On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband, Patrick, out of the house, then she murdered the three small children who trusted her more completely than anyone in the world — Cora, age 5, Dawson, age 3, and Callan, just eight months old — by choking the life out of them with exercise bands twisted so tightly around their throats that when her husband got home, he was unable to remove the bands. It takes four to five minutes to kill someone by strangulation. That’s a long time when your own child is squirming and gasping in fear and confusion. Clancy then slit her wrists, slit her throat, and jumped out of an upstairs window. She is now paralyzed from the waist down, and her legal team recently argued in court that her postpartum psychosis made her incapable of being held criminally responsible. The case ended in a mistrial last week due to a hung jury, after one holdout juror refused to budge while the other 11 jurors intended to acquit Clancy, believing there was still a shred of doubt. The judge had to privately remind each juror that proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean proof beyond all possible doubt, but to no avail.

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I am less interested in the true crime aspect of this story than in the cultural insight this case provides. The murders of the Clancy children prompted grief in the local town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, where people held vigils and left flowers and stuffed animals near the family’s home. Police who responded to the call were given time off to process the mental anguish of what they saw in that basement, and the public sent food, cards, and gifts to the police department to show their support. Patrick, who described the children as “the essence of my life,” also said, “I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have. The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone — me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace.”

These reactions are healthy and normal. It’s encouraging to see the small town of Duxbury come together to offer some small measure of comfort to the grieving, to law enforcement, and to each other in what must have been a dispiriting series of months. Patrick later sold their home, divorced his wife, and moved to New York City where he has since remarried. Then the case entered the national conversation. Digital detectives convinced themselves they had figured it out, and that Patrick had actually killed the kids. Some said the evidence for this was his astrological sign. Soon, Clancy had two types of supporters in her corner. There are the women who believe her husband set her up, and there are the women who say that even if she did it, her postpartum psychosis excuses her in one fashion or another. The first group is presumably just factually mistaken, meaning they have the wrong set of facts or are looking at them in the wrong way, but their basic faculties of reasoning appear to be intact. The second group, however, is more disturbing to me. These women seem to be practicing the kind of morally depraved tribalism that we recently got to witness with the Karmelo Anthony case. As I wrote then, “A disturbingly large segment of black America seems to think that not letting blacks kill people is a form of oppression.”

Is this fifth-wave feminism, where we go from respecting whatever kind of identity whatever kind of “woman” tells us they are, to withholding judgment on whatever women do, even including slaughtering their own children, because women are sometimes too hormonal to be held responsible for their own actions, and men just don’t understand? And isn’t that, the idea that women cannot be held responsible because they’re too hormonal, oddly reminiscent of the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from a Victorian-era sexist? In these recent weeks, I have seen numerous videos of women sharing videos of themselves on Instagram, in which they abuse their own children, often by throwing cold water in their own infant’s face, to show solidarity with Clancy, a woman who killed her kids. But even if you believe that she was too far gone mentally to be held criminally liable, why does that therefore translate into support? I can understand the psychological process whereby a boy, brutally molested by a priest, might grow up to become a child rapist. But I am not therefore going to support child rapists, and I am certainly not going to molest a child on camera and then upload it for the world to see that I support such a person. Another thing I noticed in doomscrolling such videos is that all the women appear to be liberal white ladies. As Joe Rogan commented:

If those ladies could see the crime scene and see those dead kids with their fucking vacant eyes staring up because their mother took their life, the last fucking thing that they saw was their mother standing over them … I think everybody that is saying free Lindsay … People are out of their fucking mind … The world is out of its fucking mind. It’s like more of these things come up where you’re like, This can’t be real. This can’t be real. And it is real.

I witnessed my wife go through the miracle of childbirth. I cannot conceive of hurting a child, much less my own. I also possess a masculine desire to hurt people who bring suffering upon women or children. I suspect I would take pleasure in visiting pain upon such people. But I also witnessed the pangs of nine months of pregnancy, the agony of giving birth itself, the disorientation that comes after, the feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, and yes, even despair. Having kids is a beautiful, crazy thing, and it has the power to make women incredibly beautiful, and incredibly crazy. So I have a good deal more sensitivity to this issue, I think, than I see in the commentary by a lot of the male influencers speaking on this. They are quick to say that Clancy should be executed, that she is evil, that she did a horrific thing and that our attention and sympathy should be with her children, not their murderer. I do not disagree, but then, I do not have to disagree in order to understand the madness of motherhood and the reason so many women who have gone through it might see somewhere in Clancy’s tragedy a glimmer of themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I do not go to the other extreme where I can no longer tell that Medea is the villain of the play.

But just as these women, these frenzied Maenads in their sparagmic feminism, seem incapable of seeing past their hysterical empathy, so too do the men seem incapable of making eye contact with the face in the gallows. There is a real rot of over-emotional, moral confusion on the left, where you see various minority groups defend the evil behavior of their own tribe, but there is also an under-emotional, almost psychotic lack of feeling on the right when it comes to rightfully condemning evil on the other side, because I think as with the absurd bear v. man question, the surface of it all is palpably stupid, but if you gaze into the abyss, you begin to sense a desperation gazing back. That is to say, I think when women talk about choosing the bear or understanding Lindsay Clancy, they are also, if not mainly, trying to communicate something about the threats they face that go unacknowledged, and clinging to symbolic cases like these is just one sloppy way of trying to get that attention. Anger is, after all, often the expression of an ignored idea that instrumentalizes rage as a way of getting attention, or getting something done, when you feel you are being unfairly treated, or simply ignored. Sometimes, madness works like anger. But anger is no excuse, not even when it drives you mad. Except as a legal defense…

Dark Satanic Mills

Glasgow entered the 19th century as a city of smoke and money, wrapped in hunger and insecurity. The tobacco lords who had built its stately Georgian squares a generation before now faded away as a new breed of manufacturer emerged, and the Clyde, still narrow enough in some places to ford, was being dredged and deepened into a great commercial artery that would become as wide as the bubbly, backwards Chicago River, shoveling an ominous black tide from the low hills and mill towns of coal country out to the wide world, while those same waters carried home the pale ghost of American cotton and the bone-bleached heaps of West Indian sugar, packed on little brown brigs like ossuaries at sea, all the blood and labor of so many black slaves, including children, slurped up through the straw of respectable Scottish fashion. The whole thing was demonic, but the ladies wore pretty dresses.

Those white Scottish Presbyterians, who were so obsessed with status despite their religious austerity, had tried to turn their commercial wealth into social rank by aping the aristocracy with scarlet cloaks and ebony canes, making a fortune by extending predatory credit to honest Virginia and Maryland planters, then buying their crop at dropped rates, and trapping them in debt. Thomas Jefferson hated them for it, calling their system “the most delusive of all snares.” But times were changing. Britain was still at war with Napoleon, whose defeat at Waterloo was two years away, and the first Industrial Revolution was beginning to raise steam. The days of the theatrical tobacco lords were reaching their end, replaced by the kings of cotton and sugar.

It was, of course, the African slave of the American South who helped create the cotton boom that fed Glasgow’s stiflingly humid and deafeningly loud mills, where women and children endured 12-hour shifts under dim lights, bare feet turned black from the oily floors, breathing airborne cotton fibers that gave them “brown lung,” literally dying to produce fancy dresses. So you had black slaves in America and mill hands in Glasgow and Paisley, all killing themselves to produce yards of neoclassical “empire line” gowns, which became all the rage during Jane Austen’s era (thanks to scandalous portraits of Marie Antoinette). Is it any wonder, then, that it was a cotton factory that inspired William Blake to describe the “dark Satanic Mills” of the Industrial Revolution? But I digress.

This was the Glasgow into which Daniel M’Naghten was born, the illegitimate son of a woodturner. His father owned a workshop on Stockwell Street, in the old heart of the city near the Trongate. M’Naghten grew up to the rasping sound of a lathe, proved to be a good study of the craft, and became an exacting workman. But he wanted his own name on the sign outside, and when his father declined to make him a partner, he walked away, trying his hand at the stage for a time, traveling with the show. But it all came to nothing and by 1835, he was back in Glasgow, and back to woodwork. But he was an intellectually curious man, much more than his fellow craftsmen, who spent their evenings in the local public house. M’Naghten, by contrast, attended the Mechanics’ Institute, that great Victorian engine of self-improvement where clerks and artisans crowded lecture halls to hear about chemistry and political economy. He joined the local debating society too. He taught himself French, not for trade, but so that he might read La Rochefoucauld’s maxims in the original. But along the way, he became convinced that the Tory party was conspiring against him, spying on him, and hatching to destroy his reputation as a woodturner in Glasgow. When his business finally did fail, he not only blamed the Tories, he traveled to London, staked out Whitehall, and shot Prime Minister Robert Peel in the back in 1843.

Only it wasn’t Peel he shot. It was Peel’s private secretary, a man named Edward Drummond, who died days later. M’Naghten was found not guilty by reason of insanity, establishing the M’Naghten rule, which says that if you are too insane to understand your own actions, then you cannot be held criminally responsible. When deciding the case, the House of Lords asked a panel of judges, headed by the lawyer Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, what to do about insane people who commit crimes. It was Tindal, a Tory member of parliament, who coined the phrase “not guilty by reason of insanity,” saying that you cannot really blame someone if they suffer from a “disease of the mind.”

But here’s the rub. Historians Joel Peter Eigen and Roger Smith have since argued that this rule was politically motivated. They claim that because M’Naghten had believed he was being persecuted by the Tories, execution would have made him a martyr and given the public reason to believe his delusion. So, although it infuriated Queen Victoria, who had survived an assassination attempt herself, they enacted “the M’Naghten rule” so that the state could manage politically dangerous people without martyring them. Rather than punish him for dangerous political dissent, and thus inadvertently highlight the content of his message, they instead locked him away for the rest of his life because, they said, he was stark raving mad. That not only neutralized the physical threat, leaving such people to rot away in horrific asylums like Broadmoor or Bethlem, but it labeled the underlying belief ludicrous.

Non compos mentis

New York adopted the M’Naghten rule a few years later. After John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act, tightening the standard and shifting the burden of proof onto the defendant. But this rule was never based on a psychological evaluation or moral analysis. It began as an instrument for silencing dissent. And if you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense otherwise. That is, even if we put aside its troubling origin story, we have to ask ourselves whether it makes sense to go easier on the criminally insane, rather than harder. After all, if a person confesses that they are so crazy that they cannot stop themselves from killing other people, isn’t this a good reason to put them away for a longer period of time rather than a shorter one? A person who chooses to kill can learn to make different choices, but a person who was not in the mental driver’s seat when such a decision was made can never truly reform because no matter how “reformed” they become, it’s not them we’re worried about. It’s the dark passenger who takes the wheel when the person in front of us checks out.

And besides, even if we could get through to that inner self, this doesn’t answer the question of justice. Just because I am able to reform you, or because you finally fully realize the error of your ways and are genuinely remorseful, that doesn’t necessarily mean you do not deserve to be punished. For some, punishment is just a correctional measure to improve the behavior of the sinner. So if you can cure the criminal with therapy or Clockwork Orange indoctrination, there’s no longer any need to punish them for what they’ve done. But another school of thought is that even if you no longer pose a threat, you still owe a debt to the victims. If you murder a young child, you don’t get to reform and live your happily ever after. Your life is forfeit.

The movement around Clancy represents the terminal mutation of an otherwise necessary insight. Women were once disbelieved about rape, domestic violence, medical pain, and coercion. Correcting that injustice was right. But in its most radical form, “believe women” has mutated from a presumptive willingness to listen into an instruction to suspend judgment. Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” was not a triumphant atheist slogan but a civilizational diagnosis. Nietzsche understood that European society was losing confidence in the metaphysical structure supporting its own values while continuing to spend their inherited moral capital. What he feared, but could not adequately name, was that something would eventually occupy the abandoned altar. That something has become smaller and smaller, and more about the individual, and in its narrowing capacity it did not become liberating, though individualism has given us liberating access to rights when formulated within that scope, rather it has simply become increasingly selfish, petty, narcissistic.

We have subsequently found ourselves dropped off on the doorstep of civilizational psychosis. As Nietzsche foretold, we have sacralized weakness and victimhood, and we have done it so thoroughly that we now exalt brutal oppressors and evil individuals merely because they belong to a victim class. We have quite simply begun to lose our sense of what is required to sustain a moral civilization.

The intellectual genealogy of today’s identity politics is complicated, but a recognizable line runs through it. Classical Marxism organized society around economic class. When the Western proletariat failed to become revolutionary, thinkers associated with the Frankfurt Institute and the New Left looked elsewhere for agents of transformation. Herbert Marcuse located revolutionary potential among students, racial minorities, social outsiders, and liberation movements abroad. In “Repressive Tolerance,” published in 1965, he went further, arguing that tolerance can preserve domination and that liberation requires intolerance. Critical race theorists took this ball and ran with it, but shifted the focus from explicit racism to systems, structures, narratives, abstract “whiteness,” and other ways of describing reality that allow one to treat racism as a permanent feature of American life and therefore maintain a permanent revolution, no matter how fair our society is. DEI simply translated these racist academic theories into institutional practices now commonly deployed in corporate and academic settings across the West.

And now we arrive at a moment in our history of genuine moral inversion, where we can regularly witness the sentimentalization of killers, the racialization of criminal guilt, and the romanticization of terrorism. You don’t have to be Christian to recognize this perversion as truly satanic. The solution, I believe, is one that any decent parent will recognize. The solution is setting boundaries and being consistent and firm, but without losing our sense of compassion. This is also known as “tough love.” We need to have honest, difficult, and even at times ugly, conversations about a whole host of topics that we have long avoided for fear of offending. We need to embrace Realism (or simply Truth) as a star in the constellation of Western values, no less bright in our esteem than Liberty or Justice. Until we do, these people are going to continue their collective tantrum. That’s how tantrums work.

After NBC’s Kristen Welker said President Trump’s endorsement of candidates this primary cycle got “mixed results,” Trump took to social media to ask, “How can anyone be allowed to say this,” threatened, “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment,” further saying, “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously,” and adding that he actually has a “99% SUCCESS Rate.”

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Let’s begin by addressing his claim that Welker is lying. Of the 313 congressional and state candidates Trump endorsed, 96% won, but of the 12 that lost, nine were in the past few weeks, forming a cluster that does make it look like his record is taking a hit. So in a way, they’re both kinda right. He’s right about the record, while she’s right about the recent trend. Now, more importantly, let’s recognize that this story is bigger than Welker or NBC. Or even Trump, for that matter. Or any of this. The media is under enormous pressure these days. There are people who actually think reporting on the Jason Arday story is tantamount to murder, and that we should enact prior restraint on the press to prevent such “hate journalism.”

Expression

The Jason Arday tragedy cannot justify a crackdown on the press

The conversations that are blooming around the death of Jason Arday are, in their broadest sense, not particularly new. Death is shocking, morality is messy, and we do what little we can to make sense of it when confronted with the two. Go back to any era of human history and you can likely find calls for censorship in the wake of death and disaster. Bu…

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20 days ago · 150 likes · 19 comments · Sarah McLaughlin

There is also the story of reporter Catherine Herridge, formerly of Fox News, who is being ordered to reveal her source, and had been paying $800 a day for refusing to do so (until a judge paused that fine), related to a story she reported about a suspected Chinese spy, who teaches at a U.S. university, all because the suspect herself subpoenaed Herridge for the name of the source. Or cast a glance over at our own White House, where the supposed leader of the free world, and self-proclaimed defender of free speech, is simultaneously waging war against ABC, NBC, CBS, AP, NYT, WSJ, BBC, the Atlantic, Bloomberg, NPR, PBS, VoA, RFE, RFA, MBN, and even its own military paper, Stars and Stripes. Not to mention the Pentagon’s access restrictions against WaPo, CNN, Politico, Reuters, the Hill, the War Zone, Newsmax, and others.

Expression

The U.S. military is at war with its own newspaper

At the height of World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t want the military’s independent newspaper to become a propaganda tool. He expected his subordinates to keep their “hands off” Stars and Stripes. M…

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14 days ago · 36 likes · 3 comments · Jacob Gaba

Now, you may be thinking, “So what? The media had it coming. They’re a bunch of woke liars.” And, yes, mainstream media has been overtaken by progressive orthodoxy, to the point that we now regularly see blatant falsehoods and egregious spin from our biggest and “best” papers (also, thanks partly to social media, many of us are more media savvy than ever before and therefore better at spotting mistakes, sloppy journalism, or just plain wokeslop). I agree this is a problem. It’s one of the reasons so many people prefer to get their news and analysis from independent journalists and writers on Substack, like myself. But the solution to this problem is not to lean into censorship, or sit idly by as others call for it. We must instead defend this rare and precious right. Remember, the idea of a fair and balanced press is relatively new, and easily lost. Throughout American history, the media was overwhelmingly biased, financed by political parties, openly propagandistic, and packed with rumors and lies. But then, the invention of the telegraph made precise, factual reporting easier. At the same time, market forces pressured papers to be more balanced so as not to alienate half their readers. Also, reporters became blue-collar workers rather than political operatives. So in a sense, you could say capitalism saved American journalism by driving tech innovation, incentivizing nonpartisanship, and turning from hacks and propagandists to salaried craftsmen reporters.

Unfortunately, that blue-collar industry has now been heavily replaced by woke Ivy League grads from wealthy families, the precision of the telegraph has been replaced by the noise of social media, and new market forces actually make extremist messaging more profitable as market fragmentation leads to narrowcasting. But there’s reason for hope. Social media gives us citizen journalists who report things others won’t. Fragmentation gives us independent writing at places like Substack. And places like The New Yorker may still be staffed with racist elites, but that seems to be pushing audiences in a healthier direction. Namely, away from such outlets. The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, did amazing work turning the magazine into a home for serious international reporting, then spent the credibility this amassed by having the pages of his magazine regularly vomit woke racism at its readers. And so, people are waking up. And this is good.

But what is not good is this anti-journalism sentiment. It is no deeper in thought or firmer in standing than anti-science rhetoric, anti-speech rhetoric, or more broadly, anti-intellectualism. Trump is not just merely pushing back on bad reporting. He’s part of a larger trend that seeks to erode the very purpose of even having a free press in the first place. What is the purpose? It’s certainly not open debate or public education. It is, of course, wonderful that the press offers a public forum for debate. It is also virtually a sacred societal good that the press nourishes the public mind with facts about current affairs (to the extent that they still do so). But, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously argued, these things are not the primary purpose of a free press. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need to explicitly carve out space for journalism in the Press Clause of the First Amendment. Today, Stewart is mostly remembered for his famous remark on obscenity, from the case Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I know it when I see it.” But he should rather be more fondly remembered for his 1975 essay “Or of the Press,” in which he argued that the Press Clause exists to protect an institutional press.

That means an autonomous Fourth Estate, not just “a kind of Hyde Park Corner for the community,” which we might think of today as X, or “a neutral conduit of information,” which today is arguably AI far more than it is the press itself (and even that isn’t neutral). But instead, Stewart said, the true telos of the press is to stand as a check on government power, a leash on abuses no less firm than the Speech Clause itself, and often more. As the British management cybernetician Stafford Beer once said, “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and what Trump is doing is dismantling the institutional role of the press over bad reporting, or in some cases, merely for reporting he dislikes. That is like trying to dismantle free speech because sometimes people say stupid things, or because sometimes you hear opinions you dislike. You do not cure bad speech by ending speech. But also, ask yourself, what is the purpose of doing such a thing? Why silence the only organized private business that enjoys explicit constitutional protection in order to check government power and abuse? What is the purpose of this system? And while you consider the thought, maybe also take notice of the fact that it’s a fairly woke and authoritarian impulse to try to silence reporting, or deport people, or have them fired, for saying things you don’t want to hear or that you politically oppose. Or, perhaps just as often, for saying things you don’t want anyone else to know.

As for deporting people because of their opinions, a federal judge ruled Friday that the Trump administration’s efforts in this regard are, as my Bahamian mother would put it, “a pile of foolishness.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression recently challenged the administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for their pro-Palestinian speech. The decision, which is the first in the country to squarely rule on the constitutionality of the issue, will likely have far-reaching impact in court decisions nationwide. This is good news. As Stewart understood, the press serves a function that is vital to our democracy. Like the DMV or the IRS, folks don’t have a lot of love for the American press these days. But also like those agencies, the press still serves an important function. We cannot forget this. You don’t have to like the press in order to believe in it.

This week, the Chinese Communist Party convicted two people for the crime of remembering that 37 years ago, it slaughtered hundreds of innocents simply for saying out loud that they longed to be free.

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Beijing has carried out many evils under communist rule. It killed more people under Mao than any dictator in human history, starved tens of millions, murdered those who spoke against it, harvested organs from minorities, forced abortions at gunpoint, threw religious minorities into concentration camps, and enslaved over 50 million people in the laogai system. And yet, the decision this week might actually be one of the most insidiously evil things the Party has ever done.

In the context of Holocaust education, we are constantly reminded of the philosopher George Santayana’s quote, from his 1905 book The Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are taught these famous words as an ominous warning. But for Beijing, they express the promise of success.

Grandma Wong

Every year on the 4th, Alexandra Wong packs an umbrella, but not for rain. For years on this day, she has walked, alone, toward the green expanse of Victoria Park where, for decades now, tens of thousands of her friends and neighbors gather by candlelight, often in the calm after a battering storm, to remember the students who stood up for freedom and were gunned down in Beijing in 1989. Now 70 years old, Wong has been taking part in democracy protests for at least 14 years. She was a regular fixture during the Umbrella Movement in 2014, where people affectionately took to calling her “Grandma Wong.”

As a young woman, Wong had studied accounting and music. Growing up, she wasn’t particularly interested in politics, but she did feel patriotic for mainland China. Both her parents were mainlanders, but had fled to Hong Kong when Japan invaded China during World War II. When she turned 30, she moved to Vienna, where she studied singing. But shortly after her return to Hong Kong, she saw the news. Military forces in Beijing had opened fire on students for demanding democracy. Reports varied, but some said over 1,000 innocent people were killed. “I felt really sad when I saw the bloody scenes on television,” she later told CNN. But she was also inspired. “The bloodiness and chaos stuck with me, so did the protesters’ reluctance to leave.”

She spent a decade of her life in Austria, Hawaii, volunteering for a nonprofit in mainland China. “Gradually, I started to compare these places with Hong Kong: Why in some places people live so happily, and places like the countryside on the mainland are so miserable?” In 2006, she bought a home on the mainland, a 312-square-foot flat in Shenzhen that she could never have afforded had it been in Hong Kong. It was a steal at twice the price. But something was off. “The longer I lived in Shenzhen,” she said, “the more I felt something was not right with the mainland.” She moved back to Hong Kong, where she began to speak out about her beliefs. “I want to tell the middle-aged and old people to come out, stand with the young people together,” she said. “I must take care of the young people.”

