Ron Paul changed my life. His 2008 presidential run made me a libertarian, sparking my career in political advocacy. Paul was a happy warrior, inspiring me and millions of other young Americans even in what felt like a hopeless time of war and recession.

Yet today, almost two decades later, I’ve never been more pessimistic about a libertarian future.

I voted for Trump. I knew he wasn’t a libertarian, but I expected he’d make the same effort to keep his campaign promises that he did in his first term, many of which catered to us at a historic level. He has not. DOGE was disbanded eight months ahead of schedule after being hindered due to political uproar. Instead, we got the largest debt ceiling increase in history. Tulsi Gabbard, the administration’s foremost non-interventionist voice, has been sidelined. We were promised no new wars. We got the biggest one yet, now costing roughly $28 billion at a burn rate approaching $1 billion a day. Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files. Instead, he’s fought to hide them and has directed unparalleled resources into primarying Thomas Massie, the single most libertarian member of the United States government.

And that’s just what this administration is doing. The libertarian movement itself is in shambles, riddled by infighting and with its most prominent organizations increasingly betraying their historic principles. During the Ron Paul years, libertarianism felt like the future. That moment is gone. The youth movement on the Right once dominated by libertarians has turned nationalist and reactionary. I do not see a path where libertarian ideas win the next election, or the one after that, or probably the one after that.

What I do see is a pattern. People don't adopt ideas because the ideas are sound. People adopt the ideas they want to hear, and the conditions of their lives shape what they want to hear. When conditions change, receptivity changes with them—and ideas that were unthinkable a few years earlier suddenly become live political options. Argentina is the clearest recent example. The country had to actually fall apart—runaway debt, runaway inflation, a collapsing economy—before voters were prepared to take Javier Milei seriously. America isn't in that condition and isn't yet close to it. But if things continue as they are, we will get there. When it does, somebody has to have kept the libertarian ideas alive and ready, or there will be nothing to deploy. This is the work a small number of deeply committed believers must do: keep an idea sharp and available for its moment. Albert Jay Nock called this strategy "the remnant," an idea discussed in his essay "Isaiah's Job."

I believe in this strategy. But knowing the most I can do is keep a flame lit while the world crumbles around me makes me feel powerless, and it depresses me.

I help produce the podcast Permissionless Liberty, hosted by my friends Dan Sanchez and Adam Knott. In the midst of this crisis of hope, I was grateful that they asked me to join them as a guest to work through what libertarians ought to be doing in this environment.

The first thing is to change how we frame libertarianism. Libertarians too often pitch the philosophy as a tool for us to gain our own freedom—which is, of course, what we are ultimately trying to do. But that’s not a compelling pitch to anyone who isn’t already one of us. The pitch I believe can actually work is: I want to help you live your life the way you see fit, even when I disagree with how you’ve chosen to live it. Under my libertarianism, the most religiously conservative Christian can form their Christian commune and exclude atheists like me. And that’s fine; I don’t need or want to live there. Socialists can build their worker-run cooperatives and distribute resources among themselves, so long as they don’t use the threat of violence to coerce anyone else into participating. I am free to live in my community; you are free to live in yours. Libertarianism, properly explained, is not a competing side in the culture war. It is the resolution to it.

But marketing only matters if there’s something left to sell. Each year that passes, the state’s ability to monitor our financial transactions, track our communications, identify and deplatform dissenters, and regulate away independent alternatives grows more comprehensive. If the remaining cracks of freedom in our current system are filled in by the time the public is ready to hear our message, it will be too late. I’ve grown much more interested in the tools and practices that keep those cracks open.

The deepest problem is in the incentive structure that has led to the ever-increasing growth of the state. The state is an enormous centralized tool of power, and centralized power attracts every interest group capable of capturing it: industries that want subsidies and regulatory protection, unions that want to cartelize their labor, foreign lobbies that want our military might, activists that want public institutions wielded against their opponents, and so much more. Once an interest has captured part of the state, it does not vote itself back out. Politics cannot solve this problem. The captured interests defining our politics are the problem. To change the system, the incentives must change.

The lever that has actually changed incentive structures at a civilizational scale is not politics. It is technology. The printing press, industrialization, the internet—each reshaped what power could do and what individuals could do in ways no political reform could have produced. We are now in the middle of a battle over who controls the next wave of that lever, especially AI. State-controlled AI, layered onto the surveillance infrastructure already built, terrifies me; it is the path to a level of social control no government in human history has had. Decentralized technology, by contrast, is the most promising arena for actually retaining and growing our freedom.

I do not think the technology that will decide this has been built yet. Bitcoin, Monero, self-hosting tools, local AI—much of what we already have matters, but none of it has been sufficient. What we need will likely not be a single technology but a constellation of decentralized tools that together alter the incentive structure by which people can attain their goals in our society. Our task is not merely to outrun the state’s ability to regulate but to build a free economy that those who currently hold power have more to gain from joining than from destroying. Get that right, and the state is no longer the apex predator in society; it is one institution among many that has to compete for the cooperation of a population it has lost the ability to command. Get it wrong, and the cracks close, the surveillance hardens, and the centralized power becomes forever impossible to dislodge. This is the most important fight for the future of liberty, and we are losing it by default every day we are not building.

I discuss all this and more in my podcast with Adam and Dan. Below the video, you’ll find an edited transcript of what I think are some of the most interesting sections from our conversation.

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Why I’m Pessimistic, And What Argentina Shows

Dan:

We talk on this podcast a lot about what Leonard Read calls the methodology of freedom—how to actually achieve freedom. What are your thoughts?

Jake:

Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic right now. I think we’re in a bad time. The conversation we have as a society evolves based on situations, and so I think the idea of the Remnant is really important: we’re not necessarily going to convince everybody right now, but it’s critical to educate at least a small share of deep believers so that they’re there when people are ready to hear the message.

Look at Argentina. They got into a situation where the socialism went too far, the government debt went too far, the inflation went too far, and the economy was falling apart. People were ready for some radically different answer. Milei was there to give it to them. America isn’t in that place now, and isn’t close to it. But it could get there one day, and hopefully we’ll be here making sense when people need us to make sense.

The most optimistic I can get about the United States right now—and I think this is a long shot—is that the war with Iran, which is a disaster already and likely to become more of one, leads to a reaction that takes some influence away from the people who got this so wrong. More likely, it just creates another opening for the socialist left, and this country goes toward wherever Mamdani is taking New York City. But it’s possible that libertarianism done the right way could take over the right in response to this war. And then if a Mamdani-style socialist takes the country, a libertarian Republican party might become the opposition and eventually come to power that way.

However it happens, it’s going to be a many-years or probably decades-long process until situations unfold in a way that makes people receptive to the message we have to offer. Right now I just see things getting worse.

On If Everyone Can Be a Libertarian

Jake:

Marketing strategy matters a lot. We should focus on telling other people: I want to help you live your life better in the way that you see fit, even though I may totally disagree with it. We should focus on what libertarianism can do for people who aren’t us, rather than just arguing about why everybody else is bad.

But I’m very conflicted about this, because I don’t actually know that everybody can be a libertarian. I don’t think everybody can.

We evolved for tribal society. Look at primate behavior—how chimps struggle for control over each other. We’re better than that. We’re a less violent species and we govern very differently. But when I look at thousands of years of human civilization, and at the tribal warfare that preceded it, I worry that this is just what we are. The black-pilled part of me sees very little hope. I’m not sure we’ll ever fully get out of this pattern. I hope we will.

Adam:

A sentiment of yours I really like is that you want everybody who has a political ideal to be able to achieve it with like-minded people, but you don’t want to be forced to be included. That’s how I keep my humanity. I really truly don’t want to harm a communist or a Christian nationalist’s ideals. I just want my ideals, and to be able to go with my like-minded people and form our own political union. It’s not really anti—it’s trying to get free.

Jake:

Yes, and the challenge there is exactly what your show is named after: permissionless liberty, the idea that the powers that be do not want to give that permission. So how do we break away when they don’t want to do that?

What I Saw in China, and Why We Should Be Like Switzerland

Jake:

What we present ourselves as on the international stage is not how we actually act on it. We are the imperialists. Trump has made this more clear than ever. We don’t like what Venezuela is doing? Put a corrupt crony in place who’ll sell us cheap oil. What we’re trying and failing to do in Iran right now is similar.

Meanwhile, look at countries like China—which we call a horrible international threat. I hate much of what China is doing domestically. But I went there last year and in some ways I was quite impressed. There are a couple of areas in which they’re actually more libertarian than us. Their IP law is one: you can get knockoffs of anything, often quite high quality, and I think that’s actually nice. The ease of starting a business there is much greater than here. Tax rates are comparable to or slightly less than ours.

But there are cameras everywhere, and they’re spying on you all the time. People are rightfully afraid to talk about politics there, because they’ll get in a lot of trouble. You can’t challenge anything about the political apparatus, and that inability is horrific.

On the international stage, though, they’re not going around toppling regimes that won’t sell oil at the price they want. They might invade Taiwan—a country they have a very specific grievance with, dating back decades to when it was once unified territory. I would hate to see that. But other than that, they’re not an expansionist empire. We are. And we’re not a benevolent one.

The libertarian position, I think, is that we should be Switzerland. Switzerland has a great foreign policy. They’re in a very defensible location on top of a mountain. They don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. They try to maintain as much liberty for themselves as they can, and because of that they’re wealthy and happy. We have two oceans on both sides of us. We’re even more defensible than Switzerland. And we’ve spent over ten billion dollars in the first two weeks of the Iran war alone. It’s hard for me to imagine that whatever trade or strategic benefit we extract from being an empire exceeds what we spend being one.

On Power Capture, and Why I Half-Agree with Socialists

Jake:

I’ve become very alert to the nature of power and how power works. The socialists have been talking about it for a long time, and I don’t like their answers, but they’ve caught onto some of the problem. We have this giant source of power in society, the state, and there are wealthy interests—wealthy business people who can spend their money to essentially buy the state, and then it does what they want, in their interests.

Adam:

So you’re describing the left critique of capitalist society—that wealthy people can buy power.

Jake:

Basically, yes. But I don’t agree with it as a critique of capitalism. I agree with it as a critique of power. Power is centralized, and centralized power can be bought. My answer is decentralizing power. The problem is how do you do that. Most socialists don’t actually want to decentralize power either; they want to take over the state so they can run things their way.

Where I extend past their criticism is: yes, wealthy capitalists are one interest group, but there are many others. Unions that want to buy off the state to advantage their members and artificially raise prices for their services. Foreign governments — or, more often, Americans more loyal to another country than this one, like AIPAC, but it’s not exclusively a Jewish-American thing. We’re also seeing it right now with Iranian expatriates who are angry about the Islamic regime in Iran. I agree with their criticisms of that regime fully, but they hate it so much and want it overthrown so badly that they lobby our government into wars that serve their niche interests, not the interests of the majority of Americans, who aren’t affected by what government Iran has.

