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.

Michal Huniewicz says in Fez, Morocco, where he took the photograph above, he met a young man named Rachid and had the following exchange:

Michal: What do you do, do you have a job?
Rachid: No, I don’t have a job. I have education but no job.
Michal: Why not?
Rachid: It’s the government, they don’t do anything.
Michal: What is the ruling party?
Rachid: The Islamic party.
Michal: Who did you vote for?
Rachid: The Islamic party.
Michal: What other parties are there?
Rachid: I don’t know.

The Obituary

My favorite story about the philosopher Jürgen Habermas is the time he got punched in the face for not knowing about the Beatles. It was 1970, and after breaking out only six years before, the Fab Four had made it big in the States, shifted from surface pop to reflective rock, dropped what many still consider the greatest album of all time, and were already in their White Album late period. There wasn’t a man, woman, or child left in the Western world who didn’t know the names of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Except, of course, Habermas. It was absurd because the Beatles were the greatest force in mass culture and Habermas was the greatest philosopher of mass culture. The man had written half a million words on the public sphere yet somehow managed to miss the biggest thing in it.

The guy who punched him was Peter Handke, an avant-garde writer who won acclaim for Offending the Audience, an “anti-play” so experimental it ate its own tail, forgot to be about anything, and ended up being about the fact that it’s a play. A little later, Handke lost all that acclaim when he expressed public support for Slobodan Milošević, and even spoke at the genocidal dictator’s funeral in 2006. The Nobel Committee, to its credit, waited a full 13 years before awarding Handke the Prize in Literature. It became the most controversial decision they ever made. Not even Elfriede Jelinek, with all her unreadable poetry, comes close. Salman Rushdie said at the time Handke was “complicit with evil on a grand scale” (and Rushdie taught at Cambridge). But when I think of Handke, I think of a pretentious cheerleader for genocide who clocked someone because he didn’t have the “correct” opinion, and damn if that doesn’t feel like a glimpse of the coming world.

Germany today, and much of Europe for that matter, has become the world of Handke when it should have become the world of Habermas. Habermas wasn’t the kind of person who would pretend to read a book he hadn’t read in order to sound smart. Or know the most famous band in the world. Habermas did not virtue-signal. My other favorite story about him is that, as a journalist in 1953, Habermas wrote a savage attack to the editors of the right-wing daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, expressing outrage at their decision to publish philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1935 lectures Introduction to Metaphysics, in which Heidegger talked about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. I disagree with Habermas on wanting the lectures unpublished, but he deserves credit for standing by his principles and going against Heidegger, who was still at the time greatly revered in German academia.

Habermas also wins my respect for defending a complete separation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics, meaning he was good faith enough to recognize that even his moral enemies, men he regarded as evil, might be worth listening to when it came to certain topics. That kind of epistemic charity is fundamental to being a serious intellectual, but it’s also a damn rare thing. In fact, Habermas himself felt this only applied when someone was, by his own estimation, correct. When they were wrong, as Heidegger was about politics, he believed their views on such matters could safely be censored. So despite his good-faith analysis, he was basically mad that Frankfurter Allgemeine had platformed a Nazi. Still, the principle Habermas was working from was a good one, namely that philosophy has to confront moral responsibility, not just abstract thought, and that it matters who you are, not just what you say — and not what you say you are either.

This is a radical proposition de hominem that says we should take people as they truly are, if not demand it, just as one insists upon the laws of chess as a prerequisite for any game. His devotion to authentic expression is why he had no energy for pretending to care what other people think is cool, whether it was a trending band, a trending ideology, or a trending identity. Nor did he have any energy for the illiberal left with all its endless purity testing and virtue-signaling. In fact, Habermas was early to identify the authoritarian streak in campus activism, especially their moral absolutism and intolerance toward dissent. He alienated student protesters by calling out their Linksfaschismus, or “left-fascism,” most famously during a debate he had with the communist writer and student activist Rudi Dutschke, who said they were living in the ideal time for students to engage in “direct action.”

But Habermas cautioned Dutschke to consider the consequences and pressed Dutschke to clarify whether he supported the use of violence. When Dutschke refused, Habermas accused him of Linksfaschismus. But consider, how often do we see leftist professors today condemn radical student activists for failing to stand against political violence? How often, on the contrary, do we see leftist professors call for political violence themselves, as we saw in the wake of October 7 or the killing of Charlie Kirk? Habermas single-handedly tilted German intellectualism in the direction of open discourse, and one has to wonder how much worse things would be there today if not for his legacy.

Last month, on March 14, Habermas died in southern Germany at the age of 96. The 2011 winter edition of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy described Habermas “as one of the most influential philosophers in the world.” And he was. The past century has given us some incredible voices in philosophy. People like John Rawls on justice, Michel Foucault on power, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on language. Surely, we must add to the list Habermas on communication. Here was, it seemed, the last man in Europe who still believed we can talk things out. Here too was one of the last intellectuals from an era in European history when speaking more freely was still possible. And so, in a way, he was perhaps also Europe’s last public intellectual.

Working through the past

Remember the CBS 60 Minutes segment about Germany’s online speech police, the one from February 2025, in which three German prosecutors practically bragged about door-smashing raids over internet trolling? One of the prosecutors matter-of-factly said even reposting fake quotes is now a crime in Germany. The segment went viral, I think, largely thanks to the comical look of disbelief on correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s face and the way it contrasted with the smiles these three creepy Germans, totally oblivious to how slimy they come off, especially to an American audience, or how off-putting it was to see Germans gloat about being the internet Nazis.

But it wasn’t off-putting for the simple and obvious reason, which is that the same country that gave us literal Nazis is now giving us digital ones. Rather, it was the irony that they ended up in this farcical position precisely because they are bending over backwards trying not to be Nazis, passing laws to prevent hate speech in the mistaken belief that if they censor name-calling and online bullying that they can prevent another Holocaust. But this is a dangerous misunderstanding of censorship. And of Nazism. How have Germans forgotten the Weimar fallacy? That’s the false belief that the Nazis rose to power because people were too tolerant of extremist speech, as if censorship could have stopped Nazi rule when in fact the Weimar Republic censored speech, banned newspapers, and prosecuted Nazis. But not only did this tactic fail, it blew up in their faces, making the Nazis look like underdogs that the regime didn’t want you to know about, which only gave them propaganda power.

Another reason it’s so unfortunate to see Germans behaving this way is not because of their dark history, but rather because of their noble history as free speech defenders. Just consider the journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who exposed illegal German rearmament, was prosecuted, imprisoned, and later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his “defense of freedom of speech.” Or the White Rose group, whose members literally risked death to distribute anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich. Or the 1949 Basic Law, Article 5, which says every person has the right to freely express their opinions and adds, “There shall be no censorship.”

Or the famous Spiegel affair of 1962, when Der Spiegel published a story about the nation’s defense forces and several Spiegel staffers were detained on charges of treason. In the end, they were released without trial and Franz Josef Strauss, the federal minister of defense, lost his job. It was post-war West German democracy’s first test of press freedom, and they passed. Or the scandal involving Kommune 1. Or, at long last, the great Habermas himself, philosopher of communication and champion of public debate.

But again, Germany today is not the Germany of Habermas. It is the Germany of Handke. The country’s longstanding laws against “insult” (Beleidigung) are in stark contrast to the freedoms we enjoy in the United States, and have resulted in a litany of scandalous news reports, including a police investigation for saying a politician looks like Pinocchio, a pre-dawn raid for calling a politician a “dick,” a home search for calling a politician an “idiot,” a total of 45 home raids in a single month for sexist comments online, and a seven-month suspended sentence for a journalist posting a cartoon of a politician. I have interviewed CJ Hopkins about his experiences with this censorship regime, and in a recent edition of the FIREwire, a weekly digest in which I summarize news and events related to free speech, we included this item:

Germany probes historian for criticizing … Hitler

German writer Rainer Zitelmann is under criminal investigation in Berlin after retweeting a Ukrainian post comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.

But it wasn’t the Putin attack that got him into trouble — it was the fact that the post included a swastika, even though he used it as an insult, because it potentially violates Section 86a of Germany’s criminal code, which bans Nazi symbols.

Germans have a word — Vergangenheitsbewältigung — for coming to terms with their Nazi history. It means “working through the past.” But the irony is that they “work through the past” by avoiding and silencing commentary on the topic. So they’re not actually working through much at all. And, in trying to avoid repeating the same sins, Germany has struck a Faustian bargain, hoping to achieve something noble (the end of racism, apparently), but ultimately doing terrible things along the way. Maybe this is the result of a totalizing tendency in German culture, a desire for specificity that lends itself to building comprehensive systems, which is why the Germans and the Japanese both excel at the precision manufacturing of cutlery and camera lenses, but also why they both have histories of totalitarianism. And you see this totalizing streak in German philosophy too. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, even Habermas in his way, all sought to capture the entire universe in the folds of their thinking. British philosophers, by contrast, like Wittgenstein or Russell, tend to be suspicious of grand towers of abstraction. And this tendency produces a wrinkle in the culture, in that Germans think big but act small.

Hegel believed history itself is rational and moving toward perfection, or what he called Gesamtstaat, a perfected whole society. Marx thought we could aim for perfection too. That’s the German tendency to think big. But to get there, Germans like to meticulously nitpick people into line rather than pull back and let bygones be bygones. That’s the tendency to act small. The Nazis used to call this Gleichschaltung, or “coordination,” which meant bringing everything into alignment with the regime’s ideology. Every institution, organization, and aspect of life had to be “coordinated” into the totalizing system. And this fundamental impulse survives today in the form of the German state micromanaging the shit out of people.

And so you have this tension between the rebel and the hall monitor, between the Nietzschean spirit of radical individualism and the Hegelian desire to police one’s way to Valhalla. Two souls, alas, reside in Germany’s breast. But I think Habermas came closest to reconciling these two, because it’s really only in the public sphere of debate where one finds reward for both the boldness of the Self and the precision of the State, where both the Übermensch and the pedant get to shoot their shot.

Between facts and norms

In the end, the old professor’s real gift, if you ask me, wasn’t his defense of open argument. It was his faith in mankind. Habermas came out of the Frankfurt School, that postwar German tradition of cultural Marxists who saw that the global communist revolution wasn’t coming, so they blamed culture for pacifying the people and sought to subvert it. But Habermas rejected the pessimism of his mentors, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who believed modern mass society was bleakly, perhaps permanently, defeated by capitalist manipulation. As Herbert Marcuse would later write, people had become one-dimensional men who could only think in consumerist terms. Habermas agreed, but he believed free and equal persons might still talk their way to a more legitimate social order. And that’s where he has my attention, even if he is a Marxist.

In 1962, Habermas shook the academic world with his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which made the term “public sphere” academic lingua franca. His argument was simple. In early modern Europe, a new kind of space had emerged with salons and coffeehouses, where private individuals of all classes came together where they shared stories, told jokes, and hashed out matters of common concern. Habermas believed this “public sphere” carried a democratizing promise. He also believed this promise had already rotted under the pressures of mass media and money. That’s where he and Marcuse were on the same page. But whereas Marcuse, much like Vladimir Lenin, had no faith in the people’s ability to choose what was best for themselves and so wanted to manipulate and subvert the culture, Habermas instead wanted to openly and transparently debate his way to a better society. So he was a utopian thinker but there, again, you also see his faith in humanity. He argued that speech matters because, in the end, reason is our only way out — and because democracy requires public justification. Free speech, in other words, is not just the right to say what you think. It’s the right to participate in forming what the public thinks.

In his 1981 work The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas argued that there are two ways to use speech. One is to get what you want, or strategic action. The other is to reach mutual understanding with another person, or communicative action. The whole point of free speech, for Habermas, was to protect the second kind because that kind of mutual understanding was how you obtained the consent of the governed. In his 1992 book Between Facts and Norms, he argued that even societal norms only hold legitimacy if the people they affect can agree to them through open argument. In his view, communicative action was the very engine of democracy.

It’s true that he saw little value in speech that did not further a political goal. I disagree with him there. It’s also true that he parted with the American understanding of freedom of expression because he looked at speech through a Marxist lens and saw anything oppressive as illegitimate. I definitely disagree with him there. But in general, he believed that democracy thrives in the space between two present and fully engaged people, debating in good faith. And I think that’s a beautiful way to look at it. I also think what drew me to his work was always his humanity rather than his logic. He had a radical faith in the people and in what we can accomplish if we just sit together and connect. In the end, perhaps the real tragedy is that he had more faith in us than we seem to have in ourselves.

The No Kings 3 protest on Saturday drew an estimated 9 million protesters at more than 3,300 events in all 50 states for what was the largest single-day nationwide demonstration in American history. There were people dressed up as Revolutionary War soldiers, Handmaids, posters depicting Trump as a Nazi, depicting him as a pig, depicting him with a penis for a face and the words “Small DICKtator Energy,” Ukrainian flags, trans flags, Mark Twain’s proposed flag for American-controlled Philippines, a guy on stilts with his face painted orange and a “TRAITOR” sign around his neck. It was all so absurdly stupid. And I absolutely loved it.

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The movement, which began with earlier No Kings demonstrations in June and October 2025, recently gained momentum in response to ICE operations — notably the killings of Renée Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti — as well as the Iran war. The flagship rally took place in Minneapolis–St. Paul, ground zero for those ICE shootings, where Bruce Springsteen sang and Bernie Sanders, Joan Baez, and Jane Fonda made appearances. It was a party as much as a protest. But what distinguished this round from its predecessors was its geographic penetration into conservative America. Organizers reported two-thirds of RSVPs came from outside major urban centers, including conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah, as well as swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.

Putting aside the silly ways many protesters chose to get their point across, or failing to do so, the whole thing also felt kind of pointless to me. Was this movement really going to translate into durable political power manifested through voter registration, candidate recruitment, and sustained institutional pressure? Or was it going to dissipate into the episodic catharsis of our drinking-from-a-firehose weekly news cycle? You know, exactly like its two predecessors did.

That said, sure, No Kings is constitutionally sound in the abstract. America fought a revolution to reject the power of kings, and at the lowest level of resolution, this protest is a rejection of monarchy. But another low-res characterization, just as fair, is that this is simply an anti-Trump protest. Most importantly, the coalition deploying it is riddled with a selective authoritarianism that undermines any moral seriousness it can ever hope to claim. Many of its loudest voices have spent decades offering apologetics, or at minimum studied silence, for regimes that make Trump’s executive overreach look more constitutionally scrupulous than Madison. The Bolivarian catastrophe in Venezuela — where Maduro presided over a hell of his own making until America ripped him out of his reality — drew no mass protests against his regime. Nor measured considerations about how to maintain international law when international law failed to stop Maduro in the first place, but would stand in the way of removing him. But we did see calls of support for Maduro. Just as they cheered for Hamas after October 7, for Cuba more recently, and even Iran.

Iran hangs gay citizens from cranes and guns down its own protesters, yet segments of this movement treat opposition to Tehran as inherently imperialist rather than pro-human. The reflex to frame every American assertion of power as uniquely evil, colonial, or white supremacist while treating genocidal anti-American psychopaths as complex figures deserving nuance is, shall we say, not a coherent philosophy of liberty. It’s an aesthetic. And to be clear, the aesthetic is “America bad.” And let’s also be clear: Trump is not a king. He’s a norm-breaking populist president operating within, and stress-testing, a constitutional system that still has courts, legislatures, a free press, and 9 million people in the streets on a single day proving that the system works. Calling him a king while lionizing actual dictators is not brave, it’s just stupid, and it hands Trump’s defenders the easiest rebuttal in politics: these people don’t actually oppose tyranny — they just oppose you.

And yet, I recently met a young man in his 20s who’d been a protester in Hong Kong during the worst of it. Running from police, dodging tear gas, watching his city’s freedoms get crushed in front of his eyes. I had covered those kids, in Hong Kong and in Seoul, and they were my heroes. These were young people who put their bodies on the line for democratic ideals. It was inspiring to hear his stories. But it also reminds one of the true face of tyranny. Xi Jinping is a tyrant. Kim Jong-un is a tyrant. Putin, Maduro, Khamenei, Akhundzada. But Trump is not a tyrant because he is not an absolute ruler. He is not a king of any kind. Or a dictator. Or a Nazi. Or even the worst U.S. president (that dishonor probably goes to Buchanan or Harding).