In 2019, Grandma Wong was disappeared. When she returned to Hong Kong the following year, she said she had been subjected to political indoctrination. Then, in 2020, Beijing banned vigils in memory of the Tiananmen massacre. In 2020, after security forces broke up a protest she was taking part in, Grandma Wong was removed from the scene on a stretcher, and treated at Tuen Mun Hospital. In 2021, she was arrested while marching in memory of the Tiananmen massacre. She was arrested again in 2022, and separately, while protesting in mainland China, was knocked to the ground by a young man who disagreed with her opinion, and had to be taken to Queen Mary Hospital for treatment. She was arrested in 2023 too, also for marching in memory of those killed at Tiananmen. And she was reportedly arrested in 2024, again for joining a Tiananmen anniversary march.

I am overwhelmed by such undaunted courage. Any one of those altercations could have ended up with Wong permanently disabled, or dead. Yet she never stopped, and through it all, she fought in the name of young people. That’s why, every year, without fail, she quietly made her way to Victoria Park, knowing the evening could very well end with her in handcuffs, or worse, all so that she could light a candle in memory of the students at Tiananmen, and spare a moment to remember them.

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If you are unfamiliar with Jason Arday’s story, you can read my essay about the affair.

Jason Arday was found dead at his home three days ago. After a scandal involving plagiarism and the wild stories he told about himself, he apparently made the tragic decision to end his own life. He was only 41 years old. In the whirlwind of commentary that has exploded in the wake of this news, I find myself passing through a number of feelings. Sadness that his story ended like this. Anger that he chose to leave behind a wife and two children. And finally, something less firm. A bitterness over the fact that he surrendered the light of his life believing it was all over, when I truly believe he could have turned it all around.

He could have faced the public, palms up, and answered his critics in good faith. He had undeniably dug himself pretty deep, but remorse makes a fine shovel and talent an even better one. I have interviewed both Richard Hanania and Freddie deBoer, and both men have weathered reputational harm only to answer the storm by continuing to produce work that even their critics cannot ignore. If you keep your head down, and your shoulder to the wheel, most wagons can be moved.

I don’t even think Arday’s career in academia was over. Claudine Gay is an antiracist fraud who also committed plagiarism, but she walked away with $1.5 million in compensation, took a year off, and now reportedly makes $900,000 as a professor of political science and black studies. It truly cries out to heaven. Trauma surgeons who save lives every day don’t make that much. My point being that Arday, like Gay, benefited from black privilege and could have used it in his recovery. That privilege is already spilling over into the public record of his life as progressives rush to blame anyone but Arday himself for the things that Arday himself actually did.

Some now claim that people only targeted Arday, as opposed to the many other professors who plagiarize, because he was black. Racism absolutely played a role for certain people. Some of those people comment on my essays. But for the most part, the public targeted Arday because he was appointed to a professorship at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. That alone drew attention. He was also an egregious example of diversity hiring at a time when diversity hiring is already a polarizing topic. And finally, the incredible nature of the stories he told made it impossible for the media to look away.

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Yet in his essay “The Media Lynched Jason Arday,” Ibram X. Kendi blames Arday’s death on reporters for reporting the story. “If you die from all the attacks,” Kendi writes, “the media still calls the attacks on you ‘accusations’ to wash their hands of the blood. Your lynchers announce your death as if they had no role in your lynching.”

Although roughly one-third of the victims of lynchings in America were white, the term has special meaning in the context of anti-black racism. It conveys a type of racist terrorism that ended by extrajudicially murdering a person for the sin of having darker skin. Often, their corpses were mutilated. In 1918, a black woman named Mary Turner spoke out against the lynching of her husband the day before. A white mob bound her feet, hanged her upside down from a tree, poured gasoline on her, burned her alive, cut her belly open with a butcher’s knife, and pulled her eight-month baby onto the ground, where one man crushed its head with his boot. That’s lynching.

Kendi cheapens the term for rhetorical effect by arguing that reporting on Arday’s story, or even having a laugh over the guy’s outrageous lies, is somehow comparable to putting a rope around his neck. I think Kendi is a fool who arguably does more damage to black Americans than actual white supremacists. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t read his essay in good faith and reflect on whether journalists had actually pushed too far. I myself wrote about the scandal, highlighting the insanity of it all, laying the blame at the feet of Cambridge and the racist system that prizes diversity over merit, raises the unqualified high and then drops them when things get hot. And yes, I milked the absurdity of the story for comedic effect.

But after reading Kendi’s essay, I asked myself whether I went too far. What does going too far look like when covering a story of this nature? For Kendi, it seems that covering the story at all is too much, because Arday is black and therefore innocent. This is unsurprising. In 2019, Kendi claimed IQ tests are racist. That same year, Seattle educators said math is racist. In 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, or “Blacksonian,” said rational thinking is whiteness. The pattern is clear. If black people perform poorly on IQ tests and math tests, the problem is the test. If black people find it difficult to make rational antiracist arguments, the problem is rational thinking.

You see the same failure to take accountability among narcissists. It’s always someone else’s fault. They’re always the victim. As I have written before, the Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski observed how an entire society can orient itself in such a way that its incentives generate an unusual prevalence of maladaptive personalities. During Nazi Germany, sociopathy rose far above the normal range of 2% to 3% of the population. Similarly, the modern West has incentivized narcissism among certain groups. These groups are never truly to blame, even when they quite literally commit immoral acts. When Palestinians carry out a genocidal slaughter, blame the victims. When black men murder Asian grandmothers, blame white people. When a black academic presents himself as a messianic Olympic athlete, blame journalists for covering the story. The crime isn’t doing it. It’s noticing.

If you’ve ever tried to argue with a narcissist, it’s an infuriating experience because you cannot pin them down on any point by using facts or logic. They will ignore inconvenient facts, flip things around on you, play the victim when they’re the aggressor, deny their own behavior, and if you lose your cool, they’ll say the fight began because you lost your cool. Trying to hold them to a point or have them take accountability is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. The only way to deal with a narcissist is what’s known as the “grey rock method.” You behave like a grey rock, making yourself so uninteresting that the narcissist gets bored and moves on. That means you don’t argue, get defensive, disclose personal details, show anger, or explain yourself. Also, keep encounters brief.

In other words, the more that people behave like Kendi, the more rational it is to limit contact with such people. There’s no real use in engaging progressive racists. I find this sad, because the young man in me who once wanted to become a Jesuit monk, the former Big Brother in me, the former teacher in me, all want to believe that through good faith and reason, we can get through to people. The Christian in me wants to believe that no soul is ever truly lost. But the psychology student in me knows better, and the history student in me is a goddamned pessimist about the human race.

If the media went too far, it was in crossing the line between accountability versus scapegoating. A society needs criticism, but even when attacking someone for what they did, we should leave the door open for them to come home. Or, as Sun Tzu said, offer them a “golden bridge of retreat” to save face. I don’t think we should always do this, of course. Some souls truly are lost. Some dogs have to be put down. But Arday wasn’t evil. As far as I can tell, he was good-hearted, though dishonest. Another question we should ask ourselves is whether public intellectuals like Arday or Kendi deserve different treatment than ordinary people. They’re trading on their credibility, so maybe they should be held to higher standards.

I have no qualms about delivering the uncensored truth, or even appropriate name-calling from time to time. But if we are trying to have a healthier, more mature, less divided discourse, the trick is to leave room for correction. This is the antidote to cancel culture. If every misstep is treated as unforgivable, people won’t admit when they’re wrong. That’s the importance of the golden bridge. You have to give your opponent an off-ramp. Yes, criticize them enough to defend the truth, but be measured enough to allow for reintegration. On that note, if even Kendi himself demonstrated good faith, then yes, I would listen. As a matter of fact, I’m probably one of the last people in the world who still takes him at all seriously, and I have long wished that he would return to his lost career as a compelling historian. I loved Stamped from the Beginning. But he chose to preach woke racism instead.

In covering the Arday story, The Atlantic ran an essay, “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge,” which I admit I have not read. But the title struck me. While the story of Icarus, who rose higher than anyone on fake wings and then plummeted to his death, definitely echoes that of Arday, I am rather reminded of the story of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In the play, the main character Willy Loman builds his identity around a system that values him only for so long as he is useful. Then he discovers the institution has no loyalty to him, he is discarded, and he kills himself. I think this is a better literary reference for the story of Jason Arday. “He’s not the finest character that ever lived,” the play says at one point. “But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”

Had Arday made an honest effort at reform, the howling winds of online hate would not have ceased. Anyone who has ever been canceled knows the haters never go away. I still have people who call me a Nazi, from time to time, and I’m sure this scandal would have followed Arday for the rest of his days. But he would have had those days, perhaps filled with the love of his wife and children, and had he reformed, what a lesson that would have been for society and for all the good faithful who are honest enough to see. It may be a naive dream, but we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

You can see it in his eyes. Jason Arday was clearly unwell. Have a look at his Wikipedia profile picture if you aren’t sure what I mean. What struck me before as a slimy smile and blank stare now seems more to me like the fragile mask of a wounded man. If you look into his eyes, it seems as if he’s holding back tears … or rage. But what you should also see is that there was always something clearly amiss here. As I wrote in my original essay, I blame Cambridge University for this. They took him on to wash themselves in his blackness, then left him twisting in the wind. One might even argue that his death is the best thing that could have happened for Cambridge, because now they get to point a finger at journalism and close the book on this story, and no one who is actually responsible for this man’s fate will be held to account.

I also blame Western academia for embracing the progressive racism of DEI, and for creating an incentive structure that prizes the woke phrenology of skin color and genitalia over talent and brilliance. But seeing the instant defense of Arday and the attack on journalists — after we already know The Guardian spiked its story of Arday, after we already know Arday hired a law firm to go after the journalist, and police told a journalist to stop covering the story — is a disgrace. But it also disheartens me, and makes me feel that maybe these people will never wake up and acknowledge any wrong on their side, and that the only rational thing to do is to grey rock them all.

But I’m too much of an optimist for that. I’d rather go down with the ship. One thing Arday and I clearly had in common is that he genuinely seemed to have faith in the possibility that we can change things. At the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy’s friend and neighbor, Charley, gives the greatest speech in the play:

Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University. People at the time called him a diversity hire and said he only got the job because he was black. The responses to this were hostile. “He is still very accomplished and the rest of what you’re saying is a gross misunderstanding of academic research,” one Reddit commenter said. “For him to teach at Cambridge,” another replied, “he had to have his work accepted by the highest quality journals in his field.”

History almost never allows it, but this once, everyone was right. Arday was a diversity hire. He is still very accomplished. He did have his work accepted by the highest journals in his field. But in less than three years at Cambridge, Arday has made a mockery of the institution and resigned last week after becoming the single biggest story in the news cycle, partly because of the incredible things he wants you to believe about himself.

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The Wizard of Oxbridge

Arday says he was diagnosed with autism at 3, mute until 11, illiterate until 18, partially deaf, epileptic after an attack, the survivor of a catastrophic teenage car crash that left him in a coma for months, on life support, with locked-in syndrome, the survivor of a brain tumor that erased his memory two weeks before his PhD defense (he passed), and a cancer survivor. He says he has raised millions for more than 70 or 80 charities, and installed water pumps in Africa with WaterAid, although WaterAid says it doesn’t send volunteers abroad. He says he appeared on the British documentary show Seven Up!, which aired two decades before he was born. He says he was an elite snooker player as a child, and later became a semi-professional football player. He ran 600 miles in six days, almost matching the world record, and 30 marathons in 35 days, fracturing his fibula midway and running the last nine on one good leg.

Arday’s academic accomplishments include getting his master’s in psychodynamic practice, as well as his counseling license, at Birkbeck College, University of London. Although Birkbeck says it has no record of this. He was also a visiting professor at Ohio State. But the school says this is false. He wrote a book with Palgrave Macmillan. But Palgrave says the book project never got past the proposal stage. He attended Liverpool John Moores University where, remember, he relearned his thesis in two weeks following brain surgery, and got his doctorate in education. His thesis — An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring among Student Teachers’ to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research — argues that having teachers-in-training mentor each other is good because it replaces the hierarchical teacher-student model. He invokes Marxist philosopher Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) repeatedly, including Freire’s notion that the teacher-student dynamic is inherently oppressive. Richard Dawkins recently wrote about the obscurantist, “gobbledygook” style that it’s written in, packed with basic grammatical errors such as “Key findings illuminated posit that there are also several challenges inherent in the enactment of peer-mentoring, more specifically trust, power and time.”

Writing for The Telegraph, Leaf Arbuthnot and Janet Eastham review Arday’s upcoming memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, in these terms:

Characters in the book, by and large, fall into two camps: the evil idiots who are cruel to Arday and fail to grasp his potential, and the angels who help him, mentor him, and express their ardent certainty that he is extraordinary.

This division of the cast into angels and enemies is established early on, when Arday’s mother, Giff, is treated to a powerful prophecy by the South Asian midwife who has delivered him. “This boy is destined for great things,” the midwife tells Arday’s mother, looking into her eyes. “You hear? You take care of this child.”

…

Perhaps the most painful moment in which a character expresses their conviction that Arday is superior to the hoi polloi comes when Arday gets a job at Sainsbury’s, and becomes friendly with a fellow worker named Sam. “Jason, I want you to listen to me,” Sam tells him. “I see something in you: you’re fearless. Yes, you’re having to do this job now, but one day you’ll scale Mount Everest, whether anyone thinks you can or not.” This truth duly truth-bombed, Sam conveniently melts away, never to be heard from again.

has reported that the title of the memoir itself is taken from the title of episode seven of the first season of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand,” which broadcast in 2010, about the ancient Thracian gladiator who led a slave uprising in Ancient Rome. Arday also takes his own origin story from the episode, Ryan says, and “dialogue that overlaps with not one but two prophesies about his destiny uttered in the prologue of Mr. Arday’s book.” The prophecy comes from Spartacus’ wife, who says, “You are destined for great and unfortunate things,” which does appear twice in Arday’s book. Once, when a midwife tells Arday’s mother, “This boy is destined for great things.” And later, when Arday is volunteering in Brazil and an aid worker tells him, “I can tell you’re destined to do great things. But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”

The plagiarism allegation in this tale concerns the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, whose doctoral thesis also involved student teachers reflecting on their teaching. The Guardian reported that more than 100 passages in Arday’s thesis resemble Zwozdiak-Myers’s, but Liverpool John Moores investigated and found no misconduct. Retraction Watch reports that in one article, Arday claimed to have interviewed people for his research when those interview answers were actually taken from previously published studies. Times Higher Education journalist Jack Grove investigated the story, but Arday complained and British police then investigated Grove. Grove said an officer told him not to contact Arday again because he was affecting Arday’s mental health. Then Arday hired a defamation law firm and the Times killed the story. Then Cambridge responded to the allegations against Arday by saying he was the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”

And yet, last year, DEI strategist Arthur Chan shared a post that read, “Calling someone a diversity hire isn’t just reductive, it’s racist and oppressive. End of story.” The Canadian anti-racism organization Stop Race Based Hate has an explainer specifically titled, “Why is it racist to say, ‘They were hired for diversity?’” A few months ago, Care2 said, “‘Diversity Hire’ is just what bigoted racists say when a minority or other marginalized person achieves something they themselves could not.” And Theo EJ Wilson, host of History’s “I Was There” series, said in 2024, “‘Diversity Hire’ is the new coded N-Word. The children of slave masters saying the children of slaves ‘didn’t earn it’ is wild!!”

The great and unfortunate truth about Arday

There was a time when becoming a professor at so prestigious a university demanded brilliance. Now it seems to demand little more than ideological conformity and the right phenotype. But Arday is not a total fake. His scholarly output includes over 30 research works and books about racism, such as his 2019 article, “Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro-Aggressions within the Academy,” published in Whiteness and Education, and “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy,” published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. (Also, “reimaging” not “reimagining.”) Arday is just responding to the incentives of Western academic life in a rational way. This isn’t good, but it’s rational. The real culprits are Cambridge, for helping set up the system in this way. And the journalists who dismissed his critics. And the folks who roll their eyes every time they hear “diversity hire” as if it’s inherently racist.

This week, an ethnic Lebanese Muslim named Abdul Ballout rammed his van into a peaceful crowd of people celebrating Pride in Berlin, then hopped out and started hacking people up with a machete. He murdered a Polish woman in her 60s and butchered 29 others. Part of what makes this story so sad is that Germany saw it coming, and did nothing. In 2019, Ballout attacked an injured kid in a schoolyard, robbed someone the following year, and was convicted for these crimes in 2022. Last year, he went to Lebanon where he made contact with ISIS and planned to cross into Syria to join them, but local police arrested him and Germany repatriated him. Ballout was sentenced to less than two years, but German authorities suspended the sentence because he said he didn’t really mean it and renounced ISIS, even though they also found that he was constantly looking at extremist Muslim propaganda on his father’s smartphone. Nevertheless, they released him back onto the streets, and ordered him to attend deradicalization classes. He attended only two meetings, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and went on a murderous rampage last week, after which police shot him dead. If only German authorities could have seen this coming.

But to understand how this could have happened, it’s helpful to ask ourselves whether anything similar has ever happened before, and indeed it has.

In the winter of 1979, Iran’s leftists believed history was finally moving in their direction. Marxists, socialists, secular liberals, university students, trade unionists, and public intellectuals poured into the streets alongside the followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, united by hatred of the shah’s dictatorship and their belief that the shah was an American puppet. Many on the left understood Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic state was profoundly different from their own. They assumed the contradiction could be dealt with later. Their immediate concern was breaking Western influence and the monarchy along with it, and they persuaded themselves that the Muslim clerics represented an authentic, popular, anti-imperialist force.

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In the end, they got what they wished for. The shah fled. Khomeini returned from exile to enormous crowds. And for a brief and joyful moment, the revolution appeared to belong to everyone who had helped make it. But Khomeini’s movement had advantages their allies did not: a nationwide network of mosques, disciplined organization, armed loyalists, and a clear idea of what the new order should be. While the left debated how to police people’s speech, Khomeini’s movement began tightening its grip on the nation. Today, the woke left calls anything they dislike “racist” or compares it to Nazism as a way of policing the boundaries of acceptable opinion. Back then, leftists used the terms “liberal” and “Western” to discredit people without addressing their arguments. Today, being insufficiently anti-racist makes you “racist.” Back then, being insufficiently anti-imperialist made you “imperialist,” which is precisely how the pro-Khomeini Tudeh Party attacked Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and other secular moderates.

Many leftist feminists welcomed Khomeini, even adopting the chador as an anti-shah and anti-Western political symbol. Women’s participation in the revolution was substantial and Khomeini actively encouraged it. When he made veiling compulsory later that year and women protested, leftist feminists saw the protesters as bourgeois, Westernized whores and chanted, “Death to foreign dolls!” Then the purges came. Liberal officials were pushed aside. Secular newspapers were shut down. Universities were subjected to Islamic reform. The leftists who had marched alongside Muslims as their fiercest allies were among the first to go, branded traitors, atheists, foreign agents, or moharebs — enemies of God.

Even still, the left defended the regime, reasoning that its hostility toward the United States made it objectively progressive, no matter how many it murdered. They had cast America as the oppressor and Iran as permanently oppressed. But in the end, their loyalty bought them little time. By the early 1980s, the alliance had become a hunt. Even the loyal Tudeh Party, Iran’s main communist group, which had ferociously supported the new Islamic Republic and defended its early abuses, was dismantled, its leaders tortured, forced into televised confessions, and executed. The final horror came in 1988, when the regime carried out mass executions, including of leftists who had fought to bring their own executioners to power.

I wish I could pretend this nightmare belonged only to Iran, but leftists around the world have repeated this suicidal error. In Algeria, communists fought alongside the largely Muslim nationalist FLN against France. Independence came in 1962, and the FLN immediately established a one-party state, outlawed the Communist Party, and executed its members. In Sudan, leftists and Muslims fought together in the 1964 October Revolution that removed General Ibrahim Abboud. Then Jaafar Muhammad Nimeiry crushed the left, and later Omar al-Bashir systematically tortured and executed communists and socialists. In Pakistan, leftists joined Islamic parties against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which led to the rise of General Zia-ul-Haq, who imposed Islamic rule, denounced socialism as un-Islamic, executed Bhutto, and tortured leftist activists. In Tunisia, leftists helped drive out Ben Ali, and the Islamic Ennahda party took over, after which Salafi jihadists assassinated left-wing leaders Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, as well as their supporters.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, the West isn’t learning it. Consider the genocidal rape of Britain. Consider that Sweden had a rape rate of 8.2 per 100,000 residents in 1970, then took in more Muslims than almost any other European nation, and now has a rate of 192, making Sweden the rape capital of Europe — although a meaningful chunk of that rise is attributable to legal reforms that broadened the definition of rape. Or consider the horde currently invading Spain, as up to 60,000 mostly young Moroccan men cross into the town of Ceuta, where local police now say they are on the edge of operational collapse, and the European Union itself is showing cracks as multiple nations are calling for Spain to be kicked out of Schengen over this. In every case, left-wing actors pushed their nations toward these outcomes while right-wing actors were labeled “far-right” and compared to Nazis for pushing in the other direction.

“The issue that is taboo, David, and you know this better than I do, is immigration,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali once told me. “This is immigration as subversion. It’s the spread of radical political Islam through da’wah. Da’wah itself is a program of subversion. It’s the assault on the family and other institutions, precisely as Yuri Bezmenov laid out.”

Here in America, college students nationwide have embraced not only the Palestinian cause, but specifically that of Hamas, chanting “from the river to the sea,” celebrating October 7 as “resistance,” wearing keffiyehs like it’s the new red bandana, all despite the movement’s Nazi origins. Or there’s the fact that Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and when the city suffers an Islamic terrorist attack, he slams the victims as white supremacists. Or you have Hasan Piker, the darling of leftist media, who thinks America “deserved 9/11” and Hamas and Hezbollah are the good guys, and who has leftist intellectuals defending even his most obscene remarks.

The pattern is clear. When it comes to Islam, leftists repeatedly mistake shared enemies for shared values. A movement that opposes American power, Western influence, capitalism, Israel, or the political right may therefore be treated as progressive even if its own commitments are openly hostile to liberal freedoms. At the same time, leftist-dominated institutions are reluctant to confront illiberal forces because doing so might strengthen an adversary on the right, or because it would mean laying down the law in a way that codes as right-wing itself.

The mechanism is always the same. An institution decides that an enemy of its enemy is worth protecting, and loses the ability to address or even name the danger once it’s inside the house. Iran’s leftists couldn’t call Khomeini’s men a threat because they needed them against the shah. Germany’s courts and deradicalization programs couldn’t fully act on what they saw in Ballout because that would have meant admitting the shape of the threat they’d spent a generation bringing in.

Critics have wondered why Germany brought Ballout back from Lebanon in the first place, but Ballout was a German-born citizen so Berlin was obligated to take him in, and they arrested him at the airport. However, the Ballout family are Shia Muslims, and a 2023 poll found that 93% of Lebanese Shia view Hezbollah positively, so perhaps Germany should amend its “admission criteria” to deprioritize such people. One problem, however, is that Germany’s post-Nazi constitution gave unusually strong protection to asylum seekers. This was done in a noble effort to prevent another Holocaust, but European Jews during World War II are not comparable to young Muslim men from Middle Eastern countries today.