The incentive structure of that whole system is the actual problem. Maybe we can gain small amounts of freedom to withdraw from it. But it won’t really be permissionless, because once we ever break away in a way that seriously inhibits their pursuit of power, they don’t want to and won’t let us.

Why Withdrawal from the System Won’t Be Allowed

Dan:

The reason the state can afford to assassinate foreign leaders, kidnap sitting presidents, and start wars is that it has us as tax cattle. We could try to persuade it to behave differently—or we could just withdraw our support.

Jake:

But can we? Look at the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over the right to secede. I always have to clarify for people who don’t know my framework: ending slavery was good, probably the most important thing that ever happened. Yes, the South wasn’t fighting for states’ rights per se, they were fighting for states’ rights to practice slavery. But the North wasn’t fighting to free the slaves. That wasn’t even a war goal at the start—it came later. The North was fighting for control, and to prevent the very concept of secession.

When that battle was lost, we got the great good of the end of slavery, but we also got the great bad of the shutdown of exit. So when the withdrawal of our taxes or our participation is ever threatening to the state’s ability to do the things it wants to do, the state is not going to let us withdraw. It has all the power. That’s why I keep coming back to technology as maybe the only real answer—some way where withdrawal can’t be blocked, or where blocking it is no longer in the state’s interest.

On the Surveillance Preventing Financial Freedom

Jake:

I thought I should actually be trying to use cryptocurrency more where I can, so I signed up for a credit card that lets me pay for things in crypto—it converts to cash at the point of sale. Just to get this credit card, just to be able to transact with normal businesses using my cryptocurrency, I had to send them a photo of my ID, a picture of my face from my phone, my Social Security number, all of it.

They already have the entire infrastructure in place to keep us locked down and to prevent these kinds of tools from becoming a threat—to prevent people from having real financial independence or privacy to transact how they want. So this is a speed race. We have to invent these technologies and get adoption for them faster than the state can regulate against them. I don’t know what those technologies are ultimately going to be. I don’t know if they’re even possible. But hopefully they are, and hopefully we can secede from the state through technological tools like these.

On Bitcoin Versus Gold

Adam:

Bitcoin is confiscation-resistant, censorship-resistant, and inflation-resistant. To confiscate it, someone has to physically get hold of the person and basically torture them. To censor it, they have to have the person in physical custody. And it’s transportable anywhere in the world. Self-custodied Bitcoin is the most secure asset an individual can hold.

Jake:

I’m not saying it’s a failed experiment. I wouldn’t be buying it now and trying to get back into it if I thought it was totally worthless. I think it’s the best thing we have available right now. But my pushback would be: well, why not gold? And why not cash? Cash doesn’t have the inflation hedge, but it has all the other things—they can’t know how much you have in your possession, they can’t pull it straight out of your bank account.

The state destroyed gold as our currency already. People can buy gold as a way to withdraw from the system. But I don’t totally buy the store-of-value narrative apart from the ability to transact in it at some level. When gold was the currency, we transacted in gold; our dollars represented gold. You can still buy gold as a store of value, you can melt it down and trade it as coins. Bitcoin is more transactable in some ways—digitally sendable, divisible into micro-units. But neither of these is as effective against the state as their original promise suggested.

Adam:

In the apocalyptic scenario where the system shuts down on a Friday night, you’re in a way better position holding self-custodied Bitcoin than holding stocks or bonds. Stocks and bonds can be shut down with a single phone call.

Jake:

In that apocalyptic scenario—where not just American markets but world markets are going crazy—gold has a very unique value, because you can have it physically on your person and trade it directly. But Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies still ultimately need the internet to validate the blockchain. We’ve already watched Iran shut off the internet to huge parts of its society. If the internet goes down, which states can do very easily, crypto doesn’t work.

Adam:

They’d have to shut it down worldwide. The miners are in all countries. You can shut down the internet in Tehran, but you can’t shut it down worldwide without huge problems—you can’t produce food, you can’t move water through pipes.

Jake:

You don’t have to shut it off worldwide—you just have to shut it off locally. If you and I are in the same room and I want to give you Bitcoin in a way you can trust, the miners might still be operating in some other country, but how do our transactions get over to those miners to be processed?

And in the apocalyptic scenario we’re talking about, where the state is freezing everybody’s assets because it needs the money, I think shutting down access to crypto servers and miners would be one of the first things it did. It doesn’t even have to shut down the whole internet. Given the cooperation it already has with ISPs, it can just shut down our connectability to crypto infrastructure the same way it shuts down access to bank accounts.

On Why AI Is Both the Biggest Hope and the Biggest Fear

Dan:

To end on a positive note: what’s one thing going on in the world right now that gives you the most hope?

Jake:

Artificial intelligence, honestly. It’s a dual-sided thing—I think it’s also the scariest thing. But it’s also the biggest hope.

The economic side of libertarianism, which so fascinated me and brought me into the movement, and which is still very important to me—long-run, I actually think it’s going to become the least important part. I think our society is about to become so productive, and to replace such large parts of human labor, that it’s going to be freeing in a lot of ways. The state may do terrible things with that power. But on the other hand, once there’s a hyperabundance of wealth, the state may also feel less need to fight wars for physical resources. That’s one of those technological innovations that could lead to an extraordinarily bright future, or the opposite. We’ll see.

Integrally invited me to speak with best-selling author and OpenAI prompt engineer Andrew Mayne about why fear over AI often aims at the wrong targets. Having written multiple novels, been on television shows like Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, and worked closely with AI developers, Andrew has one foot in the creative world and one in the tech world. So why isn’t he afraid of being replaced?

Many artists have taken up the anti-competitive, monopolizing strategy used by some of the big corporations they hate. Rather than share the playing field with new creators who are no longer limited by a lack of budget, art world connections, or technical skills, they seek to block these new players from the game. These artists have become censors—calling to ban AI, shaming people for using it, and making copyright arguments that defy the famous wisdom T.S. Elliot left us:

great artists steal.

I’ve painted, sung, photographed, written poems, and crafted essays. Every medium I’ve worked in can now be augmented or entirely created by AI. And nothing about that scares me because my art has never been solely about the medium. This is the ugly truth artists and everyone afraid of AI need to face: when a better way of doing something threatens your way, reality is telling you it’s time to evolve. Andrew refers to this as “disruption.” Whether that disruption is met with the flexibility of water or the rigidity of stone shapes its impact.

Change is often painful. I sympathize with artists who’ve specialized in being skilled at a medium, whether it was the portrait artists put out of work by the camera or the musicians losing work to virtual instruments. Portrait artists and musicians still exist, but the technology that made their skills less in-demand ultimately gifted creative expression to more people (and if there’s one word artists [used to] love, it’s accessibility.)

How many artists today would’ve painted brilliant portraits if only the camera had never come along? We can’t know, because they’ve already adapted to that technology by channeling their brilliance into something else.

I see AI no differently than any of the past innovations that made creation easier: moving from expensive film to digital, from time-consuming paintings to instant photos, from physical instruments to software that brings hundreds of virtual instruments into your bedroom studio. Is it still a rich, unique experience to see a live orchestra? Absolutely. Does that make it bad that a young, broke musician can add a virtual violin to their music?

To recognize the benefits of technology isn’t to deny its problems. But rather than fixate on either side of that spectrum, we should understand that tools contain both benefits and harms. Your kitchen is stocked with tools that make overconsumption easy. Weapons save lives as readily as they end them. Even the lights in your house are a tool that lets you control your time, freeing morning-haters like me to wake up later than first light, but at the cost of disrupting our circadian rhythm. Instead of fighting a losing battle against our tool-loving nature, Andrew lists some of the different options we have for addressing those problems, like re-skilling programs.

Fear is poison to the creative process. In their fear, artists are losing the curiosity we depend on for seeing and depicting the world in new, insightful ways. The fear of being “replaced” betrays a lack of belief in one’s own individuality. No human being on earth is having the same experience of life that we are. The tools we use to express this inimitable experience aren’t the point—it’s what we’re expressing that makes art so meaningful. We are not our tools. Whether cameras, software, or AI, tools simply enable more would-be artists to take part in exploring their unique slice of life.

The fear over job-loss and AI “stealing” art relies on a dangerous misunderstanding of the artist’s role: we artists are doomed/blessed to never truly own our work because we never own the inspiration that creates it. We tap into something far bigger than our limited selves, something that allows the work of both an anonymous poet in ancient China and a world-famous contemporary American rapper to touch the same place in the heart of a total stranger.

AI can’t kill that magic, but reducing it to copyrights and tools will.

⏱️ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:23 Will AI kill creativity?
1:36 Seeing AI as a tool, not a competitor
2:04 Similarities between the invention of photography and AI
5:12 Will AI accelerate problems like misinformation and tribalism?
7:31 AI "Safeguards" or attacks on our autonomy?
8:08 Will the economic disruption from AI be worth the benefits?
10:30 Ways of dealing with the disruptions from tech innovation

I’ve partnered with Integrally on this series because this app invites us to think more deeply and use dialogue to better understand our own beliefs. Integrally facilitates anonymous, constructive disagreements that get evaluated on the quality of their reasoning rather than their popularity. It’s great for testing your own ideas through disagreement and refining your debate skills without drama, outrage, and irrationality. Join me there to discuss the ideas Andrew shared and more.

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🚨Breaking: human who lived a different life in a different place at a different time has different beliefs than you.

🚨Trending: these two very different people disagree on a complicated moral issue.

🚨Shocking: celebrity known for controversial artwork makes controversial statement, fans somehow still shocked.

If you focus only on the content of our disagreements, you might find their existence upsetting. If you instead focus on human history, you realize that any time spent not fighting over our differences is the real shocker. In America’s hyper-politicized and hyper-technologically-connected society, attacking people over having different beliefs feels normal. It’s the kind of “normal” those sad orcas born into puddle-sized SeaWorld tanks felt: a demoralizing atmosphere so constant they don’t know enough to want anything else.

A seventeen-year-old American girl doesn’t first encounter serious political theory in her public school classrooms, which make the revolutionary birth of America and the miraculously enlightened ideals of its Founders seem as interesting as the scribbles in the back of her textbooks. She first encounters serious political ideas on social media.

In this fake realm, the girl also gets her first real experience formulating arguments to defend things she cares about. In an ideal setting, she would have learned that arguments should be logical, address opposition robustly, and strive for civility. She would have learned that disagreement is inevitable, so at its best it should be a collaborative effort between two truth-seekers trying to improve their understanding of the world.

What she actually learns is that you gain popularity if your argument demeans your opponent, you can sidestep the hard work of logical argumentation by mischaracterizing opposing views, and disagreement is a terrifying high-stakes battle that can result in an online mob ruining your life. That girl was me.

I found out the hard way that constructive disagreement naturally feels like exercise: you want to avoid it, despite the benefits it can bring you. When your brain encounters a disagreement on something you care about more than ice cream flavors, it triggers an ancient self-preservation protocol. Your amygdala—the threat-detecting part of your brain—revs up to take center stage. Your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode, where the stress hormone cortisol rises along with your heart rate. You’re now more ready to fight than you are to think.

