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.

Subscribe now

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, along with global Islam.

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.

That said, a political movement does not prove its moral seriousness merely by identifying genuine injustices. It proves it 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, but are refusing to do so, and should be ashamed of themselves. 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 it’s 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. It’s demanding the exclusive right to practice it.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

The “250,000” figure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victim testimonies

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your educational background and area of expertise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odysseus is a dick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Obituary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working through the past

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

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

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

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

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

Germany probes historian for criticizing … Hitler

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

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

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

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

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

Between facts and norms

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the feed

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the feed

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

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

Khamenei is dead. Death to Khamenei.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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