Good for the Jews

The Jewish Conspiracy to Change Yassine Meskhout's Mind

Yassine Meskhout is a public defender, a Moroccan, an anarchist, a liberterian, a cyclist (*shudder*) and now, our new best friend. We’ve become obsessed with his writing since his viral November 2023 essay “The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind” and the banger…

Listen now

3 months ago · 17 likes · 3 comments · Ask a Jew and Yassine Meskhout

Also, the Moroccan-Israeli playlist Yael put together has so many bangers!

Catshually

Obviously cats were pivotal throughout. First we made peace with reality and accepted that Ozzy was going to be a permanent part of our household. Then, when we couldn’t keep up with his insane energy levels, we literally kidnapped a toothless diseased stray cat off the streets of Casablanca and Ziggy has just been the bestest boy since. On the anniversary of Layla’s death, we sued the federal government, made my dead cat a viral sensation, and enraged millions of online commentators.

My wife and I had an amazing belated honeymoon, jetsetting to Morocco and then Italy. I eventually got her pregnant with twin boys! Woo!

I actually turned 40 this year and hijacked a little girl’s party on my actual birthday (the girl’s birthday was a few days prior, what a poser). There was a Taylor Swift cake:

Happy Jew Year

This year has felt dramatically less isolating as we got warmly adopted by our Jewish neighbors. It all started with meeting Elica Le Bon (we were too stunned to take a picture!) at an event and snowballed from there. Among all the new dear friends we’ve made, we also met Haviv Rettig Gur, Hen Mazzig, and many others.

I was even invited by the Israeli government itself to visit and be part of a delegation, but then that free trip got rescheduled multiple times and then finally cancelled. I hear this is normal when dealing with Israelis but anyways I’m firmly an antizionist now.

Substacking

I put out some of the best shit I’ve ever written, and also slam-dunked on many fools. As expected much of the topic was Israel-Palestine, with the reasons neatly encapsulated in this mini-manifesto. As much as Sam Kriss is an intellectual coward otherwise, I directly credit some of his pushback for inspiring me to write the essay I’m proudest of this year: Slicing the (Kosher) Hate Salami. I wish my disagreement bubble was violated much more often! Maybe next year.

It wasn’t all ethnic strife drabbiness! I also wrote about how the transgender discourse is fixated on a bizarre distraction, how moral homophones can cause activists to foster movements hostile to their core principles, and on the optimism a cheerleading movie from 20 years ago had about racial harmony. I also contributed a piece about drywall of all topics for , and it somehow ended up being their 3rd most popular article ever! Crazy!

Also did a bunch of Substack Lives, though unfortunately had audio technical difficulties with Bryan Caplan and timezone mishaps with Andrew Fox. But hopefully you know that the most insightful conversation award going to is not because he won by default.

I’d say it was a rather productive year, especially considering the demands of a solo law practice and a double homicide trial. Moreover, the vast majority of what I wrote this year was for my (yep, still pending) memoir, and remains under wraps. I’m currently mired in Proposal Land, maybe I’ll find more time next year in between frantic naps and sleepless nights.

So Stoked

Easily the most consequential year of my life so far. It’s been a rush, and I’m so stoked for what’s to come. We’re kicking off the new year with another double homicide trial (my 2nd double homicide trial in 4 months…) and then after that, just an extended paternity leave. I can’t wait to hang out with my baby boys and guide them through the world!

Shalom and Salam motherfuckers!

I know this place has been very Jew-heavy lately. I owe you an explanation for that, and a reassurance: I have no desire to make this my permanent beat. My ideal outcome is that this topic stops being relevant enough to write about.

This essay is about what happens when a political movement becomes immune to accountability. When the guy next to you at a rally is screaming genocidal slogans, and you convince yourself there must be some charitable explanation. When intelligent people build elaborate scaffolding to rationalize the unjustifiable. When people convinced they’re fighting for justice become incapable of recognizing the carnage they’re causing.

It’s not about Israel/Palestine itself. Rather, it’s about how reactions to the issue are corroding institutions and revealing dangerous pathologies. What happens in Gaza is beyond almost anyone’s control; what happens to kosher delis, universities, and civic discourse around us is not.

1. The Con

The first thing to re-establish is the motte-and-bailey duality within the contemporary “pro-Palestinian” movement, which I’ve extensively written about. It’s an incoherent buddy comedy where someone chanting for “peace and human rights” can stand shoulder to shoulder with someone else calling for “mass violence and extermination” and both insist they are part of the same cause:

The unabashed loons braying for the complete destruction of Israel could take cover behind the normies who showed up to protests simply because they hated seeing pictures of dead kids on their Instagram feed. Kind of like human shields.

I’m not going to argue about proportions, partly because the methodology is unclear, thorny, and dull, but also because it doesn’t matter. The problem isn’t the specific fraction of lunatics, but rather whose behavior defines the boundaries of what’s acceptable.

Moreover, this problem isn’t confined to an inconsequential fringe. One of the movement’s cause célèbre, Mahmoud Khalil,1 openly justified October 7th as a “desperate” attempt to avert Saudi normalization, handed out flyers from the “Hamas Media Office”, and served as spokesman and negotiator for CUAD — a coalition of over a hundred student groups that publishes glowing hagiographies of Yahya Sinwar.

Now imagine a world where the public face of this movement looked different. Imagine if Rashida Tlaib, literally the highest‑ranking Palestinian legislator in the United States, chose to align herself with anyone other than Hasan Piker, the largest political streamer on Twitch and an unapologetic endorser for terrorism. Imagine if, instead of reflexively blaming Israel for every atrocity committed by Palestinian terrorists, she took one minute to say: “Those who celebrate, condone, or excuse terrorism have no place in our movement. We are a humanitarian movement that disavows violence.”

Imagine if no one chanted about Khaybar, because what does the massacre of a Jewish city by Muslim forces in the year 628 CE have to do with Palestinian liberation today? Imagine if no one romanticized Intifada, because why would any human rights activist conjure up the period of time where children’s television shows were extolling the virtues of suicide bombings?

Imagine if Jewish Voice for Peace didn’t celebrate violence against Jews!

If any of that were true, it would be strong evidence that, yes, while there are plenty of crazies, at least the leadership is trying to steer things toward sanity. It would show a visible effort to push the movement’s center of gravity away from bloodlust and toward genuine concern for Palestinian lives.

We do not live in that reality.

Pause and consider how insane this is. Imagine if Greenpeace was infiltrated by human-extinction advocates holding “KILL ALL HUMANS” signs at rallies. Imagine if the NAACP had a vocal contingent calling for race war, and the organization’s response was to shrug and say “big tent, you know?”

If you suspect this is just a cranky hit piece from someone who hates protest on principle, I’ve already written the opposite essay: a blueprint for what a sane, genuinely pro-Palestinian movement would look like.

At this point, decent people face a choice. If you’re earnestly interested in advancing Palestinian wellbeing, you have an obligation to distance yourself from those who are not. Obvious, no? That doesn’t just mean condemning Hamas, it means disavowing their cosplaying cheerleaders. You either draw a bright line against agitating for violence or…you play along and pretend there’s nothing to see.

The con works because it’s so audacious. It serves the same filtering function as the spelling errors in Nigerian email scams: screening for marks primed to suppress their own cognitive dissonance. When you show up to a protest and the guy next to you is chanting genocidal slogans, it’s uncomfortable. A decent person doesn’t want to believe they’re complicit. So they deny. They sanewash. They invent alternative interpretations that let them stay in the group without confronting what others actually want.

After all, who would lie that openly? Who chants Falasteen Arabiya (“Palestine will be Arab”) then sanitizes it in translation as “Palestine will be free”? Who frames calling for an Intifada — a campaign of suicide bombings that sent mentally disabled teenagers onto Jerusalem school buses with explosives strapped to their chests — as a “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights”?

Who could possibly be that dishonest? Surely there must be some charitable explanation.

2. The Enablers

The dumb are gullible for obvious reasons, but paradoxically, intelligent people fall prey to more sophisticated cons. These aren’t the useful idiots who fall for the con, they’re the smart ones who know better but construct elaborate justifications anyway.

According to , the best guard against this pitfall is the symbiotic remedy of both curiosity and humility. Absent that combination, brilliance becomes a liability — smart people simply build more elaborate scaffolding to support their delusions or dishonesty. One conspicuous tell is how terrified they are to have any of it examined in real time.2

My essays on Israel have generated torrents of written outrage. Concordant with sound epistemic hygiene, I’ve offered dozens of critics an unvarnished opportunity to herald my errors for the world to see. The response rate has been close to zero. They’ll hoot and holler behind the safety of a keyboard, but the moment you ask them to defend those ideas in a format where they can’t edit, revise, and retreat into rhetorical obfuscation, they vanish.

The aversion to real-time scrutiny reveals two distinct pathologies among intelligent enablers: sophisticated obfuscation and sophisticated rationalization. I’ll use two people as case studies here just because I had a front-row seat to how this works in practice.

Sam Kriss is a paradigmatic case: a genuinely gifted prose stylist whose flourish functions as camouflage for intellectual emptiness. Others have noticed how he’s perfected the trick of saying nothing, beautifully, and relying on readers to mistake opacity for depth. He’s fully aware that his prose can’t save him in real-time, investing far more energy in avoiding a conversation than having one.3 It’s a cowardly phobia he desperately masquerades as sophistication.

Sophisticated obfuscation is one way to cope with cognitive dissonance; another is to rationalize ever more baroque horrors. The only person who ever agreed to discuss this topic with me, Robert Farrell, is a picture of the latter. By his own account he’s spent over twenty-five years obsessed with Palestine and sent me a fifty-six-page bibliography of his own making before we spoke. There is no doubt he “knows” far more than I ever will.

Robert is also a verifiable lunatic, opening with an astounding deny-and-defend performance. He simultaneously denied that children were ever used as suicide bombers while also explaining that all the teenagers caught with explosive vests at Israeli security checkpoints were merely couriers — simply one link in the greater logistical chain of ferrying explosives to blow up discotheques.

You see, I’m the one who is deluded for assuming children were used in chain link A rather than simply chain link B. I urge you to listen to the full exchange in context if you doubt any of my retelling.

But to his credit, at least he showed up. He was willing to have his ideas tested without a delete button, and in the process transparently exposed the derangement of his own worldview.4

What unites both types is their sophistication. Kriss wields obfuscation; the madman wields rationalization. Both are intelligent enough to construct elaborate justifications for the unjustifiable. Both understand, at some level, that their positions cannot survive unmediated examination.

3. All Raged Up & Nowhere To Go

This is the ecosystem: advocates openly calling for violence, useful idiots who’ve been screened to deny what’s happening right in front of them, and intelligent enablers providing sophisticated cover for both. Each component reinforces the others.

You’ve mixed up a vial of nitroglycerin. You’ve whipped up an angry mob. You’ve packed a blunderbuss with shrapnel and sulfur. Now where do you point it?

Activism of any kind relies on imploring others to pursue concrete calls to action — call your representative, donate, vote, protest, volunteer. When someone gets agitated about police violence in America, that energy can fuel either serious legislative reform or burning down a Target in the name of racial justice. That’s why guardrails are important.

This problem becomes exponentially worse when the cause is as remote and intractable as Israel/Palestine. If you whip people into a frenzy without giving them a coherent outlet, they’ll find their own. And they do.

The fuel driving this movement’s most dangerous elements is ignorance married to absolute moral certainty. An unapologetic marriage between jihadi absolutism and simpleton oppressor/oppressed sanctimonious binary-thinking. You literally have activists spray-painting “FREE PALESTINE” on a brick before hurling it through the window of a kosher deli. Rothstein’s Deli, the IDF, what’s the difference really?

You get twisted moral calculus that would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. When three Jews are stabbed to death in front of a Manchester synagogue, explainers rush in to clarify: it wasn’t just any synagogue. You see, the rabbi said provocative things, such as calling Gaza a “war” instead of a genocide, so really, what did they expect? That’s the line being drawn: if your rabbi uses the wrong vocabulary, homicide against anyone in your congregation becomes explicable, perhaps even deserved.

I know this dynamic intimately. My origin story was the vitriol I received from close friends — people I’d known for decades — simply for pointing out the problem of tolerating violent agitation. I’ve pointed out how insightful writers like can somehow demand materialistic rigor from every activist, and yet carve out an exemption allowing Palestinian activists to evade accountability:

He knows the Palestinian movement is failing to achieve material gains. He knows that attempts to justify sister city revisions or municipal investigations of weapons manufacturing would be horrendously humiliating displays. He knows he cannot possibly justify boycotting a falafel shop because the owner was born in the wrong country.

It should go without saying that a movement huffing eliminationist fumes shouldn’t get enraged when you suggest it calm down, and yet…

4. Not Just Cosplay

The causal chain is crystal clear, and the consequences are playing out exactly as you’d expect. How does misdirected rage become normalized? Start with indelible guilt…

Many progressive activists are essentially good people who genuinely want to do good — but years of being told they’re complicit in systemic oppression have left them desperate to demonstrate their virtue rather than achieve material outcomes. Folks who couldn’t point to the region on a map on October 6th, 2023 suddenly woke up as if by a sleeper cell activation switch.

Guilt makes you credulous: when atonement is the goal, you’re less likely to interrogate whether the cause actually helps anyone. Ignorance gets shored up by rolodex talking points, and resolute moral certainty is immediately downloaded and ready to go. This zombie movement continues lurching forward even after they finally got the ceasefire they’ve been supposedly pining over for two years.

MAGA’s sky-high gullibility and authoritarian cuckoldry remains deeply alarming, but at least there’s comfort in knowing it’s an incompetent low-IQ movement. The Palestine cult has fewer such assurances. Right now it’s mostly harmless twinks, privileged activists faintly cosplaying as bona fide guerilla terrorists — but its next iteration might not be as performative. Even if the automatons grow bored and move on, the damage has already been done. We have millions fully steeped in indoctrination, and therefore prone to fall sway to whatever next ideology hijacks the same cultural pathways now firmly established. That destination isn’t optimistic.

I have no connection or special affinity with Israel. I appreciate it the same way I would any other country, only to the extent it reflects the values I care about.

There’s nothing Jewish about me personally. I’m a Moroccan who grew up in a Muslim society where my uncles would pull me aside to caution me about Yahudi treachery. The painting above — a Jewish wedding in Morocco — is a reminder that diasporic Jewish life has always existed at the mercy of its neighbors’ moods. I’ve sat and drank tea in homes that looked exactly like the one depicted, and if it wasn’t for the title, I’d have no idea this wasn’t a Muslim wedding.

There’s a non-zero chance one of those homes I walked through used to belong to a Jewish family for generations, before hundreds of thousands of them eventually fled the country.

I care about the safety of my Jewish neighbors here and now, and the resilience of the institutions that have built our unprecedented liberal culture. Universities that advance human knowledge, organizations that foster civic engagement, and spaces where epistemic humility lets us act like adults instead of gullible tribal chimpanzees.

There is a way out if you earnestly care about Palestinian lives. Step one is refusing to let the eliminationists speak in your name. If you got swept up in the worst of this and now feel sick about it, you can stop anytime. Draw bright red lines around anyone who treats Jewish massacres as a feature, not a bug. Refusal is a declaration of where your priorities lie.

I wish I didn’t need to write about the Yahud, but right now it’s the issue with the most direct consequences for me and my community.

I welcome the day that stops.

There’s a genre of Substack essay about that writes itself if you simply hold up a mirror to any one of his essays. started this storied tradition by showcasing deBoer’s agonizing blind spots on trans issues, and I’m merely a follower in those grand footsteps.

Similar to FTTTG, I too remain a longtime admirer of Freddie’s writing. Yet he’s a baffling figure because he’s often flagrantly wrong in precisely the same shape that he’s insightfully correct. He’ll write brilliantly about how movements need measurable outcomes and material gains, then turn around and defend activism that produces neither — as long as it aligns with his priors.

As FTTTG observed in his piece:

it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.

This same pattern — rigorous standards, applied selectively — emerges starkly in Freddie’s treatment of Palestine activism, another pet issue he refuses to sully with criticism.

Municipal Foreign Policy

Consider Portland’s city council, which has the highest concentration of Democratic Socialists of America members anywhere in the country. DSA is nominally about advancing socialism — healthcare, wages, worker power — but the organization has rapidly transformed after Oct 7th into one singularly focused on Israel as an unyielding litmus test. In Portland, where DSA actually holds power, the hollowness of this fixation becomes impossible to ignore.

We’re told, particularly by the DSA’s own platform, that America has a lot of problems. Yet when a conflict is as remote and intractable as Israel/Palestine — with no local representatives, no policies within reach — activists desperate to justify their cultish fixation are forced to manufacture local outlets for their rage.

“Municipal foreign policy” is a phrase that should be self-evidently absurd, and yet DSA members of the Portland City Council, having apparently solved every problem in their city, thought it worthwhile to sign a bizarre anti-Israel pledge.

There’s a lot to examine but buried among the usual performative banalities is a promise to “investigate” whether weapons for Israel were manufactured or transported within city limits.

I had to blink several times when I read it to truly understand the bottomless pit of stupidity involved.

First: are there even weapons manufacturers within Portland city limits? The closest I could find is Teledyne FLIR, which specializes in thermal imaging, but that’s located about 20 miles south of the city. It’s possible some niche machine shop within the city produces specialized components (say, precision ball bearings) that might end up in larger assemblies, which might be used for military purposes, which might be sold to Israel. But we’re talking about a chain of maybes wrapped in plausible deniability.

Second: “investigate” what, exactly? Did someone break a law? Is there even a law to break? Why would the city council investigate instead of law enforcement? Does the council even have investigatory authority? The questions multiply faster than the answers.

Third: Minor point but has anyone heard of the Commerce Clause? The entire reason we moved beyond the Articles of Confederation was to create a free-trade union within the United States. We specifically dismantled interstate customs enforcement to avoid forcing truck drivers to navigate through a swiss cheese logistical landscape.

Fourth: even assuming Portland hosts weapons distribution, even assuming some law was broken, even assuming the council successfully blocks it…now what? At best, you’ve rerouted a truck carrying ball bearings through Beaverton instead of Portland. Congratulations on freeing Palestine, I guess?

The rest of Portland’s DSA pledge is more useless symbolism. One demand is to review Portland’s nine sister city affiliations (ceremonial partnerships between cities to promote cultural exchange) and reconsider whether Israeli cities belong on the list. Nothing says “materialist priorities” quite like severing pseudo-diplomatic ties with Ashkelon while your own city struggles with rampant homelessness and a fentanyl crisis.

And lest you think that Portland is an unrepresentative blip of the DSA’s priorities, in New York City, the DSA made similar demands of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s incoming administration. Among their requirements is that if NYC ever creates the promised government-run grocery stores, they must not carry Israeli products. Remember, we’re facing an affordability crisis, which is why it’s critical to ensure no Jew profits from your government-distributed feta cheese!

Ask yourself: if Palestinian activism was really about U.S. complicity or policy change, why are city councils with zero foreign policy jurisdiction burning political capital on performative resolutions about a conflict they can’t influence? The answer is obvious — the signaling ritual has to take priority over actual consequences, whether for Palestinians or Portlanders.

The Pattern Freddie Identified

This genre of hollow, preening, performative navel-gazing is something has brilliantly and lucidly articulated…in other contexts. It’s exactly the kind of symbolic theater that he spent years demolishing. Consider his essay on performative racial advocacy, where he knocks gestures masquerading as progress:

But what matters is always the behavior because it is the behavior, the material expression of racism in the world, that actually affects the experience of being Black. We privilege the material not merely because material harms are more damaging, immediate, and persistent than emotional harms. We privilege the material because we cannot measure someone’s thoughts or feelings and thus can never tell if they secretly harbor racist sentiment, and because it is the material that can be influenced by public policy. Government has tools to fight Black poverty. It does not have tools to fight white hatred. Not in any real way. Poverty lives in the world. Hatred lives in the head.

Or his other essay on performative racial advocacy:

deference politics in its essential form: at a moment of mass discontent over the state of race and policing, Black Americans got the absurd performance from Congressional leaders but not the substance of better policy.