We can disagree beautifully about ice cream flavors because our identity isn’t tied up in “chocolate ice cream lover” the way it is in labels like “Christian,” “lesbian,” “Zionist,” or “vegan.” When our self-image is challenged, we might as well be in the Colosseum facing a starving lion. But by depending on our opinions and identity labels to define ourselves, we fail to update our ancient brain’s assumption that disagreement = tribal exclusion = death. The resulting ideological rigidity robs us of the freedom we have today, enslaving us to act out a primitive past where logic, curiosity, and honest disagreement offered more risk than reward. Whether you’re facing an angry mob of tribesmen or an angry mob of Tumblr lefties, your default settings register them both as equally threatening.

The majority of debates happening on complex issues like foreign policy, immigration, cultural change, or technological change are handled by the primitive ooga-booga part of our brain.

Despite thousands of years between us and our “primitive” ancestors, our biology makes us just as likely to handle conflict with attacks and domination instead of understanding and cooperation. As our primitive instincts lurk beneath the surface of our disagreements, our world is increasingly hyper-connected. Every time we turn on a screen, we get a front-row seat to the ugly, offensive, frightening side of other humans: their irrationality, their ignorance, their viciousness. We’re living through the beginning of an unprecedented disrobing of humanity.

Every issue that can be debated will be debated, from whether pedophilia is just another form of sexuality to whether women should be stripped of the right to vote. Your discomfort doesn’t matter. Social media is the great unmasking agent, revealing whatever is there regardless of whether our future depends on cooperating with people we’ve watched cheer on the death of an innocent person deemed an ideological enemy.

We stand at a crossroads between a future that embraces the reality we’ve released from Pandora’s box and one that tries forcing it back in through violence and political tyranny. The future I want to live in is one where we seek objective reality while taking seriously that our experience of that reality is largely subjective. In that future, asking “How do you see it?” and tapping into the infinite number of perspectives on reality replaces the outraged “How can you see it that way!”

The future I desire isn’t as futuristic as many assume. Over 2,000 years before me, the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi argued that our reality is comprised of an number of infinite competing perspectives, with no “grand perspective” that encompasses and contextualizes them all. Isn’t that exactly what humanity looks like? Billions of different eyes and brains experiencing and assessing our world in their own idiosyncratic way. What better proof for this theory do we have than social media itself, which makes visible the infinite variation in our worldviews and the futility of pretending this isn’t the inevitable outcome of more connection with more humans.

We are blocked from seeing this bigger picture by a tired conflict between the individual vs. the collective, a conflict as productive as our limbs and brain fighting each other for dominance. In reality, these are two parts of the same unit—the herd and the individual without which the herd couldn’t exist. With neither subjugating the other, they can work together toward better understanding of our world in the same near-magical synergy that any ecosystem naturally does.

And yet, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave or the seventeen-year-old girl who first navigates politics on social media, many people simply can’t imagine what constructive disagreement with someone very different from them looks like. That failure of imagination belongs at the feet of many people and institutions—parents whose children felt punishing disconnection for asking probing questions, professors who turned classrooms into factory lines producing ideological obedience instead of open minds. But blame alone doesn’t solve problems.

My disagreements were once unpleasant battles to remain unchanged by my opponent. But staying unchanged by the world around you inevitably makes reality itself your enemy.

What I hadn’t learned in that Tumblr echo chamber was that good ideas don’t need dogmatic defenders. I held my beliefs so tightly precisely because I couldn’t defend them easily. And I couldn’t defend them easily because they weren’t meant to be true—they were meant to be social signals indicating what tribe I belonged to.

As a young person forging an identity in an increasingly fractured culture, I filled the void of not knowing who I was, or what I believed, with political labels that gave me ready-made answers. These answers became a prison I worked hard to stay in, lest I should step outside and discover the world was more complicated than my answers accounted for, and thus more uncertain. That comfortable prison cost me years of my life spent performing a static identity instead of growing into the person I am now.

Luckily, I discovered philosophy, where countless people before me had asked questions I never even thought to form dogmas around:

Why do we choose to keep living despite all our suffering?
What if we’re all just brains in vats?
Can we ever truly know what’s true?

Those questions made my fragile answers look painfully boring. Our ancestors rarely had the freedom to risk challenging ideas openly and inviting challenges to their ideas. Their survival depended on a small group, so conformity almost always won over curiosity. We aren’t so different today except for one key way: we have the luxury of listening to opposing views with the calm mind of someone who gets our food from the store, not the tribe. And maybe that’s the first step toward holding our beliefs more loosely: realizing it’s a luxury we’re wasting.

Critics will point out that some views advocate the destruction of others. But there’s a crucial distinction being skipped: opinions are not actions. Bad ideas can become bad actions, but the expression of bad ideas is our chance to confront them earlier and less violently.

We should be less worried about the proliferation of bad ideas and more worried about the proliferation of primitive psychological defenses guarding those ideas.

I don’t mourn the years I spent hiding from other perspectives by telling myself they were all simply evil or idiotic. I’m grateful that I have the most personal reminder that dogmatism can cost me many things that make my life better: intellectual humility, self-awareness, and good faith disagreements. I only hope more people start to feel the same boredom with dogmatism that I have. Beyond the freakouts over our inevitable disagreements is a kind of freedom. When you no longer view the disagreement itself as a source of outrage, there is only one rational response left: curiosity.

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The future will bring us more apps like Integrally, which offers people the place to practice engaging with different viewpoints in good faith instead of rewarding people for demonizing them. The existence of Integrally tells me there’s already a growing number of people who are bored with freaking out at different viewpoints and would rather understand them and how to navigate the gaps between them. If you’re that kind of person, join me on Integrally.

Integrally invited me to speak with the founder of MACS, Lyn Ulbricht—Ross Ulbricht’s mother and unrelenting advocate for his pardon—about a key threat to our justice system today.

Ross Ulbricht was given two life sentences plus 40 years without parole for his involvement in the Silk Road, a true free-market e-commerce site where what consenting adults bought and sold to each other was their business, so long as no third party was harmed. Meanwhile, convicted murderers and criminals with a long history of violent crimes have received far softer sentences, only to later murder innocent people, as in the infamous case of Iryna Zarutska.

The judge Ross faced—Katherine Forrest—explicitly said she intended to “make an example” out of him, and despite having no criminal history or being convicted of any violent crimes, she sentenced Ross to die in prison.

Libertarians have followed Ross’s case since the start because of the egregious difference in how the justice system treated him due to his belief in free markets.

In Judge Katherine Forrest's mind, Ross was a worse criminal than the drug dealer who sells poisoned fentanyl to the neighborhood kids because Ross wasn’t simply acting out of greed and ignorance like the neighborhood dealer, but out of a moral conviction for individual freedom, which she described as “a privileged argument.”

A highlight of Trump’s current term was the pardoning of Ross (I was in the audience for his second public speech; it’s a painful reminder of what the world loses when cruel sentencing puts good people in cages for too long). And yet, the problem that led to Ross nearly dying in prison is still just as much a problem. To complicate things, we’ve seen more examples of activist judges intentionally giving light sentences to violent but “underprivileged” individuals, enabling them to harm innocent people, and ultimately drive such understandable outrage in some Americans that they resort to broad support for the kind of cruel sentencing Judge Forrest applied to Ross.

This is the merry-go-round we ride when society isn’t bound by principle: overly harsh sentencing leads some people to apply overly light sentencing, which then leads some people to once again apply overly harsh sentencing.

People wrapped up in this vicious cycle easily forget what history shows us: once a government has the power to weaponize cruel sentencing, it rarely gives that up easily. The Founding Fathers knew this danger well, being of a time when whipping, branding (yes, the kind done to cattle), and death by hanging were common punishments for crimes like pickpocketing, poaching rabbits, or cutting down a tree on someone else’s land under mid-18th century British law. America stands apart from brutal authoritarian regimes and dehumanizing monarchies because of a core principle in our Constitution:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

This is the principle both those seeking overly light and overly harsh sentencing undermine in different ways, and it’s the principle Lyn Ulbricht is working to uphold.

⏱️ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:47 Are criminal justice reform attempts likely to do more harm than good?
2:28 Is it more important to properly punish criminals than avoid punishing innocent people?
3:30 Is harsh sentencing needed to deter criminal behavior?
4:18 Harsh sentencing impacts more than just the person sentenced
4:46 How the Drug War in the 80s led to harsher sentencing

America isn’t special because of its geographic location, but because of the ideals that shape what kind of society grows in that location called America. Ideas matter, especially when they can lead to non-violent people dying in prison or being killed on their commute home from work.

I’ve partnered with Integrally on this series because this app invites us to think more deeply about our ideas and use our free speech to find rational, actionable solutions to our problems. Integrally facilitates anonymous, constructive disagreements that get evaluated on the quality of their reasoning rather than their popularity. It’s great for testing your own ideas through disagreement and refining your debate skills without drama, outrage, and irrationality. Join me there to discuss the ideas Lyn shared and more.

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I’ve been part of this discourse long enough to see people become cartoonishly extreme in their views, or flip them entirely. This trend only makes it more important to spend time listening to people who are principled and thoughtful in their handling of heated issues.

The people who are guided by virtue, principles, and ethics remind us why we bother doing the harder thing when everywhere you look, serious topics are handled by insulting everyone who disagrees with you and avoiding genuine debate.

Listening to Daryl Davis is like taking a flamethrower to your pessimism. If a black man can befriend and deradicalize dedicated white supremacists, we can all try a little harder to handle our disagreements in good faith.

I asked Daryl to answer three questions:

• What's the best way to stay grounded in empathy and open dialogue when our instincts lead us to be hostile and closed-off?

• Do we need to transcend and abandon the concept of racial identity, or does racial identity help us understand ourselves and our world?

• Is “color-blindness” a trap used to subjugate racial minorities?

⏱️ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:47 Staying grounded in open dialogue when faced with offensive ideas
1:56 Speaking less with "I" and "You" vs. "We"
3:14 What role should race and considering race play in society?
4:03 What a Nazi leader once told Daryl
6:32 Daryl's disturbing prediction for the years leading up to 2042
9:08 Is focusing on "shared humanity" a trap?

Iain McGilchrist writes about how reality is inherently paradoxical. This is similar to what makes good art: contrast and the unexpected.

So when I say what has been said for millennia—that the people worth listening to aren’t the loudest, most famous, or most extreme—I hope you’ll be one of the few who understand.

Similarly, I’ve partnered with an app called Integrally on this series because it offers the same kind of quiet wisdom people like Daryl do. Integrally facilitates anonymous, constructive disagreements that get evaluated on the quality of their reasoning rather than their popularity. It’s great for testing your own ideas through disagreement and refining your debate skills without drama, outrage, and irrationality. Join me there and test out the techniques Daryl shared.