Another problem is the media coverage. The media has a powerful leftist bias and we are seeing the impact of disinformation play out in real time. In covering the Berlin attack, The New York Times ran the headline, “Car Plows Into Crowd at Berlin Pride Event in Suspected Terror Attack,” as if someone had merely parked on a hill and left the car in neutral. That headline reads less like an account of a Muslim terrorist than a story about a radicalized Nissan. Separately, the Times ran the headline, “Even Before Attack, Berlin’s Gay Community Felt ‘More and More Unsafe’,” suggesting this is not an isolated incident. And it’s not. Last year in Munich, an Afghan Muslim rammed his car into a crowd of people, killing a mother and her two-year-old daughter and injuring dozens more. In 2020, an Iraqi Muslim ploughed his car into motorists in Berlin. Also in 2020, a Syrian Muslim stabbed a gay couple in Dresden, killing one. Not to mention, the deadliest terrorist attacks in German history were carried out by Palestinians at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and an ISIS terrorist who drove his truck into a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016.

Except none of this is what the Times had in mind by hinting at a larger pattern in Germany. Instead, the article goes on to say “far-right ideology was the most frequently cited specific motivation for homophobic attacks in the city in 2025.” But you have to read carefully because that hyperlink goes to a German police report that says the far-right was responsible for a grand total of 11 violent homophobic attacks in Berlin last year. The Times ignores this, as well as the larger pattern of Muslim violence in Germany or Europe overall.

This is all deeply depressing and anyone who cares about basic rights and freedoms, Western civilization, the sanctity of human life, and the truth about our world should be burning with rage. But also, know that if you say you are, “progressive” leftists are likely to smear you as Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, or even a Nazi. Indeed, in the wake of this recent attack, one German activist said she was sad because she “had hoped that the attacker was not a foreigner, but a white Christian person.” A pink-haired young woman said, “I’m not going to say anything about the rest of the Muslim population because of the actions of this one person, but what I can say is that the people who were celebrating about this were all white men … with crosses in their profiles, because … we’ve all seen how you guys react towards gay people.”

This user refuses to comment on how Muslims react towards gay people, but she’s willing to comment on homophobia among white men? Well, for the record, Pew Research found in 2013 that Lebanon is one of the most homophobic societies in the world, where 80% of people say gays shouldn’t be accepted, while Germany is one of the most tolerant countries toward gays in the entire world, where 87% of people say it should be accepted. Another leftist German woman, with pronouns in her bio, went a step further and blamed all men:

The problem is masculinity!

We as a society have failed; Abdul was only released from the youth prison in May and would have needed more support for his reintegration.

I can’t understand that the state didn’t pay for his participation in seminars on critical masculinity. Abdul would have needed our help.

As far as I can tell, the problem here isn’t toxic masculinity so much as toxic femininity, or what some people simply refer to as suicidal empathy. And this isn’t just German women, of course. This week the American news cycle features Melissa Chaudhry, a Democratic candidate challenging Rep. Adam Smith in Washington’s 9th Congressional District, who deliberately omitted LGBT issues from her campaign website because, as she told The Stranger, “A lot of Muslims do not feel that way.” Or consider Darializa Avila Chevalier. In his essay “The Democrats have their own MAGA now,” wrote of her:

Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia, she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika,” meaning “Death to America” in Persian.

CUAD also celebrated October 7 as a “moral, military and political victory,” portrayed the slaughter as an act of liberation, and when two Hamas gunmen murdered seven people on a metro line outside Tel Aviv in 2024, CUAD praised the slaughter as “bold.” After the death of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7, CUAD called the Hamas leader an inspirational figure, praised him effusively, and called the massacre his “crowning achievement.” This makes CUAD worse than if they supported Neo-Nazism or white supremacy because no such groups today are responsible for killing 1,200 Jews. (Among neo-Nazi terrorist cells, Germany’s defunct National Socialist Underground probably had the clearest high-casualty death toll, with 10 murders.) Nor, for that matter, do white supremacists groups seek the “total eradication of Western civilization.”

Avila Chevalier also apparently opposes interracial relationships, and in a now-deleted 2019 tweet, she attacked black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” She’s a police abolitionist too. She once told someone who asked about coming up with a more sensible slogan than defund the police, “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish.” She later clarified that “defund” does not mean reform, “It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.” She also recently refused to answer when asked whether she would put a murderer in prison, and has said America’s support for Ukraine is “bullying Russia.” But, Smith adds, “The woman who said all of these things is going to be a U.S. Representative … a member of the United States’ highest legislative body … formally supported by the Democratic Party … Nor is this a case of one wacky person winning a lone, lucky victory. Avila Chevalier was one of three Congressional primary candidates backed by New York City’s powerful and charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani.”

Put next to each other, all the stories above rhyme in an uncomfortable way. But of course, being honest with ourselves about what Islam or illiberal leftism truly are does not require believing that every Muslim is a threat or that every democratic socialist is a terrorist sympathizer. As I have written many times before, I acknowledge the good that leftists have done in America. I have also known many beautiful Muslim individuals. But when illiberal leftists and Muslims gain a critical mass of influence within a society, the result is virtually always hell on earth. The question worth asking ourselves is how many more people — in Germany, in Washington state, in New York’s 13th district — are currently telling us exactly who they are while leftist institutions and political parties keep covering their ears, lying to the public, and holding open the door.

Imagine if a right-wing influencer went around saying he hates blacks. Imagine he expressed his love and admiration for the Nazis, the KKK, and the Confederacy. When white supremacists rape a group of black women, imagine he takes to Instagram to say the women are lying about it because they secretly wish a white man would rape them. Imagine he calls blacks “inbred,” says Hitler was “one of the great leaders of this world,” expresses his love for the Nazi flag, and speaks to College Republicans dressed as Adolf. Thankfully, we have no tolerance for such things in our society. Not even Nick Fuentes or Jared Taylor are as extreme as this, and they’re both pariahs. Indeed, many people have had their careers destroyed for far less offensive remarks. In 2018, Papa John’s founder John Schnatter said “nigger” while discussing how to avoid sounding racist, and it cost him his career. This week, despite the First Amendment, a Minnesota mother named Shiloh Hendrix was fined $1,000 because a Somali man chased her and taunted her to say the word “nigger,” and she did. Yet the imaginary person described above not only exists, he’s adored and defended by mainstream Republicans and major right-wing news outlets. Except now reverse the politics because we are, of course, talking about a leftist.

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On July 18, Hasan Piker strode to the lectern at the College Democrats of America’s summer convention in Washington, dressed as Mao Zedong, the most murderous dictator in human history. Piker began as an unusually self-conscious celebrity guest, joking and speaking in the conversational cadence of a livestreamer. But his address gradually hardened into something else. He excoriated Republicans for not being Democrats, and excoriated Democrats for not being socialists, accusing them of “cooperating with fascists.” In an age when our nation is so deeply divided that it threatens our very republic, Piker has decided to celebrate the division and embrace a disgusting mindset that has taken hold across the political left. Namely, that the other side is evil and therefore killing them is justified. The right rejects this view, and the more to the right one moves, the less people support using violence against the other side, whereas the more to the left one moves, the more they support using violence, though this pattern has shifted in the past three years. Now over 40% of students who identify as Democratic Socialists support using violence to stop a speaker. Until about 2023, that figure was half as much for conservatives, and historically even lower. But as it becomes clear that the left is out for blood, the right is adopting a similar view.

The left’s attitude toward political violence is generated and maintained by the permission structure that casts right-wingers as fascists. But this is a lie. President Trump is not a fascist, MAGA is not a fascist movement, and ICE agents are not Nazis. On the other hand, the right casts left-wingers as communists and socialists, so you might say this is more of the same in the other direction. But the difference is, the claim actually holds more true of the left. Yes, McCarthyism was a tyranny, but also, many of those accused actually were communists, and later admitted it. Currently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani openly identifies as a democratic socialist, as does Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, along with U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and many more. Some will object that this comparison is unfair and will want to say that the right has its own extremists who get platformed too. It’s a fair challenge. Talk radio and the fringes of right-wing media are not free of bigotry or conspiracy-mongering. There are hosts and commentators who traffic in antisemitism, racial resentment, and violent rhetoric. But the test isn’t whether extremists exist on both sides—they do—it’s whether they’re mainstreamed.

When far-right figures have made comparably ugly remarks, conservative media outlets have, with some consistency, either dropped them or refused to platform them in the first place. The Daily Wire dropped Candace Owens for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, despite her massive celebrity. CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp removed Fuentes, citing his “hateful racist rhetoric.” And there are many more examples like these. But notice what these examples have in common. In each case, the institution acted only after the remarks became public and forced its hand, and the figure was removed, not elevated. Nobody at the Daily Wire hired Owens because of her views on Jews. Nobody at CPAC invited Fuentes to headline knowing what he’d say. Piker’s case inverts this entirely. College Democrats didn’t stumble onto his record and scramble to distance themselves—his remarks about rape victims, Mao, and Hamas are years old, extensively documented, and easily searchable. They booked him anyway, as their featured speaker, at their national convention, because of his views.

If there’s a genuine right-wing equivalent of Piker, someone this openly bigoted, this enthusiastic about political violence, this recently rewarded with a major party’s own youth convention stage, then I’d genuinely like readers to send me the example. But there is no democratic fascist movement. And if there were, no Republican mayor or representative would embrace it. The closest example we have might be former Iowa Representative Steve King, who in 2019 questioned the negative connotations around “white supremacy” and “white nationalist.” But he’s not a good example because Republican leaders stripped him of committee assignments for those remarks. And sure, being a democratic socialist is not comparable to being a full-on fascist. Indeed, depending how one defines the term, I myself have identified as a democratic socialist. But again, as noted above, the right is not out to kill such figures, whereas Trump has already survived four assassination attempts and right-wing speakers on college campuses are taking a risk with their lives that left-wing speakers do not face. This warrants honest soul-searching among our American brothers and sisters on the left.

And there is apparently no limit to how extreme these socialists can be before the left considers cutting them loose. Let’s go back to Piker. This is a man who said “America deserved 9/11.” He said of Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who received a Purple Heart and lost his right eye to an IED explosion in Afghanistan, “Didn’t he go to war and like, literally lose his eye because some mujahideen, a brave fucking soldier, fucked his eye-hole with their dick?” He added that Crenshaw deserved what happened to him. He said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” adding that Hamas is “a thousand times better.” He said, “Even if there was multiple rapes that took place on October 7, this doesn’t change anything for me.” He said Jewish rape victims only made such claims because they secretly wanted Hamas to rape them, calling their accusations “rape fantasies.” He said Orthodox Jews as “inbred.” He said the Houthis are “heroes.” Yes, the same Houthis who use child soldiers and kidnap, torture, and kill critics, journalists, religious minorities, and aid workers, whose leaders own 1,800 literal slaves, and who hate Jews so much that the official slogan of the Houthi movement, known as Al-Sarkha or “The Scream,” translates to, “God is the greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Piker said he loves the flag of Hezbollah, the group that carried out the deadliest killing of Jews outside Israel since the Holocaust. He’s also a communist, and once said it’s “better” if wealthy American college girls are raped, rather than poor ones. He called on his fans to murder random Americans and “let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood.” He said, “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, a man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet.”

But has any of this made him a pariah on the left? Not at all. Not only did the College Democrats invite him to lecture them, but last year, the New Yorker Festival invited Piker to speak. Recently, Ezra Klein defended Piker against accusations of antisemitism. Pod Save America, co-founded by Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau, had Piker on its show. Gavin Newsom said he’d like to appear on Piker’s livestream. GQ wrote a puff piece about the guy including, and I am not making this up, a layout with Piker naked in a fucking bubble bath.

Piker was born on July 25, 1991, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Turkish parents. He spent nearly all his childhood and adolescence in Istanbul. At 18, he moved back to the United States for college, attending the University of Miami before transferring to Rutgers, then moved to Los Angeles where he worked for his uncle Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks. His father is Mehmet Piker, former vice president and board member at Sabancı Holding, one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, valued at $37 billion. Yes, Piker is the communist son of one of the biggest bourgeois extractors of surplus value from the working class in the world. His father is also a founding member of Turkey’s Future Party, led by former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who would like to see a return of the Ottoman Empire in some muted form.

As a nation, we need both parties. I wrote about this in my recent essay on The Odyssey, in which I argued, “A healthy civilization requires both a hard edge and a gentle heart.” Democrats have done enormous good in this country. Even the Democratic Socialists have sometimes drawn overdue attention to poverty, medical debt, abusive employers, unaffordable housing, and the corrupting influence of concentrated wealth. I harp on the left because its cultural influence is vastly greater, because it has quite recently morphed into something far more intolerant and openly bigoted compared to what I knew growing up, and because of its predilection for political violence. But I am fundamentally nonpartisan, and I believe we should all want both sides to be healthy and strong.

But a political movement does not prove itself merely by naming injustices. It proves itself by policing the hatreds that arise within its own ranks. Democrats and their allies in the media would instantly recognize Piker’s moral equivalent on the right as a racist extremist unfit for respectable company. They should apply the same standard here. I am not calling for him to be silenced or deplatformed. As my readers know, I believe the best response to hateful speech is better speech. Yet almost no one on the left is holding him accountable in this way. And I find that gross, especially given how incessantly leftists call the right Nazis. But none of this is really a mystery. A movement that will not reject Hasan Piker is not really trying to oppose political hatred in the first place.

The conversation moves from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Japanese tea ceremony to the story of a deaf woman hearing Beethoven for the first time, as they discuss whether taste should simply be trusted or deliberately trained, and why humans are so drawn to sublime forces that horrify and dwarf us.

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Homer’s Odyssey is often mistaken for a story about monsters and voyages, but at its heart, it’s a story about homecoming. Specifically, it’s about recovering a world that makes home possible. The journey it describes is not merely a sailor’s voyage from distant lands, but also the quest to return to Ithaca in the deeper sense of what Ithaca once was, and to recover the customs and sacred laws that make home, and civilization itself, possible.

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Yet when Odysseus finally reaches those familiar shores, he finds a household whose moral architecture has collapsed. In Book One, the suitors who seek the comfort of his queen’s bed are shown devouring another man’s estate. These are not foreign invaders, but Ithacans themselves, ravenously enjoying their king’s gifts while preying upon his wife and violating the code of hospitality the culture once held dear. Ithacan society has quietly come apart in the absence of its king, and importantly, the threat came not from foreign invasion—the Greeks have already vanquished the Trojans a decade before the opening verse—but from within.

In Book Two, Odysseus’s son Telemachus condemns the suitors for abandoning the norms of society that govern marriage, inheritance, and household. The suitors are not conservative in that sense. They do not keep the old ways. They scarcely believe in the ancient gods. But Telemachus knows well where such permissiveness will lead. “You should be ashamed yourselves,” he tells them. “Fear the gods’ wrath before they wheel in outrage and make these crimes recoil on your heads.”

But the suitors ignore his warnings, and behave as though binding norms have become optional. They embody an entitlement that treats grievance as authority, an eternal rot that threatens every great civilization, one from within that has no respect for its own culture, plays the victim, and believes what’s righteous is whatever one personally identifies as best, rather than what the old codes ask of them. It’s easy to see our current age in this, or the need for a figure like Odysseus to make his winding way back to our Ithaca and lay down the law once more.

It’s not in the film, but before Ithaca, Odysseus lands in Scheria, among the Phaeacians, a prosperous, orderly, and deeply civilized people who respect lawful authority, revere the gods, celebrate great art, honor athletic competition, and prize beauty. In our time, these things—law and order, faith, the Western Canon, honorable sports, and the hierarchy of beauty—code as politically conservative. But once upon a time, such notions were common sense, so much so that Homer never bothers to explain why this society flourishes. He simply shows us what a healthy civilization looks like when its customs remain intact.

It’s in this orderly society that one of the poem’s most mysterious moments occurs. A bard sings of the fall of Troy and of Odysseus’s role in it as the designer of the Trojan Horse, and Odysseus clutches his cloak in both hands, draws it over his head to hide his face, and weeps. “Whenever the rapt bard would pause in the song,” the poem says, Odysseus would “wipe off his tears and hoisting his double-handled cup, pour it out to the gods. But soon as the bard would start again … Odysseus hid his face and wept.” Later, Odysseus asks the bard to sing again of Troy. This time, he breaks down again, and Homer compares him to a woman weeping over her dead husband’s body as she is beaten by spear-butts and dragged away into slavery by the enemy. Homer never tells us why the song of Troy affects Odysseus so, but although these scenes are not in the movie, Nolan offers an explanation in one of the most powerful sequences of his career. For Nolan, Odysseus does not weep because Troy reminds him of his greatness. He weeps because it reminds him of what his greatness unleashed.

You’ll be happy to know, by the way, that the film isn’t woke. It’s actually incredibly based. Yes, given the advance signals—a black Helen, a black Phemius, a trans Sinon, a gigachad Agamemnon, the Wilson translation as source text—it was reasonable to expect that some degree of progressive cultural influence had seeped into Nolan’s film. Nolan himself doesn’t have to be woke for this to be true, and you only needed a child’s understanding of psychology to make the assumption, because no artist has ever been immune from such influences. Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in opposition to European imperialism in Africa, yet even his work included stereotypes of Africans. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was written in opposition to racism, yet it too contained offensive depictions of blacks. Even Shakespeare and Dante were not immune to the social currents of their day, because no one is, so it’s rather foolish for people to now pretend that such concerns were baseless and absurd. But also, these are often the same ones who think wokeness is not much of a thing. That said, the critics did get this one wrong. The film does have some of those influences, yes, but it’s overwhelmingly pushing in the opposite direction.

Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen is not the beauty-as-trophy image inherited from decades of casting choices that were never questioned on grounds of authenticity in the first place. Her Helen is beauty as wreckage: a woman who has been taken, marked, scarred, and is largely absent from the screen. Elliot Page’s Sinon drew the most contempt in advance, but Sinon is a shepherd’s boy who stays behind on the beach to be taken. As such, his armor is supposed to be comically oversized when he runs on the beach, a clip that went viral as evidence that the film would not be good. But also, I read Sinon as Nolan’s stand-in for the specific bravery Page has shown in a genuinely hostile public conversation about trans identity, even if that bravery is misplaced.

Nolan likes to make films about films, and if we imagine him as the metaphorical Odysseus, then ask yourself, who would be his Sinon? What young kid in his life stepped forward and showed bravery in the face of attack, all while trying to play a part he was not born to play, if not Page? Even the Wilson translation works. Wilson doesn’t share the classical assumption of what a hero is, and her Odysseus is more troubled than the one I found in the cinematic Fagles or literal Lattimore translations. But a broken protagonist makes for a better film, and Nolan has all but said as much, noting that he took his entry point from Wilson’s opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as opposed to the cunning man, or man of many turns, as it is traditionally translated.

But I also think that a man who cannot watch an actor act, who cannot sit in the dark for three hours and let a performance be a performance, has not defended his civilization. He has only made himself unable to receive it. This film is a cultural touchstone. The “woke” casting decisions all work, and are absent any agenda of the kind. I had my reservations going into it, but I decline to be so brittle that a piece of casting can take a masterpiece away from me.

One of the great things about this film is that, in its obvious commentary on our current moment, it doesn’t take sides. The film finds room to expose the debased morality of the suitors, who seem to stand in for the far-left, and the Greek armies, who stand in for the far-right. The Trojan Horse ultimately becomes more than the ingenious trick that allowed the Greeks into the city of Troy. It becomes the trick that allowed evil into the hearts of the Greeks. But Nolan uses the horror as a lens through which to remind us all why both sides in the culture war have their eternal value. A healthy civilization requires both a hard edge and a gentle heart. The film also powerfully underscores that, in fighting our enemies, we must not lose that part of ourselves that makes defending what we have worth saving. We must not surrender our liberal values, for that is what makes defending the West, and defeating its enemies, a noble crusade in the first place.

The analogy I like to make is that a nation is like a house, and we would like to cultivate compassion and tolerance within the home, but the foundation and its walls are not things to be negotiated. This ends up being the heart of the film—the need for compassion as well as respect for the structure that makes it possible. As Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, says in one scene, “The structure’s nothing. Without people’s respect for its meaning.”

Civilizations rarely collapse only through excessive severity. They also dissolve through the gradual abandonment of the norms that once sustained them. This was Nietzsche’s prediction, that after the West convinced itself God was no longer of any use, an erosion of values and a permissive culture would soon spread in the vacuum left behind, as they clearly have done. The Odyssey has been asking, for nearly three thousand years, how you find your way home after moral disorder. Not just a place to return to, but the shared understanding that makes a place worth returning to. Nolan’s film doesn’t resolve that question so much as stage it honestly, which is a harder and better thing for a blockbuster to attempt than most people expected going in. I might actually have to reach back to my childhood for a moviegoing experience of this caliber.

That’s why Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t just a good film. It’s good therapy for an ailing civilization. And, in an age searching desperately for meaning, Homer still offers the oldest answer of all: Find your way home.

On June 30, the Supreme Court told Donald Trump that a child born on American soil is no less than an American, sparking a national debate about what it means to be American in the first place and whether birthright citizenship is a central part of that identity or a dangerous mistake.

Birthright citizenship in America has its roots in English common law, which generally held that anyone born within a country’s territory was a citizen or subject. This is known as jus soli, or ‘right of soil,’ and although the British abolished the policy with the British Nationality Act of 1981, we have clung to it, along with most of Latin America. It’s important that we get this right, because the question is not merely who is born here, but what kind of nation we believe ourselves to be.

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After the American Civil War, the issue took on enormous constitutional importance because the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford had said that black Americans, even if born in the United States, could not be citizens. To permanently overturn that ruling and guarantee citizenship to former slaves, Congress adopted the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, and although its immediate purpose was to secure the rights of freed slaves, its broad language also constitutionalized the longstanding principle that, with limited exceptions such as children of diplomats or invading armies, being born here is enough to make you one of us. Then came the 1898 precedent of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese legal residents who could not themselves become Americans because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Upon returning to America after a trip to China, Ark was denied re-entry by immigration officials. But the Supreme Court sided with Ark, thus settling one of the most consequential questions in American constitutional history.

The Court’s majority opinion was written by Horace Gray, a leading scholar of English common law, who acknowledged that the purpose of the 14th was to overturn Dred Scott for former slaves, but he cared less about the spirit than the letter of the law. Yes, the evil that prompted the amendment was the denial of citizenship to freed slaves, but the solution Congress chose was to enact a rule so broadly worded that its language could be applied to everyone who fits its terms. In other words, Congress solved a specific injustice by coming up with a general philosophic principle rather than a specific provision. But Justice Fuller, joined by Justice Harlan, dissented. They argued that a child inherits the political allegiance of their parents, and this is generally true. Pew Research finds that parents in America pass on their religion and politics at similarly high rates. It’s also important to remember that Ark’s case involved parents who were legally residing in America, not illegal immigrants.

Nevertheless, with last week’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down the president’s executive order to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, discussed English common law crossing the Atlantic with the colonists, the abolitionist framers who wrote the 14th to bury Dred Scott forever, and Wong Kim Ark. Justice Thomas’s 91-page dissent argued the opposite, saying that the clause was meant only for freedmen and their descendants.