Or his other other essay on performative racial advocacy:

What does this policy, argument, or claim do in fact, for real human beings, in material terms? Put another way, if we got our way, could we see the effects of that with our own two eyes? I can see hungry Black kids getting food. I can’t see white liberals “holding space” for Black people. We must return to the real.

Or his other other other essay on performative racial advocacy:

…leaving us with generations of progressive people who think that doing politics is all about feeling and not doing, who mistake posting black squares on Instagram and liking Frank Ocean for doing politics.

And yet, when you suggest that Palestinian activists have nothing material to show for their efforts, he’s apoplectic with rage:

And when you ask him to articulate what material gains they’ve made, he glitches out and cannot answer. Someone who demanded measurable outcomes everywhere else suddenly has only vibes to offer. It’s fascinating how he can be spectacularly wrong in exactly the same way he’s spectacularly right.

The pattern is hard to miss: Freddie demands material outcomes for Black activism but exempts Palestinian activism from the same scrutiny. Perhaps there’s a principled distinction I’m missing — he’s free to treat one group differently from another, but intellectual honesty requires explaining why. How does one group invite rigorous materialist critique while another gets a pass?

Freddie clearly has the platform and intellect to articulate his reasons. Instead, his engagement with me has been relegated to what he himself would call “the bitter end of content” — drive-by sniping devoid of substance. He’s accused me of cowardice dozens of times, supposedly because I quote-tweeted him to an audience 5% the size of his own. I’ve emailed him multiple times offering direct discussion, an unconstrained opportunity to expose my errors. Silence. Then another sneering drive-by weeks later.

Freddie’s personal evasion mirrors the larger problem: what happens when movements, or their defenders, refuse accountability? He knows the Palestinian movement is failing to achieve material gains. He knows that attempts to justify sister city revisions or municipal investigations of weapons manufacturing would be horrendously humiliating displays. He knows he cannot possibly justify boycotting a falafel shop because the owner was born in the wrong country.

He knows he cannot, on a deep constitutional level, defend the indefensible. Freddie’s intellectual apparatus simply won’t cooperate.

Freddie knows that if a movement is failing its own putative priorities, critique becomes essential, not optional. And he knows this because he’s written about it with remarkable clarity on — yes you guessed right!! — the topic of performative racial advocacy:

If you care about BlackLivesMatter, you are enjoined by principle to defend it from itself, and that means being willing to express unpopular opinions, such as the reality that the movement has absolutely no sense of direction, no broadly agreed-upon goals, and no idea about how it would achieve them if it did.

Replace “BlackLivesMatter” with “Palestinian activism,” and Freddie’s own argument clicks into place with an extremely satisfying precision.

I hope that someday Freddie learns to read, and hopefully his own essays, because he’s apparently missing out on some banger insights. No fucking way, you’re saying there’s another FdB essay on the efficient ways to learn to read? The man is a treasure.

Twin boys, coming soon.

We knew Lauren was pregnant throughout the lawsuit saga. To everyone who questioned her motherhood status then, I await your apology.

Links:

• The puzzle of populist devotion: How alliances and propaganda explain right-wing populism (Dan Williams)

• Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It To Us Good And Hard? (Dan Williams)

• Status, class, and the crisis of expertise (Dan Williams)

• On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal, political, religious, and science beliefs (Judgment & Decision Making)

• Against Delusion-Based Politics (Yassine Meskhout)

• Party of Cucks (Yassine Meskhout)

• How to Protest Well (Yassine Meskhout)

1. Five Months of Denial

What went unmentioned in Ozzy’s story is that we actually tried to find someone else to adopt him. Layla’s absence and the inevitability of death were too fresh on our hearts, blanketing the future no matter how distant, and souring the present. How can anyone enjoy life when everything is destined to die anyway?

But we suddenly had a lot of empty space, and Ozzy could hang while we found him a new home. And so he did, for a while. And a while. We kept updating his adoption page over the next few months, and the foster charity we worked with gave us final say on whoever was vying to be Ozzy’s forever home. We were very picky — what’s the rush?

Five months after Ozzy showed up, we finally received the perfect adoption application, free of any blemishes we could use as an excuse. Our immediate reaction — internal NO! dressed in external sobbing — made us confront the denial we had been desperately caching away all along; we didn’t want to let go of this little guy. His origin story was simply too good to walk away from, and as a storyteller, that would be a narrative sin I could never atone for. The timing of it all was just too surreptitious — our beloved Layla dies and just a few weeks later this doofus shows up from out of nowhere? Had he shown up when Layla was still alive, she was insanely territorial and would’ve immediately yowled him out of the neighborhood, but this lucky idiot happened to escape his mentally ill owner just in time? Too much chance even for fiction.

So of course he stayed, for good this time, and his sheer idiocy continued being a hilarious spectacle. He was a playful chaos gremlin — part lovable meathead, part furry linebacker, and all energy. An Olympic high-jumper who could launch himself to absurd heights chasing feather wands, but who also produced the most pathetic “wah-waaaa” plaintive meows. Ozzy hated being petted yet would follow us from room to room, even rousing himself from slumber and sleepily ambling to wherever either of us went.

He was such an odd duck — self-serious and goofy in equal measure, and we absolutely adored him. Where Layla had been elegant and demanding, Ozzy was clumsy and needy. Where she commanded worship, he begged for attention while simultaneously rejecting it. He made us laugh constantly, and he made it easier to remember joy through the fog of grief.

At the same time, holy fuck was he a handful! His relentless playfulness translated into an exhausting reality. He constantly asked us to chase him, trotting by our legs and taunting us with his signature breeee war cry before galloping off. Or demanding more feather wand play even while visibly panting. Or just beating the hell out of Lauren.

We knew we had to get him a fellow feline playmate, or else we’d be beholden to that (exhausting) role for life. Introducing cats to each other is a giant pain in the ass because they’re such prima donnas. You have to build the equivalent of a Berlin wall partition inside your house and keep them completely separate and out of sight of each other for at least a week or two before you could graduate to some light sniffing through solid opaque barriers. It’s agonizingly slow, and you have to be mindful of every door latch.

Our first matchmaking attempt lasted almost a month but ultimately didn’t work out. Ozzy tried playfully ambushing her, but she reacted with genuine fear, and that only reaffirmed a steep downward spiral. Within days she imprisoned herself under the furniture, and Ozzy saw any sortie as an invitation to torment her.

Ozzy needed a playmate who could handle his intensity, someone with street smarts and stamina to match. We’d have to keep fostering, but it would have to wait until after we came back from our trip to Morocco.

2. The Cripple & The Mob

Speaking of Morocco, our good times were drowned out by a pervasive landscape of relentless misery.

The ‘patriarchy’ indictment had been diluted into obsolescence in the West by the world’s most privileged humans crowing about the sexism of workplace air conditioning. And yet the stark severity of actual patriarchal systems is on full display in the present day and just a transatlantic flight away. Whereas American homelessness is overwhelmingly male and ravaged by drug addiction, Morocco’s homeless are overwhelmingly women, frequently accompanied by famished young children, panhandling on the streets.

While Morocco is culturally relatively chill, it has enough traditional Islamic vestiges such that women’s social standing is heavily predicated on male guardianship and adherence to strict codes of female propriety. Step outside those codes through premarital sex, pregnancy, or even fleeing domestic violence, and the punishment is sadistically total — permanent economic and social exile with an expectation to publicly display their ‘moral failures’ through visible and atoning destitution. A grave warning to others.

Human despair dominated, but the urban landscape was also overrun with sick and grotesquely injured stray animals. It was overwhelming to be aware of how much of an impact our comparatively vast wealth could’ve had — a pittance to us would’ve been life-changing. But what was even more overwhelming was realizing that we could be wrung dry and still barely make a dent in a country of 38 million, where scenes like this repeated ad nauseam. It was the clearest confrontation of the abstractions behind effective altruism.

Lauren had managed to stay restrained despite the misery pastiche we strolled by, relegating her efforts to scattering cat food on the ground every few feet, charting our path like a modern Hansel and Gretel.

Late one night, amidst the endless parade of street cats, one little dude stood out purely for how uniquely pathetic he looked. He was hobbling around on an injured front leg, radiating resignation to whatever fate awaited him.

Lauren’s restraint couldn’t hold any longer and finally shattered — she demanded that we take him to a vet first thing in the morning. I was dreading this scenario. I knew that once the empathy dams burst, the flood would be unstoppable. I started rearranging tomorrow’s itinerary like a high-stakes game of Tetris, and went into the bodega next door to ask for a cardboard box for the crippled cat while Lauren stood vigil over him.

I was gone barely three minutes when I saw the bodega owner staring out his door with grave concern. He pointed down the street, turned to me, and said “They’re talking to your wife”. I step out and see Lauren completely surrounded by eight young men. One was shaking her hand and leaning in to do the traditional kiss-on-the-cheek Moroccan greeting.

Street harassment is an obnoxiously pervasive problem in Morocco, and it’s policed according to a strict, tiered hierarchy. Women who wear a hijab are considered “protected” to a sacrosanct degree. Unveiled Moroccan women are potentially fair game, but they tend to know enough variants of fuck off in darija to ward off predators. The ones who have it worst in this hierarchy are single white female tourists, who get absolutely swarmed by incessant attention. No one would have dared approach Lauren while she was at my side, but by momentarily stepping off screen, I accidentally turned her into a lure.

I knew the corrective machismo role I had to perform. I walk towards the mob with unhurried confidence and a wide smile. Then, with a booming voice void of anger and with flawless street Arabic, say “Hey! You’re talking to my fucking wife?”

Each one instinctively steps back, hands up pleading exculpation. My accent tagged me as a local son, and now they were scrambling to undo the unforgivable breach of talking to a Moroccan man’s wife.

But my belonging came with a trap: they naturally demand whether I’d had Lauren convert to Islam, the near-mandatory expectation to anyone marrying outside the tribe. My ‘no’ provokes sharp displeasure. Kehal tiha, their reply is spare but full: a sweeping all-encompassing indictment of the disaster, doom, and catastrophe I’ve brought upon myself. If I can’t bring a white woman into the Umma, am I even a real Muslim?

The assumption my accent so effortlessly established — born-and-bred, so surely a brother — was now a liability. I can’t admit to being an atheist apostate, not here. The energy sours. We’re not safe.

Lauren had been standing quietly to the side watching me negotiate in a foreign language, watching over the crippled cat that had anchored us here in the first place. I turn to her and say “Let’s go”. Her body pivots then halts, unsure about leaving the cat alone with a mob of frustrated dudes. One guy demands that I remedy my deficient commitment to Islam by reciting the Shahadah. He even opens a bottle of water and brings it up to my lips, waiting for me to say the magic words. Everyone else in the mob presses closer, eager to witness the miracle of reconversion.

I abhorred what was happening and resented Lauren’s complacency. Our physical safety was predicated on my uninterrupted machismo performance. Expressing any frustrations to Lauren risked dispelling that mirage — if a woman refuses to listen to her husband, why should any man fear him? Balancing that tension and with a sharper tone now “Lauren, get your shit and let’s fucking go”. The mob had absorbed enough English language culture to divine the meaning of what I said, and they start echoing it back. I grab her hand and yank us forward with steady determination, not looking back once, since wariness would’ve been a sign of weakness.

Safely back at our hotel, what followed was the biggest fight we’ve ever had.

I hated the archetype I was forced to play in such a patriarchal milieu, but still resented not having her unquestioning obedience. Morocco’s gender code demanded I play out its pageant of authority; authenticity here wasn’t optional. I had to boss her around for our own good.

I barely slept, and she woke up early the next morning to engage her quest, hopeful that the crippled cat wouldn’t have wandered far. I was frustrated at her insistence, and at one point I said “You think you can save every cat in the world?” As angry as I was, I couldn’t let her go on her own into the wild without a male chaperone. So I dragged myself along. Fucked up culture.

The cripple was exactly where we had left him the night before, as was the bodega cardboard box. We presented it to him and he wearily dove right in without any resistance. By the time we arrived at the vet, he had fallen asleep in Lauren’s arms.

They asked for his name. Without thinking, she blurted out “Chris”, in honor of a cat rescuer who had tragically died in a fire along with 100 of his cats that exact same day.

Street cats have a torrent of dental problems in part because they so frequently eat food off the sidewalk and invariably bite down on tiny pebbles. The first thing the vet did was pull out three horribly infected teeth out off “Chris”. The limping on the front paw wasn’t the result of a broken bone as we thought, but a heavily infected bite wound that likely was from another cat. Without Lauren’s intervention, “Chris” was absolutely destined to suffer a slow painful demise.

We did all we could anyways. He was in good hands and we had Italy to go to. Ciao!

3. No Sane Person Would Do This

We eventually returned to the US and “Chris” stayed cooped up in a tiny cage at the vet. Sure, all his immediate health problems were addressed (including the malady of having testicles) but it felt like a waste to just release him back out into the wild. Lauren was absolutely determined to find him a home but the problem is that anyone in Morocco keen on “owning” a cat passes over a dozen bedraggled opportunities every single day, and those with means would rather opt for a purebred showpiece. No sane person was going to choose an ugly toothless hobo off the street.

She was undeterred, devoting several hours a day towards this mission, connecting with various folks running informal cat rescues in Morocco. Ok, maybe Morocco was off the table, but what about a nice European tourist family? Higher demand pool for sure, except now you also have to jump through the EU’s insanely strict import restrictions. Again, no sane person would suffer through that paperwork barrage for this cat.

Ok ok ok, Morocco is out, and so is all of Europe. If we could somehow get him anywhere within the US then Lauren could easily tap into a robust and familiar network of animal rescues. Now the problem shifted into transport logistics. Pet transport companies quoted thousands of dollars, and cats couldn’t fly unaccompanied anyway. She joined every ‘flight angel’ group she could find, desperately seeking out anyone already flying back to the US who wouldn’t mind hauling a shrieking street cat alongside their own baggage chaos, only to get inundated with spam and scammers. Meanwhile, updates from the vet showed “Chris” growing increasingly frantic in his cage.

This was going nowhere, obviously. We were both thinking it, but I had to finally say it out loud: “It’s ok if you want to go back and get him.” Lauren crumpled in affirmation, but was also aghast at the thought. I thought about that night in Casablanca, her body pivoting toward the exit but halting, unable to leave the crippled cat alone with the mob. That same paralysis was happening again, just slower — a month-long version of the same refusal to walk away.

She was seriously going to endure another round-trip halfway across the world just to take in a street cat with god knows how many health or behavioral issues? Yes. Yes she was. My perfectly insane wife was really going to try to save every cat in the world after all.

Lauren wasn’t going to waste the transatlantic opportunity, and so she stuffed an entire suitcase with 50lbs of desperately needed veterinary medical supplies.

Her carry-on had Feliway spray, collapsible water cups, a disposable litter box, pee pads, and a printed 16-item checklist that included reminders like “ONSSA office??” and “small towel or blanket”. The import paperwork was byzantine — microchip documentation, state veterinarian endorsement (required within 24 hours of departure), international health certificates in French, and an anthology of bureaucratic stamps.

This trip was going to be a quick and easy exfiltration: go in, secure the package, and get out. She stayed at a hotel right next to the airport, where the owner loved animals and had a bunch of them roam around, including a peacock.

At the vet, she found “Chris” frantic inside a cage he’d been cooped in for almost six weeks at this point, screaming whenever she stepped away. Back at the hotel, she made sure to absolutely exhaust him before their arduous journey the next day. He played with a feather toy for probably the first time in his whole life, stared at his reflection in a mirror for the probably the first time in his whole life, and laid on textile for probably the first time in his whole life. Following that barrage of nascent experiences, he fell fast asleep curled up in the crook of Lauren’s leg.

The flight back was going to require some chemical assistance courtesy of Gabapentin. “Chris” held it together well enough through the 17-hour journey, and he didn’t vomit until right at the final descent! What a guy.

All that fastidiously compiled import documentation was apparently for naught. The border control agent apparently had no interest in the screaming cat inside the pet carrier Lauren was holding, nor in the meticulously prepared vaccine passport. All he asked about was whether she had brought any food from overseas. I waited for them at the airport with this sign:

Lauren didn’t even notice the sign. “Chris” was yowling and she was sobbing after an exhausting flight, begging to be taken home.

4. Fall of the Berlin Wall

His journey demanded a more fitting name. He was christened Ziggy in honor of another alien immigrant (and also because it paired so nicely with Ozzy as a glam rock duo).

We didn’t know quite what to expect from him. Stray cats in America tend to be relatively feral, since the most effective way to avoid the TNR dragnet is to be far away from human civilization. Moroccan stray cats have no such concerns; they grow up passively surrounded by throngs of humans, most of them kind, some sadistically cruel.

Ziggy’s medical history gives us a few clues to his origin. His jaw was fractured at one point and healed crooked giving him his signature look, and this was most likely from getting kicked in the chin. His inner eyelid sat askew, a remnant of an old upper respiratory infection. He has AIDS, or rather, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (in fairness, everyone has AIDS). He got it either from getting bit or fucking some street hoes — which also means there’s little Ziggies running around, aww!

Our house was once again the site of the Berlin wall partition, separating Ziggy from Ozzy until they could cool off. Ziggy didn’t seem to mind going from the wide-open cacophonous urban landscape of Casablanca to being cooped up in a single room. Yet he carried an anxious frantic energy, one that somehow surpassed Ozzy’s extreme.

Anytime he heard the telltale kibble shake, he’d go into a desperate tailspin. He’d force himself to shovel as much edible mass into his tiny stomach as possible, frantically devouring as if he was still warring over street scraps. He had no idea he’d never go hungry again.

Anytime he cleaned himself, he did it with obsessive pathological gusto. The griminess he was previously caked in absolutely wasn’t from lack of effort on his end. He didn’t know he’d never be that filthy again.

Anytime he fell asleep, he would violently explode into alertness at the slightest sound — showcasing a hypervigilance that was as fundamental as his pulse. He had no idea he would never be threatened again.

Anytime he was left alone, he’d let loose with piercing shrieks, a reliable method of garnering attention through a dense auditory fog. He had no idea we would never abandon him.

Ozzy was cautiously wary of this foreign immigrant coming into his house, and would give a pathetic hiss the equivalent of an exhale. Ziggy meanwhile could play all the cards. After a week of sniffing each other through door cracks, they finally saw each other through a gate. Ziggy arched his back, rotated his body, and charged diagonally towards a terrified Ozzy — full cavalry abandon, pure You wot mate? energy.

But as soon as Ozzy bolted, Ziggy immediately relaxed and took on a much more submissive posture, getting on his back and exposing his neck. Compared to Ozzy’s relative autism, years of ruthless street socializing gave Ziggy a remarkably flexible social rolodex, ready to deploy on demand no matter the circumstances.

The partition saga was miserable while it lasted. I couldn’t leave my home office to pee without ensuring I had at least one arm free to navigate the layers of barriers. The other difficulty was Ziggy’s relentless ferreting desires. We taped up cardboard barriers but Ziggy would find whatever leverage and wedge his head through any opening, famished to interact with a terrified Ozzy. Each added layer compounded the traversal difficulties, and Lauren and I had to live on opposite sides of the house. The boys had moments of calm and would touch paws through barriers, like frat boys afraid of being called gay.

Three weeks in one morning, I just got fed up. Ziggy once again burst through the latest barrier and I finally gave in and said fuck it — you two can roam free and settle out your imaginary beef yourselves.

I braced myself for the screeching and hissing but heard none. Silence. Then, movement. I watched them slowly circle each other around the giant bean bag. Ziggy crouched flat against the ground, and Ozzy’s tail lolled in the air. And then — chase. Ambush and counter-ambush. Holy shit, they’re playing.

We couldn’t believe it actually worked. At last, we tore down that wall and reunited Germany’s Federal Republic.

5. The Lottery Winners

The Cold War was formally over, but Ziggy had no idea what defeating communism meant for him.

Over time, I watched his sleep getting deeper, his lounging pose getting longer, and the noise he’d ignore getting louder. I’d catch myself watching him sleep, thinking about all those nights he had no safe place to close his eyes.