Then on Saturday, an old friend from Chengdu visited. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years, and it was heartwarming to catch up. We talked about his work, his efforts to transfer from a student to a work visa. I asked him whether he ever worries about possibly being deported in the current climate. He said, “No, what can I do about it?” But then he acknowledged that things are so wild now, so unpredictable, that no matter how sure he felt, and however certainly he knew he had followed all the rules, there was a little fear that could creep in, if he let it. We had a few drinks. We talked about Chinese politics, and I expressed my admiration for China’s tiered electoral system, its “meritocratic democracy,” even if it was so corrupt and submissive to a dictator’s will that it meant nothing in the end. But the idea seemed nice. My friend laughed. I explained that things can be so perfect on paper, but if you don’t have the culture for it, it won’t really work because the laws of society emanate from the values and norms of the people, not the other way around. Then we talked about the No Kings protests and both agreed that these lovable weirdos were not going to affect anything. “If they think they are,” I said, “they’re a bunch of fools.”

Then we walked through the No Kings protest on the National Mall. My friend stopped and looked around, marveling. “You can just do this,” he said. I was beaming. “This is it,” I said, “this is the thing itself.” He told me police would be all over this if it were China, and I nodded, already well aware. I had seen it myself. I told him I could walk over to a group of nearby officers we spotted and chat them up, and they would probably be very friendly. I told him I could stand right in front of those officers and shout, “Trump is a bastard who doesn’t deserve to live!” And what would happen, he asked. Probably nothing, I said. Then I added, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I explained that this is the reason you can never convince Americans that the Chinese way is better. He gave me a look and said, “But I thought you told me these people are fools.” But they were also a symbol of peaceful protest, even if in places like Portland and Los Angeles, shit got real. “I don’t agree with all of it,” I said. “Or most of it. In ways, they are fools. But they’re fools for democracy. And those are my kind of fools.”

“There was much in it that I did not understand … but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

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A beautiful young woman named Noelia Castillo Ramos has become the face of one of Spain’s most bitter moral arguments. After a long and painful legal battle, her request for euthanasia was formally approved in Catalonia in 2024. The Spanish government executed her today. This is not the nation’s first euthanasia case, but what turned hers into a national drama was her father’s repeated and desperate pleas to prevent her execution, arguing that she had mental health issues — depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder — that undermined her ability to make such a decision. Borderline personality disorder can indeed cause suicidal thoughts, but the standard treatment is close monitoring and therapy, not killing the person if they ask.

Nevertheless, courts rejected the father’s pleas again and again, and today the state put Noelia out of her misery. For many, this story is one about the morality of euthanasia. But for others, it’s a story about the horrors of European immigration. Noelia’s troubles began when she was brutally gang-raped in a state-run center for vulnerable youth. As a result, in 2022, she stepped out of a fifth-floor window. She survived, but fractured her spine and was left unable to walk and in constant physical agony thereafter. We don’t know who her rapists were because Spain does not report the ethnicity or country of origin for such perpetrators, fearing that this will lead to racial tensions. But we can make an educated guess. Using Spain’s Justice Ministry data, reports that in Catalonia, where she was raped, 91% of rapists in prison are foreigners, despite making up only 17% of the region’s population.

In 2018, NPR reported on the fact that African women migrants to Spain were arriving with horrific experiences of rape. NPR being NPR, they didn’t report on African men raping Spanish women, or African men raping African women, or even Spanish rape victims, but by reporting on African rape victims, you got a glimpse into the world from which they were fleeing — the world Spain has decided to import. In its November 2025 report, “Demography of Crime in Spain,” researchers at the conservative think tank CEU-CEFAS warn about “imported crime” due to mass immigration. They note that foreigners, who make up only 31% of Spain’s prisoners, commit 500% more rapes and 414% more murders than Spanish citizens.

The report also notes that, given Spain’s aging population, there should have been a steep decline in murders and rapes over recent years, but that the influx of migrants from Latin American and African countries — places with some of the world’s highest murder and rape rates — has led to a different outcome. Nor is this at all restricted to Catalonia. An internal police document from Navarre showed that foreign nationals accounted for nearly 63% of sexual offense arrests and over 73% of homicide arrests in the region, with Morocco and Algeria being the most frequently represented countries of origin among suspects.

But whenever I share such information with left-leaning friends, the response is invariably the same. Rape is illegal, so rape will be punished. Instead of discriminating against migrants, why not simply punish rapists, regardless of their background? Putting aside the strain this places on police, courts, and prisons in countries across Europe and North America, this line of reasoning also assumes that rape is, in fact, being punished. In 2019, for example, five men were acquitted in Barcelona after gang raping a young woman. The court ruled it was not rape because she was unconscious. The court added that the men did not use violence to rape her. But of course, they didn’t use violence because she wasn’t awake and therefore she didn’t resist. This is not an isolated case either. Far from it. But maybe you’re thinking this is confined to the squalid parts of certain cities. A problem, sure, but an avoidable one. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case either.

In 2024, Spaniard David Lledo saw three Moroccan migrants raping a 15-year-old girl outside his home in the posh village of Gata de Gorgos. The migrants had been squatting in a nearby vacation home. When David rushed to save the young girl, the migrants beat him to death with a baseball bat. David left behind five children. Nor has the problem improved. Just last month, a Senegalese migrant who raped a 14-year-old Spanish girl was ordered to pay a fine instead of going to prison, even though he openly admitted in court to raping the girl. This past February, in the exclusive Retiro area of Madrid, a 22-year-old Colombian, living illegally in Madrid and with a prior criminal record, was arrested after allegedly raping, beating, and robbing a 20-year-old woman. And this month, in the upscale district of Chamartín near the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, five minors of Spanish, Dominican, and Honduran nationality were arrested for stabbing a 14-year-old boy.

One of the largest rape scandals in Spanish history is known as caso de La Manada, or “the Wolf Pack case.” It involved the 2016 gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona. Five men led the young girl into a building, raped her, beat her, filmed it all, and took her phone so she couldn’t call for help after. The case sparked national outrage. The BBC reported that it “galvanized Spain’s feminists” because the initial ruling treated the rape as a lesser sexual-abuse offense rather than rape. Thankfully, Spain’s Supreme Court later reversed that and sentenced the five men to 15 years. Feminists ranted about Spain’s “rape culture.” But the men were Spanish, not foreigners. So then what happens when nonwhite foreign men rape Spanish girls at levels never before seen? When the justice system fails to punish them? Do feminist activists flood the streets over incidents like these? Does the BBC report the story? Or do we get a mixture of leftists telling us why we really need to open the doors to more immigration along with a dose of media silence?

And despite it all, Spain recently announced it will give half a million undocumented migrants legal status. At the same time, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the government will deploy an AI hate tracker, so as Spain brings more murderers and rapists into the country, and refuses to report their race, ethnicity, or religion, and refuses to punish them for raping young girls, it will also now likely punish anyone who speaks up about it, especially if they mention the perpetrator’s race or religion. Anyone who hops online to express frustration or anger over the latest MENA rape scandal will likely be fined or arrested for “spreading hate.” The United Kingdom is the blueprint.

In Barcelona, the arrival of spring is signaled each year by the pink petals of Judas trees and the fragrance of bitter orange blossoms. This year, after the government executed Noelia earlier today, the symbolic significance of those Judas trees and those bitter blossoms takes on a new meaning.

Two ISIS-inspired Muslims threw bombs at peaceful protesters in New York City outside Mayor Mamdani’s residence last week. The protesters were voicing their opposition to the threat of Islam in the city — and they clearly had a point — when a much larger, pro-Islam counter-protest formed nearby featuring a man in a Palestinian keffiyeh waving the red flag of Shia martyrs and comedian Walter Masterson shouting into a bullhorn, “I’m born and raised in New York and we want everyone to stay in New York! You don’t get to come from outside and then tell everyone else—” But he was cut off when, in a chef’s kiss of poetic irony, one of the terrorists shoved him aside and screamed Allahu Akbar! as he threw his bomb right over Masterson’s head.

Being a good woke, Masterson later ran to X where he condemned … white supremacy. Specifically, the leader of the anti-Islam protest Jacob Lang, who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and ended up spending four years behind bars for 11 counts, including attacking Capitol officers with a baseball bat. The next day, Mamdani held a press conference to comfort the people of New York, in which he made perfectly clear that such a disgusting attack against New Yorkers would not be tolerated, and in no uncertain terms, he condemned radical Islam. Nah, just kidding. Mamdani condemned white supremacy:

Good morning. On Saturday, a protest was held outside Gracie Mansion, where I live with my wife, Rama. Neither of us were home at the time. This was a vile protest rooted in white supremacy entitled, “Stop the Islamic takeover of New York City.” I’m the first Muslim mayor of our city. Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the 1 million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home.

I really hate how white supremacists always go around blowing people up in the name of Allah. That passage, by the way, was the only reference Mamdani made to Islam in his speech, framing Muslims as victims in the wake of this Muslim attack and echoing his remarks in October when he said, “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab.” He did not speak to the memory of the 2,977 people who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because they were incinerated by radical Muslims.

The two terrorists were brown young men of Afghan and Turkish origin, and because of the talking point about white supremacy, it’s important to note that they were brown and not white. According to the federal criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department on Monday, when an NYPD officer asked the terrorist Ibrahim Kayumi why he threw the bomb at peaceful protesters, he replied, “ISIS.” His co-jihadist Emir Balat pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on paper and said the goal had been to carry out a bigger terrorist attack than the Boston Marathon bombing. Specifically, he said, what he meant by this was more death and suffering. So they packed their bombs with nails, screws, and bolts in order to shred and mutilate anyone they failed to kill.

Thankfully, the bombs fizzled rather than detonated and police officers rushed in with the kind of muscular reflex that is the stuff of NYPD legend.

Mainstream news did what mainstream news reliably does by warping the facts beyond recognition in the most grotesque manner. CNN initially described the horrific attack on X as if the two terrorists were just a couple of regular American teens trying to enjoy the warm weather. Separately, CNN news anchor Abby Phillip initially described the event as an attack against Mamdani, rather than against the anti-Islam protesters. The X post was later deleted and Phillip later apologized, saying she made an “error.” But never mind that there was clear footage of the event and it went viral immediately. Never mind that Phillip is not some Disney-brained TikTok influencer, but a CNN anchor and former White House reporter from whom we should expect better. All that aside, these “errors” always go in the same direction.

The New York Times didn’t perform any better. After Mamdani blamed white supremacy, the Times ran a story headlined “Mamdani Chooses His Words Carefully After Alleged Terror Attack.” Aside from the offensive claim that blaming white supremacy was a carefully thought-out choice — hell, maybe it was, maybe Mamdani knows exactly what he’s doing — there’s also the fact that this story ran on March 9, two days after the attack and long since half the internet had already seen the footage of the terrorists literally throwing the bombs. So why in the world are they saying alleged terror attack? Generally, you use that term when a crime has not yet been adjudicated in court because guilt is undetermined. But that rule doesn’t apply when you have footage of the crime. But the Grey Lady didn’t stop there. Behold:

Accused of bringing a bomb? As the journalist Melissa Chen wrote, “Bro is literally holding a looney toons ass bomb with a lit fuse and it’s SMOKING.”

The real story here isn’t just that two radical Muslims tried to slaughter a crowd of peaceful protesters in the heart of New York City. It’s that the city’s own political leadership as well as the institutions responsible for telling us the truth about such events — and keeping us informed and safe as a consequence — seem almost pathologically incapable of doing their jobs. When brown Muslims shout Allahu Akbar! while throwing nail-packed bombs as peaceful protesters, and the political and media reflex is to go digging for white supremacy under the couch cushions, we’ve got a real problem. Especially because this is deliberate misdirection. Especially because none of this would happen if the attackers had been white.

If you check the Wikipedia article for this story, Jacob Lang — who, whatever you think about the man, was a victim here — is mentioned by name. But the two attackers are not. There are no details about the bombs. No mention of Mamdani’s speech or the egregious media missteps. The article says the attackers “allegedly” tried to detonate bombs and refers to them as “suspects.” But again, we have them on film carrying out the attack. We know their names. We know they did it. Wikipedia’s leftist bias has been obvious, and studied, for some time now, but it’s been getting worse as of late. It used to be that for incidents like this, Wikipedia was a rich mine of data, often more comprehensive than any news article. But now that woke editors have largely taken over, it is often barely worth glancing at anymore.

The impulse to misdirect blame, conceal facts, and outright lie in the name of not drawing negative attention to nonwhites or Muslims is not a good one. That instinct doesn’t make New Yorkers safer. What it does is erode public trust by signaling that some forms of extreme violence will always be minimized, misreported, or reframed to fit a racist ideological script. What it does is batter already-crippled public trust in political leadership and the media at a time when we dearly need both. That’s frighteningly dangerous because when the people tasked with naming threats refuse to name them, the public eventually stops believing anything else they say. Rightfully so. But as Mamdani and these outlets apparently fail to understand, or simply do not care, that puts us all in danger. Including Muslims.

From the feed

The 79th British Academy Film Awards were interrupted last week when a man in the audience shouted “nigger” as actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan stood on stage presenting an award, yet incredibly, the situation managed to get even worse when we all found out that the man who shouted “nigger” was John Davidson, whose life story inspired the film I Swear about his struggle with severe Tourette’s syndrome, and instead of showing him some measure of compassion and understanding, people accused Davidson of racism and demanded that he apologize, then SNL mocked him for good measure, specifically making fun of his condition, even calling the skit “Tourette’s” and comparing him to the likes of Bill Cosby. At this point, even if he had actually shouted “nigger” in pure racist hatred, it would not have been as bad as this because one racist in the audience is not remotely as serious a moral concern as the fact that we have created a situation where hundreds if not thousands of people are perfectly willing to bully an innocent disabled man over a misunderstanding.

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Of course, we’ve been doing this to innocent people for years, and the favorite tactic of attack has always been to pretend someone is racist so you can tear them down. Now it’s happening to a man with a disability that, until last week, everyone with a room-temperature IQ understood makes you say things beyond your control. People are even claiming that if you defend Davidson, you’re a white supremacist. The Sinners actress Wunmi Mosaku said she’s “not sure” if she can forgive BAFTA and that the traumatic experience “kept me awake at night.” People have begun using the term “black fragility” to describe such clownish reactions, a term the always insightful has been using since at least 2021 when he wrote about the preposterous sensitivity to “nigger” among black Americans:

Law professor Jason Kilborn cited the N-word (and the B-word) on an exam thusly: n****, b****. It was in a question about an employment discrimination case. He has done so for years previously to no comment — as all reading this but a sliver would expect. But this year, a group of black students initiated a protest against him for harming them in exposing them to this expurgated rendition of the N-word. That is, in a class training them in litigation in the real world. One black student claimed that they experienced heart palpitations upon reading the words.

Heart palpitations. Upon reading a word on the page. Not even the word “nigger,” but merely a hint of the word as “n****.” Kilborn then attended an hours-long Zoom talk with a black student representing the protesters who wanted him gone for his heinous crime, in an attempt to clear up any misunderstanding, after which the student reported to the dean that Kilborn might even be a “homicidal maniac.” By the time McWhorter was writing his essay, Kilborn was no longer teaching the class, was relieved of his administrative duties, and because of the possible physical threat he posed to black students as a “homicidal maniac,” was even barred from campus. Sadly, that is how sensitive many black Americans have become to this word. That is the black fragility McWhorter references in the title of his essay. But while “white fragility” essentially refers to having a healthy sense of self-respect, such that one will speak up in order to reject racist guilt-tripping — that’s basically how the term is defined by Robin DiAngelo, who coined it — “black fragility” instead refers to having a profoundly unhealthy sense of self, to the point of narcissism, and is synonymous with narcissistic injury, meaning the grossly disproportionate psychological wound that a narcissist feels when they perceive themselves to be disrespected.

Consider, for instance, what other black entertainers said about the BAFTA scandal: that this proves “we still don’t understand what inclusion means,” that the experience was “painful,” that in the future any white men with Tourette’s in the audience when a black person is speaking “better double up” on their meds, and even that “he shouldn’t have been in the room.” That’s right, we should start prohibiting people with disabilities from attending public events in order to avoid hurting black people’s feelings. News reports cannot even bring themselves to repeat the word “nigger,” not even in print, as if merely citing what happened, which is why the news exists, would be seen as furthering the imaginary harm done, or perpetuating the racism that never actually took place. So instead, news reports talk about “a racial slur” or, if they’re feeling brave enough to inch a little closer to the facts, they might say he uttered “the N-word.” People are even complaining that BBC didn’t edit it out, as if merely hearing the word on TV, even though we know it was the result of a motor disorder, might cause devastating harm. As if black people are constitutionally so fragile that the psychic shock of those two syllables might cause them literal trauma, perhaps bringing back all the horrific memories of slavery that neither they nor their grandparents suffered.

