freedom and reason

The rational observer doesn’t need distinct lines of political thought to be working together in an explicit coalition for them to function as one. What is required is not formal coordination, but a shared concern or animating principle that anchors these otherwise separate forces. If different ideological movements are moving toward the same end, if they share an underlying antipathy towards something, they form what is effectively an implicit coalition. This is the phenomenon of convergence.

We can see this dynamic in what is often called the “red–green alliance.” Here, elements of the progressive left and Islamist movements form an affinity grouping. The red piece includes strands of anarchist, communist, and socialist thought that, at times, align tactically with jihadist movements. Here, what binds otherwise very different ideologies together is a shared hostility toward Jews. Antisemitism serves as a unifying thread.

A similar tendency appears on the right. There has been a noticeable development of antisemitic rhetoric alongside a more sympathetic stance toward Islam among some figures associated with the “America First” tendency, most notably Tucker Carlson, Meghan Kelly, and Candice Owens.

Influencers in this space have suggested that the left and right should find common ground based on shared grievances, including and especially hostility toward Jews. Many of these voices are Catholic. There is an obsession with Christian Zionism, not solely as part of Christian eschatology, but as an animal bred by the Jews. Nick Fuentes is exemplary of this tendency.

Lately, the alignment of the far right and Islam has become more than convergence, with Christian antisemites taking to sharing on social media the postmodernist standpoint of Edward Said and critical race theory to make the case that the Jews are white settlers displacing Arabs they call “Palestinians.” (See History Matters, and On Matters of History, Israel Wins the Debate to understand the problem.)

Antisemitic sentiment has existed within segments of both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions over many centuries. With the Protestant Reformation, there emerged a shift in which aspects of what might be described as “Jewish sensibility”—a practical, this-worldly orientation—became more integrated into mainstream Christian thought in Europe. (See The Dark Heart of Antisemitism: Separating the Haters from the Critics.)

This shift helped create conditions in which capitalism could develop more broadly in Europe, no longer seen as exclusively associated with Jewish communities but as compatible with Christian ethics. Before this, the rationalism that came to prevail in Europe (interest, profit)—and then globally with world capitalism—was condemned for its Jewishness. The far right is open in its hostility to the Enlightenment. But it doesn’t realize that it is opposed to the rational foundation of capitalist relations. They would be quite comfortable standing with the monarchists on the right side of the French National Assembly. (I am not here denying the excesses on the left side of the French Revolution. But the Ancien Régime had to go.)

Karl Marx wrote about these themes in an early essay, “On the Jewish Question.” There, he developed an analysis of Judaism and economic life, where he framed “practical Judaism” in relation to “theoretical Christianity.” Later thinkers, such as Max Weber, in addition to his landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, explored the idea of ancient Judaism as a bridge, or more accurately a pivot, between Eastern (Oriental) and Western (Occidental) traditions. From this perspective, the synthesis of religious and philosophical ideas that gave rise to Protestantism, in turn, contributed to the Enlightenment and liberalism—the intellectual and economic foundation of the modern West.

The ideas of liberalism, which represent a unified front against the irrationalism of communism, fascism, and Islam, emerge from this development. Before this, Christianity and Judaism were viewed as antithetical. The emerging reactionary coalition, combining elements of the left and right, pines for a return to anti-Jewish antipathy. It is atavistic in a most extreme way. Tragically, antisemitism has made significant inroads in popular culture. This nascent alliance threatens the future of freedom and reason in the West.

Nick Fuentes came out as a Democrat this week, and he's not alone. Many erstwhile Right-wing podcasters are now finding they have more in common with the Left these days, thanks to a meeting of minds on a singular issue: One's level of comfort blaming Jews for the world’s ills. pic.twitter.com/okb7oPQwGo

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) May 10, 2026

Batya Ungar-Sargon, who, like me, and for many of the same reasons, escaped from the left-wing warp of the twenty-first century, noted on X Saturday that Fuentes has now come out as a Democrat. He’s not alone, she observed. I, too, have noted this (a while ago, see The Woke Reich and the Enemy Within). “Many erstwhile Right-wing podcasters are now finding they have more in common with the Left these days, thanks to a meeting of minds on a singular issue: One’s level of comfort blaming Jews for the world’s ills,” she says in the clip shared above.

It is not just Fuentes switching loyalties. I am watching to see if Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene make the move next (Greene seems close to announcing her switch). They’re drawn to the left because antisemitism is manifest in Democratic Party politics.

In an interview with Maria Bartiromo over the weekend, House Democrat Ro Khanna advanced the conspiracy that Jews are the puppet masters. It’s not the rabble on the streets anymore. It’s the Democratic Party. This is an entailment of the Democrat strategy to use Muslims and other Third Worlders, whose Jew-hatred is notorious, for electoral advantage. They have to abandon Israel for their new constituency, namely the Muslims. Democrats believe there are enough self-loathing Jews to keep a toehold in that community. They’re right. Shockingly, Zohran Mamdani, the Shi’a Mayor of New York City, won the 2025 election with roughly 30 percent of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls.