The frantic desperate energy surrounding the sound of food finally abated. It helped that he knew enough Arabic to appreciate the severity of yelling Tseb! (the Moroccan version of Shoo!) and my native accent wasn’t a liability here. He probably heard that plenty of times from angry Arab men, so I offered verisimilitude. He stopped frantically jumping up on the counter during meal time, and somehow learned to patiently wait.

We somehow lucked into a cat that could surpass Ozzy’s intense athleticism. They would chase each other around the house relentlessly, until both of them are lying on the floor panting. Their twice-daily play-fights turned the house into a Wrestlemania cage match. Ozzy initially lacked technique and could only leverage his size to tank hits, lying on his back and pushing Ziggy away with his legs in a move I called “The Mechanic”.

Ziggy meanwhile pulled off slick street fighting moves he acquired through survival-stakes alley brawls. His mainstay was pinning Ozzy down then executing a 180° roundhouse kick, and the coolest was an ambushing parkour wall jump where he’d feint right only to materialize left. I wondered if he remembered his training, if those memories ever surfaced when he was curled up on the bean bag.

The two acted like such dudes together. We couldn’t believe our luck at how perfectly matched they were. I felt the first flicker of something I couldn’t name yet. Relief, maybe? Or wonder at how improbable this all was.

Ziggy adapted to the good life with suspicious ease. He didn’t showcase awe or wonder — just stoic resignation and stirring indignation bordering on offense, as if insulted by the very suggestion he might want for anything. I assumed it was trauma wiring: when his life was blanketed by perpetual threat and deprivation, his tiny walnut brain had no reason to keep records beyond the last forty-eight hours. So he just carried on in the moment, as a living embodiment of mindfulness forged through sheer necessity. The fucked-up part is that while he moved apparently unburdened by his past, I couldn’t stop replaying it.

Months later, the boys managed to push on a window screen while we were out legally defending murderers. Ozzy, the notorious escape artist, uncharacteristically stayed inside. We found Ziggy three yards over, screaming his heart out, darting frantically between fences — and most disturbingly, looking through us as if we were strangers, abject panicked fear multiplied by heat-induced exhaustion.

As Lauren and I frantically kept pace, she instinctively announced to a neighbor “He’s not from America, he doesn’t know this area!” matter-of-fact, like a mom declaring a peanut allergy. A lifetime of Moroccan street smarts were suddenly useless in this strange foreign landscape.

She caught him through claws and fangs, and once back inside, his amnesia cycle initialized. The screaming stopped. The wild-eyed panic vanished. His memory limit did exactly what it was designed to do, and he somehow forgot that he forgot, grooming himself on his bean bag with disturbing normalcy.

One day Ziggy was in the backyard staring up at the sky, towards nothing in particular but simply drinking in his environs. Bombarded with unprecedented stimuli — his eyes capturing a pervasive green canopy he’s never seen before in Casablanca’s concrete sprawl, a quiet stillness he never before thought possible, and bird calls he’d never imagined existed.

I appreciated just how precarious this timeline is. I was watching a Moroccan immigrant who won a lottery against impossible odds, mirroring my own path to America, as the only reason I live in this country was because a computer randomly picked my name out of a giant hat.

How many butterflies had to flap their wings in exactly the right way. How Layla had to die. How Ozzy had to randomly appear at exactly the right time against our wishes. How his energy had to overwhelm us. How we walked down that exact Casablanca street at that exact time. How that mob pressed closer and Lauren’s body halted. How her unrelenting pathological obsession refused to let go. How Ziggy getting bit during a random street fight was the greatest thing to ever happen to him.

How fragile this entire reality lineage is, compared to its alternative. The one where Ziggy is succumbing to a slow and painful demise, famished, covered in grime, delirious with pain; afraid, unknown, unloved, and so very alone. Finding his final refuge within the crevice of a long-abandoned building, and exhaling his last breath, never ever knowing the soft embrace of a Big Joe brand bean bag chair.

That joy turned sharp in my chest. My gratitude for Ziggy was perfectly proportional to the misery he miraculously slinked behind. My heart catches thinking how close we averted disaster. I can’t look at Ziggy without deeply appreciating how much joy he brings, but also without being overwhelmed at how much misery is out there that we couldn’t do shit about. The only solace I have is to avert my eyes; focus on what we did save, rather than dwell on the vast universe of what we couldn’t.

Such is life. Such is Ziggy.

The Boys and their antics has its own Instagram page @gardenoflay.

Special Thanks

Wiam (@loveandsavecats): None of this would’ve been possible without Wiam, who coordinated everything — vet appointments, discounts, translations, and constant hospital visits. She’s doing extraordinary work with zero institutional support so please donate here, even $20 goes incredibly far in Morocco.

Clinique Veterinaire Almassira: Provided excellent care for Ziggy at heavily discounted rates and went above and beyond with logistics, getting the state veterinary paperwork approved the day before the return flight. They work with Wiam and help her with many of her rescues at a discounted rate.

VIP@Home Vet (@vipvetseattle): Donated nearly $1,000 in veterinary supplies, including medications otherwise unavailable in Morocco.

The Yass House (@theyasshouse): Another Yassine, another cat rescuer, and Lauren’s male chaperone in my stead. Provided much need emotional support, advice, and signal boosted for help to his many followers. Has many cats he is trying to adopt out to America and Canada if anyone is interested.

Riad Hamdani: A rare pet-friendly hotel near Casablanca airport run by an animal-loving owner planning to open a dog sanctuary. Highly recommended.

Fallen Whiskers Jewelry (@katieteix): Makes pet keepsake jewelry using whiskers, fur, ashes, teeth etc. She was working on Layla’s memorial piece using whiskers and flowers from our backyard when all of this was happening with Ziggy. She bought every item off Lauren’s Amazon wishlist made for the trip, and really helped signal boost to her large followers.

About Morocco’s Animal Crisis:

Morocco has virtually no animal welfare infrastructure — no TNR programs, no shelters — just scattered volunteers operating on their own dime. Ahead of the 2030 FIFA World Cup, authorities are mass-killing street animals through shooting, poisoning, and starvation (@iawcp documents this). The recent death of a British tourist from rabies brought international scrutiny, and their inane solution is proposing a law that would criminalize feeding stray animals (more info).

How to help: Donate to Moroccan rescuers like Wiam and Yass House. Adopt a Moroccan cat if you can, they’re remarkably well-adjusted. If you’re traveling to Morocco, contact local rescuers to ask what they need or volunteer as a flight angel. Small actions can matter enormously.

Let’s say you’re a zoo architect tasked with designing an enclosure for ostriches, and let’s also say that you have no idea what an ostrich is (roll with me here). The potentially six-figure question staring you down is whether to install a ceiling.

The dumb solution is to ask “Are ostriches birds?” then, surmising that birds typically fly, construct an elaborate aviary complete with netting and elevated perches.

The non-dumb solution is to instead ask “Can ostriches fly?” then skip the ceiling entirely, give these 320-pound land-bound speed demons the open sky life they actually need, and pocket the cost differential.

Your boss is not having it, however. When you inform him of your decision to eschew the ceiling enclosure, he gets beet-red and apoplectic, repeating like a mantra “But they’re birds! BIRDS!” and insists that ostriches belong in the aviary with the finches and parrots. I mean, he’s taxonomically correct (the best kind of correct) that ostriches are indeed birds, but it’s also apparent that he’s using the “bird” sticker as a fallacious shortcut to sneak in all sorts of nonsensical assumptions.

Designing an ostrich pen based purely on the “bird” label (and all the smuggled premises that label drags along) would be a disaster. The zookeeper’s real concern isn’t taxonomic purity but practical reality: How much space do they need? What kind of ground surface? What food? What climate? In the real world, ostriches end up housed with zebras and gazelles despite their “bird” sticker, because what matters is substance (the animal’s needs), not the label slapped on the cage.

Does this whole scenario sound farcical to you? I agree! And yet it’s exactly how the transgender discourse has been playing out.

The ostrich story is a perfect encapsulation of what I termed the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy. To recap, the fallacy is the habit of slapping connotation-heavy labels onto contested premises in order to shortcut real debate. It involves three moves:

1. You have a premise that’s difficult to justify directly (“We should build a pointless and expensive aviary for ostriches” — maybe the boss wants the prestige project or has budget motives).

2. You find an adjacent, easy-to-accept premise (“Birds belong in aviaries”).

3. You slap a shared label onto your contested premise (“Ostriches belong in aviaries because they are birds! BIRDS!”) to smuggle in agreement without direct confrontation.

If this sounds manipulative, that’s because it is. In a second piece, I explained why this tactic is fallacious reasoning, showing how it mixes up composition and division fallacies while relying on slippery semantics. Even though I had very specific contentious examples in mind, I chose to obviate them to avoid a distraction. That bloodless approach was probably a mistake in retrospect because it avoided providing something tangible for readers to chew on. Let’s fix that now, let’s savor blood.

People like sports. For whatever reason, humans have always gotten a big kick out of watching other humans slug it out. Athletic competition has been a cultural mainstay since our cave-dwelling days. But for the spectacle to be interesting, there needs to be some measure of competitive balancing. Watching a heavyweight boxer pummel a league of toddlers might lose its entertainment value after the sixth brain hemorrhage.

But there’s a tension of sorts: if your talent pool is your Dunbar tribe of 150 and you just want to know who’s the best spear thrower, there’s no real downside to open competition. Such a community is small enough that participation is within reach of a meaningful number of people.

But scale up to millions of people, and unrestricted competition becomes a problem. You end up with freakishly gifted elites dominating the field while everyone else withers on the vine with zero chance of winning anything. Interest dies, participation plummets, and the sport collapses.

The solution here is leagues. While you might not necessarily be the absolute best spear thrower in the whole entire world, you certainly can have a chance to be the best within an arbitrarily defined demographic.

But how you demarcate the leagues is also in tension. The obvious answer seems simple: rank everyone by skill and group them accordingly. Put the top 10 spear throwers in Division A, ranks 11-20 in Division B, and so on down the line. The problem is that we want competitors to be more or less evenly matched, but we can’t know if they’re evenly matched unless they already competed in even matches. Classic ostrich-and-egg problem.

You could theoretically conduct tryout matches but every rational actor has a massive incentive to sandbag their own performance. Why reveal your true power level during assessment when you could intentionally underperform, get placed in a weaker division, then trounce everyone when it finally matters?

Even if you solve the competitor’s dilemma, you still have an assessment paradox. If you somehow make your screening accurate enough to force people’s best effort, you’ve basically already run the competition. Why bother with the actual tournament if you’ve already determined the results? But if your screening is too weak or easily gamed, you end up with mismatched divisions where ringers demolish genuine novices. What you need is Goldilocks fudge factors:

1. Just enough assessment to create reasonably fair matchups

2. …but not so precise as to preordain the results.

3. Plus, whatever criteria you use need to be objective enough to safeguard against manipulation.

There’s no perfect solution because the whole point of spectacle is to avoid prescient analytical precision.

The ur-example that reasonably satisfies all three factors is weight-class divisions. Weight can be such an extreme determinative factor in combat sports that an untrained 250-pound couch potato could walk into any boxing gym and absolutely demolish a 100-pound opponent with decades of training. In pure striking exchanges, technique has little bearing when you’re getting ragdolled by someone several times your mass.

At the same time, weight isn’t so determinative that you’d expect every 150lbs combatant to perform identically. There’s still plenty of room for training, skill, strategy, and fighting style to matter enormously. And best of all, weight is objectively measurable, making it very difficult to game (obviously severe weight cutting is still a thing).

Every effective league division follows these same principles: find an attribute that’s predictive enough to create fair competition, objective enough to resist manipulation, but not so deterministic that outcomes become foregone conclusions.

We see this across the field. Little League lets kids compete by screening on age rather than forcing eight-year-olds to face grown adults. Minor leagues create opportunities for decent adults who can’t quite hack it against professionals, using severe salary incentives to eliminate sandbagging. Paralympic classifications account for different physical disabilities.

And, of course, sex-based divisions also follow this pattern because males in general have an overwhelming athletic advantage over females, with the other advantage being administrative simplicity in ascertaining sex (Or at least, it used to be — more on that later).

Why perseverate so much over sports? The point here is to emphasize that league divisions don’t appear arbitrarily out of thin air. Their purpose is as a means to an end, and they’re not the end itself.

League divisions can come and go depending on what you want to prioritize. For example, the early UFC tournaments (1993-1996) actually had no weight restrictions whatsoever — anyone could fight anyone regardless of size. Initially it was an absurd bloody spectacle with karate masters trying to land precise strikes against boxers or boxers getting taken down and having no idea how to defend submissions. Very quickly, people figured out that certain martial arts (namely Brazilian jiu-jitsu) were far more effective than others in unrestricted combat. And while it served as a fascinating real life experiment, UFC eventually got too predictable once people figured out the meta-game. Weight classes were then introduced not just for safety and regulatory compliance, but also to keep it interesting.

On the flipside, we could conjure up hypotheticals that demonstrate their obsolescence. Imagine cybernetic skeleton replacements become fashionable, allowing users to replace their entire skeletal system with lighter, stronger materials. A participant now weighs much less but can hit exponentially harder. The previously reliable purpose behind weight classifications suddenly evaporates because weight is no longer as predictive of performance. Insisting ‘but he’s really below 150 pounds!‘ is technically correct (the best kind) but still nonsensical — you’re mistaking the sticker for the thing itself.

The moment you lose sight of why a categorization exists, you become vulnerable to defending arbitrary lines in the sand while the world shifts beneath your feet. Categories are tools, not sacred principles — and tools are useless if they no longer serve their purpose.

Sports organizations adopted sex-segregation because it satisfyingly balanced multiple factors: predictive enough (clear athletic advantages between categories), objective enough (historically simple to determine), and not so deterministic (meaningful competition within categories). But maybe that’s no longer the case?

Regardless of whether you think trans is fake or whatever, it’s just undeniably true that cross-sex hormones and gonad removals are much more prevalent nowadays. We’ve always had overlapping “boundaries” across the spectrum of male and female athletic performance — after all, elite female athletes can outcompete plenty of males — but the distinctions are increasingly blurred. The sharp bimodal distribution we once had is becoming a flatter, more spread-out curve as increasing numbers of people occupy the previously sparse intermediate performance zones.

What does that mean for sex segregation in sports? This brings us back to the central point of this entire essay: it depends entirely on what purpose sex-segregation served in the first place. You cannot have a coherent opinion on how divisions should be drawn unless you can clearly articulate the underlying principles that justify those divisions in the first place!

It’s important to remember there is no universally “correct” answer, just like there is no universally “correct” weight class. Different sports organizations might reasonably prioritize different goals: some might want to prioritize preventing male athletic advantage from overshadowing female athleticism, others will favor administrative simplicity, others will want to elevate subjective identity over all else, some might emphasize revenue generation and fan engagement, and others might just say fuck it all and finally become the first horoscope league.

This isn’t an essay only about sports. I went into detail to showcase that sports league divisions (or any other categories) aren’t divinely etched by the heavens on obsidian tablets; we literally make them up because they happen to be useful! The real tragedy is watching people defend categorical boundaries whose purpose they can’t explain, like our zoo boss insisting ostriches belong in aviaries (“BIRDS!”).

When it comes to sex segregation of any kind, the lack of curiosity on why the segregation exists in the first place is astounding to me. Should transwomen be allowed to go into women’s bathrooms? I don’t know, why are there separate bathrooms in the first place? Should transmen inmates be housed in men’s prisons? I don’t know, why are there separate prisons in the first place? Should transwhoever go into this bucket or the other bucket? I don’t know, what’s with the buckets? None of these disputes are resolved by a dictionary.

Label smuggling thrives because it’s cognitively cheaper. Humans are pattern-recognition machines; labels are handy shortcuts, reducing complex issues into easily digestible narratives. But humans are also lazy machines. We’re eager to outsource cognitive labor to emotionally charged words.

The reason the sticker shortcut fallacy is so prevalent is that it’s really effective at distracting people. The idiocy of debating the birdishness of ostriches as a guise to decide whether to build an aviary should be apparent, and yet there’s hordes red in the face arguing the definition of “woman” not realizing semantics are used to disguise contested premises.

For some, the confusion is intentional: there’s a conclusion they’re ultimately after, but it’s easier to smuggle via connotation rather than draw attention by openly declaring it at the customs checkpoint.

Remember, labels simplify communication only when shared definitions exist. Absent consensus, labels actively distort and mislead. Insisting on labels rather than attributes is prima facie evidence of malicious intent — someone trying to force a concession they can’t earn openly and honestly.

Next time you get lured into a sticker debate, stop. Use a label only if its admission criteria are crystal clear and uncontested. Otherwise, assume the label is moving contraband premises. Seize the cargo and answer the real question hidden underneath.

Writing is hard. One of my aspirations is precision and transparency. Basically, open source my arguments. Ideally you know my premises, my logic, and my conclusions, and it’s set in such a transparent structure that you could plug-and-play other premises in and see how my conclusions change. That’s the aspiration at least. Practically, there’s an inescapable tension between writing precisely and writing compellingly or succinctly. You just have to make sure the sweet spot doesn’t stray too far.

pursues a different sweet spot, and he pursues it extremely well. His prose is endlessly and floridly compelling, but it can also be drowned in inscrutable fog. There is nothing wrong with this. Sometimes writing needs to capture sentiment, something much more ethereal than a coldly-machined instrument, and Kriss can capture this extremely well, particularly on the topic of Israel-Palestine. His comment to one of my earliest pieces paints a vivid picture of the “calculated unfreedom” Palestinians in the West Bank live under. I thought his essay Against the Brave was beautiful, and yet the prose probably contributed to many misunderstanding his thesis (some deliberately ‘misunderstood’).

So there can be a downside. I’m not cut out for the hot takes salt mines because beat me to the punch and wrote basically exactly what I was planning to write:

Sam Kriss makes good art, not arguments. Keep reading him because he’s interesting. But the words he weaves are a curious and enjoyable lie, and a self-admitted one at that, and I’m now unsure if he really understands anything he talks about.

I had an exchange with Kriss recently (ages in Substack years) that perfectly captured the pitfalls. The basic context you need is that I restacked a essay that encourages supposedly “pro-Palestinian” activists to stop harassing random Jews and to instead:

If you are truly passionate about any sort of Palestinian cause, go take a look at groups like Realign for Palestine. Go work with them and focus on peace.

Despite my disagreements with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, founder of RfP, I wholeheartedly elevate his efforts as a Palestinian voice earnestly seeking peace; a position that garners him intense hatred from the far-left (don’t watch this, it’s soul-draining).

Kriss took umbrage with this suggestion, vaguely decrying RfP as a “slimy initiative from the atlantic council”. The Atlantic Council is basically if NATO had a think tank — very much in favor of liberal internationalism and transatlantic security cooperation & interventionism. Because the Atlantic Council funds RfP, it’s reasonable to presume that the latter would reflect the former’s ideology, but does it?

RfP openly outline their principles on their website — namely advocating for a two-state solution while disavowing destructive extremism. It should be a trivial exercise to point out any objections!

Kriss refused to answer plainly, offering up various analogies1 instead:

• “rough equivalent of responding to october 7th by promoting an iranian thinktank’s programme to make jews less covetous and disagreeable”

• “it’s like responding to october 7th by asking why zionists don’t support the iranian revolutionary guard”

• “imagine a white supremacist group set up a charity that claimed it wanted to lead black teenagers away from criminal gangs: even if you think leading kids away from gangs is a good idea, the institutional affiliation is clearly enough to make this a deeply suspect venture. asking al sharpton why he doesn’t support Klansmen for Hope would not be a particularly impressive gotcha.”

Sunbeams are finally peeking through the canopy with that last one, we’re getting closer to an actual answer!