Later at the NAACP Image Awards, Lindo opened by saying, “We appreciate all of the support and love we have been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend.” Give me a break. “All the love and support”? Did Lindo just recover from a life-threatening bout of cancer? Did he just come out recovery from meth addiction? “In the aftermath of what happened”? Wait, what happened exactly? I must be completely lost because I was convinced that what happened was that absolutely nobody did absolutely anything wrong, that nobody hurt Jordan or Lindo in any way, but that at the back of the room, one man was struggling with a disability. Others assumed malicious intent despite knowing Davidson has Tourette’s. Jamie Foxx, who has said he loves killing white people in movies, decided to wade in by saying, “Out of all the words, you could’ve said Tourette’s makes you say that?” and “Nah he meant that shit.” Well, Jamie, it’s 2026 so I can say this now: Stop being a retard.

Tourette’s is best understood not as a disorder of speech or personality, but as a disorder of neural inhibition. It involves dysfunction in the brain circuits responsible for selecting and regulating motor output. The most important of these circuits is the cortico–striato–thalamo–cortical (CSTC) loop (yes, I had to look that up and don’t ask me to remember it later), a feedback system linking the prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus. When this loop functions smoothly, it allows desired actions to proceed while preventing unwanted ones from breaking into conscious behavior. In Tourette’s, that gating system is unstable. Fragments of motor programs “leak” through. Many individuals with Tourette’s describe a rising internal tension, or pressure, that’s temporarily relieved when the tic occurs.

Also, only about 10% of people with Tourette’s have coprolalia, which is what makes you say offensive things. Emotionally charged language — especially taboo words — activates limbic structures more strongly. These words carry high emotional weight and are tightly regulated by social norms. It’s precisely because of this that they are heavily “tagged” by inhibitory systems. It’s a survival mechanism. The brain marks these words as powerful and potentially dangerous in social contexts. So in a way, you could say Davidson had that tic not because he’s racist, as some have foolishly claimed, but because he’s not, and therefore in his mind flagged that word as extremely taboo. You could also say this happened because leftist black Americans and their woke allies have decided to make the word the most taboo word in the English language, investing it with so much social power that it becomes the most likely word to get tagged in a way that would turn it into a tic.

I truly feel for Davidson. This latest chapter in the culture war is so frustratingly stupid it’s like a really bad episode of The Jerry Springer Show. And yet this is a painful but needed reminder for our nation that the absurd hypersensitivity Americans have around the word “nigger” is actually really unhealthy and will inevitably lead to situations in which innocent people are trampled over pretend harms, which is precisely what happened here. We should be ashamed of ourselves for becoming so profoundly unkind in the name of kindness. In the end, that’s the real takeaway. But I have two personal stories I’d like to share about this word before I go.

One is that I remember sitting with my cousin Anthony one time when someone used the word “nigger” nearby. My mother’s side of the family is Bahamian and most of my relatives down there are black, including Anthony. I grew up with him, have taken great pride in watching him mature into manhood, brag about him all the time to anyone who will listen, and love him very much. At the time, we were out at a bar drinking Hennessy and talking about life. He was beginning to show an interest in electrical engineering, an interest that only blossomed since, and he was telling me about building circuit boards and how he was using them with electromagnets when someone in the crowd shouted the word in anger and it sliced the air.

Although the person wasn’t directing it at Anthony, I noticed a subtle shift in his expression, a kind of flinch like he’d been jabbed with a small needle, and even though I know that unconscious pain is something society has helped shape in him by convincing him the word has such power, nevertheless he has been convinced, and now that he has, it does hold that power for him, and so while I want the word to lose that power, I also don’t want him or others to suffer hearing such hateful terms and then feel that twinge of pain. Nobody wants those they love to feel hurt. But also, Anthony is much younger than me, and as such, I have always looked on him as a kid brother. Maybe it’s the protective big brother in me, but I don’t want him to harbor that pain either. I want him to outgrow it. I want him to be someone who, if a racist spat that word in his face, wouldn’t tremble and run home to nurse his injured soul. Instead, I want him to be someone who’d shrug and think to himself, What a piece of shit, but otherwise feel nothing. And if hearing the word more often means it loses its sting and hurts him less in the long run, I think that’s the better path.

The other story I want to share is that when I was teaching in China, a student named Hang once asked me if there were any words he should know to avoid using when he visited America. Naturally, the first one that came to my mind was “nigger.” That, above all words in America, is the one you don’t want to say. And I knew that he was a fan of rap music, so there was a risk. I wrote “nigger” on the board along with a few other words to avoid. Also, in Mandarin Chinese, the filler word used when you’re thinking what to say next, where you would say “um” in English, is neige, literally meaning “that.” But it can sound like “nigga,” depending on one’s accent. I told him to be careful about that too. A teacher who worked in the same building as me, an American woman, saw what was on the board and became livid. Even though I explained to her what I had been doing, she didn’t care. There was no reasoning with her. I thought she had nearly lost her sanity. This was long before “woke” existed in a pejorative sense, and I had been living in Asia at this point for nearly 20 years so I was out of touch with American society. I had no earthly idea back then that so many of my fellow citizens would take her side, given half the chance.

Clearly, when we are attacking disabled individuals for having a disability, things have gone horribly wrong. And when it comes to this word, things went wrong a long time ago. We should’ve never pretended that any single word can be so powerful, and we should’ve never taken anyone seriously who claimed to be so mortally wounded by the word that its speaker ought to pay some price. We should’ve never stopped reading Huck Finn out loud. We should’ve never fired any professors who did. We should’ve never stopped singing our favorite rap lyrics. There was a girl who got in trouble in the UK because she posted her dead friend’s favorite rap lyrics on Instagram in memory of him, and that should’ve never happened. There was a professor who got in trouble for teaching Mandarin grammar by explaining the filler I mentioned above, and that too should’ve never happened. This is all absolutely insane, but it’s also the direct consequence of our sensitivity around this word and around racism in general. Yes, kids, racism is bad. It’s evil. But words are not evil. Not even really, really hateful words. However, if you make a word taboo, you won’t have to wait very long before somebody gets hurt because they used it.

Because of this, we should all stop using “the N-word” as a replacement because this suggests that “nigger” is so incredibly harmful that it cannot even be uttered or reproduced in print, not even in reference to the word itself. So maybe we should just go one step further and remove it from the dictionary. I’m kidding, of course. That would be the height of pearl-clutching buffoonery. Except guess what, it’s already happened. That is how you invest a word with such power that we end up with situations like Davidson being crucified as a shitty person simply because he has a disability. But while we’re on the topic, where did “the N-word” come from? Here’s Wikipedia:

One of the first uses of the N-word euphemism by a major public figure came during the racially contentious O.J. Simpson murder case in 1995. Key prosecution witness Detective Mark Fuhrman, of the Los Angeles Police Department—who denied using racist language on duty—impeached himself with his prolific use of nigger in tape recordings about his police work. Co-prosecutor Christopher Darden refused to say the actual word, calling it “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” Media personnel who reported on Fuhrman’s testimony substituted the N-word for nigger.

The tapes became one of the most explosive moments of the trial and were devastating to the prosecution. Darden, himself a black man, did not defend the language. But in court, he made a show of describing it as the worst word in history and refused to repeat it. Did he really mean every bit of that, or was some small share of his rhetoric merely courtroom theatrics? I leave that to you to decide, but imagine for a moment if the entire country went down this insane path simply because one lawyer wanted to make a rhetorical point in court and played it up a little too much.

Not to mention, why is this the only word we cannot say? Why are blacks the only people in existence whose slur you cannot speak? Jews suffered slavery for twice as long as black Americans and genocide, yet we don’t go around saying “the K-word” as a replacement for “kike.” Nor should we. But one thing I will say for SNL is that although I thought their joke was in poor taste, I appreciate that they are free enough to make it. But even if I opposed them making it, I still wouldn’t want to censor the skit because I know that’s a sure-fire way to amplify it. If we really want to drain this dirty term of its racist potency, we should consider permanently retiring “the N-word” and teaching new generations of children the old rhyme about sticks and stones.

From the feed

“You are hated across the world! If you don’t know this, you should! The people burn your flag! The Islamic peoples all over the world chant, Death to America!”

– Ali Khamenei in response to President Obama’s diplomatic outreach in 2009.

Khamenei is dead. Death to Khamenei.

It’s hard to know the pleasure Edward R. Murrow must’ve felt when he became the first journalist, reporting for CBS News from London in 1945, to announce the death of Adolf Hitler. I am certainly not the first to report Khamenei’s death. But I imagine the feeling was not terribly different. When I heard the news, like many Iranians, I felt relief. I thought of my Iranian loved ones and their families. But also, like many Iranians, I understood this victory could come at such a devastating cost it may be the same as losing. We could end up in a protracted war. Iranian society could collapse into even darker chaos. We could see economic shocks and regional instability ripple across Gulf economies. Domestic conflict could fracture along ethnic and tribal lines. If Tehran blocks or disrupts the Strait of Hormuz, global oil prices will spike and stock markets will fall. And, for all this, the regime may still be standing when the dust settles. But on the other hand, Khamenei, who ruled from 1989 until his assassination on Saturday, and who was the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East and the longest-serving Iranian leader since the Shah, had become one of the most evil dictators on the planet. Eliminating him may come at great cost, but leaving him in power was hardly a peaceful alternative.

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In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of slavery as a grave moral wrong and of the Civil War as perhaps a form of divine judgment against both sides for tolerating the practice. His point was that if justice demands a terrible cost, then we must recognize that cost as just. Not to celebrate it, but to accept and solemnly pay the price. Truly, there are only a few genuine slave states in the world today, by which I mean places where every living person is effectively a slave. North Korea is such a place. The entire country is essentially one massive concentration camp. Eritrea, Syria, and Iran too. But the list is short because few countries in the world are so unfree. Nothing in China or even Russia comes close. However, while North Korea and Syria are too crippled by their own dysfunction to have any meaningful impact beyond their own borders, Iran is quite powerful by comparison, earning significant revenue from crude oil and petroleum products, despite international sanctions. It uses the profits to tighten the screws on its people and terrorize the world by funding terrorist groups in half a dozen countries. Iran has also tried for decades to develop nuclear weapons and its leaders, especially Khamenei, have repeatedly said they want to destroy Israel. Now Iranians, who have suffered in hell for half a century, might finally be free. It’s too early to say, but should this end with elections, it will be America’s greatest victory in the name of democracy since we defeated the Nazis.

But what makes Khamenei so uniquely bad? Being a brutal dictator who kills thousands of his own people is not enough to stand out in the Muslim world, sadly. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurdish civilians of Iraq and carried out mass executions, torture, and political purges. In Syria, Hafez al-Assad ordered the Hama massacre. In Sudan, Omar al-Bashir carried out the Darfur genocide. In Iran, Khamenei’s predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini oversaw extensive political purges and executions. But Khamenei did something that would set him apart from every other Muslim dictator in history. Simply put, he became the father of Islamofascism, and he did this by fusing theocratic authority with state bureaucratic power. Other Muslim dictators — monarchs in Saudi Arabia or secular military strongmen in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq — have ruled through state institutions or personal command, but Khamenei institutionalized clerical authority itself into the core organs of state power. His office became an administrative and executive nerve center that controlled the military, courts, media, everything. Such constitutionalized clerical supremacy is unique in the Muslim world. He then made the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) the brutal spine of his regime, using it like an Iranian Schutzstaffel (SS) to enforce control and literally kill reform movements.

Khamenei was no less bloodthirsty than his counterparts in Syria or Sudan, but he possessed an apparatus of surveillance and police violence that allowed him to execute his will with greater severity and precision than Assad or Bashir could ever imagine. Khamenei regularly executed dissidents and violently repressed protests in 1999, 2009, 2019, and 2022. He never carried out an industrial genocide comparable to Hussein’s campaign in Anfal or Bashir’s campaign in Darfur, but the domestic brutalization of his people was more systematic and universal. His security forces and militias carried out systematic campaigns of torture, rape, and murder against the people of Iran. To give just one example, when the 22-year-old Masha Amini didn’t wear her headscarf properly, police murdered her in September 2022. When people protested, security forces arrested almost 20,000 citizens, killed over 500, held public trials for over 1,000, and executed several. Protests broke out more recently after the collapse of the Iranian rial, which plunged to historic lows in late December 2025, putting unbearable pressure on shop keepers and merchants in Tehran. The protests soon expanded to include broader political discontent. The government responded by throwing the nation into an internet blackout and slaughtering up to 30,000 people in the darkness. Men and women protesters, including minors, are currently being gang raped in custody before being killed.

Iran also visits hell upon the rest of the world by supporting various terrorist groups with funding, weapons, and training. This includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi movement in Yemen. In Gaza and the West Bank, Iran supports Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. Iran supports Al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada in Iraq and Syria, Fatemiyoun Division in Syria and Afghanistan, Zeinabiyoun Brigade in Syria and Pakistan — as well as Harakat al-Nujaba, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, and Al-Mukhtar Brigades in Iraq. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel, attacked kibbutzim and towns, shot civilians in their homes and at a music festival, set houses on fire, killed families at close range, and abducted more than 200 people, including children and the elderly, dragging them back into dark tunnels under Gaza as hostages. Hamas and multiple other groups were directly responsible, but Iran was the puppet master. Hezbollah’s long record includes suicide bombings such as the 1983 Beirut barracks attack, which killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers, as well as rocket campaigns deliberately aimed at civilian population centers in northern Israel during the 2006 war, forcing mass evacuations and killing non-combatants. In Syria, Hezbollah units and Iran-organized militias fought alongside the Assad regime, which used sarin and chlorine gas against its own people in Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Shaykhun in 2017, which makes breathing painful, fills your lungs with fluid, and drowns you in your own phlegm. And yes, Iran helped Syria develop those chemical weapons too.

In his address announcing Khamenei’s assassination, President Trump said:

From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts. And it was Iran’s proxy, Hamas, that launched the monstrous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. … Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. … They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore. … For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally obliterated. We’re going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces … To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. … Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.

Prediction markets tend to have some interesting takes on geopolitical events and the major ones are currently trying to forecast Khamenei’s successor. On Polymarket, 36% of forecasters say the next supreme leader of Iran will be Alireza Arafi, the hardliner cleric who has served as head of Iran’s seminaries since 2016, while only 13% say it will be Hassan Khomeini, Ruhollah’s grandson, and only 9% say Mojtaba Khamenei, the second eldest child of Ali Khamenei. On Kalshi, 37% say it will be Arafi while only 14% name Mojtaba. But only 43% of forecasters on Polymarket say the regime will fall by June 30 and only 20% on Metaculus say the U.S. will control Tehran within one year. So the crowdsourced betting is basically saying the successor gets named pretty quickly, but there’s real uncertainty about whether the system holds together or the whole thing crumbles.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts Iran’s allies. China and Russia have both got huge investments in Iran’s oil and infrastructure, but they’re not gonna ride in and save Khamenei’s regime militarily. Also, what of Khamenei’s whole strategy with the “Axis of Resistance” network made up of terrorist groups? With him gone, all those proxy relationships get wobbly. This could end up being the terrorist version of the Soviet collapse in 1991, after which all the states propped up by Soviet cashflows rapidly shriveled. But one thing is certain, Israel has truly had a remarkable run. They decimated Hamas leadership in Gaza through sustained airstrikes and ground operations, took out Hezbollah’s command structure with that staggering pager operation that killed thousands with a Thanos snap, and now they’ve just eliminated Iran’s supreme leader in a joint operation with the United States. Israel has fundamentally reshaped the regional balance of power in its favor in just a few months.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The Israel Century is dawning.

Now we get to watch who fills the power vacuum. Will it be reformers or hardliners? Will the IRGC consolidate power around a single leader and maintain business as usual? Or will we see a prolonged power struggle between factions that last months and makes energy markets unpriceable? Or will one of the most destabilizing and horrific places in the world become a liberal democracy? Will Iranians overseas now be able to visit their homeland before they die? Unfortunately, I am not as hopeful as I would like to be. History suggests that killing a long-entrenched leader often hardens political rule and can escalate conflict, especially when their loyalists fill the halls of power and number in the thousands. This may prove to be a momentary tactical triumph that only propels decades of even more instability. In the end, I fear the only way theocracy will ever leave Iran is the same way it came in. Namely, through violent popular revolution. So maybe killing Khamenei doesn’t give Iran its freedom back. But it sure as hell kicks down the door. Besides, a moral victory is only a loss to a cynic.

