But the problem is not simply political Islam. Look closer to home. It was not the Mormons who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015 and murdered 12 people for drawing cartoons. It was not atheists who, on their way out, found a wounded police officer named Ahmed Merabet lying on the pavement with his hands raised, and shot him in the head. It was not Quakers who walked into a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray during morning Mass, forced 85-year-old Father Hamel to his knees at his own altar, and cut his throat open while filming it. Nor was it Hindus who drove a 19-ton truck down the Promenade des Anglais on Bastille Day 2016, crushing 86 people, children among them. It was not the Amish who beheaded Samuel Paty outside his school for teaching a lesson on free expression, then posted a photograph of his severed head to Twitter. It was not Buddhists who, two weeks later inside the basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice, killed three worshippers and nearly decapitated one of them. We know who it was.

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France is on fire, while the rest of us get a lecture on why the flames are misleading. These are students protesting poor school conditions, we are told. The real culprits are bad governance, the economy, and the police. The blame lies with them, not the people holding the petrol bombs. The screams of “Allah” and “Palestine” are unrelated to religion or politics. Above all, we must understand that these young scholars simply want to return to studying math. After they’ve burned down the school.

A friend recently sent me a post by the French essayist Philippe Lemoine, in which he describes “a very high level of general dissatisfaction in France at the moment, mostly due to anemic economic growth and inflation, especially with the price of gas.” As if the price of gas is the reason 1,500 businesses have been wrecked, or as if school conditions are why you see teens smashing shop windows and looting everything inside, then filming themselves in the burning street, stealing boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and gloating, “We have plundered everything in the name of Allah.”

As comedian Rob Schneider noted this week, “France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education. Everything the left says they want AND THEY’RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.”

The reason for this is already there for anyone who cares to look. At a blockade in Beaugency, students were filmed chanting a rap song glorifying the jihadists Mohamed Merah and Salah Abdeslam. In Brive-la-Gaillarde, at a march backed by France’s largest communist-rooted union, the CGT, the union’s sound system reportedly played the same song. This month, a video circulated from outside a lycée in Mitry-Mory, northeast of Paris, showing a teenage boy who appears to gesture toward a group of police, then says, “In the name of Allah, we kill them!”

Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them, the first time.”

The real question is what exactly can be done about all this given that the people who want France’s destruction are already inside the city gates, they are already citizens, and they are already in positions of political power. Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament for La France insoumise, has said Hamas’s actions are “legitimate.” Perhaps one day, she’ll be the leader of the party, or maybe prime minister of France, and because she is nonwhite, her skin color will be held up as evidence that her victory is a triumph of liberal values.

In Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme, Bernard Rougier, a Sorbonne professor of Arab studies whose work examines Islamism in towns, even single apartment blocks, offers us an insight right in the title of his book, “The conquered territories of Islamism,” because these areas have been conquered, and are probably not coming back. In October 2020, Macron said France’s real problem is “séparatisme islamiste,” an ideology that sees its own laws and social norms as superior to the Republic’s. The problem, as I continually argue, is not immigration but immigration without assimilation, especially mass immigration, and there is a refusal among many Muslims to assimilate to French society because they consider assimilation a form of submission to the social and legal norms of infidels. The Muslim Brotherhood calls its strategy of working inside institutions, rather than attacking them, entrisme. Anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, author of Le frérisme et ses réseaux, calls entrisme an attempt to subjugate without fighting. One way to do this is through informational warfare, often through music and social media. Gilles Kepel, a scholar of the Middle East and Muslims in the West, coined the term “jihadisme d’atmosphère,” or ambient jihadism, to explain how jihadism runs not through organized networks, but culture, in the songs of Freeze Corleone or Boro700, on social media through French leftist and Muslim political influencers, even in the global popularity of the Palestinian movement. The young man in the Mitry-Mory video is not a recruited jihadist, but he is breathing the air.

Then there’s the leftist side of the problem. In my recent essay on the French riots, I explained the roots of this, how communist and socialist teacher and student unions have helped drum this up the chaos in the name of antiracism and anti-colonialism. The original complaints about teacher shortages and bad schools were real, but these activists changed the nature of the movement. The Union Syndicale Lycéenne, which describes itself as antifascist, feminist, environmentalist, and collectivist, called for nationwide school blockades. These groups are correct that French barbarism in Algeria was a horror, and that does help explain why Algerians in France have such warranted animosity toward the country that has welcomed them in and given them a home. Lemoine also acknowledges the role of hard-leftist unions in all this, and adds, “What set them apart from traditional French social movements is how violent they were.” This is important, because one talking point I hear is that these riots are not unique, and that violent protesting is as French as beurre on a baguette.

But I think these riots are unique, and uniquely violent. In 2023, after a full week of chaos, France reported 808 officers injured. In 2005, France deployed 11,700 officers over three weeks and reported 224 injured. In the current riots, 997 officers were injured in a single day. I’ve heard people reference the yellow vest movement, arguing that this sort of violence has happened before. But on the worst day of those protests, Dec. 8, 2018, 1,723 people were arrested nationwide. A few days ago, on Oct. 17, about 2,400 were arrested. The targets are different too. The yellow vests vandalized the Arc de Triomphe and looted shops near the Champs-Élysées — and set fire to one prefecture. The current rioters burned the town hall in Limoges, broke into the town halls in Marseille and Lille, trashed the prefect’s residence in Bordeaux, burned a Lyon tourist office, and vandalized at least 300 Paris businesses. They’re not profiting financially or politically from such destruction. It just feels like raw hatred of French civilization.

The violence is so bad Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, the cabinet member over the national police and gendarmerie, admitted that in some cities, police have “lost control.” He offered to resign, but President Macron refused, saying he needs Nuñez to keep the chain of command intact, or they might truly lose control. The situation is so bad now that the Paris police prefecture is inviting shopkeepers to hire private security.

“I keep seeing a lot of people who are depicting those kids as ‘Islamists’ and ideologically motivated actors,” writes Lemoine, “but I think it’s a complete misreading of the situation in my opinion. This isn’t an ‘Islamist uprising’ or whatever nonsense people are talking about. Their actions are opportunistic and driven by a nihilistic culture that is very similar to what you see in Black ghettos in the U.S., where anti-social behavior is totally normalized, with an added Islamic veneer due to their family background. This nihilism and their family background makes them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination, which is why terrorists were almost always delinquent before they turned to religion, but most of them aren’t ideologues and those who are don’t loot stores.”

Yes, banlieue nihilism is real, and I’m sure most of these kids couldn’t explain Islamist doctrine if you asked them. But it’s also more than that. There’s the inherited postcolonial grievance against the French state, with which I sympathize, and the Islamo-leftist media ecosystem a lot of these kids inhabit, which I like less. A May 2025 French government report on the Muslim Brotherhood said Islamist preachers and influencers use social media to depict French secularism as a weapon against Muslims and the French state itself as inherently Islamophobic. On TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Telegram, these voices portray France as hostile to Muslims, secularism as discrimination, and assimilation as a demand to abandon Islam. One TikTok preacher with 250,000 followers calls France an “Islamophobic state” and promotes the niqab. Hassan Iquioussen is a preacher whose YouTube sermons drew tens of millions of views. France ordered him expelled in 2022 after he gave speeches calling Jews “misers and usurers,” said “the Zionists were in collusion with Hitler,” that women should “stay home to take care of the children and their husband,” and Jews live “in ghettos, because they don’t want to mix with others, whom they consider slaves.” I find this more hilarious than anything. Certainly no reason to expel the guy. But a trip to Brooklyn couldn’t hurt.

Police have investigated students organizing the violence on Snapchat and using the protest slogan Bismillah c’est les ténèbres. In the name of Allah, it’s darkness. This is one of the main protest slogans of this movement. A call for darkness in the name of Allah. No doubt if they ran society, the result would be the Dark Ages. Given the Palestinian and Algerian flags, the screams to kill in the name of Allah, looters who yell at the camera that they do it in the name of Allah, and cries for darkness in the name of Allah, one might be forgiven for suspecting that Islam has something to do with this. But when the name of Allah is invoked, we must resist the vulgar temptation to imagine that religion could conceivably be involved. Never mind that other faiths are not. Never mind that poor Chinese and Vietnamese, who live in some of the same neighborhoods in the same poor conditions, are curiously not involved in these riots. In fact, now the rioters are targeting Chinese French. One young North African man said, “The Chinese in France have become too wealthy and are now part of the ruling class. They wear nice clothes and drive big cars. It’s unfair.”

In 2023, Education Minister Gabriel Attal banned the abaya in schools and activist Elias d’Imzalène predicted the ban would fail, citing the riots after police killed Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old shot at a traffic stop, as proof that Muslim youth no longer want to “remain silent and bow down.” In 2024, he asked a Paris rally whether they were ready to “lead the intifada in Paris.” Also in 2023, as the riots spread, thousands of TikTok users livestreamed the looting and arson as it happened. Macron blamed Snapchat and TikTok, saying the platforms were being used to organize the violence. Some Muslim groups have found a different kind of revolution, fighting clothing restrictions through the courts. I admire those efforts. When schools began sending home girls in abayas, Action Droits des Musulmans challenged the ban before the Conseil d’État. Les Hijabeuses, a collective of hijab-wearing footballers, took the French Football Federation’s headscarf ban to the same court, but lost. In 2016, the Human Rights League persuaded the Conseil d’État to strike down the burkini ban.

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Another friend recently asked me, “Watching what’s happening in France really makes you think about how a country isn’t really tested until some part of it is on fire. That’s when you find out who and what you’re actually surrounded by. If war broke out and your country was invaded, how many people around you would pick up a rifle to defend it, and how many would smile and even help the enemy because their allegiance lies elsewhere?”

What a delightfully depressing question. Are we watching France fail to defend itself against an invasion? Are French collaborators again holding the door open, as leftists have repeatedly done for Islamists in other countries? It’s hard to say, but I said this:

France has answered this question before. Many times. French collaborators helped the Spanish Catholics in the 1590s, foreign anti-revolutionaries in the 1790s, and the Nazis in the 1940s. It’s actually their famous snobbery that makes them this way. They’re ideologues, always have been, so they tend to be doctrinaire absolutists. Russia and Germany have it too, but less. It makes ideological loyalty stronger than loyalty to a shared community, which can lead to foreign domination being rationalized as the price one has to pay for defeating “evil” people domestically. You also see this on the American left, which is very influenced by French thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, Bourdieu, Althusser, and Fanon. But Americans also inherited Rousseau from the French, and with it, a powerful tradition of revolutionary universalism. However, it was the British skepticism of grand theories, empiricism, and gradual reform, best embodied in the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, that inoculated us against such quisling tendencies. Another way the American left reflects the French while the right reflects the English is that the French ideal is to be cultivé — cultured, intellectually sophisticated, in the know, fluent in the “right” terminology, whereas the English ideal is to be sensible — practical, measured, and possessed of sound judgment rather than approved vocabulary.

Lemoine has a point. Plenty of the people rioting in France are opportunists. A woman running off with stolen dresses has no political convictions, but this only tells us why she joined the riot. Not why the riots began. Not why the rioters are screaming the name of Allah, singing jihadist rap music, and flying the Palestinian flag. I’m not saying this explains everything about the riots. But the fact that people ignore, deny, or downplay it as a factor is disturbing. A stolen television is one thing. A burned town hall, a torched school, or an attacked police station is another. These are institutions through which France governs itself and passes its civic inheritance to the next generation. Ironically, every ransacked public building may strengthen the hand of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally, whose promises of order and immigration control become more attractive by the hour. The radicals may find that, in trying to bring down the French Republic, they’ve only helped their enemies.

Lemoine is right about something else too. He ends his post with this: “It would take years to solve the problem even if we started now, which we won’t because our politics is completely broken, because it would require getting our budget in order, implementing reasonable economic policies, fixing our immigration and justice system, etc. We are cooked to be honest.”

Still, I remember a stretch of pavement on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir in January 2015, where two men who had just massacred a newsroom in the name of their god stood over a wounded police officer and shot him in the head. You might read this as further proof of all the reasons I just finished listing to be depressed, but I see a flicker of hope in the blood. Merabet, a Muslim, died defending the Republic. France is an idea as much as anything else, and as young men stand in burning streets invoking the same god against the same police, others are picking up the idea of France, some for the first time.

Although I was born here, it has taken me all my life to discover America. And while I don’t recall moving back, I do remember quietly judging my new classmates. My school had no uniforms and so the kids got to wear whatever they wanted, and combined with the unfortunate cult of American individuality, this had produced a student body that was less Norman Rockwell, more Jackson Pollock. Think neon windbreakers, highlighter-bright shirts, acid-washed jeans, and questionable haircuts. It was 1992, five centuries after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and everyone seemed to be talking about the discovery of this New World. I was 12 years old at the time, and I’d only just discovered it myself.

Growing up in the Bahamas, we celebrated Columbus Day as an official national holiday known as Discovery Day. The islands have never had a large Italian community, but when Columbus made his voyage in 1492, the first shores he landed upon were the sugary white sands of San Salvador in the Bahamas. Today, there are barely more than 800 people living on the island. The place where they say Columbus touched down, on Long Bay, is now empty except for a few casuarina trees, a white stone plaque, and a tall white cross. The plaque was donated by Spain in 1992. But driving north from Sugar Loaf Settlement along Queen’s Highway, you’d miss it if you didn’t know where to look. And there are few people left on the island to even stop.