After much cajoling, his most substantive response builds on the taint-by-association scaffolding:

i’ll explain it like you’re five. the atlantic council is a neoconservative thinktank based in the united states. it has two main roles: to provide analysis and talking points for friendly politicians, and to funnel money towards people and groups that share its interests. it’s a fixture in the american security and diplomatic establishment, draws funding from the state department, and there’s a long-established revolving door between its offices and those of the us government. politically, it supports an interventionist us foreign policy with a focus on maintaining the us’s ties with nato states and other allies. those allies include israel, which the atlantic council has broadly supported, including through the current war.

i know that you probably don’t share my deep scepticism of and revulsion toward foreign policy blob thinktanks. but please try to actually think about this for a moment. if you support the palestinian cause, the atlantic council is not a credible actor. it is an adjunct the infrastructure that is currently starving and killing the people of gaza. it doesn’t matter if you share their rejection of armed violence; the fact alone that they support armed violence on the other side means they are simply not a trustworthy vehicle for this message, because they are not a neutral party, they are an enemy. if you support one side in a conflict, you are unlikely to support its enemies. big brain stuff i know.

Clear?

There’s a way to resuscitate Kriss’s simpleton logic to focus instead on optics. As in, yes RfP themselves may not hold any objectionable positions, but their relationship with a neocon think tank kills their effectiveness. This is a theoretically cogent argument, but what demographic are we even talking about here? We have to identify the portion of the population that would be receptive to RfP’s message of peace but for their relationship with the Atlantic Council. In other words, someone who simultaneously has inside baseball knowledge about think tank funding, but shallow enough that they’re turned off by optics. Who the fuck is Kriss talking about here? Do these people even exist?

It’s very odd for Kriss to accuse RfP of supporting armed violence from Israel (using this tendentious argument-by-association) when Alkhatib has repeatedly and unambiguously criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, such as calling it a “ruthless and relentless war of annihilation”, blaming Israel’s “faulty intelligence, inconsistent rules of engagement” for causing needless loss of life, accused the IDF of dehumanizing Palestinian lives, criticized the restriction of humanitarian aid into Gaza, referring to Israel’s actions as “criminal”, even admitting he struggles with deep anger towards Israelis for the death of several of his family members in Gaza, and much much much more.

Kriss is incapable of denouncing any of RfP’s positions because he doesn’t know what any of them are. Ignorance is bliss. But even if he did, I can’t even predict what exactly he’d disagree with. Instead, it’s sufficient that they’re daisy-chained to something else he doesn’t like. His position is a road roller that squishes the world into delectably stark thin strips: Israel = Atlantic Council, Atlantic Council = RfP, and therefore if Israel = bad then RfP = bad. Don’t think too hard!

His reluctance to transparently articulate his position makes more sense in this context. He could’ve saved both of us a ton of time if he just said “RfP is bad because it’s vaguely connected to this other thing that is bad”…but that gives the game away doesn’t it? It’s a dumb thing to say out loud and without adornments.

As a wise man once said:

I think he’s a great writer who can dress up nonsense in fancy words so your brain doesn’t realize he ain’t saying squat.

Precision isn’t for poets.

Some of you may have independently connected the dots already. Yes, I filed a federal lawsuit against the Blue Angels with my wife Lauren as the plaintiff. No matter how often I say this people will still be confused, but the lawsuit is specifically about a government entity blocking someone on social media because they dislike that person’s criticism. This is classic viewpoint discrimination, and a flatly unambiguous violation of the First Amendment.

Since you’re presumably here for my writing, the legal complaint is a gem — the perfect combination of a sharply honed and legally precise framework, overstuffed with a raw and unhinged filling. Perfectly colored within the lines of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

2025 07 21 Blue Angels Complaint [filed]

593KB ∙ PDF file

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Behold, the introductory paragraphs (Scribd link):

1. This is the story of a heart-wrenching emotional loss needlessly compounded by unapologetic Constitutional violations. When a beloved family member was terrorized by the United States Navy’s Blue Angels, an American citizen exercised her Constitutional right to criticize her government’s role in her daughter’s suffering. In response, a cadre of emotionally fragile snowflakes masquerading as naval officers chose the coward’s path: they silenced this citizen’s speech, violated their oath to the Constitution, and brought disgrace upon the uniform they claim to honor. A year later, when that same vulnerable creature died after enduring yet another sonic assault during her final days on Earth, the Navy’s Constitutional betrayal compounded the tragedy — an American remained silenced, unable to voice her grief or otherwise hold her government accountable for its role in her family’s suffering.

2. Every August, a squadron of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets multirole fighter aircraft descend upon the Puget Sound with the subtlety of a military occupation, conducting screeching low altitude flights with their twin jet engines reaching speeds of over 700 mph and producing decibel levels exceeding 130 dB — louder than a jackhammer at close range and sufficient to cause immediate hearing damage. This auditory carpet bombing is nominally not part of an invading enemy force destined to traumatize a captive civilian population but rather represents the United States Navy’s own elite aerobatic troupe: the Blue Angels. With an annual budget exceeding $40 million in taxpayer funds, these self-proclaimed ambassadors of naval aviation conduct their cacophonous flight demonstrations ostensibly to ingratiate the general public to the work of the brave men and women of the US Navy — regardless of whether the public consents to this aural assault or not. However, there exists robust public discourse disputing the purported mutual beneficence of this often-fatal stunt show, with mounting evidence that these performances serve primarily to satisfy the Navy’s institutional narcissism while needlessly tormenting vulnerable humans and animals alike.

3. Every August, Puget Sound residents endure what can only be described as state-sanctioned acoustic torture. A 2024 University of Washington study found over 74,000 residents exposed to jet noise levels scientifically proven to cause hearing loss, hypertension, and sleep disruption. Veterans with PTSD report flashbacks; autistic care home residents have been terrorized mid-treatment during what should be therapeutic sessions. Meanwhile, a 2020 study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering show such jet noise penetrates Puget Sound waters deep enough to impair endangered and beloved orcas’ critical hunting and communication abilities. During training exercises at a California Naval base in 2021, a single “sneak pass” shattered buildings and triggered immediate health effects in nearby Navy personnel. Even internal emails between high-ranking Navy officers grudgingly admit “some valid concerns including safety of citizens and impact to medical patients are being raised” regarding these performances’ cacophonous assault on civilian populations.

4. Every August, Lauren Ann Lombardi engaged in a familiar American pastime of complaining to her government about her government’s actions through her government’s social media accounts. As the human parent and advocate to her Layla — an elderly cat who suffered from congestive heart disease — Lombardi expressed her displeasure with this taxpayer-funded naval squadron in unambiguously coarse terms that any red-blooded American can understand and appreciate. For the affront of expressing Constitutionally protected criticism, the Constitutionally illiterate bureaucrats running the Blue Angels’s Instagram page resorted to censorship instead of accountability, bringing shame upon the Service they purport to represent. These thin-skinned bureaucrats blocked Lombardi from commenting any further, thereby muzzling an American citizen while simultaneously blinding the broader public from witnessing legitimate grievances against their government.

5. Every August, Layla would spend endless hours soaking up sunshine, tracing the days like a sentient sundial in peaceful communion within her protected backyard domain. In the summer of 2024, Layla’s heart condition spiraled. Lombardi spent several grueling overnights at an emergency vet where fluid had to be drained from around Layla’s failing heart. Layla returned home in critical condition — heavily sedated and desperately exhausted — and unfortunately perfectly timed with yet another Blue Angels sonic barrage. Even through the narcotic fog of sedation and her weakened state, Layla’s primitive limbic system overruled her medication and she fled in primal panic beneath furniture, her labored breathing escalating to clinically dangerous levels. Lombardi employed desperate measures to block or muffle the deafening roars — barricading windows with thick blankets, flooding the house with calming music, physically shielding Layla’s ears — to no avail. Whatever bandwidth Layla’s walnut-sized brain could previously gorge upon had been narrowed to a single overwhelming frequency: pure debilitating terror.

6. Every August was good until then, but no August would ever be the same again. Layla’s condition continued to deteriorate and she left home again, for the final time. She spent her last week fighting for her life in a specialty hospital before being humanely euthanized on August 11, 2024, surrounded by her inconsolably grieving family. Layla’s final days on Earth were marred by sadistic suffering — cowering in terror beneath furniture while her ailing heart struggled against the Blue Angels’s relentless noise pollution. Layla died knowing only fear when she should have known only love.

7. The Navy’s cowardly censorship and allergy to criticism transformed personal tragedy into Constitutional treason. By maintaining their block against Lombardi’s scathing complaints on a subject of intense public interest, taxpayer-funded censors compounded a mother’s grief with the bitter knowledge that her own government had silenced her voice at a time she needed it most. As precedent in Knight Institute v. Trump and other cases had shown, government officials cannot hide behind their own personal sensitivity or cowardice to escape criticism or accountability. Our constitutional order is predicated on a foundational bargain: those who wield government power must subject themselves to the full force of First Amendment scrutiny, regardless of how uncomfortable that criticism makes them. The purpose of this civil action is to compel the government to honor its Constitutional obligations and abide by the very document these defendants swore an oath to defend.

While the cause of action was strictly about social media blocking, the story of our dearly departed cat Layla provides the framing context. So in summer 2023, the Blue Angels were practicing their (admittedly very impressive) aviation stunts, and Lauren had some very choice words for them:

They blocked her and I immediately thought “They’re a government entity, they can’t do that!” and then promptly forgot about it. Before you ask: No, fuck (in all its glorious forms) is neither a violation of Instagram’s TOS nor a valid basis to censor under the First Amendment. For fuck’s sake, Cohen v. California (1971) was a landmark 1A case that upheld the right to wear a “Fuck the Draft” jacket inside a courthouse!

A year later, almost to the day, Layla got very sick. After Lauren spent a couple of sleepless nights at the emergency vet, we had a very brief snippet of relief from Layla getting better enough to go back home. Literally within 15 minutes of her arrival, the Blue Angels started screeching overhead.

It’s hard to convey the level of helplessness felt. From how it went down the year before, we knew to expect at least 6-8 passes a day, every day, for at least the next week. Layla was as drugged up as she could possibly be, and it was not possible for us to relocate to another region to escape the noise. We had to sit and bear it.

It’s also really hard to convey how physically loud their low-altitude passes are. This isn’t anywhere within the same ballpark as a commercial passenger jet flying overhead, our windows were literally rattling and the walls were shaking.

When I poured my heart out writing a remembrance worthy of Layla’s memory, there was one paragraph that didn’t include the full story, with the bolded sentence edited out before posting:

The vitals were concerning but stable, but she wasn’t herself and still loopy from the med cocktail. Back at home, she was incapable of sleep and developed an unprecedented obsession with water, spending hours and hours sitting in front of her water bowl, unable to drink. She’d whine at us to let her into the bath tub — a place she never had any interest in — so she could sit in front of the water stream and purr loudly to herself. Meanwhile, a squadron of military jets incessantly screeched overhead, causing Layla to flee in a panic despite her catatonic state.

The Blue Angels practice schedule matched up almost exactly for when Layla was home, and it was really sad to know that her final memories of the place she loved so much were saturated with fear.

But then and there, I knew what I had to do. I had a plan and a year to enact it.

A year later, the lawsuit dropped, and it just happened to be a couple of weeks before the Blue Angels’ practice runs — coinciding exactly with when media attention on the squadron would be highest. At best, I expected maybe a few local outfits to bite; maybe an evening news reporter needing something quirky to fill air time. But then the story quickly took off beyond my wildest expectations.

I severely underestimated how perfect of an antipode “Seattle Woman” was to “Florida Man” and also severely underestimated the average American’s level of media literacy (or just plain literacy). They also took the absolutely goofy photo of Layla in a dress I embedded within the complaint and plastered it all over the internet.

Once it ramped up, we were bombarded by media inquiries, or sometimes just very basic fact-checking. It made me deeply appreciate journalists as a profession when one of them across the globe dedicated time of their day to email us and confirm Layla’s age, or for them to have a 30-minute conversation just to write a 400-word piece.

We got invited by a local radio station for an interview at their studio, and I felt completely in my element. In contrast to their coverage the day before, the two hosts were somehow infinitely nicer to us in person:

Lauren, meanwhile, manifested apex maternal energy. The kind where a mom immediately starts bawling when asked about her children, while simultaneously declaring that her quest for vengeance on their behalf will never be abated.

The story was catnip for online engagement, and the avalanche of comments were virtually all harshly negative and — coincidentally — ignorant of what the lawsuit was actually about. While journalists (mostly) reported it accurately, their audience didn’t let details get in the way of their outrage. We got our first ever hate mail! Someone from Denver, CO put effort in finding an old address in order to physically mail a grammatically challenged missive:

It’s not a surprise that it fell among partisan lines, and tons of comments had plenty of assumptions, including my favorite bit of fanfic:

Just to yet again address the legally illiterate, there was nothing frivolous about the lawsuit. To quote a wise man:

Bouchtia and Lombardi dismissed any notion that they were worried people would view the lawsuit as frivolous. “Because it’s not,” Bouchtia quipped. “I mean, yeah, they can be wrong. I don’t care about the opinions of ignorant people.”

The lawsuit is a bona fide cause of action based on unambiguous 1A jurisprudence, served upon the correct parties, and fully compliant with every Federal Rule of Civil Procedure. I don’t expect everyone to know this next bit of trivia, but the complaint specifically requests only injunctive and declaratory relief — essentially asking the court “Hey can you let everyone know what the govt did was bad, and also can you tell the govt to stop doing this bad thing?” — and is not and cannot ask for monetary damages. Damages for constitutional violations committed by federal officials are severely foreclosed thanks to restrictive rulings set by SCOTUS under the Bivens lineage. It’s good to be the King!

But hey, the hate-fueled engagement train served only to force a Conversation, and now everyone was talking about it. That same week, we just happened to have been invited to a private party with the mayor of Seattle and got to ask him a question about the Controversy Du Jour. “Oh was that you guys? This year is definitely the most complaints I’ve ever heard on this issue.” You got that fucking right Mr. Mayor.

While we’re at it, why not top it off with an in situ protest with a deranged poster.

It’s long been an open secret but folks were easily able to connect my real name to my pseudonym. The facade barely serves any purpose anyways and maybe the lawsuit had a…familiar flamboyance. The attention to my meatspace half encouraged me to finally get off my ass and create a website for my law firm, and it’s squarely what you’d expect. No I will not be your lawyer. Unless you know the pass code, stop asking.

After all the furor died down, I noticed something else that was also diminished. This year, the Blue Angels were significantly quieter — definitely not as many screeching passes, on not as many days, and not as high on the decibel/rattling gauge.

Maybe after getting international attention for censoring an American, the Blue Angels finally learned a lesson or two about how to shut the fuck up.

We know why you’re really here.

You put up with my unhinged rants and 5,000-word essays about vocabulary on the off-chance you get a crack at the good stuff. Suffer no more, because Ozzy and Ziggy finally have their own Instagram page.

On top of the boys’ antics, we also have a cast of supporting characters. Like the jays who ask for peanuts by knocking twice on our windows, or the posse of semi-tamed squirrels who run circles around the boys.

It’s named Garden of Lay, in honor of our dearly-departed Layla.

https://www.instagram.com/gardenoflay

No politics! Just raw unfiltered and wholesome cottage-core animal goodness.

While you’re at it, you can follow me there too I guess. I intend to use it as bait to reel in unsuspecting new readers through a combination of thirst traps and writing snippets. My primary platform will not budge away from being here on Substack.

When MAGA sauntered on the scene, it was apparent there was no there beyond: Whatever Trump says (plus hating foreigners & vaccines). Even on subjects where we found nominal agreement, I couldn’t get them to apply their criticism consistently. When they complained about Hunter Biden’s nepotistic Burisma gig, I was right there with them! Even the smell of corruption is noxious! But ask them to apply that same standard to Trump’s entire family enterprise and LOOOOOL

The Delusion Debasement

The most soul-crushing humiliation spectacle was their 2020 election fraud mental acrobatics. There was nothing wrong with investigating plausible allegations of electoral fraud early on as reporting was still ongoing. But we then rocketed from “black Sharpie markers might disqualify certain ballots” to “Italian satellites remotely hacked voting machines.”

I have to stress that this wasn’t just random internet yahoos, but no less than the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to convince the Department of Justice to investigate the satellites. Picture the psychic torture: you survive law school, claw through DOJ’s competitive gauntlet, then arrive at work to find this in your inbox. How do you recover from discovering your prestigious career has been reduced to babysitting a madman’s fever dreams?

No credible lawyer would touch this lunacy, so naturally only incompetent sycophants stepped up. Enter Sydney Powell (who cited ghosts as sources) and Giuliani’s oil-leaking head paired with the worst venue-booking skills in legal history.

Embarrassing doesn’t capture the abject degradation. Watching a grown man insist he won the beauty pageant was existentially devastating enough. At least with Trump, his ego demanded the delusion.

But millions of Americans parroting his fairy tales? What could they possibly have to gain from incinerating their dignity just to cuck for another guy’s feelings? I watched otherwise intelligent MAGA-ites who could dissect Sudanese civil war minutiae stammer “maybe the Hugo Chavez lady is onto something.”

I was very optimistic there’d be a breaking point — a line where the carnival of delusion would be too much to bear, and they’d finally come to their senses. 2020 was a very rough year for all of us, we had unprecedented pandemic lockdowns and widespread civil unrest, I naively believed they deserved some charity.

January 6th was my optimism high-water mark. The clown show had reached its inevitable logical conclusion: a mob so thoroughly marinated in their own fever dreams about stolen elections that they finally enacted what their delusions rationally demanded — physically stop what they fervently believed was a fraudulent coup. Instead, we got a parade of obese tourists aimlessly waddling around.

The Molon Labe crowd, the We don’t dial 911 warriors, the 1776 will rise again revolutionaries — and they couldn’t even stage a competent insurrection? Deaths that day: two heart attacks, one Adderall overdose, one woman who literally jumped toward a bullet, and the dignity of an entire nation.

Not just sad, but aggressively pathetic low-class humiliation theater.

That was the apex, and it’s only been downhill since. The chorus of universal condemnations grew quiet and retreated. In its wake, soothing mantras took its place, opining that maybe J6 was Antifa, or maybe it was all orchestrated by the Deep State, or maybe (voice swelling) everyone involved was a Patriot who did nothing wrong!

The exit ramp was right there, but they fishtailed right back into the maw. For reasons I will never comprehend, the allure to dive back into the cult was more appealing than living with the fact they may have been duped.

There was no bottom, and the debasement was actively a choice.

Unapologetic Grift

I thought all this was obvious but the delusion theater was just the beginning. Trump is a brilliant salesman exclusively motivated by his own self-interest, and willing to use anyone for his own benefit. Yet I underestimated the genius of building a political movement that catered exclusively to gullible idiots.

Remember how Steve Bannon was convicted of defrauding MAGA patriots dumb enough to donate to his fake “Build The Wall” charity? Yeah, Trump pardoned his ass. Why? Here’s the official announcement:

Prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project. Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.

In other words, fuck you that’s why! That’s how easy this grift is: you can literally steal money from earnest Trump supporters and MAGA will just shrug and welcome you back into the fold if their leader says so.

Or remember how Fox News paid a record-breaking settlement for trafficking in the delusions their moronic audience demanded? Behind the scenes, Tucker Carlson was ridiculing his own audience for being gullible rubes, and yet he remains in MAGA’s good graces. It’s so easy!

Or consider the Jeffrey Epstein masterpiece: MAGA built an entire mythology around elite child sex trafficking, elevated Epstein as the ultimate villain, then systematically ignored that he was Trump’s longtime friend who Trump knew “liked them young”. When Epstein gets re-arrested and dies in federal custody — during Trump’s presidency, under Trump’s DOJ, supervised by Trump’s Bureau of Prisons — how do these brilliant detectives respond? They blame Hillary Clinton, obviously!

The pattern was unmistakable: these people have been duped and duped and duped, over and over again. Duped so often and so effortlessly. Trump figured out he could cut the sales patter entirely, as his base will gleefully devour whatever shit is plopped in front of them. They’re such very good doggies, yes they are!

The bilking ramped up, starting with peddling NFTs of photoshopped pictures of his face pasted onto muscled bodies for $99 plus tax. By this last election, Trump long passed into DGAF territory and took every opportunity to hawk bibles, sneakers, watches, and whatever other merchandise his licensing team could monetize. By inauguration, he launched a memecoin to get a tsunami of traceless cash dumped right into his own personal wallet, netting an estimated $350 million in the first week alone.