Ro Khanna is advancing the conspiracy that Jews are the puppet master. It’s not the rabble on the streets anymore. It’s the Democratic Party. It’s so bad that Nick Fuentes is joining up. https://t.co/QXI5do0B5j

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) May 11, 2026

* * *

What amalgamates disparate political tendencies is a shared hostility toward the West itself, often characterized as decadent. In this framing, decadence is linked to perceived Jewish manipulation of Western institutions and values. More than this, modernity itself is the work of Jewish operatives seeking to enslave the goyim. This narrative draws on much older patterns of thought, in which longstanding prejudices are repurposed in contemporary political contexts.

A contemporary figure associated with the critique of the liberal West is Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher whose work has gained attention in far-right circles. Carlson interviewed the ideologue in Moscow in late April 2024 (Carlson also met and interviewed Vladimir Putin and traveled about Moscow, singing its praises). During the interview, Dugin—often described in Western media as “Putin’s brain”—railed against Western liberalism.

Like many on the left and the far right, Dugin argues that the modern liberal West is in a state of cultural and moral decay. It is, but not for the reasons he supposes. He positions his philosophy—sometimes called the “Fourth Political Theory”—as an alternative to communism, fascism, and liberalism. It is yet another attempt at a “Third Way.” He emphasizes a return to tradition, civilizational identity, and a multipolar world order in opposition to what he sees as Western universalism. This means he rejects human nature, seeing what people are in terms of what culture has made them. In effect, he advances a right-wing postmodernism wrapped in the language of premodern atavism.

What is the Western universalism Dugin and his followers oppose? One finds them in the founding documents of the American Republic—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in the post-WWII period (put aside the corruption of the UN and its Third Worldization for now). However much the reactionary right appeals to the ideas that founded the American Republic, they explicitly reject liberalism. Demanding the right of free speech, publishing, and assembly from this crowd is strategic, not principled. They are, in substance, illiberal.

A paradoxical feature of the illiberal attitude—the essence of authoritarianism—I am describing is the rhetorical conflation of liberalism and progressivism, a confusion engineered by the Democratic Party as part of its legitimation project. These terms are, in fact, opposites; the latter represents the ideology and practice of corporate statism.

Corporate statism is profoundly illiberal—and the goal is transnationalist. Thus, a contradiction emerges: the Red-Green alliance is organized by progressive forces. Since progressivism is diametrically opposed to liberalism, the reactionary right is pulled into the gravitational pull of the transnational project. This is paradoxical because the project is at the same time understood by the right as Jewish in character. Antisemitism deranges people.

I am opposed to the transnationalist project, too, but not because of any ethnic character. I oppose the project because of its goals: to reorganize the world as a neofeudalist global order in which the world proletariat is managed in techno-estates run by transnational corporations and financiers comprising a new aristocracy. The fact that Jews are overrepresented among elites does not signal an ethnic cabal to take over the world, but rather indicates a culture prone to material success, which reaches its zenith in Jewish practical life. Such a culture is not to be rejected, but emulated.

Dugin’s framework draws heavily on thinkers like Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the same year he became rector of the University of Freiburg (in his rectoral address, he aligned the university with the destiny of the German Volk and National Socialism), and on geopolitical theories associated with Eurasianism, a cultural and political doctrine arguing that Russia is neither fundamentally European nor Asian, but a distinct civilization with its own historical destiny, geopolitical sphere, and values.

Synthesizing these ideas, Dugin portrays the West, particularly the United States, as a force that erodes traditional cultures and imposes a homogenizing liberal ideology worldwide. In this sense, his critique resonates with both far-right and some far-left critiques of globalization, even though their underlying values differ significantly. How is this not the sister of European fascism?

* * *

I will return to Dugin in a moment, but I need to say something about the evolution of anti-globalization sentiment on the left—enough to make a new section. When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, the critique of political economy grasped the peril inherent in the transnationalist reorganization of the world, even if it did not appreciate its corrective, namely, economic nationalism (nationalism is a dirty word on the left). Regional and global financial and trade networks, such as the IMF, World Bank, the WTF, the EU, NAFTA, and GATT, were major targets of criticism.

Over the course of the twenty-first century, focus on these networks not only waned but street-level action came under the control of elites associated with transnational corporate power and world finance. Anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-West sentiment came to the fore. This is in part due to postmodernist corruption, reflected in the rise of critical race theory, post-colonial studies, and queer theory, and tendencies with a substantial pro-Muslim bias (French philosopher and pedophilia advocate Michel Foucault is the exemplar). However, antisemitism was present in critical political economy circles before then, cloaked in criticisms of Israel, which was designated an apartheid and genocidal state.

Most notorious among those obsessed with the Jews and their supposed wickedness was James Petras, who taught for many years at Binghamton University and wrote extensively on imperialism, US foreign policy, and global capitalism. He became controversial for writings about pro-Israel lobbying and what he described as disproportionate Jewish influence in US politics and media, as if this were a bad thing. The work most associated with that controversy is The Power of Israel in the United States. In this book, Petras crossed from criticism of Israeli policy or lobbying networks into sweeping claims about “Jewish power” that echoed longstanding antisemitic narratives about covert ethnic control over world affairs.