For many locals, Discovery Day was merely a day off work to be with the family. But there were also parades on San Salvador, sloop sailing regattas across the out islands, and live goombay music in Nassau where I lived. I barely recall most of it, but I do remember loving Discovery Day. Even more, I loved the story of Columbus, not least because my parents owned a cabin cruiser and we often took overnight trips, fishing off the stern, stargazing with Dad, falling asleep to the cradle-rock of the waves, and waking in the night to discover what it means to be at the mercy of a raging storm of invisibly black water. The thought of venturing 4,000 miles into unknown seas, through the North Atlantic hurricane belt, always filled me with terror and respect.

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In 1992, two biopics about Columbus came out celebrating the 500th anniversary of his voyage, one starring Marlon Brando with the French actor Georges Corraface as Columbus, and the other, directed by Ridley Scott, starring Sigourney Weaver with the French actor Gérard Depardieu as Columbus (note the French-washing of Spanish history). Both films were flops, but I watched each with giddy delight. I still remember Depardieu jumping into the water and striding through the shallow waves, sword in hand, approaching the shore to the big choral swell of Vangelis’s “Conquest of Paradise.” But the anniversary sparked discussion in my homeroom class, and I soon learned I was not supposed to celebrate this chapter in Bahamian history. Back home, my grandmother’s baby brother, Philip Smith, was a member of parliament for San Salvador, and was proudly leading the celebrations there, staging a reenactment of the landing on Long Bay. Meanwhile, I was in America, being taught to hate it.

I didn’t understand. Hearing the reasons to dislike Columbus was like being told that Superman secretly liked to strangle cats. Many Americans were having the same experience because although opposition to Columbus Day had been around since the 60s, the 500th anniversary was when it went mainstream. Despite my initial confusion, I was a quick learner and, armed with my newfound talking points, I came home one afternoon and defiantly told my mother that her limited-edition AK Kaiser porcelain commemorative bowl, finely painted with images of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, as well as flowers, flamingoes, and fish of the islands, was a relic of genocidal racism. My Russian father let out a giant sigh and began quietly clearing our dinner plates. I accused Mom of supporting genocide. I compared Columbus to Hitler. I was probably lucky she didn’t break that stupid bowl over my head. Instead, she looked at me like I had just told her that the asparagus was sexist.

I’ve thought about that moment over the years, but my budding activism must have had a bigger impact on me than on my mother because I asked her about it the other day, and she has no memory of it whatsoever. But I certainly do. Especially since, over the years, I’ve come back to the faith of my youth and now I celebrate Columbus Day with pride. This year, our nation marks 250 years of Italian contributions to America. Most of the nation, anyway. That’s because these days, Columbus Day competes with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Like Christmas, the holiday is now a battleground in the culture wars. Just a few days ago, in fact, President Trump issued a proclamation saying, “We are forever indebted to his courageous voyage, and we will never allow his legacy to be erased by radical extremists.” As it happens, some of those extremists are my friends, and a few of them were shocked to learn that I celebrate this day of colonial evil — at least, the ones who don’t read The Radicalist. So here are my thoughts.

Lord of the flies

On October 12, 1492, Columbus and his men reached an island that the local Lucayan people — part of the broader Taíno world — called Guanahani, which he renamed San Salvador. In his journal, which comes to us through a later summary by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, Columbus noted that the islanders carried no weapons, and when he showed them swords, “they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance.” They “should be good servants,” he said, and he decided to take six of them back to Spain. Two days later, he added, “with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”

In 1493, Columbus came back with 17 ships and more than 1,000 men. He found La Navidad, the fort he had left on Hispaniola, burned and its 39 men dead. He began building a colony on the island, which today is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and he ruled with an iron fist. In 1494, Alonso de Ojeda, one of his captains, cut off a Taíno man’s ears over stolen clothing. In 1495, the Spanish rounded up about 1,500 Taíno and shipped 500 to Spain as slaves. Mothers who escaped fled into the forest and left their infants behind. Almost half the captives died on the crossing. Michele da Cuneo, an old friend of Columbus who joined the second voyage, described in a letter how the noble admiral gave him a captive Carib woman, and how he thrashed her with a rope until she stopped resisting and then raped her. In 1963, Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus’s most celebrated American biographer, called Cuneo “a jolly dog” who liked “a good time.”

Also in 1495, Columbus and his brother Bartholomew marched against the Taíno with cavalry and war dogs, rounding up more slaves. Every Taíno aged 14 or older had to hand over enough gold dust to fill a hawk’s bell — the small brass bell falconers tied to a bird’s leg, about the size of a thimble. The quotas were nearly impossible to meet, since the island’s gold lay as dust in riverbeds and had to be panned grain by grain. Those who found a way to pay the fee were given a copper token to wear around their necks, and anyone caught without one had their hands cut off and bled to death. Many Taíno fled to the mountains, abandoning their farms. Famine followed. But Columbus was undeterred, writing, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

In 1498, he returned on a third voyage and made his first landing in South America. On Hispaniola, Spanish settlers revolted against Columbus, and sent letters home complaining. The Crown dispatched Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate, and when he arrived in Santo Domingo in 1500, he wrote of “a kind of tyranny,” describing how one Spanish man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off and was sold as a slave, as well as a Spanish woman who dared to say Columbus’s father had been a weaver — which was true, his father was a wool weaver from Genoa — and was paraded naked through the streets on a donkey, then had her tongue cut out. Bobadilla arrested Columbus and his brothers and sent them to Spain, where the monarchs freed them later that year. Unpaid settlers returning from Hispaniola told tales of what they had survived, mocking Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” as the “Admiral of the Mosquitoes” for having discovered disease-ridden lands that ruined many a Castilian gentleman. But this was the least of the admiral’s sins. Columbus plausibly killed thousands, and enslaved at least 1,600. He never returned after 1504, but the machinery of death he created continued to harvest souls.

The people I grew up reenacting fared even worse. Within a few years of Columbus’s landing, Spanish slavers began raiding the Bahamas for labor to replace the dying Taíno of Hispaniola. When the Spanish went back for the last of the Lucayans in 1520, they could find only eleven. The islands stood empty for more than a century. Maybe if Columbus had gone a little softer on the innocent Lucayans, there’d be more people on San Salvador today to stop and read his plaque. But as it happened, the Bahamas I grew up in was built entirely by people who came after them.

The first Italian American

To the best of my knowledge, the name of Christopher Columbus mostly collected dust for the next two centuries. But starting in the 1730s, British writers began using the term “Columbia” as a poetic reference for the American colonies. One of the first people to personify America as “Columbia” in verse was Phillis Wheatley, who was freed from slavery two years before she wrote her 1775 poem “To His Excellency General Washington,” in which she wrote about the nations of the world and how “in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.” This borrowing became popular in part because the name “America” honored Amerigo Vespucci, whereas “Columbia” was at least a tribute to the man who had actually discovered this new territory. (People often claim Columbus did not discover the Americas because natives were already living there, but this is an illiterate argument since “discover” means to learn of something’s existence, not necessarily to find something no other human has ever found.)

Once this poetic formulation of his name became common, it was used to refer more to America than to Columbus himself. Examples include Washington, D.C., Columbia University, and Columbus, Ohio. But this is no more a tribute to the man than “Britain,” an old Celtic name for the native inhabitants meaning “the painted ones,” is a tribute to paint. Then something marvelous happened. Between the late 19th century and the 1920s, more than 4 million Italians immigrated to America. They were poor, Catholic, and linguistically alien to the English-speaking Protestant majority. They were also, especially southern Italians and Sicilians, commonly seen as criminal, intellectually inferior, and incapable of assimilation. But assimilate they did.

Many Protestant Americans saw these Catholic immigrants as more loyal to the pope than the Constitution, but Columbus offered them a way to challenge these stereotypes. After all, he was the famed explorer who helped kickstart the very process from which modern America emerged. Then in 1890, just before the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, New Orleans police chief David Hennessy was shot and authorities indicted 19 Italian immigrants and Italian Americans. The first trial ended with no conviction, and a mob stormed the parish prison and killed eleven men of Italian descent, in what is the largest documented lynching in U.S. history.

No one was ever charged, and prominent politicians and newspapers actually defended the violence. Italy recalled its ambassador, and the crisis ended only when the United States paid $25,000 in reparations. The massacre sparked national anti-lynching politics, and President Benjamin Harrison called on Americans to celebrate the 400th anniversary, not just for patriotic reasons, but diplomatic and political ones, as well. So in its way, Columbus Day began as a kind of Italian version of Juneteenth. And in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson made Columbus Day a federal holiday.

A communist holiday

If you ever saw Good Will Hunting, you may remember the scene where Hunting, played by Matt Damon, says to his therapist Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams, “If you wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your fuckin’ ass.” Maguire replies, “Better than Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent? You think that’s a good book?”

Zinn’s 1980 book opens by presenting the European encounter with the Americas from the standpoint of indigenous suffering, arguing that conventional American history had chosen the wrong protagonists. I loved that book as a leftist teenager. I loved the subversiveness of it, and I loved the power of knowing a history most folks did not. But Maguire’s response is smarter than it seems. He’s telling Hunting he knows the book too — and the writer’s unspoken politics. Zinn stood further to the left than most of his readers know. When the FBI released its files on Zinn in 2010, they showed that informants had reported him as a member of the Communist Party USA in the late 1940s and early 1950s, attending meetings in Brooklyn and, according to one informant, teaching his comrades a course on Marxism. But publicly, Zinn described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.”

Whatever his party card said, his project was recognizably Marxist. Zinn wanted to strip away what Marxists call false consciousness, the sense that capitalism, and the American society built around it, is simply the natural order of things. Or that it is acceptably good. Much of his work as a historian, therefore, was to show that American society was fundamentally immoral, and therefore in need of rejection at a basic level. We see this in a lot of woke ideology today — “woke” itself is just a slang term for cultural consciousness — and once you understand this, you can understand what Zinn was trying to do by centering Columbus the man rather than Columbus the symbol, even though that’s not what Columbus Day was ever really about.

Zinn was right about Columbus, but he never once turned the critical lens he applied to the Spanish colonists to the native people of the New World. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs sacrificed war captives by the thousands, cutting out their hearts atop the Templo Mayor, and stacked the skulls in a tower of more than 650 heads cemented together, including women and children, while captors ate parts of the bodies in ritual feasts. Around 1450 on Peru’s coast, the Chimú cut open the chests of children, some as young as five. In South Dakota around 1325, attackers at Crow Creek slaughtered villagers, scalped and dismembered the corpses, and carried off the young women. In Colorado around 1150, Ancestral Puebloans at Cowboy Wash butchered and cooked people. And across the continent, slavery was widespread. None of this excuses Columbus. He was a savage. But so were these indigenous people.

Nor did Zinn turn the lens he trained on Columbus Day toward Martin Luther King Day. He was happy to put on his historian’s hat for the uncomfortable truths of Columbus the man, but he did no such thing for King, who plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, serially cheated on his wife, rejected the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection that his Baptist congregants took on faith, and according to an FBI surveillance summary, may have looked on and laughed while a fellow minister raped a woman in a Washington hotel room. None of this approaches the scale of Columbus’s crimes, but it’s the principle that matters. We acknowledge the truth of the words King delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, and we honor the man even though he doesn’t live up to the symbol. But more importantly, we would never assume that someone celebrating MLK Day is celebrating being a scumbag husband, just as we don’t assume that someone celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day means celebrating eating children. Rather, these holidays celebrate the good parts, and we don’t sit around debating whether we can separate the good from the bad either. We just separate them. Readers familiar with my history may be wondering, what about someone like Vladimir Lenin? Do we get to celebrate him too? But with King and Columbus, we celebrate specific achievements worth honoring, and set the sins of the men aside. With Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we celebrate an ethnic identity, which I find less deserving, but not inherently immoral. But with someone like Lenin, the atrocities were not distinct from the achievement. When we celebrate King, we celebrate his antiracism. When we celebrate Columbus, we celebrate his discovery. But when people celebrate Lenin, they celebrate his revolution.

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The decisive push for Indigenous Peoples’ Day came on the same anniversary when I was sitting in homeroom, learning about the real Columbus and what he did to the people of my mother’s homeland. In the Bay Area, activists formed a group called Resistance 500 and lobbied the Berkeley City Council, which voted unanimously to make Indigenous Peoples’ Day an official city holiday. In 2014, Seattle and Minneapolis adopted it too. And in 2021, President Biden formally recognized it.

Our debt to history

For me personally, as well as for America at large, the Columbus Day debate raises a genuinely hard question about national memory. Should we honor figures for their contributions even when they committed serious wrongs? Columbus belongs in the history books, but that alone doesn’t earn him a holiday. My beloved Bahamas has already made this choice. In 2013, the Bahamas replaced Discovery Day with National Heroes Day, honoring Bahamians rather than the man who emptied the islands of their first people. Then again, the Bahamas never had an Italian immigrant story to give Columbus a second life.

A few days ago, my mother told me someone took a hammer to the statue of Columbus on Shirley Street in Nassau. I was saddened to hear the news. I imagine Uncle Philip would be too. Later in life, he became the Bahamas’ official envoy for slavery reparations, building the moral and legal case for former European colonial powers to pay Caribbean nations for native genocide and chattel slavery. Yet he also stood on Long Bay and erected a statue to the man who committed them. Like him, I don’t think the people who want to abolish Columbus Day are wrong about Columbus. I think they’re wrong about Columbus Day. I found out this week that my mother still has that bowl, sitting on a shelf in her living room. I hope one day she gives it to me.