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I hate Voldemort and Death Eaters.

Before I go on defending hate, I should admit there’s a completely reasonable worry behind all the “hate is bad” rhetoric. We know from history that certain kinds of hatred—bigoted, blind, irrational, overgeneralized hatred—can grease the rails for atrocity. And if you’re an individual who gets lumped into a hated group and the air around you is thick with slurs and open contempt, the world starts feeling dangerous and cold. Many are understandably concerned about protecting others. Their concern about “hate” is not about a desire to micromanage everyone’s souls; it’s about wanting to protect the most vulnerable people from living under a constant, degrading threat or worse.

I’m not actually arguing against that concern. I don’t want mobs delirious on blind hatred, and I don’t want anyone’s kid marinating in daily targeted humiliation for looking different. Where I disagree is with the sloganeered, corporatized, sanctimonious Stop Hate™ version—and with the legal, cultural, and religious-spiritual machinery built on top of it—that suggest all hatred should be taboo while quietly handing certain people a monopoly on deciding which hates are allowed and which are forbidden. There’s a distinction between bigoted, blinding hatred and the ordinary, necessary hate that grows out of love.

With that said, I also hate mosquitoes.

If they’re in my home, I swiftly execute them. I don’t torture them, I don’t pull their wings off one by one—I just kill them. They are programmed by nature to suck my blood and wreck my sleep; I seem programmed by nature to hate them. Their death relieves my anxiety. They hurt me to prolong their life; I kill them to reduce my suffering. No one mourns them, not even other mosquitoes.

If we “loved” mosquitoes, Florida would not be as populated as it is today. Loving mosquitoes would often be foolish, sometimes even wrong. I don’t think we should torture them, but if a mosquito gave your kid malaria and you had a brief fantasy of putting that mosquito on a tiny rack, I’m not going to morally gasp. If, on the other hand, your “love” of mosquitoes led you to let them breed in your child’s bedroom, your love would be some bad love.

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I don’t meaningfully love everything or everyone, and I don’t think I can, no matter how much some people might scold me for my “lack of love.” I do have a kind of baseline compassion even for vile humans. I don’t think anyone deserves hell—not Hitler, not Voldemort, not Moses (yeah, I said Moses). That’s the extent of anything like my “universal compassion.” No eternal torture. No cosmic sadism. Heck, I might even hit the switch for “eternal cosmic bliss for all beings” if I came across it. But that would be a suspicious switch, right?

The invention of hells is a projection of the most malicious impulse in human nature. Some people are not satisfied that their enemies suffer in this world; they fantasize about following them into the next one to enact the most exquisite torments, unconstrained by physics. If they admitted these were just spiteful fantasies that never leave their hearts, that would dull the malice. But they don’t. They hope it’s real, swear it’s righteous, and call their vindictiveness “justice.”

Consider something simple: whatever we are at the deepest level—psychic constitution, “soul,” DNA, whatever—we did not create it. Our choices flow from a nature we did not design. You can try to change yourself, but the desire to change and the ability to change come from something prior to you. That’s true of “good” people and “evil” people. So punishing anyone with prolonged torment—hell, karmic prison, whatever costume you put on it—is obscene. Out of love, hells should be hated.

What’s odd is how often hell-belief shows up in people who supposedly preached boundless compassion. Jesus: “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek”—but also, a hell is righteous for people who don’t obey his demands. Gotama: “hate not even bandits who savagely saw off your limbs”—but a hell is appropriate for those who deny that Gotama had superhuman powers like walking on water. The hypocrisy and doublethink are extraordinary. Perhaps evil?

But wait, let’s zoom out. What is this “evil” I am referring to?

Some people think hate is always evil. That’s nonsense. To call something “evil,” “bad,” or “wrong” is already to be hostile to it. There is nothing contradictory about saying “hating this specific thing is wrong.” You can say it’s wrong to hate gay people, or wrong to hate Jesus. But saying “hate is wrong” as such is self-contradictory.

The problem isn’t just that they hate. The problem is what they hate, how they hate, and what they’re willing to do with it. The evil is in the details.

Now let’s talk about Nazis. Actual Nazis, not whoever it was politically convenient to hyperbolically call one today.

Nazis wanted to exterminate or enslave entire groups of people for idiotic reasons. Most morally functioning people today don’t just mildly “disapprove” of Nazis; they hate them. They don’t want Nazis marrying their kids, walking their dogs, or running their daycare. That’s good. That’s sane.

So imagine a classic trolley problem. You’re on a bridge. Next to you stands an unrepentant, giant, muscular Nazi who used to happily round up innocent people and put them on death trains. Down below: a runaway trolley headed straight for a car full of kittens. If you push the Nazi off the bridge, his body hits a switch and the trolley is diverted. He dies. The kittens live.

You should push him. Honorably.

If you don’t push the Nazi to save the kittens, I won’t say you deserve hell (no one does), but morally you’re failing badly. And if you fail because you’re afraid of being caught, or because your conscience has been poisoned by some ideology that tells you any act of violence is “impure” regardless of context, or because you’ve been trained to think hate is always wrong—then your “virtue” is unholy trash and hurting innocent kittens.

Hatred is on a spectrum. I can mildly dislike something, or I can loathe it with a passion, or anything in between. Haters of hate tend to be blind to this continuum. If you express a firm disagreement, they interpret it as genocidal rage.

If I say “I don’t believe trans women are women,” many people will infer I want violence against trans people, which is not true. I disagree with a metaphysical claim. I dislike being told I’m morally obliged to chant that claim. I also want trans people protected from harassment and actual violence. Refusing to adopt someone’s gender ideology is not violence, and refusing to affirm someone’s preferred pronouns is not harassment.

But some people will hate my disagreement and noncompliance so much that they want laws—backed by the threat of police, courts, and prison—to coerce my speech. I think trans women are male and trans men are female. I think using someone’s preferred pronouns is perfectly okay when it’s voluntary, but I also think it’s accurate to use he for males and she for females, and I have no interest in punishing anyone for “misgendering”—that is, not using biologically accurate pronouns.

There should be no government laws compelling pronoun usage. Not in private, and not for businesses. If you hate “hate” so much that you will use the violent arm of the state to punish someone for verbal noncompliance, you have more hate in your position than I do in mine. That alone doesn’t make you wrong. Sometimes more hatred is holy—like pushing Nazis off bridges to save kittens. But it should at least make you honest to yourself about what you’re doing.

That state violence also backs hate-speech laws, which are supposedly about stopping hate. How hypocritical. Advocating them is, by their own logic, hate speech. The laws are never applied to all hateful speech—they’re used selectively against certain kinds of hate, expressed by certain kinds of people. The same people who say they’re “fighting hate” will quite happily vomit hatred at their enemies and feel holy doing it.

The same dynamic plays out in institutions. If you’re in academia, or want to be hired there, it’s very clear that hate is a job requirement. Universities might as well be open about it and ask for “statements of hate”:

They’ll protest, of course: No, no, we love trans people; we don’t hate anyone; we’re allies. But “ally” is war language. In World War II, the Allies were those fighting the Axis. An “ally” presupposes an enemy. If an ally is caught fraternizing with the enemy, they’re no longer an ally. Being an ally requires hating the right people.

War is many things, but it is definitely not the absence of hate.

If you’ve been even slightly heterodox on this stuff in the last eight years—since the rise of The Dark Lord Trump and the ascendance of the new race-and-gender orthodoxy—you’ve probably felt the hatred of the haters of hate. Under very peculiar notions of “allyship,” people who didn’t display enough public zeal for the ideology were ostracized, ghosted, quietly un-friended. The marginalized were “allying” by marginalizing heretics.

A few good friends of mine—friends I discussed philosophy and politics with for decades—blocked me or cut off contact when they discovered I was a heretic. One reason? I don’t hate Trump enough. I have contempt for Trump, but I have at least as much contempt for Biden. That alone was sufficient to trigger their hatred. Hating “hate” wasn’t the problem; not hating their chosen villain hard enough was.

And then there’s “antisemitism.”

After Hamas’s massacre on October 7th and Israel’s catastrophic destruction of Gaza, there’s been an upsurge of hatred toward speech critical of Israel or Judaism. The rhetoric is all about opposing “antisemitism.” The people who hate “antisemitism” have rolled out the same style of control fantasy as those who dream of compelled pronouns: punish “hate.”

But very often what gets called “antisemitism” is hostility toward an ideology or political organization—Zionism, Judaism, the Israeli state—not racial hatred of Jews as a biological group. The category is often—sometimes deliberately—blurred.

Jews are not a race, any more than Christians or Scientologists are a race. Not all “Semites” are Jews; not all Jews are Semites. A Han Chinese person could become a Jew, Christian, or Scientologist without their race changing. Moral hatred of an ideology—Scientology, Nazism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Wokeism, Zionism—is not racism.

People know racism is socially and politically radioactive in the US. They don’t feel the same way about religious, political, or ideological antipathy. So it’s effective to slander someone as a racist for disliking an ideology or a political organization. Campaigns “against hate” exploit that confusion—especially around antisemitism.

Don’t misunderstand me: we absolutely should hate actual antisemites. The Nazis really did believe Jews were a “race” and hated that imaginary race murderously. They also hated almost every race that wasn’t their own. As I said, if a person pushes an unrepentant Nazi off a bridge to save a trolley full of kittens, they would be a hero. If they were punished for it, it would be a miscarriage of justice.

But given the power of the association between “antisemitism” and Nazism—and the very intense hatred everyone rightly feels for Nazism—accusing someone of antisemitism is a very loud call to viciously hate them. And the people making that accusation often revel in that hate while chanting slogans about “anti-hate.”

• “Thou art an antisemite; thou hate.”

• “Thou art a racist; thou hate.”

• “Thou art a sexist; thou hate.”

• “Thou art an Islamophobe; thou hate.”

• “Thou art a transphobe; thou hate.”

It’s all the same structure. We could keep going with the logic:

• “Thou art a Naziphobe; thou hate.”

• “Thou art anti-Scientology; thou hate.”

• “Thou art anti-communist; thou hate.”

“Hate” as a taboo word disintegrates under reason. It doesn’t disappear; it just loses its magic aura and you see it doing work as a tool of control. If someone passionately pushes “anti-hate” as a brand while constantly identifying, policing, and punishing the “haters,” chances are they are an aspiring tyrant. They don’t want to abolish hatred. They just want a monopoly on which hates are allowed.

A people without hate is a dream come true for a tyrant. Because without hatred, people will never dethrone them.

After all this talk of hate, what about love?

Love is never far from hate. Without loving something, we would hate nothing. Hatred is symbiotic with love. If you love your child, you will hate someone trying to torture your child. If you love truth, you will hate certain lies.

It’s like a coin: you can’t move heads without moving tails. The only way to get rid of hate is to get rid of love. And if that were somehow achieved—if you could anesthetize an entire society so they neither love nor hate anything—that would be an act of hate against what it means to be human.