Supporters, by contrast, argued Petras was analyzing organized political influence, similar to analyses of other lobbying groups. A similar rationalization is seen in the rehabilitation of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s reputations in the wake of their book The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Walt and Mearsheimer were careful in distancing themselves from ethnic essentialism, whereas Petras’ work was highly reductive. Even those otherwise sympathetic to critiques of US foreign policy or Israeli state policy were compelled to distance themselves from his work. Too much, too soon. Walt and Mearsheimer gave the antipathy intellectual cover.

However, over the intervening years, Petras’ antisemitism has been mainstreamed. This view was introduced in a major way into the Democratic Party by former president Jimmy Carter in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, wherein he argued that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and construction of settlements constituted a system of apartheid. This sent progressives in search of other books leveling the same charge. There, they found the work of Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein (who recently appears to regret what he helped start), as well as Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, the so-called “New Historians.” They learned from them a falsehood: that Palestine was an Arab land and that Jews were interlopers—white settler colonists. The work of Edward Said provided the postcolonial theory that would lend intellectual heft to their antisemitic worldview.

* * *

Returning to Dugin, what makes his work significant is that he provides an intellectual vocabulary for civilizational opposition to the West. His “Fourth Political Theory” is explicitly anti-West. He argues that communism, fascism, and liberalism are products of the same Western modernity and should be replaced with something rooted in cultural particularism, religion, and tradition.

This stance is to be distinguished from my own nationalism, which emphasizes the universalism of reason and science. In my worldview, liberalism is not limited by cultural frames. Other moral systems are particular. Liberalism is universal. But for Dugin, all moral systems are particular; all knowledge is rooted in cultural systems and is thus relative, hence his advocacy of multipolarism. The parallels between his theory and postmodernism are unmistakable, and it is here that the left and right find common ground.

Thus, the elements of Dugin’s thinking create what may appear to the Western universalist as strange overlaps where very different groups share a common opposition to Western liberalism. Because liberalism and its universalism are treated as the primary enemy, groups that otherwise disagree can appear aligned in their opposition.

Dugin’s belief that modern society has lost its spiritual grounding resonates across ideological lines, especially among those who see modern culture as morally decadent and, crucially, irredeemable. Dugin interprets global politics as a struggle between “Atlanticism” (the US and its allies) and “Eurasianism” (a bloc led by Russia and aligned civilizations). This framing naturally encourages alliances of convenience among those opposed to US influence. This is how Fuentes can celebrate Stalin’s birthday.

Dugin is often portrayed as an ultranationalist. But ultranationalism is a widely misunderstood political worldview. Characteristic of regimes like Nazi Germany, ultranationalism is built upon the premise that one nation—often defined in ethnic or racial terms—possesses a unique superiority and historical destiny. This worldview does not aim to integrate nations into a shared global framework, but rather to elevate one above all others, at the expense of sovereignty.

Ultranationalism thus subverts nationalism and represents a form of globalism, one that parallels corporate statism. Indeed, the political-economic arrangements underpinning fascism are corporatist. Ultranationalism appears to be an internally contradictory ideology. Whatever its contradictions, it serves the interests of those who are reordering the world.

But the contradiction is important to interrogate. It arises because such regimes, despite appealing to nationalism, pursue aggressive expansion beyond their borders. Ultranationalists reject the interstate system. Under Adolf Hitler, for instance, the idea of Lebensraum justified territorial conquest across Europe. This expansionism was not an effort to create a cooperative or interconnected global order. Instead, it sought to impose a rigid hierarchy in which conquered peoples would be displaced, eliminated, or subordinated. The goal was not global integration, but world domination.

In this light, ultranationalism does not exactly represent a paradoxical form of globalism as we understand it, namely world capitalism in its corporatocratic phase, so much as a rejection of the international principle of national sovereignty, what is known as the Peace of Westphalia. Ultranationalism opposes liberal universalism. The modern state system rests on the idea that nations coexist as formally equal actors (albeit sovereignty is conditional on behavior). Ultranationalist ideologies explicitly deny this premise.

A more precise way to understand the dynamic, then, is to see ultranationalism as combining intense inward nationalism to mobilize its population, often ideologically rooted in palinogensis, with outward imperialism. Its ambitions may be global in scope, but they are not globalist in spirit, at least not in the way globalism is understood in mainstream political economic thought (whatever the problems with that). Rather than seeking a world of interconnected equals, it envisions a world reordered under the supremacy of a single idea—one that is authoritarian and illiberal.

* * *

Crucially, Dugin has publicly aligned himself with the traditions and symbolism of the Russian Orthodox Church and frames his political philosophy in explicitly religious and metaphysical terms. His broader ideology of “Eurasianism” draws heavily on Orthodox Christian ideas about civilization, spiritual destiny, and opposition to Western secularism. Antisemitic sentiment is inherent in this worldview.