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There’s now a running online fight over Indian-American dominance of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and over whether the “striver” immigrant model is compatible with American culture. On May 28, Shrey Parikh, a 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, won the 2026 Bee in a spell-off against runner-up Ishaan Gupta, who is also Indian-American. Parikh is the 31st champion of Indian heritage in a run that began with Nupur Lala in 1999. Apart from 2021, no one outside the community has won since 2008. That’s nearly two decades of dominance by a group that makes up roughly 1% of the population. But instead of a celebration of excellence and meritocracy, the win was followed by a wave of online abuse, including racist slurs and demands that the boy be deported.

The more respectable criticism goes after “striver” culture itself. Indian-American families run their own parallel spelling circuit, anchored by the North South Foundation and the South Asian Spelling Bee. Former speller Vauhini Vara, writing in Harper’s, found that kids on that circuit start drilling at five or six. Parikh himself works with three coaches, pays for word lists, and competes in online bees 12 months out of the year. This has prompted the public intellectual known on X simply as Wanye to weigh in, conceding that Indian-American kids win through work, but that this kind of winning is itself un-American, because Americans prize natural talent and distrust grinders:

“You don’t study for the spelling bee” is a deep and important aspect of American culture. I was at a baseball game discussing some young players with a buddy one time and he said to me offhandedly, “hard work is fine, but nothing beats talent.”

Americans have this sort of sense that there’s something a little off about working really hard to get good at something that you’re not naturally good at. You’re never really going to be on the same level as the guy who has a natural talent. We have room in our hearts for scrappy little guys who work hard, but we are by default suspicious of grinders and strivers.

If you were really meant to do it, then you’d be naturally good at it. You sign your kids up for little league, but you don’t take it too seriously unless they show remarkable early talent.

Yes, this sounds sort of ridiculous if you take it too literally. No, nobody is saying that there’s any kind of practical test for this or that anybody should be excluded because we found out that they secretly studied too hard.

But this is a part of American culture. And if you can’t understand it, then that just marks you out as foreign to that culture to an even greater degree.

I think this is why “imposter syndrome“ is a western phenomenon, to a significant degree. We all kind of know when we’re a natural at something and when we’re there because we got lucky or as the result of grinding. We all know what it looks like when something comes natural to somebody else. And we feel suspicious of even ourselves when we consider the evidence that our own accomplishments required hard work.

This is the culture that produced the sword in the stone. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve practiced, how much you’ve trained, how hard you’ve worked. You’re either meant to pull the sword or you aren’t. Neo isn’t “the one” because he studied to be.

“You don’t study for the spelling bee” is true of some, but wrong in the way he frames it. If you’ve ever seen or read about the subject — Spellbound is a good documentary, American Bee is a good book — you know these kids crack their heads against books with a focus and ferocity that few adults ever manage in their entire lives, which is what makes them so captivating to watch. The book Word Freak talks about a level of obsessive work that almost suggests a mental disorder, so if what you want is a display of natural talent, that’s it. And sure, there are wordcels who possess a natural talent for such things in the way that he means, like myself. I speak multiple languages and seem to pick them up easily. I rolled out of bed without studying at all and scored in the 99th percentile on my GRE verbal. But at the highest level of competition, in that the top 1%, you simply have to prep. I didn’t, frankly, because I just didn’t feel like studying and was confident I’d do well enough.

I’m not a 1% chess player, but I’ve had a certain debate with one of my best friends for years now because I used to play chess mostly blind, meaning without a granular, encyclopedic knowledge of theory. I liked solving problems in real time, thinking through risks, and not moving on muscle memory. My friend is literally autistic and has mastered the second approach. He used to take more games off me, but after years of play, I memorized what I must. Being the son of a Russian master, I always had good opening theory and a formidable endgame, but I have had to learn more since, and truthfully, I miss the old way.

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So did Bobby Fischer. Late in life, he complained that chess had become nothing but memorization and prearrangement, and he invented Fischer Random, which shuffles the back rank, to kill off opening prep. It may be apocryphal, but they say someone once asked how many moves he thinks ahead and he replied, “Only one, but the best one.” Magnus Carlsen has taken up the same cause with his Freestyle Chess tour, and his own play pushes opponents into strange positions, creating multiple problems for them without appearing to have a clear conclusion in mind. When I was the head of the national desk at the New York Times sister paper in South Korea, one of the most popular stories we ever ran was about how Lee Sedol played a Go tournament against Google’s AlphaGo, and beat the computer in Game 4. With his now-famous Move 78, he got weird enough to drag them both into uncharted territory, then he out-thought the machine. The chess I miss is the kind where natural talent wins, but playing chess purely as a thinking man’s game means that when you’re evenly matched in intelligence, but your opponent is playing a memory game, you’re going to lose.

Even though you see some masters play a version of the thinker’s game, no one would say Carlsen or Lee are weak on theory or that they are just out there winging it. Raw talent is impressive to see and can be competitive at the highest level, but winning talent requires a combination of giftedness and almost maniacal devotion. Not to mention, the most captivating part of the stories about these kids is almost never the win, but the grind. At least for me, but many others I suspect, it’s knowing how Jordan trained growing up, the hours he put in, the devotion and obsessive perfectionism, that makes him not just a winner, not just a legend, but the GOAT. Same goes for other sports GOATs on my list: Fedor Emelianenko, Alexander Nemov, Lu Xiaojun, Mikhail Baryshnikov. All naturally gifted. All insanely hard working.

That’s an international list, but what I’m talking about is more true in America than anywhere else because grinding is the most American shit of all. The attitude that it’s foreign discards the deeply American notions of the self-made man, of true grit, of the Protestant work ethic, and of Horatio Alger stories that put effort above inborn gifts. It dismisses the American idea that you shoot your shot, give it your all, and bust your ass. Hell, even if you fail, you can rest your head easy at the end of the day knowing you did your best. In some parts of the world, if you put everything on the line and fail, you’re seen as a failure. You threw everything into a startup and it didn’t pan out? You’re a fool. But in America, you’re seen as a risk-taker, a badass, someone who doesn’t back down, who says things with their chest, who rages against the storm, clinging to the mast, screaming in the wind. Americans may be brash and loud and sometimes crude, but we are also the Lieutenant Dans and Cool Hand Lukes of the world. The frontiersman, the gunslinger, the dogface soldier. What we love about these figures is their unbreakable determination, their spine, and yes, their grinder mentality. You might be good with a lasso and maybe you can even ride a horse, but if you’re a stranger to striving and hard fucking work, you ain’t no cowboy, son.

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The country is currently in crisis as riots rage nationwide, people are having their faces burned in public and their heads slammed into concrete, and the spineless media is simply reporting it all as a dispute over the economy, with scarcely any mention of Islam or African immigration. Now as a result, French students cannot even go to class because about 400 schools across the country are closed. And this all erupted within just a few weeks.

Last month, France’s major unions called a National Day of Action to protest proposed budget cuts and to push for higher taxes on the wealthy. This led to marches, school blockades, and two cars set on fire. Most of the unions involved were socialist, but the General Confederation of Labour and the Fédération syndicale unitaire have communist roots. To put these groups in an American context, they fit within the same ideological ecosystem as the Democratic Socialists of America, those clowns who want to get rid of the Constitution, abolish police and prisons, and who think being physically fit is a form of racist “body fascism.” These French groups have reasonable pro-labor goals, but they blend them with similarly woke social justice beliefs. Once their protests kicked off, they then helped national student unions, which are run primarily by high schoolers, organize companion protests. These student unions are cut from the same ideological cloth. One of the main ones, Union syndicale lycéenne, describes itself not in terms of seeking a better education, but as “antifascist, feminist, environmentalist …” you get the idea. So they joined the fray, issuing their own demands: no more overcrowded classrooms, lighter class schedules, reform of the university admissions system, and renovations of deteriorating schools.

Except classes are not overcrowded. The average classroom in a French high school contains 30 students, compared to 21 students in the United States. Nor is their class load particularly heavy. French students face 5.5 hours of instruction each day, compared to 5 or 6 hours in the United States. As for the university admissions system, it’s not that they are put through grueling testing, such as Chinese students prepping for the gaokao, but simply that they are placed on ranked waiting lists without knowing whether they’ll get into their preferred school. It’s not that the system is unfairly difficult, but that these students are struggling to compete. I am sure some of these students are diamonds in the rough who are not being afforded the opportunities they need to thrive. And that is a tragedy that demands attention. But also, some of these kids are just terrible pupils. As one student complained, “We can’t sleep in class because the teachers aren’t happy about it.” Finally, there’s the claim that the schools are in terrible condition. But have a look for yourself:

On Sept. 29, high schoolers across France barricaded their schools. Within days, the protests had exploded into nationwide riots. Masked teens set buildings and cars on fire, smashed windows, looted shops, threw paving stones at police, and attacked passersby on the street. These are not your average student protesters. America recently saw college campuses flooded with pro-Palestinian protests, and some of those did result in violence. But for the most part, they took the form of encampments. These French riots, by contrast, are extremely violent. And not just in the sense of students punching people or shoving officers to the ground. One rioter set a woman’s face on fire with a flamethrower. Multiple students have thrown hydrochloric acid at officers. One teen blew his hand off by picking up a dispersal grenade to throw at officers. And here’s a video of students “protesting” the “terrible conditions” of their schools:

Responding to the riots, the group Stand Up to Racism posted, “Revolt is spreading in France and antiracism is at its core,” along with a video of students at Henri IV School in Paris singing, “We are all antifascists.” What does a school protest have to do with racism? This is because many of the rioters are African immigrants, or the children of African immigrants, and people are starting to observe that fact. The current riots began with blockades outside Paris in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, and Seine-Saint-Denis, home to the highest share of immigrants of any department in France, has remained their epicenter. But instead of having a hard conversation about immigration policy, the left is simply calling people racist for noticing. Even the government has blamed the far-left France Unbowed for stoking the protests. As i24 News reported:

Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, and Pantin were among the centers of the unrest in Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris. Immigrants accounted for roughly 32% of the department’s population in 2020–2021, according to national statistics agency INSEE. French-born residents with at least one immigrant parent accounted for a further 32%.

France’s suburbs have repeatedly been the starting point for nationwide unrest involving young people from immigrant families. In 2005, three weeks of riots followed the deaths of two teenagers of African descent hiding from police in an electricity substation. In 2023, the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, a teenager of North African descent, triggered another wave of violence.

“If you believe antiracism is the cause of the riots in France,” wrote philosopher Peter Boghossian, “you are retarded.”

This is not a criticism of Muslim Africans as a group. I admire the military leader Emir Abdelkader, who bravely resisted the French conquest of Algeria and protected thousands of Christians during the 1860 Damascus massacres. I adore Assia Djebar, the Algerian-born Muslim novelist and historian who became one of France’s most prominent literary figures, even serving in the Académie française, as well as a renowned feminist who was often considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and who I think should’ve beaten out Doris Lessing in 2007. And while I don’t care much for football, one of my favorite moments in the sport is when the Algerian-French player Zinedine Zidane head-butted another player for insulting his mother and his sister. For me, this was more satisfying to see than even Diego Maradona’s “goal of the century.” So I like Algerian Muslims. I am not aiming this criticism at Africans as a group either, or Muslims as a group. But the cases above are not the only ones worthy of consideration.

In Paris in 2022, an Algerian murdered a 12-year-old girl. In Annecy in 2023, a Syrian refugee stabbed toddlers in a playground. In Arras, the teacher Dominique Bernard was stabbed to death at his school and three others were wounded by one of his former students, Mohammed Mogouchkov. In Paris that year, a German tourist was stabbed to death and two people were hurt by a French-born Iranian with a prior terrorism conviction who had pledged allegiance to ISIS. In Crépol, a 16-year-old was stabbed to death during a village dance by young men from a Romans-sur-Isère housing project. In Rouen in 2024, an Algerian man tried to set fire to a synagogue and was shot dead by police. In La Grande-Motte that year, an Algerian man set several fires at a synagogue and a police officer was injured by an explosion. In Mulhouse last year, an Algerian man killed a 69-year-old Portuguese man and injured six others, including two police officers. Macron called it an “Islamist terror act.” The attacker, Brahim Abdessemed, had been in France illegally for over a decade. The government was fully aware of this, and had been trying to deport him, but Algeria refused to take him 10 times.

But that’s not all. In Paris, a 19-year-old student was murdered in the Bois de Boulogne. The suspect is a Moroccan with a prior rape conviction who was under a deportation order. In Lyon last year, an Algerian was arrested over allegedly stabbing to death a disabled Iraqi Christian for posting criticism of Islamists online. In Paris this year, Brahim Bahrir attacked gendarmes with a knife during a ceremony, and was shot dead. He was a French national who had been released in December after serving a Belgian terrorism sentence. In Sarcelles in July, a car carrying weapons was found near a synagogue. The anti-terrorism prosecutor linked the plot to Islamist extremism. Recently, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 46 terrorist attacks have been foiled in France over just four years, most of them Islamist.

And then there are the riots. When Morocco had its World Cup run in 2022, celebrations turned violent in Paris, Lyon, and Montpellier, where a 14-year-old boy was killed by a driver. Last year, PSG’s Champions League celebrations turned into rioting that left two people dead and nearly 200 injured. This year, the same celebrations ended in riots again, with one death and 890 arrests. Also now, every New Year’s Eve, close to 1,000 cars are burned across France. And when police shot Nahel Merzouk, a French 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, France saw the Nahel riots. Rioters burned more than 5,000 vehicles, damaged nearly 1,000 buildings, and attacked some 250 police stations and gendarmeries, along with town halls and even schools. The rioters were mostly young people from the banlieues, many of immigrant background, and the average age of those arrested was 17. The government said about 90% were French citizens, but that’s misleading because citizenship says little about whether they come from immigrant backgrounds.

