim immigration; patriotic resistance to the Islamization of the West is blamed for the killing. The same accounts suggesting stochastic terrorism spew the most virulently antisemitic bile imaginable. I have yet to see condemnation for the massacring of Jews coming from them. 

I detailed the phenomenon of dyadic violence above to open the way for consideration of the possibility that these males found a rhetoric to give their actions meaning. I emphasize that explanation is not justification. My job is to understand why people do bad things. But if the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) thinks an extraordinary event will shame the critics of Islam into returning to their long slumber, they don’t grasp the depth of Western opposition to the Islamization of their societies. This doesn’t justify mass shootings, but Westerners are justifiably worried about the future of their civilization.

Muslims have become quite adept at exploiting the language of religious tolerance to suppress criticism of Islam. But Islam is an ideology just like Fascism, National Socialism, or Communism. If a pair of teenagers were to target members of the Ku Klux Klan, would the nation amplify the pleas of Klansmen to tone down the rhetoric? Would the demand go up for those criticizing white supremacy to abandon their speech against it? On the contrary, some hope that their speech will move people to take up arms and target racists with violence. “Punch a Nazi in the nose.” “This machine kills fascists.” We know that a great many people hope that antisemitic rhetoric will provoke violence against Jews. Weirdly, they are often the same people who call for violence against Nazis, the San Diego shooting notwithstanding.

* * *

Concerning the hype about the rise of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the wake of San Diego, there is no evidence to indicate a rise in hate crime incidents against Muslims. A dramatic case does not suggest otherwise. In light of anti-Jewish hate crimes, crimes against Muslims pale in comparison. Have those feigning panic ever raised alarms about anti-Jewish hate crimes? They’re too busy instigating them.

According to the FBI, as of 2024, single-bias hate crime incidents against Jews were 1,938, compared to 228 against Muslims, even though Jews and Muslims are roughly the same percentage of the population (1.5-2 percent). That means that around 70 percent of religious-based hate crimes in 2024 were against Jews; only around eight percent of religious-based hate crimes were against Muslims. Compared to 2023, hate crimes in 2024 rose six percent for Jews. Hate crimes against Muslims actually decreased between 2023 and 2024. I don’t have numbers for 2025. FBI statistics are always lagging because data need to be collected, compiled, and verified. That takes several months. 2026 is not done yet. 2025 is still being finalized. But there is nothing in the reporting I have seen that indicates a rise in hate crimes against Muslims since 2024.

The effort to stifle anti-Islamic speech uses the lie that Muslims are an oppressed religious minority in the West. The liars manufactured a propaganda term to frame the lie, namely “Islamophobia.” They’re trying to shame those who care about freedom into not standing up against a totalitarian movement. I ask readers to imagine a world in which attacks on fascists were used to shame the public into halting criticisms of fascism. It wouldn’t stop me. A free people have to oppose fascism. And, for the same reason, it has to oppose Islam. Clark and Vazquez don’t speak for patriotic Westerners. Clark and Vazquez are creatures of the antisemitic far right.

* * *

According to reporting by the New York Post, the Islamic Center of San Diego, where Clark and Vazquez carried out their attack, previously gained national attention for its links to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar prayed at the Islamic Center of San Diego, obtained an apartment nearby through advertisements posted there, and took flight lessons in the area. Current imam Taha Hassane drew criticism for comments made days after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. In a video posted to social media, he stated, “This did not start last week or on October 7. This is the result of brutal Zionist occupation and genocide.” He then justified violence against Jews. “Resistance is justified when people are under occupation and don’t let them change that narrative.”

More Information on Imam Taha Hassane from the Islamic Center of San Diego…

Let me begin by once again expressing that I passionately denounce the violence that occurred today at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

Now let's listen to what Imam Taha Hassane's reaction to a… https://t.co/MomB9OAgL3 pic.twitter.com/GRZ9XnuH3F

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) May 19, 2026

Hassane’s wife, Lallia Allali, and daughter Selma Hassane have also faced scrutiny. According to the watchdog group Canary Mission, Selma Hassane has promoted incitement, spread hatred of Israel, engaged in anti-Israel activism, and supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. StopAntisemitism accused Lallia Allali of posting graphic images after October 7 that included a Jewish star with text reading “the devil is killing,” and of leading the Palestinian Youth Movement, which has been involved in anti-Israel protests.

Whatever one thinks of the moral underpinnings of conquest, the new moral sensibility that weaponizes history and finds the living guilty of the deeds of their ancestors, a sensibility feeding on ressentiment, to the extent that the accused confess to alleged sins and make amends, ceding land or altering their way of life, in an expression of what Canadian psychologist Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. Yet the question of legitimacy in any present moment is determined by whether the society in question is good or bad, not whether responsibility for the evil deeds (having accepted that they were indeed evil) escapes the grave. Surely we have matured enough as a species to not hold children accountable for their father’s sins.

All nation-building features demographic transformation. The United States would not exist if it were not for conquest and the reordering of the continent. North America was not empty when the English (and other Europeans) arrived. The shape of the country is the result of expansion and war. Following the Mexican-American War, the United States took control of 500,000 square miles of land. This territory became the present-day states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as well as most of Colorado and parts of Wyoming. Some Mexicans still claim the territory belongs to them. But they would have to take it. And the US would—and should—stop them if they try.