Are readers familiar with the work of John Chrysostom (c. 347–407 CE), one of the most important figures in early Christianity, revered in Eastern Orthodoxy as a saint, theologian, and master preacher? Born in Antioch and trained in classical Greek rhetoric before turning to an ascetic Christian life, Chrysostom became a priest, gaining widespread recognition for his sermons, which emphasized moral reform and a rigorous Christian life. Later, he was appointed Archbishop of Constantinople, one of the most powerful positions in the Christian world at the time.

As archbishop, Chrysostom became known for his outspoken criticism of corruption and excess, both among the wealthy and within the Church hierarchy. This outspokenness made him powerful enemies, including members of the imperial court. His conflicts eventually led to his exile, and he died in hardship while being transported further into exile. After his death, however, his reputation grew, and he came to be honored as one of the great Church Fathers. The Divine Liturgy most commonly used in Eastern Orthodox churches today is traditionally attributed to him.

Those who follow him may admit that his legacy is complicated by a series of sermons known as Against the Jews, in which he harshly criticized Jewish religious practices and Christians who participated in them. If we are to recall Chrysostom, this ought to be our focus. These texts are widely regarded today as examples of early Christian anti-Jewish polemic and have been the subject of significant criticism.

Rationalizing Chrysostom’s antisemitism, his defenders will note that, like many figures from late antiquity, his life reflects both the theological achievements and the cultural conflicts of his time. Yet, the fact that Chrysostom stands as a towering and influential Orthodox figure, admired for his preaching and moral vision, his appeal to antisemites makes it impossible to ignore the centuries-long thread of antisemitism through time.

I note all this because the reader needs to understand that Catholicism is not the only Christian faith with a long history of antisemitism. This is not to say that all Catholics and Orthodox Christians are antisemites. It is to say: beware of Alexander Dugin and his Orthodox brethren.

* * *

To be sure, the secular left will never embrace Christianity. At the same time, to characterize the left as secular is problematic (see Genes, God, and Gender: Why Secular Societies Invent New Religions). The left will never embrace Christianity because it is seen as a feature of the decadent West. But wokism is a new religion, and it parallels more extreme religious legalisms of the past. Hence the lure of Islam.

Strands of Catholicism and Orthodoxy also share much with Islam. At their core is a common loathing of the Jews and the view that the West and its liberal values are decadent.

It is unlikely that there could ever be an explicit coalition of the left and the far right. Gender identity doctrine is a major obstacle. But it doesn’t matter in the final analysis. It only matters that both sides work against the West and the Enlightenment. That is reason enough to oppose what constitutes an effective alliance against freedom and reason.

President Teddy Roosevelt routinely held boxing and Jiu-Jitsu matches at the White House. He even suffered a detached retina in a match at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, blinded in that eye for life. He was truly a Rough Rider. Roosevelt was hardly in a minority of fans of pugilistic sports. America has long had a love affair with the Sweet Science. At one time, boxing was America’s pastime, and young Americans have for decades learned the manly art of self-defense. It is a celebration of excellence and masculinity.

Donald Trump promised to host a UFC fight at the White House on the campaign trail. Having regained the White House in a landslide victory, he is delivering on his promise. He has incorporated a UFC night at the White House into the broader Freedom 250 platform—a spectacular, year-long celebration marking America’s 250th birthday. Can left-wingers not feign patriotism for even one year? No. They can’t. They hate America and its traditions. They hate whatever patriotic working people like.

Part of the left-wing hysteria is almost certainly a lament over the fact that Pride Month will not this June feature a White House festooned in Pride Progress colors and autogynephiles covorting about the grounds with silicone tits out. But it’s deeper than this. Indeed, the love of perversion is itself a manifestation of hatred for normality and tradition.

More deeply, the incessant postings on social media stem from a loathing of ordinary Americans who have long appreciated the martial arts. At the heart of progressive hysteria is a pathological aversion to masculinity and the natural fact that moral man is a physical being who affects outcomes through force and will. Long ago, Frederich Nietzsche told us what makes these people tick: ressentiment.

It is not for progressives that violence is a bad thing per se. Look at the violence on our streets. Violence for them is not merely acceptable but necessary. They call it “social justice.” Those who wish to bring down the social order believe they are the only ones who have a right to it. They abhor violence in competition under the rules of fair play—as long as it’s not men punching women in the face at the Olympics. They condemn violence that secures the national interests. They pursue violence out of envy for the successful and revulsion at the normal. They target those who believe in the good order that the American Republic promises.

Congenital snobs, progressives look at the preparations for UFC at the White House and see “white trash.” They see the rubble of the East Wing and would have you see them as incapable of grasping that building something better sometimes means tearing down something old. Yet, they themselves tear things down when it suits their fancy. Then they grow ugliness on the corpse of the once beautiful. They desecrate memorials and topple statues and stand on the ruins waving alien flags.

What is expressed here is a loathing of the spirit of the nation that those who despise it seek to overthrow. This is the way of progressivism. It takes nature and virtue and stands them on their heads to make an upside-down world that no decent person would want, then bequeath that world to the heirs of a post-rational world.

In History Matters, and On Matters of History, Israel Wins the Debate, The Dark Heart of Antisemitism, and several other essays on this platform, I have written at length about the right of Jews to a homeland and the incessant resistance to this right. Today, I want to dispel this notion that one can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic.