Homeboy is still thirsting for lucre apparently, because now in 2025 we have Trump mobile phone plan (only $47.45/month! Get it?) and Trump cologne (“For Patriots Who Never Back Down, Like President Trump” for only $199!) and who knows whatever the fuck else.

There’s someone out there emptying their wallet on a broken coffee table, amassing enough coins to purchase an official Trump Cologne, skipping over other essentials to get there. The grift is over the top and utterly farcical. I now think back to the hallowed halls of Burisma with tears in my eyes, pining for simpler times where I could tabulate the corruption without the help of a multinational accounting agency.

The more reality-tethered Trump supporters don’t bother denying the rampant corruption anymore — they’ve instead evolved a more sophisticated form of cuckoldry. Yes, he’s robbing us blind, but he’s the flawed strongman our hopelessly broken system needs right now.

It’s the ultimate rationalization: being financially exploited is acceptable as long as it comes with the promise of policy revenge…except the grift extends beyond just fleecing supporters financially and includes hoodwinking them on policy as well.

What results do you have to show for it? Before the election last year, I spoke to someone who beclowned himself into voting for Trump as a way to “safeguard free speech”, a rationale that is beyond laughable now as Trump has demonstrated an unprecedented hostility to any words that jeopardize his emotional fragility. The problem I described before about creating a culture of sycophancy has now put North Korean news anchors to shame.

His bizarre infatuation with tariffs has sent his base into a tailspin. Taxes on imports are great! Except when he inevitably chickens out, at which point it’s just the Art of the Deal! Except when he promises they’ll be back because taxes on imports are great! A buffoonish clown parade where the same policy is simultaneously genius for existing and genius for disappearing.

At least they’re deporting foreigners, right? There’s a MAGA demographic that pins their wasted existence on day laborers loitering outside Home Depot, and it’s not like they have the mental faculties to aver from that therapeutic fantasy. Sometimes sadistic spectacle is an end in itself, particularly if it distracts from personal failings.

The Price We All Pay

I miss what America used to be.

I was born across the Atlantic ocean, and stared at its glimmered horizon in awe. When I visited, I was mesmerized at seeing a McDonald’s on every corner, whereas Morocco had 3 in the entire country, and each opening a national news story. I saw your big homes, your fancy appliances, your avalanching influence over popular music, and your perpetual oeuvre of the most spectacular trove of cinema. America showed how good life could be through peace and commerce. As a fan of material comfort, I applaud this move.

I didn’t realize how much I’d miss Pax Americana until I watched it bleed out all over the pavement. This civilizational degradation was completely avoidable — an unforced error with warning signs the size of billboards — and it’s falling apart for the stupidest fucking reasons.

It’s ok to admit mistakes, to acknowledge you were conned and defrauded. It’s ok to concede personal failings, where our slipups were exploited by others. It’s ok to concede fallibility. Error correction is never personal failure, it’s a personal triumph — the highest form in my eyes. It’s the cleansing wudu ritual that nudges you into the right path. You’re doing great. You’re living. You’re thriving. You were wrong, but you realize that now, and I adore you for that.

What remains unforgivable is doubling down on this train of abject humiliation, dragging the rest of us into your self-imposed degradation.

I used to think shame would be our savior, but now I think it’s what will bury us. They’re too ashamed of being conned to admit they were conned — trapped in a cycle where acknowledging the truth feels worse than continuing the lie. So they double down, seeking compensation for personal failings by outsourcing their rage, letting someone else wield their anger while he picks their pockets during the fireworks show.

I used to have enmity for the MAGA movement, but now I just have pity. They’ve chosen to humiliate themselves so thoroughly, so completely, that anger feels almost cruel. Like kicking someone who’s already prostrate in their own filth.

I just wish this movement humiliated themselves on their own time and in their own corner, without dragging us down with them.

I’ve been on a nostalgia kick for the early Prestige TV era, rewatching some of my favorites circa early aughts. My wife has never seen The Wire before and I got her absolutely addicted to it. We blazed through it and now are on Deadwood.

The series remain a masterclass in televised storytelling, I can’t praise both of them enough from that angle. But the themes they grappled with were heady meditations on the nature of institutions. I’m about to hammer on obvious points that have already been thoroughly investigated, namely that humans possess insanely insatiable desires, and whether that pursuit manifests in a constructive or destructive manner is predicated on a lot of blind luck.

So Deadwood is set in Deadwood in 1876, a real gold prospecting town that was illegally located within Lakota people territory. These people didn’t even have a legal right to be there but, they’re all still play-acting the law! They spit in their hands to secure contracts over land and property worth many times what one person could ever earn in a year. Like, ok, fine, maybe they didn’t have a right to build a saloon on land they didn’t own nor could ever own, but claiming someone won’t honor their contracts are goddamn fighting words. There’s something very powerful about the meme concept of promising an obligation, and then honoring that obligation, that even criminal cutthroats will obey it.

Watching this play out made me realize why Westerns as a literary and cinematic genre have such enduring appeal. I get it now. We’re watching a hybrid Establishment culture break West and assemble institutions in its wake. These are largely European settlers, but they ain’t no monarchists. There’s literally no authority, no government, within a hard day’s gallop. The only dispute mechanisms available come under threat of brute force.

Also, these people spent so much of their time outside. They’re…hippies living in the woods, but also fascistic murderous colonialists, but also honest businessmen. They were capitalist survivalists, charting a new path, and forging the carpet of a country they couldn’t possibly imagine the future of. This gung-ho fuck-you cowboy-murderer attitude, but also we primarily care about money and will always always honor a contract. What a fucked up bizarre concoction of a culture! Who knew that it would work so fucking well?

They also had honest-to-God folk heroes walking among them. Whether it was Icelandic sagas about rogue lawyers, or chivalric epics about knights in shining armor, there was always a corporeal distance between the common folks and heroes. No longer. Now you had a literate population who had an insatiable thirst for newspapers and pulp novels. They had photographs of their gunslinging heroes. These were the essential ingredients for memetic acculturation.

They had fugitive marshals that sometimes became actors but otherwise just went around being celebrities. Is that any weirder than our present fixation on celebrities and TikTok influencers? We’ve always needed these pylons of personality. The Big Strong Men of history laying expectations. The murderer, the outlaw, the rancher, the scout, the builder. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were architects of this country and the values we come to uphold.

This got me thinking about other institutions attaining resilience through life-or-death pressure.

Take the British Navy in the amazingly swashbuckling Master and Commander (2003) about an English frigate hunting for French ships in 1805. The English had a baller navy, and it couldn’t have worked without inventing what is basically a corporate hierarchy with a strong executive at the top. The captain wields an enormous amount of unquestioned authority with harsh discipline, but everything else must necessarily be sub-delegated with some level of autonomy.

There’s a scene after the English frigate narrowly escaped a devastating ambush by a French ship, where the commanding officers are sitting around the Captain’s quarters, kind of in awe of the ship that just tried to kill them. Marvelous gunnery, they’d say.

I realized then the scene was functionally identical to a bunch of Tech Bros sitting at a conference table around a project plan. How’s the server load? The cooling? Can we get a new branch commit?

The latter is applied towards a much more productive mission than dismembering some poor French sailors. The corporate hierarchies we use in dull Silicon Valley boardrooms? They’re descendants of practices refined when getting it wrong meant drowning in the Atlantic. If your procedures and policies and practices on a frigate were in any way deficient, you fucking died. Better get better quick! Every protocol, every chain of command, every delegation of authority was tested against the ultimate arbiter: survival.

What’s remarkable is how these blood-tested blueprints outlasted their original contexts. The frontier’s handshake contracts and the Navy’s rigid command structure both represent the same phenomenon — humans under extreme pressure accidentally creating institutions so robust they’d define civilization for centuries.

The Missing Discrimination Protractor

The barest nub of a definition for the word discriminate has always been simply the neutral ability to discern one thing from another, reflecting its discriminare Latin origin. You “discriminate” when you can distinguish red from blue, sad from angry, hot from cold, etc.

The colloquial use nowadays is much more negative, covering acts of unjust distinction along axes that are considered beyond the pale. This lexical shift matched related legal and social developments, starting around the late 1800s and fully cemented by 1960s Civil Rights Movement. But what exactly distinguishes neutral discrimination — discerning any differences — from unjust discrimination?

I’ll demonstrate that there are no consistent standards, and that the process by which certain discriminations become taboo (whether legally or socially) is largely arbitrary. You won’t find scientific precision here.

The most common justification is that discrimination is unjust whenever it elevates superfluous or irrelevant traits over directly relevant ones. But if this were the underlying framework, it would obviate the need for a discrete lists of protected classes. Instead of discrimination laws outlining specific verboten axes, it would be far simpler to legislate a blanket prohibition on any “irrelevant characteristics.”

Another popular justification targets immutable traits. While characteristics like race and sex are indeed immutable, this framework is demonstrably incomplete. Someone born without limbs faces immutable disadvantage, yet we don’t consider it unjust when employers require manual dexterity for certain jobs.1

There is also discrimination that targets both immutable and irrelevant traits, yet remains legally or socially tolerated. Someone could refuse to hire people born in even-numbered years, favoring only Odders over Eveners. And yet such a crystalline arbitrary decision would be too peculiar and niche to rouse popular outrage, despite checking off both the immutable and irrelevant2 checkboxes.

You can flip through the entire rolodex of principled justifications and won’t find a single honed protractor that tells you which specific axis of discrimination should be considered verboten. Rather, it’s ultimately an arbitrary designation, but one based on an identifiable pattern.

The answer for which forms of discrimination become taboo isn’t moral consistency. Rather, it’s about identifying combustible fault lines that threaten to tear society apart if left unmanaged. The arbitrariness reflects centuries of ad hoc responses to social crises rather than systematic moral reasoning.

Tolerance Through Exhaustion

To explain this, we have to travel to the year 1517 in the town of Wittenberg, located in what is now Germany. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was the ur-viral blog post of the time, kicking off the Protestant Reformation movement which engulfed Europe in over a century of war. At least eight million souls (or roughly 20% of the continent’s population) were snuffed out, over something as dumb as an ecclesiastical split.

To be fair, if you’re a true believer in religion (as opposed to just donning it for aesthetics), few justifications are as imperative, as pressing, as existential as other humans impugning your Almighty Deity. Since the dawn of time, believing in Tangaroa rather than Marduk was unflinchingly accepted as the basis for justifiable cruelty of every kind without question. Of course we had to murder their men, rape their women, and enslave their children — they talked shit about Marduk!

But by the mid-1600s, this quotidian and very familiar cycle was wearing out its welcome. The printing press broadcast ecclesiastical disagreements across a much wider spectrum. Now people couldn’t be content knowing just whether their direct neighbors prayed to the right bronze deity, but the private thoughts and contemplations of strangers across mountains and oceans were suddenly relevant, enraging, and motivating.

Combine that with mankind’s relentless ingenuity in advancing slaughter’s technological edge, and you end up with the Reformation wars. Millions dead, cities burnt to the ground, torture meted out as currency — all because someone dared to believe in one fictional entity over another.

To its credit, mankind eventually was jolted from this destructive meat grinder fetish. wrote about how the 1648 Peace of Westphalia formally ended the latest re-run of these bloodbaths:

No side could eliminate the other, and the survivors agreed that no matter how important questions of religion are, everyone would pretend that it was OK for other people to be damnably wrong. They would not use threat of violence to root out evil beliefs. Western liberalism grew from these fields of corpses and the conviction that we cannot return there.

A historically unprecedented idea took shape, one of ecclesiastical tolerance. I want to again stress that from an earnest religionist perspective, tolerance is an absolutely insane concept to embrace. Your time on Earth is barely a mote compared to the infinite expanse of the divine eternity, which means anything and everything must prioritize the latter, no matter what. By definition, there is no bigger priority in mortal life.

But material practicality was prioritized. After enough carnage, it became easier to let everyone pray to “their” god in their own corner, facing their own particular delusional brand. Stop fighting and go to your rooms.

So the best explanation for why religious discrimination is seen as taboo isn’t moral consistency — it’s that religion represents a particularly cataclysmic societal fault line, one with devastating effects if allowed to fester. For the sake of peace, societal cohesion, and uninterrupted spice flows, we taboo religious intolerance. The arbitrariness emerged from exhausted historical necessity, not philosophical principle.

The Combustible Fault Line Principle

Humans have bottomless creativity for magnifying and reifying minute differences. Westphalia provided the blueprint that other fault lines would follow:

1. Identify a meaningless difference and reify it into an indelible institutional apparatus

2. Death, toil, bloodshed, and civilizations torn

3. Wake up from the hangover and figure out how to fill the geological fault line with aggregate materials

4. Repeat

This pattern repeated with racial segregation, gender discrimination, sexual orientation, and others. Thanks to Vietnam War veteran reception, Congress saw fit also to forbid veteran status bigotry. I’m not claiming all were equally combustible, but rather that they followed a remarkably similar pattern of being deemed too dangerous to leave unmanaged. The qualifying inquiry has nothing to do with assaying particular traits, but simply “Is this axis of discrimination too dangerous to allow unhampered?”

This is why discrimination on race is verboten while discrimination against Eveners is not, even though both involve immutable characteristics. These taboos necessarily follow demonstrable periods of strife — we don’t preemptively taboo discriminations unless they start resembling prior catastrophes. There's nothing magical about race qua race, or sexual orientation qua sexual orientation as the basis for taboo discrimination. We don’t distill this principle in a laboratory.

After all, there are groups whose maltreatment remains broadly acceptable. We’re generally OK literally putting people in cages for extended periods if they commit what we deem to be crimes, and sometimes even killing them. Besides police abolitionists, no one identifies basic bitch law enforcement as a combustible fault line.

By the same token, we could theoretically continue locking up and/or executing (officially or unofficially) men for being gay, as was and continues to be routinely done, but societal values shifted such that this became deemed unacceptable. So verboten in fact, that hate crime legislation emerged to signal that not only would gay conduct be decriminalized, but extrajudicial enforcement would be extra super punished.

This is combustible fault line management in action. Hate crime legislation serves as society’s way of saying: this group is included, treating them differently isn’t something we endorse, and we’ll prosecute you extra hard if you target them!

Whether or not it changes behavior, it definitely sends a message through the enforcement mechanism. When you’re a vulnerable minority wondering if you can adequately protect yourself, it’s like having a figurative hand reach down from the heavens. It’s chalking on the ground a brightline demarcation: step over this line and we will fuck you up. It provides crucial reassurance that prevents fault lines from widening into fiery chasms.

Slicing Transparently Thin Garlic

Now that we’ve established the origin story for tolerance and verboten axes of discrimination, there remains a serious demarcation dilemma.

Take homophobic hate crimes. The essential and primary characteristic of being gay, honed down to a needle point, is simply a male having the desire to have sex with other men. It’s an internal sentiment, not a behavior. A celibate man attracted to other men is still gay, while a straight man having situational gay sex isn’t necessarily considered gay.

But there are also secondary characteristics that heavily correlate with the primary one. Generally speaking, hate crime legislation takes an expansive approach to what it considers a sufficient “because of” nexus. If someone shot up a gay nightclub, their defense of “I don’t hate gay men per se, only people who attend gay night clubs” would be deemed an unacceptable salami slice.

Remember the scene in Goodfellas where they use a razor to slice garlic so thin that it just liquifies into oil? We can do the same here with the semantics by extending the logic with “Nothing against gay men, I just hate people who use Grindr” or “Nothing against gay men per se, I just hate people who watch RuPaul’s Drag Race”. We generally disapprove of Not Guilty By Reason of Semantics.

You can keep attenuating further and further, spreading the butter thinner and thinner, and realize that there is no clear brightline demarcation that marks the beginning and end of Homophobistan. Distilling protected characteristics to their bare essence is the wrong approach entirely.

Yet in the process of establishing how thorny it is to slice the “because of” salami, I obviated a much deeper question: why does identifying the specific slice even matter? There are ultimately only two answers.

1. Condemnation: Motive is relevant because it’s the necessary component for evaluating the validity of an action. Someone punching a gay man in the face because of their gayness is a very different act than if it was because of their terrible parking job.

I confess to making a big mistake, the worst kind of all, and that’s failing to heed my own advice. When I wrote the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy, I warned against grappling hooking onto labels as a way to level skip past much more contentious conversations. That’s essentially what emotionally-loaded labels like homophobic, antisemitic, and racist do. Consider the difference between a “violent assault” and a “violent racist assault”. Both victims suffer identical injuries and hospital bills, but the latter carries extra moral condemnation. That’s it. We can sidestep this semantic confusion entirely by asking the real question: not ‘Is this racist?’ but ‘Is this condemnable?’

2. Group apprehension: I used to be stridently against hate crime legislation. The concept seemed laughably incoherent — all violent crime is motivated by hatred of some kind, so why should one brand take precedence? As a free speech maximalist, the difference between assault with hate crime enhancement versus plain vanilla assault appeared to be criminalizing thought itself.

What I found convincing is that harm from crimes motivated by victims’ identifiable characteristics doesn’t stop at just the direct target, it also negatively impacts anyone else with the same characteristic who now reasonably experiences apprehension about being targeted next. The spread of terror within a particular community is often the perpetrator’s intentional raison d’être.

The Jewish Question Mark

This topic goes beyond just gay sex. Consider the Jews.

In 2018, eleven attendees were shot and killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Based on the location (Jewish place of worship) and the individuals (Shabbat services attendees) targeted, there was unanimous consensus that the perpetrator was specifically motivated by an animus against Jewish people per se.

But there’s more to the story, and a way to flip this. What the perpetrator specifically cited as motivation was his belief that the synagogue was complicit in the “Great Replacement Theory” via their affiliation with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). offered an astute counter-hypothesis:

The people in the Pittsburgh synagogue were not targeted for being Jews but for being American Jews. HIAS is not an Israeli institution. The Pittsburgh shooter didn’t have a problem with Jews per se. He had a problem with Jews in the US because they vote Democrat and support mass migration into the US. There is no evidence he had any problem with Israeli Jews.

If this comes across as facile, that’s precisely the point, and yet there’s nothing technically inaccurate about it. You can slice this an infinite number of ways and you’ll run into the same absurd RuPaul logic as before. For example, only about 30% of Israeli Jewish men wear a kippah, with the numbers for diaspora Jews bound to be lower. Does this mean specifically targeting only kippah-wearers evades the “because of” being Jewish?

Or, more starkly, polling suggests that somewhere between 60-95% of Jews would be considered Zionists (as in, they support the existence of Israel, nothing further). Is that a sufficiently overlapping nexus? What consistent principle would allow anyone to say yes to a 30% nexus but no to double that?

There’s an easy answer if you begin with the animating principle behind these taboos, rather than robotically applying binary distinctions.

Remember the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy and just ask the directly pertinent question instead. The question isn’t whether someone targeted the platonic ideal of Jewishness (or gayness, or blackness, or wheelchairness) — it’s whether they’re exploiting a combustible fault line that threatens our fragile Westphalian peace treaty. This (kosher) salami-slicing problem and similar semantic games attempt to obscure the underlying social dynamics that discrimination taboos nominally exist to manage.

Rather than myopically extracting essences into lab flasks, we revisit what gave us our original commandments: Is this a condemnable discriminare that threatens to sunder our society?

Semantic Smokescreen

On May 21, 2025, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed outside of the Capital Jewish Museum, with the gunman shouting “Free Palestine!” This sparked the familiar semantic debate: was this antisemitism3 or antizionism? Supposedly, the distinction is that antisemitism targets Jews qua Jews, while antizionism targets only those supporting the Israeli state apparatus.

I also fell into the Sticker Shortcut trap myself, reflexively labeling the attack as “antisemitic” based on the circumstances known at the time, and using the label as shorthand for “condemnable discrimination”. It was a mistake that missed the point entirely.

As established, the distinction can only matter if 1) one motive is less condemnable than the other, or 2) one motive causes different widespread apprehension than the other. Neither factor applies here, making it a distinction without a difference. Consider: if the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooter claimed his homicidal rampage was actually motivated by antizionism, would anyone condemn his actions less or otherwise breathe a sigh of relief?4

Even if you accept the premises, the antizionism distinction has several related catastrophes at play. It’s horrendous attenuation multiplied by garbage targeting multiplied by deranged decision-making.