The Apple Music Super Bowl LX halftime show opened in a sugar cane field with Bad Bunny singing in Spanish about girls sucking his dick, featuring guest appearances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, some rapping about fucking girls with big tits in his car with his erect penis, then the dancers waved the flags of various Latin American countries with a sign that read, “Together, we are America,” and Bunny listed the countries of the Americas. At least it was entertaining. The political message was about as subtle as anything else Bad Bunny writes. We are all American. All Latinos are American. All the illegal immigrants coming to America from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras are American. Love defeats hate. Oppose ICE. Or something like that. The guy’s not exactly a philosopher.

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When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime headliner, the reaction was immediate. For some, the choice felt inevitable. The Puerto Rican rapper is the most streamed artist in the world, as he was in 2020, 2021, and 2022. The Swifties defeated the Bunnies in 2023 and 2024, but Benito Martínez, the “King of Latin Trap,” was next to the top both years. Not to mention, he’s a global pop figure whose reach extends far beyond the U.S. music industry, and quite a force within that industry too, having won multiple Grammys, including Album of the Year for an all-Spanish album.

Está pegao.

But for others, the halftime show felt like a provocation. Less an entertainment booking than a cultural statement about language, identity, and who the Super Bowl is for, actually. It also comes at a time when America is debating who America is for, which is also a debate about illegal immigration and ICE tactics, about Trump and his over-correction to woke ideology, and about what we want America to be and who we want to be a part of it. There’s more talk these days about Christian values, Christian nationalism is on the rise, and white conservatives, who have been shamed on the basis of their race for years, are now more openly advocating for white conservative values. Thanks to half a decade of woke politics, they are also no longer cowed by accusations of racism for expressing group self-interest just as blacks, Asians, and Latinos have always done. The immigration crisis has only crystallized those concerns. President Biden allowed in crisis levels of illegal immigrants and efforts to clean up the mess have led not only to ICE abuses of fundamental American rights, but protesters who compare ICE to the Gestapo while trying to prevent immigration officials from deporting child rapists. Meanwhile, President Trump consistently turns the temperature up rather than assuring the public that violations of civil liberties will not be tolerated.

Bad Bunny chose to insert himself into the center of all this. Wisely perhaps, given the attention it has earned him. In the weeks before the Super Bowl, he used his platform at the 2026 Grammys to call for abolishing ICE. During his speech, he said, “Before I say thanks to God, I gotta say, ICE out! We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We are humans and we are Americans. The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” At the halftime show, he expanded on the idea that “we are Americans,” meaning everyone in the Americas. I’ve encountered this before, this sensitivity to the word “American” being used by Americans to mean someone from the United States. Certain Latino social justice warriors will even correct you if you introduce yourself as American. It’s a stupid argument because the name “United States of America” clearly lends itself to only one reasonable demonym — “American” — as opposed to whatever country the Latino complaining about this comes from.

Also, you never hear such people critique the fact that they call themselves “Latino,” even though this does not come from Spanish being a Romance language, but from the fact that France wanted to be able to lay claim to the New World and compete with Spain for territory. So France popularized “Latin America” as an alternative to “Spanish America” so that Spanish-speaking people of the New World could be reframed as belonging not simply to a Spanish family, but a Latin one that also included France. In other words, Latinos calling themselves Latino has more direct colonial roots than Americans calling themselves American. But also, Latinos calling themselves Latinos — but not French, Italian, Spanish, or other members of the Latin World — is an exclusionary synecdoche. It’s the same as when Americans call themselves American but not other people from the Americas. In other words, Latinos who complain about this, yet refer to themselves as Latino, are doing a worse version of the same thing they are complaining about.

And that’s to say nothing of ICE’s legitimate law enforcement efforts. Or the optics of having an outspoken anti-ICE Latino rap about blowjobs in Spanish while lecturing Americans on diversity. The media loved it, of course. In fact, their applause was almost orgiastic. Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg called it “the most impressively conceived and executed Super Bowl halftime production I’ve ever seen,” adding that it was “vital in every imaginable definition of the word.” Vital in every imaginable definition of the word? You can almost hear Fienberg weeping for the Puerto Rican sugarcane workers as he writes. Also, is it just me or is “vital” giving off the same energy as calling Caitlyn Jenner “brave”? Nor does giving the quote in context make it sound any less 2020 woke:

Am I sure there were nuances to the cultural specificity being articulated that there’s no way a 40-something white guy could possibly get? Absolutely.

Do I hope some publications have Puerto Rican writers exploring and decoding those nuances? I surely do.

But here’s the thing I know with certainty: When I don’t understand something, I can either attempt to do a little research and follow a few links and learn about the things I couldn’t process in the moment, or I can complain. And, honestly, why would anybody in their right mind complain? Because I understood that the halftime show was about life and humanity and telling a story in a way that’s nearly without Super Bowl precedent. It was vital in every imaginable definition of the word. It was necessary and it was alive and it was musical, well beyond a simple set list.

Obviously, anyone decoding the nuances of a Bad Bunny halftime show would have to be Puerto Rican, right? Give me a break. Imagine the caucasity of being white and looking things up. What I like about this article is that Fienberg openly admits the show flew right over his head — and even hints that it might be racist to do some googling to educate oneself — while nevertheless giddily clapping for it all. He reminds one of a gay pro-Hamas protester or one of those Minnesota anti-ICE protesters who end up defending a child rapist from deportation. Basically, a useful idiot for an ostensibly noble cause, at least once you’ve pressure-washed all the nuance from its surface. Here, I suppose, that cause is diversity.

You see, Bad Bunny’s halftime performance signals the mainstreaming of Latin culture in America at a time when Latinos make up 20% of the population. The problem is, this abrasive performance was also totally unnecessary. It comes off like a celebration of Latino diversity, as if America has finally reached a moment when Latinos can be themselves. We’re here — deal with it. Except Latinos don’t need any mainstreaming. Shakira and J. Lo already did the halftime. Despacito was the No. 1 song in the United States and everybody loved it. Coco is one of the biggest Disney movies of all time. Chipotle is everywhere. Americans love Latin culture. Bad Bunny is declaring victory in a war that no longer exists. That’s because the subtext here is Trump, ICE, and immigration. And I’m sorry, but if that’s the conversation we’re having, then we are not all Americans.

I love Latin america. I have lived in many parts, including Puerto Rico. I am married to a Latina and we have a Latina daughter. I speak Spanish, I cook Latin food, and I dance salsa. Latin culture is a permanent part of my everyday life. Saying that we are not all Americans is not in any way disrespectful to Latinos. It’s just a fact. I also lived in Japan, speak Japanese, and adore its culture. But Japanese are not Americans either. And Bad Bunny framing the message in terms of love doesn’t make this any less true. Nor should we fall so easily for his oafish political stunt. In Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny has another nickname in addition to “King of Trap”—Benito el Comunista. That’s because his far-left politics are well-known to his fellow Boricuas. Notice how he chants the names of Latin American countries when he can use them to shame the United States for enforcing its own immigration laws, but where were his calls of solidarity all these years as Venezuela suffered under Maduro? Or as Nicaraguans suffered under Ortega? Where were his calls for the people of Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia? Nowhere, that’s where. Because when has he ever cared about anything taking place outside his own pants? Like pro-Palestinian protesters who are more animated by hatred of Israel than concern for the children of Gaza, Bad Bunny only pretends to care about his fellow Latinos because that gives him moral cover to attack the United States in the name of the oppressed.

Writing for The Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli described it as “close to art” and “a cultural moment, a paradigm shift.” Time characterized the show as “a fierce act of resistance” and “a sharp cultural and history lesson.” I could go on, but I’ll spare you. What I won’t spare you, however, are his lyrics. Yes, I’m exactly the kind of white-privileged male that Fienberg is taking about. One who looks things up. Here are some selected lyrics from the song “Safaera,” which Bad Bunny sang during the show:

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (push it in)
Pussy with dick, dick with ass, yes (push it in)
Pussy with dick, dick with ass (push it in)
Your tits rubbing my nipples (push it in) …

Really big tits like Lourdes Chacón
Really big ass like Iris Chacón
I don't know why I haven’t seen the pussy
But let’s go to bed to fuck you in panties …

I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt
To see what is hidden in your pants
I want to grind on you and grind on you and grind on you (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and grind on you and grind (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt, a blunt (hard, hard)
The ecstasy is already kicking in …

My dick is being chased and I want you to hide it
Grab it like a bonga
She took a pill that made her horny
She fucks in the Audi, not in the Honda, ayy
If I give it to you, don’t call me
Cause this is not to make you love me, ayy
If your boyfriend doesn’t eat your ass
He better fuck off

Come down to my house, I’ll lick it all up
Mami, I’ll lick it all up
Come down to my house, I’ll wear you out, ayy
I’ll wear you out
Come down to my house, I’ll lick it all up (papi, keep going!)
Mami, I’ll lick it all up (papi, keep going!)
Tell me, servant (papi, keep going)
If you smoke weed (papi, pa-papi) …

The dealer is twerking (hard!)
It seems like she fucks well while high
I want to take a selfie with that huge ass (wow)
Erect, erect, I’m erect, and it shows (whoa, whoa)
What are we gonna do with that huge ass?
In university they’re all A, A, A
But those tits are C
You are super horny, mami, I already know
I’m also horny, what are we gonna do?
With that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
Go crazy with that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
If you have that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
If you have that bum-bum, go crazy, buoh!

You can decide whether you think the Super Bowl should be family-friendly or whether that ship has sailed. But I don’t think the English equivalent of this song would be allowed. So then what’s going on here? That’s the part that bothers me most about this latest flashpoint in our culture wars. I couldn’t care less whether Bad Bunny performed. I don’t watch the Super Bowl. But it’s the attempt to bullshit me, to gaslight me, to get away with something as if I wouldn’t notice, that rubs the wrong way. For example, to sing about girls sucking you off in front of millions of Americans and then pretend that people are objecting simply because they don’t like the sound of Spanish. Oh, because xenophobia is the problem, is it? Or as if Americans have a serious anti-Latino issue that needs addressing.

Or that, because I want immigration law enforcement, I am therefore anti-diversity. Or that I am racist because I feel no personal guilt over historical colonialism and have no desire to be lectured on tolerance by people who come from cultures that are staggeringly more racist, sexist, and homophobic than modern American culture is by any measure. And here’s a pro-tip. While I do like some of his songs, “DtMF” especially, a Puerto Rican lapdog who humps everyone’s leg is not exactly the MLK of the anti-ICE movement you were looking for.

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

– Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

On Saturday, 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was walking down the middle of Nicollet Avenue during an immigration enforcement operation, four miles from where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. He was filming Border Patrol agents with his phone when one of them pepper sprayed a nearby woman to force her off the road. Pretti tried to help her. When the agent sprayed Pretti and began pushing him off the road too, he resisted. The agent threw Pretti to the ground and other agents came to help subdue him. There was a scuffle. One agent yelled that Pretti had a gun. Another agent removed a SIG Sauer 9mm from Pretti’s belt and walked away with it. That particular gun model is notorious for easily misfiring, and it may have gone off as the agent walked away with it, though it’s hard to say. Suddenly, with his arms pinned near his head, Pretti was shot 10 times in five seconds.

Hours earlier, 50,000 people had taken to the streets of Minneapolis in minus 20-degree weather to block immigration enforcement and demand that ICE leave the state. Minnesota is now the burning focal point of our national immigration debate and will likely become the greatest organizing center for leftists since Gaza or George Floyd. The Trump administration’s posture toward the crisis appears to be fuck around and find out. Powder keg, match.

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Only weeks earlier, and mere blocks away, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, during an enforcement action. After blocking agents with her car, Good’s wife Becca taunted them to fight then told Good, “Drive, baby, drive!” Agents rushed the car and told Good to get out. Instead, she gunned it, appearing either to flee the scene or attempt to murder the agent with her car, depending on who you voted for in the last presidential election. It was yet another case of one screen, two films. Was she simply trying to drive away? Should she have put it in park when the agent told her to get out? Was she trying to run the agent over? Is it relevant that she and her wife were members of Minnesota ICE Watch, a local chapter focused on resisting lawful ICE operations? Is it relevant that Agent Ross, the man who shot her, had recently been dragged by a vehicle? These questions were debated for days, but the answers were mostly predetermined. Again, I can predict what you think about Good’s death by asking whether you think a trans woman is a woman, whether you think vaccines cause autism, or how you choose to pronounce the name Kamala. And that should disturb us all.

Ironically, left-wing protesters who oppose ICE as authoritarian are often the same ones who support the Iranian regime, the Russian regime, the Maduro regime, and the “liberation” of Palestine. Of course, a similar point can be made in the other direction. When it comes to political hypocrisy, clean hands are few in the crowd.

Nor are these deaths isolated in the broader context of President Trump’s expansion of ICE operations, under which federal agents have now killed a total of five people nationwide. One was a man who tried to flee. One was a man who fired a rifle at an agent. One was a man who tried to drag an agent to death with his car. One was Good. One was Pretti. For the sake of argument, let’s shove aside all nuance and say two of these deaths were self-defense while the other three were psychopathic public executions, even though the circumstances around Good and Pretti’s deaths are still fiercely debated. Let’s also ignore the fact that Pretti wasn’t killed by ICE, but by Border Patrol, and add his death to the tally. That means over the past 12 months, ICE and officials working with them have killed three innocent people in the process of making 328,000 arrests. Even one death is too many, but that’s actually a very low rate for law enforcement. Even if we count all five deaths, that’s one per 65,600 arrests. By comparison, the New York Police Department made 189,774 arrests and fatally shot 13 people in 2022, which pencils out to one death per 14,598 arrests. This means ICE efforts are more than four times safer, so why isn’t Mamdani calling for the abolition of the NYPD?

Obviously, this is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, nor is it meant to be. I’m simply highlighting the prevalence of lethal force as a ratio of arrests in order to illustrate how dangerous immigration agents are, or are not. But we should also acknowledge that though these numbers are relevant, they are not what people are reacting to when they oppose ICE. They are reacting to masked men roaming the streets, or drive-by macing people, or throwing bags over people’s heads for no reason but expressing a constitutionally protected opinion, as recently unsealed documents show. They feel, as communities, they are under attack. And Trump’s rhetoric does nothing to ease those fears. But if agents are being compared to Nazis, and if that is encouraging already fearful people to take violent action, then it’s also important to point out that despite their often thuggish and brutish behavior, these agents are not actually going around killing people. Quite the opposite. That said, a friend of mine is an immigration lawyer who has worked in the field for many years and to hear him tell it, this new batch is indeed distinct in their behavior. “They were always a bit surly, confrontational, high school caricatures, but bearable, ultimately bare-minimum professional,” he tells me. “The same cannot be said of the new goons.”

But as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently observed:

It’s a complicated political thing because you’ll see polls now where voters will say, “I don’t approve of Trump’s immigration policy, maybe I even support defunding ICE.” But then you’re asked, “Who do you trust more on immigration, Republicans or Democrats?” And they still say Republicans, right? But I think the basic challenge for the Trump administration is, they see themselves, I think reasonably, as having been elected on a promise to conduct mass deportations. I think you can make a case, and I would make a case, that with better training and different hiring practices and so on, you could reduce abuses and reduce, you know, some of the things that show up in everybody’s social media feed right now. At the same time, there is a way in which ICE has always done raids in immigrant neighborhoods that, you know, arrest sympathetic-seeming people or, you know, pick up people who don’t have infractions while going after someone who does have infractions. Like, what we’re seeing right now is just what ICE normally does, but times three, or times four, or times five. And a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with it. But it’s not clear to me that there’s some other way that the Trump administration can say to themselves, “We’re pursuing this policy,” that would be vastly more popular. Maybe somewhat more popular. But I don’t know.

He later went on to add:

But there is a larger sense among conservatives, basically, that the Biden era was a kind of revelation of what liberals and Democrats, or at least the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, really wants to do, right? That, for a long time, you had liberals who were favorably disposed to immigration but always said, “Well, of course, we’re not for open borders.” But finally, they got the chance, and it effectively was open borders for two or three years. And then they sort of felt like they needed to, I mean, you can say it’s not open borders. We can have the debate. But if you just look at a chart of the sheer number of people who came in in the first three years of the Biden administration, it was an unprecedented wave of immigration, unlike any basically in my lifetime. You don’t have to call it “open borders,” but imagine yourself as a conservative skeptic of immigration watching this happen. And then you basically decide that if you, when your party is in power, can’t conduct substantial deportation, then you’re in a kind of sucker’s game where the Democrats are in power, they let 5 million people in, the Republicans take power, they secure the borders for a while, don’t do anything about immigration, then the Democrats come into power and do it all over again. So behind Stephen Miller is this sense that we can’t let the Democrats get away with that. And again, the fact that Republicans still are slightly more trusted than Democrats suggests that this is not just a kind of hard-right concern. And the other thing to note is that it is, in fact, true what the Department of Homeland Security keeps saying, that a policy that’s focused just on deporting people in jails and people with criminal records does yield some kind of conflict with sanctuary city laws and rules in liberal jurisdictions. They’re not making that up.