One of the more remarkable things about the Old Testament and Judaism is that it’s not so much focused on heaven as it is on the Jewish people and how they should conduct their affairs. It’s a practical religion. It’s not a religion based on salvation and transportation to an afterlife. It doesn’t promise the poor a good life in some other form. It promises the good life to everybody who is disciplined and watches out for his neighbor.

But it’s more than that. The Old Testament is the story of the establishment, conduct, and defense of the Jewish nation. The Old Testament is full of talk about nations. It isn’t an argument for converting everybody to Judaism and transforming the world. It’s about allowing people of different ethnicities to form a sovereign political state for themselves. Zionism is a political and national movement advocating for the self-determination of the Jewish people in their historic homeland. It’s rooted in Judaism. Jews are indigenous to the territory that the Romans renamed “Palestine” to punish the people for their struggle for national self-determination.

People like to tell you that their criticism is of Zionism, not the Jewish people. But Zionism is a modern-day representation of the goals that the Jews have sought going back thousands of years—and that they have a natural right to pursue. There is no substantive difference between them. Antisemites don’t get to dress up their anti-Jewish sentiment in the language of anti-Zionism and then claim they’re not anti-Jewish.

I’m an atheist. My ethics are rooted in natural history and in the tradition of natural rights that informed the American founding. I have written about this several times on this platform, and this won’t be my final word on the matter. We are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of a nation founded on this idea. These ethics are not exclusively secular-humanist—nor do all those identifying as secular-humanist subscribe to them. Many Jews and Christians also live according to these ethics. Indeed, the authors of the Declaration of Independence were profoundly influenced by Christian ethics shaped by the rationalism and science that the Enlightenment elevated and promoted.

The authors of the Declaration appealed not merely to human preferences or secular political arrangements, but to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as the source of certain unalienable rights. Whether one interprets Nature’s God in a traditional religious sense, as a rational Creator who established the order of the universe, or as the spirit of natural history, the essential claim is the same: human rights exist independently of the state and are not granted by governments. Governments may recognize or violate those rights, but they do not create them. The rational state exists to recognize and preserve the natural rights of man.

This conception of God is not one of constant intervention or miraculous acts. Rather, it is the God of reason, order, and natural law. Such a Creator established a universe governed by intelligible principles and endowed human beings with the capacity to understand them. The uncorrupted species-being of man projects these virtues naturally. We see this in the story of Israel. And that story is the story of any moral nation. Once forced out of Eden, man makes history. He makes history through hard work and sacrifice, and he does so shoulder to shoulder with his comrades.

God’s design is thus expressed through human agency. Men and women make history and act within it courageously, exercising judgment and reason, and in solidarity. Actions that advance and protect natural rights are good because they align with the moral order embedded in creation, i.e., the natural order. Means achieving those ends are informed by an ethics rooted in a moral ontology. Actions that suppress or violate those rights are bad because they conflict with that order. The ends and the means to reach them are objectively determinable.

Thus, morality is neither arbitrary nor merely the product of social convention. It is grounded in the realities of human nature and the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Rights are not preferences elevated by consensus, nor are they permissions or privileges granted by rulers. They arise from the nature of human beings themselves and therefore impose obligations on both governments and individuals. The measure of a society is the degree to which it secures and respects those rights and assigns duties to citizens to uphold a good society and to defeat those who would undermine it, on the field of battle if necessary.

When President John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” he was appealing to the idea that a free society requires active participation, responsibility, and sacrifice from its citizens. The statement assumes that citizenship is not merely a claim upon benefits but a commitment to the common good.

Providence, in this (rational secular) understanding, is recognized not through supernatural signs but through the course of events after the fact. What was achieved? When justice prevails, when liberty advances, and when the rights of a people are preserved against oppression, one may see evidence of a larger moral order in his achievements.

This does not mean that every victory is divinely sanctioned or that history inevitably bends toward justice. As history shows, bad things happen when moral men fail to act or impose good on the world. Rather, it suggests that when free people act in accordance with reason and natural rights, they participate in a process that reflects the underlying order. Providence is not an interruption of nature; it is revealed through the success of human efforts that accord with the laws of nature and the rights and duties those laws imply. Man sees providence in his work—if he has the capacity to discern goodness. In this way, belief in natural rights provides a foundation for ethics that stands above both personal preference and political power. It offers a standard by which governments, institutions, and individuals may be judged.

I have written about this before, as well, but here the moral philosophy of Adam Smith must once more be noted. In his The Moral Sentiments of Man, Smith described what he called the “impartial spectator.” For Smith, inherent in human beings is the capacity to step outside their immediate passions and interests and view their conduct (and the conduct of others) through the eyes of a detached and unbiased observer. Man is not merely capable of sympathy. He is also capable of reason. Man is at once an emotional and rational animal. The impartial spectator serves as a guide to moral judgment, allowing individuals to evaluate whether their actions are just, honorable, and worthy of approval.