People don’t go to war without loving something. Sometimes it’s something contemptible—love of a particular “race,” love of a sacred land that must be “cleansed” of other “races.” Sometimes it’s something decent—love of one’s friends, love of freedom. But there is always some love at stake. And behind that love, there is a shadow: a readiness to hate whatever threatens it. No amount of moralistic doublethink changes that.

Pushing the Nazi off a bridge to save the kittens is an act of love (for the kittens) and an act of hate (for the Nazi). Both are present. Both are necessary for that decision.We don’t make the world better by pretending hate is always evil. We make it better by being honest about what we love, what we hate because of that love, and what we’re willing—and not willing—to do in the name of either. The evil is never “hate” in the abstract.

The evil is in the details.

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But the most interesting questions, the ones that actually lead us closer to the truth, don’t collapse easily into slogans. They take patience, the willingness to entertain uncomfortable possibilities, and a kind of intellectual humility that’s becoming increasingly rare.

So I asked Maggie Anders, a libertarian commentator and host of Undoctrination, a few deceptively simple questions that usually end in outrage or tribal signaling:

• Is Gen Z becoming more conservative, and if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

• Are women to blame for the spread of wokeness?

• If libertarians could only focus on one issue when persuading people who disagree with them, what should it be?

Good-faith discussion isn’t about being polite or neutral. It’s about taking the complexity of our world seriously enough to give every question the depth and rigorous thinking it deserves.

That’s a skill, and like any skill, it improves with practice.

That’s why I’ve partnered with on this series. Integrally is designed to encourage structured, anonymous dialogue where arguments are evaluated on their reasoning rather than popularity or hyperbole. Try it for testing your own ideas, engaging with the strongest version of opposing views, and refining your debate skills with real people without dealing with all the worst parts of tribalized, outrage-fueled disagreements. Join me there and share your answers to the questions above.

That’s how ideas get better, and how people do too.

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Lost amid the memes, cancel culture, and bot armies is the value of disagreement: a chance to expand our worldview and add color to black-and-white thinking.

I’m working with to put our attention back on the art of disagreement—not just because toxic disagreement is one of the viciously polarizing forces in our culture, but because how you disagree is often how you do everything.

As you encounter the three questions I asked my friend in this interview, do something different: instead of focusing on what your answer is, notice how you form that answer.

This conversation isn’t about convincing you to agree. It’s about showing what careful disagreement looks like.

is an author, speaker, and conservative commentator. I asked him to explain his position on these 3 controversial topics:

1. Can single mothers do as good a job raising children as a two-parent household if they try hard enough?

2. Is the media responsible for a significant portion of our country’s cultural problems, like division and nihilism?

3. Are people seeking justice for past oppressions against their identity group more likely to do more harm than good?

If you want a clear picture of how you handle most of your life, answer these questions the way you normally would.

Maybe your impulse is to scoff at the question and answer with a sarcastic one-liner. Maybe this parallels the change-averse, defensive way you handle other challenges in your life.

Maybe you pause and think through your answer from multiple angles, crafting a careful response that considers opposing views. Maybe this parallels the careful, strategic way you approach the rest of your life.

If you’re not sure how your argumentation style reflects your way of living, that may be even more informative. Maybe your tendency to avoid the discomfort of disagreement mirrors other places where avoidance shapes your life more than you do.

The best way to become more conscious of how you argue isn’t by fighting on social media or trying to miraculously stay mindful during a heated argument. It’s on platforms like , where you can anonymously practice constructive disagreement and dialogue with a built-in system for rewarding your high-integrity arguments.

I find myself using social media less and less, as it feels more and more like trying to have a philosophical conversation with a mob of patients in a psychiatric ward.

But what really worries me is that young people are getting most of their practice in forming arguments on social media—the place where the worst behavior often gets rewarded.

Platforms like Integrally offer some hope. Join me there and share your answers to the questions above.

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We learn about how caterpillars turn into butterflies and what photosynthesis is, but we rarely get one solid lesson on how to be wrong. The average person learns to avoid being wrong (or, just as well, admitting they’re wrong) like they learn to avoid touching a hot stove.

The moment I understood that I should be running toward my errors instead of away from them was during the year that never really ended: 2020.

Around the height of cancel culture madness, I started publishing critiques of ideas like white privilege and censorship, but doing so with the humility of someone who had bought into these ideas until recently.

I accidentally discovered that modeling the epistemic humility required for constructive disagreement while our culture was besieged by censorship, hostility, and hysterics instantly popularized my work.

This could be the part of my story where I made “ex-leftist” a personal brand and spent the rest of my life telling people how I was wrong that one time. But what I learned wasn’t just that “leftism is flawed”—the cardinal flaw I uncovered was how leftism justified shielding my ideas from constructive disagreement.

That lesson is why I published another supposedly career-killing confession: I had claimed to oppose identity politics, but wasn’t holding Jewish nationalist movements like Zionism to the same standard. During the intense tribalism that followed the years after October 7th, I admitted to changing my mind and it changed my life.

The beauty in honest disagreement isn’t just the truth you find outside yourself, but the truth you find out about yourself.

“My people” pulled away with polite frostiness. Invitations quietly evaporated. 2020 all over again. Articulating my disagreement took me off the road to professional partisanship and toward financial independence and friendships that are more than political alliances.

Whether you avoid it or embrace it, your disagreements will shape your life. We’re immersed in a culture with more ideological variety than ever, and yet most people still struggle to disagree constructively about personal preferences in art or dating. And unlike the past, where we primarily practiced disagreement with friends or classmates, more and more people are learning how to disagree from malicious or even fictitious social media users who are overrepresented in dark triad personality traits.

Amid alienation, division, and echo chambers, it’s no coincidence we’ve been collectively losing our ability to disagree well for decades.

Being Grateful For Disagreement

The pitfalls of disagreement are the same today as in the days of Socrates: avoid, attack, perform. Social media subsidizes this pattern: sarcasm is rewarded with likes, certainty is rewarded with followers, and tribal alignment is rewarded with instant belonging.

But constructive disagreement—the kind that expands your capacity to think through different ideas instead of shrinking it—starts with a small, internal pivot:

You see ideological tension as a puzzle instead of a threat.

There’s even research that shows constructive disagreement increases creative problem-solving. And here’s the part nobody talks about: that improvement happens even when your opponent is wrong. It’s engaging in the cognitive friction that matters, not necessarily the accuracy of the opposing view.

Destructive confrontation, the kind we get a front-row seat to on social media, is an attempt to avoid that friction. Since most of us never learn to be wrong with grace, it becomes a monster in our minds, and we can end up living our entire lives on the run from it. Insults, straw-manning, mischaracterizations—anything less than seriously engaging an issue is energy that could be spent on cognitive friction spent instead on avoiding the discomfort it requires.

Your Feelings About Disagreement Will Shape It

Most people agree about the value of constructive disagreement, but here’s the hard part: constructive disagreement is downstream of your emotional response to being wrong.

Most people feel disagreement as a rejection. It feels like a threat that stirs the ancient part of our brain still worrying about whether we’ll be exiled from our tribe and starve to death. But if you can relate to disagreement differently—if you can re-associate it with the sensation of growth, intellectualism, even ego-liberation—then disagreement becomes a rewarding experience, a path to deeper relationships, and a skill to feel pride over.

Three internal shifts make this possible:

1. Replace the reflex of “I’m being attacked” with “I’m being invited to practice.”

It sounds a little cult-y, but cults do know a few things about changing people’s thought patterns. Each time someone challenges you, see it as an opportunity to expand your understanding of the world.

2. Stop treating your beliefs as “you” and start treating them as your projects.

Creating distance between you and your beliefs can make you less defensive about them. Projects are meant to be tested. If you frame your beliefs as works in progress, disagreement stops triggering the same defensive circuitry.

3. Make steel-manning the standard you hold yourself to.

High-quality thinking requires high-quality standards. Steel-manning forces you to fully consider the logic of another worldview. It transforms disagreement from a contest into a collaborative design problem. Straw-manning is a sign that you’re avoiding the intellectual effort required to understand a different viewpoint.

Moving Beyond The Dunning-Kruger Curve

We often describe the Dunning-Kruger effect—the tendency for people with low skill or knowledge in a domain to overestimate their competence because they lack the awareness to recognize their own errors—as a cognitive flaw, but that underplays its social dimension. The original studies show that people become most overconfident when they’re operating in isolation, cut off from feedback, but the effect intensifies inside echo chambers.

Group polarization research shows that when like-minded people talk only to each other, they become more extreme while also becoming more convinced they’re correct.

I lived this reality. I was ignorant, but more than this, I was insulated. It was easy for me to dismiss any opposing views without engaging them seriously because I didn’t have opportunities to do exactly that: engage with opposing views seriously.

This is why genuine expertise requires continuous exposure to challenge. Philip Tetlock’s work on political forecasting shows that the “superforecasters” aren’t the ones with the most knowledge but the ones with the most flexible mental habits and the widest exposure to competing models of reality. Constructive disagreement is what keeps expertise from becoming dogma.

Disagree Better to Be Better

Our culture now incentivizes the wrong kind of disagreement. The platforms that most of our communication now happens on reward slogans over nuance, certainty over curiosity, intensity over synthesis. Constructive disagreement requires courage, curiosity, and maturity—all of which are hard-earned skills that translate into long-term success in the real world, but often at the cost of short-term “success” online.

Apps like Integrally are trying to solve this problem by offering a place where the conditions for constructive disagreement are rewarded. But just as with any kind of personal growth, the individual has to want improvement before they can achieve it.

The Future of Disagreement

I’ve yet to regret a constructive confrontation. Still, I routinely interact with people whose first response to disagreement is tension or hostility. I used to be that person, and on my bad days, I still am. I now see that side of myself as a smaller, primitive self; it’s the same me who loses my temper in traffic or has the extra serving I regret.

A skill issue, but worse: the inability to engage in constructive disagreement robs you of the opportunity to update your beliefs. This is what keeps many people stuck in the quicksand of self-censorship, unfulfilling relationships, or income and career blocks.

It’s hard to put an “aha” moment into words; it’s one of those things you learn through feeling the change happen within you. But if I could describe the change that freed me from being afraid of disagreement, it was similar to realizing all the anxiety I felt in high school was useless because everybody was just as insecure and confused. “Worry less, be yourself, and try your best” is good advice for the first day of school or every day we wake up to navigate a society of very different people with different views.

You may not have mastered the lesson yet, but luckily it’s a skill you can start practicing right now.

💡 Don’t forget to check out our sponsor, Integrally. Whether you enjoy disagreements or find them stressful, Integrally is the perfect app to practice anonymously debating on a platform that finally incentivizes civil discourse without any censorship. Give it a try as one of its founding members.