Let’s assume a homicidal gunman was genuinely motivated by affront against Israeli military actions rather than hatred of Jews qua Jews — how far does that nexus extend? The dead embassy staffers had no nexus to the IDF as far as anyone knows. Diplomatic staff does all sorts of mundane functions on behalf of their government, from processing visas to organizing cultural exchanges, so does this mean that anyone who draws shekels from the Israeli bourse is now a fair target? Are we comfortable gunning down Jerusalem postal workers or municipal water inspectors? What line are you proposing?

Even if we assume you have drawn a neon brightline, how confident are you that others will hew to it? The consequences of incompetent targeting became especially stark in the Boulder attack less than two weeks later, where a man threw Molotov cocktails at elderly women marching for hostage release. The arsonist deemed that grandmothers in Colorado were fair targets because they deigned to…support victims of war crimes?

The extremely poor targeting reticule is a disturbingly recurring pattern. “Free Palestine” has been explicitly cited during unprovoked assaults against random Jews at the San Francisco marina, punching a man posting flyers about hostages held by Hamas, stabbing a visibly Jewish man in Brooklyn, firing a shotgun at a synagogue during Hanukkah, destroying hundreds of (non-Jewish) peony flowers at a Michigan arboretum, throwing a brick through the window of a kosher grocery store in Massachusetts, or vandalizing Holocaust memorials, Jewish restaurant, and synagogues in France.5

Can anyone explain what any of this has to do with Palestinian wellbeing or how it advances it?

This catastrophically imprecise targeting is hardly surprising. When people are whipped into a frenzy, the first to act are often the least competent, most deranged, and least informed. Someone who decides to break civil society’s peace treaty isn’t likely to exercise calm, measured, or well-researched judgment about target selection. You simply can’t trust homicidal maniacs to be judicious about their latent bigotries.

It’s no consolation to say “Don’t worry, those upset about Gaza are not targeting Jews per se, only those who assist, are affiliated with, or otherwise plausibly related to Zionism!” That’s like giving a blind security guard a machine gun and reassuring everyone with “Don’t worry, he only shoots trespassers!”

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that pollster David Shor documented a disturbing bipartisan rise of young people openly admitting unfavorable views of Jewish people.6 The question said nothing about Zionism.

Why random Jewish qua Jewish targets are pursued by those supposedly agitated by Palestine is certainly an interesting philosophical question.

How does something like this even happen?? I desperately wish to know — “Oh I meant to stop the latest IDF offensive, but I got confused and accidentally threw a brick through the window of a kosher grocery store instead. My bad.” Except it’s worse than that because we don’t even get a ‘my bad’ but its opposite! What the fuck?

If these people are so unhinged about target acquisition, it certainly calls into serious question whether they have the competency to hold the right moral intuitions in the first place. It’s patently unreasonable to simply assume good intentions.

Forgive the narcissism, but the ever-expanding and fuzzy reticle has expanded to such a degree that damn near anyone could be in its sights, including me.

I thought about the effects of indiscriminate violence after the Israeli staffers were killed. I’m neither Jewish nor Israeli, nor have any affiliation with any military or government whatsoever. Yet an avenue of empathy remains.

I’ve been attending events and have been warmly embraced by my local Jewish community. I recall one evening when we exited the venue and stepped out into the cool night air. I recall the lovely woman who embraces me tightly every time we meet, as she leaned out the passenger window waving goodbye. I recalled the Shabbat dinner at her house I had calendared for the following week.

I imagined this scene of serenity broken with tragedy. The joviality turned jagged as gunshots ring out and wails plead to the skies. I imagined the avalanche of dread sweeping all of us as we sprint to triage whose existence among us has ceased. All because someone deluded themselves that their flailing, frantic carnage is part of — if you squint hard enough and don’t ruminate too deeply — a righteous, valorized crusade.

Whether the motivation is “pure” antisemitism or “merely” antizionism is utterly irrelevant when the practical effect is identical: community-wide fear multiplied by blindfire shotgun-blast targeting.

When synagogues are vandalized and Jewish communities (along with anyone unfortunate to be adjacent) live in terror, parsing the attacker’s precise ideological motivations misses the point entirely. Do we want to look the other way so long as perpetrators say “Zionist” instead of “Jew”? Do we want to encourage an open season of violence so long as attackers invoke the right magic words? Do we want to go back to Westphalia?

I don’t.

Since we would happen to be within the Mediterranean neighborhood, we also decided to visit the land where half of my wife originates from. This is probably going to be yet another jumbled travelogue with lots of pictures!

[Musical accompaniment will be Bob Sinclar’s remix of Raffaella Carrà - Far l'Amore, which was put to amazing use in the opening scene of the highly highly recommended 2013 movie The Great Beauty.]

Look, I want to start by saying my wife & I were fully, absolutely, completely, and thoroughly enamored by Italy. I’ll get the necessary disclaimer out that we stayed at an apartment for only a couple of weeks, and that we still ultimately experienced a rosy and superficial impression as tourists on vacation.

I don’t care. Shut up. Italy was the best.

Holy Fucking Shit, the Food

I need a preamble about how much I adore the food in Morocco. Apologies to all the chefs within my extended family, I also know that a significant edge that Moroccan cuisine has isn’t just the recipes, but the ingredients. Beef in Morocco straight up tastes way better than anything I could ever acquire in America, regardless of how you prepare it. The closest I ever got to rekindling a close surrogate is when I first discovered 100% grassfed beef years ago. That gets really close to replicating Moroccan beef quality, but not quite all the way there.

Similarly, Moroccan bread just tastes way better than any bread I could ever find in America. Part of it is simply that Moroccans fully embraced the French boulangeries from their former colonial masters. There’s now a bevy of bakeries on every block, pumping out fresh baked bread (and croissants) every single morning. I live in the US near a French bakery that gets really close to replicating Moroccan carbohydrate quality, but again, it’s just not quite all the way there.

There’s an amusing mirror parallel to my visits, where I yearn for nothing more than simple Moroccan bread with Moroccan butter, while my Moroccan cousins extoll the quality of McDonald’s.

So there we were, chowing down on delicious food and talking about our upcoming Italy leg, when my buddy tells me that the food is way better in Italy than in Morocco.

I refused to blindly accept the hype, but my skepticism was dead wrong. The food in Italy is unparalleled.

I didn’t understand the big deal over truffles before, and now I want to put them on everything. Also this documentary about old Italian truffle hunters and their truffle-hunting dogs was so good, watch it! Wife literally cried after tasting truffle pasta:

And melted after tasting tiramisu:

One of us broke down crying at the culinary abundance:

I Seriously Love Narrow Streets So Much

Everything that I adored about old-school Moroccan urbanism was also available in ancient quarters of Italian cities (except it was much cleaner, there were zero stray cats with debilitating health conditions, and my wife could walk alone without worrying about street harassment).

Monuments to a Dying Religion

Every chapel, church, and cathedral we walked into was stunning in its architectural displays. As silly as I find all religions to be, I’m happy to give divine delusions credit when it directs human endeavor towards a useful purpose.

We were in Venice for Easter, and I had never before attended Mass so I figured what better opportunity? The acoustics were immaculate but overall the spectacle was quite boring; a few stern-looking old dudes speaking in Latin for almost two hours. I ate the communion wafer for the first time and it was the blandest thing I’ve ever tasted.

The audience also reflected the elderly demographic, and my wife & I were probably the youngest people there. A few in attendance seemed so pleased to see us there, but little did they know…

For what it’s worth, we’ve been lighting a candle at every place for our dearly departed Layla.

As we walked out of the chapel one attendee ran after a young couple leaving, and screamed “Maledetta!” (Cursed!) as she pointed at them. I wish I knew what that was about.

My wife used to work as a funeral director, and it’s a profession that is viewed with decreasing utility as no-frills-cremation continues to get more popular. Italy provided an interesting glimpse into what how important memorializing the dead used to be. The cemetery we visited was very elaborate and extremely well-maintained.

Speaking of which, one of my favorite movies is the 1994 Cemetery Man (also known by its Italian title: Dellamorte Dellamore). It’s a silly horror-comedy about a cemetery where every burial gets reanimated as a zombie a week later.

It Has Become Impossible to Avoid the Jews

I tried and failed, but there was no escaping the Jews. After the Easter service, we were walking around the Venetian Jewish ghetto minding our own damn business when a rabbi spotted us reading a flyer and insisted that we join them for Seder dinner, to commemorate the end of Passover. Who can say no?

Whereas Catholic Easter Mass that morning was demure and solemn, Jewish Seder with this crowd was a drunken cacophony of unrestrained joy. It was non-stop singing of wordless songs (nigun) and constant blessings and cheers. I didn’t know why we were invited to this tiny crowded restaurant, but we were happy to be included.

Another rabbi stood and gave a speech for the day. Although we all were in Venice, I was struck by how he started by saying “Our Nation is surrounded by enemies…” and then relayed a version of this story from Exodus:

Moses and the Israelites sang a triumphant song of gratitude to God for annihilating their enemies…On seeing the drowning Egyptians the angels were about to break into song when God silenced them declaring, “How dare you sing for joy when My creatures are dying” (Talmud, Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b)

Anytime I introduce myself as being from Morocco within these circles, I wonder how many assume I’m Jewish. Sometimes they start telling how many Moroccan Jews they know. I always wonder when to interject, without the undue haste you might expect from a straight guy at a gay club reminding everyone that he’s not gay.

So in a conversation with a very French Jew, I happen to mention that I used to be Muslim. He then asked me what I was now, and I said athée (atheist in French).

There was a long pause, during which I wondered whether I had mistranslated.

Then he said: On vous aime, comme un frere (We love you, like a brother) and gave me a big hug. 🥺

But then again, a few days later, I was barred from visiting a historic synagogue in Florence because my shorts were too short.

Curiously, the only time I ever saw a rifle brandished by Italian law enforcement was a lone soldier stationed right outside the synagogue. Could be a coincidence!

Unrelated, but did you know that Jesus was a Palestinian?

Call Me Giuseppe

People were so fucking hospitable. We showed up to a popular restaurant that was completely full. No tables free. The waiter responded to this insolence by shaking my hand, apologizing profusely, and then offering us free wine while we waited for our table to clear.

I have never before in my life ever attempted to speak or read Italian, and yet. I’ll give credit to my fluency in French which allowed me to triangulate and discern a surprising chunk of unfamiliar Italian vocabulary. Italian is spoken almost exactly as written, so that part also allowed smooth paving.

This stage the stage for our camouflage operation. Everyone around us was criminally attractive and fashionable and so we felt we needed to step it up. Wife accomplished this by dolling up. I accomplished this by buying one hat for €10.

Giuseppe was born.

Staying at a single apartment allowed us to cosplay the fantasy that we were residents. We’d get up in the morning, walk through the narrow streets, buy a baguette, and stop by a cafe.

Shopkeepers started to recognize us, thanking us for coming again. One day I stopped by this cafe to buy four cookies for the road. The criminally attractive barista paused, gave me a sly look, then said in a marinated accent: All of them for you?

My affirmation apex was walking through a plaza in my Giuseppe hat while eating some gelato. A woman approached and immediately started speaking to me in Italian. I put my broken linguistics to use: Non parlo Italiano, parli Francese? Inglese?

Turns out she was a native resident of Florence, asking me (moi!) to recommend a good place to eat around the area. I was flummoxed to pass so well, and asked her and her friends if it had anything to do with the chest hair waterfall from unbuttoning the top 3 buttons of my shirt. They cackled, and then spent 15 minutes asking me what the fuck is wrong with Trump.

We also used teamwork and figured out how to eat gelato while holding an umbrella:

Criminally Weak Weed

We got all excited when we encountered a weed vending machine!

Except we then realized that the “legal” weed in Italy has THC capped at a laughable 0.2% (for reference, the norm nowadays in US dispensaries is 25%-30%). The teenage-looking boys in the basement looked really proud of their grow operation though.

Overwhelming History

Everyone knows this already. Blah blah blah Roman Empire blah blah Renaissance blah blah Pasta.

Even in April, the crowds in Venice were abysmal. The problem, of course, is all the other tourists, not us! I can understand why the locals would be pissed. The city is just such a bizarre and unique place, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how the fuck it managed to function as the capital of a massive maritime empire. Anyone who played Civ 5 understands.

Also we went to a model train museum. It was the work of largely one dude, and I couldn’t believe the grave seriousness by which they talked about this project. These are model trains!

As a kid in Morocco, I fantasized about having my own model train set going around the circumference of our apartment, mounted near the ceiling. As an adult, I settled for video games. I couldn’t stop thinking about the hours I spent optimizing signals in Transport Tycoon.

Amalfi Coast Of Course

We ate lots of lemons, and hung out by the water. Giuseppe’s power meter was maxed out at this point.

Wife modeled by the water and I pretended to take pictures instead of a video:

Randomly ran into multiple parades. By sundown the parades had morphed into a bevy of ominous figures wearing white hoods. Perhaps they heard I was in town.

Cats Limited

Unlike the feline overpopulation carnage we saw in Morocco, we did not see a single stray cat in Italy. Not one! The cats in Venice didn’t count as strays, since literally every neighborhood was an island.

The seagulls in Venice did not fuck around. They’d perch on top of very tall statues and then swoop in to violently snatch snacks from the hands of oblivious British women. I finally understood why they are considered such a menace, and why they should stop it now.

Our apartment had a statue in honor of our cat Ozzy.

Here’s how my wife looks at goofy cat prints:

A Broken Country

It’s not all good news, a surprising number of things are outright broken and we saw this within an hour of our arrival to the country.

We had to take a shuttle train from the airport to get to another train station. No problem, we can just use a VISA credit card like we had been everywhere else. Nope, card declined. No problem, we can just get ripped off at the nearby currency exchange bureau. I put in €20 into the vending machine and it just outright ate it due to some error or whatever.

Instead of just spitting the money back out, it printed detailed instructions for the office we had to visit to get our money back. Oh fuck off.

I thought fuck it, let’s just get on the train anyways without a ticket, and if we get caught we just pull the “I’m just a dumb American tourist card!” but nope! As soon as we got to the gate, there’s a notice that the shuttle is now out of order. The Italian dude in front of us literally did the stereotypical Italian thing with his hand — you know, fingers bunched together pointing up, shaking his wrist at nobody. We solved our problem by just hailing a taxi.

Uber is not a thing here. You can’t just magically and reliably summon private transportation at any hour of the day, driven by a third-world immigrant with no concept of the Circadian schedule.

In Italy, if you want a taxi you generally have to physically hail one.

OR

YOU

CAN

TRY

THE OFFICIAL FLORENCE TAXI APP (creatively named appTaxi)

I thought ok, don’t diss this too early, give it a chance. For our departure out of the country, I scheduled a taxi to take us to the airport at 4:30AM and triple confirmed the details. We packed up all our luggage and showed up at the rendezvous point 10 minutes early. We waited. At exactly 4:30AM, I get a notification that my ride was canceled because fuck you that’s why.

This had to be a mistake, maybe the guy was just late! The tension got too high and so I dragged 80 lbs of my wife’s shoes across Florentinian cobblestone, screaming TAXI at any vehicle that vaguely resembled one.

[Side note: The early morning time meant the streets were nearly deserted. Across my entire stay, this was the only time I ever saw homeless people camped out or sleeping rough. Elsewhere, I saw one or two people rummaging through trashcans. If Italy has homeless people, they hide them extremely well.]

No joke but approximately a dozen EMPTY bona fide taxis flat out refused our desperate hails, shaking their head no and vaguely pointing as if I was supposed to know what the fuck they meant. The driver who finally picked us up got a €40 tip. I had no further use of that fake money anyways.

But in fairness, the most self-conscious I felt as an American was the awe on my face when I recorded a video of their underground garbage collection. Everything is dumped into giant underground bins, that are then collected by a truck crane. Such an elegant and obvious solution. It’s probably why, despite the lack of street cats, we never saw a single rat during our stay.

Whatever infrastructure failings they might have, at least they know how to properly take out the trash. Mamma Mia.

Overall Rating: 11/10

Who knows, we might move there.

Here’s an example from a recent Al-Jazeera story. I try to simulate the perspective of someone reading this article with little to no prior knowledge about the events in question.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the United States- and Israel-backed organisation established to supplant the aid work of the United Nations,

All of this is factually accurate! And yet, it’s odd that the most important thing they thought worth mentioning about GHF is that it is “backed” by the US and Israel. I can glean that it means GHF is receiving some sort of support and/or coordinating with the US and Israel, but why is this important for me to know? What information does this fact impart?

The only explanation I can think of is that the negative opinion one would assume Al-Jazeera readers to have about US and Israel would hopefully be conveyed onto GHF as well.

…has accused Hamas fighters of killing eight of its staff and wounding multiple others in an attack on a bus en route to a food distribution centre.

Note the above construct, and compare it to a parallel sentence further down:

On Wednesday, 57 people were killed and more than 363 injured as they tried to access aid at the sites, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said.1

Both sentences are identical insofar as they present information, and then cite the source of said information. Typical journalistic conventions.

And yet there’s a very obvious difference between “he said she slapped him” versus “she slapped him, he said”. The first prioritizes the accusation, while the latter prioritizes the conduct, even though in reality both claims are accusations. But those not paying close attention might inadvertently dismiss the first as hearsay and accept the second as factual. Sneaky.

Moving on back to the GHF:

The GHF, which is led by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical Christian who advised US President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been mired in controversy since beginning operations on May 27.

Again, all of the above is factually accurate! Having no idea who Johnnie Moore is, it isn’t explained why the most important things they thought worth mentioning is his religion or what political campaign he was involved in 8 years ago. Why is any of that relevant? It would have been more interesting and directly relevant to know if Moore had any prior experience in humanitarian aid distribution (maybe he has none!) but whoever wrote this didn’t agree.

Similarly, the intent again appears to take negative opprobrium about evangelical Christians and Trump and impose it as a transitive association upon Moore as well.

But whatever, they do say the GHF is “mired in controversy”, maybe they explain that!

The UN and aid groups have boycotted the foundation over concerns that it does not meet basic humanitarian standards and is not independent of Israel.

…That’s literally their only attempt to explain this supposed “controversy”. Not meeting basic humanitarian standards sounds bad, but which standards are we talking about exactly and how are they not being met? Some of the ways I would assume humanitarian aid could fall short would be if there was insufficient quantities, or if it didn’t meet basic nutritional standards, or if it was spoiled. Do any of those apply here? No clue.

I have no idea what to make of the point that GHF is not independent of Israel. Why is that a problem exactly? Perhaps I’m advertising my naivety, but I can’t think of a reason why an aid recipient would or should care about the “independence” of the organization handing them desperately needed food. With no other information to go off, I’m left speculating for possible explanations

That entire sentence contains no meaningful concrete information, but yet again it makes an admirable effort at imparting vaguely negative connotations. GHF is not meeting standards (bad!) and also Israel (bad!!).

Misleading reporting is obviously not unique to Al-Jazeera, and I’m explicitly not telling you that you should dismiss everything Al-Jazeera reports on. The problem I’m describing is broader and much more prevalent.

One of the most tedious forms of sophistry I regularly encounter is reflexively dismissing any inconvenient claim whenever the claim is reported by a disfavored media outfit. I never do this, and you shouldn’t either. Even if you have a very good reasons to distrust said media outfit, you should nevertheless endeavor to be precise with your scalpel.

If you’re skeptical about something, be specific about why. If you encounter that same reason elsewhere, pay attention to whether it engenders the same level of skepticism as before. If not, it’s a good indication that you’re using motivated reasoning to artificially boost what you want to be true rather than what is true.

That’s why reading newspapers on topics you know they’re going to be atrocious at is such good practice. If you know that Al-Jazeera will be a shitshow on anything adjacent Israel, then at least you’re primed to pay close attention to how. After all, I didn’t uncover a single lie in that Al-Jazeera article, and their sourcing is remarkably transparent. It’s like taking apart a toy to see how it works underneath. Once you understand the mechanism of action, you’re better equipped to spot it again out in the wild — even when it flatters you into ignoring it.