Benny Morris, associated with the “New Historians,” a group that reexamined Israel’s founding using declassified archives, has defended aspects of the Arab displacement as historically necessary for the creation and survival of a Jewish state in the context of the 1948 war and continuous Arab hostility. Given the existential nature of the conflict, a stable Jewish-majority state may not have emerged without the large-scale displacement of Arabs living in mandatory Palestine. Morris compares this to other historical cases of violent nation-building (for example, the American Republic vis-à-vis American Indians). To be sure, one can have compassion for those who were displaced—hundreds of thousands of Jews, as well, expelled from Muslim-majority territories across the Middle East and North Africa—but history cannot be changed. Only the fruits of history may be enjoyed or suffered.

Why don’t we see Jews demanding land in Iraq, even though Jews had lived there for centuries? The practical life requires moving on from history. What’s done is done. Attempts to rectify the misdeeds of those who rot in graves only mistreat the living. This is why reparations in America are a non-starter. It’s why white South Africans have a right to their farms—and to use lethal force to defend them. There are generations of white South Africans now. It’s their land. I’d be disappointed if either Jews or Africaners opened public meetings with land acknowledgments. I always cringe when this happens at public meetings in the United States. I’d rather we just get to the agenda so I can enjoy the rest of my day. Frankly, I don’t appreciate the tone of voice. “Historical trauma” is emotional blackmail.

Dwelling on past injustice, even when we agree that an injustice occurred, is the quasireligious practice of conjuring ghosts to haunt the living—a rhetoric designed to motivate the envious to upset present reality with unjust law and policy, and, inevitably, theft and violence. Once valorized as a historical victim in a world where cross-generational reparations—in whatever form they may take, up to and including revenge—are recast as “justice,” the “oppressed” become liberated from obedience to conscience. The individual regresses to the primitive tribalist. The justice that results is retributive.

What is rationally addressed with respect to the modern understanding of justice is the current conflict between Israel and the Arabs, and here what is at issue is, most immediately, Islamic terrorism, and, more systemically, the ambitions of the barbarians who surround the Jewish state. The aims of those who call themselves Palestinian are not really rooted in rectification of an injustice—few today were alive then—but in a pathological hatred for the Jewish people and a burning desire to seize their land. Hamas’ express goal, like the Nazis before them, is to eliminate the Jews. Indeed, in many ways, the Nakba is the fallout from a failed genocide. Arabs would like a do-over. But Arabs have plenty of countries they call their own.

* * *

In light of the recent past, which many living persons have experienced, the one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict seems the most attractive. The two-state solution is unworkable. Incorporate Gaza and the West Bank into Israel proper. Those Arabs who want to leave can do so (they already have a state called Jordan—the flag is the same, absent the star). Those who want to stay can be integrated with Israel, as were other Arab populations living in Israel during state formation.

The agitators would like you to forget this, but Israel did not expel all non-Jews from its territory. Twenty percent of the population of Israel is Arab. Most Israeli Arabs are descendants of those who remained within Israel’s borders after 1948 and became Israeli citizens. They vote in elections and have political parties and representatives in the Knesset. Arab judges have served on the Supreme Court of Israel. Arabs work as doctors, journalists, lawyers, pharmacists, and professors throughout the country. There are many Arab businesses. That’s not ethnic cleansing. That’s integration. Israel today has vibrant Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Bedouin communities. Israel is a multiethnic, multiracial, and multifaith nation substantially based on civic nationalism. It is a diverse country.

If history matters to people so much, then Israel’s opponents would, if honest, have to acknowledge that Jews have lived on this land for thousands of years, long before Arabs were even a people with a language. Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. King Solomon ruled the United Kingdom of Israel in the tenth century BCE. That was a long time ago. And Jews have had a continual presence there ever since (and long before Solomon and David). Today, as then, Israel is a Jewish state. The government did not manufacture that truth, but merely formally recognized it. Is this ethnonationalism? Sure. Most nations are rooted in ethnonationalism—prioritizing cultural, demographic continuity, linguistic commonality—with a core ethnic group that defines the nation.

* * *

Years ago, I opposed the idea of a Jewish state because of a reactionary stance towards ethnonationalism generally. But after a lengthy spell of reconsidering many of my positions, I could find no moral objection to inclusive ethnonationalism. Swedes can allow non-Swedes to immigrate to Sweden. But Sweden should remain majority-Swedish, and those who find the situation intolerable should go home. Why wouldn’t they deport themselves and return to the culture that suits them? (Who wants to be where they’re not wanted? Answer: colonizers and invaders.) Observers were aghast when, at the big rally of patriots this weekend, Tommy Robinson, when asked what he would do if he were UK prime minister, said he would institute a policy of remigration of Muslims. A great many Brits agree with him.

Many ears hear Robinson’s words and find them racist. But what they really hear is their own hypocrisy (anti-Islamic sentiments are not racist anyway). The English are the indigenous population of that archipelago’s mainland. The ethnic Swedes are an indigenous population of Scandinavia. They have lived there since the last Ice Age. The principle that nations are a people’s vehicle for self-determination is a human right, rooted in natural law. Would anybody suggest that China is a racist state because it wishes to remain majority-Chinese? Of course not. So why are Western nations held to a novel and different standard? White Europeans are only eight percent of the world’s population, yet mass perception uniquely regards them as unworthy of a homeland and cultural integrity. Tolkien’s Hobbits didn’t mind friendly visitors, but I see no evidence they would have invited strangers to live in the Shire.