You may be wondering why agents are walking around Minneapolis in the first place. The reason is, they’re carrying out their assigned duties under the ongoing Operation Metro Surge. That means they are actively patrolling public streets looking for individuals believed to be in the country unlawfully. But they’re not just eyeballing people and asking to see their papers. Instead, ICE typically operates off pre-existing information such as target lists with names, photos, and criminal records. This is why operations often happen outside businesses, on sidewalks, in parking lots, and near apartment buildings. They’re positioning themselves where a known target is expected to appear. And some of the people they’re going after are truly evil—rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers. Last month, a dozen men were arrested in Minneapolis. One was a pedophile. One was convicted of robbery, fraud, and domestic assault. One was convicted of domestic abuse and assaulting a peace officer. One was allegedly a gang member with a long list of criminal convictions. Of course, this requires us to take federal authorities at their word, to some degree, and that’s a tall order these days. But I have found no evidence to suggest ICE arrest records are falsified. Or that they are going after Mexican housemaids and Somali truck drivers. And as you can see below, they’re getting a lot more criminals than Biden did. But I don’t remember anti-ICE protests under him.

Speaking of hypocrisy, what of the fact that there were also no ICE protests under President Obama? On the contrary, his ICE chief received an award for 920,000 removals while Trump’s ICE chief was called a Nazi—even though they’re the same person: Tom Homan. It gets worse. In 2012, Obama deported 409,000 people. In 2025, Trump only deported 290,000 people. And yes, innocent people were killed under Obama’s ICE efforts too. There was Anastasio Hernández-Rojas, who was killed after repeated taser and beating by U.S. Border Patrol officers during an immigration detention dispute. There was José Rodríguez, a young boy killed when an agent fired 16 shots at him—and was later acquitted of murder. Indeed, an investigative project found that between 2015 and 2021, ICE officers were involved in 59 shootings across 26 states, resulting in injuries and deaths. But no anti-ICE protests. Obama was not compared to Hitler. People in Minneapolis did not view ICE agents as Gestapo.

One of my own family members, on the Latino side, is a woman I simply refer to as Tía, which means “aunt” in Spanish, even though she’s not actually my aunt. Tía once had her own experience with U.S. immigration under the Obama administration. At the time, she was a 59-year-old woman who barely spoke English and had lived illegally in the United States for 10 years. She worked as a nanny and was deeply beloved by the families who employed her. With the money she made, Tía was able to help feed and support her family back home in Peru. She helped her sons and daughters, her grandchildren, helped pay for their school, their hospital bills, and was a raft for nearly two dozen people.

One year for Thanksgiving, she took a Greyhound to visit family down in Florida. Immigration officials commonly run Greyhound operations, and will wait for the buses to come to a stop and then arrest everybody because they know most illegals can’t fly. So they were at the bus station when she got to Miami. It was midnight when they got there, and ICE came onto the bus and started arresting everybody. She was an old woman, thin as paper, on the edge of 60, and couldn’t communicate well. They started grabbing people, violently, dragging them off the bus without explaining to them who they were or what was happening. They didn’t punch her or anything. But they yanked her by her arm, dragged her down the aisle, and shoved her down the steps. The detention facility was horrible. The conditions were filthy and cold. There were people inside with terrible wounds to their faces and bodies, inflicted by ICE agents. They gave people $1 a day for food. In detention, she met an old woman from Poland who had been racing to the hospital because her husband was dying. That’s how she got caught. Pulled over for speeding. When they arrested her, they didn’t arrest her American husband, of course, but she had no idea what happened to him. She asked my family to visit different hospitals looking for him because no officials would help her or even talk to her. My family tried to find him, visiting every hospital in the area, but found nothing. To this day, it’s a mystery. But we know that the woman got deported back to Poland.

There are three reasons for the crisis. First, Trump is being aggressive. He should have better messaging, more concern for harm done to innocent people, and a zero-tolerance policy any time agents hurt innocent people or violate their constitutional rights in any way. That is not happening and it’s a national disgrace. Moreover, he and his administration should be held to a higher standard when it comes to such things because they have more authority, both legal and moral, than either Walz or Frey. Second, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023, thanks to Biden’s refusal to address the problem. Critics claim this was intentional because seats in the U.S. House are apportioned based on the number of people, not citizens. Third, Democratic leaders have encouraged resistance to Trump’s immigration efforts. Over 77 million Americans voted Trump into office, and immigration was one of the primary reasons why. Yet Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has refused to cooperate with Trump’s immigration efforts. He has called Trump a fascist. More recently, he referred to ICE as Nazi forces. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has said he will not cooperate with the federal government. He has told ICE to “get the fuck out of our city.” Meanwhile, I have seen half a dozen or more Instagram videos of leftists saying, “Kill ICE,” “Shoot them in the face,” “This is fucking war.” And I have seen footage of protests that looked like war zones. Is it any surprise that if you rile people up in this way, convince them they are literally fighting Nazis, and support them in trying to obstruct justice, that someone might get hurt?

Walz and Frey should be cooperating with federal agents while also working to turn the temperature down. They have done the exact opposite. In Tennessee, three out of every four ICE arrests occurred at a local jail or other lockup—quiet, controlled, no bystanders, no confrontations. It could have been this way in Minnesota too. Instead, violent encounters with ICE are 590 times more likely to take place in just nine non-cooperating counties than in the country’s remaining 3,134 counties. Minneapolis is one of them. Good and Pretti’s blood is on Walz and Frey’s hands too.

Ultimately, none of this negates the core principle that no violation of civil liberties can be tolerated. Federal authority does not excuse excessive force, nor does political opposition justify violence against law-enforcement officers. Americans did vote for stricter immigration enforcement when they elected Trump, who ran explicitly on that issue, and federal agencies are executing laws enacted by Congress and upheld by the courts. But at the same time, the legitimacy of law enforcement rests on restraint, accountability, and adherence to constitutional standards. For an excellent analysis of the laws surrounding protester rights, the shooting of Alex Pretti, and relevant First Amendment concerns, I recommend the essay below.

Expression

The Alex Pretti shooting and the growing strain on the First Amendment

On Saturday, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by United States Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. The tragic loss of life, and the Trump administration’s response, de…

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5 months ago · 39 likes · 8 comments · Aaron Terr

Only a thorough, independent examination grounded in evidence can determine what went wrong this past weekend, who bears responsibility, and how similar tragedies might be prevented in the future. But Pretti’s tragic death stands as a reminder that unresolved conflicts between lawful police mandates and political opposition carry real human costs. The deaths in Minnesota represent a profound failure of policy, political rhetoric, and human judgment. They demand sober investigation rather than reflexive justification or blanket condemnation. But those answers are slow-coming, and the fear in people’s hearts is palpable. It is a dark day in America when enforcement of the law and preservation of liberty appear to be in direct conflict, and when lives are lost in the space between political absolutism and institutional responsibility. But the fact is, Alex Pretti would be alive today if he’d been standing on a street in Nashville instead of Minneapolis. That is not a defense of ICE abuses. But Democratic politicians who willfully turned Minnesota into a theater of confrontation don’t get to act surprised when the curtain comes down on someone.

From the feed

About a year ago, I attended a beautiful party and ended up standing at the back of the room talking to a beautiful woman. As she listened, she gave her full attention. When she spoke, she did not raise her voice. There was a kind of restraint in her presence that communicated power, and wisdom, but with a playful flicker in her eyes. I could tell she probably had a good sense of humor. She was small of stature and elegant of poise, carrying herself with quiet authority, the way confidence settles upon some people who have seen enough of the world or lived long enough that they no longer need to prove a single thing to anyone. In her case, both things were true. I want to say she was maybe in her late 60s, and had made the long journey to the West from Iran, created a new life for herself, and raised a beautiful young son as a single mother. I remember thinking, one doesn’t often get to meet a woman like this. And, though I’ve only met a few women from Iran, they all had this aspect about them, this resolute strength, though I’ve never seen it as clearly as I did that night. In Persian, such a woman is sometimes called shir-zan (شیرزن). Lioness.

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As an undergraduate, I minored in gender studies. I almost majored in anthropology instead of literature because I had such an abiding interest in people and populations—as a grad student, I studied human behavior—and I took particular interest in Les Misérables. The poor, the suffering, the oppressed. I carried this focus with me into journalism many years later, covering authoritarian regimes and the innocents they brutally governed. Again and again in my studies, and in my reporting, I have found myself looking into the eyes of women. The women of Tigray, Ukraine, Xinjiang, India, the Andes. Jewish women, black women, Rohingya women, Somali women. Their stories haunt me most. Their strength leaves me floored. But the long suffering of Iranian women is almost mythic at this point. They are, for all practical purposes, a nation of slaves wrapped in the black cloak of their death cult, brutalized and tortured in ways most Western women cannot even imagine, often by their own loved ones.

Christopher Hitchens once remarked that the only cure for world poverty is the empowerment of women. But it does far more than that. A nation whose women are enslaved cannot have any moral center. A boy who grows up seeing his mother and sisters treated like dogs, and who comes to embrace the system that treats them so, can never fully be a good man. The horror of it breaks women’s minds, but poisons the souls of the men who maintain it. In the end, no one is truly free. Women and men alike, and children too, are chewed up by it, mauled by savagery. When I was an undergrad, one of the textbooks we studied was the anthology Reconstructing Gender by Estelle Disch, which still sits on my shelf. In it, in an essay titled “Fighting Gender Apartheid Under the Taliban,” author Genevieve Howe describes not just a “gender apartheid,” but “a virtual ban on women.” In a 1998 report, Physicians for Human Rights went further, calling it a “war on women.” And that’s exactly what it is.

The final battle

Iran has entered the new year facing the most serious internal challenge to clerical rule in my lifetime. What began as protests over economic collapse—rampant inflation, currency depreciation, and unemployment—has rapidly evolved into a nationwide political uprising. The protests have spread across all provinces, with their chants no longer confined to economic grievances. Now the most common slogans are “This is the final battle” and “Death to the dictator.” Inshallah.

The state’s response was predictably swift and brutal. Security forces, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have used live ammunition, mass arrests, and intimidation to suppress demonstrations. “I saw it with my own eyes,” said one man. “They fired directly into lines of protesters, and people fell where they stood.” A young woman from Tehran said, “Security forces only killed and killed and killed.” She added, “In war, both sides have weapons. Here, people only chant and get killed.” CBS News reports that sources inside the country say “at least 12,000, and possibly as many as 20,000 people have been killed.”

One of the victims was Hessam Khodayarifard, 22, who was shot dead in the city of Kuhdasht on New Year’s Eve. Authorities initially refused to hand over his body, and when mourners at his funeral began chanting anti-government slogans, troops moved in on the grieving family with force. Another victim was Shayan Asadollahi, 28, a barber in the town of Azna who was returning home from a demonstration when several Revolutionary Guard pickup trucks pulled up on them and opened fire. Shayan was hit in the gut and bled out. He was his family’s sole provider. Three hours south in the city of Lordegan, Sajjad Valamanesh, 20, was shot during a protest. Then the Revolutionary Guard called the family and forced the boy’s father to give an interview on state media in which he called for an official crackdown on “rioters,” which he only did because officials said otherwise they wouldn’t release Sajjad’s body for burial. This is the horror of life in Iran. But how did it come to this?

A brief history

Modern Iranian politics is best understood not as a series of disconnected crises, but as a single arc shaped by three figures—the Shah, the revolutionary cleric who replaced him, and the man who still rules today.

Iran’s current leader, Ali Khamenei, has served as Supreme Leader since 1989. Under his rule, the Islamic Republic evolved from a fervent ideological state into a hardened security regime. Power rests with clerical institutions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and an extensive surveillance and repression apparatus. The protests of 2009, 2019, 2022–23, and 2025–26 have made clear that the system survives not through consent of the governed, but by force.

Khamenei inherited a state created by Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and Iran’s first Supreme Leader. Khomeini returned from exile amid mass demonstrations against the monarchy and rapidly transformed a broad, ideologically diverse uprising into a clerical dictatorship. His defining contribution was the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih—the “Guardianship of the Jurist”—which placed ultimate authority in the hands of Islamic jurists rather than the electorate. Under his watch, liberals, leftists, monarchists, journalists, and religious minorities were arrested, tortured, and executed. The 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy and the ensuing hostage crisis hardened Iran’s posture toward the West. By the time he died in 1989, the revolution had devoured its rivals and institutionalized Islamofascism.

The man overthrown in 1979 was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s last Shah. His reign, beginning in 1941, combined rapid modernization with authoritarianism. The Shah pursued ambitious reforms such as land redistribution, expanded education, women’s legal rights, and industrialization—while suppressing opposition through a powerful security service known as SAVAK. To supporters, he was a modernizer dragging Iran into the twentieth century. To critics, he was a corrupt autocrat ruling at the pleasure of foreign powers. He modernized Iran’s economy and society, but refused to liberalize its politics, creating a growing class of educated citizens with no lawful avenue for dissent.

The United States became entangled in Iran’s fate in 1953, when it helped engineer the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. That intervention crushed Iran’s most promising experiment with parliamentary democracy and restored the Shah as a dominant ruler. In the short term, the coup secured Western access to oil and ensured a friendly government during the Cold War. In the long term, it poisoned Iranian political culture. The Shah came to be seen as an American-backed dictator. The very language of democracy was discredited as a foreign instrument. The ultimate result was that the people became revolutionaries who rallied behind Khomeini largely because he was vocally anti-American. He called America the Great Satan and became known for his slogan, which pro-Palestinians often chant: Marg bar Amrika. Death to America.

A global poison

In addition to brutalizing the people of Iran, the regime destabilizes the entire region and, in certain ways, the world. Since the 1980s, Tehran has pursued regional influence through proxy warfare, funding and arming militant groups across the Middle East. It is Iran that supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen.

In 1979, Iranian students, backed by the post-revolutionary regime, seized the American embassy and held 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. In 1983, Hezbollah carried out a suicide truck bombing on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds, all with IRGC support. In 1984, a Hezbollah car bomb, supported and directed by Iran, killed 23 people outside the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut. In 1985, Hezbollah carried out a series of coordinated bombings in Paris, again sponsored by Iran.

In 1992, a truck bomb exploded at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people and injuring 240. The blast was claimed by an Islamic Jihad faction linked to Hezbollah. Argentine courts and investigators identified Iranian involvement through proxy operatives. In 1994, a massive car bomb destroyed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. Argentine prosecutors formally accused the Iranian government of directing the attack through Hezbollah operatives. In 1996, Hamas suicide bombings on buses along Jaffa Road killed dozens. The operatives had been trained, armed, or funded by Iran. Also that year, a truck bomb exploded near a housing complex used by U.S. Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemembers and injuring hundreds. A U.S. federal court later found that Iran financed and directed the attack through the Hezbollah al-Hejaz group.

And that’s just the highlight reel for two decades. The violence has never stopped. In addition to backing Hamas and therefore having blood on its hands for October 7, Iran also organized and carried out at least two terrorist attacks within Australia in 2024. The first occurred on October 20, when arsonists attacked a kosher restaurant in Sydney. The second took place on December 6, when arsonists firebombed the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. To top it all off, Iran maintains a Hezbollah presence in Latin America through Venezuela, terrorizing people there too, though the capture of Maduro might weaken this network. Suffice it to say, the end of this evil regime would be a blessing to the world. So then why isn’t it the biggest news story of the day?

Media betrayal

The people of Iran are fighting a truly vile enemy, one that is a global poison to us all, and they have been fighting for longer than I’ve been alive. Finally, however, it seems they could be breaking through. Maybe this really will be their final battle. Even if they do win, that doesn’t guarantee democracy will follow. But if Iran does move toward elections, it could be one of the greatest political shifts in our lifetime. So you’d think the media would be all over the story. Well, not exactly. Writing for Honest Reporting, Rachel O’Donoghue reports on how the protests “have exposed the dishonesty, laziness, and moral cowardice of much of the Western media.” She adds:

For nearly two weeks, the Western media either buried the story or, worse, reframed it using the regime’s own talking points . . .