Just like “racism,” “antisemitism” is a term that political factions use to slander their enemies for saying things they don’t like. It has reached the point where congress and the White House are trying to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to suppress speech and intimidate people who have dissenting political opinions. The government is deporting people, companies are firing employees, and schools are silencing students on the basis of so-called “antisemitism.” If we are going to understand antisemitism as more than a hollow political weapon, but instead a pernicious bigotry to oppose, it’s imperative that our society develops a firm understanding of the history of the term “antisemitism” and its lesser known corollary, “semitism.”

“Semites” are a racial category first constructed in the 18th century of people whose ancestors lived in regions that spoke “Semitic” languages, including Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Discussions about the history of “antisemitism” today tend to be anachronistic in the sense that they suggest that “antisemitism” can be observed in the disparagement of Jews and Judaism that goes back thousands of years. A prime example is the common description of Antisemitism as “the world’s oldest hatred.”

Humans have been hating each other, as individuals and part of a collective, for all sorts of reasons far before Jews even existed. Ancient Israel itself was mythologically formed, according to the Tanakh (the Jewish bible), through a genocidal hatred of various people of Canaan:

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God. — Deuteronomy 20:10

Furthermore, the use of the term “anti-Semitic” only came into existence in the 19th century, and early included a reference to all “Semites,” not just “Semitic Jews.” The earliest usage of “anti-Semitic” seems to be found in a 1860 criticism by Moritz Steinschneider of Ernest Renan’s article “New considerations on the general character of the Semitic peoples, and in particular on their tendency towards monotheism.” Steinschneider criticized Renan’s “anti-Semitic prejudices” in regard to Renan’s analysis of the religions that came from Semitic people, including Islam and Judaism. Only after the term was adopted by German ethno-nationalists who used it specifically for Jews did it become popularly associated only with hatred toward Jews based on a conceived Jewish race. Antisemitism is in fact one of the world’s youngest hatreds.

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The history of antisemitism is intimately tied to the erroneous belief that Jews are a “race.” Due to imagined characteristics of a Jewish race, German ethno-nationalists, such as Wilhelm Marr, argued that Jews wouldn’t be able to assimilate into German society even if they did renounce Judaism, as religion wasn’t their issue. In his 1879 pamphlet, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View, Marr wrote:

I may have erred. It might be that Semitism and Germanism will enter a political social peace. I just don’t believe in such a peace. I only believe what I see: our social, political subjugation by you. But instead of boastfully rattling the chains as is done by many, I admit that we have been fettered “hand and foot”, “heart and soul” — from palace to hovel.

We can count him as the originator of the terms “anti-Semite” and “Semitism” and identified himself as an antisemite. He literally established the “League of Anti-Semites.” His hostility to Jews wasn’t simply due to his dislike of their religion, it was due to his bigotry about their imaginary “Semitic” racial characteristics—aka “Semitism.”

The Jew had no homeland. With each passing day he became more estranged from his former native land and memories of it became merely symbolic. Nature had denied him the gift to blend with other people, to assimilate.

“Semitism” is a pseudo-scientific abstraction representing the characteristics that Jews have by nature, according to Marr, not by culture; not by religion—they are characteristics passed on through biological ancestry. Marr attributed character traits to “Semites,” who he equated with Jews.

Within the agricultural Germanic lands the Semitic craftiness and its practical business sense provoked a reaction against the Jews.

Before the 19th century, there was usually less of a racial tinge to the hostility toward Jews. It was most commonly driven by religious and cultural hostility, which could often be relieved if a Jew converted. Some of the Palestinians starving in Gaza are probably descendants of “Semitic” people who converted to Islam or Christianity from Judaism. The antisemites of the 19th and 20th century thought Jews could not convert though because they didn’t recognize Jews as a religious group, but a race. That erroneous notion was explicitly expressed by Adolph Hitler in his 1925 book Mein Kampf:

From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race?

The “Jewish question” that haunted Europe in the 19th and early 20th century was generally about whether Jews could and would integrate into European societies after emancipation. Antisemites answered that question by saying Jews could not integrate because Jews were—by inherited biological nature—incapable of integrating into non-Jewish nations. They proposed expulsion or extermination. For example, one of the most influential antisemitic philosophers, Eugen Dühring, in his 1881 book, The Jewish Question, a racial, moral and cultural question with a world-historic answer, was explicit about the racial characteristics of Jews as a subset of the “Semitic” race:

However, the basic understanding which sees in the Jew not a religion but a racial tribe is already breaking through decisively. Only, it is still, to a certain degree, distorted by the mixture of religion in it. But it lies in the interest of a noble mankind, thus of a true humanity and culture, that this obscurantism of religion, which has up to now covered and protected the worst characteristics of the Jews with its darkness, be fully removed so that the Jew may be revealed to us in his natural and inalienable constitution. Then the cultural characteristics developed from the racial nature can also be understood and measured; indeed even the religion will then get, not merely as a mirror of some characteristics, but independently, an evaluation which indeed diverges very much from that which the priests on the one hand and the religious instructors on the other have made popular in terms of ways of judgement. It is however neither feasible nor beneficial to substitute, regularly and everywhere, a name with an old, well-known ring to it with a new way of characterisation. One may therefore say in brief - when one means the race - Jew’, and not, rather, Semite’. The Jews are a definite small tribe of the Semitic race and not this entire race itself, to which, for example, once even the Phoenicians, remembered from destroyed Carthage, belonged. Arab- Bedouins are not of Jewish origin, but indeed Semites. The Jews are, on the other hand, the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race into a nationality especially dangerous to nations.

Self-identified antisemites and the creators of antisemitism (as a self-conscious movement, not an abstraction invented by scholars in the future) distinguished their philosophy as being about supposed Jewish racial traits. And they made concerted effort to distinguish it from previous religious antipathy and conceptualizations, even suggesting that religion obscures the truth.

According to Adolf Hitler, the “intellectual pioneer” of Nazism was Theodor Fritsch. After the electoral success of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party Hitler described Fritsch’s “Handbook of the Jewish Question” as “relevant for the anti-Semitic movement.” Many leading Nazis including Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels referred to and cited the manual. The “handbook” was originally titled Antisemiten-Katechismus, or “Antisemite’s Catechism.” In the 1893 edition1 there is a question and answer section; the first two questions are pertinent to the topic of this essay:

1) What is meant by antisemitism?

“Anti” means “against,” and “Semitism” refers to the nature of the Semitic race. Antisemitism therefore means opposition to Semitism. Since the Semitic race in Europe is represented almost exclusively by the Jews, we understand “Semites” in the narrower sense to mean the Jews. Thus, in our case, “antisemite” means “opponent of the Jews.”

2) How is it possible that in our enlightened age Jews are still persecuted because of their religion?

No one thinks of opposing the Jews because of their religion. No one seeks to disturb their worship; it enjoys the most careful protection from all classes — including the antisemites.

…As the name itself indicates, antisemitism is directed against the “Semites,” that is, against a race, not against a religion. If the antisemites were fighting against the religion of the Jews, they would have to call themselves “anti-Israelites.” It therefore betrays a poor understanding of language when someone connects antisemitism with “religion.”

Given that Fritsch was considered by the leaders of Nazis to be the “intellectual pioneer” of Nazism, everyone should probably consider his definition of antisemitism to be crucial to understanding it. Their conception of Jews as a subsection of a “Semitic race” is irrational, but their conception of themselves as a hater of that superstitious abstraction, while contemptible, is entirely intellectually comprehensible. And for the sake of historicity, intellectual integrity, and the profound moral difference between antipathy based on “race” (a pseudoscientific immutable inherited property) and “religion” (a choice which reflects personality and character), that is the definition and understanding which should be used.

Consider this fascinating passage from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

ANTI-SEMITISM. In the political struggles of the concluding quarter of the 19th century an important part was played by a religious, political and social agitation against the Jews, known as “Anti-Semitism.” The origins of this remarkable movement already threaten to become obscured by legend. The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle—an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia—and that the anti-Semites are engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental Anschauung.

Quite prescient, as the origins of the movement have indeed become obscured by legend. And the “atavistic” definitions of antisemitism that we can see in modern dictionaries and hear from Zionists have become ubiquitous to the point where there are political activists attempting to make atavistic definitions law. Let us examine two of those definitions. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” From dictionary.com: “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.” These definitions neglect to distinguish antipathy toward Jews on the basis of race as opposed to other motivations, such as religion, culture, or politics.

Before the passage from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica was published, some Jews (and Christians) had already begun to cultivate the conception of antisemitism as an old and eternal hatred that the world had against them, not racial in character, but abstract and infinite in form and expression, a metaphysical chameleon that follows them wherever and whenever. Just a few years before Britannica’s, the Jewish Encyclopedia’s discussion of “anti-Semitism” did in fact acknowledge its modern creation:

The term “Anti-Semitism” has its origin in the ethnological theory that the Jews, as Semites, are entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European, populations and can never be amalgamated with them. The word implies that the Jews are not opposed on account of their religion, but on account of their racial characteristics.

But further down the entry, under the heading, The Old Hatred of the Jews, it encourages a “wider” interpretation—an eternal and religious, interpretation:

While the term Anti-Semitism should be restricted in its use to the modern movements against the Jews, in its wider sense it may be said to include the persecution of the Jews at all times and among all nations as professors of a separate religion or as a people having a distinct nationality. Its history begins with the period of the Book of Esther, when the charge was first made that the Jews are a “people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s laws; therefore it is not for the king’s profit to suffer them” (Esth. iii. 8).

This passage simultaneously suggests the term “should be restricted” but then creates a “wider sense” that includes “all times and among all nations.” But not even that captures the full history of antisemitism according to the Jewish Encyclopedia; it actually begins, not with Wilhelm Marr, but the Book of Esther—a Jewish mythological tract. The Jewish Encyclopedia reconceptualized antisemitism into a timeless theological archetype—having nothing to do with race—based on a Jewish theological construct of an eternally hostile external world bent on destroying Yahweh’s “treasured possession.” That theological construct is perhaps best expressed in a traditional Jewish liturgical poem, the Vehi Sheamda:

The poem is traditionally spoken during the Jewish Passover holiday, commonly set to melody or song. It can be found in a variety of arrangements, including even hip hop. “The world hates Jews” is a fundamental motif of Jewish mythology, and antisemitism was reconceptualized as the manifestation of it, regardless of the distinct nature of the hatred. That motif can be observed in the enslavement by the Pharaoh, the attack by Amalekites, Purim, the Babylonian Exile, the Book of Judges, Hanukkah, and the destruction of the second Temple.

It was such a reconceptualization of antisemitism that functioned in a dialectic with Zionism. Theodore Herzl, generally identified as the primary founder of modern Zionism, wrote in his journals that it was his reading of Dühring’s book that inspired his messianic passion to establish a “Jewish state”:

When did I actually begin to concern myself with the Jewish Question? Probably ever since it arose; certainly from the time that I read Dühring’s book. In one of my old notebooks, now packed away somewhere in Vienna, are my first observations on Dühring’s book and on the Question. At that time I still had no newspaper as an outlet for my writings—it was, I believe, in 1881 or 1882; but I know that even today I repeatedly say some of the things that I wrote down then. As the years went on, the Jewish Question bored into me and gnawed at me, tormented me and made me very miserable. In fact, I kept coming back to it whenever my own personal experiences—joys and sorrows—permitted me to rise to broader considerations.