Significantly, the charge of ethnonationalism is rarely leveled at non-Western nations. There’s a reason for this. Accusations of “islamophobia,” “nativism,” “racism,” and “xenophobia” are weapons targeting Western patriots with the intent to silence them and disorganize the instinct to defend one’s way of life. However, like Satan’s eternal subservience to God, words only have the power we give them. A man may not like the feel of raindrops on his head, but eventually he will be dry again, and the rain will stop. Once a man stops caring about whether he is a racist in the eyes of those who are robbing him of home and hearth, the charge of racism has no effect. Must a privileged man hand over his wallet to the robber who demands it? Perhaps if the robber is armed, or has the state at his back. But then, the privileged man can arm himself, can’t he?

There is a project behind all this. The robber does have a state behind him, or more precisely, a state-in-formation. That state will not suit the Swede or Englishman. Accusations of bigotry are designed to selectively delegitimize national self-determination to reincorporate the peoples of the West into a transnational corporate order. That is the purpose of the regional projects like the European Union—to rob the peoples of that region of their sovereignty and self-determination. The rhetoric of multiculturalism is designed to denigrate their respective ethnic identities. The people who brought freedom to the world are accused of tyranny.

* * *

The Third World is being weaponized by elites against the First World. Antisemitism is a species of anti-whiteness generally. To be sure, it is the more virulent strain, but at its heart is loathing of the Enlightenment values of discipline, progress, and reason, and the wealth that flows from these in action. And Jews had a lot to do with that. Those who loathe the Jews do so because they are envious of Jewish success—and the success of those who have adopted their ways. Rather than seeing Jews as a people to be emulated, the resentful decide that it is not worth the effort and instead take what they won’t work for. Since Western civilization is ultimately founded upon Jewish ingenuity and practicality, the loathing is generalized. Envy and resentment lurk behind the project of cultural disorganization and the managed decline of Western nations.

Those who resent Jewish success cannot allow themselves to attribute that success to Jewish discipline and ingenuity. They have to rationalize their lack of effort and talent. Those who are poor find their rationale in victimhood. And victims must have oppressors. Of course, the sneakiest oppressors are those who pull strings without being seen. Hence, the conspiracy theory that Jews secretly control the United States and, by extension, the world. This antisemitic trope has roots dating back centuries, gaining modern traction through fabricated documents like the early twentieth-century Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Hamas charter presents as evidence in making their case. The Protocols is a hoax.

It is not just the Arabs who advance the theory. Those on the far left and far right in the West claim that a shadowy global Jewish cabal manipulates banks, governments, Hollywood, mass media, and foreign policy (e.g., U.S. support for Israel). The Jews have implemented a program of cultural erosion, financial exploitation, or world domination. It is not that these agendas don’t exist. I have documented the reality of globalization in numerous essays on this platform. What is false is the belief that this is the work of Jews string-pulling. Propagandists for transnational corporate power smartly use the existence of antisemitism to deflect from the agenda to establish a new world order. They accuse critics of their ambitions of imagining a Jewish conspiracy behind them to avoid scrutiny. Useful idiots on both the left and the right do their work for them by embracing the trope.

It feels almost silly to note that the theory lacks credible evidence, relies on cherry-picked anecdotes, obnoxious stereotypes, and confirmation bias. However, its effects are nonetheless destructive. The Jewish cabal myth has historically fueled pogroms and ongoing hate crimes. Jewish Americans (around two percent of the population), like other successful ethnic groups, participate in various influential sectors proportionally to their small population. They hold no monolithic control over institutions or global events. Given the influence of other ethnic groups in our society, that Jews would get all the attention is itself an indicator of the deep-seated hatred and loathing.

Hysteria over the Israel lobby is a case in point. Extremes on the left and the riot raise the specter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. What about the Saudi lobby? Saudi Arabia spends enormous sums on defense relationships, elite access, lobbyists, PR firms, and Washington consultants. China’s influence is enormous, as well. Business lobbying, corporate relations, supply chains, technology markets, university/research ties—all these sway political and policy decisions. Half a million Chinese nationals are studying in the United States. Taiwan has established a massive Washington presence around anti-China alignment, defense cooperation, and semiconductors. Armenia, Cuba, Greece, India, and Ireland all have lobbies. Crickets.

Because Jews are portrayed as evil, Israeli laws and policies are straightaway perceived not merely as exceptional but inherently wicked. For decades, Israel’s security arrangements have been described as apartheid. Arab hostility towards Israel necessitates the arrangements that limit the movement of people in the “occupied” territories. As with Israel’s just retaliation for the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Arabs are the authors of their own restrictions in the West Bank. The Nakba occurred in the context of Arab armies attempting to end Israel’s project for statehood. Israel erred when it pulled its soldiers and citizens out of Gaza almost two decades ago. That situation, like so many others, could be resolved if hostilities against the Jewish people stopped. But there are too many recalcitrant Arabs living there. And they do the work of those not living there.

This business about genocide against the Palestinians? There are more Palestinians now than before Israel was established. A lot more. Right before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Arab Palestinian population in Mandatory Palestine was roughly 1.2–1.3 million people. Today, in the West Bank and Gaza, there are around 5.5 million. Usually, with genocides, the opposite is true: the numbers go down. On the eve of World War II in 1939, the global Jewish population was about 16.5–16.6 million people. By the end of the war in 1945, the worldwide Jewish population had fallen to roughly 11 million. The Holocaust wiped out about one-third of the world’s Jewish population. There are still fewer Jews today than there were before the Holocaust. If readers are searching for actual cases of genocide, the Holocaust is the paradigm. There is no genocide against Palestinians. There are no concentration camps. If rubble troubles you, just take a look at pictures of German cities after Allied bombing during WWII.