From The New York Times to the BBC, coverage was sparse and evasive. When the protests were mentioned at all, their explicitly anti-regime nature was often omitted. Demonstrations were reframed as vague cost-of-living protests, despite protesters chanting openly for the end of clerical rule . . .

Worse still, when journalists were challenged about their lack of coverage, several offered excuses that bordered on the absurd.

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson claimed that social media footage must be carefully verified before reputable outlets could use it—a striking assertion given the same outlets’ willingness to publish unverified material from Gaza for months.

Channel 4 International Editor Lindsey Hilsum echoed the line, arguing that Iran is objectively difficult to cover because foreign journalists cannot enter the country.

We were expected to forget that these same journalists spent years publishing casualty figures, video footage, and testimony from a Hamas-run enclave, often without meaningful verification, attribution, or editorial caution.

When criticism became impossible to ignore, coverage did finally increase.

But instead of centering Iranian protesters and the regime’s brutality, many outlets simply pivoted to laundering Tehran’s propaganda.

The BBC and NBC News ran headlines amplifying Khamenei’s claim that protesters were vandals trying to please Trump.

Sky News led with Iranian state media allegations blaming Israel and the United States for the violence.

CNN, even while acknowledging deaths, repeatedly emphasized its inability to independently verify activist reports—a caveat that might carry weight if the network had not spent the past two years publishing Hamas-run casualty figures from Gaza with minimal skepticism or attribution.

In short: when Islamists speak, they are treated as sources. When Iranians speak, they are reduced to claims.

How Iran saved civilization

On December 14, 1959, the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi held a luncheon in honor of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who thanked the Shah by raising a toast to him and to the Iranian people, in which he said:

The American people have the greatest respect and admiration for the Iranian people. Your kings, from Cyrus and Darius, are known among those famous monarchs who have advanced the cause of humanity. Your scientists have contributed to the foundations on which we have built our industrial society. Your philosophers and poets have enriched the culture of the West. The fortitude of the Iranian people in the face of invaders, and their resoluteness in maintaining their nation through the centuries, have won admiration throughout the world.

Therefore, I propose a toast to the Shahinshah. May he continue to give wise leadership to his people. May God prosper him and them in their work of peace.

Your Majesty, your good health.

Iran is one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Cyrus the Great and his successors created the first true world empire, governing diverse peoples under a policy of religious tolerance and an administrative template that influenced every subsequent empire from Alexander to Rome. Iran is also home to the first major monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, which introduced concepts such as the cosmic struggle between good and evil, individual moral choice, final judgment, heaven and hell, and a coming savior. These ideas profoundly shaped Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and became foundational to Western religious thought.

Persian architecture has left its mark on the world too. The Persian walled garden, known as pairidaeza, is the origin of the word “paradise,” and Persian architecture, from Persepolis to Isfahan’s mosques, established principles of symmetry and the integration of water that influenced buildings from the Taj Mahal in India to the Alhambra in Spain. The blessed people of Iran have done no less than shape the way humanity governs, believes, and dreams.

When I was 15 years old, I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, which makes a specific claim. Namely, that Irish monks preserved Latin texts during the chaos following Rome’s fall, then reintroduced classical learning to continental Europe. It’s a charming thesis, though medievalists often note it overstates Irish uniqueness. Byzantium, for instance, never lost the Greek classics. But the Persian claim rests on broader and more consequential ground. When the Abbasid Caliphate established Baghdad in the eighth century, it was Persian scholars, along with Syriac Christians, who undertook a systematic effort to translate Greek philosophical and scientific texts into Arabic. This wasn’t haphazard monastic copying, like in Ireland, but a state-sponsored intellectual project. And it changed everything.

Works by Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy that had been lost or neglected in the Latin West were not only translated, but commented upon, and synthesized. While the Irish project was essentially curatorial, the Persian contribution went further. Avicenna didn’t merely preserve Aristotle. He developed Aristotelian philosophy in ways that later shaped Aquinas. Al-Khwarizmi didn’t just translate Indian mathematics. He needed a method to resolve inheritance disputes and land surveying. The Quran specifies precise fractional shares for various heirs, and when multiple heirs with competing claims existed, he calculated each share by developing and solving linear and quadratic equations. Existing arithmetic wasn’t up to the task, so he simply created algebra.

When 12th century European scholars began translating Arabic texts into Latin, primarily in Toledo and Sicily, they were recovering Greek knowledge filtered through Persian and Arab commentary. Avicenna’s Canon and Averroes’s Aristotelian commentaries became curriculum staples in European universities. The Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity depended substantially on this Arabic-Persian bridge. The Irish contribution, though valuable, was geographically limited and lasted a few centuries while the Persian contribution sustained itself for over a millennium and extended from Spain to India.

That’s not all. The Persian polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sina) compiled his thoughts on medical science in the year 1025 in his Canon of Medicine, which remained the standard medical textbook in European universities until the 1700s. His philosophical synthesis of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought shaped both Islamic and Christian scholasticism, where his most influential contribution was his distinction between essence and existence. In Aristotelian thought, things have essences—what makes a horse a horse, a triangle a triangle. But Aristotle didn’t really address why things exist. Avicenna argued that for everything except God, essence and existence are separate. You can understand what a horse, or a unicorn, is without knowing whether any horses or unicorns actually exist. This led to his proof for God’s existence, in which he said things can exist or not, but God must exist because God is existence, or wajib al-wujud, the Necessary Being whose essence is existence itself. If this sounds simple to you, you are failing to understand it. But that’s an essay for another time.

Enter Trump

President Donald Trump has responded publicly and unusually forcefully to events in Iran. He seems to uniquely recognize the scale of the threat we face. He has warned the Iranian regime against massacring protesters and suggested that violent repression could provoke severe consequences, including military or economic escalation. Reporting indicates that Trump-aligned policymakers have discussed a range of options from symbolic support for protesters to direct coercive measures.

He’s not bluffing either. In his first term, Trump eliminated Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds force. In his second term, he ordered the attack on the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. The ominously named Operation Midnight Hammer was a U.S. overnight strike in late June aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear program at its most hardened points, notably the deeply buried Fordow facility, along with Natanz and infrastructure near Isfahan, using long-range B-2 stealth bombers flying nonstop from the United States.

The operation was historically significant for the first-ever combat use of the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a bunker-buster designed to destroy underground facilities previously considered unreachable by conventional weapons. The GBU-57 slams into the earth with incredible velocity and burrows deep before detonating. It doesn’t explode its target, but causes it to collapse and implode on itself. At the same time, U.S. Navy submarines launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at surface targets. Israeli President Isaac Herzog thanked America and said the mission advanced security for “the free world,” which is undoubtedly true. Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it was “clearly grounds for impeachment.”

Sometimes they laugh

That reaction by AOC is perhaps predictable. But if we’re looking around the room at reactions to what’s happening in Iran, or what the United States has done to address this threat, the story gets darker still. The Western media isn’t the only one being silent. In The Wall Street Journal, editor-at-large Gerard Baker writes in his essay “Iran Cracks Down. Where Are the Western Protests?”:

Where are the protests in the West? Specifically, where are all those defenders of persecuted Muslims who have been so active on the streets of New York, London, Sydney, Rome and elsewhere the past two years? Where are the demands for justice and freedom for the downtrodden victims of a brutally repressive state?

What is so different about the cause they have been espousing in their demonstrations over Gaza and the cause of the millions of innocent coreligionists 1,000 miles to their east? Those kaffiyeh-wearing, banner-waving, slogan-chanting activists say they were moved to protest, sometimes violently and unlawfully, by the plight of Muslims dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods, immiserated, starved, beaten and murdered by a savage regime.

In Iran, this has been happening for decades. More than three million Iranians have been driven from their homeland in the 47 years of the mullahs’ rule. People have been forced into prisons (literal ones—not the metaphorical “open-air prison” of Gaza) or into exile in foreign lands, their homes and property stolen, their loved ones punished and frequently murdered.

Where, indeed? Maybe they’d find the time to hit the street if their brutal oppressors wore yarmulkes instead of turbans. But their soulless silence isn’t even the half of it. Leftists, the same ones who would be first on the chopping block—literally—are the same to chant “Death to America” and “Hands off Iran.” These depraved psychopaths do not chant, “Hands off Iranian women.” The head of the Democratic Socialists of America’s international committee posted, “Long live Ayatollah Khomeini & the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The socialist influencer Hasan Piker has mocked the dead and, laughing, called their murder “poetry.”

The fight is far from over. Many in Iran still support the current regime. The protesters face an uphill battle. And even if they do succeed, there’s no guarantee that what comes next will be liberation. Many of the fighters themselves are just another flavor of radical Islam. But I pray for the people, for the women, for all the lions of Iran, and for their noble cause. And I listen for silence and laughter, and make a promise to myself to never forget where it came from.

In William F. Buckley Jr.’s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era: Lessons in Civility from a Catholic Conservative Icon, author Josh Cohen explores how meaningful friendships can be sustained even in times of intense political division. Drawing on the life and example of Buckley, who famously engaged people across ideological lines, the book argues that sharp disagreement doesn’t have to mean hostility and that principles such as civility, Christian ethics, and open dialogue can be restored to public life.

Cohen is a writer and editor based in Minnesota. He hosts the blog Eyewitness History, where every week he shows listeners a passage from history through the eyes of the people that watched the events that shaped our world.

Late last night, and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power—air, land, and sea—was used to launch a spectacular assault.

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These were Trump’s opening words during yesterday’s press conference announcing the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. A few concerns here. Forcibly seizing a sitting head of state within his own country is potentially a violation of international law. Specifically, the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Exceptions are narrowly limited to self-defense against an armed attack and UN approval. Not to mention, using our military to enforce U.S. criminal charges abroad dangerously blurs the line between law enforcement and war. Imagine China trying to enforce its laws on U.S. soil, which they already do, or snatching a head of state as we just did. We should want countries to go through multilateral, diplomatic channels of action. This is how we foster international stability. On the other hand, Maduro was an evil man who enslaved an entire nation and we just cut their chains. China, if it did something similar, would be acting in the opposite direction of liberty. And yes, there is a difference between breaking the law to free people and breaking it to enslave them. This is also where Christopher Hitchens would lean in to say intervention can be justified if it removes a murderous tyranny and advances universal human rights, and taking out Maduro easily passes that test.

Indeed, there have been only a handful of dictators worse than Maduro in the entire history of Latin America. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic stands apart as the worst of all, followed by Pinochet and his empire of torture in Chile. The strongman Batista, so brutal a figure he helped radicalize Cuba into the arms of a communist apocalypse, is third on that list. But Maduro is not far behind, and worse than many more. Worse than Hugo Chávez, for example, who rewrote Venezuela’s constitution to weaken checks and balances, packed courts and electoral bodies with loyalists, expropriated private industry and oil revenues, crushed independent media, empowered the military and colectivos, hollowed out democratic institutions, presided over extrajudicial killings by security forces, and tortured detainees—activists, protesters, officers who weren’t dirty—with beatings, prolonged isolation, agonizing stress positions, asphyxiation, and electric shock. All of which, naturally, directly enabled Maduro’s rule and the nation’s economic collapse. All of which, inarguably, pales in comparison to what came after. Maduro was also worse than Noriega. Worse even than Castro with all his firing squads, show trials, mass executions, gulags for dissidents, gays, and Christians, worse than all of that.

Leftists, the same ones who will look you in the face and defend the slaughter of infants in their cribs using farm tools during Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the genocidal executions under Lenin, or Hamas butchering teenagers at a concert, or Pakistani immigrants in England gang raping little girls, all because it furthers the Cause, will tell you it’s wrong to capture Maduro. “Hands off Venezuela!” they’re already chanting as they march in Los Angeles, Toronto, and hundreds of other cities. But for added context, you should know that Hands Off Venezuela isn’t just a slogan, it’s an organization founded by the International Marxist Tendency, formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist International. What’s more, the guy who founded Hands Off Venezuela, Ted Grant, was a huge admirer of Chávez and personally met with him many times over the years, leading to speculation that he was one of the dictator’s close political advisers. But Grant spent most of his adult life living among the Victorian and Edwardian terraced house of Islington in north London, not in the Caracas slums of Cota 905 or La Silsa, where murderous gangs run by Maduro turn the ghetto streets into war zones that make East St. Louis look like the suburbs of Chesterfield. So Grant can kindly shut the fuck up.

But Maduro’s capture presents yet another problem. Trump cannot initiate an act of war, or something functionally equivalent, without congressional authorization. A unilateral capture risks violating the War Powers Resolution and bypassing Congress’s exclusive authority to authorize force. Then again, President Obama authorized a unilateral Navy SEAL raid deep inside Pakistan, killing Osama bin Laden without Pakistan’s consent or prior congressional approval, and justifying it under the 2001 AUMF and inherent Article II powers as a limited counterterrorism operation rather than an act of war. Stephen Colbert opened his show that week by leading the studio audience in a chorus of U-S-A! U-S-A! before opening, “Suck my giant American balls, Al-Qaeda! Folks, I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl who just shot bin Laden in the eye.” Jon Stewart was no less thrilled. On The Daily Show, he famously declared, “Last night was a good night for me. And not just for New York or D.C. or America, but for human people … Al Qaeda’s opportunity is gone … Can they still do damage? I’m sure. But we’re back, baby.” He added:

I just want details. What look did he give when bin Laden realized the helicopters overhead were not giving traffic and weather updates? You think he pulled a Culkin? Maybe he gave a little more dramatic chipmunk? ... Believe me, he wasn’t expecting it. You know, he was living in some staid and upscale Pakistani suburb for some time when we got him. You know this guy’s out there preaching suicide bombing and jihad, pretending he’s Gandalf wandering the frontier, all the while he’s living like one of the housewives of Orange County.

Rachel Maddow also weighed in:

This is the day they got bin Laden. This is the Situation Room. And that is probably as much as any of us need to know about what exactly the president of the United States was thinking while it happened. … I think it’s just incredible.

But after Trump’s capture of Maduro this week, Maddow’s reaction was not celebratory at all. Rather, she troubled the news with concerns about Trump’s real motives, what this means, and the impact it might have. She looked deeply troubled. Funny how that works. But for all her concerns, which are not unreasonable—it’s her unprincipled hypocrisy I disdain—and the ones I’ve already listed here myself, but also as someone who knows the horrors of what Maduro wrought, I have to confess, Trump’s opening words struck a patriotic chord in my heart. Maduro was an evil man who plagued millions. But Trump didn’t execute him. He captured Maduro, who will now face justice in court. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted in Argentina by Mossad agents and secretly flown to Israel, where he was tried and executed. Even then, the scales were not balanced. But who thinks it was wrong to take him? If Mossad had put two .32 ACPs between Eichmann’s eyes, it would have been too good for the bastard. Maduro is no Eichmann, but he is the worst living dictator in the entire Western Hemisphere.

It was an assault like people have not seen since World War II. It was a force against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of Caracas. To bring outlawed dictator Nicolás Maduro to justice. This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history. And if you think about it, we’ve done some other good ones, like the attack on Soleimani, the attack on al-Baghdadi, and the obliteration and decimation of the Iran nuclear sites, just recently, in an operation known as Midnight Hammer. All perfectly executed and done. No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday or, frankly, in just a short period of time.

Trump later added:

If you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it. But it was an incredible thing to see. Not a single American service member was killed. And not a single piece of American equipment was lost. We had many helicopters, many planes, many, many people involved in that fight. But think of that. Not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed. The United States military is the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet by far, with capabilities and skills, our enemies can scarcely begin to imagine.

Trump then explained that Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, have both been indicted in the Southern District of New York, “For their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens.” I’ll be damned, I said to myself. Donald Trump just pulled a Batman. In The Dark Knight, the mob accountant Lau flees to Hong Kong, thinking himself safe. The Joker shows up to a meeting of Gotham’s crime bosses and says of Lau, “As for his so-called plan, Batman has no jurisdiction. He’ll find him and make him squeal. I can tell the squealers every time.” One wonders if Maduro squealed. Batman slips into Hong Kong in at night and rips Lau out of the window of a skyscraper, extracting him midair, proving no one is beyond justice under his watch. But Batman is a vigilante. Not a president. Still, the story Trump narrated earlier today sounded like it fell from the pages of a comic about Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. Silent insertion, flawless capture, exfiltration, no U.S. fatalities. And with every word, my mind fell back to the millions upon millions of Venezuelans who now weep for joy that America has returned to them their cherished freedom. I am not blind to the problems with how this went down, but thinking of all those people, it makes me proud to be an American. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes:

President Donald Trump has launched not a splendid little war, but perhaps a splendid little operation in Venezuela. He has captured a dictator and removed him from power. So far, Trump seems to have executed a bad idea well: The military operation, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” seems to have been flawless. The strategic wisdom, however, is deeply questionable. And the legal basis, as offered by the president and his team, is absurd. Some Americans, and some U.S. allies, are appalled.