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One problem is that it’s hard to get a full sense of how bad the problem even is, because France does not collect data on race, ethnicity, or religion, including for criminal offenders. That ban dates to a 1978 data protection law, and in 2007, the Constitutional Council struck down a measure that would have allowed ethnic statistics. Part of the logic here is to prevent another rounding up of people on the basis of such factors, as happened during World War II. It’s ironic then that a law passed to prevent another horror like the one that was visited upon Jews is now allowing a new horror to be visited upon Jews, as well as everyone else. And EU law adds another layer: Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which the European Commission proposed in 2012 under Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, restricts processing data on race, ethnicity, or religion. But the GDPR doesn’t mandate this blindness. Denmark, which is bound by the same regulation, publishes crime data by country of origin, including for the children of immigrants. France does publish the nationality of suspects, however, and while foreigners only make up about 9% of residents, they are heavily overrepresented in some offenses, such as vehicle thefts and burglaries. But since most children of immigrants are French citizens, those numbers say nothing about the second generation.

We can try to get at an answer obliquely, but not with any real precision. In 2016, France had about 5.7 million Muslims, more than any other European nation. From 2016 to 2023, about 2.4 million immigrants entered France, and 44% aged 18–59 were Muslim, which suggests roughly 1 million Muslim arrivals. Another 313,000 immigrants arrived in 2024, and France issued about 377,000 first-residence permits in 2025. At the same 44% rate, that adds roughly 300,000 more. These are gross arrivals, ignoring departures, deaths, and births. Still, they put France’s Muslim population at around 7 million. How many of that 7 million is a concern? Well, a 2024 survey found that 22% of French Muslims expressed sympathy for Hamas, and nearly a quarter supported violence against Jews. That pencils out to more than 1 million Muslims living in France with violently hateful ideas about French Jews.

Worse, sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar, who has studied Islam in French prisons since the early 2000s, has estimated that Muslims make up roughly 40 to 60% of inmates, and up to 70% in some prisons near large cities. France now holds a record 90,000 prisoners, so even the low end of his range would mean about 36,000 Muslim inmates, and the high end would mean about 54,000. That’s a fucking nightmare.

France is being eaten alive and the costs are piling up in burned schools and murdered children. The Simpsons once mocked the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” for giving Paris to the Nazis. What fewer people know is that the craven Vichy regime betrayed its own Jews and deported 76,000 to Auschwitz. Only 3,000 came back. Now they’re holding the door open for another violently antisemitic group. If the first French colonial empire was in the Americas and India, and the second French colonial empire was mostly in Africa, the third is in France itself, as the government colonizes its own population.

But I only have so much sympathy for the French. After all, this is the way the Western Roman Empire collapsed, by reaping the harvest of its conquests, bringing too many other barbaric groups into its fold, and becoming a balkanized clump of states. And frankly, it may sound cold-hearted but what France is experiencing now is partly its own damn fault. If you don’t know the lore of Algerian hatred for the French, let me tell you the story. During the Revolutionary Wars, two Jewish merchants in Algiers, Bacri and Busnach, supplied grain to France on credit, in a deal financed by the city’s ruler. Almost 30 years later, the French had still not repaid their debt and the ruler of Algiers, Hussein Dey, finally lost his temper with French bullshit and, during a heated exchange, slapped French consul Pierre Deval in the face with a fly-whisk. Considering their mistake, the French might have overlooked this insult. But King Charles X, facing a defiant parliament, saw a foreign war as a way to distract from his troubles at home. In 1830, he used the insult as a pretext to invade Algeria.

The conquest was savage. Under Marshal Bugeaud, the army burned villages and crops. In 1845, French forces asphyxiated hundreds of people sheltering in the Dahra caves. War, famine, and disease killed up to a third of the native population. In 1945, after police fired on Algerian demonstrators in Sétif, Algerians fought back, killing around 100 settlers. The French responded with the Sétif massacre, slaughtering thousands of people, many of them innocent, including little children. Both sides committed atrocities in the brutal war that eventually resulted in Algerian independence. But French depravity wasn’t done yet. Algerian harkis, Muslims who fought on the French side, were abandoned after the war, and many were massacred. The few who made it to France were subjected to harsh racism and warehoused in camps, where dozens of children died, and the children of those who survived all this were treated like shit despite the fact that these people had given everything to the country and were, in the greater sense, more truly French than the racist white French born on that land.

Let me explain what I mean by “the greater sense.” In Les Regrets IX (1558), Joachim du Bellay gave us one of the earliest formulations of France as a civilizing matrix, writing, “France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois.” France, mother of arts, arms, and laws. In Tableau de la France (1833), Jules Michelet wrote that England is an empire, Germany is a country, but France is a person. The idea being, France is more than just a people in a place. France is an idea, and it has a soul. The same spirit runs through the line, often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson but actually from the playwright Henri de Bornier, that “Every man has two countries, his own and France.”

In other words, France is a choice. Not a bloodline. This idea is echoed again and again. Montaigne wrote that he was French only through Paris, and that he considered all men his compatriots. Sacha Guitry is credited with saying that to be Parisian is not to be born in Paris, but to be reborn there. And Hemingway captured the same notion in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, meaning that Paris is the feast you carry with you for the rest of your life, once you’ve lived there young. As a lover of French culture, I cherish this idea. As Americans, we often like to think that we came up with this. We tell ourselves the pretty little lie that the Old World was nasty and brutish with its traditions of blood and soil, but that we threw off such thinking for more modern, liberal truths. Except we inherited a lot of this from the French, and our Founding Fathers knew it, even if we have neglected to teach it. This is one of the great beauties of France. But the problem is that now France has welcomed nations into its house who do not share in the idea, who do not want to belong to some intellectual or aesthetic tradition of meaning or taste. I am talking about people who can scarcely be bothered to even consider such things as a moveable feast of devotion to a certain kind of soul. If you tried to explain it to them, they’d probably stab you.

After the initial horrors visited upon Algerians by the French, things did not improve by much. In World War I, France brought in at least 130,000 North African workers and more than 170,000 Algerian soldiers. Most went home afterward, but small Algerian worker communities stayed on in Paris, Marseille, and the northern industrial areas. Then in 1947, after Algerian Muslims had been made French citizens, a new statute let them move freely to mainland France. In 1963, labor agreements with Morocco and Tunisia brought more and more arrivals. In 1976, the family-reunification decree let workers already in France bring their spouses and children. That, more than anything, is what turned a population of temporary workers into a permanent Muslim community, and their children, born in France, cemented that presence. At the same time, the institutions that used to integrate people were disappearing. Factories, unions, the Communist Party’s suburban networks, and military conscription — suspended in 1997 — had all once turned Italian, Polish, and Portuguese workers into Frenchmen. Those successes convinced the French that assimilation works on its own. What they failed to understand was that it only worked because the system was doing the integrating, and North African workers were arriving just as deindustrialization began taking those very institutions apart.

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At the same time, these tensions were made worse by the fact that Muslim immigrants still faced discrimination. In Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (2016), authors Adida, Laitin, and Valfort show that Senegalese applicants with Muslim names got far fewer callbacks than otherwise identical Christian Senegalese applicants. Partly as a result, unemployment in France’s priority neighborhoods, where many Muslim families live, is more than double the national average. Then there are the anti-French attitudes in post-colonial societies, especially Algeria. The 1954–62 war left a burning hate on both sides, and many descendants of Algerian parents define themselves against France, and the Algerian state’s “memory politics” feed the vicious cycle. Islamist currents don’t help either. Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s spilled into France when the Armed Islamic Group carried out a wave of bombings in 1995, including one at Paris’s Saint-Michel station that killed eight people. Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood networks, and imams paid by foreign governments, now spread their influence. In fact, France only stopped accepting new foreign-paid imams in 2024. And while all this was happening, the state blinded itself with colorblind universalism and the ban on ethnic statistics. Meanwhile, “decolonial” ideas are spreading on the left alongside anti-French ones, French leftists treat assimilation as a dirty word, and when cities burn, you get called racist if you point any of this out.

And who loses in all this? The old French, for one. But also the new French, by which I mean Algerians and other Africans and Muslims, who have made their home in this great country and embraced the idea of France, often even more than the native people themselves, as tends to happen. I would argue that we see a similar thing in America with Latino and Indian immigrants. Yet these people are judged as part of the same group as the savages currently tearing things apart. If you talk to an Algerian Muslim who is truly French in spirit, they will speak with utter disdain and even disgust about these newcomers, and they loathe being lumped in with them, rightfully so, though by now many have become quite assimilated to the stupidity of white French racism and the way it recoils from nuance or logic. I feel for these people, trapped now between the idiots on the French left, unassimilated immigrants who tear things apart every time they lose their temper, and the racists on the French right.

The country has simply become too diverse too fast, and the thread of a once beautiful idea is unraveling in the lap of so many different competing ones. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to even have a country when it is being pulled in so many directions. Or as Charles de Gaulle put it, “How can you govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”

This morning, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 was headed from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 people aboard, nearly all Israeli, when the Omani co-pilot stabbed the Indian captain and tried to crash the plane. The aircraft dropped about 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds, and a hijack code was broadcast. Israel scrambled fighter jets. The wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door, and Israeli passengers rushed in and restrained the attacker. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu cited the stabbing and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called it a “jihadist terror attack.”

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But multiple outlets failed to clearly report these facts. BBC World reported, “Israel-bound flight diverted after fight between pilots.” The Washington Post reported the flight “was diverted to Saudi Arabia after a midair altercation prompted a hijacking distress signal,” but the article’s web address ends in “after-onboard-altercation,” revealing that was the original headline. CNN called it a “’violent’ altercation between two pilots,” and U.S. News/Reuters said “brawl.” For contrast, NBC ran “Pilot stabbed his co-pilot in apparent attempt to crash Israel-bound plane,” NPR ran “A pilot stabs another pilot and tries to crash their flight,” and CBS led with a passenger saying the “co-pilot tried to murder the pilot.”

The New York Times, in its breaking-news post, said only: “A plane flying from Dubai to Israel was diverted after an altercation between the pilot and co-pilot, Israeli officials said.” Its later coverage focused on the diversion and “the confrontation between the pilots.” When critics pushed back, NYT Communications posted: “Our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we’re able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don’t publish speculation or unverified information.”

I don’t have a problem with the initial reporting, given that the Times posted their first story at 6:08 a.m. ET and Netanyahu and Katz’s statements came out around mid-morning Eastern, so these details were not yet confirmed at the time of publication. My problem is more with the claim that “Unlike activists and partisans, we don’t publish speculation or unverified information,” as if we’re all a bunch of nitwits who have never heard of this thing called the Times before. As if the Times doesn’t do activism, just facts and data. So let’s review a few examples together.

1619

In 2019, the Times published a revisionist interpretation of American history that historians have attacked and even its own author and world-class mother, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has refused to defend, saying, “I’m a journalist, it’s a work of journalism.” As if that’s an excuse. The original 1619 Project famously, and falsely, asserted that protecting slavery was “one of the primary reasons” the colonists declared independence. Then in 2021, the paper partnered with the Pulitzer Center in launching the 1619 Project Education Network, explicitly designed to have educators “design, teach, and share curriculum” based on the Times project. Among other things, they produced a four-week high-school unit titled “Literacy and Liberation,” whose stated objectives include understanding “equity, power, and justice,” learning how literacy helps students act as “social change agents,” and empowering students “as activists in the present and in the future.” One of its assigned texts was Marxist philosopher Paulo Freire’s “The Importance of the Act of Reading.” A unit titled “Reparations Math and Reparations History” has students investigate reparations and use algebra to propose how the United States could pay them. Another has students become environmental-justice advocates. So, in their own words, they were literally training high schoolers to become Marxist “activists.”

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Trans

In the 2018 article, “Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence,” the underlying story was that the government was considering a legal definition of sex as biological, binary, and generally immutable. The paper framed this as “defining transgender out of existence,” which is the woke activist language of erasure and trans genocide, and plainly an interpretive formulation rather than a neutral description of the proposed regulation. In other words, they were doing activist journalism. Another example is Julia Jacobs’s 2020 story about J.K. Rowling, which described parts of Rowling’s argument as “misinformation” and said there was “no evidence” that pro-trans bathroom policies increase assaults or privacy violations, but the story gave ample room to transgender and nonbinary voices repudiating Rowling, and almost none to the other side of the argument.

Gaza

The al-Ahli hospital explosion on Oct. 17, 2023, is the obvious centerpiece here. The initial Times homepage headline read: “Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says.” This foregrounded an Israeli airstrike and a death toll of 500 before either had been independently verified. Internal Times discussions later reported by Vanity Fair showed staff members had urged editors to hedge the claim. The Times eventually published an unusually candid editor’s note saying its early coverage had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas.” Yes, Hamas. A second example came just two months later when the Times ran “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab War Losses in 40 Years.” Taken literally, that was obviously wrong — Syria, Iraq, and Yemen alone make the comparison untenable. The underlying article was actually making the much narrower claim that Gaza’s toll exceeded the Arab death toll in wars with Israel during that period. Then there’s the story “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace,” which compared Gaza’s reported women-and-children fatalities with civilian deaths in Ukraine, Iraq, and Afghanistan and concluded that the pace had few precedents in this century. The article acknowledged that Gaza authorities did not distinguish civilians from combatants, and women and children as an approximate proxy for civilian deaths. Or there’s the fact that Times columnist Megan Stack twice used a truncated quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” — omitting the sentence, “There will be no Hamas.” And when Netanyahu talked about getting rid of Hamas, Michelle Goldberg claimed he was talking about the “surrender and deportation” of all Gaza residents. This month, a peer-reviewed study by Yale professor Edieal Pinker analyzed 1,559 Times articles on the Israel-Gaza War and found 70% had an anti-Israel bias.