The horror of the collapse of the Jewish population in Poland speaks to the horror of genocide. The Nazis were relentless in their extermination program. However, the Arab population soars after the creation of the state of Israel. Arabs were drawn to Mandatory Palestine with the rise of Jewish affluence. The claim of genocide against the Arabs in Palestine is mythical. Did some Arabs leave their towns and villages during the wars initiated by the surrounding Arab countries? Yes. It is not uncommon for civilians to flee their homes during the war. The security situation made it difficult for them to return home. This, too, is common in such situations. Like every other nation-state, Israel has a right to collective self-defense and to maintain the internal security of its citizens.

The question people need to ask themselves is why the historical perception is so distorted for so many people. Why would anybody not know the chart I first shared is accurate? For those who think Jews control the narrative, they have to ask why Jews would portray themselves as genocidal, when in fact they integrated the Arab population into Israel, except for those Arabs who refuse to join the state of Israel and pose a security threat to the Jewish nation. Somebody else is pushing the genocide narrative. Who do you think that is? This is, in part, a rhetorical question. But I still think the answer is important for educational purposes, since the well-educated make better political choices.

Arabs have been given multiple opportunities to establish their own state on Jewish land. They have instead pursued the ethnic cleansing of the territory that, during the period of Roman imperialism, was renamed Palestine to disempower the Jewish population living there. “From the River to the Sea” is the rallying cry of ethnic cleansing. Short of a state, the Arabs have had enough chances to establish peaceful relations with Israel. They have made it abundantly clear that they will not establish peaceful relations with Israel. A two-state solution would only result in a continuation of hostilities. Enduring peace for the Israeli people requires abandoning the idea of a peaceful Palestinian state on Jewish land. That idea was always a bad one, as President Truman admitted in clips recently put in circulation on the Internet. Those who wanted cheap oil from the Arab states demanded a compromise and pressured Truman into postponing the inevitable. There is no peaceful coexistence with those who seek to exterminate you.

* * *

https://t.co/kQcKlXrUvL

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) May 19, 2026

In moments like these, Christopher Hitchens comes to mind. Among other things, Hitchens was a fierce critic of religion, and Islam in particular. Would Hitchens have toned down his anti-Muslim rhetoric because two teenagers attacked an Islamic Center? Not a chance. Watch this video, and you’ll see what I mean.

I was asked recently what explains antipathy towards the Jews. The subtext was that Jews have brought Islamic terrorism on themselves. I left the insinuation aside and noted that, among many reasons, is the efficacy of Jewish culture in promoting success across the life course. People are jealous of Jewish affluence. However, I did not discuss in my answer why the civilized world has turned against the Jews. But I will address it here: widespread antisemitism among Third World people is useful for aligning those people with the transnational project.

Worldwide, there are roughly 16 million Jews compared to approximately two billion Muslims. But Muslims are not the only problem. Antisemitism is not unique to Islam. The project to transform the world requires conscripting the world’s population into the new world order. Antisemitism provides a common cause. And that means that the security of the Jews is negotiable. The interests and reputation of a relatively tiny population are sacrificed for the sake of the transnational project.

The resurgence of virulent antisemitism in the world disproves the thesis that Jews are behind globalization. It is because of globalization that the world Jewry is exposed to the peril of Oriental culture. The clash of civilizations is brought about by economic integration, opening avenues for mass migration and spreading backwards and destructive ideas and practices. The long history of Jewish survival suggests that they are the last population to pursue collective suicide. Indeed, the very tenacity of Jews in perpetuating their presence in history in the face of obstacles tells us about their collective will to live and thrive.

“We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.” —Charles Péguy, “Our Youth” (1910)

Maeve Halligan, co-founder and president of the Cambridge University Society of Women, gave an eloquent speech at the Cambridge Union on May 14. Do not misunderstand me when I say this: I am not suggesting Halligan visits Freedom and Reason, but I must note that our arguments on this topic march in lockstep, especially of late, as I have ramped up my passion over this issue. The more I know about the madness that has colonized our professional and sense-making institutions, the more strident my tone becomes. I must tell what I see. That I hear my arguments in the words of others indicates a frequency out there, and that a growing number of people are tuning in to it.

Here is Halligan’s speech for those who haven’t yet seen it:

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' – I'll tell the truth instead."

I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here: pic.twitter.com/XpUFS4hYjU

— Maeve Halligan (@MaeveHalligan) May 15, 2026

Among her debate opponents was Helen Webberley, a demon about whom I have addressed in previous essays on this platform (see An Ellipse is a plane figure with four straight sides and four right angles, one with unequal adjacent sides; The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”). Why am I demonizing a fellow human being? Because we have to question whether she is, in fact, a human in the moral sense of that term. A poster on Mumsnet, after watching the debate, put it well: “I remember once thinking the criticism directed at [Webberley] by GC [gender critical] women was excessive, especially the claim she was ‘pure evil.’ After hearing her speak, I no longer think that.”

Opportune time to repost this. https://t.co/rQR9XwZIVv

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) May 16, 2026

Four years before dying in the early days of the Second World War, French poet Charles Péguy encouraged us, above all else, to “see what we see.” All it took for me was watching Webberey’s appearance on the Andrew Gold podcast, Heretics (see the link above). The woman exudes evil. One hears wickedness not merely in her words (which horrify the good and decent person). Watch her eyes. They are black holes. The thinnest sheet of paper could not slide between her and Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician and the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation. 