In a philosophy grounded in natural rights and reason, the impartial spectator is understood as the faculty by which human beings discern the moral order embedded in nature. It is through this exercise of reasoned self-examination that individuals align their conduct with justice, temper self-interest with concern for others, and contribute to a society founded upon liberty and mutual respect. For many men today, that capacity has been corrupted and deranged. In this year of America’s anniversary, we rededicate ourselves to rooting out corruption and overcoming derangement.

Whether one approaches this standard as an atheist, a Christian, a deist, a historian, or a philosopher, the central principle remains: human rights are inherent, objective, and worthy of defense because they arise from the very nature of humanity and the ordered universe we inhabit. If we are to save the American Republic and the West, we must regain this understanding of rights and obligations and commit the coming generations to it.

This is the definition of racism pushed in the academy: power + prejudice = racism. They further assume blacks have no power. It follows that blacks cannot be racist. However, the definition of racism is a belief that ranks human groups based on inherited traits and entitlements, asserting the superiority of one group over others. Those with little or no power can believe such a thing. If they do, they are racist. A black man can be just as racist as a white man.

The power + prejudice = racism formula cuts both ways. A system established by law that codifies this belief is indeed a racist society. In the past, parts of the United States imposed such laws to privilege whites, and these laws were rooted in the belief that all members of non-white racial groups were justifiably subordinated because of their inferiority. A racist social order prevailed in parts of America. No serious student of history denies this fact.

But, today, these laws are no longer present (struck down over sixty years ago)—at least with respect to blacks. However, many institutions in the United States impose policies disfavoring whites, and the logic of those policies rests on the belief that all members of the white race benefit intergenerationally from systemic racism—even though there are no laws systematically benefiting whites.

The belief that all whites are oppressors is racist, since it necessarily assumes that whites are genetically (in the broad sense of that term, as encoded in a population group) predisposed to prejudice and that all enjoy racial privilege in the absence of any law or policy privileging them. As I have noted in past writings, the claim that all whites enjoy racial privilege commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. To claim that any one person from a demographic category necessarily carries with him through life an abstraction derived from aggregated data, such as a lesser likelihood of being poor, is betrayed by the fact that there are millions of white people living in poverty. At the same time, the greater likelihood of an affluent life among certain demographic groups does indicate the presence of a culture of striving. Rather than demeaning that culture, a decent society promotes that culture for everyone. Aggregate statistics predict probable outcomes, but abstractions can never indict or convict individuals.

A society founded on formal equality and individual liberty does not structure itself to privilege any group on racial grounds. It treats all individuals as equals under the law. A black man received the same sentence as a white man for criminal homicide despite the statistical fact that black men as a group are overrepresented in murder. True antiracism requires colorblindness, not in the recognition that there are different races (there is nothing racist about observing the natural fact of grouped human variation), but in the principle that the color of one’s skin should not determine opportunity (see Colorblindness and Blindness to Color). What determines opportunity in a free society is one’s talents and tenacity, not one’s race.

Progressives decry colorblindness and the meritocratic society. Progressives don’t merely see race but organize society around it. This is why redrawing congressional maps to remove racial gerrymandering is so offensive to them—that and losing partisan political power. So they assert or imply that present-day discrimination is warranted by past discrimination. A white man can be told to go to the back of the line because black men were, in the past, oppressed by the law. The individual must suffer because of the sins of the father.

In reality, Democrats don’t really care about black people, as evidenced by the conditions progressive social policy has produced in the cities they control. Here, we might say that white racism still prevails. But that is even more reason to recommit ourselves to colorblindness—and the defeat of Democrats at the polls.

The difference between yesterday and today is that the racial hierarchy has been inverted in the operation of our institutions. There should be no racial hierarchy at all. Since they are designed to systematically privilege one racial group over another (however symbolic that privilege, however tokenized its people), policies and laws such as affirmative action, DEI, and racial gerrymandering are racist and should be abolished. They never had a place in a free society. And the same party has pushed racial identitarianism for centuries: the Democratic Party.

For this and many other reasons, progressivism is intrinsically antagonistic to the liberal foundation of the American Republic because it rejects the principle of equal treatment. Even where equity is required to achieve the goals of equality, Democrats reject the principle, as evidenced by the assault on women’s rights by transgender madness.

At least Soviet Communism, however terrible the results, officially declared that equality was the goal of the Revolution. In this way, progressivism is closer to National Socialism than Communism. It does not seek equality of any sort, but privileges based on identity. However, a free and decent people should find none of these systems acceptable.

Friedrich Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), argues that the only kind of equality compatible with a free society is equality before the law, or formal equality. All individuals, he argued, should be treated the same under general laws, without special privileges or discrimination based on class, race, status, or wealth. Attempts to create substantive equality—equal outcomes in income, social conditions, or wealth—require governments to intervene heavily in personal life. In Hayek’s view, achieving such equality demands constant control over people’s choices, opportunities, and property, giving the state excessive power. As a result, individual freedom and spontaneous market processes are undermined.

The Constitution of Liberty is an elaboration on Hayek’s 1945 book, The Road to Serfdom (1945). There, he argues that when governments take extensive control over economic planning and individual decision-making, they inevitably threaten personal freedom and democratic institutions. Central economic planning requires authorities to decide what should be produced, who receives resources, and how people should work and live.