And let’s not forget Nicholas Kristof’s column “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” published on May 11, 2026, which is based on interviews with 14 Palestinians who said they were raped in Israeli custody. Kristof tells us about an anonymous Palestinian journalist who says guards ordered a dog to rape him. But Kristof doesn’t treat the claim as obvious bullshit. He doesn’t treat it as unproven testimony either. He tries to support the claim by citing a viral post by an influencer who said an unnamed source had said it was true. But The New York Times Communications department wants you to know they “don’t publish speculation or unverified information” because they’re not “activists and partisans.” So where did this insane story about dog rape come from? The Times of Israel traced the claim back to June 2024, when an official from Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry made it on Al Jazeera Arabic. Yes, Hamas.

Worse, the Times Opinion head Kathleen Kingsbury said the column was “rigorously fact-checked” and "contained “no errors.” This led to the lie going nuclear on everyone’s timeline. Few outlets in the world have spread as much disinformation about Israel as the Times, few taken as seriously have spread lies as absurd, and few have doubled-down rather than self-correct when called out, as indeed they did this week. And the damage was considerable, in terms of moving the needle of public discourse on an already dangerously contentious issue even further in the direction of crazy. For an example, the English columnist and leftist activist wrote a piece, “New York Times confirms Israel using dogs to rape,” that currently has over 6,000 likes. ’s Zeteo and Al Jazeera English argued it should have run as a news story rather than opinion. Meanwhile, no forensic or documentary evidence has ever been made public and the claim has never been proven true. So well done, Times.

Confirmed

Let me be clear. I respect the Times. It’s still one of the most important news organizations in the world, and its reporters do work in war zones, in courtrooms, and inside government agencies that almost nobody else can match. I also find that my respect for the Times is more granular than all-or-nothing. Perhaps this has to do with my time working in the field, as I find most readers do take an all-or-nothing approach largely because they don’t have the time or interest in dissecting the nuances of the issue. If a paper proves itself shoddy, they’re done. But I take swings at the Times precisely because I haven’t given up on it (even if it has mostly turned into a gaming and propaganda platform these days). So while I do reach for the vomit bag when I read their black, trans, or Palestinian coverage, I also respect specific reporters and specific bureau chiefs such as Keith Bradsher, their Beijing bureau chief, whose work is very data-driven, very technical, and Motoko Rich, currently Rome bureau chief but previously Tokyo, who is known less for data and more for old-school shoe-leather reporting. Also, Kenneth Chang on the science desk. (You can see my decades in Asia have produced a certain bias.) So that’s where and why I maintain respect. I’ve helped run newsrooms, and I know every paper gets things wrong. Fine. But my complaint is that the Times’s errors all fall in the same direction, story after story, year after year, because they are not really errors. They’re the marks of a political bias. The staff at the Times is staggeringly, suffocatingly, absurdly progressive. But hey, having a point of view is not a sin. The Nation has one, as does National Review. The difference is, they admit it. And the Times won’t. Now it’s lecturing the rest of us that, “unlike activists and partisans,” it only deals in confirmed facts. Consider me unconvinced.

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Last week, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the bombshell essay, “In fighting for every black child, did I betray my own?,” about how she deliberately kept her daughter in a terrible black school as a kind of political experiment. And just to shelve the opening question, yes, Hannah-Jones, you absolutely did betray your daughter. You also betrayed the brave generations of black parents who fought, marched, sued, and sometimes literally risked their lives for the simple right to send their children to better schools. Those parents fought all the way to the Supreme Court to get their kids out of inferior, segregated classrooms, and you inherited that hard-won freedom. You were bused to predominantly white schools in Waterloo, Iowa, through a voluntary desegregation program, and by your own account, that education is what allowed you to flourish. Then, like a spoiled brat who doesn’t appreciate what her parents gave her, you threw it away, choosing educational deprivation for your own child as a demonstration of your virtue. Only someone who never had to fight for every scrap of opportunity could treat it with such disdain. You are a narcissistic black elite who has made a fortune larping as a member of the oppressed class, and you arrogantly believed you could discard those benefits for the sake of the greater community, or your own vanity project, or whatever the hell this was.

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You, Nikole Hannah-Jones, came up in a world, at least in the waters you swim in, where being black confers a kind of automatic authority, the doctoral expertise of lived experience, and where institutions offer nothing but affirmations, step-ladders, and cushions. You have only ever known a world in which blacks are unfairly advantaged in academia, where failing to even speak grammatical English is celebrated. American universities had explicitly considered race in undergraduate admissions for roughly half a century by the time the Supreme Court ended racist admissions in 2023. Harvard’s racist policies roughly quadrupled a black applicant’s odds of admission compared with a white applicant with similar academic credentials. At the University of North Carolina, where you went to school, out-of-state black applicants in the middle academic tier were 33 times more likely to be admitted than equally qualified Asian Americans. Off campus, more than half of American workers say their workplace now holds DEI trainings or meetings, some of which are cartoonishly racist and unlawful.

Maybe you assumed the racist cushion you have helped stitch would catch your daughter, too. Or maybe, despite cosplaying as someone who opposes classist segregation, you rolled the dice knowing you could yank the parachute cord at any time. As you put it, “Her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.” But you couldn’t. As I wrote on Notes:

I would never sacrifice my child to my politics. The one thing you’re supposed to do as a parent is give your child the best opportunity you can in life. Not risk their future so you can run a political experiment on them. What kind of person decides to make their own daughter go slumming so they can wash themselves in the moral glow? And then pimp them out for content? Good on her for owning the mistake, I suppose, for whatever that’s worth. But as a parent who actually works hard to give his child everything he can in life, I cannot imagine the thought of this ever entering my mind.

But I want to address something I have not seen anyone online address. I want to address the actual logic behind Hannah-Jones’ decision not to send her daughter to a white, affluent school. Instead, she put her child in pre-K at P.S. 307, the Daniel Hale Williams school in Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill neighborhood, a high-poverty public school where almost all the students are black and Latino.

P.S. 307 performs extremely poorly on standardized tests. In 2024, only 28% of students met the state standard in English and 27% in math. In 2023, it was only 17% in English, against a state average of 49%, and 27% in math against 52%. Out of 4,346 schools in the state, P.S. 307 ranks 4,031st. In other words, the school Hannah-Jones chose for her daughter is one of the worst in New York. It wasn’t always, which I’ll get to shortly. But making matters worse, she actually campaigned against a “yuppie invasion” of kids from whiter areas into her daughter’s failing school. Here’s The New York Post’s report:

She and her husband crusaded against letting more students from affluent backgrounds into their daughter’s struggling, mostly-black Brooklyn elementary school — while decrying New York’s hopelessly “segregated” public school system … Hannah-Joneses stood firmly against a Department of Education rezoning initiative, which seemed poised to flood their kid’s school with local tots from wealthy backgrounds. This despite the couple themselves being well-off non-native New Yorkers living in Bed-Stuy in a completely different school district. At the time, nearby public school PS 8 was overflowing with students, at 148% capacity and had a multi-year waitlist. PS 307 … was underutilized, at just 50% capacity.

The change would have relieved the overcrowding at P.S. 8, desegregated both schools, and brought together kids whose paths might otherwise never cross, bridging a gap between rich and poor, black and white. It would also likely have brought more resources, more funding, and more parental clout, the very things that could have helped lift those poor black and Latino kids up, the very things Hannah-Jones claims she put her own child there to accomplish. As Hannah-Jones herself bragged: “A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school fucking changes the school, right? Like, there are certain things that just are not gonna happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”

But if you read her essay, you find that this was arrogant bluster. She did not have the power to transform the school, and the result of her political experiment is that she badly harmed her own daughter, who is now a teenager scrambling to fill in math she should have learned in elementary school. She also harmed all the other kids at P.S. 307, the very kids she claimed she was helping, by sacrificing her own child, by working against desegregation and against more parents just like her coming into the same school, something that might have actually produced the result she claimed she wanted. Yet in her recent essay, she writes, “We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.”

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The incoming school, the Post reports, “had rapidly become one of the borough’s best and most desirable.” But Hannah-Jones’ husband, Faraji, was furious and opposed the plan. If this was desegregation, and from a highly successful school, the academic benefit to students at P.S. 307 could have been revolutionary. So why oppose it? Well, at the time, 85% of P.S. 8’s pupils were white. Faraji even said of incoming, affluent parents — right after she bragged about the change affluent parents like her can make happen — “When those affluent parents come in, we do not want to alienate the parents who live across the street in the Farragut.”

Listen to how she justified it. She didn’t want to “alienate” black Farragut parents by having them send their black kids to a school with white kids. Writing to the Post this month, she explains she wanted to “slow the process down to ensure parents had input.” But Americans have heard that language before. In 1956, 101 Southern congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, warning that desegregation was “destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races” and that “parents should not be deprived by government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.” The segregationists who fought Brown v. Board of Education rarely said they wanted to keep black kids out. They said they wanted to go slow, protect community harmony, and give parents a voice. The Manifesto did not attack blacks. Instead, it spoke of keeping little white children in an environment that “confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life,” meaning of course, a white way of life. Agree or disagree, that is the heart of the segregationist position, and as you read on, I’d like you to ask yourself whether Hannah-Jones truly wants desegregation, as she claims, or simply a black version of the exact same thing I just quoted.

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Like most Americans, I was forced to learn about “Bo” French this month when he decided to voice his opinion about the people of India. That’s the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad commissioner, which is not a role you probably knew existed, nor an electoral race the rest of us would be watching, if not for his comments about the browning of our country. America has been having a national debate about Indians ever since December 2024, when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy defended H-1B visas as a way to import top talent. MAGA nativists Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer attacked them, President Trump slapped a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, and about 20 states sued. Since then, the economist and writer have been cheerleading for Indians, while critics point out that Indians are displacing American tech workers. Personally, as someone who has lived in India for years, I am not blind to the flaws of Indian society, and there are certain behavioral norms, particularly toward women, that I would not want to see imported to America. For more on that, read about my online scrap with India’s top women’s rights official, Rekha Sharma. Nevertheless, I am mostly partial to the cheering.

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Yes, the critics have a point, Indians are indeed taking American tech jobs. And then you have cases like the software company Cognizant, which gamed the H-1B lottery in favor of Indian workers. A jury found the company liable for discriminating against non-Indian employees, and the Labor Department has opened its first major H-1B fraud investigation. Nor is this an isolated case. The FBI busted three India-based call centers posing as Social Security officials, and the Department of Justice has sentenced eight defendants in a similar scheme targeting the elderly. No surprise there either. In many poor parts of India, scamming Americans and the rest of the West has become an important source of household income. There are also concerns about caste discrimination, and again, we find that if you import people from a region, they do not magically become American the second they step one toe inside America. Rather, they bring with them their own norms and values. So, we find the Indian caste system is now spreading on American soil. A 2016 survey of South Asian Americans conducted by Dalit civil rights organization Equality Labs found that 25% of Dalit respondents said they had faced verbal or physical assault based on their caste. In 2020, California sued the tech giant Cisco, accusing it of caste-based discrimination. And in 2023, Seattle became the first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination.

Here’s another concern. I love the gift of America’s natural landscape. I am a hardcore minimalist camper, survivalist, and fisherman. I respect the great outdoors. But India reveres nature in principle, and trashes it in practice. Don’t get me wrong, I love Indian nature too. I lived for months in the monsoon forests outside Goa, sleeping on the bare jungle floor. I lived about a year in a wooden cabin high in the Himalaya, hiking hours to shower under icy waterfalls, or trekking barefoot down a beaten mud path into town for fresh vegetables. I have a lot of fond memories of the natural beauty of Mother India. But consider the Ganga, or Ganges River, which Indians regard as sacred. Near where I used to live in Rishikesh, the current of the Ganga runs cool and fresh, as clear as the Caribbean waters I grew up with, and I waded into it often, stopping on my walk to and from yoga, even on brisk mornings when the water was bitingly cold. But later, when I was living downstream in Varanasi, I read water survey reports and remember finding that the river there was literally worse than sewage. If you shit in a bucket and sat inside it, I’m not sure it would be much worse than entering the Ganga near the Malviya Bridge, after she has passed along the ghats of Varanasi, and the city has poured its putrid bile directly into her veins, rotten human carcasses and cow shit and industrial urban waste and all. So I blanch a little when I read about Indians polluting North American forests or bodies of water, because I know how far this can go.