Halligan did not let the opposition interrupt her. However, she had to yield to a point of information from an audience member, a trans-identified male and former patient of hers, who stood and gave his account of how he had been treated under Webberley’s “care.” It was as if this man were talking about Magus Hirschfeld, the German physician and a founding father of sexology, who, with surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt at his side, mutilated the genitalia of men who served Hirschfeld on his estate, a menagerie of disordered personalities—an Island of Misfit Toys. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Medical Atrocities Then and Now: The Dark Continuity of Gender Affirming Care.)

Known as the “Einstein of Sex,” Hirchfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Although Hirchfeld was forced into exile by the Nazis, Gohrbant was rehabilitated and put in charge of live human experimentation at the Dachau concentration camp. However, the madman was not prosecuted at Nuremberg (the Doctors’ Trial). On the contrary, he became a celebrated surgeon. In 1950-51, he was made chairman of the Berlin Surgical Society. Gohrbant pioneered vaginoplasty, an operation where the “patient” is castrated and his penis inverted and pushed into the open wound between his legs (often reinforced with a piece of the man’s colon). Webbereley’s black eyes see what Hirshfeld and Gohrbant saw, a gaze directed by sexual sadism.

If readers have ever wondered how butchers and sadists could persist in the shadow of the Holocaust, the answer lies in understanding the power of ideology to corrupt and grasping the methods by which madness is institutionalized. I have devoted numerous essays to the matter, interrogating the methods and exposing the ideology. You can search for the essays on Google, which—after years of shadowbanning—has finally indexed Freedom and Reason. Google can blame Gemini for that.

What lies behind more than a century of medical atrocities, euphemized as “gender affirming care,” is the obsession among trans activists and the medical industry with altering physiology, erasing secondary sex characteristics, and mutilating genitals to produce simulated sexual identities. This is the spirit of transhumanism. At the heart of the ideology is an obsession with cosmetic surgery, the profession organized around profiting from personal preference (shaped by manufactured insecurity) to enhance aesthetic appearance rather than addressing medical problems to restore normal bodily function and health, genetic engineering (i.e., eugenics), and technological augmentation of bodies. Transhumanism is an anti-human ideology rooted in loathing of the results of natural history and the amassing of wealth—and of power.

Among the grand battles of the Twenty-First Century—antisemitism, demographic transformation, the feminization of boys and men, Islamization, transnationalism—is the struggle against gender identity doctrine, a neoreligion denying the gender binary and the immutability of sex. Indeed, these are all pieces of a whole, a project to negate the moral foundation of the West and usher in a global technocratic order in which species-being is extinguished. Such a project needs Frankenstein, and demons like Webberley are eager to step into the role and make monsters of the deranged and vulnerable.

Air Force One is on its way home after the President’s state visit to China. Donald Trump’s account of the meeting is that it went well. But Xi Jinping said a disturbing thing during his speech—he raised the specter of the Thucydides Trap. The Thucydides Trap, a concept popularized by Harvard professor Graham Allison, describes the structural tension that occurs when a rising power (in this case, China) threatens to displace an established ruling power (the US). The reference suggests the US is afraid of China. It warns of war. Xi is subtly threatening America.

I agree with Jack Posobiec, a former intelligence officer who appeared on yesterday’s morning edition of the War Room. Observing the moment, Posobiec said that Trump should get on Air Force One and return home. He also suggested that the White House cancel the visas of Chinese students and send them back to China. I also agree with the War Room’s host, Steve Bannon, that the US Navy should send a carrier battle group to the South China Sea. On second thought, Bannon may have been the one who suggested canceling visas. At any rate, the sentiment was that America Xi should not speak to us in that tone. I agree. The Chinese are keen on saving face. Trump should have made them lose face. But Trump is polite, so he let it go. I hope at least he filed away the reference.

Among the other objectionable things Xi said to the President’s face was his claim that the US is only 250 years old (a dig at our anniversary), while China is thousands of years old. However, the Chinese Communist Party has been in power for less than a century, roughly the same timespan as the Soviet Union. The CCP is no more the legitimate government of China than the Islamic Republic is the legitimate government of Persia. The CCP was a Leninist creation. And Xi is a Stalinist. Chinese communism (With Islam in tow) has replaced Soviet communism in the East-West divide, replacing an old existential threat with a new one. On comparative terms, the new threat is worse. The CCP cuts the organs out of living bodies and sells them on the international market. It has forced millions of women to abort their babies. It runs concentration camps. And it is integrating with the transnational corporate order. Evil is striving to become planetary.

If China is a rising power, it is only because the Democrats and transnationalism have built China into a superpower. Richard Nixon’s disruption of the Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1970s opened a path to globalization that Democrats walked the US through. The Democratic Party is the party of globalization. Globalization has undermined the fortunes of American labor and, if allowed to succeed, will end its freedom, as well. This is not inevitable. China’s economy is in decline. They lack a consumer class with purchasing power to buy the cheap commodities they produce. They depend on the US market to move product. Cut them off. Isolate them. The question today is whether Trump will do what must be done.

During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan pursued a strategy of increasing economic and military pressure on the Soviet Union through geopolitical competition, higher US defense spending, and technology restrictions, believing the Soviet system was economically weaker than it appeared. The CIA concluded California’s economy was larger than the Soviet economy. The agency assessed that the Soviet economy was stagnating, inefficient, and burdened by military costs. The Soviet Union had become far less productive and innovative than the United States and increasingly unable to compete with Western technological and consumer prosperity. Reagan used that knowledge to shape the collapse of a totalitarian system.