Despite my litany of criticisms against the traditional press in general, their practices are still miles ahead what the corps of new media personalities in the business of serving confirmation slop do to their eager audiences. These people literally make shit up out of nothing. Some of them even used their experience to bootstrap themselves into official government positions. It’s crazy!

Me telling you to “read the news a bit closer” assumes you already read some news. That alone is miles ahead anyone who passively absorbs headlines and tweets through osmosis. I wish I had better advice for helping the millions who are wallowing in this epistemic quagmire.

In the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to hold ourselves to a perpetually higher standard.

I criticize a lot of things, but that comes paired with a core responsibility. If I’m knocking something down, the onus is on me to showcase what the target of my criticism should do differently. I have lobbed a lot of degradation towards so-called “pro-Palestinian” protesters and true to my word, I will give feedback while using the 1964 Free Speech Movement (FSM) protest as a contrasting template. I’ll be retreading some familiar points but with a lot more depth.

The comparison is particularly fitting because many organizers and participants in today’s campus protests have explicitly inspired their actions and tactics from the FSM and the wave of student activism that defined the 1960s.

Background

The free speech golden age we were previously enjoying up until a few months ago didn’t always exist.

In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, began prohibiting student groups from distributing political literature and organizing on campus. While these restrictions may have been enacted with specific groups in mind, such as civil rights activists or those protesting segregation, the new rules applied to everyone. As unconscionable as it might sound today, students at public universities in America could literally get arrested for engaging in what was deemed “political activities”. The reason that is no longer the case is thanks to student protest movements such as the FSM.

The FSM emerged in response to the university’s enforcement attempts. Jack Weinberg, a former student, was arrested for refusing to show identification while tabling for the group Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Within 15 minutes of the arrest, about 300 students had arrived at the scene and completely surrounded the police car, with the crowd eventually swelling to up 3,000 people. Weinberg remained inside the car, with students passing him food and water through the window, and he was not released until 32 hours later.

This confrontation catalyzed the FSM, leading to mass sit-ins, building occupations, and ultimately the mass arrest of 801 students. Their unrelenting actions forced the administration to capitulate and eventually roll back the prohibitions on political activity.

I fully support FSM’s titular cause, as well as the tactics they used to achieve their objectives. There’s no disputing their actions were illegal and constituted real transgressions — trespassing is generally bad — but in this context, those actions were deployed in a serious and proportional manner which maintained a clear moral focus.

Now, it’s really easy to get nostalgic about a time period, especially one you never lived through. I aim to avoid this pitfall by focusing on concrete and particularized suggestions about how to properly engage in disruptive protest. It will take a similar form to how I evaluate when it’s appropriate to engage in violence.

1. Your Cause Must be Just

Ideally, you’re protesting in favor of a good cause. This is a very boring point to make, but I mention it first because it’s often the beginning and end of how protest movements get evaluated. “Is it for a good cause? If so, then I shan’t criticize it” and vice versa. I get it, and don’t fault anyone for caring only about the cause’s merits. After all, if you believe a cause is unbearably noxious, there’s no tactical reconfiguration that could sanitize it. But for my purposes, that’s too myopic.

Although it should be painfully obvious that I have very little sympathy with the “pro-Palestinian” movement, I nevertheless have taken pains to critique their tactics from the perspective of their putative objectives — as in “What they’re doing is bad because it’s bad for Palestinians”.

The challenge, however, is that I genuinely cannot know for sure what cause “pro-Palestinian” activists are pursuing. A distressing number of campus groups are unambiguously in favor of Hamas and want nothing more than to cheer on Jewish massacres. Some want to slam the undo button on Israel as a whole. Some are gullible conformists who will parrot any slogan, geographic knowledge be damned. And some, I assume, are good people who are understandably disturbed by the horrendous civilian suffering in Gaza.

This is a messy and contradictory coalition. It’s the inevitable result of extreme factions hiding behind human shields because they are too timid about expressing their true aims. Worse, the non-crazies within this movement who tolerate the Hamas apologists are culpable for shifting the Overton window in precisely the wrong direction — toward “music festival massacres are justified” and away from Palestinian welfare.

So, before anyone can evaluate whether your cause is just, at minimum it must be coherent. You must be able to specifically articulate what your ultimate goal is, void of euphemism. The “pro-Palestinian” movement has completely failed at this initial elementary step.

In contrast, FSM’s objective was clear and unified: Berkeley students wanted their university to stop prohibiting political activities on campus. While participants may have had different motivations — some animated by the broader principle of freedom of expression, others by civil rights or opposition to the Vietnam War — none of that prevented them from coalescing around a clearly-honed mission.

2. Your Goal Must be Actionable

Having established the need for a coherent cause and assuming you have one, the next requirement is an actionable plan that can — at least theoretically — move you closer to said goal. I say “theoretically” because it’s unreasonable to expect guaranteed results amidst so much uncertainty. However, you must at minimum be able to explain how your actions advance you forward. Not every action has to directly advance the ultimate goal, and it’s perfectly ok to pursue intermediate objectives so long as they serve your larger aims.

Let’s start with the FSM, because it’s much simpler. Their problem was that Berkeley University was prohibiting political activities on campus, and they wanted Berkeley University to stop prohibiting political activities on campus. Therefore, it made sense that Berkeley University was the target of their actions.

All of FSM’s actions aimed either to frustrate enforcement or otherwise convince Berkeley to stop prohibiting political activities on campus. Their tactics included mass sit-ins, occupying Sproul Hall, surrounding a police car to prevent the removal of an arrested student, and organizing rallies and negotiations with administration. Demonstrations showcased strength and widespread popularity among the student body. Occupying a building (without damaging it) and voluntarily submitting to arrests showcased a level of dedication and commitment.

In the end, the dispute was resolved through brute calculus: any time the university tried to enforce its rules, thousands of students jammed the gears and made it very costly. Enforcement of the ban became logistically impossible. The administration eventually backed off, presumably because prohibiting political speech on campus was simply not worth the headache.

Turning to the “pro-Palestinian” protests, even if we set aside the problem of a muddled cause, their actions often lack a clear path to achieving them. The most coherent campaign was the Uncommitted movement, which threatened to withhold votes from Kamala Harris unless their demands were met. Mainly, they wanted Israel (but curiously, not Hamas) to be somehow pressured into a permanent ceasefire, an end to all US military aid, plus an arms embargo for good measure. Notably, Uncommitted never offered a concrete plan for how Israel should secure the release of hostages held by Hamas.

While Uncommitted absolutely had an appropriate target for their protests, their “unless” made no sense. First, they could not conclusively argue that a policy shift would have been a net positive — whatever anti-Israel votes gained could be offset by pro-Israel votes lost. At best, it was a serious gamble. Second, the inevitable alternative to Kamala Harris was Trump, someone who has been much more unequivocable in his support of Israel. Uncommitted was essentially saying “either you feed me, or else I’ll starve myself!”

[A brief detour into Israeli military capabilities]

There are issues with Uncommitted’s demands that are much more fundamental, and which I temporarily side-stepped above. Israel has been receiving around $3.8 billion per year in military aid from the US since the 2000s, constituting roughly 15% of Israeli military funding.

US military aid has since increased to $17.9 billion total in emergency military aid since Hamas initiated the current war. Israel’s military budget on its own has surged 65% to $46.5 billion in 2024. This now constitutes 8.8% of Israel’s GDP, the second highest in the world, right after Ukraine’s current 34.5% (for context the US spends 3.4%). This remains a significant decline from 1975, when Israel was willing to allocate a record 30% of its GDP towards its military.

Obviously, America’s military aid to Israel is significant. But let’s say Uncommitted got what they wanted and the US stopped all aid and imposed a total arms embargo on Israel. Given the significant chunk involved, we should reasonably expect Israel’s military capabilities to be hobbled. At least, temporarily.

The problem that few protesters seem to consider is that while Israel started out scrimping and scrounging for whatever military equipment they could get their hands on (including Soviet hand-me-downs via Czechoslovakia in their 1948 independence war), it now has a robust and healthy military industry that is both iconic and prolific. Israel designs and manufactures a wide range of its own advanced military equipment, including the Uzi submachine gun, the IMI Galil rifle, the Merkava main battle tank, and precision-guided munitions like the Iron Sting 120mm mortar and the SPICE family of guided bombs.

Major manufacturing sites include Israel Military Industries (IMI) for small arms and ammunition, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for precision-guided bombs and missiles, and Elbit Systems in Haifa. Elbit recently secured contracts to supply thousands of heavy air munitions and establish new raw materials plants, with the explicit aim of reaching “full independence” in bomb and munitions manufacturing.

It is particularly relevant to note that Israel has already been subjected to arms embargoes several times before: France in 1967, the US in 1971, and the UK in 1973. Israel’s world-class military industry was developed in response, and it would not have reached its level of sophistication were it not for the embargoes. Now, this tiny country barely the size of New Jersey, is the 8th largest weapons exporter in the world, comprising 3.1% of global arms exports.

What the US gives that Israel cannot readily make itself are advanced fighter jets (F-15, F-35), and certain precision ordinance (JDAM kits, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs). Were that supply source suddenly vanish, there is no universe where the IDF just shrugs and says “ah we don’t have GBUs, let’s pack it up and go home guys.”

Making things go boom is very easy. It takes little technical sophistication to drop an unguided bomb from a plane when gravity does all the work. The eye-watering invoices of modern munitions come from the integration of guidance systems, sensors, and networked targeting computers — features that reduce collateral damage but are harder to replace quickly if US supplies are cut off.

If you’re genuinely and earnestly concerned about the civilian death toll in Gaza, there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse! Both by further entrenching Israel’s domestic military industry, or by encouraging a reduced reliance on precision munitions.

[End of detour]

I know, I know, I have probably devoted more thought into this subject across a few paragraphs than all protestors everywhere combined. It’s hard to get straight answers, but their rhetoric evinces a sort of magical thinking; that Israeli military capacity would somehow fall apart if the US isn’t there to prop it up. This abyss of ignorance might explain why some appear to genuinely believe that the US could somehow “pressure” Israel into abandoning its campaign against Hamas.

What’s the alternative for earnest and well-informed activists? The fundamental problem with Uncommitted is that they were advocating for an unpopular position. Unfortunately, that happens sometimes, and even if your cause is righteous, there is no shortcut out of this unenviable hole. When you are universally shunned by those in power, your only way forward is slow, step-by-step coalition building. You find the sympathetic compatriots that do exist and figure out how to help them advance over their less favorable alternatives.

Uncommitted could have called on Hamas to release all their hostages…why not? They could have protested in front of Qatari embassies to highlight its funding of Hamas and sanctuary for their terrorist leaders. They could have advocated for alternative military suggestions — such as, instead of bombs, sending in special operations forces to rescue hostages or whatever.1 Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has explicitly advocated for moving Gazans out of harm’s way by allowing them into Israeli territory, and protestors could ask Egypt for the exact same relief on its side of the blockade. The number one humanitarian priority for any warzone is the evacuation of civilians, so why should the Gaza war be any different? (Hint). There are literally infinite alternative suggestions that, while they wouldn’t fully satisfy the protestors’ ultimate goals, would at least get them closer.

You can stop laughing now. I’m trying my best to be as charitable as possible although I don’t blame you for rolling your eyes at the last paragraph. The reason we saw none of those attempted compromises from Uncommitted and others can only be explained by the fact that the central animating motivation of this protest movement is that “Jewish Massacres” must take priority over “Palestinian Wellbeing”.

I don’t intend to nitpick every single action just because it isn’t immediately consequential. I already acknowledged that it may be necessary to chop gigantic causes into tiny digestible chunks. The issue is that, in the midst of so much tactical uncertainty, the movement stridently undercuts its own effectiveness and credibility.

3. Your Actions Must be Proportional

Beyond actionability, protesters must also consider proportionality. Ideally, you would achieve your goals solely through compelling rational arguments — because then nobody gets hurt or inconvenienced, and nothing gets damaged. But if we’re at the protest stage, we’re assuming that window has already closed, although mass demonstrations synergize with backchannel lobbying.

In practice, disruptive protest movements work by making things unpleasant enough to force a capitulation to their demands. These range across a spectrum of tactics: from “I’ll vote for someone else unless…” to “I’ll camp outside your home to yell at you unless…” to “I will break into and occupy your workplace unless…” and, in the worst cases, “I will bomb random bystanders unless…”.

I’ll focus on two elements: target and feasibility. Call this the “Whaddaya want me to do about it?” test.

FSM’s actions were proportional in the sense that they were properly targeted and showcased a level of seriousness that remained effective. For example, if the thousands of students who occupied Sproul Hall had instead occupied a bakery twenty miles from campus because one of its owners was the stepbrother to the university chancellor, it would make sense to ask, “Whaddaya want me to do about it?”

Or, if Mario Savio had responded to the university’s policies not by giving an iconic speech, but by killing a campus police officer. That would no longer be proportional to the cause because now the entire foundation of law and order is at stake, far beyond just a dispute over speech on campus.

Contrast this with recent protests at the University of Washington, where members of an unambiguously pro-Hamas group called SUPER UW broke into the newly-built Interdisciplinary Engineering Building and caused up to $1 million in damages — doors pulled off hinges, broken CNC machines, smashed windows, the works.2

What’s the nexus between a university building and Palestine? Grab my hand as I take you on a homeopathic accounting journey…

The IEB cost $102 million to build, half of it came from the state legislature. Of the rest, Boeing donated $10 million for naming rights over the building’s second floor. Boeing is a gigantic corporation with $65 billion in yearly revenue, and is Israel’s supplier of the aforementioned advanced fighter jets. Not every detail of this relationship is public, but it’s probably fair to say that Israeli defense contracts constitute about 1-2% of Boeing’s total revenues.

In terms of intensity, SUPER UW’s actions could be justified under my proportionality rubric if lives are at stake and Boeing is complicit. The problem is it’s both too much and too little. Only a portion of the IEB building had anything to do with Boeing, and it was specifically devoted towards how to incorporate AI into engineering. It’s not like they had impoverished grad students screwing in screws on ordinance about to drop on Gaza the next day. At the same time, if a $100 million building is vaporized on campus, does a multi-billion conglomerate hear it?

Yet, SUPER UW remains sanguine about its self-importance:

What the fuck are they accomplishing here? This is by no means the only such example of a befuddling disproportionate intensity of effort.3 If you appreciate homeopathic accounting, then you’ll love the fact that endless manhours were wasted on fruitlessly trying to convince some universities to divest from some index funds which include some companies with some operations in Israel, of which some may have something to do with its military.

When they failed to pursue campaigns that had actual consequence, protestors regularly double-down on whatever happened to be within reach. As of a year ago, at least 70 US cities have passed some sort of resolution on Gaza, typically asking for a ceasefire. One activist, Riddhi Patel, felt so strongly about her quixotic campaign that she personally threatened to murder Bakersfield City councilmembers who didn’t vote her way: “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”

Now, you might think this is a total joke and a waste of time for everyone involved, but I have it on good authority that at least one Israeli artillery officer hesitated for a few milliseconds when he heard that the city of Ojai, California (pop: 5k) disapproved of what he was doing.

There’s a dimension along which I would like to extend empathy: helplessness, particularly in the face of what you deem to be a grave injustice, feels absolutely terrible. I myself regularly encounter this sentiment; there is a great deal of awfulness around the world I can’t do a fucking thing about.

Don Quixote is me. I’m an open borders advocate and believe immigration restrictions to be a moral travesty from both injustice (why should people be treated differently solely based on which lines of the sand they were born in?) and material (immigration can be the most potent anti-poverty program imaginable while also economically benefiting the host country) perspectives.4 However, I readily and wholeheartedly accept that my position is deeply and irredeemably unpopular, and has no realistic prospect of getting implemented!

I wish this wasn’t true, and I wish I could do something about it, but such is reality. I leave that unenviable mission to other advocates who are better positioned or motivated than I am, and I personally cope by imbibing on nihilism. Maybe this is not an ideal attitude to sport, but at least I have the awareness to know it does not help to 1) have a public meltdown 2) in front of someone who can’t do a damn thing about it.

4. Bitch Be Humble

It can feel really good to be in the limelight, to be the center of attention. There’s an inescapable, self-centered, performative dimension to many protests. Tent encampments on campuses across the country has the world’s most privileged human beings desperately aping the look of bona fide refugee camps. The full-throated chants of “Intifada!” which pretend to be part of something more consequential and dangerous than a few blokes marching around. And of course, what will never ever stop being funny is taking over a university building and then begging the school administration to allow “humanitarian aid” (aka DoorDash & water) through.

Self-adulation is not, on its own, necessarily a bad thing for protest movements. If all the other aspects are lined up correctly, perhaps adulation can encourage more participation in a positive direction. At the same time, it creates a serious risk of mission drift.

At a 20 year reunion movement, FSM leader Jackie Goldberg spoke about herself in self-effacing terms compared to current students: “I don’t think they’re really any different than we were, and we weren’t that special and we weren’t all that unusual, and we’re certainly no more committed to justice and equality than they must be.”

It’s good to remember that if you’re protesting for a cause, this isn’t about you, it’s about the cause. If you forget that, you’re liable to confuse what advances you personally for what advances the cause. And that’s a really bad space to be in.

What Now?

The Free Speech Movement succeeded because it understood something that today’s campus protesters have supposedly forgotten. Effective protest cannot sustain itself on just righteous anger. It demands strategic thinking, tactical discipline, and above all, intellectual honesty about one’s actual objectives.

The four principles I’ve outlined — just cause, actionable goals, proportional tactics, and humility — work synergistically. Without a coherent cause, you cannot develop actionable goals. Without actionable goals, you cannot calibrate proportional tactics. Without proportional tactics, you undermine your cause’s legitimacy. And without humility, you abandon course-correction and arson your entire edifice.

These are not just tactical failures; they are grave moral dereliction.

To the extent the “pro-Palestinian” movement is indeed just an anti-Palestinian movement that prioritizes homicidal spectacle over the welfare of actual Palestinians…I guess they should just keep doing what they’re already doing. Ideally they should also drop the unconvincing charade.

To the extent the “pro-Palestinian” movement genuinely cares about Palestinian welfare, they have an iron-clad obligation to pursue strategies that might actually help Palestinians, rather than performances that make them feel better about themselves.

This is the story of how I tore my ACL while giving someone a lap dance. It’s also a story about Obama.

The year is 2013. Within a few hours of landing in the city during a trip, my friends and I hit the town. Bar-hopping from place to place, and accumulating a large snowball of acquaintances as we went along. Our final stop was going to be at an after-hours dance nightclub, the kind that stayed open until sunrise and where you’d find lone electronic music connoisseurs bopping their heads in a corner somewhere with their arms crossed.

We were a ball, and danced up a storm. My homies had such confidence and swagger on the dance floor that the crowd would do that thing where they part and give you a wide berth to give a space for your flailing limbs. Just like Moses. At one point, one of my buddies disengaged and sat down to check on his phone. In a bid to reengage him, I went up to his chair and started giving him a lap dance. Naturally. It got his attention.

I should discuss my lap dance technique. The kinesiology behind it. Obviously it involves a lot of active hip work, and making that happen in a structurally sound manner requires a solid foundation. Thankfully, years of squats and deadlifts gave me the lower body fortitude to support me during the high intensity core gyrations required. [If anyone requires a visual aid for this next section, please print out my picture and paste it onto a stick figure. If you’re too poor to have a printer at home, I can’t help you.]

My lap dances took two different distinct formats — frontal and rearal. The rearal has two distinct advantages in its favor: solid structural stability and the best theater seat of my ass. I’d have both feet firmly planted, bent over, and I could use even use my arms for additional — overkill — structural support. Without the hindsight benefit of an engineering degree, I nevertheless strove to approach the craft with the methodical precision it demanded. Halfway to designing real bridges.

The frontal required the most dexterity. It’s the most structurally precarious (FORESHADOWING ALERT) but also provides the most direct access to my genital area, which I’m told scores very well with lap dancing judges. The frontal approach is impossible to pull off without carefully incorporating the surrounding architecture.

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Homophones are words that look or sound exactly alike, but convey completely different meanings. It’s how bear can refer to the large forest animal or the act of carrying a burden, how light can be a weight designation or a source of illumination, or how spring can be a climate season or a compression device.