Because societies are complex and individuals have different goals, governments cannot achieve such planning without coercion and expanding state power. Over time, this concentration of authority weakens the rule of law, limits free expression and economic choice, and can lead to authoritarianism or tyranny. Hayek’s central warning was that even well-intentioned efforts to control the economy for social goals unintentionally create conditions that erode liberty and pave the way for oppressive government. Hayek insists that protecting liberty requires limiting the state to enforcing impartial laws rather than trying to engineer equal social or economic results.

This is the spirit of colorblindness, which lies at the heart of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which granted authority to the states to segregate by race. (See Our Colorblind Constitution: What Justice Harlan Can Teach Justice Jackson About Equality and Fairness; Justice Harlan’s Colorblind Constitution and the Abolition of Racial Gerrymandering; Louisiana v. Callais and the Politics of Selective Collectivism; The Constitution is Colorblind—So Why Do Democrats Insist that the Country is White Supremacist?) We should never have deviated from this principle. And now we must insist that we return to it.

For the record, there was a time when I accepted the progressive argument. You can read my previous take on the matter in this 2014 essay: Why Black People Can’t Be Racist…At Least Not Against Whites. I overcame embarrassment and migrated that essay from my old Blogger platform to WordPress because I believe it’s instructive for readers to see how a mind can change, as well as the influence of ideology on a man who should’ve known better. I know better now. I have penned numerous essays correcting my error (see, e.g., “Blacks Can’t Be Racist” and the So-Called “Myth of Reverse Racism”). The educator has been educated.

Antisemitism is not merely the belief that Jews influence things. There would be nothing wrong with such influence if Jewish culture were a good thing. Indeed, the influence is real, and it is a good thing. Christianity is founded on Judaism. Christianity does exist without the God of Abraham. Christian ethics is an extension of Jewish morality, which played a major role in shaping Western civilization and the emergence of individual liberty and private property.

The West is what it is because of the ideas that underpin it, and these are, in a major way, Jewish ideas, interwoven with Greco-Roman ideas that merged with the philosophical inquiries of Ancient Greece. Jewish morality and the entailments of the Greco-Roman pillar—engineering and science, practical governance, and the legal systems of the Roman Republic—explain why the West is the most affluent and technologically advanced civilization in world history. Your good life is indebted to it.

The core of antisemitism is, therefore, not the influence of Jewish ideas and Jewish practicality per se but the belief that there is something wrong with these ideas and, moreover, that there is something evil about Judaism, which is why the ideas are wrong, and why, therefore, Jewish influence must be suppressed. The condemnation of Jewish influence is a paradigm of the well-known fallacy of “poisoning the well.”

Antisemites poison the well by reducing Jewish influence and interests to a supposed essence of Jewishness, an essence rooted not in ideas but in the people themselves, which is marked as a genetic evil. Indeed, the origin of the fallacious tactic of poisoning the well is itself a medieval antisemitic libel during the Black Death that accused Jews of deliberately poisoning public wells to spread the plague. Another prominent medieval libel accusing Jews of being “baby killers” is known as the blood libel. We hear this charge leveled against the Jews today.

Crucially, antisemitism is different from that which motivates the suppression of objectively bad ideas, such as those of Islam. Islam is a political ideology like fascism. Islam is not an ethnic identity. The Islamic system has contributed nothing morally to Western civilization. The Qur’an is a bad plagiarism of Judeo-Christian ideas, which it deforms in the retelling. It is antisemitic at its core.

Christian Arabs present no problem for the West. It is the Muslims who are the problem, and this is because a Muslim is an adherent to a system of bad ideas. It is not the individual Muslim who is evil (the man can be saved), but the belief to which he subscribes that is the problem. By contrast, for antisemites, the evil of Judaism inheres in the Jewish people. Islamophobia is a propaganda term designed to stifle criticisms of Islam.

When the far-right blames Thomas Massie’s blowout loss in Kentucky to decorated war fighter and patriot Ed Gallrein on AIPAC, it is saying that Jewish citizens of the United States participating in government (AIPAC and other Jewish-American groups that supported Gallrein are US-based) is a bad thing because Jews are bad people. Why else would it be wrong for American Jews to participate in their republic?

This is the same argument Adolf Hitler made, and here it is appropriate to raise the problem of National Socialism, which is resurgent. Hitler repeatedly claimed that Jews, despite being a small minority in Germany, exercised disproportionate influence over areas such as academia, culture, finance, media, and politics. These claims were central to Nazi ideology and propaganda. They rested on Hitler’s belief—and he was hardly alone in this belief—that Jews are an existential, racial evil—not merely a disliked ethnic group, but a parasitic, destructive race fundamentally opposed to nature, Aryan humanity, and German survival. We are once more hearing the rhetoric of parasitism leveled at the Jews.

This is, by the way, the reason the whiteness of Jews is denied: they cannot possibly be part of the white race from this warped worldview. Sadly, some Jews today deny their whiteness in an attempt to escape the anti-white prejudice inherent in woke progressive ideology. I wrote about this many years ago (see Jews are White. So Are Arabs, and its many links to other essays). But woke progressive ideology is on the run, so hopefully the phenomenon of self-loathing wanes.