Will Trump do the same? Technology issues were discussed at the summit, especially around artificial intelligence, export controls, semiconductors, and supply chains. Reporting indicates that China pushed for easing US restrictions on advanced semiconductors and chip-making technology. For its part, the United States focused on AI safety discussions, strategic guardrails, and export controls tied to national security. US officials are downplaying China’s emphasis on chip export controls. It is unclear whether Washington agreed to significant technology concessions. Trump is a polite man when dealing with authoritarians, so we await our debriefing, hoping the assessment will be forthcoming and transparent.

In the final analysis, the West must dump the CCP in the history’s toilet, just as Reagan did with the Soviet Union, and flush it to the sewer. The United States should center its strategy regarding the rise of communist China on supporting the liberation of the lǎo bǎi xìng—the ordinary Chinese people—from totalitarian rule, enabling that ancient civilization to build a future worthy of its cultural heritage and free the world from the pressures of authoritarian state capitalism. It will then be a worthy partner in world affairs. The Chinese people are decent and kind. Integration with the world capitalist economy will not change the character of the current regime. Communism is incorrigible. Integration will only embolden the CCP. Worse, it will expose the rest of the world to the logic of authoritarian state capitalism and everything that entails—concentration camps, total surveillance, and the final negation of species-being.

A good parent doesn’t coddle their children or excuse their bad behavior. They want their children to be conscientious, resilient, self-reliant, and responsible. Children with good character and self-discipline are more successful in life, enjoy greater emotional and psychological stability, and are less likely to violate others than those who lack good character and discipline.

Democrats are well-known for their paternalism. This goes back to the days of slavery, where Democrats treated slaves as children, most obviously in restricting their autonomy. The party still treats blacks this way. This is why they infantilize and down-talk to blacks.

Are readers familiar with the work of researchers at Princeton, Cydney Dupree and Susan Fiske, who identify what they call “competence downshift”? It’s what turned Batya Ungar-Sargon from a progressive into a liberal. Dupress and Fiske found that white progressives, when interacting with black people, tend to use simpler, less “competence-signaling” language than they used with white audiences. The researchers interpreted this as a subtle form of patronizing behavior rather than overt hostility. This is an example of Democrat paternalism.

The unfortunate reality is that, in their paternalism, Democrats are bad parents. They establish conditions that make blacks dependent on their party and then excuse the bad behavior that results from those conditions.

Long ago, psychologists identified what they call “locus of control.” This concept was introduced by Julian Rotter in the 1950s. There are two types: internal and external. A person with an internal locus of control is self-starting and prepared to take responsibility for his actions. People with an internal locus of control believe that success or failure mostly depends on behavior, choices, and effort. Taking initiative can change circumstances. People with this orientation are more successful in life.

By contrast, those with an external locus of control tend to be helpless and irresponsible. They blame others for the situation their choices put them in. People with an external locus of control tend to believe that “Things happen to me” rather than “I make things happen” or “My actions influence outcomes.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists like Peter Berger and C. Wright Mills helped validate the external locus of control orientation. Their intent was not to promote helplessness or formally defend what psychologists called an “external locus of control.” Rather, they criticized what they saw as overly individualistic explanations of human behavior. Whatever their intentions, progressive social engineers saw in the critique a justification for government intervention in the lives they sought to manage. Thus, social critics participated in a project to diminish the agency of those who face hurdles in life.

It took a while to realize that conservative and liberal critiques of progressive social policy are correct, but I get it now. Progressive policies reinforce a fatalistic worldview. Academics built around this an intellectual justification with critical race theory and pressed it into the education system. CRT feeds social justice warriors a rhetoric. Its advocates target those who believe their circumstances are not their fault. Millions of people now believe somebody else is responsible for the situation confronting blacks.

This restricts poor people’s political strategies—or, more accurately, directs political energy towards supporting policies that are not in their best interests. Rather than insist on a more robust pro-worker economic strategy and the values of hard work and striving, progressives affirm a self-fulfilling prophecy and deepen it into structural dependency. They cultivate what is known as “learned helplessness.”

There is a political strategy behind this. Democrats did this knowing that those who are dependent on government will vote for the party that puts them in that situation and makes them that way. It’s like the child who is given everything at home: there is no reason to leave what amounts to a comfortable prison. Freedom is retranslated from the experience of the rough-and-tumble to having “free” food, housing, and medicine. The spoiled child lives in the basement. He does not bite the hand that feeds (although those with spoiled children know that is not always true). It is not that there is no role for the government in helping people in need. The problem is making able-bodied citizens helpless.

Excusing behavior complicates the problem. When those whom progressive social programs made dependent on government break the law—which is an inevitable entailment of such policies, since dependency breaks down personal responsibility and undermines the family, the primary unit and source of any integral social order—Democrats, the bad parents that they are, step in and prevent accountability for the unruly. They excuse their behavior and shift the blame. It’s not their children’s fault. They have elevated bad parenting to bad government.

It certainly isn’t the parents’ fault. They’re the ones who have the children’s best interests at heart. They’re sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Their heart is in the right place. They are good and decent people, compassionate and loving. Rather, it’s the billionaire’s fault. It’s the Republicans’ fault. They insist that the situation is the result of centuries of capitalist inequality and white supremacy. It’s the conditions, they say, not the behavior and choices of the poor. We have to study the root cases, we are told, as long as progressive policies are not identified as the root cause.

