I Hope Freddie deBoer Learns to Read Someday
Starting with his own essays!
There’s a genre of Substack essay about Freddie deBoer that writes itself if you simply hold up a mirror to any one of his essays. First Toil, then the Grave 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 Freddie deBoer 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.
I feel so vindicated. I'm actually a fan of FdB, notwithstanding the fact that he would probably rather I wasn't. So much so, that even what I perceived, at least, as overt rudeness to me in his comment section didn't make me a non-fan.
And I admit that I'm perennially baffled by the fact that someone who opposes nation states supports a movement whose goal is to establish a... nation state (that would be worse for human rights and democracy and the such in any sense I can conceive of).
Likewise, that he stated he is under no obligation to condemn Hamas because it's obvious he's no ally of theirs from his values in all domains of life, but that this 1) didn't stop him from condemning Israel, when he presents this stance as a mere specific stance of a general principle too; 2) I would call his denial of rapes on 7/10 and overt support of the Palestinian cause more than 'not condemning' Hamas.
I take comfort in the fact that my comment on one of his essays about this made it to the top of the thread even in a hostile environment (https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=44905611). I worry that it might be deleted now, so, for posterity:
I'm an Israeli and I would have agreed on nearly all counts on October 6. I still think the only way forward is toward Palestinian autonomy. At this point in time, a one-state solution is a death sentence to me, in a way that I think was not true when I inherited leftism from my family. This might be Israel's fault, though I'll refer you to your own article about how it is not only the whites who have agency (are Jews white, anyway? I specifically have Polish roots, but...). I think it is an unmitigated tragedy that of all Israeli governments, THIS one is waging this war. I have zero ideological overlap with them and zero faith in their ability to accomplish even their own professed ends. It doesn't matter to Hamas, though, that I protested against the occupation in the West Bank, refused to contribute to the Occupation in my IDF service, both at personal risk and cost. I must note, though, that the towns Hamas targeted featured people far far braver and nobler than I, with better leftist bonafides, and they will be sorely missed in the discourse because they are dead.
Justice for the Palestinians as Hamas perceives it involves using their own people as meatshields and outsourcing the responsibility for their welfare expressly to the UN. Their blood and soil rhetoric is as disgusting as any you'll find.
They are impeding, not aiding, the Palestinian cause, unless this cause can be articulated as "death to Jews". I'm sorry if it appears to me that the embrace of the Palestinian cause is an excuse for antisemitism, given how far back Hamas pushed said cause and how repugnant Hamas should be to anyone who identifies as a liberal, a humanist, a progressive... No, I'm not sorry at all. I'm disappointed and scared in a way I used to mock my mom for being, because I thought antisemitism was largely a thing of the past. I don't think you're an antisemite, not least because it would be immensely painful to conceive of with how much I appreciate you. You would do well to acknowledge the brutality of the attack against Israel (still ongoing - Hamas violated the ceasefire by refusing to release (female) hostages), the deafening silence of women's organizations, the sheer ignorance fueling some of the discourse, etc etc etc. You say you shouldn't have to, and I agree. Condemnation of all these things should be fucking obvious. Instead we got *praise* for these atrocities. Talk about "context". And I'm forced to be more Zionist than I've ever been because I see more clearly than ever before that Jewish lives, women's, babies', are forfeit in the eyes of the """left""". Everything is a holocaust, everyone are Nazis, except for genocidal attacks against Jews by people who say Hitler had it right. And I'm scared. I'm more scared still of losing my values because of how scared I am. I do not want to the people who spat on Shani Louk's naked corpse as it was paraded in the street to vote for my parliament. It doesn't make me anything but a sane human being.
Anyway, thank you for your tax dollars.
That "Pro-Palestinianism" (it's anything but) is purely performative is a feature not a bug. That Gaza is foreign and remote and non-actionable on the local level is precisely the attraction.
Your basic ignorant (and determined to remain ignorant at all costs) Western poseur moron gets to check the box that says to all: "Look at how moral and good a person i am (more than you)", without actually having to bear any consequences or do anything real. All the costs are imposed on the Israelis, the Palestinians, and, increasingly, the "bad jews" who dare to take issue with Islamist religio-fascist psychopaths or reject that rape is justified under certain political circumstances.