The far right in America today—Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, Nick Fuentes, Ian Carroll—and their comrades-in-spirit on the left—Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, the Free Palestine crowd—are antisemitic because they believe there is something evil about Jews as a people. They no longer hide their pathological loathing of Jews. They have come out of the shadows because they see antisemitism returning to popularity. All the better, since we now see them clearly for what they are.

There is a dark convergence underway in which the elements of National Socialism are being reconstituted. This development is especially alarming in its alignment with Islam, an organically antisemitic and fascistic ideology. This convergence explains why Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie are so opposed to preemptive war to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and degrade their capacity to wage proxy war against Israel and the West. They know that if Israel falls, then Islam will be emboldened. But they are too obsessed with see Israel fall to be concerned about that.

One must have noted that the far right hysteria concerning Massie’s defeat in Kentucky says nothing about Massie’s alignment with CAIR, an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in America to subvert US domestic and foreign policies. The toleration of CAIR and the network of Islamic Centers across the country is itself an indication that the nation does not fully grasp what time it is. Would we have allowed the Nazis to set up recruitment and training camps in the United States during WWII? We are at war with Islam. Wake up, men of the West.

The resurgent antisemitism in America sees Jews and not Muslims as the problem because of this loathing of Jews as a people. It deranges them, as it deranged Germans under Hitler. The derangement during the dark days of National Socialism led to the extermination of millions of Jews. Paradoxically, antisemites deny or downplay the Judeocide, even while their rhetoric is favorable to the destruction of the Jews. They do this to weave into consciousness the presupposition that Jews are so diabolical that they—the Jews—would exaggerate the lethal hatred against them.

If we allow antisemitism to once again gain momentum, we will have forgotten what we said after the Holocaust. We said, “Never again.” I am committed to that slogan. I’m calling out antisemitism where I see it. So should you. Jew-hatred is an assault on reason and good moral order.

Good riddance to Green and Massie. Good on the Trump Administration for purging the Republican Party of antisemites. And Trump is doing more than that. He is recommitting the Party to the strengthening of Western hegemony while disentangling the United States from the transnational network that represents the true threat to the future of free peoples everywhere.

This is why Trump is so hated by the left, even if they don’t know why their hearts are so filled with hatred. The moment is flushing out the antisemites. The choice is ever clearer. Either a man stands with the Judeo-Christian West (I say this as a life-long atheist who recognizes virtue) or he stands with its enemies. If that sounds Manachean, then that’s because the situation is dark-and-light. There is no shade.

I have long been a critic of the Reductio ad Hitlerum arguments. I wrote about this fallacy during Trump’s first term as president, when his efforts to secure our borders were depicted as Hitlerian. When the left compares Trump to Hitler or MAGA to fascists, when it declares immigration detention centers to be concentration camps, and remigration as ethnic cleansing, when it compares Jews to Nazis and accuses Israel of genocide and baby killing, the fallacy is obvious. None of these claims is true. What I am describing in this essay is not an instantiation of the fallacy. It is the thing itself. And the thing itself is the evil we must vanquish.

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. The Nazis revised history to support their racist ideology by manipulating facts, controlling education, and spreading propaganda. The Nazi rewrote textbooks, censored books and media, and distorted historical events to justify political goals. By controlling how history was taught and remembered, the Nazi regime sought to gain public support, strengthen loyalty to Adolf Hitler, and legitimize discrimination, violence, and eventually genocide. 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. This ambition makes Islam useful to transnationalists, those who are denationalizing the world. 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. Transnationalists exploit tolerance to push mass migration and multiculturalism because they know these undermine the nation-state.

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. Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mehgan Kelley, and others represent a faction on the populist/right-wing nationalist side of American politics that argues Trump and mainstream MAGA figures have betrayed “America First” principles by remaining strongly pro-Israel and launching a preemptive war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. I say “Blue Hat” because their politics effectively bolster the Democrats and the transnationalists the party represents. Lately, some of the Blue Hats have even taken to ingratiating themselves with Muslims.

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. Perhaps Israel is capable of defending itself. But a Middle East without Israel would only strengthen Islam. Israel represents the only modern liberal democratic state in the Orient. And the Islamic Republic represents a real threat to Israel’s existence—long-range ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, and genocidal proxies at the borders of the Jewish state. Carlson, Kelley, and their ilk 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 the Blue Hats see as the true enemy. If the US were to withdraw its support for Israel in any significant way, it would imperil Israel, and this, in effect, empowers Islam. It is not as if the Blue Hats have neutral ground on which to stand. Either one stands with Israel, or one stands with Islam.

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. Judaism, working through the rational Christianity that pushed through the Reformation, gave rise to liberal capitalism (Anticipating Weber: Revisiting Marx and the “Jewish Question”). It is the moral and practical spirit of the Enlightenment. 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 appreciate the reader’s patience in allowing me to critique the progressive epistemic and note the threat of Islam (I have written several essays on the latter, which I will leave the reader to seek out if interested). 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.