The historical case for the majority’s reading is strong. The debates over the 14th show a Congress far more preoccupied with foreclosing any future Dred Scott than with parsing the immigration status of parents. After all, the category of “illegal immigration,” as we understand it today, barely existed in 1868. The dissenters’ theory, that citizenship should track a child’s “primary allegiance,” is a solid argument, but as the majority notes, if the framers had meant to build a domicile test into the Constitution, someone would have said so. Instead, we get pages of legislative history embracing the old common-law rule of the right of soil with almost no dissenting voices. On the other hand, we have never before faced mass migration, and certainly not from populations whose values are corrosive to our own, and who may even be consciously gaming the system in order to destroy us from within. We are a powerful nation, and we have many enemies.

But let’s consider the right of soil more closely, because the concept itself makes good sense. If citizenship isn’t determined by where you’re born, it has to be determined by something else: Blood, ancestry, the status of your parents. That’s jus sanguinis, or ‘right of blood,’ and it’s the system Germany ran for most of the 20th century. Under that model, a Turkish family could live in Germany for three generations, paying taxes, speaking German, burying their dead there, and yet their grandchildren would still be foreigners. And their grandchildren too. That’s the logical endpoint of rejecting the right of soil, a permanent hereditary class of stateless people living in a country that will never be theirs. But the right of soil refuses to let the state punish a child for its parents’ choices. Thankfully, every other area of law recoils from such a notion. We don’t inherit our parents’ debts. We don’t inherit their liabilities. We don’t inherit their crimes, at least not usually. The right of soil is the same principle. The accident of your birth should never determine the story of your life. This is a fundamental concept in a nation where all men are created equal, where we abide no kings, and where every person is given a fighting chance.

But put aside the philosophic calculus, for even just as a practical matter, the right of soil is a better system in several ways. Consider the financial cost, for one. Ancestry-based systems require the state to constantly verify lineage using birth certificates, parental documentation, and DNA testing, sometimes going back generations. That’s expensive, invites fraud, and gives bureaucrats discretion over who counts as a “real” American. By contrast, America’s system is administratively cheap. For the ordinary native-born American, citizenship is proved with a birth certificate, which costs $15 in the state of Virginia, where I live. Under Italy’s ancestry-based system, you have to cough up a non-refundable €600 ($685.50) just to file your claim, and then you have to wait about a year for processing. Germany’s process can take several years.

Birthright citizenship also helps prevent anything like a caste system from taking root in America. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which guarantees the right of soil, makes it constitutionally impossible for a class of American-born people to be permanently excluded from citizenship, regardless of how long they or their ancestors had lived here. It specifically closes off the possibility of a hereditary underclass. On the other hand, if we allow enough people from India to move to America simply because they are a benefit to our economy, then yes, we may end up importing the caste system along with them. In fact, we already have. And although caste is not traditionally recognized by law in America, that’s changing too, starting in Seattle.

Here’s the thing. Birthright citizenship made unambiguous sense back when America had no immigration restrictions and no illegal immigration category at all. The concept didn’t even exist. The rule was built for an era when everyone who showed up on American soil was simply let in. Hell, it wasn’t even until the 1980s that illegal immigration became anything more than a marginal issue. But then two phenomena emerged. First, birth tourism. There is now an entire industry of maternity hotels, serving mostly Chinese and Russian nationals, in places like Southern California where women fly in specifically to give birth and secure a U.S. passport for their child, with no intention of raising their children as Americans. Indeed, many will raise them as loyal subjects of our enemy states, and teach them to hate us. Why should we allow this to happen? Second, illegal immigration. Automatic citizenship for children of illegal immigrants functions as a standing incentive structure that undermines the state’s ability to control its own borders. Now we have anchor babies whereby a U.S.-born child who can sponsor parents for legal status at 21 becomes a mechanism for undoing an enforcement action that our political system otherwise supports. This lets individuals unilaterally confer a benefit — a path to family citizenship — that Congress never voted to give them. Again, why should we allow this to happen?

One possible fix to all this is rather simple. According to some, the answer is not to abolish birthright citizenship. The answer is to continue to apply it, but only to those who are legally here. Or, at least, only to the children born here, without the ability to anchor in their families. This is how most of Europe operates, and even there, immigration is out of control. The U.S. and Canada are outliers among wealthy nations in that we offer birthright citizenship without any conditions at all.

And, to be clear, the Supreme Court didn’t shut down the idea that we can revoke or place conditions upon birthright citizenship. What is actually said was that President Trump is absolutely welcome to make that case to Congress and the states, but he doesn’t get to re-litigate Wong Kim Ark by executive order.

Birthright citizenship has been one of the most successful assimilation mechanisms any nation has ever built. It converts the accident of geography into unconditional membership, and it has made second-generation Americans — the children of Vietnamese refugees, Soviet exiles, Nigerian doctors, Salvadoran laborers — some of the most patriotic, hardest-working citizens this country has. Immigration, broadly, has been a source of national strength, not weakness. These Americans are the workers who show up for jobs legacy Americans won’t take, they are the founders of a disproportionate share of billion-dollar startups, and the soldiers who enlist in a military their parents fled.

Every serious immigration system in the world necessarily distinguishes between people building a life in their new home and people using the country as a jurisdictional loophole. We should be proud of our birthright citizenship. But we should not be blind to the fact that this sacred right is abused by people who see America only as an economic zone with a strong currency and a weak border, if not an enemy to be defeated, rather than as a civic project they intend to join. The Court was right that the Constitution doesn’t let Congress or a president solve that problem by redefining who counts as a citizen. But we, as Americans, must still decide how to protect the norm from the minority who exploit it without punishing the overwhelming majority who don’t. Unfortunately, our current state of tribalistic politics hardly allows for an intelligent discussion of such a volatile issue.

We have to decide what it means to join this nation and whether our values are worth preserving at all. To the degree that they are, we have to face some hard truths about the values that people from other cultures bring with them, about the people who will add to our noble campaign, and about the ones who are little more than enemies within. The Constitution settled who is an American. The harder question is whether we still know what it means to become one.

People from all over the world have come to America for the World Cup this year, only to realize they’ve been lied to their entire lives. When Americans say ours is the greatest country on earth, we’re not chest-thumping. It’s not ultra-nationalism either. What our welcome visitors are rapidly discovering is that it just so happens to be true. Now millions of people, from Italy to Senegal, from Argentina to South Korea, are fast becoming American patriots. And it’s beautiful to watch.

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You’ve probably seen the videos. The Italian man at a diner whose mind is blown when the waitress offers to refill his Coke. “I can refill this a thousand times!” he tells his friend. “And it’s free!” But you paid for it, his friend says. “Once!” Then he chugs the entire drink and orders another. There’s the British girl in the Smoky Mountains who says, “I understand now why they call it America the Beautiful.” In another, she says, “I’ve been to around 27 different countries in my whole life … I’ve been all over the world, basically. And nothing comes close to the U.S.A.”

Many of them came imagining a land of fast food and bland bar snacks, only to end up losing their minds when they realize America is the greatest foodie destination on the planet. Only Japan and Argentina produce beef as good as ours. Only Italy and Spain produce ham that can compare to Virginia’s, much less South Carolina pulled-pork BBQ. You like seafood? Maine lobster, Alaska king crab, Bristol Bay salmon, each is best-in-class. Washington apples, Michigan blueberries, Georgia peaches, Hawaiian pineapples, all the best. We also make some damn fine whiskey, wine, and beer.

Then there are the people swooning over cement mixers, school buses, thunderstorms, Waffle House, Taco Bell, ranch dressing, Walmart, and chicken parm (the “Deli Guy,” it turns out, is one of our greatest ambassadors). Others feel betrayed and lied to by the notion that America is just another country, like any other. The British influencer Adam in America recently commented, “The media portrays Americans as rude, lazy, all of the above—and it’s further from the truth. The amount of hospitality and kindness and care and pride Americans hold is truly like no other country I’ve been to.” This heartwarming phenomenon has a name too. They’re calling it the Big American Sleepover.

And these visitors are not wrong to be astonished. Driving across Texas takes longer than crossing most of Europe. We have the biggest trees on earth, the oldest trees on earth. We have the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades, Big Sur, Niagara. If just one of these existed in another country, that alone would be reason to visit. The transistor, the internet, the polio vaccine given away for free, GPS given away for free, the moon landings. Jazz, blues, rock, Hollywood. The whole world grows up on American culture.

But the greatest thing about America is its people. Black Americans who built so much of this country under conditions of profound injustice, and then produced the Civil Rights movement, one of humanity’s most morally significant achievements. Latino, Asian, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Arab, Haitian, Korean Americans. This country has taken people from every conflict in history and handed them the same passport. No civilization has ever attempted that at this scale and come this close to pulling it off. None.

So here is my question today. Why can’t our own children see it?

Why does it take a girl from Britain, standing in Yosemite with tears on her face, to see what a graduate of our finest universities has been trained not to see? Why do visitors from Senegal and South Korea feel a wonder that our own students would be embarrassed to express out loud? I’ll tell you why. Because somewhere in the last few decades, we stopped teaching our children that this country is worth loving and started teaching them a different lesson instead. We taught them, as recently said in her brilliant speech, that the world divides into two camps: oppressors and oppressed. That every person, every institution, every nation must be sorted into one box or the other. And once you accept that framework, everything follows.

Charlie Kirk was a good man, but his murder becomes amusing. Henry Nowak was an innocent kid, but he can be left to bleed out. Karmelo Anthony must be innocent, and the celebration by so many black Americans is found to be reasonable. America, the most powerful nation on earth, goes in the oppressor box. And nothing in the oppressor box is to be loved. Not its founders, not its flag, not its birthday.

And let me be clear about who is responsible. We are. Our generation. We built the universities where this doctrine took hold. We paid the tuition. And at every turn, we chose cowardice over hard truths. We inherited an incredible moral bedrock from our parents and grandparents that included values such as duty, responsibility, and the knowing difference between right and wrong, then we spent it down like a trust fund without ever even glancing at the balance.

Worse, we stopped asking anyone to buy in. We welcomed millions and told them nothing about what this country asks of the people it receives, because we’d forgotten ourselves. We opened the borders to certain immigrants who do not all hold these values and convinced ourselves it’ll be fine, that they’ll assimilate and learn to get along, because they just want a better life, because that’s what we would do. But our nation doesn’t run the same when you try it with people who have completely different norms. We have been asleep. And now we are slowly waking up to what has been growing while we slept. And yes, it’s a rude awakening.

On our campuses, there are essentially no conservative universities at all, outside of a handful of religious and military institutions. American faculty today report self-censoring at higher rates than at the height of the McCarthy era. Yes, the McCarthy era, the very episode we teach as a cautionary tale. Well, now we live it, except what we live is a version on steroids. We built temples of free inquiry and turned them into places where half the country’s ideas cannot be spoken aloud. Then we act surprised when students emerge believing that certain ideas are not arguments to be refuted, but opinions to be silenced—and those who hold them deserve whatever the hell they get.

When Ketanji Brown Jackson was but a nominee to the Supreme Court of the this great land, she was asked to define the word “woman” and answered that she couldn’t because she’s not a biologist. As someone later quipped, I’m not a veterinarian but I know what a dog is. Think about what it takes for an accomplished jurist to be unable to say aloud what every grandmother in human history has known. Think about the number of intelligent people who have been pulled in by such rhetoric, or stood by as their own children got pulled in, because they held truth and reason more cheaply in their own esteem than wanting to seem like a good person. This has consequences in women’s sports, in women’s prisons, in women’s shelters. We have gutted protections that the feminist movement bravely spent a century building. We have become cowards. We have abandoned our daughters because we are terrified of seeming intolerant. That’s what the oppressor doctrine does when it fully captures institutions. It doesn’t protect the vulnerable, it decides who is allowed to be vulnerable.

Or consider the Summer of Love. George Floyd’s death was a tragedy, and the officers responsible were rightly prosecuted and convicted, but what followed was a moral panic that burned billions in property, defunded police in cities, and then watched their most vulnerable, and disproportionately black, neighborhoods absorb a surge in violence. Worse, question any of it and you weren’t wrong—you were racist and therefore evil. Or look at our streets since October 7, with young Americans marching in support of a movement that raped and slaughtered 1,200 people, including children, and celebrated it in real time, a movement whose founding father was a Nazi collaborator who adored Hitler, and that openly calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state and chants slogans that reference the genocide of all Jews everywhere. How is that possible? What happened to all those years of work advancing awareness about antisemitism? Again, what cowards we are, what cowards we have become, where even atrocity is framed as resistance. It’s the same broken compass that lets a hammer and sickle hang on a dorm room wall but not a Nazi flag, despite the fact that communism’s death toll is vastly larger. Both are monstrous, but only one gets a shrug.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. And you’re right. The censor’s temptation is not owned by one side. When a government detains legal residents for their political speech, when officials target news outlets they dislike, every one of us should oppose this, loudly, whatever we think of the speech in question. But a fever and a chronic disease are not the same illness. What we face in our schools, our media, our museums, and our HR departments is not one strongman’s excess but a slow institutional capture, a subversion of our entire society, of our very understanding of reality itself, and it’s harder to fight precisely because, as these things generally go, you only find your voice after the hour is already late. And late it is.

But it’s not too late, not just yet. The cure for a doctrine that forbids love of country is standing in line at a Waffle House holding a selfie stick. Every one of those videos—the refills, the mountains, the Deli Guy—gives me hope in this battle. Our visitors apparently don’t know the rules. Nobody told them America goes in the oppressor box. So they just look at the actual country, the land, the food, the people, the freedom, and report what they see. They are holding up a mirror, and in that mirror is a nation that is, by any honest measure, the greatest experiment in human self-governance in the history of civilization.

Progressives especially, I am asking you to look. Your country is worth loving. Loving it is not the same as ignoring its failures—Frederick Douglass proved that, holding America to its own promise with a fiercer patriotism than today’s complacent defenders ever mustered. Yes, you can demand better and still feel gratitude. Yes, you can fight for change and still feel wonder. But a movement that cannot say “I love this country” without irony is a movement that will keep losing the people who feel that love most deeply. The left has lost its vocabulary for patriotism. And you must find it once more. I would even argue that your only hope of ever winning the fight you continue to fight is by having some measure of the wonder that I describe. The people arriving from Italy and Senegal and South Korea and Morocco are feeling that wonder now, for the first time, with fresh eyes. They are seeing the beauty and privilege you have stopped allowing yourself to see.

We, as Americans, must find our spine and remember to teach our children well. Teach them the difference between right and wrong. Teach them that people are individuals, not boxes. Teach them the courage to speak, especially when their opinions go against the grain. We call ourselves the home of the brave. It’s time we earned the name again.

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In a few days, the World Cup final will be played in New Jersey, under American skies, and however the game ends, people from every nation on earth will go home having seen something they didn’t expect. They will go home having seen America. This July 4th, as we turn 250, let us try to see it too. Let us be a home of the brave. God bless you all. And damn it, God bless the United States of America.

On June 16, British Parliament member Rupert Lowe shared The Rape Gang Inquiry Report on X, which tells the story of how Pakistani and other South Asian Muslims have carried out the genocidal rape, psychopathic torture, and systematic murder of white British girls on British soil with the knowledge and help of British institutions for over 50 years. Today, less than a week after the report’s release, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he is stepping down. If he is proven to be at all directly responsible for what you are about to read, he should be imprisoned for life.

If you have not yet read the 218-page report, I will summarize all you need to know here. But I warn you, I have already told my wife not to read this. Although I believe we all have a moral duty to stay informed, I also have no wish to cause anyone trauma or physical pain, and what I am about to share is capable of doing both. Even as a former war correspondent who has interviewed genocide survivors from at least a dozen different countries around the world, what follows is one of the most horrific examples of genocidal rape I have ever encountered.

The report itself is a privately funded, non-statutory document released by Lowe and survivor-turned-activist Sammy Woodhouse, who helped expose the Rotherham rape scandal, which involved mostly Pakistani men gang-raping, sexually enslaving, and torturing at least 1,400 white British girls. The report is distinct from the UK’s official Statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs. Unlike that inquiry, this one was crowdfunded, raising over £790,000 ($1.05 million) from about 24,000 individual donors, which gave it independence from the government. This was a necessary step since the government itself is deeply complicit in this atrocity. But this also meant the inquiry could not compel witnesses or demand documents. The most powerful evidence therefore presented in the report, in my opinion, is the testimony of the victims, which I will share below.

The “250,000” figure

The report combines survivor testimony with evidence from previous investigations, arguing that organized gangs of Pakistani Muslim men systematically groomed, raped, and tortured 250,000 white girls across at least 149 local authority districts, or nearly 40% of the UK. But that headline number is not original to this inquiry. The report says, “No such count exists because the British state has failed to record it.” The report instead attributes the figure not to a formal study, but to a comment Lord Pearson of Rannoch made in the House of Lords in May 2019:

If you take the accepted figure of 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone and extend it across the country, you come to a much larger figure. Indeed, Rotherham’s MP, the courageous Sarah Champion, has put the figure at 1 million.

The Rotherham inquiry conservatively identified 1,400 victims between 1997 and 2013, but it could be the case that Rotherham has the highest rate of such crimes anywhere in the country. Maybe police in Rotherham are especially corrupt. Or unbelievably incompetent. Maybe the city is home to a particularly radical subset of Pakistani Muslims who carry out such acts at much higher rates than anywhere else in the UK or, indeed, the world. We just don’t know. We therefore cannot assume that the rate in Rotherham is the same nationwide, so we cannot extrapolate that figure in the way that the report does, which many have been repeating since.

English authorities identified 18,700 suspected victims in 2018, up from 3,300 five years before. A statutory public office identified 19,000 potential victims of grooming gangs in 2024. If there were also roughly 19,000 potential victims for each of the years between, which is a reasonable assumption, that would total 133,000 potential victims over seven years. If, however, we only add the numbers we actually have — 1,400, 3,300, 18,700, and 19,000 — we get 42,400. How many of these rapists were South Asian Muslim men, or Pakistani men in particular?

We cannot answer that either, unfortunately, because police officials have not only been silencing the victims, but also covering the tracks of the rapists for them by simply not recording their information. A national audit published in January noted a consistent pattern whereby the ethnicity of rapists was simply not recorded, but that when it was, it was often Pakistani. Yet despite this, “The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with White perpetrators when that can’t be proved. This does no one any favours at all, and least of all those in the Asian, Pakistani, or Muslim communities who needlessly suffer as those with malicious intent use this obfuscation to sow and spread hatred.”

As you shall see, experts, investigators, and victims have repeatedly and consistently said that these cases overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, involve Pakistani men or, in same cases, also Indian and Bangladeshi men. But I want to be very clear about something, which is why I am not interested in digging too deeply into the numbers. The scale of the problem is only part of the story because even if there were only 100 confirmed victims, it would still constitute genocidal rape.

Victim testimonies

What follows is only a small sample of the victim testimonies included in the report, and the report only covers a portion of the total. To give you just one example, this report leaves out the story of Mohammed Karrar, who branded an 11-year-old girl on the ass with an M for Mohammed, threatened to cut off a girl’s face, and used a bike pump to expand a girl’s anal passage to more comfortably rape her.

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One of my favorite podcasters, , recently asked , “What could I do as an individual listening to this to save the West?” Kisin replied:

Teach your children how lucky they are. Take them abroad. Show them the rest of the world. Show them what people live like in poor countries around the world and remind them how fortunate they are. And then explain to them where it all comes from. And it comes from the fact that we have developed, designed, invented, found the magic formula for human society. At least, the best one that humans have invented so far. Freedom of expression, freedom of research, freedom of speech, capitalism, private property, the rule of law, and the idea — we talked about religion and I think it comes largely from Christianity — that we all have dignity by virtue of being human. Those are the things that have driven our society to the tremendous success we have and to the technological progress. People don’t realize that but without freedom — freedom of research, freedom of expression — you don’t have the technological progress that we have. And then you don’t have the dominance that we enjoy. Because our dominance is almost entirely based on technological progress. We’re not the most populous civilization in the world. We don’t have the largest number of people.

We are prosperous because of our technological advantages and they come from the incredible opportunities that people have to research things, to make things, and then to profit from them in a way that they don’t have in other societies. Teach your children that their society is great. Teach them that they live in one of the best places in the history of the world and that all the bullshit that they’ve been taught at school is not true. My parents had to do this for me. When I was growing up in Soviet Union, before my first day at school, they said two things. First, do not ever discuss anything we talk about in the home at school because we’ll all be in trouble. And two, they’re gonna teach you this, this, this, and this. This is not true. That’s fine. You don’t have to argue with the teacher. Just know that it’s not true. Here’s why it’s not true. If you have any questions, talk to us. You have to inoculate your children against this stuff and then they will be good citizens. Then they will create things of value to the society and they will spread that message to others.

The transmission problem is the oldest existential threat any civilization faces and it’s more acute now than at any point in Western history. This is because the institutions historically responsible for that transmission — church, family, local community, civic ritual, newspapers, universities, and left-wing political parties — have been replaced by a monoculture of credentialed expertise and woke conformity that’s actively hostile to the very thing it’s supposed to transmit.

Often when I speak to friends on the left, they are entirely convinced that the problems they see on the right are worse than the ones on the other side. But what I see is a political problem on the right and a narrative problem on the left, and I tend to worry much more about the latter for the following reason. Every civilization runs on a story it tells itself about why it’s worth preserving. But what happens when the storytellers are replaced by those who regard the civilization’s foundational values and achievements as primarily a ledger of colonial, capitalist, or Christian sins? What you get, I think, is what we have now. You get generations who can identify every atrocity committed in the name of Western expansion but cannot tell you what the Magna Carta was, why the printing press mattered, what free speech looks like in practice, why Shakespeare is better than any writer alive today, or why racism is not acceptable, no matter who the target. It therefore turns out, at least by my consideration, that the greatest defenders of Western civilization are not soldiers, though I salute ours, nor professors, nor even our greatest artists and poets, much as I may feed my soul on their good works. Rather, I am convinced that it all comes down to parents.

In 1908, the town of Fairmont, West Virginia, sat that summer beneath a grief too large for its churches to hold. Months earlier, the earth at Monongah coal mine had opened and taken its men, some 360 of them, fathers and sons descending together into a black shaft that would never give them back. It was the worst mining disaster in our nation’s history. Grace Golden Clayton, whose own father had died in the tragedy, watched the town’s women become widows all at once, its children become fatherless, and she could not let the men pass without ceremony. So on July 5, 1908, in her local church, she asked that a day be set aside for fathers. But it would not yet be a holiday.

The following year in Spokane, Washington, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, who had been raised by her widowed father William Jackson Smart after her mother died in childbirth, conceived the idea of Father’s Day after hearing a Mother’s Day sermon. She decided fathers ought to have a day too, and began a letter-writing campaign to garner support for the idea. A lot of men found paternal sentimentality emasculating, however, and Dodd struggled for decades against ridicule and suspicion by those who felt the proposed holiday was nothing more than a florists’ and retailers’ invention, like how some folks today claim Valentine’s is just a way for Hallmark to sell cards. It was not until 1966 that her dream became a reality when President Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation of Father’s Day. In 1972, President Nixon made it a federal holiday. Six years later, Dodd passed away at the age of 96.