The situation of blacks is not merely the creation of the welfare state. There are structural forces behind the creation of the ghetto. Structure is not entirely irrelevant in understanding problems confronting people. This historical development lies at the feet of Democrats, as well. Behind the welfare state is the destruction of the American economy by globalization.

As I have argued in numerous articles on this platform, Democrats have always sought to undermine the American System. Developed by Alexander Hamilton during the Republic’s first presidency under George Washington, the American system was designed to protect domestic industry and jobs. Democrats obviate this system to pit the American worker against foreign competition. (See History as Ideology: The Myth that the Democrats Became the Party of Lincoln; Will They Break the Peace of Westphalia or Will We Save National Sovereignty for the Sake of the People?)

Economic nationalism created the most powerful nation in world history. Today, after decades of globalization, America’s greatness is diminishing. Representing the narrow interests of the corporate state, progressives pursue free trade, offshore jobs, and, in the 1960s, open the country to mass immigration. As a result, America suffers a vast surplus population of able-bodied persons, disproportionately black. The burden of administering life for those displaced by the transnationalist project has been placed on the taxpayers’ backs.

* * *

To get a bit more technical, in criminology, we distinguish between integration and regulation. Integration aligns with the psychological concept of internal locus of control. A person who is integrated with prosocial norms controls his or her own behavior. The well-integrated follow the law. They are law-abiding strivers. Those who are less well integrated in society, on the other hand, require external control.

Here, sociologists have attempted to validate their antisocial and unruly behavior. In the late 1930s, for example, Robert Merton redefined crime and deviance as “innovation” and “retreatism” and theoretically reconceptualized these as “adaptations” to unchosen circumstances. Those who innovate (crime) and retreat from society (drugs and homelessness) are then regulated, governed by external forces. This is where law enforcement enters the picture—if progressives would allow cities to use it. The point is that big government becomes necessary to manage the innovation and retreatism. And big government inevitably manages everybody. In this way, the external locus of control is generalized.

At the core of Merton’s anomie/strain theory was the premise that social structures can pressure people toward deviance when cultural goals are emphasized but legitimate means are unequal. This spawned a school of thought that became dominant in the 1960s, exemplified by the advocacy of Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven. This idea underpinned the logic of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which engineered government dependency in black communities and expanded government, already greatly expanded by previous Democratic presidents, as seen with Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party thus actively undermines both requirements—integration and regulation—for a decent and orderly society. Their policies disorganize families and communities. The result is generations of people who are poorly integrated with prosocial norms. This produces criminogenic conditions. On top of that, Democrats weaken the regulatory function that exists to manage the societal disintegration progressive policies produce.

As a result, crime, disorder, and violence are commonplace in communities governed by Democrats. Tragically, these effects, given the progressive command of society’s sensemaking institutions (education, mass media), have become widely perceived as normal.

It’s the normality of social pathology in Democrat-controlled cities and states that leads many people to assume crime, disorder, and violence are intrinsic to the nature of blacks. History shows otherwise. Before the Great Society, black families were as stable as white families. While there was crime and deviance (there always will be some, as Émile Durkheim long ago taught us), these pathologies were nowhere near the levels they would reach during and after Johnson’s presidency. But few people study history. Instead, many assume this is just the nature of those living in those communities that progressivism has disorganized. Indeed, some conclude that it is the nature of blacks that disorganized those communities in the first place. In this way, Democrats perpetuate the racism they engineered to justify slavery and Jim Crow.

Despite representing themselves as antiracists, Democrats are responsible for creating the negative perception that many have about black Americans. Not only have they made blacks dependent on the government, and not only do their policies undermine the policing function (which imperils everybody living in and near the ghetto), but progressives have also engineered the attitude and behavior that has damaged the collective reputation of black people.

* * *

Democrats attempt to deflect attention away from this reality by blaming the situation on “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” But the reality is that Democrats are the culprit. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that they get a lot of help from black leaders. Instead of encouraging black Americans to demand what’s right for their communities, to find a way to transcend their circumstances, progressives conditioned them to expect a life dependent on big government. Those close to the community encourage them to defend this way of life. The result is perpetual poverty and servitude, and neighborhoods rife with crime and deviance.

The point of antiracism in the progressive worldview can only be about power. Suppose we agree that anti-black prejudice and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow explain why life is difficult for black people. How does it help a black child to tell him that he will never get ahead because of prejudice and history? Do Jews let antisemitism disable their children? Or do they teach them to see prejudice as an obstacle to overcome? Are Jews paralyzed by an ancient hatred? Or do they choose resiliency and striving? We know the answer. Jews are successful because they are resilient strivers. One would only tell children to give up, to be a victim, excuse bad attitudes and choices if one wants to keep blacks down, to make them dependent on government and subservient to power. Who is teaching black children defeatism and fatalism? We know the answer.

Should we be sympathetic to the situation of black Americans? Of course. That’s why I penned this essay. Sympathy is a crucial element in compassionate human relations. However, being charitable to those who apologize for those who accept dependency and excuse deviance, sympathy without discernment and wisdom very easily becomes pathological. When people excuse destructive behavior, when they affirm disordered personalities as part of normality, they betray those they say they love and imperil communities.

Adam Smith, grasping as clearly as anybody the nature of humans, told us to mind the “impartial spectator,” the fair-minded observer inside us whose perspective we use to evaluate our own behavior. Smith understood that people are naturally biased, emotional, self-interested, tribal, and vain. But we also have the capacity to step outside ourselves mentally and ask: “Would a reasonable outsider approve of what I’m doing?” We use this sense to judge others on the same terms. We do ourselves and others no good when we bury the impartial spectator. Indeed, we demagnetize our moral compass. We demoralize the self and find ourselves rationalizing deviance and perversion. The derangement and weaponization of sympathy follow.