Russia and China claim to be appalled, too, but to use a classic diplomatic expression, the leaders in Beijing and Moscow should be invited, with all due respect, to shut their traps.

No kidding. Putin and Xi ought to pray we don’t turn our attention their way next. If Trump captured Putin in a similarly flawless mission and dropped him off, gift-wrapped on the steps of the National Police in Kyiv, ending the war overnight and possibly leading to the recovery of the 20,000 children who were torn from their parents and deported into the dark heart of Russia, would we look back on that moment in history decades later as a gross example of American imperialism? Or would we regard it, like Eichmann’s capture, as a rare but glorious moment when dictatorial monsters were not only defeated, but defeated in the courts rather than shot in their beds? More importantly, what would Ukrainians think? What would Russians think, whose sons would no longer be fed into the meat grinder of Putin’s psychopathic war? What do Venezuelans think today?

We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. We don’t wanna be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. It has to be judicious. Because that’s what we’re all about. We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. And that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland. We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. We’ve had decades of that. We’re not going to let that happen. … We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.

This addresses concerns about a power vacuum, or one of Maduro’s henchmen taking over, or the failure of the economy to restart, thus leading to systemic collapse and eventually state failure once again. Of course, we wouldn’t have stepped in if there was nothing in it for us. We do not actually purely out of selfless Christian virtue, nor should we take any such rhetoric seriously. But if we can liberate 30 million slaves, give them back the democracy that was stolen from them, rebuild their economy so that they and their children may flourish, and serve justice to their former master, how much moral discount should we factor into our analysis that we make a pretty penny in the process? We must not, however, seize Venezuela’s oil for ourselves. That is their wealth. But also, that is not what Trump describes when he talks about spending billions to fix a broken infrastructure. We spent lavishly to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II, $13 billion on Germany alone under the Marshall Plan, all of which was to our profound benefit—but even so, it was still the right and noble thing to do.

I think it can be colorably argued that there is no other way to have done this. Sanctions have done nothing to change Maduro’s behavior, much less his tyrannical regime, though they did make life harder for the people. So you either leave Maduro to murder and rape millions for the next few decades, and who knows, maybe a full century if the man who comes after him is as bad or even worse, or you stop him, and if you stop him, now having involved yourself, you have a duty to the people. But to leftist critics, of course, all this will look like colonialism. The problem they are going to have with that argument is that Venezuelans couldn’t possibly be happier.

Besides, American interests in Venezuela are not exclusively altruistic. Maduro was responsible for harming our own citizens too.

The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States, as alleged in the indictment. He personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de las Solis, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans. Many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years, of Americans, died because of him. … Maduro remained in power and waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States of America, threatening not only our people but the stability of the entire region. And you also saw, in addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs, that he inflicted untold suffering and human destruction all over the country. All over. In particular, in the United States. Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide. And he did indeed. They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called the police. They were brutal. But they’re not so brutal now. … The gangs that they sent raped, tortured, and murdered American women and children. They were in all of the cities I mentioned, Tren de Aragua. And they were sent by Maduro to terrorize our people and now Maduro will never again be able to threaten an American citizen or anybody from Venezuela.

People may be wondering whether this is good intelligence or Trump playing fast and loose with the facts, as he so often does. Did Maduro actually send Tren de Aragua to terrorize foreign citizens in their own countries, including in the United States? If so, that would potentially be an act of war. The UN Charter’s Article 2 says a state may not use force against another state’s territory or people, but that isn’t limited to a formal military invasion. Sending armed killers counts too. In April, the Human Rights Foundation reported, “Venezuela’s Maduro continues to use Tren de Aragua for transnational repression, kidnapping, assassination.” The report said:

On Feb. 21, 2024, Ronald Ojeda — a 32-year-old former Venezuelan army lieutenant living in exile in Chile — was abducted from his home in Santiago by individuals posing as police officers. Days later, his dismembered body was discovered inside a concrete-encased suitcase. Ojeda had fled Venezuela in 2017 after facing persecution for his anti-regime activities and was granted political asylum in Chile in 2023. Chilean authorities quickly identified the perpetrators as members of Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest criminal network.

Chilean investigators suspected the assassination was ordered by Maduro as retaliation for Ojeda’s activism, and formally classified the case as a state-ordered political assassination. Attorney General Ángel Valencia agreed. The report adds:

For years, the Maduro regime has harbored and enabled Tren de Aragua. Born within Venezuela’s prison system, the gang expanded under the protection of Maduro’s inner circle. Until a raid in late 2023, Tren de Aragua operated openly from Tocorón prison in Aragua state — a facility transformed into a fortified criminal compound complete with pools, nightclubs, and armories, functioning as a “liberated territory” with government acquiescence. Security experts have long noted that the regime co-opted criminal groups like Tren de Aragua as enforcers, deploying them to attack pro-democracy protesters and eliminate political opponents. Operatives have effectively acted as an extension of the regime’s repressive apparatus, shielded by official impunity and alleged financial ties to state officials.

If Tren de Aragua takes orders from Maduro then its theft, drug trafficking, extortion, sex trafficking, and murders in Chicago, New York City, parts of Colorado, El Paso, Salt Lake City, and other U.S. cities are acts of war, no different than if Maduro had sent black ops forces into U.S. territory. It’s important to understand that Tren de Aragua is best documented in the United States not as a major drug cartel, but as possibly the largest network in the country for sex slavery and human trafficking. And where are Western feminists to raise a placard for this? Sadly, hiding in the same place as when the conversation turns round to the fact that Pakistani immigrants are raping little girls or that Somalis butcher their women as a common practice. Namely, on their hands and knees combing through the grass for another opportunity to blame white Western men.

Early last year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee announced a federal indictment charging eight Venezuelans tied to a multi-state human trafficking and sex slavery conspiracy centered in Nashville. Prosecutors say the defendants worked together to recruit poor, young, vulnerable girls from Central and South America, mostly Venezuelans, under false promises of a better life, then got them to Tennessee—as well as New York, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, Nashville, Miami—told them they now owed massive debts with massive interest piling up, and sexually enslaved them to be repeatedly raped on a daily basis by men who contacted Tren de Aragua using WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, specifying what they wanted to do to the girls, and paying a higher price for more “exotic” pleasures. Let your mind sit with that for a minute or two. Recall it when you see people chanting, “Hands off Venezuela,” because what they really mean is “Hands off Maduro.” And the natural reply should be, “Hands off Venezuelans.”

America can project our will anywhere, anytime. The coordination, the stealth, the lethality, the precision, the very long arm of American justice, all on full display in the middle of the night. Nicolás Maduro had his chance. Just like Iran had their chance. Until they didn’t, and until he didn’t. He effed around. And he found out.

In Lima, you have to open your taxi door carefully because a motorbike could be ripping by. The bikes cut through traffic, tearing past dented, unmarked taxis, overcrowded combis, and Mitsubishi Coaster buses painted with images of saints and skulls. A bus lurches to a sudden stop mid-lane to scoop up passengers and a man steps out of his Toyota Corolla behind it to scream that the bus driver is a cholo. “La puta que te parió,” he says, and gets back in his car. Another bike rips past—a Rappi deliveryman in his dusty orange company jacket, riding a 110cc with the big orange insulated delivery box on the back. But sometimes, one of them pulls up on you as you’re stuck in traffic, right alongside your window, and lingers. If they stick a gun in your window, you’ve got maybe two seconds to realize what’s happening and hand over everything you’ve got—and if you flinch, they’ll shoot you in the face.

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The motero crime wave began in early 2018, with locals in Lima noting well over a thousand of these assault robberies in just the first months of that year. It wasn’t a mystery where it came from either. Most of the moteros were Venezuelans. The year before, a large wave of Venezuelans had entered Peru. In 2016, there were about 8,000 of them in the country. By the end of 2017, there were around 110,000. Estimates suggest from 2017 to 2019, 800,000 more flooded into the country. And they weren’t just motero muggers. A friend of mine told me a story about an old woman who owned a simple bodega, selling mostly soft drinks and crackers and fruit. She’d been there for decades. But some Venezuelans decided they were going to open a rival bodega nearby, and they didn’t want competition, so they told the old woman to shut her business down. The old woman refused, because she had no other way to survive. So they shot her son in front of her.

Long before the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua began making national headlines in the United States, I had come to know the name during my years in Lima. I suppose there was some early mention of the group around 2021, when U.S. federal law enforcement and Latin America specialists began noticing the group’s expansion through South America, and so if you were looking for it, the gang’s name did occasionally appear in specialist reports and court documents. But it was not yet a household name. The gang broke into mainstream U.S. media in 2023, when police and prosecutors in New York City, Chicago, and parts of Texas publicly linked specific violent crimes—robberies, sex trafficking, organized theft rings—to Tren de Aragua–affiliated suspects. This coincided with a broader national debate over immigration, crime, and border enforcement. Then in 2024, a series of high-profile arrests, law-enforcement briefings, and congressional rhetoric turned the gang, along with MS-13, into a shorthand for transnational crime.

The spread of Venezuelan criminal groups abroad—especially Tren de Aragua—is often mistakenly blamed on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro allegedly emptying the prisons. I had heard this story during my time in Lima, and I’ve heard it repeated since. But the reality is more complex, and more structural. Venezuela’s utter collapse over the past decade led to a prison system that effectively disintegrated, with several major facilities becoming inmate-run spaces where gangs organized freely, accumulated weapons, controlled territory, and developed transnational ambitions. It was like Haiti, but behind bars. There is no documented nationwide decree ordering the mass release of ordinary criminals, but that’s not to say Maduro is innocent. His ruinous, and frankly evil, regime has resulted in porous borders, corruption, and administrative chaos that made it easy for people—including gang members—to move in and out of the country. When millions of Venezuelans fled between roughly 2017 and 2019, overwhelmingly for economic and humanitarian reasons, organized gang members traveled along the same migration routes, blending in with refugees and later rebuilding cells, even entire criminal networks, in destination countries such as Peru and the United States. Maduro didn’t open the prisons, per se, but he created the hell that gave birth to these groups, and tore his own country apart to the point that the prisons no longer functioned and the borders were no longer secure.

Cañas

There’s a bar in Miraflores, downtown Lima, down a side street off Avenida José Pardo. The name of the bar is Cañas, meaning sugarcane. Or sometimes, cane liquor. It was directly next to my apartment building, close enough that I could get there in a torrential downpour, walking hugged against the building, without getting wet. I came to think of it as an extension of my living room.

I went there for the pisco sours. I had made a study of the pisco sour by then. I’d gone to the Morris Bar on the old Jirón de la Unión in central Lima, where the drink was invented. I’d been to Hotel Maury, where they refined the recipe by adding egg white and bitters, and to Hotel B, my favorite bar in the city. Eventually, I’d gotten so good at making them myself, I couldn’t find a place that satisfied me. It’s not an easy drink, and some part of the recipe is always in flux, uncontrollable, but given enough experience, mostly predictable. The limes, for example, vary in sweetness from one to the next. And the egg always adds a variable to the mix. But I had become obsessed, and had nearly touched perfection once or twice along the way. I knew my work was good when Peruvians at parties began asking me, the gringo, to make their Pisco sours.

It’s a lovely drink too. Heavy, bright, refreshing. Apparently, it was created at the Morris by an American bartender who, lacking whiskey, had improvised with the local brandy. Now, that might suggest that this is actually an American drink at heart. But here’s the twist. The whiskey sour he was trying to replicate had itself been invented by a Peruvian in San Francisco decades earlier. The cocktail had crossed the border twice. But it was at Cañas, where a Venezuelan named Luis made the best pisco sour in the city. Other than my own, of course. I think his secret was that he beat the egg white to silk. Luis and I used to talk long, as I’d watch him make my pisco sours, in the slow hours of the evening. He told me about growing up in Venezuela. How beautiful the country was. How much he missed it. And how he would never go back.

The government had destroyed his home, he said. Not his house, but his home, the country itself, and he was lucky to be alive. Once, I came in and found he was drinking himself, which he never did. I ordered a pisco sour, and then another, and we began to talk, and he began to tell me the story of how he walked to Lima. The whole way. He had traveled with his little sister, though he didn’t tell me her name. She liked to pick flowers along the way, he said. Roadside flowers. She’d pick a few, and act like she was going to keep them forever, like they were her new friends. A little later, once they’d wilted, she would place them down on the side of the road. This struck him, because back in Venezuela, flowers on the side of the road were usually placed to remember the dead, often someone who had died in a car accident in that exact spot. People called them flores de muerto. Flowers of death. She liked to sing songs at night, to keep herself from being afraid of the dark. There were a lot of other people on the path, fleeing Venezuela, and not all of them were good people. A beautiful girl like her, and so young too, she could be an easy target. He never told me exactly what happened to her, only that she didn’t make it to Peru.

It was at Cañas that I asked my wife’s father for permission to marry his daughter. My Spanish was still rough, but I made sure to do it in Spanish, and he gave me a talking-to about taking care of her, and I listened to every word. Then Luis brought us pisco sours and we drank until the evening blurred. Not long after that, COVID hit. Peru had the highest per capita death rate in the world at one point, and subsequently, the strictest lockdown in the world. The lockdown was so strict that a man I knew got arrested for stepping outside without a mask to put his trash on the corner. A woman I knew would fill a backpack with groceries and walk around the block, pretending she was coming home from shopping, just to breathe fresh air. For eight months, I didn’t leave my apartment a single time. When the lockdown finally lifted and Cañas reopened, I went back. The bar looked the same. But Luis was gone. I never learned what happened to him, and never heard from him again.

El Burro

The man who might have pointed a rifle at me in traffic and the man who made my drinks came from the same country, and fled the same regime. One was a product of the hell Maduro created, the other a product of the economy he collapsed. Maduro inherited power in 2013 with a thin electoral mandate and a deteriorating economy. When opposition victories and economic contraction threatened his position, he chose survival over reform. What emerged was not simply an inefficient state, but a repurposed one. The security apparatus became an instrument of political control. Venezuela’s Special Action Forces, the FAES, carried out lethal raids in poor neighborhoods under the guise of anti-crime operations. They became death squads. United Nations investigators documented a consistent pattern: victims shot at close range, evidence staged to simulate confrontations, families threatened into silence. The UN concluded that the killings were not aberrations, but policy. It recommended that FAES be dissolved. Earlier reporting by then–UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet attributed thousands of deaths to security operations.

Opposition leaders, protesters, journalists, and suspected dissident officers were arrested and held in facilities like El Helicoide, a former shopping center converted into a political prison. Testimony collected by UN investigators describes electric shocks, asphyxiation, prolonged stress positions, beatings, and rape used to extract confessions and intimidate networks. There were, of course, protests. In 2014, 2017, and 2019. There were elections too. And then, after all that, Maduro threw thousands of people, especially anyone he could pinpoint as having taken part in those protests, into a dungeon. Protest itself was criminalized. Demonstrations were met with live ammunition and armored vehicles. Armed pro-government colectivos attacked protesters alongside police, providing plausible deniability while chilling dissent. The press was systematically targeted. Independent outlets were closed or blocked, reporters arrested or forced into exile. The state oil company PDVSA was transformed into a patronage machine as billions were siphoned through inflated contracts, shell companies, and opaque oil-for-cash swaps. Meanwhile, purges of technical staff accelerated the collapse of production long before heavy sanctions took effect—despite what the vile Marxists at the Grayzone or Jacobin, who carry water for this psychopath, would argue. Even The Nation has downplayed his evils. Even programs designed to alleviate suffering became vehicles for theft. The CLAP food program routed contracts through offshore firms tied to insiders, not to mention boxes were overpriced and poor in nutrition, turning mass hunger into a revenue stream.