The solution to the “Jewish Question” by antisemites and Zionists was symbiotic. Antisemites believed that Jews ought to be expelled from European nations because they could never assimilate, while Zionists believed Jews ought to establish their own sovereign state because they would never be able to assimilate. For the antisemites, Jews could not assimilate because of the racial nature of Jews; for the Zionists, Jews could not assimilate because of an eternal inevitable enmity from non-Jews. The notion of Jews as a race, foundational to antisemitism, is also foundational to Zionism. Thus, leading Zionists such as Max Nordau, cofounder of the Zionist Organization with Theodore Herzl, often spoke of Jews racially:

Before the emancipation the Jew was a stranger among the peoples, but he did not for a moment think of making a stand against his fate. He felt himself as belonging to a race of his own, which had nothing in common with the other people of the country…

This is the history of Israel at the end of the 19th century. To sum it up in a word: The majority of the Jews are a race of accursed beggars. More industrious and more able than the average European, not to speak at all of the inert Asiatic and African, the Jew is condemned to the most extreme pauperism, because he is not allowed to use his powers freely.

Many leading Zionists expressed ideas suggesting that Jews were racially superior to other conceived racial groups. Zionists, despite feeling understandably threatened by antisemites, were not generally opponents of a racial conception of Jews—they simply disputed the specific racial traits that antisemites prescribed. Like the Nazis, many Zionists supported eugenics. Arthur Ruppin, who between 1933 and 1935 was the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, had this to say about the Jewish immigrant population of Palestine in 1911:

Let a question be touched upon here that is also of importance: the question of whether there is not a possibility to work towards maintaining the purity of the Jewish race in Palestine. Since we want to fully develop precisely what is Jewish in us in Palestine, it would naturally be desirable if only “racial Jews” came to Palestine. But a direct influence on the selection of immigrants according to their greater or lesser approximation to the Jewish racial type is practically unfeasible. Nevertheless, it can be foreseen that the immigrants will generally be more strongly Jewish than the Jews in Europe, because it is likely that those in whom Jewishness is most pronounced, physically and spiritually, will be most repelled by their non-Jewish environment in Europe and will therefore feel most drawn to the Jewish community in Palestine.

During the early 20th century, numerous racial tribalist ideologies were booming. Impious Jews who no longer believed the supernaturalist myths of their religious forebears, often embraced a quasi-naturalist myth of a Jewish race. Given the racialist mythology that exists in the foundational stories of the Tanakh, like that of Abraham and his “seed,” this shouldn’t be a surprise. The Tanakh contains passages that explicitly rebuke members of the tribe for having wives and children outside the mythological race:

After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.’ When I heard this, I tore my garment and my mantle, and pulled hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled. — Ezra 9:1-2

And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken thy commandments, which thou didst command by thy servants the prophets, saying, “The land which you are entering, to take possession of it, is a land unclean with the pollutions of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations which have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness. Therefore give not your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever.” — Ezra 9:10-13

Ruppin, in wanting to “purify” the Jews in Palestine sounded a lot like Ezra. Zionists didn’t ultimately need the 19th century “race science” to inspire their eugenicist ideals; they had Judaism. Ruppin wasn’t just a theorist though, he was in charge of the immigration operation for Jews to Palestine between 1933-1935, and his views played a role in it. As documented by the Jewish publication, The Forward:

As head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), [Ruppin] put his purity schemes into practice, arguing that Ethiopian Jews should not be permitted to immigrate, because “they have no blood connection,” and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be brought only for menial labor.

Despite some Jews obsessing over trying to demonstrate a racial unity among Jews, because anyone can convert to Judaism, and people did and do continue to convert, there can logically be no racial unity to it. No one can convert to a race. “Complicating” Jewish identity into something more than a religious identity is an ancient Jewish (and sometimes Christian2) tradition that is still alive and well today. But it isn’t complicated, it’s just superstitious racecraft.

Zionist organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), disparage people for believing what they label “antisemitic tropes”. The list of beliefs the ADL finds racist includes that “Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street” and “Jews in business go out of their way to hire other Jews.” It includes those ideas as “tropes” because they resemble beliefs or assertions made by antisemites about Jews, but it excludes the foundational trope of antisemites: that Jews are a race. It probably doesn’t include that “trope,” which contributed to the genocide of Jews and non-Jews, because the ADL itself embraces it. Often people try to use “ethnicity” and “ethnic group” as a way to smuggle in race without actually using the word race. For example, here we see the ADL defining racism as connected with “ethnicity”:

Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.

And here is Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the ADL, calling Jews an ethnic group.

Let’s be clear that the Jews, again, are complicated. And a lot of this doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes that we use today to think about difference. Yes, they are a religion. They are also an ethnic group.

“Ethnic pride” has long been a way for racial tribalists to express and hold onto pride about their race—aka conceived biological lineage or ancestry—while using a slightly different rhetoric that is less taboo. The rhetoric of ethnicity has functioned as a way for racial tribalists to essentially conceal racial judgments and theory without using the language of race. In their usage, it functions identically as the term “race”: establishing inclusion in a group based on biological ancestry. Ironically, even by the definition of racism by the ADL itself the state of Israel is racist because it gives “favorable treatment and evaluations” to Jews.

Israel currently gives special rights to Jewish citizens. As written in its Nation State Laws:

1 — Basic principles

A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.

B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.

C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

Israel also gives Jews particular privileges over property. As documented by Human Rights Watch:

The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”

Israel also gives Jews the exclusive right, globally, to immigrate—the “law of return.” It does not give this right to the survivors of the hundreds of thousands of people who were violently terrorized out of their homes in 1948—the Nakba.

The “law of return” includes both converts to Judaism and children of parents who are/were Jews. Which means that a “Jew” who doesn’t have any significant pious appreciation of the Tanakh, nor any recent ancestry in Palestine, has a right to “return” to Israel while the people who were coerced from their homes by militant Zionists and their descendants do not. According to Israeli law, American Jews born in Brooklyn, such as billionaire Jerry Seinfeld, have a greater right to live in Israel than the refugees in the West Bank who were violently coerced from their homes.

Ironically, many Muslims and Jews share common biological ancestry, especially Arab Muslims in Palestine and Mizrahi Jews (Arab/Middle Eastern Jews). And many Ashkenazi Jews(aka European Jews) are genetically closer to Italian Christians than Mizrahi Jews.

Our results, primarily from the detailed analysis of the four major haplogroup K and N1b founders, but corroborated with the remaining Ashkenazi mtDNAs, suggest that most Ashkenazi maternal lineages trace their ancestry to prehistoric Europe… Overall, it seems that at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion.

If Israel wants to use ancient blood-logic to give Jerry Seinfeld a right to return to Israel because a minority of his ancestors are presumed to have lived in ancient Judea, why shouldn’t millions of Palestinians be given the right who possibly are more likely than Jerry Seinfeld to have ancestors who lived in ancient Palestine or Judea?

It makes no more sense to conceptualize Jews as a race than it makes sense to conceptualize Christians as race. It doesn’t matter that many Jewish groups have been relatively more endogamous than some other religious groups; there has nonetheless been a significant amount of conversion and intermating among Jews and non-Jews. Other than the genetic evidence, the Maccabees were documented forcefully converting the Idumeans, and there’s a strong case that a substantial factor in the population growth of Jews in the Roman Empire was voluntary conversion. These days the amount of interreligious marriage among Jews is greater than many other religions, such as Mormons and Muslims. From a pew study:

The 2020 survey also finds that 58% of all married Jews say they have a Jewish spouse, while 42% say they are married to a non-Jew. That overall intermarriage rate has not changed much in the last seven years. In the 2013 study, 56% of all married Jewish respondents said their spouse was Jewish, while 44% said they were married to someone who was not Jewish. …

Previous Pew Research Center surveys have found that compared with Jews, larger shares of Mormons (85%) and Muslims (87%) in the United States are married to someone with the same religion.

Still, Zionists have been trying to locate “Jewish genes” for decades now, engaging in pseudo-scientific race research, yet have repeatedly failed: not only because the science doesn’t support the notion of a Jewish race, but fundamentally because it is an irrational quest. Bringing up science that shows some of the Jewish population shares ancestral biological descent is logically irrelevant. No one can convert to a race.

Besides being a common practice and seemingly theological reflex of lots of Jews since antisemites appeared on the world stage, the attempt to expand the definition of antisemitism beyond what it was originally established as has been a product of statecraft and priestcraft. Gradually after the state of Israel was formed there were increasing political efforts to equate the disparagement of Zionism with antisemitism. That effort has taken place in Israel, Europe, and the United States, carried out by Zionist scholars and political elite of the Israeli state. However, every “working definition” or “proposal” by Zionists, such as the IHRA definition that Zionists now are trying to enforce in the U.S., is complete garbage. For example, the first draft proposed by scholarly “experts” from the American Jewish Committee (AJC):

Antisemitism is hatred toward Jews because they are Jews and is directed toward the Jewish religion and Jews individually or collectively. More recently, antisemitism has been manifested in the demonization of the State of Israel.

It is embarrassing scholarship when the definition that the “scholars” provide of antisemitism is precisely what antisemites explicitly said it wasn’t: “directed toward the Jewish religion.” That explicit distinction was also directly substantiated by the 1935 Nazi Nuremberg Racial Laws defining Jews through a racialized framework of ancestry, not religion.

Let’s recall what the Antisemitic Handbook would have to say about the AJC definition:

As the name itself indicates, antisemitism is directed against the “Semites,” that is, against a race, not against a religion. If the antisemites were fighting against the religion of the Jews, they would have to call themselves “anti-Israelites.” It therefore betrays a poor understanding of language when someone connects antisemitism with “religion.”

It isn’t complicated: there doesn’t need to be committees of Zionists designing “working definitions” of antisemitism: it was explicitly, clearly, and coherently defined by antisemites themselves. Definitions like the IHRA’s are political and religious activism posing as objective scholarship.

The political reason why Zionists manipulate the definition of antisemitism is simple: after the Nazi Holocaust, the term “antisemitism” has become associated with one of history’s most heinous atrocities and one of the most understandably hated political cults that has ever appeared on the world stage. That moral association is socially lethal in most of the world now. If Zionists can morally taint anyone with such an association for criticizing their ideology, military actions, history, or spiritual mission, people become afraid of saying or doing anything that could lead the label to be applied to them, justified or not. Ironically, in the name of “fighting hate,” people who now “fight antisemitism” are often prolific spreaders of hatred by framing people who disparage Zionism or Judaism as antisemites. According to the ADL’s own “antisemitic” incident tracking, 58% of all “incidents” in 2024 contained “elements related to Israel or Zionism,” which includes expressing “conspiracy theories about ‘Zionist media’ manipulation” and suggesting a Jew has dual loyalty toward Israel. This implies that it’s “antisemitic” to suggest that it’s part of a Zionist effort to control media when Zionist billionaire Larry Ellison acquires CBS and TikTok with the public approval of Benjamin Netanyahu, who described how these assets will serve as a “weapon” for controlling the political narrative around Palestine.