Homophonic confusion is not necessarily a problem, because context usually gives us enough clues to scry the word’s intended meaning. Within critical applications, forethought has provided us with safeguards: the NATO phonetic alphabet to avoid letter confusion, and roger was adopted as the standard affirmative phrase specifically to avoid the dangerous ambiguity of a pilot saying right. So generally when ambiguity finally blossoms, it’s either absolutely hilarious (“Knowledge is power, France is bacon”) or reveals someone’s literacy struggles (There/Their/They’re).

I’d like to introduce a related concept: moral homophones. This is where vastly different moral frameworks nevertheless get confused as the same thing because their practical applications are often identical. Just as linguistic homophones “sound the same but mean different things,” moral homophones appear identical in practice while harboring fundamentally incompatible underlying principles.

For example, vegetarian diets can be adopted for vastly different reasons. One person may do so out of a deep commitment to reducing animal suffering, while another cares none and is motivated purely by health benefits. Despite this fundamental disagreement on a core ethical principle, their behavior is nevertheless bound to be indistinguishable in practice. A divergence may not surface except in extremis, such as with the discovery of a mythical creature whose suffering directly correlates with human longevity. The animal welfare advocate will change nothing, while the health loon will clear out their pantry to make room for the new LifeSpan Fillets™️.

Moral homophones are unavoidable in the same way that humans having very different reasons for doing the exact same thing is unavoidable. Yet this phenomenon creates two distinct dangers. One is sleepwalking towards a coalitional divorce, where members who were previously laboring in harmony suddenly discover their frameworks unraveling at the seams when circumstances shift. The second is accidentally empowering a worldview that ends up backfiring when you need it most — essentially nurturing an ideological parasite that devours its host.

I want to highlight what I consider to be the ur-example, illustrate its serious ramifications, and then offer an easy solution.

The Sin of Racism isn’t Racism

No other example better illustrates this concept than the homophonic confusion between what I would call “individualistic antiracism” versus “reparationist antiracism”.

Much effort has been devoted towards revising dictionary definitions, but for old school advocates, the original sin of racism was the category error of mistaking irrelevant characteristics for relevant ones. The sin isn’t about simply having aesthetic preferences about race, but allowing those preferences to override pertinent considerations. This was seen as both irrational as well as morally corrosive because of the implicit reliance on collective attribution — the fallacious assumption that an individual’s worth, capabilities, or moral standing can be determined by their group membership.

The fundamental injustice therefore was tarring individuals with either collective guilt or collective merit they neither earned nor deserved. The exemplar of this thinking is enshrined in MLK’s most famous line from his most famous speech: judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.1

In stark contrast, “reparationist antiracism” takes almost the antipodal approach. It eschews individual merit and doubles down on collective attributes. Under this rubric, so long as you are superficially a member of an oppressed class, you are presumed to have been aggrieved even if you — individually — are not. And on the flipside, you are presumed to be guilty because of your membership even if you — individually — have committed no crime. The exemplars here are Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, or Minor Threat’s classic banger Guilty of Being White:

I’m sorry for something that I didn’t do

Lynched somebody but I don’t know who

You blame me for slavery, a hundred years before I was born

It’s fascinating how such diametrically oppositional approaches can nevertheless exist in relative harmony, but that’s because practically speaking, they are identical in most applications. “We should raise funding for schools in black neighborhoods to make up for deficient funding” looks the same from both perspectives, up until the moment you reach budget parity. The individualists will pull the emergency brake and declare victory, while the reparationists will slam the accelerator, insisting the real work is just beginning.

In Defense of Signaling One’s Virtue

To the extent that we want individuals to conduct themselves virtuously, it’s good to have societal mechanisms that reward and encourage virtuous behavior. And once you start rewarding good behavior, you necessarily encourage people to advertise their beneficence, jumpstarting a constructive positive cycle. So long as it is truthful and earnest, there is nothing inherently wrong with signaling one’s virtue.

This otherwise beneficial cycle can be corrupted, and represents a particularly fatal danger with moral homophones. Instead of producing substantive virtue, wires can get crossed and we unintentionally end up encouraging either empty performative virtue, or “virtue” antithetical to our preferred framework. All because the social reward mechanism cannot distinguish between genuine virtue and its impostor — whether that resemblance stems from honest convergence or deliberate subterfuge designed to ride the tailwind of another’s legitimacy.

Many moral crusades had to go through a tendentious journey to finally garner lasting influence. With racism in 20th century America, racist attitudes had to lose cachet among influential intellectual types. Within those circles in the 1950s and 60s, the virtue signaling cycle reinforced the memetic replication of individualistic antiracism. If you wanted to be considered one of the “good decent people” who could hang at New York City apartment parties, you had to demonstrate your subscription to this framework.

The memetic spread wasn’t confined to intellectual salons, it also gained momentum through celebrity endorsement. Charlton Heston exemplified this dynamic, proudly marching with MLK in 1963 and leading the arts contingent at the March on Washington, serving as a durable counter to John Wayne’s explicit and public adoration for “white supremacy”.2

Individualistic antiracism had unique characteristics which made it so fervently compelling, and accelerated its memetic virality:

• Explicitly patriotic: Calling back to America’s fundamental promises etched on its founding charter, that all men are created equal.

• Rationally capitalistic: As the black conservative Thomas Sowell said “Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.”

• Pleasantly passive: There was no affirmative obligation imposed upon you, all you had to do was not discriminate.

Passivity is a double-edged sword because whatever barriers to entry it lowers, it sacrifices in bombast and urgency.

If you flipped a switch during Jim Crow America and eliminated every single discriminatory policy, virtually nothing would change the next day. Some obvious effects would disappear, such as separate water fountains and segregated schools, but much of the accumulated impacts of decades of discriminatory policy would take years or decades to undo. The black families that lost out on cheap loans to purchase homes during decades of redlining would not wake up with back interest in their bank account from all the generational wealth they missed out on. The debate around the Civil Rights era mirrored the one during Reconstruction. The promised 40 acres and a mule reparation package for lifelong bondage never materialized. Instead, shackles were unlatched and Freedmen were set off to fend for themselves, often stumbling back into subjugation somewhat less glaring than the slavery of yore.

From the standpoint of virtue signaling, it’s really hard to compellingly brag about all the things you are not doing. It’s not sexy. This vulnerability was a maladaptive trait within social reward systems, one which the reparationist approach just happened to be uniquely suited to capitalize on. If you were someone who genuinely believed in individualism and the power of people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, you accepted letting fields lie fallow today for a promised bumper crop in the future. But the reparationist approach is much more dramatic — it promised redress right here and right now.

Stuck Between an Antiracist Rock and an Antiracist Hard Place

Individualists faced pressure from the other side as well. The soup at the time actually included a third homophonic ingredient: the status-quotidians. Those who wanted to appear supportive of civil rights while maintaining the status quo, best exemplified by the “separate but equal” canard. In the same way that reparationists could “pass” as the less extreme individualists (all while hovering their foot above the gas pedal), status-quotidians also had an incentive to “pass” as the more respectable individualists.3

If you’re a genuine individualist stuck in the middle, no matter how earnest, you might be encouraged to either distinguish yourself from the status-quotidians, or the virtue encouragement cycle might encourage you to dabble in the reparationist camp because of the easier ramp towards accolades. The social reinforcement machine humming along lacks the resolution to distinguish competing frameworks anyway, and the push from one side worked synergistically with the pull from the other.

Still, the demarcation lines between the dueling camps remained fuzzy for many decades, in part because there were genuine overlaps of disagreement which further blurred the boundaries.

At first, the reparationist ramp-up appeared as too incremental and reasonable to reveal its true nature as an opposing force. But gradually the acceleration intensified, like an engine revving out of control from its chassis. It became passé to merely pass laws banning racial discrimination — so timid, so quaint! Instead you demand reparations for redlining from decades ago, and trawl deep through genealogy trees to assert reparations for any and all enslavement and related atrocities, going back centuries. You don’t just ask for universities to stop discriminating; you demand they make up for lost time by taking affirmative action to discriminate against some groups as a remedy for past discrimination against another group. An eye for an eye with no statute of limitations.

Ironically, what let the reparationist mask truly slip was that eventually the individualists had essentially achieved total victory. A black man was elected president after all! And just as the individualists could finally consider retirement, relaxing on their rocking chairs, the reparationists finally discovered their momentum.

The watershed moment came during the 2015-and-beyond era, when the individualist antiracists had been comprehensively defenestrated from any position of influence. Where once you had to demonstrate that someone was not judged on their merits, any disparate impact was now prima facie and irrefutable evidence of discrimination, such that even autonomous traffic cameras were denounced as an example of “racist technology in action”. Color-blindness was openly disavowed as naive or, worse, an insidious tool of white supremacy itself. Racism was no longer defined as bigotry based on race but redefined so that culpability was only possible by one particular race (guess who). You could openly proclaim hatred of one particular race (guess who) and still be hailed within the “antiracist” penumbra.

The tails had fully and completely come apart. Lifelong comrades no longer recognized each other.

Picking Up the Pieces

I highlighted the story of antiracism in America because it stands as the most salient and evocative illustration of moral homophones. Would the reparationist approach have been able to achieve such prominence if it hadn’t ridden alongside the individualistic approach, buoyed by its tidal fervor? It’s hard to imagine. It probably would’ve been the death knell of the civil rights movement had MLK’s iconic speech been replaced a Robin DiAngelo struggle session castigating the audience on indelible white guilt. None of what made the individualistic approach uniquely compelling — patriotic, capitalistic, passive — applied to the reparationist approach.

The antiracism case study reveals a pattern that extends across the political spectrum. A parallel cautionary tale are liberal Jews who found themselves bewildered and isolated after October 7th, watching progressive groups openly celebrate organizations explicitly dedicated to Jewish genocide. What previously appeared to be shared commitment to social justice masked a core schism rooted in incompatible moral frameworks.

Jewish Americans had been prominent allies in civil rights movements for decades, from funding Freedom Riders to marching alongside MLK, who was himself a strong supporter of Israel. This historical alliance made the contemporary fracture all the more jarring. Liberal Jews who supported progressive movements (including the adjacent “decolonial” movement) believing they were strengthening universal human rights inadvertently bolstered social justice ideologies that explicitly excluded Jewish lives from moral consideration. There were burgeoning clues for those paying attention, such as with the Women’s March implosion over Jewish inclusion.

unwittingly made the perfect case study for moral homophones from a foreign policy lens, before I even published this essay!4 The post-World War II liberal order was buoyed by overlapping motivations that masked basic disagreements about civilization itself:

Yes, some Americans cared about saving Western Europe for economic reasons, others cared about democracy and freedom, and many worried about the balance of power. But to conservative Americans in the 20th century — the type of people who joined the John Birch Society — the Cold War was about preserving Christendom from the threat of godless communism.

The pattern repeats as cultural pendulums swing back and forth. From the right, the University of Austin is monomaniacally bristling at anything that may have a passing resemblance to DEI. Within MAGA, immigration restrictionists motivated by economic concerns are surprised to learn that many of their compatriots want to institute a Pantone color swatch citizenship test.

And there’s Scott Alexander’s classic observation: “If you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.” Under most practical applications, the belief that “witch-hunts should not happen” is indistinguishable from simply “being a witch”. This dynamic explains why civil liberties organizations face an existential challenge: the very people they might appeal to also risk derailing their core mission.

A Framework for Action

The solution is not complicated: attack your allies! What I mean by this is that it's great to have allies willing to assist in a shared endeavor, but you must be ruthless in scrutinizing your disagreements.

People already instinctively engage in this kind of ally scrutiny through qualifying statements. We naturally say things like “I don’t support their methods, but I support their goals” or “I don’t agree with their message, but I defend their right to speak.” These qualifications reflect an intuitive recognition that surface-level agreement often masks deeper philosophical differences.

The gay rights movement manifested many of these instincts. Supporters would preface their advocacy with “I’m not gay but…” to underscore a universalist relevance. The Mattachine Society, with their crisp sartorial presentation, put a lot of effort to distinguish themselves both from the iconoclastic queer liberationists and from the assimilationists who wanted to remain in the closet.

The key is making this instinctive skepticism and distinction more systematic and rigorous. Here’s how to implement this productively:

• Start with acknowledgment: Begin by explicitly recognizing your willingness to work on shared endeavors, even if you are motivated differently. This prevents the process from devolving into destructive purity spirals.

• Identify core disagreements early: Don’t wait for circumstances to force hidden tensions into the open, and actively seek out where your essential assumptions diverge from your allies. This is accomplished by repeatedly emphasizing first-principles reasoning instead of reflexively accepting surface-level consensus.

• Create clear demarcation lines: Establish explicit boundaries about where cooperation ends and fundamental disagreements begin.5 This serves both to educate observers who might confuse the movements and to prepare for future divergence points.

• Maintain collaborative relationships: The distinction between this approach and endless purity test spirals is that you preserve the ability to work together on shared goals while maintaining intellectual honesty about your differences.

That’s it, it’s that simple! The goal isn’t to eliminate all disagreement, but to ensure that when the inevitable fractures occur, they happen along predictable lines rather than catching everyone by surprise when the stakes are highest.

All this is yet another reason why we should avoid sanewashing at all costs. It can be really tempting to see a mass of undulating zealots sorta-kinda agitating for a cause sorta-kinda similar to yours, but history shows a real risk of creating a monster that will devour you the first chance it gets.

Just as linguistic homophones can create confusion in communication, moral homophones create confusion in coalition-building. The solution in both cases is the same: context and clarity. We must learn to distinguish between words that sound alike but mean different things — and between allies who act alike but believe different things.

The central conflict is between two cheerleading teams: the San Diego Rancho Carne High (RCH), whose students are unimaginably rich and whose cheerleading team is almost entirely white save for the one Token Asian, and the East Compton Clovers, who are poor financially but rich in melanin.

RCH has been on a remarkable winning streak, pursuing their sixth consecutive national title. Through a series of events, the team finds out their previous captain had been stealing their award-winning cheerleading routines — from the Clovers! The Clovers always knew about the choreography heist but lacked the resources to compete nationally. So they spectated their own routines from the bleachers as RCH won year after year.

The film is not subtle about its agenda, but it’s worth ruminating on the specific ways it depicts racial tension. The Clovers are the underdogs, but the movie makes it clear they are tremendously talented — there is no doubt about their creative and physical prowess in cheerleading. Their exclusion from the national competition isn’t due to overt melanin aversion. There’s no sneering judge dismissing their style as ‘ghetto’ or ‘inappropriate’ for the competition, no concerned administrator wondering aloud about their academic eligibility, no security guard hassling them at competitions.

Instead, their only barrier is economic: they can’t afford the entry fee. The movie trusts audiences to recognize that an unlevel playing field is injustice enough.

The Clovers are proud, resourceful, fully cognizant of the challenges they face, and at peace with having to work twice as hard for half the recognition. There’s a quiet dignity in how they’ve channeled their frustration into excellence, refusing to let systemic barriers diminish them.

There’s an interesting contrast in how the Clovers accept help. When the new RCH captain (Kirsten Dunst), offers to pay their entry fee, the Clovers reject it. Accepting help from her would have implied that RCH’s theft was forgiven, and could have cemented a racially subservient relationship.

In contrast, they do accept a black talk show host’s offer to pay their entry fee. This echoes an increasingly antiquated ethos of an independent black resilience (most prominently aligned with Malcolm X) that is not dependent on fickle white generosity. The Clovers are willing to accept outside help after all, but only if — from their perspective — it is sufficiently sanitized of racial baggage. Their selectiveness is undeniably a setback, materially speaking, but at least it’s rooted in dignity and self-determination. Perhaps it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

Few terms are as mis/over-used as ‘institutional racism’ and I don’t intend to resurrect it. It does try to grasp at something very real: many institutional barriers get in the way of individual flourishing, and these barriers can correlate with race, even in the absence of a direct causal nexus. The Clovers, for many reasons related to their race, were held back by lack of capital, but all they asked for was for a chance to be judged on their merits.

The restrained messaging of this morality tale is in sharp contrast to much more recent oeuvres. These works, inspired by real histories of exclusion and violence, choose to depict racial oppression by dialing up the absurdity and exaggeration. The TV show Lovecraft Country (2020) is set in the era where race-based discrimination was legal, and black motorists relied on specialized guides such as The Negro Motorist Green Book (briefly depicted in the show) to know which areas would refuse them food and lodging or subject them to arbitrary arrests.

In the first episode, a black family stops at a diner in 1950s Massachusetts (Massachusetts!), where they’re met with leery and suspicious looks from the all-white residents. The subtle tension quickly ramps up into a cartoonish chase sequence as shotgun-toting locals pile into a pickup truck, careening through traffic in a frenzied and ultimately self-destructive pursuit.

The show took a genuine historical fear and turned it into a Tom & Jerry chase scene, the one where he monomaniacally crashes into a wall and everyone laughs. Lovecraft Country drew obvious inspiration from Get Out (2017), where racism was literalized as body-snatching. The Guardian’s (presumably unironic) review noted:

The villains here aren’t southern rednecks or neo-Nazi skinheads, or the so-called “alt-right”. They’re middle-class white liberals. The kind of people who read this website. The kind of people who shop at Trader Joe’s, donate to the ACLU and would have voted for Obama a third time if they could. Good people. Nice people. Your parents, probably. The thing Get Out does so well – and the thing that will rankle with some viewers – is to show how, however unintentionally, these same people can make life so hard and uncomfortable for black people. It exposes a liberal ignorance and hubris that has been allowed to fester. It’s an attitude, an arrogance which in the film leads to a horrific final solution, but in reality leads to a complacency that is just as dangerous.

This was a movie where a cadre of white liberal suburbanites are achieving immortality through surgical brain transplants conducted on randomly kidnapped black men! What exactly is the intended message here? That black people should stay away from Trader Joe’s locations lest they get unwittingly transformed into mindless thralls by white Obama voters?

The absurdity behind the film’s central metaphor presupposes that white people are so blinded by their privileged perspective that they’re constitutionally incapable of understanding how insidious racism really is. But instead of raising the salience of the message, it undermines it by relegating racial oppression to the realm of body-snatching horror fiction rather than grounded social commentary.

Artistic hyperbole is undermining even when deployed in the opposite direction. BlacKkKlansman (2018) is a critically acclaimed movie that I couldn’t get through. Though based on a true story, Spike Lee couldn’t help but depict the KKK as a bunch of incompetent, idiotic, goofball rednecks. If they’re such a laughingstock, such a clown car of an outfit, why would law enforcement ever care to infiltrate them?

You’ll notice the examples I listed all came out during the height of Wokism, and their messaging is a reflection of the times, just as Bring It On is a reflection of its time.

One of the core aspects of Wokism is a refusal to accept that racial oppression could ever get better, even though it unquestionably did. Pick whatever metric you want to define oppression by, but inflation-adjusted per capita black wealth continues to skyrocket for example:

And yet, an unprecedented pessimism has taken hold starting around 2015. In 2020, the portions of Americans who said that race relations were bad nearly doubled to 55%, compared to 26%-30% in previous years:

In the absence of gross violations to point to, Wokism resorted to microscopic diagnostic tools, unearthing microaggressions that were previously invisible to the naked eye. Yet, paradoxically, dramatic depictions compensated in the other direction: simultaneously dressing down the KKK as inept idiots, while also presenting American racism as a cult of suburban body snatchers.

What I appreciate about Bring It On is that the central racial tension is subtle but grounded in reality. It illustrates that injustices don’t always have obvious answers or villains. It also shows that even supposed victims of institutional challenges can set themselves back, such as when they pursue pride at their own expense.

It’s remarkable that a silly, self-aware teen comedy about cheerleading can have something to say about race that is more nuanced, thoughtful, and meaningful than many recent critically acclaimed films. This was not due to an unprecedented burst of filmmaking genius, but unfortunately the result of the racial discourse suffering a regressive setback.

Also, I’m not saying this only because I married a former cheerleader, but the sport is severely underappreciated as an athletic feat. The double-triple jumps and pirouettes in this compilation video are formidable achievements. They represent countless hours, pain, and perhaps a statistical paralysis.