So yes, I have my concerns when it comes to Indian immigration. But what exactly did French say about Indians? Did he express concern about pollution, caste discrimination, sexual assaults, or tech jobs? No, he shared an image of Indian students celebrating at a University of Texas graduation, dressed in school colors, having the time of their lives, joyous and wholesome, one guy even wearing a cowboy hat. If this isn’t the kind of immigration you want — people who love America, and drink deep of the cup, and who seem fully assimilated — then what the hell do you want? As I have explained above, it’s reasonable to object to behavioral norms such as sexism or pollution, and it’s reasonable to object to ideologies such as Islam, but if the people are demonstrating American norms, what the fuck is the problem? Is it really just that they aren’t white? Is that all we’re supposed to care about? Even within white supremacist circles, the idea is supposed to be that whites are superior because of certain civilizational achievements or behavioral norms. Western liberal democracy, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Western Canon, lower homicide rates. These are the kinds of things literate white racists cite. But French seems to think these things belong exclusively to white people, as if the currency of cultural treasure can never be exchanged. As I have written about the concept of cultural appropriation:

One of the ugliest pieces of racecraft ever conjured in the cauldron of the human mind is the notion that great works of art should be fenced off by race like rows of a garden from hungry deer. This means that if you are black, Shakespeare does not belong to you. You can look upon his roses of youth and violets of madness, but you had better keep your hooves on that side of the fence. Shakespeare belongs to white people, specifically white British men. When he writes of forbidden young love or the ruin of unchecked ambition or the delirium of indecision, he is not tapping into shared and universal experiences.

French is not a serious person, and he certainly doesn’t understand what can be learned from the vast wealth of Indian culture. A person like this has probably never even heard of the Ramayana, Advaita Vedanta, or listened in rapture to Ravi Shankar playing a sitar raga. He doesn’t know a fucking thing.

Genuinely, his only concern seems to be the color of their skin. I look at that photo and my first thought is, these guys look hella fun. That’s the beauty of America in a single photo, and it makes me proud to see people coming to the glory of what we’ve built, and wanting to thrive with us, and join the American family. Welcome, brothers, welcome. But in case you think maybe French meant something else, something more reasonable, consider the fact that he also thinks we should deport Native Americans! Deport them fucking where? Doubtless, he hasn’t thought very far beyond his own mouth. And Republicans are now split on whether to condemn or defend French. Karl Rove, a key architect of George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential victories, called French a “bigot” and said he plans to vote for Democrat Jon Rosenthal over French. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Trump responded:

Karl Rove is so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often. He suffers from a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome primarily because, for almost 10 years, I beat back and won against so many of the people and things that he wanted and espoused. Why does FoxNews and the WSJ keep his RINO Voice alive. The guy is a stone cold loser!

But now let’s turn the page to another kind of newcomer, and consider the question of immigration from a slightly different angle.

“It is completely ridiculous, it’s laughable, to say guys like myself, guys like Abdul El-Sayed, we hate America,” Hasan Piker recently complained. He was responding to critics who point out he has said, “America deserved 9/11.” Piker says he already explained what he “really meant” by that remark. El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, is included because he campaigned with Piker at several university campuses in the state, and defended his appearances with Piker, and seems to even get annoyed when people ask him about it, as if the question is unfair. Okay, Piker made a mistake and took it back. Except he has also said:

The United States of America is the most dog-shit country on the fucking planet … The absolute worst fucking place on the planet. Just a horrific, monstrous, awful, dog-shit country that I fucking despise. The absolute fucking worst country ... I fucking despise this nation. I despise this country with my entire fucking heart.

And he has also bragged, “I say I hate America all the time … I say it with my fuckin’ chest.” And here’s a full minute Piker saying how much he hates America. Just this week, in fact, he said “pound for pound,” America conducts more terror around the world than al-Qaeda. And he celebrates Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and brutal dictatorships like China. So fuck this guy right alongside French. In fact, Piker seems like a significantly worse character than French. But as I recently wrote, Piker is just one person. The real concern ought to be why Piker has so many followers of the left, why the left doesn’t disavow him, why scummy figures like El-Sayed think they can campaign with Piker and not be asked about it. When asked to condemn such rhetoric, El-Sayed refused and became irritated with the question. And don’t forget, El-Sayed is the dirtbag who responded to the March 2026 attack on Temple Israel synagogue in Michigan by expressing concern for the attacker, saying, “Hurt people hurt people.” He apologized months later. Looking at figures like French and Piker, both sides really ought to be disgusted with themselves for associating with such people. But does French have a whip of a point? Will the browning of America truly change it in some meaningful way? Should we be concerned with people like Piker joining the American family? Does it single a true decline in what we used to be, or is that just another kind of American?

During World War II, the U.S. Army asked director Frank Capra to make a documentary film series. By the time he was brought into the Army in 1942, the Sicilian-born kid from Lincoln Heights, a working-class immigrant neighborhood just northeast of downtown Los Angeles, had become the most celebrated filmmaker in America and one of the most prestigious directors in the world. He won the Oscar for best director three times in the 1930s, making populist, optimistic comedies and dramas about regular folks standing up to the Man. Some of his hits included You Can’t Take It with You in 1938 and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939. But when the Army came knocking, they wanted something different. Gen. Marshall asked Capra to help explain the war to American soldiers. When Capra tried to decline, saying he had never made a documentary, Marshall replied, “Capra, I have never been chief of staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before. Boys are commanding ships today, who a year ago had never seen the ocean before.”

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Capra agreed to take the assignment. But when he saw Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, a bone-chilling masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, he knew he had to find a way to counter that kind of racist cinematic power. The result was Why We Fight, in which Capra made the radical decision to include Nazi speeches and footage. He understood that when dealing with evil, you don’t have to prove you’re the good guy. Sometimes, you just have to let the other guy talk. I have always taken this story as a lesson in free speech. People who hope to censor often fail to see that silencing your critics only paints them in dissident colors. If your enemy is truly vile, it’s a blunder to demonize them when you can accurately quote them instead. It was in Prelude to War and The Nazis Strike that Capra made the most use of repurposed Axis footage. And it worked. Audiences were appalled and Prelude won an Oscar for best documentary. One may think supplying Nazi content would have the opposite effect, which is why deplatforming attempts are popular today, but Capra had faith in his fellow Americans. And he was vindicated.

Except that method only works when operating within a shared moral frame. You show the audience what Hitler said and did, and the audience reliably supplies the condemnation because those words and actions violate the norms they already hold. But if the underlying norms change, the same content can stop functioning as an indictment, and can even begin to function as recruitment. In the 1940s, America was far more culturally homogeneous than it is today, particularly in terms of the public moral vocabulary. This was the result of the fact that Americans were 90% white, 90% Christian, and 97% citizens. This is not to say that any one of those features is better than being Asian, Buddhist, or a citizen of Japan. But it should hardly need saying that a uniform society will more readily reinforce its moral reflexes. Or to put it another way, in a multicultural society, you cannot always rely on shared cues to trigger the same moral response. As de Tocqueville warned in Democracy in America:

Obviously without such common belief no society can prosper; say, rather, no society can exist, for without ideas held in common there is no common action, and without common action there may still be men, but there is no social body. In order that society should exist and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is necessary that the minds of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas; and this cannot be the case unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the common source and consents to accept certain matters of belief already formed.

In 1787, 53 years before de Tocqueville published those words, John Jay, a Founding Father and a principal architect of American democracy, made the same point in the second Federalist essay, “Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence”:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Jay was wrong on the facts. Even in 1787, the country held Dutch, Germans, Scots-Irish, Quakers, Catholics, and Jews. But that’s the point. What he mistook for common blood was common conviction, and it was conviction that held. But we have chosen to ignore our Founder and our French friend who, whatever their errors, saw this truth plainly, and have instead chosen to walk a different path. Even before these great men commented on the topic, Benjamin Franklin wrote about his concerns over German immigrants in Pennsylvania in the 1750s. It’s almost laughable to us today to imagine this being a serious fear. But Franklin wasn’t dealing with the Germans of today. In his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” and in a 1753 letter to his English friend Peter Collinson, he laid out his specific complaints, that the Germans were not assimilating, and that their birth rates and immigration numbers would lead to the displacement of Franklin’s own people. He worried they would swing elections as a unified voting bloc, and noticed they had no loyalty to Pennsylvania, such that during King George’s War in the 1740s, when Pennsylvania needed colonists to defend against the French and their Native allies, Germans refused to fight. Many did so for religious reasons, being pacifist Mennonites or Amish, and Franklin saw them as living off the sacrifices of English colonists. The comments about complexion and swarthiness are bigoted, but he was also fair in his assessment, adding also that their industrious and frugal nature could “contribute greatly to the improvement of a Country.”

Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

He was proven right in his lifetime. Germans did form a voting bloc, one that contributed to Franklin himself losing his Pennsylvania Assembly seat in 1764, not because he was a bad assemblyman — he was one of the best, and had been chosen as speaker that year — but simply because Germans remembered his “Boors” remark. But in the end, Germans did assimilate. Within a couple of generations, they became English-speaking, blended into American life, and Franklin’s fears are now regarded in hindsight as nativist panic. Except that nativism is about shutting people out, whereas Franklin had wanted Germans to assimilate in. He wasn’t calling for them to be expelled, but for them to blend into the broader culture. And ultimately, they did.

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s famous 1782 “Letters from an American Farmer” offered the more optimistic vision, one in which different European nationalities blended together:

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle.

This is perhaps the earliest formulation of the melting-pot, and this dream of a “new race of men,” united not by the prejudices of blood and soil, as in Europe, but by chosen principles and self-interest, as Crèvecoeur goes on to say, is as fundamental to American liberty as the Constitution itself, for it means that, freed from Old World hierarchies and monarchies, people can come here holding nothing more than a desire to thrive in the “broad lap” of America. And I love that about this place. But both Franklin and Crèvecoeur were still exclusively talking about cultural gaps between different kinds of white European Christians. These gaps eventually closed, but that does not mean that all gaps will, or can. The reason Franklin was proven wrong in the long-run is that German immigrants were not arriving with the intent to undo the society they entered. They came for refuge and opportunity — to thrive with, not rule over. Similarly, when waves of Catholic immigrants came from Ireland in the 1850s, the Know-Nothing Party built an entire political platform around fear of the dilution of Protestant American culture. But again, these fears proved hysterical, the collapse never came, and Catholics assimilated over time. But, also again, the gap was between two white Christian groups, and so relatively narrow in scope, compared to what the world can offer. What, instead, would happen when completely different groups began to pour into America?

The country was already in the midst of finding out, as the California Gold Rush of 1849 drew thousands of Chinese to the West Coast. Up until this point, America had basically operated with open borders, and most of the people coming in were European, except for the nation’s population of African slaves. The wave of Chinese immigration that began in the 1840s was the first real influx of voluntary, non-European migration to America. And it quickly became clear that the Chinese had a different set of cultural values. For one thing, they prized the clan over the individual and disputes, credit, job placement, and welfare ran through associations known as huiguan rather than through courts, banks, or employers. Labor was contracted in gangs through a headman rather than negotiated on an individual basis, which looked to white workers like unfree “coolie” labor. Americans also opposed the opium dens, gambling, and filthy conditions found in Chinatowns. But mostly, what drove opposition to Chinese immigration was two factors: the fact that Chinese laborers took lower wages, undercutting white workers, and sheer racism.

“Anti-Chinese sentiment,” as we now politely refer to this particular breed of racist hatred, culminated in the end of America’s open borders with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. America’s ability to welcome nonwhite immigrants into the family had been tested for the first time (I’m not counting forcibly imported slaves as “immigrants”), and America responded like a Klansman finding out his daughter is dating a guy named Wei Chen. I ain’t racist, just don’t want it in my family. But looks can be deceiving, especially when looking with racist eyes, because although Chinese were not white, European, or Christian, the cultural gap was not really so great. When I lived in China, I used to enjoy reading New Yorker columnist Evan Osnos, their China correspondent, who once observed that Chinese and Americans today are closer than Soviets and Americans ever were. Politically, the gap may be as wide. But Soviet and American teenagers in 1975 shared no music, films, or brands, while Chinese teenagers today carry iPhones and worship NBA stars. The deepest divides aren’t racial or religious, but ideological, and race and religion matter only insofar as they track those gaps.

American attitudes on this question really began to shift thanks to two Zionist thinkers. In his 1908 play The Melting Pot, the Zionist playwright and friend of the great Theodor Herzl, a man named Israel Zangwill, popularized the phrase “melting pot.” The play tells the story of two Russians, a Jewish boy named David and a Christian girl named Vera, who meet as immigrants in America and fall in love. The twist is, Vera’s father was responsible for killing David’s family in a pogrom. But David chooses to embrace America as a place where European hatred can be transcended, and he and Vera plan to marry. Then in 1924, the Zionist philosopher Horace Kallen coined the term “cultural pluralism.” In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national-origin quotas and dramatically diversified immigration. This is celebrated, or lamented, depending on one’s view of immigration.

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In America today, whites are now 58% of the population, Christians are 62%, and citizens are 93%. As Pew reported this month, these trends are expected to continue. By 2060, the U.S. Census Bureau projects whites will fall to 45%. By 2070, Pew projects Christians will fall to 46%. But again, I am not saying that a white Christian is better than an Asian Buddhist. That sort of racial arithmetic is repugnant and stupid. Not to mention, rather inconvenient for me given that more than half my family is black, my mother is a non-citizen, and my wife and daughter are Latinas. What I am saying, however, is that multiculturalism necessarily erodes monoculture. That’s almost definitional. To the extent that a society becomes more multicultural, it becomes less monocultural. Obviously. The real question, then, is whether a particular monoculture is beautiful, valuable, and worth preserving. If you believe that modern-day Japan or the America of the 1940s possess a distinctive culture worth keeping, then multiculturalism is a kind of death. However, if newcomers sign onto a shared civic code, what follows isn’t a funeral, but a renewal. This is why, much as I adore Japan and chose to make a life there, I could never shake my American soul or the idea that in a place where strangers can choose to be one people, society is better off. Not by blood, but by commitment. That’s the shared civic project I deeply prefer, and find most beautiful. That’s my America.