But while critics saw this as consumer capitalism’s absorption of domestic ritual, it also represented an evolution in the American concept of fatherhood itself. The notion of a “good father” began to shift from that of a distant patriarchal authority toward a more emotionally expressive, nurturing ideal that postwar America increasingly chose to celebrate. Every correction is an over-correction, as I like to say, and I do tend to think we went a little too far in this direction. But above all, I believe that a father should set an example of what kind of person to be in this world, how to treat others, how to be wise and kind, how to chart one’s course and weather any storm. And I think when that example is properly set, it helps lay the very foundation of who we are as a society. And we are a great people.

We are explorers, inventors, warriors, and poets. But before any of that, we are storytellers, and that fact explains more about human history than anything else. We humans are the only species that navigates a world it has narrated into existence. We layer invisible architecture on top of physical reality and then live inside that architecture as if it were load-bearing because, astonishingly, it becomes load-bearing the moment enough of us agree to act as if it is. That’s why maintaining our stories is so crucial. Narrative, once it scales, starts behaving like physical infrastructure. It gets written into law. It gets enforced by police, courts, banks, and zoning boards. This is our magic. We can tell a story and make it true.

And if we stand by the values and principles contained within our best stories, the stories that made our nation great, then I do believe we can weather just about any storm. Indeed, we can save the West. And, beautifully, it happens to be true that the best way to do this is with love. I am talking about the love of a parent for their child because, it turns out, Mom and Dad weren’t just raising you. They were laying a brick on the wall of Western civilization itself. You, you beautiful thing, you are that brick. So teach your children well. Feed them on your dreams. And to all you dads out there, Happy Father’s Day.

A disturbingly large segment of black America seems to think that not letting blacks kill people is a form of oppression. This fact is repeatedly thrown in our faces every few weeks when yet another black person murders an innocent white person and then black voices flood social media to tell us it’s not his or her fault. Not even if they actually did it. And if you disagree, you’re racist. The latest example is Karmelo Anthony. The depraved, tribalistic, racist nature of the response to this story within the black community has been sickening and appalling to witness. Indeed, it recalls the Palestinian response to October 7.

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If you haven’t taken the time to read about this story, allow me. This week, 19-year-old black student Karmelo Anthony was given 35 years in a Texas prison for murdering 17-year-old white student Austin Metcalf. The murder took place when heavy rains delayed a track meet in April 2025 and Anthony decided to walk into another team’s tent. He was asked to leave 15 times but refused. “Touch me and see what happens,” he said, reaching into his bag. There were young girls in the tent and Anthony was making threats and suggesting he had a weapon, so Metcalf did what any noble young man might do. He tried to push the threatening stranger out. That’s when Anthony stabbed him to death, ran away, and later told police, “I was protecting myself.” His mother later told CBS Morning, “My son didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He was defending himself.”

His family then fundraised and pocketed $630,000, used the bounty to move into a $900,000 home in a gated community where young Karmelo won’t have to worry about sociopaths like himself, took a public defender even though they can now afford Johnnie Cochran, and now that the criminal trial is over, they claim Anthony is penniless and cannot afford an attorney for the civl trial. Metcalf’s father almost immediately expressed forgiveness and tried to meet with the Anthony family. As he and his own family now grieve their incomprehensible loss, they also routinely experience death threats from people who think his dead son is to blame in all this and that his killer is somehow the victim. The Metcalf family has also suffered six swattings, which is when you make a false anonymous report to police hoping that a SWAT team breaks open your target’s door, things go wrong, and some more Metcalfs end up in the ground next to their son. Meanwhile, the Anthonys are in their new million-dollar home, paid for with blood money.

And what has been the response? One black mother responded by saying she expects her son to do the same as Anthony, adding, “Fuck around and find out.” Another black mother of five boys is going viral for desperately asking, “What do you want us to do?” As if teaching her son not to murder people is simply too much to expect. One black woman said if you touch a black person who doesn’t want to be touched, and they murder you, you got what you deserved. Another said that even if the evidence shows Anthony was not acting in self-defense, “We gonna stand by ours regardless.” Yeah, we know. As she says this, you can hear someone in the background scream, “Kill all crackers!” I encourage you to watch these videos, if only to pay attention to their diction and lucidity. These women are not intellectually disabled, insane, or on drugs. They’re simply black women who, when it comes to this topic and presumably others that politically code the same way, behave as if white lives don’t matter.

One black man said he’s disappointed by his own people because this kind of thing should be happening every single week. Black people, he said, should go out and regularly murder “a little boy … a little girl … an old lady.” He added that he wishes he knew where Metcalf is buried because he’d like to dig him up and stab his corpse a few more times. Another black guy actually found Metcalf’s grave and filmed himself pissing on it. One black guy said it’s open season on whites this weekend. One black guy posted an AI-generated image of Metcalf in an open casket with the words “dead loser” on his chest and commented, “Fuck all white people, let’s kill America.”

These examples come from random people commenting on social media. I share them because I want to capture a slice of the general public’s response. But this is just a taste. Believe me when I tell you that I have not even shared 1% of what’s out there right now. There is an ocean of commentary like this. We don’t know what percentage of black Americans feel this way because no such survey has yet been done. It would be reckless and arguably racist to generalize in a sloppy way about the entire community. But these voices are staggeringly vast in number and not at all relegated to the barking mad or the searingly stupid. They also include the black community’s best and brightest. They include people at the heights of cultural, social, and institutional influence. I am referring to people like Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who said black women live in more “fear and agony every single day” than the Metcalfs can imagine. Except their fucking son is dead, so I have to disagree.

I am also referring to people like Twitch influencer Bruce Ray, who posted that he stands with Anthony, adding “#FREEHIM.” Or people like podcaster Larry Reid, who said all blacks should move back to Africa because the Anthony verdict proves this country doesn’t deserve them. Or business leaders and civil rights activists like Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter, who said the verdict “requires moral honesty about who is deemed dangerous, whose pain is centered.” Here’s some honesty, Bernice. People who kill kids for touching them are deemed dangerous. People who cannot grasp this except when it happens to black kids are either racist or not especially bright. As I replied, “It is truly heartbreaking to see a young man arrested for killing while black.”

Then there’s professor W. Burlette Carter, who claims Anthony did not get a jury of his peers. She thinks a “jury of your peers” would mean, in this case, a jury of black teenagers. She also admits she didn’t even bother to read the court transcript before pontificating on the verdict. She therefore gets several basic facts about the case wrong. What’s more, she just to happens to be a graduate of Harvard Law School and is currently professor emerita at George Washington University Law, so you would think she understands how juries work or why familiarizing oneself with the facts of the case might be a useful thing to do before forming an opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I think she almost certainly does have this understanding. But I also think she’s an incredibly tribalistic person and that her racial tribalism is shutting down her ability to think straight about this matter.

Then we have , a black professor at Howard University, which is the most prestigious historically black college in the country and one of the most influential black institutions in the world. Patton recently wrote an open letter to Metcalf’s grieving father: “Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries.” In it, Patton mocks Metcalf’s father because during his victim-impact statement in court, he said that he harbored no ill will toward any race, adding, “We all bleed the same color.” Amen, sir. How many of us could extend such kindness in a moment of such pain? Yet she mocked him for this because, despite his good heart, he still blamed a black youth for murdering his son because a black youth murdered his son. Metcalf addressed Anthony in court directly: “You failed your parents, you failed yourself, and you failed society. You don’t belong in this community.” He added, “You can’t even look me in the eyes right now, but you can stab my fucking son in the heart.” To which Patton responds, “And right there, in his own words, Jeff Metcalf told on himself.” She adds, “So let’s talk about Jeff Metcalf’s failure as a father.”

What could prompt such a response? Patton is eager to tell us. She doesn’t like how people picked apart the life of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old black boy who was shot by police in Cleveland in 2014 while playing with an airsoft rifle in a park. I didn’t like it either. The story was heartbreakingly difficult to read and all the prying was gross. But she also dislikes that the public did this to Trayvon Martin, which was less morally black-and-white since he got into a fight with George Zimmerman and ended up on top of him, allegedly smashing his head into the concrete, until Zimmerman killed him. She also adds to the list Michael Brown, who shortly after robbing a convenience store in Ferguson in 2014 was confronted by a cop, reached into the officer’s car, tried to grab his gun, and got himself killed. Because the public “picked through … school records … social media pics … text messages” and “scrutinized” the “size … behavior … family” of these boys, Patton explains, it therefore makes sense to shit on a grieving father. Bear in mind, this is a woman who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, authored several books, and won multiple reporting awards from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, National Association of Black Journalists, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the National Education Writers Association. Patton is a successful and highly influential person. She adds:

Quite frankly, I am glad Karmelo did not give you the courtesy of looking you in the eye. Because even there, even in that courtroom, even with a Black boy sitting before the machinery of the state, you still wanted control. You still wanted access to his body and deference. You still wanted his face, his gaze, his submission, his performance of shame.

Patton blames the father of the murder victim. But notice that she has no blame for the murderer’s parents. She even blames the father for his grief. But Patton isn’t done yet. Next she lionizes Anthony as a powerful and defiant young black man. He didn’t look away out of shame, she wants us to believe, but out of power and some kind of ancient wisdom, as if this teen stabbing is actually a sort of fable about black masculine transcendence or something. “There was power in him not looking at you,” she writes. “There was refusal in it. There was survival in it. There was an ancient knowing in it.” An ancient knowing? People like this make me want to believe that hell is a literal place.

But enough of Patton. She isn’t the point. The point is, the pattern she exemplifies demands an honest reckoning with something our public discourse works hard to avoid. Namely, black violence and the moral rot within black communities that enables and even celebrates it. This generates a toxic culture that can be dangerous or exhausting to even be around. Black folks themselves who are sick of it have come up with a term to describe this phenomenon: black fatigue. This is refreshing to see for two reasons. First, for the health of our national discourse, we need to find a path to a place where we can talk honestly about race and race relations in America — with a discerning eye, and a kind heart. The problem is, any criticism of blacks or black culture, even when warranted and fair, often gets labeled as racist. Because of this, many would rather remain silent than take the social or professional risk of saying anything. This only hurts the country, and black people in particular, I would argue. Second, it’s therefore encouraging to see blacks themselves speak up.

But whenever the discussion does come up, the reflexive explanation for black overrepresentation in violent crime, as well as various other types of unfortunate behavior, is to cite socioeconomic factors. Yes, poverty is real, and its effects are real, but the data does not cooperate with that explanation as cleanly as some suggest. Consider that the sons of black families in the top 1% of income are convicted of crimes at roughly the same rate as the sons of white families earning $36,000 a year. A study by Freakonomics co-host Steven Levitt found that economic conditions had only small effects on crime, and mostly on property crime. A large Swedish study found that increasing people’s income did not reduce their crime rates. A University of Washington study found poverty is not the driving force behind crime so much as one’s friends or family disruption (70% of blacks are born to single mothers).

It’s simply not true that violent crime is much higher among blacks solely or even primarily because of socioeconomic factors. Prince George’s County in Maryland has the highest concentration of black wealth on the East Coast and is one of the richest majority-black counties in America. It’s been called a “bastion of black wealth.” Yet the violent crime rate in Prince George’s County is about 475 per 100,000, which is over 30% higher than the national average, while the poorest white county in America is Owsley County, Kentucky, with a violent crime rate of just 78.

There’s a problem in black culture that we must name clearly, even as we do so with precision and care. In the days after Anthony’s conviction, black voices emerged to celebrate. They mocked a father’s grief. They claimed a teenage boy deserved to die for the transgression of touching a black person. Even professors at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning lent their credibility to this evil, suggesting the father’s anguish was pathetic and contemptible. This is not what a call for justice sounds like. This is the gleeful desecration of human suffering.

Yes, we can acknowledge the real wounds in black communities, the legitimate grievances, the history of racism blacks have long suffered in this country, the litany of ways our justice system has historically failed our black brothers and sisters, all of it, everything, without having to pretend that this celebration of a child’s death flows from anything resembling moral clarity. It flows from something else entirely. It flows from a toxic culture of violence and racial narcissism in which victimhood becomes license for cruelty, and racial solidarity curdles into hate. The hard but necessary part is naming this without indicting an entire community for the sins of its worst members. But we cannot stay silent about those worst members. And their words deserve the open contempt of anyone who believes in human dignity.

One of the most influential Christians who ever lived despised Jews, considered gay love a demonic perversion, viewed women as inferior to men, saw demons constantly, thought Satan could be defeated with a well-timed fart, and had his greatest spiritual epiphany not while preaching the faith or praying for counsel, but while evacuating his bowels. On the other hand, Martin Luther reformed Christianity, remade Western civilization itself in the process, and possibly gave us the Christmas tree.

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According to legend, the Apostle of Germany — or the German Heretic, depending on one’s view — famously hammered his 95 theses to the wooden door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. The Church was then in the practice of selling “indulgences.” The idea was, if you were sorry for your sins and you showed this through repentance, confession, prayer, and taking part in Church life by helping fund its operations, then the Church could lessen your time in purgatory. But to Luther, this was tantamount to slapping an entrance fee on heaven.

And he had a point. The Church at the time was incredibly corrupt. The papacy was not just a spiritual guide but a territorial power involved in wars and dynastic schemes. Popes and bishops gave jobs, lands, and favors to relatives. Many high-ranking churchmen lived like princes. Some bishops held multiple offices and collected income while barely visiting their dioceses. And priests were supposed to be celibate, but mistresses were as common as cathedral pigeons.

But the good Church was not uniformly rotten. Many priests, monks, nuns, and ordinary believers were deeply sincere and did much good. For over 1,000 years, Christian art and Western art were synonymous. Music theory largely developed in ecclesiastical contexts through Gregorian chant. The Church preserved and developed Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy through scholasticism, especially via figures like Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. The first European universities — in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford — grew out of cathedral schools and operated under Church charters. Physics and astronomy emerged from efforts to understand God’s works. The Church developed canon law that became one of the most sophisticated legal systems in Europe, influencing modern jurisprudence. Monasteries preserved chronicles and pioneered systematic historical writing. In short, Western art, music, education, science, law, and history all owe a great debt to the Christian faith.

And as far as the corruption went, it was especially bad at the very top and in the financial machinery of the institution, but that’s about it. Still, by the time Luther picked up his hammer in 1517, the Church had become a spiritual institution that was run a little too much like a political empire, a bank, and a family business. So Luther did have a point, and the sale of indulgences was corrupt, even if his criticism was bad faith. I say that because his attack would have sounded to a Catholic at the time like arguing that if you join a charity marathon, train for months, run the race, and raise donations, that you only got healthier because people gave money.

Even so, Luther powerfully argued in his 95 theses that you cannot buy God’s forgiveness, that true repentance is a lifelong process and not a financial transaction, that the Pope doesn’t get to decide otherwise, and that Christians should probably give their money to the poor instead. But although Luther is most famous for this argument and the Reformation it sparked, I would argue that the most important thing he ever did was democratize the faith by translating Scripture from the Latin of priests and lords to the German of the common people, as well as by rejecting the idea that any one bishop should hold authority over the entire Church, not even the bishop of Rome. Although that second point is not terribly surprising given that he believed the Pope was the Antichrist.

Like some Prometheus, Luther brought the fire of the gospel to the German people, but if salvation means becoming spiritually whole, enlightened, united with God, or “ascending to heaven,” then it fundamentally concerns what a person is and not merely what they believe. This is why I reject Luther’s view that salvation has nothing to do with being wise or doing good deeds. That was the brilliant insight he had while taking a shit. But wisdom is necessary. Truth is the only way to enlightenment, indeed attaining the highest form of truth is itself what enlightenment means. And once you achieve a certain level of wisdom, good deeds come naturally because a wise person is not going to go around doing stupid or harmful things.

Good deeds are the expression of a transformed character. If someone is cruel, dishonest, or violent, what sense would it make to call them spiritually saved simply because a particular set of words happened to pass through their waking mind? This is roughly the intuition behind much of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Socrates’ emphasis on wisdom, many forms of Buddhism, much of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and numerous other religious and philosophical traditions. It’s also common sense.

The counterargument from Luther would be, “You’re confusing the result of salvation with the cause of salvation. Wisdom and virtue are important, but they flow from salvation. They don’t earn it.” But I don’t find this convincing. If you murder your wife and children, I find it insane to claim that you are still spiritually saved in any meaningful sense simply because you felt bad after and you happen to believe Roman soldiers once executed a Jewish rebel in the Middle East who then came back to life.

If Judaism is a faith tailor-made for people with OCD and Catholicism is cut out for people with depression, Protestantism might be the faith for people whose lives are defined by reactance. That’s when people will react even in ways that are harmful to themselves because they don’t like being told what to do, and several major thinkers have argued that Protestantism is the primary cause of Western individualism (though they disagree on whether this was actually a good thing).

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously argued that Protestantism, especially Calvinism, encouraged individualism in a way that promoted capitalism. Alexis de Tocqueville also tied Protestant culture to American individualism and skepticism of hierarchy. But one of the strongest academic statements of this thesis comes from Louis Dumont who, in Essays on Individualism, argues that Christianity, and especially the Protestant faith, helped create the modern concept of the autonomous individual. In The Unintended Reformation, Catholic historian Brad Gregory says rejecting a central religious authority on all things is what led us down a path to secular inquiry, whereas religious fragmentation led us to moral plurality and eventually subjectivism and then relativism, all of which moved the locus of ontology from God to the Self and from the church to the lab.

But my friend Elijah Snyder argues that the emphasis on the belief of the individual in Protestantism, rather than on the community, has had unintended and profoundly negative consequences. The biggest downside has been that Western society has evolved into a fragmented and consumerist evangelical culture that often feels shallow, dogmatic, and spiritually unhealthy. This has led some to seek traditions more aligned with the teachings of the early Church. Some call this “apostolic Christianity,” after what was taught by the apostles in the first century. Or “primitive Christianity.” Or, if you prefer something more poetic, you might borrow a line from the Epistle of Jude to refer to yours as the faith once delivered.

Snyder recently spoke with me about all this, as well as the death of American Protestantism, evangelicalism along with it, and what comes after.

What is your educational background and area of expertise?

The truth is I’m a college dropout, and I want to be very careful to note my lack of formal training in theology, church history, sociology, or any of the other topics we’ve been discussing. I don’t claim to speak for Orthodox Christians or academic scholars of the Bible, or really anyone else at all. I can only share observations I’ve made in my personal journey of faith, which has involved a lot of wandering over the last few years, and perhaps would resonate with any of your readers engaging with this very strange era of modern Christianity.

How have early Christian ideas of heaven, hell, and salvation changed over time?

The modern concept of hell that most Americans are familiar with is known as “Eternal Conscious Torment” (E.C.T.), which is sort of self-explanatory. People tend to think of hell as a literal place where you are tortured in a fire forever as punishment for your sins. To be clear, this is not a new idea, and versions of it have existed through most of Christian history. What has changed, however, is the degree to which this concept is viewed as the official standard of Christianity as a whole.

In the early days of Christianity, intellectual diversity flourished in specific matters of theology. There were broad mysterious concepts that most Christians shared, but the specific interpretations of these concepts could vary, and often did. Eastern Orthodoxy has preserved this culture, preferring to allow a sense of mystery around the finer details of metaphysics and the afterlife, and allowing for different schools of thought. Hell is a great example of the preference for mystery in ancient Christianity. Most Christians have always espoused a belief in eternal life, but how it works was up for discussion in the early Church, and still is, where early Church traditions have held up.

Specifically on the issue of hell, two of the alternate points of view that emerged included universalism (everybody eventually ends up in heaven, restored to God), as well as annihilationism, which is the belief that the wicked will simply cease to exist. There are other questions worth exploring as well: Is the fire meant to punish, or to purify? How can it be a place of utter darkness and simultaneously a lake of fire?

The model that I find most compelling is the one developed by Eastern Orthodox theologians like Maximus the Confessor and Isaac the Syrian. These incredible thinkers taught that hell was not a literal place, but a state of being in which a person is suffering endlessly because of their continued resistance to God’s love, which is pictured as a consuming fire. Both sinner and saint are surrounded by God’s love, experiencing His divine presence. To the ego-driven, power-hungry, selfish man who would rather “reign in hell than serve in heaven,” the presence of God feels like torture. God’s love comes to transform us and lead us to a higher mode of existence, to become infinitely loving, humble, beautiful creatures. The truth is, however, not everybody wants to be enlightened. Some souls could spend eternity always wanting more, always striving after their delusions, never able to experience joy and satisfaction because of their own stubborn pride. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “the doors of hell are locked from the inside.”

As time went on, the Western Church began to coalesce around a more systematic understanding of theology, with clearly defined correct and incorrect answers to centuries-old mysteries. This led to the current state of Western Christianity, where E.C.T. is viewed as beyond discussion for most Roman Catholics and Protestants. Even in seeker-sensitive modern evangelical churches, while hell might not be a popular sermon topic, the theological positions tend to align with this Roman Catholic vision of punitive never-ending torture, and many modern Christians are unaware that more nuanced positions ever existed within traditional Christendom. Any Christian who views Eternal Conscious Torment as foundational to their faith might do well to investigate Eastern Christianity and some of the theological nuance that has been preserved in those traditions.

Why are so many Protestants disillusioned with their tradition, yet unwilling to return to Catholicism?

Protestantism is, at its core, defined by a distaste for centralized authority and control. The Reformation only lasted several years before splintering into competing sects with different points of view on everything from baptism to communion and church governance. This is both the beauty and the downfall of Protestantism — it’s a free market where you are able to walk away from one tradition and find another that better aligns with your values and inclinations. No two Protestant denominations are the same, and frequently the local churches can differ from location to location even within the same denominational network. The theological emphasis is on one’s personal relationship with God, and people are encouraged to read the Bible constantly, interpreting for themselves and forming their own conclusions about what is true. Questioning the organization theologically is granted, even invited, on most issues. There is much about this that is highly commendable. Protestants think for themselves and are not easily drawn into a corrupt authoritarian system.

However, in an age where capitalism and technology have increasingly isolated people from all forms of community and human connection, a growing demand has emerged for something bigger than oneself and one’s “personal relationship with God.” Many Protestants are becoming aware of the need for shared rituals, long-standing tradition, and unifying structure. The giant LED screens and hipster outfits that define the modern evangelical church experience have become clichéd and cringey, and by comparison, ancient traditional Christianity feels more authentic and reverent. This has led to a record-breaking increase in conversions to Catholicism in the Western world, driven largely by discontented Protestants who are seeking something more substantial, more beautiful, and more time-tested.