Sympathy’s derangement and weaponization lie at the heart of the project of managed decline. Progressivism, the politics of corporate statism and transnationalization, and those of the resulting administered life, drive the project. Progressives replaced the American dream with a nightmare from which Americans need to be awakened. We don’t need a vast state that generalizes the principle of parens patriae. On the contrary, we need a small, less intrusive government that promotes liberty, families, and personal responsibility. To the extent that the state gets in the way of anything, it should only get in the way of those forces that threaten the American way of life. Democrats put big government in the way of freedom and self-actualization.

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon!” House Democrat Ro Khanna took to the floor to call for term limits on Supreme Court justices and to immediately expand the Court from 9 to 13 justices. Democrats seek to thwart justice by packing the Court. (They have also suggested defunding the Supreme Court.) Democrats must believe their party will win the midterm elections and replace the executive branch with a Democratic Party-led administration. They may not have realized it, but they just gave Republicans another plank for their 2026 platform.

History buffs will remember that Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the Court in 1937. His Judicial Procedures Reform bill failed thanks to principled Democrats in the Senate. The JPR rejected Roosevelt’s plan by a 10-to-8 vote. Roosevelt’s scheme explicitly aimed to neutralize conservative opposition to his New Deal programs, i.e., the vast project to expand the administrative state (which, unfortunately, was largely successful in institutionalizing the corporate state). The proposal was an egregious violation of the separation of powers.

The reality is that no rights have been taken away from black people. The Democrats are telling an absurd lie. Every adult black man and woman who is a citizen and hasn’t committed a felony can register to vote and participate in our democracy. But Democrats don’t think in terms of individuals. They’re tribalists. They always have been. The same mentality that justified racial slavery and Jim Crow rationalizes organizing the vote by race. This style of identitarian politics has no place in a nation founded on personal liberty, where each citizen is equal before the law.

The Constitution is colorblind. It privileges no class of people. Has Khanna not read Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)? He should—and learn which side of history a moral person stands on. (See Justice Harlan’s Color-Blind Constitution and the Abolition of Racial Gerrymandering.) But he does not seem to be well-read. And he and his brethren are certainly bereft of principle.

Democrats were beside themselves when the Supreme Court overturned racial segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). It took the Civil Rights Act (1964) to put an end to the apartheid Harlan found so repugnant. Ro Khanna’s party filibustered the CRA in the Senate. Remember that? One of the filibusterers, a former Klan leader, Robert Byrd, Exalted Cyclops of the West Virginian Klavern, went on to become the Senate majority leader. No evil deed goes unrewarded in the Democratic Party.

Once more, the Supreme Court had to step in and stop the Democrats from obviating the foundation of the American Republic. Just like their party ancestors, Democrats see Louisiana v. Callais as a setback. Of course they do. Unprincipled partisan power drives the logic of their politics and policies. So does the paternalism that infantilizes black Americans (which I analyze in a forthcoming essay on this platform). Racial gerrymandering is the same genus of racism as affirmative action and DEI. Those days are over—if good and decent people have anything to say about it.

Democrats can dress their racism in any clothes they like, but the threads are always imaginary, and we can see nakedness. Mutual knowledge has removed the dark shroud of the Democratic Party’s ambitions of one-party rule. One of the greatest mistakes in the history of this nation is allowing Democrats to survive Reconstruction. They deserve the same treatment that the Nazi Party received in Germany after WWII. They should be thankful for the First Amendment they seek to limit and weaponize in a myriad of ways.

Zionism emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century as a response to widespread antisemitism and persecution of Jews. The goal of the movement was to secure the Jewish homeland. This led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, following the National Socialist attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe. But Israel existed long before then. Jewish presence in the land that the Romans later called “Palestina” goes back more than 3,000 years. Zionism is, at its core, the fight for Israel as a Jewish state. The Arabs and Muslims have dozens of states. Jews have only one—and theirs is the oldest. It is also the best in the region.

Anti-Zionism is plainly an expression of antisemitism. It seeks not only to deny Jews their homeland but to deny Jewish existence as a people. This is the mission of Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations, many of which are funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The threat is not just to Jews. The threat is to Western civilization, which is grounded in Jewish law and sensibilities. Christians, whose origins lie in the Jewish faith, whose ethical system is based on that ancient religion, must be involved in the struggle against Israel and the West. Jews and Christians must be a united front against Islamism and the reactionary politics on the left and the right. Those Christians who turn their backs on Israel turn their back on their own culture and religion.

When people tell you that they are not antisemitic but anti-Zionist, they may be speaking from ignorance. However, what guides them to this denial is an ancient antipathy towards the Jews. This antipathy is amplified by the convergence of far-right ideology and Islamophilia on the left. Islamophilia is itself an expression of antisemitism. Third Worldism at the United Nations has infected that body with this ancient hatred. The threat Jews face has been continual for millennia, and today it is reaching yet another fever pitch.

Is it ever okay to criticize the Israeli government? Of course. All governments are subject to legitimate criticism. But opposition to Israeli efforts to secure their nation and to defend it against external and internal threats is never a valid criticism unless one regards antisemitism as a moral position. Opposition to the collective self-defense by the Jewish state is therefore straightforwardly antisemitic.