Of course, as the economic pressure mounted, Maduro’s regime built sanctions-evasion networks, selling oil at steep discounts through intermediaries and moving payments via front companies, gold shipments, and cryptocurrencies to secure elite liquidity rather than national recovery. U.S. prosecutors charged Maduro and senior officials with narco-terrorism, alleging coordination with Colombia’s FARC to traffic cocaine and corrupt state institutions. The consequences spilled across borders. Venezuela’s collapse produced nearly 8 million refugees—the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere—placing heavy strain on Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and beyond. The violence and oppression created by Maduro—known as El Burro, “The Donkey”—have torn Venezuela apart and rippled across all of Latin America, and into the United States. Those millions of refugees are forever changed, most of them for the worse. They walked the same roads Luis and his sister walked. Some of them, like Luis, found work and rebuilt. Some of them died along the way, left behind along the road like so many flores de muerto. Others ended up in strange new lands, impoverished, too old to start again, broken by the family lost along the way. And some ended up on motorbikes in Lima traffic with rifles in their hands.

La Patria

This morning, I woke up to the news that President Trump claims to have captured El Burro. He plans to have a news conference at 11am today at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, where he’s spending New Year’s week. Naturally, there will be conversations, and debates, about U.S. foreign policy. There will be outrage from the Marxists at Jacobin. I am sure we will be treated to young leftists in the streets protesting U.S. power and defending Maduro. But among so many homeless and broken Venezuelans, there will be cheers. The faces of so many abuelas from La Patria will be covered in tears. So many brothers and sons will be utterly overwhelmed, thinking of a possible reunion on the horizon. And what of Venezuela? Will it descend into chaos? Will Maduro’s bootprint remain fixed on the face of the nation? Will gangs take over and turn the country into something like Haiti? Maduro is the most economically destructive dictator in world history, not including destruction by war. He inherited oil wealth, functioning institutions, and regional power—and managed to destroy all three. Will Venezuela rise again once he’s out of the way? Imagine what that could do for its 30 million inhabitants, its 8 million people overseas, or the 126 million in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, whose countries have been made poorer, and markedly less safe, all because of one Marxist dictator.

I’m not especially interested in providing a sweeping, big-picture analysis of how the Maduro regime emerged, how Venezuela’s economy unraveled, what role the United States or sanctions may have played, or in parsing the statistics of collapse that have already been endlessly litigated elsewhere. I just wanted to share with you my very small window on a country that was once great, now that some glimmer of light possibly promises to return. Before El Burro, the cities worked. Caracas had congestion and crime, yes, but also reliable electricity, stocked supermarkets, universities that still drew regional talent, and a middle class that planned vacations as opposed to exits. Cafés were full, bookstores open, and bars loud late into the night. The oil economy distorted things, but it also propped the nation up. Salaries meant something. Savings existed. You could imagine a future for yourself and your kids.

The country itself felt open and generous. Beaches were clean and accessible, not overrun or rationed. Clear water, white sand, families relaxing all day long with coolers and radios playing salsa. The Andes were green, the plains expansive, the coast like something from a postcard. It was heaven. Domestic tourism was normal, people traveled within their own country because they could afford to, because roads functioned, because hotels operated without generators. Venezuelans were proud, and rightfully so. Most of all, there was social ease. Business disputes didn’t require political loyalty. Police were not universally feared. The state was inefficient, sometimes corrupt, but it was not a weapon turned against its own people. Venezuela before Maduro was no utopia. But it was something greater. It was a home, a home to many who have long hoped to return, and some who never can. Venezuelans have a lot of street smarts. Viveza criolla, they call it. Let the people have their country back, and I am sure they will do wonderful things. And to all my Venezolano friends, pa’lante.

It’s been a wild year. Much of my writing this year revolved around race, as I kept returning to the ways in which elite institutions denounce racism while practicing a subtler version of it themselves. I explored this in “The banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix’s racism,” and at greater length in “Every racist writer at the New Yorker, in their own words,” where I simply let these racists speak for themselves. Sometimes, the most devastating critique is a mirror.

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During these past 12 months, a lot has rightfully been said about the damage President Trump is doing to our democracy, some of it by yours truly. But I part ways with friends who insist nothing on the left compares. Trump changed the Republican Party. But what I’ve been documenting this year is a harm that may prove more durable. Namely, a transformation of American institutions themselves—our schools, newspapers, publishing houses, and scientific outlets. One is a political threat, confined to an admittedly dominant but potentially transient faction within one party. The other is structural, making America more racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, more intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and less capable of parsing basic scientific facts about reality—all in ways that will likely be with us for decades to come.

Then there was violence. Not just the metaphorical kind, but the real thing. I wrote about Antifa—not to pretend it’s a centralized organization, but to push back against those who pretend it isn’t really a thing at all. In September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, shot in the neck for the crime of having an opinion. In the aftermath, I discussed how publications and colleagues that would have canonized a slain activist on their own side, or even a criminal like George Floyd, literally laugh out loud at his execution or rushed to present him as morally repugnant using misleading clips, distortions, and lies. I also wrote about what Kirk represented, and about why the left has produced no equivalent figure willing to sit in a chair on a hostile campus and say, “Prove me wrong.” In addition to pretending Antifa isn’t real, or that Kirk was a Nazi, other stories were simply ignored when they didn’t feed certain racist, anti-white narratives. When a deranged black man murdered an innocent white Ukrainian refugee, the lack of coverage was instructive, and I tried to make that lesson plain in “The racist silence over Iryna Zarutska.”

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On gender, I’ve tried to hold a position that shouldn’t be controversial. Trans individuals deserve dignity and compassion, but dignity doesn’t require us to abandon the category of biological sex, or to pretend that a policy question is settled science. I debated this, and watched my interlocutor deny making arguments even as I quoted them back to him in real time. Thankfully, we can all breathe a deep sigh of relief that strong cultural signals indicate this stupid, and often evil, movement is coming to an end, as I covered in the essay “America detransitions.” I also wrote about the crisis facing young men. As a former Big Brother mentor and schoolteacher, I’ve watched this problem simmer for years. What’s new is the open contempt from progressive women who can barely bring themselves to care, and who blame men for seeking support from the people who love them, which I lamented in “How feminists are weaponizing love.” I also wrote about another troubling issue that threatens our way of life in the West, and which the left refuses to acknowledge as such—immigration—by covering topics ranging from Pakistani rape gangs in the UK and the Manchester synagogue attack to the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota, and more.

I continued to write about Gaza, too. About the absurdity of the genocide claim, the moral failures within Palestinian culture, and their predictably violent refusal to let the Europeans who welcomed them as refugees celebrate Christmas in peace. Turning my eye back to U.S. politics, I followed the political rise of Zohran Mamdani, the new Marxist mayor of New York, who I profiled in a two-part essay on the man and his politics. The damage he’ll do will likely be limited. But it will last.

Finally, I tried to write about what’s worth preserving. Why blue-collar culture matters. An unexpected, if superficial, example in civility from Trump and Mamdani. I also praised Ben Shapiro’s TPUSA speech, in which he showed the courage to attack antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on his own side.

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This wasn’t a year for comfort. It was a year for noticing—a practice that has fallen out of fashion in some corners. If this work accomplished anything, I hope it served as a record, written while the arguments were still hot and before memory could be revised. That, at least, is what a year in review ought to be. Next year, I’ll be doing more of it. Long-form investigations, original reporting, and essays that take time to get right. If you’ve found value in this work, a paid subscription is the best way to keep it going. Please share my work with friends and family too. Thank you.

Happy New Year,
David

“The future of this country relies on truth.”
– Ben Shapiro

In the 1930s, a necrotic tumor of antisemitism, isolationism, and conspiracism threatened to destroy the credibility of the Republican Party. Figures like “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, and the isolationist America First movement forced the party to choose between populist currents and a principled stand against prejudice and misinformation. The Party made the right decision then, and the consequences were profound, but the past has a way of returning. Nearly a hundred years on, Republicans now face the same question.

For much of American history before those days, the Republican Party enjoyed a reputation of moral purpose and popular reform. While the Democrats favored states’ rights and slavery, Republicans believed America meant something. Founded in 1854 in opposition to the expansion of slavery, the Grand Old Party fought for the Union, its Constitution, and freedom from aristocratic slavers. That reputation did not survive the Great Depression, but it was real. Democrats flipped this perspective under President Roosevelt, whose New Deal provided the public of the 1930s some measure of recovery and relief. In the process, they rebranded public provision and the expansion of state power as the will of the people and cast Republicans as the very elites they had always opposed. But it was in those crucial years that Republican leaders, particularly men like President Hoover and Senator Joseph I. France, who demonstrated true moral leadership by condemning the growing bigotry and ignorance on their side of the line. Externally, Republicans clarified their image as a sane and centrist alternative to the Democrats. Internally, the purge reinforced the boundaries of acceptable discourse within party ranks. Last week, history repeated.

In a fiery speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest Conference, Ben Shapiro went scorched earth on Candace Owens and the rot of antisemitism and conspiracy thinking that has eaten its way into Republican politics. He did not mince his words.

Today, I want to talk about the future of the country—this amazing country. It relies on what we need to find as our core mission. Most of all, the future of this country relies on truth. This country relies on truth because victory cannot be achieved without truth. Victory without truth is victory for a lie. That is no victory at all. Unity without truth is no unity. It is merely solidarity in falsehood . . .

I want to talk about something even more important: how to discern those attempting to speak truth from frauds and grifters. Because something is new: an informational environment rife with opportunity and chaos. Opportunity because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and hear. Chaos because an anarchic informational environment means we actually have to be smart in how we assess the information and arguments that we hear. Why does that matter? Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger—not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in dishonesty, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism. These people do not deserve your time. They are something worse than that: a danger to the movement . . .

We owe you the truth. That means we should not mislead you. We should not hide the ball. We should not be deliberately obscure about what we are telling you. We have an obligation to clarity and honesty. We have to be clear in the language we use. We should not traffic in generality. We should not say things like “they” shot Charlie without saying who we mean. The person who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk—who, from all the evidence, points to being a gay, trans-loving furry. If we are going to target ideological people, the radical trans movement treats those who oppose it as threats. We should talk about that. Those are specific problems. They require specific responses. There is increased hatred. There is despair and rage that makes things worse. We must be honest about what people say and do. It is the job of politicians to build coalitions. It is the job of those of us who shape public opinion to hold politicians to account and hold them accountable to our values. We must not let fear of audience deter us from telling the truth. We must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth.

If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here with him every single day—his best friends—to cast aspersions at them and at Erika Kirk, and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over his murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA, we with microphones have a moral obligation to call that out by name. Erika Kirk and TPUSA never should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly at a time of mourning. The people who refuse to condemn these vicious attacks while speaking here are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice . . .

Because we have a duty to truth, we also have a duty to provide you with evidence of the claims that we make. Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and “just asking questions” is lazy, stupid, and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth or evidence. When Candace Owens says, “I don’t know, but I know,” that is retarded, and we are all more retarded for having heard it. When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign-policy opponents of loyalty to another country, he is not actually making an argument based in evidence. He is simply maligning people that he disagrees with. Our duty to provide you evidence means we actually have to do much more than “just ask questions.” Just asking questions is something my five-year-old does, and it’s really cute when it comes from my five-year-old. But when grown men and women spend their days “just asking questions” without seeking answers, they are lying to you. In fact, they are doing something even worse. They are seeding distrust in the world around you and enervating you . . .

Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you, and they are making your life worse in the process. That lie may feel good in the moment. It may excuse us from taking the corrective action we can take on a personal level to fix our lives. It might give us someone else to blame for our own failures. But in the end, the lie kills not just your future but the country we have been given. For those of us who talk for a living, that is our job: to discuss America’s problems with truth and evidence, to provide possible solutions, and to encourage Americans to succeed and make great decisions. We who speak to people on a regular basis, who have a microphone and audience—we have duties to you.

As a high school student in 2008, Owens sued the Board of Education in Stamford, Connecticut for failing to protect her from students who left three death threats and racist and sexual slurs on her voicemail. With the help of the NAACP, she got a $37,500 settlement from the case. Yet she later claimed, “Obama did a lot to tear the country apart. I do not remember, growing up, having all of these race issues. I really don’t remember it.” She attended the University of Rhode Island where she majored in journalism, but later dropped out. In 2015, Owens was CEO of the marketing agency Degree180, which also ran a political blog, in which she once wrote about “the bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party,” adding “The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY,” and cited at the top of her list of needed social changes the end of the “gay-transgendered-bi-straight-anything-else conversation.” After a few years as a woke blogger, she reinvented herself as a MAGA activist. In 2018, Owens began working as comms director for TPUSA, but resigned less than one year later after a video surfaced of her at the launch of the group’s UK branch saying:

I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word “nationalism.” I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say “nationalism” the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a National Socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay fine. Problem is, is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. That’s not, to me, that’s not nationalism. So in thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t. I think that it’s okay. It’s important to retain your country’s identity.

Other than neglecting to mention that genocide was also one of the problems with Hitler, I have no problem with someone arguing in favor of a nationalism. We need only cast our glance toward Britain, where Owens was speaking, to see what happens when a nation exchanges its sense of national identity for diversity—which is fine if you like it, as I do, but it’s an aesthetic preference that should not come at the cost of culture, tradition, or unity. We can talk about the moral gap between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism, but even ethnic nationalism is not inherently wrong. Consider Japan, Poland, Israel, or South Korea. These are beautiful places that do not need ethnic diversity in order to improve. Imagine, for example, claiming that Nigeria is inferior because it doesn’t have enough white people. Nevertheless, Owens was out, but she soon joined The Daily Wire, where Shapiro was a co-founder and its ideological anchor. As a result, Owens became one of the most visible black conservative commentators in America, frequently collaborating with Shapiro’s media network and benefiting from its institutional reach. But that relationship began to unravel dramatically in 2023, largely over disagreements surrounding foreign policy, especially U.S. support for Israel and the Israel-Gaza war.

Owens increasingly framed the conflict in ways that Shapiro and others at The Daily Wire viewed as conspiratorial or even potentially antisemitic. Maybe that comment in the UK wasn’t just an innocent remark about identity and unity, after all. Shapiro publicly condemned her rhetoric, and tensions escalated to the point where Owens left The Daily Wire in March 2024, framing her exit as liberation from institutional constraints while critics saw it more as a rupture caused by her refusal to moderate her increasingly batshit claims. But that’s where the money was, and in the following months, Owens built a large independent platform, increasingly emphasizing narratives that positioned her against The Establishment. The situation escalated dramatically after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Owens, now knee-deep in the shit of at least half a dozen conspiracy theories, was eager to feed the speculation and paranoia surrounding his murder. She questioned the investigation, suggested cover-ups, foreign involvement, and internal betrayal, all without evidence. Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and the new CEO of TPUSA, publicly urged Owens to stop and accused her of exploiting the tragedy for personal gain. But Owens simply doubled-down. This month, she urged her audience to read the antisemitic book The Talmudic Jew, by August Rohling, which inspired the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

To be clear, calling out the right’s conspiratorial tendencies is not an exercise in political bias. A healthy two-party democracy requires both wings of the system to be grounded in truth and mutual recognition of reality. You don’t need to support the other party to want it to be sane, coherent, and responsible. This applies on both sides. There should be a healthy version of the left without the excesses of woke culture, just as there should be a healthy version of the right that rejects bigotry and conspiratorial lunacy. But if Democrats honestly want healthier Republican politics, if all those years of lamenting post-truth narratives, the inaccuracy of Fox News reporting, and reality-rejection on the other side really meant anything, then they have to give credit where credit is due—and Shapiro deserves a standing ovation.

But predictably, his words have not been entirely well-received. Megyn Kelly, also mentioned in his speech for making excuses as to why she wouldn’t call Owens out, described his remarks as a “betrayal.” Leftist podcaster Angie Sullivan said, “Ben Shapiro is not the magic Jew. They are not going to stop being white supremacists and antisemitic over at Turning Point, and in MAGA. They are not going to take down their swastika flags, they’re not going to take off their white supremacy tattoos, because of Ben Shapiro.” God help us, if she’s right. But if you think MAGA is infested with hatred and distortion, then Shapiro’s full-throated condemnation of bigotry and conspiracy theories should resonate across the aisle, for he is articulating precisely the sort of commitment to truth that liberals have long claimed to represent. That rhetorical alignment, however partial, should earn recognition from Democrats who genuinely care about the factual integrity of our national discourse.

If you can’t clap when the right says something you support simply because it also says other things that you don’t, you might just be in favor of a one-party state. What the nation urgently needs now is not reflexive praise or dismissal of voices across the aisle, but a willingness to affirm truth wherever it is championed. As our father Abraham once said in his speech at Peoria in 1854, the year his party was founded, “Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.” As such, Shapiro’s message is one worth applauding from any quarter that values truth over faction and facts over fiction. And it is exactly what this moment in American political life needs, not just for Christmas and Hanukkah, but for the future of our republic.

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