That said, for many Protestant wanderers, the Roman Catholic Church is still a bridge too far. Dogmas like papal infallibility require an uncomfortable degree of unquestioning submission to authority. The Pope holds the unilateral power to speak for God, and it’s fair to wonder if one day the Roman Catholic God might become a raving progressive advocating an extreme social justice agenda. After all, this has already happened across major historical denominations like the Anglican Communion. Add to this dubious concentration of centralized authority the long sordid history of corruption, simony, sexual abuse, and other scandals within the Pope’s jurisdiction. Just because one is tired of hyper-modern Protestantism does not mean they are prepared to shut off all critical thinking and embrace the absolute monarchy of a manifestly imperfect bishop in Rome.

Why does Orthodoxy seem to attract some people coming out of evangelical or Protestant backgrounds?

I often explain the difference this way: aesthetically, Orthodoxy looks more similar to Catholicism than Protestantism, but theologically Protestantism is far closer to the Roman Catholics than the Orthodox. Orthodoxy has the beautiful art and architecture, the global unity, and the solemn pageantry of Catholic (meaning traditional Christian) faith. One can be forgiven for assuming this means they would be more theologically in line with the Catholics. However, the opposite is true.

Protestants and Catholics — let’s group them as Western Christians — agree on a literal fiery hell where people are tortured forever. Orthodox Christians have a nuanced and diverse conversation about the afterlife. Western Christians teach that sin is a legal offense against a clear system of rules, and that Jesus’ painful torture and death on the cross was a punitive satisfaction of God’s justice. Think of it as paying reparations in Catholicism, or in Protestantism it can even have to do with satisfying God’s anger and wrath. Orthodox Christians believe that sin is something more like a sickness, with symptoms in our behavior, and that Christ came as a doctor and a rescuer to heal us of our sin and liberate us from its oppression. In fact, St. Athanasius actually teaches that “God became man, so that man could become god.” We are not merely forgiven for a crime; we are transformed into our truest self, our ultimate purpose: to share in God’s own divine nature.

These are only a couple major examples, but the rabbit hole goes deep. I think that people leaving evangelicalism feel that they are able to retain their faith in Jesus, and their faithfulness to Christian belief, while exploring a far more healthy and profound way of understanding Him. Too many of us are traumatized by a guilt-based system of do’s and don’ts and a concept of salvation that is more of an insurance policy against God’s anger than an expression of His love. We don’t want the same skewed theology with a more majestic building. We want to participate in the greatest story ever told. I feel like I have discovered the original recipe for something I have loved all my life, but never quite made sense of. When I go to church now it’s meditative, peaceful, and challenging — the world does not often put us in a position to slow down, be present, and engage with the miracle of life.

Orthodoxy also has an incredibly strange decentralized leadership structure. While there is a hierarchy of honor and respect, with leadership and unity around some fundamental dogma, technically every bishop is considered an equal — all 941 of them. Each bishop has jurisdiction over a geographical area and its churches. This results in a sort of hyper-conservative gridlock. Not much has changed in Orthodox practice over 2,000 years, and that’s because it would require a strong majority of the 941 bishops agreeing on the same thing. The last ecumenical council where this occurred was in 787 AD. So there is no concern about a rogue papacy forcing the church in a direction either reactionary or progressive.

How did growing up in a Pentecostal sect shape your understanding of religion, authority, and belonging?

The obscure, dying sect I grew up in had mostly normal Pentecostal theology, like you might find at any number of local modern American churches, but the leadership culture and internal norms have evolved to create a toxic cult-like environment of obligatory conformity and control. Growing up I was constantly reinforced in my unquestioning, unwavering obedience to a man who spoke for God. Being deeply scrupulous by nature and loving Jesus since I was a kid, I fell head over heels in love with the vision of our little group for many years of my life, including the entirety of my 20s. I became a pastor for a season, and made great sacrifices of money and time to further their agenda.

When I reached my 30s I began to really explore the implications of everything that I had learned in ministry, marriage, business leadership, and life. This led to something of a crisis in my faith when I realized the extent to which my group’s culture was completely degrading into a cesspool of ego, resentment, exploitation, and manipulation. It’s not that I simply ended up in a toxic church — it’s that the ideas I was raised with from the cradle seemed to be a structural part of the brainwashing that allowed these people to control my entire way of life and exploit my resources. I realized then that I had put my faith in a God who was another man’s sock puppet — and not even a particularly compelling man, but a virtual nobody ruling over their own little religious kingdom. I had to reexamine my faith itself.

In the long run I reconciled my struggle with faith, in part through Orthodoxy, and in part through reading Eckhart Tolle and smoking weed. However, I retain a deep suspicion around religious leadership that I will take to my grave. I chose to participate in an institutional structure with flawed leaders, and I do so knowing that I will be authentic about my perspective, no matter what they expect of me. Independent critical thinking is unfortunately not encouraged in most religious contexts, but in Orthodoxy I feel safe having a separate sense of my own personal perspective than the official Church narrative.

What is the evangelical or faith deconstruction movement really reacting against?

This is a tough one, because I don’t think there’s any one answer that speaks for the present movement of evangelicals publicly deconstructing. In some cases it’s a reaction against rampant abuse, nepotism, and fraud in the evangelical world. Many people have been hurt in some particular way, whether by organized shunning, sexual assault, or any number of other localized scandals. Some were propagandized from their childhood years against the scientific community in the name of defending Biblical accuracy on issues like evolution. Others are sickened by the way massive numbers of evangelicals have wholeheartedly committed to a MAGA movement that seems antithetical to the actual commands of Christ.

For me it’s a mixture. The above issues never seem to be confronted by evangelical leadership in a way that seems appropriately accountable for their complicity. Modern American evangelicalism has morphed into a perverse church industrial complex where consumerism and celebrity culture hold the reins of the movement. Additionally, my own intellectual development as a believer has led me to believe the Reformation was something like a revolution — an inevitable consequence of Catholic corruption being overcorrected against — and I feel that the revolution has come full circle to the point where Protestantism is doing more harm than good.

Why are so many millennials and Gen Z Americans leaving evangelical Christianity?

The internet has remade pop culture into a thing that sorts for authenticity and engagement rather than polish or production value. Giant screens and fog machines may have impressed Gen Xers in the 90s looking for an emotionally satisfying experience at church, and celebrity pastors certainly have discovered a gold mine in terms of exploitation. However, the local Orthodox parish is not trying to market to you, or pretend to be something it’s not.

Your local Orthodox priest is serving the divine liturgy according to the way it was written well over a millennium ago, and there is no coffee shop in the front lobby. In that way, it feels dramatically more authentic and uncompromising as an experience. I suspect millennials and Gen Z perceive the American Orthodox movement as something organic and real, in contrast with a Protestantism that seems to be torn between progressive woke posturing and 30-year-old pastors wearing Air Jordans and selling bespoke t-shirts.

How is the rise of the religiously unaffiliated connected to the crisis within American Protestantism?

Protestantism is very much focused on what the individual believes in a metaphysical sense, and on faithfulness to any number of dogmas depending on how the local congregation interprets the scripture. People who identify as “spiritual but not religious” are wanting to connect to God without feeling like they must force some sort of mental conformity to fit in. Orthodoxy is far from “spiritual but not religious,” but the reverent, open-minded way of discussing theological issues seems to resonate with people who are suspicious of organized religion.

I’ve made statements considered heretical to my Orthodox friends, and instead of clutching their pearls and trotting out the apologetics, they seem nonreactive and embracing of the difficult, deep questions about their faith. I can’t speak for everybody, but there are a number of people in my parish who have come from backgrounds in Eastern philosophy, New Age spirituality, and academia. For people uncomfortable with making a lot of dogmatic doctrinal commitments, Orthodoxy is a safe place to explore Christianity without feeling the need to be a Republican, avoid using swear words, perform an emotional display of worship, or conform to any number of other American religious cultural norms.

Why do outsiders often fail to grasp how powerful evangelicalism still is as a cultural and political force?

Probably because evangelicalism is a subculture with its own unique lingo and expectations. I could list pages of names that would mean nothing to you unless you grew up in an evangelical church. Not just pastors and authors, but movies, music artists, non-profits, style trends — it’s really its own little world. It just so happens that it’s a big enough world to swing a Republican primary, or support an alternative halftime show during the Super Bowl. If you find evangelical ideas concerning or repugnant, you must understand that there are tens of millions of people in this country for whom they are the most normal thing in the world.

What are people actually searching for when they leave modern evangelicalism?

For me, it was permission to be religious while expressing myself authentically. I don’t believe in talking snakes. I don’t believe that God will torture the majority of the world’s population in a fire for eternity. I don’t believe the apologetic arguments trotted out in debates about God usually make a whole lot of sense. I don’t like the sense that if I drop an f-bomb or get a little drunk at the barbecue that I’ll be alienated and treated with suspicion or condescension. Evangelicals may feel I’m being unfair here, but I find the culture of evangelicalism intellectually repressive and stifling. However, I think in general almost everyone leaves evangelicalism seeking some sort of authentic engagement with the big questions of life — one that does not have predetermined answers in a systematic theology.

What do you think the future of Christianity in America looks like?

I don’t think that the American Orthodox movement is going to maintain this pace forever. As much as my ego would like to believe we’ll take over, the truth is that not everybody finds it as delightful as I do. Evangelicalism is not going anywhere, but a greater percentage of people will be non-religious, Orthodox, or Catholic in the future. Some modern churches will probably dial back the megachurch model and embrace more tradition. One evangelical pastor named John Mark Comer has been quite successful at integrating ancient Christian theology into his very modern context. I think the biggest difference might be political.

Evangelical Christians tend to be extremely pro-Zionism, and the ancient forms of Christianity have always been deeply suspicious of Israel for theological reasons. I suspect the political field competing for Christian support will diversify, and you will see more diversity of perspective and language when people speak about God on the public stage. Ultimately I hope the future of American Christianity looks more humble — we need to approach the non-believer with respect, kindness, and charity. Christianity was meant to be a universal religion of mercy, not a means of separating oneself as special and different from others. If you believe that you should love your neighbor, care for the poor in their needs, admit when you are wrong, and seek to forgive those who have hurt you, you are as Orthodox as anyone could be. In the words of St. John, “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

In the early hours of December 3, 2025, a first-year finance student at the University of Southampton was walking home from a night out with friends when a Sikh man stabbed him in the chest five times, killing him. The student, 18-year-old Henry Nowak, was a British-Polish kid from Chafford Hundred and one of four siblings. In sentencing his killer, the judge said of Nowak, “He was a much-loved, kind, hard-working and ambitious young man, devoted to his family and with a bright future. He was a first-year student at Southampton University, the first in his family to go to university. He was careful and principled, full of humor, warmth and promise.”

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Reports say Nowak was sober enough to drive when he came across Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old who was severely obsessed with weapons and had previously been reported to police for stealing ceremonial training weapons. His father, Moga Singh, and brother, Gurpreet Singh, were later charged with possession of numerous weapons found at their family home, including multiple small knives, a flick knife, a machete, swords, kusaris, a baton, knuckledusters, an axe, and an air rifle. Police found more than 20 weapons in total at the Digwa family home after the murder.

Digwa stabbed Nowak to death with his kirpan, an 8-inch ceremonial blade that Sikhs can legally carry in Britain, whereas carrying knives in public is generally illegal in the country. Nowak tried to escape by climbing over a fence, but Digwa cornered him and filmed him trying to get away. Some reports say neighbors called the police after hearing Nowak’s cries. Other reports say Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, made the call and told police Digwa had been the victim of a racist attack. Then Digwa called his parents, who arrived before police, and his mother Kiran Kaur took the murder weapon and hid it at their home.

When police arrived, Digwa told them Nowak had grabbed his turban and racistly abused him, but the judge later said he did not believe this claim because it was completely at odds with Nowak’s character. But also, if you think having your turban pulled and being racistly insulted justifies stabbing a young man in the chest five times then you are an animal who is not fit to live in British society. Nowak repeatedly told police he had been stabbed, but an officer replied, “Don’t think you have, mate.” Digwa then said, “He hasn’t been stabbed,” and a female officer responded, “I know. But we have to check, don’t we?”

The officers then handcuffed the dying teen as he lay bleeding on the ground, pleaded for his life and saying that he couldn’t breathe. He died moments later. A pathologist later said nothing could have saved his life, even with immediate treatment, but that’s not the point. Digwa was convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years, but that’s not the point either. His mother was convicted of assisting an offender by hiding the murder weapon and his father and brother were charged with multiple weapons offenses. But the point here is that they let a young boy die because he was white. The point is that if Nowak had been a brown Indian boy, and his killer a white British lad, the police would have reacted differently.

I saw an interesting panel discussion about this on the Piers Morgan show this morning. Marc Lamont-Hill was there to argue that we should not have any police at all. But I found myself agreeing with Michael Knowles, who replied by saying this incident clearly illustrates that Britain has a two-tier justice system and that “what happened to Henry Nowak is the real version of what people pretended happened to George Floyd.” People pretend Floyd was innocent, or even noble of heart, when he was a violent criminal who preyed on the innocent and was in the process of breaking the law at the time. Also, his murder was complicated by the fact that he physically resisted arrest and was high on fentanyl and meth. So now we have murals and statues of him and we all pretend like the guy was Thomas fucking Jefferson or something.

We also paint Derek Chauvin as some kind of pathologically racist demon cop, and there is some evidence to suggest that he might be racist, but also he apparently did use the “maximal restraint technique” that was clearly taught by the Minneapolis Police Department. This is not to say what happened was not a tragedy. It absolutely was. Whatever you may think of him as a person, Floyd left behind five children, some of whom knew him. Besides, his was a human life. However, Nowak actually was a good-hearted person and Digwa actually is the sociopath we were all supposed to see in Chauvin. Yet Floyd’s murder generated the largest protest movement in American history, set multiple cities aflame, wrought billions in damages, left many injured, multiple dead, and politicians just kinda shrugged and called it a “reckoning,” as if we deserved it, meanwhile Novak’s murder gets almost nothing by comparison. And we all know exactly why. And it’s appalling.

Whenever I hear about talk of a two-tier justice system in Britain, it immediately brings to mind the story of Hamit Coskun. In February 2025, Coskun, a half-Kurdish and half-Armenian man from Turkey, bought a Quran and set it on fire outside the Turkish Embassy in London to protest the Turkish president’s failure to uphold his country’s secular values. A man named Moussa Kadri saw what was happening and began stabbing, kicking, and spitting on Coskun in broad daylight. Coskun was arrested and charged with religiously motivated harassment under the Public Order Act. He was convicted and ordered to pay a fine of 240 pounds, plus a surcharge of 96 pounds. Kadri was charged with the minimal offense possible and given a 20-week suspended prison sentence, 150 hours of unpaid work, and 10 days of rehab. The judge said Kadri had simply lost his temper. Hey, it happens to the best of us.

The judge also said Cousin was clearly guilty of causing a public disturbance, as proven by the fact that a crazed Muslim was stabbing him, which was clearly disturbing to the public peace. Yes, the judge really did say that. And Coskun now carries a criminal record for life, as well as the physical scars from his attack, while Kadri faces no jail time and won’t stand trial until 2027.

Or there’s the Lucy Connolly case. Last year, Lucy Connolly, a childminder from Northamptonshire with no criminal history, posted the following message on X in the hours after yet another mindless Muslim stabbing attack:

Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.

Her post was viewed 310,000 times and she was sentenced to 31 months in prison, the longest sentence ever handed down in Britain for a single online comment. As Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said on X, “Her punishment was harsher than the sentences handed down for bricks thrown at police or actual rioting.” Critics pointed out that the man who stabbed Coskun for burning a book received a suspended sentence and no jail time whatsoever while Connolly received 31 months for words on a screen.

Then you’ve got the Rotherham child rape scandal. Between 2005 and 2017, groups of primarily Pakistani and other Asian men molested and raped hundreds of children but even though police and social services received reports of the abuse for years, they failed to investigate properly. An independent inquiry in 2014 found that authorities deliberately ignored evidence because they feared being accused of racism and worried about upsetting members of the very communities that had preyed upon these girls. A five-year investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct later concluded that Rotherham police ignored the child raping for decades because they didn’t want to offend Pakistanis by arresting Pakistani rapists. Well, I’m sorry, but if that’s the kind of thing that upsets your community then maybe your people aren’t really cut out for life in the West.

In Rochdale, there was a similar pattern of police and prosecution services refusing to follow up on appeals for help because, as former Labour MP Ann Cryer put it, authorities were petrified of being called racist. And this was despite the fact that one child gave police DNA evidence of her rape. Former MP Simon Danczuk said senior Labour politicians warned him against mentioning that the rapists were pretty much all Pakistani men — because they feared losing votes.

Part of the cause, layered underneath all of this, is the import of American critical race theory and what’s broadly called woke ideology into British institutions, along with the idea that systemic racism is the primary explanation for disparities in outcomes between racial groups, or that Britain is an inherently sinful culture thanks to its history of colonialism and slavery, and that white Brits benefit from this evil system of institution al racism.

This framework arrived in Britain through universities, NGOs, and eventually into the civil service and criminal justice system itself. The idea that disparities in sentencing or charging must be evidence of racial bias rather than other factors became orthodoxy. British institutions like the Sentencing Council and the CPS adopted American-style diversity training and ideological commitments to reducing disparities by demographic group rather than by ensuring equal treatment under law, and this uniquely American export — the notion that equality means proportional outcomes rather than equal application of rules — fundamentally reshaped how British prosecutors and judges approach their work. Where traditionally British justice operated on the principle that the law should be blind to race, the new framework made race central to every decision. That philosophical shift is what ultimately created the conditions for the two-tier system we’re seeing now.

Which is to suggest, the police in this story were not necessarily racist themselves, nor were the people who created these laws. The problem is, as they say, systemic. Writing about Henry Nowak, recently said something I like:

I am not saying that the officers who attended the scene that night are bad people, or that they set out to let Henry Nowak die. I believe, in fact, the opposite: that they were following the spirit of their training, and of the culture that had been built around them, in good faith, over years. The problem is not the individuals. The problem is the system that produced them — a system that taught them, in effect, that an allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure, normal medical common sense, and normal human judgement.

That system was built with the best of intentions, by people who genuinely wanted to address real injustices. And it has produced a policing culture in which a killer can stab a teenager five times, claim to be the victim of racism, and watch the officers handcuff the person bleeding out on the street.

They will not acknowledge what they built. They will say that this was an isolated failure of individual officers, not a systemic problem. They will say that raising this case is itself a form of racism — an attempt to undermine legitimate anti-racism efforts by dwelling on an edge case. They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.

But that game is up. Anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear the truth knows what happened here. A young man is dead. His killer exploited an ideology to escape justice, if only briefly. And the institutions that were reformed in the name of anti-racism are now openly racist against white people.

The most straightforward solution to the two-tier problem would be to return to the foundational principle of equal treatment under law. The law should be blind to race, ethnicity, and religion. Everyone should be treated fairly, regardless of race. This should be common sense. But that means several legal changes with regard to sentencing guidelines and other areas of the law, and it means reforming the education system, and probably immigration law. But the deeper answer to this is cultural. Britain needs to reassert the idea that merit and individual conduct matter more than one’s group identity. Or Britain needs to assert its own British identity over that of all others, at least on British soil. But currently, the system is trying to achieve equality of outcomes by race through the law, while paradoxically requiring that white people are treated as lesser. Making these corrections are a gargantuan lift, and I am not entirely convinced that the British people have it in them, or that their demographic fate will allow them to make such changes even if they do.

In the end, it seems that the multicultural project, which promised to accommodate all cultures equally, has instead created a system where the majority culture is treated as guilty and suspect while minority groups receive preferential treatment through the criminal justice system. Normally, the British would have a fantastic response for this. Namely, their noble tradition of free speech, the cornerstone of British liberty. But this has been eroded through hate speech laws and social pressures, leaving ordinary citizens unable to voice legitimate concerns about what is happening to their own society without being branded racist and possibly even arrested.

Only by reclaiming its own values and sense of moral good can Britain find itself again. We shall see, I suppose. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has presided over and defended this two-tier nightmare, recently accused Nigel Farage of making hay over Henry Novak’s murder because Farage said this:

Henry’s family have responded to this tragedy in just the most extraordinarily dignified way. But I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.

Almost nothing in the history of American sports compares to the injustice of baseball’s color line. Of course, there were color lines in other sports. Black boxers were barred from the heavyweight title until Jack Johnson broke through in 1908. But the color line in baseball was different. This was America’s national sin cutting right through the heart of America’s national pastime. The whole country watched this game and when they did they saw themselves reflected back. When Jackie Robinson broke that line by taking the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, it was the greatest moment in baseball and one of the greatest in American sports. More than that, it was a great moment in our democracy. But if anything does compare to the color line, it’s allowing trans athletes into women’s sports, for nowhere else has bigotry in politics, whether it be racism against blacks or sexism against women, led to a greater share of unfairness in sport based on sorting athletes by demographic traits, whether it’s holding the color line or removing the sex line. But now, it seems, America might finally put transgender athletes in their place.

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The momentum to this moment has been a long time building. In 2021, Laurel Hubbard became the first openly trans athlete to compete at the Olympics, representing New Zealand in women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo Games. In 2022, Canadian trans cyclist Veronica Ivy said on The Daily Show, with Trevor Noah nodding stupidly along, that he is a biological woman. “I am a woman,” said Ivy. “That’s a fact. All my identity records, my racing license, my medical records, all say female. And I’m pretty sure I’m made of biological stuff. So I’m a biological female.” According to such logic, if I can convince my doctor’s office to provide me with medical records saying that I am a tree, then because a tree is made of biological stuff and so am I, therefore I will biologically be a tree. This is like when children miss lunch and tell you they are “literally starving.” Or, more fittingly, when the government doesn’t pay for one’s cosmetic top surgery so trans activists call it a “literal genocide.” The trans journalist Emily St. James has argued, for instance, that denying trans-affirming medical care is a form of genocide, adding, just to be clear, “We don’t use that term metaphorically.

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Eventually, Americans grew tired of this stupidity. The three main reasons people didn’t vote for Kamala Harris were inflation, illegal immigration, and the trans issue. To quote Hunter S. Thompson, “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill … and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” In 2022, World Aquatics banned men from swimming against women. In 2023, World Athletics banned men from playing track and field against women. In 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to keep men out of women’s sports and the NCAA subsequently made men ineligible for women’s sports. It’s progress, sure, but not the kind of progress one celebrates. This is more the kind that makes you shake your head, like when Saudi Arabia ended the ban on women drivers in 2018.

This past March, the International Olympic Committee decided that only women can compete in women’s events. Again, more “progress.” Now the sporting world waits to see what the United States will do. As it happens, the Supreme Court is currently reviewing laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prevent boys from playing on girls’ sports teams. These decisions will settle the trans debate in America for years if not decades to come. As CBS reported last week, “The cases are among the most closely watched of the term.” In one case, Little v. Hecox, a man named Lindsay Hecox is suing the governor of Idaho because he thinks not being able to play on the women’s cross-country team at his university amounts to unlawful sexism. In the other case, West Virginia v. BPJ, the mother of a 12-year-old boy named Becky Pepper-Jackson is suing West Virginia officials over a law that says her son cannot play track and field against girls. Both boys identify as girls and both plaintiffs claim the 14th Amendment, adopted so that freed slaves would have equal treatment under the law, should also ensure that boys receive equal treatment during tryouts for girls’ sports.