Still, the white Americans of the 1940s weren’t just people who shared a skin color. They were the proud heirs to particular histories, customs, and institutions. Their largest ancestral streams ran from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia, each carrying its own assumptions into the American story. The English supplied much of the basic political and legal architecture: common law, representative assemblies, trial by jury, and a strong culture of voluntary association. Germans left their mark through the kindergarten movement, models of public schooling, and a culture of newspapers and almanacs that sustained literate communities. Scandinavians brought traditions of mutual aid and cooperative enterprise, and helped shape the civic culture of the Upper Midwest through debating societies and political associations. Dutch, Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants brought energy and friction without displacing the basic constitutional frame. Blacks, brought here in bondage, produced some of the country’s greatest civic institutions: the black church as a center of organizing, black colleges that built a professional class out of nothing, and a tradition of nonviolent protest that did more than any other movement to force America to honor its own founding language. Jews, arriving in waves from Eastern Europe, built much of the country’s labor movement and its garment-district unions, founded institutions from Hollywood studios to the ACLU, and brought with them a rabbinic tradition of argument and textual scrutiny that shaped American intellectual and legal culture.

That is the glory of American diversity. And thankfully, we welcome newcomers like my grandparents, my mother, and my wife, not just to live among us but to join the great American family, confident that we have something real to offer them and that we will be enlarged by what they have to offer us. But a nation can welcome newcomers only so long as it remains confident in what it is welcoming them into. And I believe we have opened the door too wide, and have begun to lose our sense of self. As a result, we are now solemnly informed that the values we once regarded as universal are merely Western, or white, or in a more fevered telling, expressions of white supremacy, and that the scientific method, Enlightenment values, the legacy of Renaissance art, and other triumphs of European culture, as well as liberal norms of Western democracy, are now to be set beside other ways of knowing, as though evidence and superstition were cousins. Even free speech, meritocracy, peer-reviewed science, and math itself are now in peril as we increasingly push our values aside to make way for those who would not assimilate to them. This is a fatal mistake. Any gap of race, nationality, religion, or culture can be bridged, and all people can be welcomed into the family, provided they assimilate to a core set of values. But what we have today is something else. A genuinely pluralistic society has to tolerate not only profound differences in belief and custom, but profound disagreement about those differences. If the newcomer is free to practice customs his neighbor finds objectionable, his neighbor must be equally free to object. Otherwise, we have achieved the curious form of pluralism in which every difference is to be celebrated — except a difference of opinion. This is where Britain finds itself today. And that is mostly because Britain decided to accommodate people who had no interest in thriving with them, but only lording over them, as they increasingly are.

I’m not arguing against ethnic diversity, still less for closed borders. I’m arguing against the childish conceit that either comes without costs. Cultures don’t encounter one another without changing one another. The question is whether we can still reproduce the liberal norms that made the whole experiment possible, and whether we still believe in them more than we believe in diversity for its own sake. The other night, I saw a video of Hasan Piker puking forth sheer hatred for America, and to be clear, I believe he has the right to say he hates America. Indeed, I would defend that right without hesitation. But free speech tells us what people can say when they’re here. Piker says he hates America and says it, in his words, with his “fucking chest.” What should trouble you isn’t his use of free speech, but the fact that plenty of Americans would now applaud. Capra’s audience would’ve hissed. But if the enemy were communists instead of Nazis, and Capra tried the same trick today, it wouldn’t work. And that’s fucking terrifying. To be fair, Piker was born in New Jersey, though raised in Turkey, and most of the people cheering him were born here too. Still, a country already losing faith in its own principles is in no position to welcome mass migration, especially not when each new arrival often only ends up learning what America believes from Americans who increasingly don’t.

It’s simple, really. Import people without liberal values into a culture that no longer holds them, and they’ll have no one to learn them from. Again, look at the Islamification of Britain. The progressive left is fond of the response, “Well, just enforce the laws when they get here,” failing to remember that in a democracy, laws can be changed. Rights survive on parchments only so long as they survive in the conviction of people who are asked to defend them. Otherwise, we’re nothing but an economic zone and Capra’s calculation no longer works out. Now instead of Capra’s films, if you play a video like the one above, many people will like and subscribe. And that’s the lesson we need to learn. Capra’s trick only works when the audience already shares the values his footage is supposed to offend.

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One of the greatest lines in American literature is when Huckleberry Finn says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The barefoot, motherless son of the town drunk, Huck is a racist Missouri scamp who can barely read or do math, and is so ignorant that he is surprised to learn Moses, the lawgiver of Israel, is not still alive. Unsurprisingly, as we drift down the Mighty Mississippi in the company of this kid, we find that he has been taught to believe in the intellectual leprosy that says black people are less human, and even as he travels with the escaped slave Jim, befriends him, sees his love for his family, and comes to care for him, Huck cannot shake the belief that helping him escape is a sin. Near the end of the book, Jim is sold for forty measly bucks. Huck then writes a letter to Jim’s owner, revealing his whereabouts, but he cannot bring himself to betray his friend, so he rips up the letter and resolves to “steal Jim out of slavery,” even though he still believes choosing Jim’s humanity will send him straight to hell.

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What makes this such a powerful moment in American literature is that for the sake of a friend, Huck rebels not only against white Southern society, but against God himself. The threat of perdition then hangs over the last third of the book, which feels to me as much about the stories that eclipse the better angels of our nature as it is about the bonds of fellowship. The moment Huck says he’d rather burn, and voluntarily chooses to walk into an eternal prison of fire, he emancipates himself from mental slavery, to quote Bob Marley, whereas Jim is dragged off and denied even the dignity of that choice, for the evils of antebellum Southern slavery offer no such moral stage for the soliloquy of a black man.

Huck, though redeemed, demonstrates that even in rejecting the system, he is still a beneficiary of it. This moment hits brutally hard, or it would, except the story keeps rolling on, like Old Man River, and by the end of it all, Huck and Jim are reunited, and the reader is left laughing again. It’s too clean and happy an ending for me, and Huck’s redemption arc is too ethically pretty. Many folks know the line by Hemingway, from Green Hills of Africa, that goes, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But fewer know the next sentence, which says, “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.”

The true force of that great American novel is getting to watch a black man, who society refuses to recognize as fully human, awaken in a white child his own humanity, and getting to watch that child learn to think for himself. Huck rejects the social script on race, and it takes a revolution of his own soul to do so, as it would take a revolution of the American soul to do the same. In both cases, the guiding hand on the wheel was black, and in both cases, the greatest obstacle was a social script. Skip ahead 68 years and we find a similar experience in the pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which he keeps discovering everyone has a preset script for him, one based on the received “wisdom” about race, and one that ignores his humanity, hence the title of the novel. At the start, the unnamed narrator thinks he’s been invited to give a speech to the town’s leading citizens. Instead, he and other black boys are forced to fight blindfolded in a boxing ring for the amusement of a bunch of drunken white savages. In the end, beaten and bloodied, the narrator still delivers his prepared remarks, clinging to the hollow belief that a respectable negro will be accepted by such barbaric whites, even after he has seen clean through the filthy lie of respectable white society. Huck rejects the racial script of his society, but Jim can’t, and Ellison’s narrator won’t. Though legally free, he is mentally bound by his belief in a story about race.

The third book that comes to mind when thinking of this topic is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the most painful of the three, in which we read about a little black girl, only 11 years of age, who learns to see herself as ugly because she doesn’t have the blue eyes of Shirley Temple. Here, the racial script of society is darker than ever, because at least Ellison’s narrator saw through the sickness, whereas young Pecola Breedlove is pulled fully inside the lie, which even consumes her sense of self. If you read across the chronology of black literature, you will become witness to a horrible reality. Namely, that as black Americans became more free, black writers told stories about racial scripts that were ever more deeply embedded, consuming, and clever. In all these stories, race functions as a script so forceful and blunt, it becomes blinding. There’s probably an undergraduate essay somewhere in this, about the use of blindness and sight in both Ellison and Morrison, but what troubles me is that now we find ourselves in an age when the racial script of our society has evolved yet again, becoming more clever, and digging its claws deeper.

The new script says that race does not exist, that it’s all just an illusion, and that any recognizable gaps in performance are merely the result of white supremacy. Now, as a result, an entire generation of young black boys and girls, born free, are being raised in the mental slavery of believing that the White Man still lords over them in every corner of reality, and that the locus of control over their lives is forever external to their own will. Black Americans have never been more empowered, and yet not since slavery have they felt so powerless. We have replaced an unscientific belief in race with an unscientific denial of race, and declared it a solution. But every correction is an over-correction. The blindness of race denialism sees racism even in the concept of race itself. Nor is this the noble belief put forward by Martin Luther King Jr., who said that we should all strive to live in a society where race has no real social weight. That, I would say, is the only rational solution to any of this. But race denialism is something else entirely.

Early race “scientists” used monstrously stupid methods such as phrenology, craniometry, and anthropometry. They rejected evolution and the idea that different races have one shared human ancestry. They imagined races as different species. They believed in a sort of racial spiritualism that said all whites are smarter than all blacks, and more moral too, as if each race carries a mystical essence, such that a white imbecile who cannot even tie his shoelaces is somehow more clever than a black neurologist. But some of these more primitive formulations of race had a kernel of understanding. Consider the botanist Richard Bradley’s Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature, published in 1721, in which he attempted to describe the various racial categories, naming “five Sorts of Men,” including “the White Men, which are Europeans, that have Beards,” as well as “the Malatoes” and “the Blacks,” and others. Even Bradley, writing 300 years ago, knew that “Difference is enough to shew us their Distinctions,” but “as to their Knowledge, I suppose there would not be any great Difference,” and if they had the same environment, he added, “they would vary no more in Understanding than Children of the same House.”

A century before Darwin, Bradley recognized the role of environment in the shaping of such groups and their various understandings. But these crude, almost superstitious efforts to understand human populations were later blended with a misunderstanding of Darwinism, producing the kind of unscientific racism practiced by the Nazis. And because the Nazis practiced it, race science was stamped as inherently untrue and immoral. The problem is, what the Nazis practiced had nothing to do with science. Rather than using the scientific method to test their ideas about race, they began with conclusions based on nationalist myths and cherry-picked data to support what they wanted to believe. After these Dark Ages of racial understanding, we flipped the script, but now that the Western world has walked the opposite path, and our knowledge of human populations is actually scientific, rooted not in bigoted mumbo-jumbo but in evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics, it has become clear that we are simply fooling ourselves in the other direction, and that the race denialists are cherry-picking their data too.

Last night, I saw a debate between Nathan Cofnas, the researcher who exposed Jason Arday as a fraud, , and . I have written about the Arday scandal, and about claims that he was lynched by the media, but now the conversation has tilted toward Cofnas himself, who is a race realist or, as he puts it, a “hereditarian.” Cofnas was talking to Loury and McWhorter about race and IQ, explaining that the average IQ of a black American tests at about 85, whereas the average IQ of a white American is about 100 — a gap whose causes remain intensely disputed. Cofnas did not discuss counter-arguments such as the Flynn effect, stereotype threat, test-bias literature, or geneticists who reject the hereditarian reading of the same data. But reasons aside, the testing gap is real, and this is a deeply unsettling point since the cutoff for mental retardation was originally 85, until it was lowered to around 70 in 1973. As Minnesota’s state disability council explains, “The main reasons for dropping the borderline category were its racial implications (racial minority groups were over-represented in the borderline group) and a growing uneasiness about the effects of labeling.”

Cofnas, as I understand him, argues that we shouldn’t lower standards, admissions rates, disability thresholds, or anything else. Rather, he advocates for leaving facts as we find them and presenting them no matter how ugly they may be. We cannot decide to avoid the topic, he claims, because people will have the conversation either way, indeed they already are, and so he believes it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that Nazis are not the only ones moderating the discussion. As you can imagine, this has generated intense backlash against not only his position, but Cofnas himself. This is hardly surprising. If you look up the term “race realism” on Wikipedia, you’ll find that it’s treated as synonymous with “scientific racism” and “biological racism,” as if it’s simply a fact that believing in the biological reality of race is itself racist.

Cofnas believes that unless and until we accept race as a fact, and also that some gaps in performance are the result of natural differences in IQ, then the progressive left will forever howl at the existence of those gaps, claiming they are the result of racism, as Ibram Kendi famously has. After all, blacks were historically and horrifically oppressed, so if we rule out natural causes as a possible explanation for performance gaps, indeed if we say it’s racist to even suggest that the gaps might be natural in nature, what else can explain them but bigotry? For Cofnas, that is the genesis of woke ideology, and he believes that wokeness will be with us until we confront these truths.

It’s worth noting that the origins of race denialism are just as absurd as the origins of race realism. Early critics of race realism were anthropologist Franz Boas, who also gave us cultural relativism, and biologist Lancelot Hogben, a socialist who believed in the sameness of all people for political rather than scientific reasons, and who understandably rejected anything tied to race after witnessing South African racial policies up close. In other words, Hogben rejected race as a category for the same reason the West has done so: motivated reasoning after witnessing the evils of racism. These ideas eventually evolved into what is now known as social constructivism, which denies all categories of human beings, claiming they are all social constructs. This idea says there are no gender differences, that gender has no biological basis, and so men can be women and women can be men. It says that there is really no such thing as disability, just differently abled people, and that being unable to see or walk is actually a kind of gift. You can even find parents who hold this view posting reveal parties, like gender reveal parties, except what they are celebrating is the disability of their child. Still another version of this belief is cultural relativism, which says all cultures are morally the same, as if Somalia or Pakistan are just as fit for human thriving as Switzerland or South Korea. Another sub-genre of this ideology says that childhood is a fictional category, and you can find people who want to deconstruct this category, removing parental rights and giving children the ability to decide things for themselves, as well as removing consent laws so that children are legally eligible for sex, and “minor-attracted persons” are no longer persecuted.