Also, notice that in order to claim one is the victim of sexism on the basis of being a boy one must begin by acknowledging that you are, in fact, a boy. Plus, before the Supreme Court could make its ruling, Pepper-Jackson won a girls’ state championship last week in the Class AAA title for shot put with a personal best of 38 feet 11.75 inches. The second-place finisher, or first-place girl, was Paisley Babiczuk who threw 36 feet 11 inches. That’s a difference of two feet. Putting that in perspective, this year’s Texas state champion in girl’s shot put won by a few inches. Yet we’re supposed to believe that not allowing this to take place is sexist … against the boys. And in case you’re wondering, the gap doesn’t narrow at the elite level either. The men’s world record in shot put is 77 feet 3.5 inches by Ryan Crouser, while the women’s world record is 74 feet 10.25 inches by Natalya Lisovskaya. That’s about 2 feet 5 inches. You might be thinking, 2 feet isn’t that much. Maybe it’s explained by better training for the men. Or more expensive equipment. Maybe women can close the gap! Except the men’s shot weighs 16 pounds while the women’s is less than 9 pounds. That’s right, despite throwing almost twice as much weight, the men still throw farther.

When it comes to the legal rights of trans people, the foundational precedent is the 2020 case Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Court said discriminating against trans employees violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. But three months later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, shifting the Court from roughly 5–4 conservative to 6–3 conservative. Stephen Breyer retired in 2022 and was replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, maintaining the overall balance, so today’s Court is much more conservative, and we may see a different result. In the 2025 case United States v. Skrmetti, for example, the Court ruled 6–3 that Tennessee’s law restricting puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors with gender dysphoria does not violate the 14th Amendment because the law regulates treatment based on the purpose of the medicine, not based on the person’s sex. As Amy Howe writes at SCOTUSblog, these decisions suggest the Court is already questioning whether sex discrimination extends to trans athletes. And, CBS reports, the Court appears likely to uphold the bans in Idaho and West Virginia. I get this sense too, especially from reading Justice Kavanaugh’s questions during oral arguments. Kavanaugh, who has coached girls’ sports, at one point said:

I mean, I hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. I hate that. But it’s kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teams. And someone who tries out and makes it, who is a transgender girl, will bump from the starting lineup, from playing time, from the team, from the All-League — and those things matter to people big time — will bump someone else.

In the end, the controversy over transgender athletes is not actually a dispute about sports. Sport merely provides the field upon which a much larger conflict has come into view. In all recorded history, little occasion ever arose to define what was meant by a woman. Just as many of our social norms now wash away in the hands of people other than those who formed them, our understanding of reality was similarly never bolted down by statute but simply assumed because it was observed. We don’t have laws for everything because we generally prefer to keep the government out of our business as much as we can. We fall back on norms to fill the gaps. This works very well if you have a society with high social trust, low corruption, and strong civic norms. Think of Nordic Lutheran societies like Denmark, Dutch Calvinist societies like the Netherlands, Confucian societies like Korea and Japan, or Anglo-Protestant societies like early America.

However, a norms-based liberal democracy won’t last long in modern Karachi or Mogadishu. They simply have the wrong set of norms. You can set up such a society in London or Boston, but it won’t last long if you invite a lot of people from Karachi or Mogadishu. Nor is this to say that any one group of people can lay claim to civic virtue. Like physical fitness or the ability to speak Japanese, you must invest the time to acquire the gift as well as the time it takes to maintain it. In the case of civic virtue, such work is done by schools, newspapers, books, movies, magazines, shows, music, and all the sundry engines of culturecraft, all of which are profoundly warped leftward in our current culture. And make no mistake, handing our institutions over to people who believe America is a fundamentally evil, white supremacist, colonial hellhole with a slave economy and a rape culture is going to have some predictably negative consequences. So now, for example, we find ourselves having to sort out whether math itself is racist or whether boys can turn into girls by closing their eyes and making a wish. If we keep at it, maybe we’ll be poking around in the dirt before too long.

That is why the Supreme Court decision on trans athletes is so important. Like the color line in baseball, this transcends sport and directly reflects the moral sanity of our nation, or lack thereof. Law did not invent the distinction between man and woman. It merely recognized it. Upon that recognition we formed institutions and protections to account for the realities of human biology. But just as illegal immigrants take advantage of our democratic norms, and just as we are hesitant to harden our society in the ways that would be required to stop this, so too have trans activists taken advantage of the better angels of our nature, preying upon the fact that we would rather just use incorrect pronouns than hurt someone’s feelings. We would rather just let someone use the bathroom they want than confront a potentially unstable person. We would rather just let little Johnnie play soccer with the girls rather than break his heart. And so, as a result of a million miniature surrenders, we find ourselves in the unusual position of maintaining institutions dedicated to women while hesitating to say what these entities we call “women” even are.

Nor is the problem that Americans lack compassion. Few people object to treating transgender individuals with dignity and respect, if not love and affection. Many of us have trans loved ones in our lives. But the difficulty arises because institutions have convinced themselves that honesty must be sacrificed in the name of kindness. This is almost never the case. The fact that the Supreme Court is reviewing these laws in Idaho and West Virginia signals that America might be undergoing a moral awakening of sorts. Perhaps we have finally allowed things to go as far as they can in the name of kindness. Perhaps soft men have made these times hard enough. Perhaps America is finally beginning to assert its foundational civic values. We do not have to remain Anglo-Protestant to thrive. But we do have to hold onto a certain constellation of values and norms, one of them being an unapologetic pursuit of the truth.

You know, it’s amazing how modern Aristophanes can feel. Consider The Frogs, his masterpiece, about a declining Athens that has lost touch with its founding virtues as political polarization and the incompetence of institutions tear its society apart. Go back and read that one afternoon, see if it doesn’t give you chills. Or how about The Clouds, about an Athenian father who takes classes from Socrates himself to learn how to argue his way out of debt. In one class, Logic personified defends traditional Greek virtues such as respect for authority, but Logic loses the debate to Illogic, who says people should just do whatever makes them happy. The father’s son takes the class and becomes a brilliant sophist who can prove anything but believes in nothing. The son even uses his newfound debate skills to justify physically beating his father. The old man realizes too late that intellectualism is poison if it is not grounded in reality, and that an entire society can become sociopathic if its people lose the ability to recognize obvious facts. We have listened far too long to lectures by the likes of Illogic and our youth have come home to us corrupted and lost. No, you should not just do whatever makes you happy. No, you cannot be whatever you want to be.

Every age develops orthodoxies that appear too delicate to examine. The people who question them are often accused not merely of error but of immorality. The vast majority of trans activists, were they to read this, would conclude that I am a hateful bigot. Their inability to engage in good faith is a significant part of the reason why their cause is falling apart in front of us. We have to always remember that no society preserves its intellectual integrity by forbidding inquiry into the foundations of its own beliefs. No belief is beyond challenge. Especially beliefs that are guarded by outrage and offense. Especially when those beliefs fly in the face of basic biology. It will unfortunately be a long way out of this mess, but the world will be a safer and fairer place for women athletes when we get there.

Elon Musk says Christopher Nolan is desecrating the greatest story in Western literature by turning Homer’s Odyssey into yet another pile of woke slop. The epic film features a black Helen of Troy, a black Clytemnestra, a black Athena, a brown Eurylochus, a brown Cepheus, a brown Agamemnon in gigachad armor, rumors of a trans Achilles, a Latinx Eumaeus, a gender-critical postmodern feminist critique of Odysseus, and Travis Scott as the Homeric narrator, except he’s black and he raps.

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I love Nolan as much as the next guy, but that sure as hell doesn’t sound like the Homer I read as a boy. Worse, every one of those changes falls cleanly within the well-worn pattern of woke film propaganda that only the performatively ignorant or the truly stupid continue to say they cannot see. I swear to God I still meet people who, if you talk about an upcoming movie being woke, will roll their eyes as if woke movies don’t exist. It’s like these people quantum-suicided their way into our dimension from one where Kathleen Kennedy was never born.

The two biggest winners at the Oscars this year were One Battle After Another, which is based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland about how the Nixon administration was fascist and radical leftists are the good guys — I wonder what the director was trying to say by making a movie like this in 2025 — and Sinners, about white vampires who prey upon innocent black folks in a Mississippi town in 1932. And yes, white people did prey upon blacks in the Jim Crow era, but imagine making a movie about how Muslims prey on British girls today, or one where black vampires prey upon innocent people of all races because the director wants to say something about how outrageously violent black Americans are compared to everyone else. Even if it was beautifully shot on 65 mm film using IMAX 15-perf and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, and even if the white actor who is number one on the call sheet played two roles, no one would give a shit because the movie would be instantly labeled white supremacist.

So when a movie like The Odyssey comes out and people recite the argument we’ve all heard a hundred times before about how the film is fiction, so it doesn’t really matter if they make everyone black, people recoil because we’ve all learned by now that this doesn’t actually work the other way, and so this isn’t actually a believable reason anymore. In fact, we’ve also noticed that even when it’s non-fiction, it makes no difference because then you get the argument about artistic license, so it doesn’t really matter if they make everyone black. Again, the principle never operates in the other direction. It’s a systemic issue, not the personal bias of any one director. But if you noticed it at all, you’re probably racist.

Though to be fair, no one seems upset about Matt Damon, a kid from Massachusetts with British and Nordic ancestry, playing the king of Ithaca. Or Anne Hathaway, a Brooklyn girl, playing his Spartan wife. I haven’t seen anyone on social media complain about Charlize Theron, an Afrikaner, being cast in the role of Calypso. Or Jon Bernthal, a Jew from rural Maryland, as Menelaus. Not to mention Tom Holland as Telemachus, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, or Mia Goth as Melantho. I guess we’re supposed to accept these casting decisions because they involve white actors instead of woke race-swapping. Except the ancient Greeks weren’t white. Not only that, they also didn’t look white. They had black hair and olive skin, so if you only cared about phenotypic accuracy, you’d want Oscar Isaac as Odysseus and you’d be just as upset about Matt Damon taking the role as you’d be about Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.

But that’s not what seems to be getting under everybody’s skin. In January, comedian Chrissie Mayr wrote on X, “Casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy is absolutely disgusting and goes directly against what was written thousands of years ago.” Mayr has a point in that this is definitely not historically accurate casting, as I will explain below, but “disgusting” is an interesting choice of words that gets my racist Spider-Sense tingling. Musk replied, “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.”

How dare they cast a black Athena! But an Afrikaner as Calypso? Seems fine. What bothers me about this is that conservatives already know it’s bullshit because when pro-Palestinian protesters tried to shoehorn the Gaza War into a Marxist framework by talking about Israelis as if they’re all white colonizers, conservatives quickly pointed out that Mediterranean people are not white and that it’s stupid and wrong to say that they are. But suddenly, none of them can remember that the ancient Greeks didn’t look like Edward goddam Cullen from Twilight.

Still, these people do have a point. The casting itself does warrant scrutiny. Helen of Troy is meant to be the most beautiful woman in the world. On one level, I can accept Nolan’s decision to cast the ebony Nyong’o because it’s true in spirit, in the sense that she is one of the most celebrated beauties of our time. Other women celebrated as the most beautiful include Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, and Margot Robbie. But in 2017, Esquire UK ran an article, “The Most Beautiful Women of All Time,” with Nyong’o at the top of the list, followed by Blake Lively, Zoë Kravitz, Emma Watson, Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, and Natalie Portman. You may not agree, but the fact that she made the list means that she is at least seen that way by many, and that’s enough for her to play the role in the symbolic sense. As Alec Baldwin recently wrote, “Dear Elon… but she IS the most beautiful woman in the world.”

The counter-argument to this is that Helen was quite famously not black. In fragment 23, Sappho describes her as “golden-haired.” The exact term used is ξάνθαι, or xanthai, which means yellow, golden, or blond. In the Iliad, Homer describes her as “white-armed.” In other words, she was probably a blonde white chick. That aside, we also know both her mortal parents were Spartans. She was a Greek princess, not a Kenyan like Nyong’o. In other words, casting Nyong’o as Helen of Troy is like casting Emma Stone to play the Queen of Sheba. Both are semi-historical, almost mythic figures, which is the very justification being used for Nyong’o in this role. But we all know it wouldn’t work the other way. Again, the problem is systemic and the rules only apply in one direction. Another example of this is cultural appropriation, which is very bad, but only if you’re white. If you’re black, you can appropriate anything you want, even entire cultures. As Sunny Hostin, co-host of The View, recently said:

This idea was also explored in a book called Black Athena — I think people should read it — which argues that classical Greek culture is heavily indebted to Afro-Asiatic and Near Eastern roots. I actually taught Greek mythology to eight-graders, so I covered this. So people that are saying that Helen of Troy cannot possibly be played by a black woman don’t know history.

I’m so glad we have the historical expertise of a former eighth-grade instructor to help us understand that ancient Greeks owe it all to black people. As Kangmin Lee commented, “We wuz Greeks and shiiiii.” By the way, the hotep history book she’s talking about was written in 2006 by the British professor Martin Bernal, a scholar of Chinese politics (so slightly outside his wheelhouse here), who no one takes seriously.

But for all this, as one friend recently said, arguing over casting decisions in a film based on a Homeric epic is a bit like arguing about the historical accuracy of an event we only know from the concept album. Sure, American Idiot captures the alienation of post-9/11 American life. But it also looks at those events through the cartoonish lens of teenage punk rebellion. Green Day is not David McCullough, and Homer was no Thucydides. Rather, like Nolan, he was the epic storyteller and cultural voice of his day, and as such, he took liberties with the truth when it made artistic sense to do so.

But even so, you can’t blame moviegoers for the backlash unless you’re being very intellectually dishonest about the influence of woke ideology on Hollywood. After being force-fed this slop for over a decade, Americans moviegoers have become allergic to the stuff. These people treated our mythic heroes with contempt and humiliated them for cheap subversion, if not a Marxist endgame. In The Last Jedi, for example, Luke Skywalker is portrayed as a bitter hermit who rejects the Jedi legacy, turns a sacred symbol into a gag by chucking his lightsaber over his shoulder, and flushes his dignity by chugging gross alien milk. In the Marvel movies, the tragic Shakespearean figure of Thor is gradually reduced to a buffoonish punchline who other characters repeatedly and openly mock. Haha, get it?

This is not the creative subversion of tired old tropes. Cormac McCarthy subverted the Western with Blood Meridian. George R.R. Martin subverted the fantasy in A Song of Ice and Fire. Chinatown subverted the detective film noir, Watchmen subverted the superhero story, Dune subverts the messianic sci-fi adventure because the chosen one becomes a warning about charismatic power. John le Carré subverts James Bond-style spy thrillers by depicting tradecraft as drab, bureaucratic, and futile. The Wire subverted the police procedural by arguing that no brilliant detective can defeat institutional decay. The Sopranos subverted the mafia story by depicting the crime boss as a vulnerable, insecure man who struggles with depression, panic attacks, and sometimes pisses himself.

All these are examples of subverting beloved tropes, yet the very people who complain about what they did to characters such as Luke, Thor, and Indie are the very people who adore every work I just listed above. So it’s not that people dislike seeing their narratives troubled or their heroes failing. They adore it. Indeed, mythic heroes have always failed. Consider Achilles, Arthur, even Odysseus. What people dislike is when the work itself is sneering at the character, the legacy, or the fans’ attachment to them, rather than exploring tragedy with seriousness. Or when a beloved franchise is turned into a vehicle for one group’s political grievances.

Other features of woke film include replacing character growth with identity shorthand. So, for example, characters are presented as admirable because of what they represent, not because they struggle, change, sacrifice, or earn anything. One example of this is girlboss invincibility. Think of the heroine who is instantly great at everything, never seriously wrong, and surrounded by weak or foolish men. Remember Captain Marvel as played by the insufferable Brie Larson? Why, after all, is Superman admirable? It’s because of his ethic of self-sacrifice and his Kansas farmboy good-heartedness, that’s why. But why is Captain Marvel admirable? Apparently, it’s because she has a vagina between her legs. If you think that’s vulgar, I agree!

Part of this pattern also involves mocking straight white men. Instead of writing a complex antagonist, the movie gives you a smug caricature of “the bad people” the filmmaker dislikes. And if you haven’t spotted the pattern yet, that generally means turning straight white male heroes into losers and failures. Black men can still be heroes, gay men are accepted because they’re not threatening to women, and women are the new alpha warriors, but when stories are retold that feature straight white men as the hero, woke filmmakers only have a few options: make the hero evil or make the hero black, female, or gay.

And again, no one really minds blind casting of this sort. What they generally tend to mind is being called racist if they happen to enjoy Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, meanwhile if a black person is cast as a fictional character we are told it’s racist to object because the character is fictional. And while holding that incongruity in your head, you also have to be okay with Jodie Turner-Smith playing Anne Boleyn, Adele James playing Cleopatra, Gold Rosheuvel playing Queen Charlotte, or Hamilton giving us a racially reimagined George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Aaron Burr.

The reason is supposed to be something about how the message of those men applies to people of color today. But imagine making a movie with Ryan Gosling playing Malcolm X in order to send the message that his crusade against racism is relevant to whites facing racism today. It wouldn’t fly. David Oyelowo played King Henry VI, Sophie Okonedo played Queen Margaret, but Tom Hanks ain’t playing Shak Zulu and the reason isn’t any of the ones they give when you ask them. It’s not that fictional roles are up for grabs. Nor is the rule that historical roles should be historically accurate. The rule is that if you’re not a straight white male then you can play any part you like, and if you are a straight white male then you should only play straight white males. But going back the Nolan, it’s not as if I’m going to boycott the film or anything as absurd as that. Nonlinear intellectual blockbusters are fun, and I’m willing to grant Nolan a bit of elbow room in the faith that he’s going to deliver something monumental in return.

And while we’re on the subject of casting and masculinity, let’s talk about rumors of the trans Achilles. People are saying Elliott Page has been cast as Achilles, and this seems untrue, but even if so, we can learn something from the way people are reacting to the rumor. What jumps out at me, as with the outrage over blackwashed casting, is that conservatives are over their skiis here. Everyone keeps posting images of Page in scenes from the film Troy, except in the AI-edited version the puny little Page gets easily killed off. It’s funny, I admit, but the problem with these jokes is that the entire premise is the stupidity of having someone built like Page play someone as badass as Achilles. Because how could such a scrawny twerp ever convincingly fill the role of one of history’s greatest warriors?

Except, while you can reasonably object to a biological female playing the role of a famous male warrior, if instead your argument is that Page doesn’t look the part of Achilles, I’m afraid you’re wrong. Achilles wasn’t built like a bodybuilder. He didn’t look like Brad Pitt in Troy. He wasn’t doing multiple weekly sets of lateral raises. And he sure as hell couldn’t bench more than his bodyweight, if that. For that kind of fighter, you want Ajax. He’s your brick shithouse. But Achilles? More than anything else, he was commonly described as “fleet-footed.” That’s the most common adjective used for him by Homer because he was fast rather than strong. Think of a ninja. Think of a fighter like Bruce Lee as opposed to Mike Tyson. We’re talking speed, skill with the slender ash spear, agility with the bronze blade in close combat, and bottomless endurance. Everyone thinks Page is a silly political play, but Page is far closer to what Achilles probably actually looked like, whereas the brawny Pitt is just Hollywood stupidly believing that every hero in every movie has to be muscular or the audience just won’t buy it. I wish I could say they were laughably wrong, but the freakout over Page suggests otherwise.

As you can see, this is a fun topic to discuss because any honest rendering is going to be packed with nuance. As such, you can imagine the media has been handling all this as well as you might guess. Writing for The Rolling Stone, Nikki McCann Ramirez makes the argument that if you think Helen of Troy should maybe not be black, well, you’re racist. The Daily Beast is calling it a “MAGA meltdown,” as if the people complaining are just a bunch of racist crybabies having a bigoted tantrum. Or consider this criticism by over at The Dispatch, whose essay frames the backlash as a “weird right-wing freakout”:

I was a little surprised by the source of the inevitable caterwauling about The Odyssey … as Christopher Nolan is broadly appreciated by conservative filmgoers and The Odyssey is the sort of classic that the right has long championed adapting for the masses. Sadly, the Very Online Right, spearheaded by its grand leader, Elon Musk, has decided that The Odyssey is bad now. It has too many black people, you see, and there are rumors that a trans individual might be playing Achilles.

This is annoyingly bad faith. Yes, conservative filmgoers like Nolan. Yes, The Odyssey is the kind of classic that conservatives have been pining to see for some time. But no, the reason for the backlash is not because Musk is a racist transphobe with an army of terminally online right-winger fanboys who would follow him off a cliff. Honestly, why are people like this seemingly incapable of grasping the very simple concept that people dislike propaganda? You may not agree that this particular film is woke, but if you literally cannot grok the fact that people are mad because they think yet another film is preaching the same ideology, or you cannot see how this film maps onto that ideology, and instead all you can come up with is that it must be because the critics are racist transphobes, then maybe you’re just too stupid for life.

Besides, despite all the drama, the movie is going to do just fine. One reason is simply because Nolan is a great filmmaker so people will like his movies regardless of their politics. But also, some people are convinced that Nolan is a conservative filmmaker. I don’t think we have enough information to make claims about Nolan’s politics, but the theories are interesting.

After The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, the author of Invented Organs argues, “It became common wisdom across the political spectrum that Christopher Nolan is a conservative filmmaker.” The author cites as evidence the film’s “pro-police, maybe even pro-torture message,” with Batman dressed in SWAT tactical gear instead of spandex, as well as “the clear inspiration the revolutionary Bane drew from the Occupy Wall Street movement.” There were also clear allusions to the Bush administration and the War on Terror, such as when Batman uses “advanced interrogation techniques” to get information out of a mob boss and, later, the Joker. Batman also hacks every cell phone in Gotham, a nod to the Patriot Act, which lets the FBI wiretap Americans without probable cause, despite the Fourth Amendment.

But Nolan also worries the moral landscape every step of the way, so it’s never exactly clear where he stands on the issue. Rather, it seems to me he’s simply tying his movie to some of the big issues of the day. The author of Invented Organs adds that “although there is an undercurrent of conservatism … in Nolan’s body of work, there is a more consistent and prominent through-line: he makes movies about men of ambiguous character who suffer for their obsessions.”

That, I think, is probably a better explanation for why Odysseus is not going to be portrayed as an unmistakably noble hero. It’s not because Nolan has gone woke. It’s because Nolan enjoys playing in the muck and mud of human complexity. What sets Shakespeare apart is that he doesn’t let you pick a side. Macbeth is a murderer but you understand his ambition. Shylock demands his pound of flesh and you see both the justice and the cruelty in it. Even villains like Iago have complexity that make them fascinating rather than cartoonish. Not to mention, the Bard gives Iago some of the best lines in his entire body of work. Nolan is really good at doing this too, though Shakespeare distributes moral complexity universally — everyone gets interiority — whereas Nolan does this, but only with the protagonists. His movies might feel like symphonies, but they’re actually concertos. Batman’s crisis of conscience, Cobb’s guilt in Inception, Oppenheimer’s moral reckoning, Cooper’s personal sacrifice in Interstellar. “Fundamentally,” the author adds, “Nolan makes character studies of men — not women — who sacrifice endlessly for and work tirelessly towards some sort of monumental accomplishment, whether it is to rid Gotham City of crime, split the atom, or — in the case of 2006’s the Prestige, create the ultimate magic trick.”

This is also why I think Nolan chose the controversial Emily Wilson translation of the Greek text. Not because he wants to make a woke Odyssey, but because her version is more complicated. She presents a morally confused, worried, exhausted, and broken man rather than a two-dimensional hero. I think Nolan looked at her Odysseus and saw a more complex, Shakespearean slab of clay that he could do more interesting things with. As the author of Invented Organs said, Nolan “makes movies about men of ambiguous character who suffer for their obsessions.” And Wilson’s hero is closer to this than other versions, the only problem is the reason she presents him this way is because she has opinions about masculinity.

So yes, her translation has received a lot of backlash. Wilson is the first female translator of Homer’s work, and she’s a radical feminist who approaches the story through that lens, viewing Greek male heroism as generally a really bad thing and wondering why the ancient Greeks didn’t spend more time talking about women and slaves. The answer, of course, is because they were ancient Greeks and not modern-day undergrads majoring in gender studies. But for Wilson, that isn’t enough. The text has to be queered into shape. In her translator’s note to the text, she described the Odyssey as “a poem that is deeply invested in … male dominance.”

She even refers to the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope, the beating heart of the story, the reason he longs for home, her 20-year wait being one of the ancient world’s most powerful symbols of true love, as nothing but “a heteronormative patriarchal marriage,” adding, “those were things that turned me off.” So then why bother translating the greatest work in Western literature if it’s not really your thing? Because you can bend it to your will. You can make it less about masculine heroism and heteronormative love and more about women, slaves, and the importance of diversity. As Wilson explains about theme of heroism and love in the story, “I realize now more deeply than I used to that it has so much more in it than that.” Oh, such as what? Well, she explains, a “wide range of different kinds of relationships” as well as a “wide range of different kinds of people.” And she explains that this is what drew her into the story. Interesting.

And before you shrug this off as if these minor translational decisions make no serious dent in our cultural imagination, consider this analysis by Johanna Staples-Ager, who is far from being some mindless woke barista nitwit, but is instead a brilliant doctoral student in genetics at Yale who has done some impressive work:

Odysseus is a dick.

I’m going to say that again, because I find it so satisfying: Odysseus is a dick. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with this man, and can confirm that Homer’s many-minded hero, his complicated protagonist, is a narcissist, an adulterer, a thief, and bad at his job to boot. The fact remains, though, that he is a really good liar. It was Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation that first alerted me to this glorious, satisfying contrast — not to mention the true heroism of his wife Penelope. My life among the classics has never been the same.

I grew up in a household saturated by the classics. My father read Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf to me as a bedtime story, and by kindergarten I knew the witches’ incantation from Macbeth by heart. A high school drama nerd, I watched and read every story involving the Greek pantheon I could get my hands on, down to the Odyssey’s to-the-letter but rather hammy 1997 miniseries adaptation. As much as I loved these stories, however — as much as they were part of me — there was often something missing, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It had something to do with Penelope’s tears: the implied weight of them, brimming just beyond the confines of the page and screen. It flickered in the fearful corners of Helen’s eyes. You don’t belong here. My junior year of high school, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and actually read the classics — the classic classics. I swiped Richard Lattimore’s 1967 translation of the Odyssey from my father’s shelf, safe in Wikipedia’s assertion that it has long been considered one of the most faithful translations. Fond of such awkward literalisms as “he slept with the exhaustion of sleep,” it left me cold as wave-worn Ithaca, bowed beneath Poseidon’s furious wrath. Even Athena, my favorite goddess, fell flat, suffocating under an assortment of “wilts” and “thous.” To look at the source of my love for the classics, and find it so wanting? It felt like I had no home to return to.

A year later, when Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey came out, I reserved it from the public library and scooped it into my backpack like something precious. The library edition was satisfyingly hefty, its cover packed with quotes lauding Wilson’s prowess: the sure, sharp drive of her iambic pentameter, the glass-pane clarity of her interpretation, and all of these things eminently rapid, clear and direct. I first opened it at breakfast, careful not to spill oatmeal on the pristine pages. Here was the first major translation of Homer’s epic by a woman, and it was in my hands.

You get the idea. The translator had a vagina, the reader had a vagina, and having a vagina was really important to how they both thought about heroism and longing for one’s family. But of course, the themes of this Greek epic poem transcend such sexist thinking. Not to mention, the chronological snobbery that pollutes every line of Wilson’s work. Still, I find Staples-Ager’s writing beautiful and emotionally persuasive. But I also find it sad to read about a young girl who grew up immersed in the classics, as I did, which is rare enough these days, yet who ended up turning her back on them because the classics weren’t feminist enough. This is little different than listening to a black scholar say he fell out of love with Shakespeare because it lacked black characters. You get it, but you also understand that their worldview is not deep so much as blinkered.

Yet credit where credit is due, Wilson is right that Odysseus would not be seen as a hero in the modern sense. To the Greeks, a “hero” was simply a man who accomplished some great deed. Today, we expect our heroes to also be men of good heart. But Greek heroes were rarely decent men. Achilles was a sociopath, for instance. But although Odysseus did slaughter the suitors of his wife when he finally got home, and although he did sleep with Calypso and Circe while he away, it’s more complicated than that. Calypso held him against his will, so it’s not entirely consensual, and if the tables were turned and this was a woman, people would be saying she was raped because of the power imbalance. But Odysseus is a mortal confronting a literal god, so there’s a slight power imbalance here too.

And with Circe, she’s a sorceress who turns his men into pigs and uses magic to seduce Odysseus. So again, it’s not as if he just got horny and cheated on his wife. But that is how many of Wilson’s fans defend her characterization of the man. She also takes all sorts of tiny, but meaningful stabs along the way. Translation is nothing if not a litany of tiny decisions, and those decisions can add up to quite a lot. Many of Wilson’s decisions are hilariously bad, and extremely woke. One of the lesser offenders is actually the most infamous one. Instead of opening with the famously grand line, “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways,” she instead begins with the flat, “Tell me about a complicated man.” Because in her version, he’s not grand. He’s just complicated, and not all that special. But the slaves…

Of course, the minor issues I have as a former teachers of Classics with each individual translation choice that Wilson makes does not, in itself, seem like much, but the onslaught is relentless. At a certain point, the Sorites paradox seems like a relevant reference. When Homer calls Odysseus polymetis, meaning “cunning,” Wilson translates this as “Lord of Lies.” When Calypso gives Odysseus the choice between immortality or returning home, and Odysseus chooses to return home to be with his family rather than to live forever, a decision that has long been regarded as proof of the goodness in his heart, Wilson instead claims he does this because he doesn’t want to give up his “patriarchal male power in the house.”

So yes, even though the Wilson and Nolan defenders have a good point, the Wilson and Nolan critics have several good points of their own. They also get a lot of things wrong, of course, because among them you’ve got genuine racists who just don’t want to see Nyong’o in anything as well as Musk fanboys who see nothing wrong when, for instance, one user writes, “Christopher Nolan is racist against the Greek people and their cultural heritage,” and Musk responds, “True.” Or when another user writes, “The destruction of the Odyssey by Nolan and the Left isn’t just about a movie. It’s about Western Civilization. The Greeks were its foundation. From Democracy to Art to Philosophy to Culture. The Left wants to destroy Western Civilization and everything that helped create it.” And Musk replies, “True.”

Even to the extent that woke ideology is corrosive to Western values, this corner of the Discourse is just embarrassing. Musk went on to attack Nolan directly, saying, “Shame on Chris Nolan for desecrating Homer! He will never live it down.” Matt Walsh claimed Nolan only cast Nyong’o as Helen of Troy because he knew “he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman” — and Musk responded, “True.”

Did Nolan make a woke Odysseus? I don’t have any reason to think Nolan is woke, but whether a film is woke is a matter of genre, somewhat regardless of editorial intent. If you are With an estimated budget of $250 million, the film is believed to be the most expensive of Nolan’s career. Variety predicts this will be the highest-grossing film of the year, while TheWrap predicted it could surpass The Dark Knight to become Nolan’s highest-grossing film ever. So I’m pretty sure that, even if it does prove to be a heartbreaking work of staggering wokery, Nolan is going to live it down just fine.

Racist gerrymandering against white people is illegal, the Supreme Court decided last week in Louisiana v. Callais. It turns out, you cannot actually redraw congressional district lines to benefit black voters over everyone else without violating that one part of the Constitution that says you have to treat everyone the same under the law. You know, the Fourteenth Amendment.

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What happened was, Louisiana previously had one congressional district of mostly black voters out of a total of five districts. That means the elected official from that district, Troy Carter, was the only black person in the state’s delegation at the U.S. House of Representatives. The delegation was therefore 20% black even though blacks make up 30% of the state’s population. To some, that doesn’t seem fair. If blacks are 30% of the state’s population, they think, shouldn’t its representatives be 30% black?

But here’s the problem with that kind of thinking. Louisiana is also 53% Protestant and 22% Catholic. Should half its representatives be Protestant? Does at least one have to be Catholic? What about atheists? Or Muslims? Or gays? What about trans people? Non-binaries? Furries? And if you think that’s going too far, how about if we just keep it to racial groups? Latinos are almost 10% of the population, so is Louisiana soon going to have to redraw districts on their behalf too? And what happens if you draw a district in order to produce a black representative, but the black voters there refuse to comply by voting for a non-black delegate?

When I visited Portland a few years ago, there were so many homeless tents on the sidewalks that you had to walk in the street. Portland’s woke progressives didn’t seem very concerned with the negative impact this was having on working people. I was reminded that American communism had shifted from class-consciousness to phenotype-focus years ago. But when it became evident that people in wheelchairs were unable to get around, and were suing as a result, suddenly the people of Portlandia had to make a difficult decision. One group had to go. The homeless, of course. But the Portlandians predictably tried to please everyone, made a right mess of it, and are still sadly chipping away at a half-measure to this day.

Situations like that are a good illustration of Pareto efficiency. In the field of computational redistricting, which uses mathematics and graph theory to analyze how district lines translate into political power, one key concept borrowed from economics is Pareto efficiency, or the idea that you can’t improve outcomes for one group without making things worse for another. In redistricting, this problem becomes vivid when multiple minority groups live in the same geographic area. If you draw a district to maximize black voting power in a neighborhood where Jewish and Latino voters also live, then you dilute those other groups’ influence in that district. And if you redraw the line to benefit one group on the basis of their race, then you are harming other groups on the basis of their race. You cannot use “positive racism” to fight negative racism because it’s all racism.

One counter-argument is that the heart of the matter is not about having a delegate whose skin color matches yours, but about having a voice of your own and the ability to choose your own representative, regardless of skin color. But if so, why do blacks get a protected voice in that sense and not other oppressed minority groups? One might say the reason is because of historic oppression, particularly against black voters in this country, and there’s no denying that. But gerrymandering has been used to reduce the voting power of other groups too. That includes Latino voters along the southern border, Chinese immigrants in western states, Native American voters on reservations, Irish and Italian immigrants in northern industrial cities, and Catholics and Jews pretty much anywhere you find them.

Even if you wanted to get out your scissors, there’s no way to cut the map to make it fair for everyone because all the ideological and phenotypical aspects of human identity are far to complex to capture within the mental and physical limitations of the five or even six representatives you’d have on hand. It’s impossible. And, even if you try to maximize your coverage of identity groups by selecting for the most intersectionally representative people — picture, if you will, a black trans disabled Catholic drag queen — you’re still never going to succeed because there are simply too many possible demographics. Say you create a district that benefits blacks, but that most of the gay people in your state are whites who live in the parishes that make up that district. You’d better hope those gay voters lean in the same direction as those black voters, otherwise your new pro-black district is going to end up also being, according to the divine laws of Kendian algebra, an anti-gay district.

These race games — whether it’s affirmative action, restorative justice, or racial redistricting — are often well-intentioned. But then, so is war. And like war, race is a strange game where the only winning move is not to play. The government really ought to stay out of it as much as possible, and the way that the Supreme Court has decided to do this is by stepping in only to prevent active discrimination. So if you want to use the Voting Rights Act to prevent deliberate racism, such as by making it illegal to gerrymander districts in a way that seeks to dilute black voting power, that’s fine. But if you want to use the Voting Rights Act to carry out deliberate racism, such as by gerrymandering districts in a way that seeks to strengthen black voting power (and weaken non-black voting power), that’s a problem.

So to review, under two lower court orders, Louisiana redrew its congressional map to create an absurdly gerrymandered second district that would also be mostly black. The lower courts had reasoned that having just one black district probably violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, created to prevent racist gerrymandering that would redraw district lines to dilute black voting power. This was done either by spreading black voters thin across a number of districts, making them a minority in each one, or by packing them into one district so that they dominate that one but lose in all others. The Voting Rights Act stopped this, but it doesn’t legally guarantee fairness. It just prevents states from deliberately rigging their districts to make sure that blacks can’t elect their preferred candidates. Its wisdom is that it says you cannot make elections fair for everyone in every way, but you can stop folks from deliberately trying to make them unfair.

It’s important to keep in mind that in 2023, the Supreme Court also ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s map illegally diluted black voting power, a precedent that voting rights advocates then successfully applied to Louisiana. So you can use racial considerations to prevent people from having their voice taken away. But again, race cannot be your primary consideration when advantaging one group over another. Let this be a lesson, though few will deign to stoop low enough to learn it. The best way to prevent racism in this country is by having the government generally step back, leave people alone, and step in only when racism is actively taking place in a way that prevents people from accessing their rights. In almost every circumstance when the government did otherwise, the results have been catastrophic, have often led to an increase in racism, and have rarely done the black community any lasting good.

In its recent decision, the Court agreed to let Louisiana to draw a new map ahead of House elections this November. That map is expected to favor Republicans, who will now likely take all six House seats. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the loudest judge on the bench, was predictably the lone dissenter, arguing that the court’s ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.” She even insulted the other judges, claiming their decision reflects an unprincipled use of power. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, could not let the attack go unanswered, and thing got heated in the opinions. They replied that her “baseless and insulting” comment “lacks restraint” and “is a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.” As one person wrote on X, “Jackson very clearly shows us how bad a Supreme Court could be. People have no idea how good we actually have it.”

Critics are now calling the decision a death blow to the Voting Rights Act. Politico declared the law effectively a “dead letter.” NPR falsely reported the decision “gutted” the Voting Rights Act and even claimed it rolled back protections against Jim Crow policies. So not only is not being racist not enough, apparently being anti-racist isn’t enough either. Now you have to support institutional racism against white people in order to avoid the charge of anti-black racism. Obama posted on X that the decision “effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities.” There may be some truth to this, but to the extent that racism is required to prevent the dilution of that power, such power has no place in America. At the very least, whatever happens to political power in the South as a result of this decision, it will no longer take the crooked, gerrymandered shape of racism. And, as the constitutional law professor Josh Blackman recently wrote, “Going forward, black people will no longer be moved around like pawns to maximize Democratic districts.”

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The good name of the Southern Poverty Law Center is now mud. America’s most famous anti-hate group was indicted by a federal grand jury last week for allegedly funneling more than $3 million over the course of a decade to the very hate groups it claims to fight — including the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and the organizers of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. SPLC paid informants inside these groups for a whopping 40 years, although the indictment focuses only on the past 10 years when they allegedly used shell companies, fake names, and wire fraud to dupe donors out of their money. One informant received over $1 million in payments. The SPLC also cut $270,000 in checks to an informant who was in the planning chat for the Charlottesville rally. The SPLC paid him to take part in the chat, paid someone to manage transportation for the rally, then after Heather Heyer was murdered at the event, they sent a fundraising email to everyone with the subject line, “This Is Why We Fight.” As FBI Director Kash Patel said, “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups — even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.”

So today, let’s consider the moral poverty of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Founded in 1971 by Alabama lawyers Morris Dees and Joe Levin, the SPLC began as a small legal clinic willing to take the cases nobody else in the South would touch. Dees, the son of an Alabama farmer who had seen racial injustice up close, sold a successful publishing business to pursue civil rights law. Early on, the SPLC desegregated recreational facilities, reapportioned the Alabama legislature, and integrated the state troopers. The cases that built its reputation were genuinely landmark. In 1981, the SPLC ended a Klan terror campaign against Vietnamese fishermen in Texas and created its Klanwatch project that same year to monitor organized hate activity nationwide. In 1987, after Klan members lynched 19-year-old Michael Donald on a Mobile street, Dees pursued a civil judgment against the United Klans of America, not just the individual killers, and won $7 million, bankrupting the organization and forcing the sale of its national headquarters. A few years later, after White Aryan Resistance members murdered Ethiopian graduate student Mulugeta Seraw in Portland, Dees won a $12.5 million judgment against the group, again targeting the institution rather than only the perpetrators. These victories established a legal template whereby the SPLC used civil liability to bankrupt hate groups rather than waiting for criminal prosecution. In the process, they drove some of the most dangerous white supremacist organizations in the country out of existence.

But what the SPLC does today is quite different from what built its reputation. The shift, critics say, is from courtroom combat against violent groups to the broader and far more lucrative business of culture war combat. The centerpiece of this shift is the SPLC’s hate map, an annual list of hate groups and anti-government organizations that journalists, tech platforms, corporations, and government agencies have widely treated as an authoritative reference. The problem is, the map has steadily expanded to include not just violent neo-Nazis and Klan chapters but mainstream conservatives and religious groups. The SPLC has smeared people like Charlie Kirk as hateful extremists. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-liberty law firm that has won multiple cases before the Supreme Court, is listed as a hate group for several reasons, one of them being that they oppose men who identify as transgender from competing in women’s sports. I’m no fan of the group, which also opposes same-sex marriage, but it’s repulsive to me to include their rational opposition to trans athletes as a reason why they qualify as a hate group. And that’s fairly illustrative of why people have come to dislike the SPLC in recent years, despite its noble origins, because it is seen as yet another institution like The New York Times, Harvard, or the ACLU, once towering in their greatness, now utterly compromised and a sore to our society, an embarrassing wing of the progressive campaign to subvert America in the direction of left-wing politics, slandering mainstream conservatives and Christians along the way as hateful and extremist, defending leftist terrorist groups like Antifa, applying as its metric of justice the Marxist racial and genital algebra that has become our modern-day phrenology, all while traditional American values and positions on marriage, immigration, and gender get demonized.

Meanwhile, the consequences of being listed as a hate group by the SPLC are not trivial. It can destroy a nonprofit’s ability to raise money through donor-advised funds, damage its relationships with corporations, or even expose its staff to physical danger. But as anyone who has spent 20 seconds on Bluesky knows, lumping principled conservatives in with racial supremacists is not a mistake. It’s the actual point. It creates a chilling effect on conservative opinions and, though guilt by association, nudges public opinion the other way. As Cornell law professor William Jacobson has observed, “Time and again, I see the SPLC using the reputation it gained decades ago fighting the Klan as a tool to bludgeon mainstream politically conservative opponents. For groups that do not threaten violence, the use of SPLC ‘hate group’ or ‘extremist’ designations frequently are exploited as an excuse to silence speech and speakers. It taints not only the group or person, but others who associate with them.”

The SPLC will even target people who oppose extremism and hate, the very thing they themselves claim to do, if that person opposes the wrong kind of extremism and hate. Lately on the left, for example, opposition to Muslim extremism can get an otherwise liberal voter labeled as a far-right bigot. And so, in 2016, the SPLC labeled Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim who runs the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam, an “anti-Muslim extremist.” Yes, they called a Muslim intellectual “anti-Muslim.” They also put him on the same list as the Klan. And only after years of pressure did the SPLC settle a defamation lawsuit with Nawaz for $3.375 million and issue a public apology, an apology they later removed. In 2019, more than two dozen employees sent letters to leadership describing a culture of sexual harassment and racism under founder Morris Dees, who apparently liked to target young women. Dees was fired that March, but the irony was punishing, given that the SPLC had spent decades prosecuting others for precisely the kind of workplace misconduct that was rampant within its own walls.

But if that hypocrisy was a scandal, the current instance could be fatal. Beneath it, however, lies a much larger question. Namely, are they propping up their own opposition in order to have a reason to exist? In other words, is white supremacy such a small problem in America that the leading anti-hate group has to literally fund hate to stay in business? A glance at the data suggests this isn’t true. Indeed, reported hate crime incidents have been running near historic highs. The FBI counted 11,862 cases in 2023 and 11,679 in 2024, the second-highest year on record since data collection began in 1991. Black Americans remain the most targeted racial group, Jewish Americans the most targeted religious group, and every election cycle tends to produce an uptick. But here’s the thing, what counts as a “hate crime incident” can be quite broad, and getting broader all the time. So this might actually be a picture of increasing sensitivity rather than of increasing hatred in our society.

And yes, when we check a more relevant metric — lethal extremist violence — it tells a different story. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual tracking, extremist killings fell from 35 in 2021 to 28 in 2022, 20 in 2023, and 13 in 2024. But 13 to 20 deaths per year across the entire country, while individually tragic, represents a vanishingly small fraction of America’s roughly 20,000 annual homicides. So yeah, maybe an organization like the SPLC, with nearly $800 million in assets and $170 million in annual revenue, sustained by donor appeals warning of an imminent white supremacist dystopia, has an obvious structural incentive to keep the threat looking existential even as the body count from organized hate violence is collapsing. And apparently, that’s exactly what they did.

When I profiled the Nazi hunter and Iraq combat veteran Kris Goldsmith for The Free Press, one of the things I wanted to do in that piece was paint a picture of white supremacy in America. I wanted to illustrate how dire the problem had become, and why we needed people like Kris to address the problem. It’s a sensible way to approach a story like that. The only problem was, America doesn’t really have a white supremacy problem. Ours is not a white supremacist nation and only very stupid people, the untraveled, or cultural Marxists think otherwise. Indeed, ours is arguably the least racist nation that exists or has ever existed. Organizations like the SPLC, that not only feed on the notion that we are deeply racist people, but are willing to sell us that lie at our own expense, are not on the side of the good. In the end, I made my profile about Kris and the good work he was doing, his honorable reasons for doing it, and the difference he was making in individual lives.

To be fair to the SPLC, they did something irreplaceable in the 1980s and 1990s. They found a new way to dismantle white supremacists groups and genuinely made America a safer place for minorities. But somewhere along the way, it seems this scrappy legal practice became a massive fundraising enterprise that needs the threat of hatred to feel vivid in order to remain solvent. Even if we dismiss the current scandal, that doesn’t erase all the years the SPLC spent hounding conservative voices, or the egregious mission creep from fighting extremists to fighting right-wingers and just calling them extremists. Or, for that matter, the way that they have contributed to a culture in which we now simply call our political enemies Nazis rather than attempt to engage them. So yes, they did lots of good work, but they also spent decades contributing to the moral poverty of our culture.