So what are we to do with all this? When it comes to race and IQ, McWhorter would rather not have the conversation at all, as he isn’t convinced there is much value in it. I’ve heard Coleman Hughes and Sam Harris make the same point. Loury disagrees that we shouldn’t look, or at least, he feels that Cofnas has every right to look at any subject in science, guided only by his curiosity. I agree. As for the question of whether race exists, McWhorter puts it best:

Race does exist. I’m sorry. But there are aspects of somebody’s genetic makeup where if you did not know what race (as in, the races that we perceive) they belong to, you could tell. And so, race is not a meaningless concept even though there are intermediate cases. Just because categories are fuzzy doesn’t mean that categories don’t exist. There is race.

If you need some data, consider that in 2005, Tang et al. took people from four groups — white, black, Asian, Latino — and read each person’s DNA at 326 spots. A computer sorted everyone into four piles based on the DNA alone, without being told anyone’s race, and the piles matched how people described themselves almost perfectly. Only five out of 3,636 people were sorted into a different pile than the race they’d reported. In 2022, Gichoya et al. found that AI trained on medical imaging — e.g. chest radiographs, mammograms, spinal films, hand radiographs — could infer a patient’s self-reported race with 0.8-0.99 area under the curve. For reference, 0.5 is a coin flip and 1.0 is perfect. Researchers corrupted, noised, blurred, and filtered the images, reduced them to 4x4 pixels, even blocked off whole sections, but the models still got the right answers. What are the categories these computers recovered from DNA and medical imaging? If you think the categories don’t really exist, that would make what these computers did an amazing magic trick. Or, as McWhorter says, race is real and what the tests show is that it is obviously a biologically meaningful category that even machines can detect.

But my concern is less about any of that and more about whether we can at least have open conversations about socially meaningful topics like race and human intelligence, ones that are driven by data rather than politics or emotion. In What Is Race?, Quayshawn Spencer argues for biological racial realism, rejecting essentialist categories while acknowledging that patterns of genetic ancestry clearly line up with common racial labels. Spencer and McWhorter are right, old-school race essentialism was wrong, but race denialism is wrong too. I also share some of McWhorter’s concern and hesitation when it comes to the debate over race and IQ. I personally find the data on race and IQ interesting, as well as troubling in its implications, and I take the point that this debate is already being had, and that if we don’t talk about it, the last people we want talking about it are going to be the ones in charge of the conversation. But also, there are incredible risks that come with opening up the chat, as such a discussion will require an enormous amount of understanding and sensitivity on the part of race realists, as well as curiosity and tolerance for discomfort on the other side. I’m not convinced we’re there yet, and I’ve got several apps on my phone that give me proof of this nearly every single day.

In his memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, published in 2019, writes about the goal of unlearning categories of race. He is after a world where those categories stop organizing our lives. I think that’s the right attitude. But I also think we’re probably not going to get there until we can at least accept certain realities about human populations. And that means accepting performance gaps between races. The solution to this problem is simply to stop caring about race, and the degree to which races are represented when compared to their prevalence in the general population. We should fight bigotry, and pour resources into helping oppressed communities, but beyond that, we should embrace meritocracy.

Above all, we should abandon the social scripts about race that trap people in their comfortable catechisms. Whether it’s the belief that race is real, or a phantom, each ideology runs the risk of sparing its believers the labor of looking harder. We also have to be braver about truth. And that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. I mean truths about our racist history, but also truths about racial differences in behavior. I mean truths about racism today, but also truths about the nature of race itself. Once we mature to that degree, I will agree with McWhorter and Williams that there is nothing of great value in the conversation. Or to put it another way, the value was in learning to get past the concept. And if that attitude lands me somewhere the polite consensus calls hell, all right, then. I’ll go.

This week, Qassam Muaddi, “Palestine staff writer” at the anti-Zionist outlet Mondoweiss, writes that Palestinian journalists have a kind of reporting authority other journalists cannot match because Palestinians are describing their own lives rather than debating abstractions. “This is why independent journalism is not ideological,” he writes, “because we don’t engage in an abstract debate over abstract ideas about somebody else’s life. We report our lives, and the lives of people around the world for whom basic rights and recognition of their own identity is not abstract.” He adds, “This is why we don’t subscribe to the ‘common wisdom’ labelling of what is ideology and what isn’t. We stick to the common reality of our common humanity.”

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What Muaddi is saying is that having a personal connection to a topic in a way that influences the neutral presentation of facts in one’s reporting, otherwise known as a bias, proves you are not biased. He also frames the “neutral,” Western standard of journalistic objectivity as an ideological position, and therefore biased. So being objective is biased and being biased is not biased. Are you fucking kidding me? He also criticizes how Palestinian testimony, which is based on lived experience, gets dismissed as advocacy because, he says, actually holding an ideology such as Palestinianism is so unbiased that he doesn’t even think of it in such common terms as ideology. My, how clever. Muaddi is, in other words, arguing that proximity to the issue, in this case because of one’s ethnicity, confers some sort of epistemic authority, whereas the neutral view of an outsider who is not personally invested in the topic, and therefore less likely to engage in motivated reasoning, is actually the biased one.

It’s easy to understand why Muaddi would arrive at this view. Outsiders are far more likely than Palestinians to disagree with the “common wisdom” found among his people. They are more likely to reject Hamas as a reliable source of information. They are more likely to recognize Hamas as a genocidal terrorist group. They are more likely to see that certain rhetoric is not merely anti-Zionist, but antisemitic. Unless, of course, they’re Irish. The ideas he is expressing is known as standpoint theory, or standpoint epistemology, and this version of the idea is about as textbook as you’ll find. But one sees examples of it almost every week. When Karmelo Anthony murdered Austin Metcalf, I remember black Americans claiming authority on the issue because of the color of their skin. If you’re not black, the logic ran, you can’t understand what it’s like. A similar refrain was heard during the Lindsay Clancy trial. If you’re a man, I saw women say, then sit this one out. A more famous version of this is saying that men should bow out of the abortion debate. Earlier tonight, I read ’s latest essay, “Nobody Owns Disability,” in which he writes:

Standpoint theory is the notion, popularized in academia, that only people who are part of a given “marginalized group” should have the right to speak on issues related to that marginalized group. Some people will insist that there are more nuanced versions than that, but as a lived discursive reality, that’s what standpoint theory actually is … My immediate response is to say fuck you, I don’t have to live under the burden of regulations I don’t agree with, and I decline to follow your rules in this regard.

Another version of the theory is that if you don’t consult a group member, then your commentary is somehow invalid. But, as seen above with Palestinians, being part of the group is just as likely to introduce motivated reasoning and in-group bias. How are you not to be biased if you grew up in Palestinian culture, waterboarded with Hamas propaganda your entire life, by everyone in your entire life, including your own family, and then you see Israelis bombing your cities, killing your people, and you are supposed to transcend a life of brainwashing, the demolition of your livelihood, and everything you know to be real? Such thinking asks a mirror not to reflect.

In an op-ed last week, “Identity Politics Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This,” Lydia Polgreen argued against identity-as-authority, writing, “Identity is a set of characteristics you inherit. But what you make of that inheritance is character.” I like this way of thinking about it. To be fair, the underlying reasoning of standpoint epistemology can help create a more balanced, or even more objective, account of the world by including perspectives that may bring information to the table that outsiders would not think to include. My wife tells me the story of how her company never realized one of their buildings wasn’t ADA-complaint because it had no wheelchair ramp — until they hired someone who couldn’t walk. But this is only valuable in subjective accounts. In writing about Lindsay Clancy, I wanted to include some consideration of the madness that many women suffer postpartum, and why I believe many women saw in Clancy something of their own suffering, so I spoke to women in my life and read testimonies by mothers. But if you’re writing about statistics regarding postpartum experiences, such input is irrelevant. You no longer care what it feels like, only what the raw data says. The numbers might be wrong, but the lived experience of a woman is not going to correct them. So where did this come from?

In the 1970s, the decolonial feminist Sandra Harding developed standpoint theory by borrowing from Marxist philosophers like Georg Lukács and Nancy Hartsock, who emphasized the concept of the standpoint of the oppressed. The concept says that people in oppressed positions can, because of their position, see and understand the workings of a social system more clearly and completely than those who benefit from the system. The idea is that domination requires a kind of self-deception or blindness on the part of the dominator. Their comfort, and their ability to maintain a capitalist system, depends on not seeing how that system produces their advantage, whereas the oppressed have no such incentive to look away. The oppressed, therefore, have some special claim to objective truth. And it’s true that people in power have less reason to examine the mechanisms of their power. But it’s not true that the oppressed are any less susceptible to bias. In fact, their very oppression can make them all the more motivated in their reasoning.

Before this, the idea came from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Hegel argued that the master, who has the slave do all the productive labor, ends up dependent and passive, while the slave, through direct confrontation with material objects, develops a fuller self-consciousness and a truer grasp of reality. Marx and Engels adapted this into a class framework, essentially arguing that the proletariat, precisely because he or she is exploited by capitalist relations of production, is more likely to see through the lies of capitalism to the exploitative nature of market exchange. And while I am no Marxist, I think it’s undeniable that if you’re a slave, you’re more likely to understand that stories about your “freedom” are a lie. In the 1920s, Lukács sharpened the notion into an explicit epistemological claim, arguing not simply that being oppressed made you more likely to see the truth of the system, but that it made you the only one who could see it. The privileged individual, according to Lukács, is incapable of seeing the truth. Suddenly, being oppressed meant being wiser while being privileged meant being ignorant. In public discussions, people began to say that one had to “check one’s privilege” before entering a debate. Hartsock translated this from class to gender in 1983, and Harding named the resulting framework “standpoint theory” in her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism. And there, at last, we had the term in its modern form.

This is why I consider standpoint theory a disgusting philosophy, because it keeps racism’s core premise intact, namely that mind is downstream of group membership, and that who you are determines what you’re able to know. We’ve seen that argument before. The Nazis had a category for “Jewish physics.” The Soviets had one for “bourgeois biology.” In both cases, people decided whether an idea was true by looking at the person who said it, or by first checking with group members to confirm if it “feels right.” The modern version just flips the direction. Now it’s the people with less power who supposedly see more clearly. Either way, if your knowledge or access to truth comes from your group, not only is that bigotry, but it also means that if somebody in the group disagrees then they aren’t just wrong, they’re betraying their group identity. This is how you end up with people suggesting that if you vote a certain way, you’re not really black. It’s a way for the progressive left to crack the whip against the backs of blacks who don’t fall in line. As President Biden said in a 2020 radio interview, “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, the you ain’t black.” In other words, Don’t be a race traitor.

This is why the whole idea of being “politically black” is so fucking gross and inherently racist and, by the way, Marxist. It just becomes a way of gatekeeping knowledge according to skin color rather than facts, reason, and science. But the alternative to standpoint theory isn’t indifference to lived experience. Sure, ask a Palestinian journalist, a black American, or a postpartum mother what something felt like. But be sure to quote them clearly, for the sake of transparency in service to the reader. Ask them whether a claim about mortality rates or criminal intent is true, however, and their proximity to the pain doesn’t make them a better instrument for measuring it, it just makes them a more motivated one. “I lived it” is not related to “I’m right about it,” and “You wouldn’t understand” is not an argument. Yes, a standpoint can furnish a detail that an outsider would never think to ask about, but the moment a group insists that only its members can judge claims about that group, or that its members must be included in the jury pool of analysis, then that’s not a more honest epistemology anymore. It’s a discursive hiding place, and it should surprise no one that the people most eager to stand there are the ones with the most to shield from an outside eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Satanic Mills

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non compos mentis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expression

The Jason Arday tragedy cannot justify a crackdown on the press

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

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2 months ago · 150 likes · 19 comments · Sarah McLaughlin

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

Expression

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

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

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2 months ago · 36 likes · 3 comments · Jacob Gaba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grandma Wong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Wizard of Oxbridge

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

The great and unfortunate truth about Arday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is masculinity!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Yet when Odysseus finally reaches those familiar shores, he finds a broken home. In Book One, the suitors who seek the comfort of his queen’s bed are shown devouring another man’s estate. Ithacans themselves, no less, ravenously enjoying their king’s gifts while preying upon his wife and violating the code of hospitality the culture once held dear. Ithacan society has quietly come apart in the absence of its king.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civilizations rarely collapse only through excessive severity. They also dissolve through the gradual abandonment of the norms that once sustained them. This was Nietzsche’s prediction, that after the West convinced itself God was no longer of any use, an erosion of values and a permissive culture would soon spread in the vacuum left behind, as they clearly have done. The Odyssey has been asking, for nearly three thousand years, how you find your way home after moral disorder. Nolan’s film doesn’t resolve that question so much as stage it honestly, which is a harder and better thing for a blockbuster to attempt than most people expected going in. I might actually have to reach back to my childhood for a moviegoing experience of this caliber. Nolan’s The Odyssey is a good film. But it’s also good therapy for an ailing civilization. And, in an age searching desperately for meaning, Homer still offers the oldest answer of all: Find your way home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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