The ADL claims to be dedicated to “fighting hate,” but simultaneously frames people as “antisemitic” for making reasonable inferences about Zionist political activities. Organizations such as Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism.org publish political blacklists of individuals who they believe are guilty of “antisemitism” and “hate.” StopAntisemitism.org cites the IHRA definition for deciding who gets included on their site. Children’s show host Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, has expressed sympathy for Palestinian children harmed by the famine in Gaza while also expressing sympathy for Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas. She also raised thousands of dollars for a Save the Children fund for kids in Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine. But, for expressing opposition to what she believes is a genocide and sharing information StopAntisemitism.org believes is false, they listed her as “antisemite of the week” for the first week of April 2025 and wrote an open letter to Pam Bondi demanding an investigation into whether Ms. Rachel is operating as a foreign agent.

Canary Mission is largely funded by wealthy Zionist dark money donors, has ties to the Israeli government, and is led by Israeli Rabbi Jonathan Jack Ian Bash. The individuals on their lists are doxxed with photos, other identifying information, and a dossier of their supposed sins—often speech that’s hostile toward Israel. The consequence of being on the blacklist could include career destruction or violent threats. The Trump administration has used Canary Mission for identifying immigrants and visitors that it has tried to deport.

Nothing to see here folks. If you do see something, based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism you are probably antisemitic, and if you say anything about it, you could be put on a public blacklist that fanatical Zionists and governments monitor. Being a Jewish organization like Jewish Voice For Peace won’t even provide exemption from being put on a blacklist.

The most explicit declaration of the Zionist intent to manipulate the definition of antisemitism was from Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who in 1973 wrote in the American Jewish Congress Bi-weekly a description of the framework that Zionists have now largely approached their critics with for the past 50 years:

One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism. The old classic anti-Semitism declared that equal rights belong to all individuals within the society, except the Jews. The new anti-Semitism says that the right to establish and maintain an independent national sovereign state is the prerogative of all nations, so long as they happen not to be Jewish.

The “new anti-Semitism” became a Zionist “trope.” He of course first defines the “old anti-Semitism” inadequately and unlike the “old” antisemitism, that is actual antisemitism, the “new” has nothing to do with “Semitism.” But it does have everything to do with leveraging the hatred the world has toward Nazis to slander those who disparage Zionism.

As the decades pass, the Zionist “task” to politically manipulate the “Gentile world” to feel that disparaging Zionism is equivalent to antisemitism has only grown. They have now succeeded at passing motions in the United States Congress that equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and establishing the IHRA definition of antisemitism across many U.S. institutions.

As of July 1, 2024, a total of 1,242 entities globally have adopted or endorsed the definition. The 1,242 entities include national and local governments, NGOs, universities, athletic clubs, and corporations. …

271 of the 533 non-federal government adoptions occurred in the UK, with 132 in the U.S., including 95 localities and 37 states, representing nearly three-quarters of U.S. states.

Unfortunately, there is a great danger that can come from such irrational declarations of antisemitism, other than the obvious desecration of the spirit of the First Amendment and instilling fear of criticizing a religion or foreign government. I believe Zionists are right: antisemitism is on the rise; but it’s primarily on the rise because of what Zionists are doing—and because there has been so little effort to explain clearly and distinctively what Semitism is. Rather than challenging and disparaging the racialization of Jews that is at the foundation of antisemitism, most Zionists and their supporters have enabled such a racialization by “complicating” Jewish identity; rather than accepting Jews as a religious group alongside Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Scientologists, they insist that Jews “are something more”—something special. That something special is ancestry. They do the same thing as antisemites, but in reverse.

They are semitists, but instead of conceiving the “Jewish race” they imagine to exist as a cursed race, they see it as a blessed race, and their philosemitism can lead the most zealous of them to see all disparagement of Jews, Judaism, or Israel as a sinister racist plot to destroy the “holy seed.” Love can be blinding, just as much as hatred. For example, John Hagee, the founder of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), the largest Christian Zionist lobby group in the United States, is a fervent philosemite. In a recent sermon he preached about how the “seed” of Abraham and the “descendants” of Jacob—the “Jewish people”—were promised the land of Palestine forever. His sermon conceptualizes Jews through a racial nationalist lens: a biological lineage that was chosen by Yahweh, a “real estate agent” of earth, to “conquer” and rule Palestine. But it isn’t just Palestine:

There are 38 different passages in the Bible that give the borders of Israel. God promised the Jewish people these lands. One half of modern-day Egypt, all of Israel, all of Lebanon, all of Syria, all of Jordan, all of Kuwait, and three fourths of Saudi Arabia.

He suggests it’s a divine duty for Christians to give support for Israel during their current war: “antisemitism never sleeps.” He says, those who bless Israel—defined as the modern state—will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. He asks his audience:

…what has been your treatment of the Jewish people? Remember, Israel is God’s firstborn son. They are the apple of his eye. What have you done literally done to bless the Jewish people?

Of course, the state of Israel appreciates the work of philosemites like Hagee. He boasts about a letter of gratitude from Netanyahu in his sermon. And billionaire Zionist Miriam Adelson, who lobbied for anti-Zionism to be defined as antisemitism, in a speech given to CUFI, praised the Christian audience for the blind nature of their loyalty to Israel:

Christian United for Israel is about putting faith into action… you fine men and women bravely and consistently stand up for Israel and the Jewish people without hesitation without calculation you do it because it is the right thing to do. Because it is the Christian thing to do. Because your souls also pine to Zion. And friends, never has this been clearer to me and to many of my fellow Israelis and Jews than over the past 9 and a half months.

In response to their unhesitating and uncalculated support for Israel, the philosemites have inspired great antipathy toward Israel. And as that antipathy has grown, it has become more socially acceptable and antisemites have become more bold. They’re willing to speak about what others will not; they speak, for example, about the Talmud, which describes Jesus as boiling in shit in the afterlife. But rather than simply making a religious critique, they incorporate a racialist framework. They provide the only conduit for anti-Judaism, because other prominent voices critical of religion, the ones typically comfortable with anti-Christianity, anti-Islam, anti-Buddhism, anti-Hinduism, or anti-Scientology, fear the reputational consequences of speaking out (or are themselves Zionists3).

I find antisemitism detestable. The notion that a person should be judged and classified as racially “Jewish” because they had ancestors who were Jewish is as contemptible to me as the notion that a person should be judged and classified as a “Nazi” because they had Nazi ancestors. I do not want to see antisemitism grow, nor do I want to see philosemitism grow. I want them both to fade into obscurity.

When Jake Shields calls Jews physically ugly it is a clear proof of racial enmity toward Jews (antisemitism) because Jews, as a religious tribe with a relatively diverse ancestry, do not have any universal physiognomy; only in a racial ideology like Semitism do they share a common and distinct physiognomy. People like Jake Shields and Nick Fuentes will continue to grow in popularity as long as other prominent voices mostly deny some of the things that they say that are actually true, partially true, and disturbing. If prominent people don’t point to radical Jewish rabbis as a valid, although not universal, product of Judaism—a religious choice—then antisemites pointing to the radical Jewish rabbis as products of race (semitism), an immutable universal property, will be what people find. And if people who don’t actually try to fully practice the religion of the Torah nonetheless stay devoted to the religious tribe and continue to identify as “Jews” or “Jewish” based on a solidarity with people who they believe have a particular ancestral lineage4, it’s going to reinforce the erroneous notion that Jews are a “racial tribe,” a pillar of antisemitism.

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4

For example, Sam Harris.

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This essay was originally published at The Libertarian Institute.

The more disordered modern society becomes the more loudly we hear a common diagnosis: capitalism wanted this.

Blaming capitalism has long been the status quo for the political left, who over the decades have expanded from the Marxist critique of economic inequality to blaming capitalism for eating disorders, serial killers, declining libidos, misogyny, and just about anything else they can come up with. Increasingly, blaming capitalism has gained popularity on the right as well, who credit it with the decline of the nuclear family, community, religion, and all sorts of moral and cultural decay.

“Capitalism wants you to be sick,” “capitalism wants you to hate,” “capitalism wants you to be weak,” “capitalism wants you to hate your body,” “capitalism wants you burned out, silent, and disconnected,” “capitalism wants you to save less and spend more,” “capitalism wants me dead.”

According to its critics, capitalism is the ghost in the machine pulling strings to make our lives worse, all for its own profit. But that’s a philosophical error—a refusal to distinguish between a system and its inputs. Our civilization does have serious problems. The critics are right to say so. But capitalism isn’t responsible for society’s flaws; we are.

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The Problems Are Real

Contrary to the Steven Pinker thesis, not everything is getting better.

Critics of capitalism point to skyrocketing mental illness, particularly among youth. It’s true. Rates of adolescent depression have doubled over the last decade, and suicide is now the second leading cause of death for people aged ten to thirty-four in the United States. Critics blame the commodification of attention—especially through social media—and argue that capitalism wants to exploit our mental health for profit.

They argue “capitalism is at war with the family” and other traditional communal institutions. Indeed, Americans’ membership in houses of worship recently dropped below 50% for this first time ever. They blame this for the crisis of meaninglessness that has contributed to increasing depression. Marriage rates are at an all-time low, as are birth rates, and where children are born, single-parent households are increasingly common. “Capitalism wants us to stay single,” they argue, and point to pornography as the symbol of how of capitalism wants to damage our relationships. As of 2025, OnlyFans has gained over 120 million active users and 4.5 million active creators.

They argue capitalism wants us fat to benefit the food and pharmaceutical industries. Over 40% of American adults are now obese, driven in part by ultra-processed foods developed and marketed with precision. Author Michael Moss criticizes food industry capitalists for engineering products precisely for the “bliss point” which maximizes consumption. Industry consultant Howard Moskowitz designed that formula—it’s real.

In general, they argue that capitalism wants what sells rather than what leads to human flourishing. Libertarians do themselves a disservice when they underplay these problems’ severity and suggest markets alone will solve everything. But there is a third option between capitalism wanting our cultural degradation or wanting to be its savior: it’s neither, and it was never supposed to be.

Capitalism is a Mirror

“What Capitalism Wants, Capitalism Gets” proclaimed The Wall Street Journal, but this is an absurdity. Capitalism doesn’t “want” anything. It has no goals, no intentions, no will. Capitalism isn’t a moral actor. It’s a mode of production—a system defined by voluntary exchange and private property, governed by prices and profit-and-loss. Its central function is to allocate resources efficiently by reflecting what people want and rewarding those who best provide it.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises explained:

“The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer. Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.”

In a capitalist system, what gets produced is a direct function of revealed preferences. Capitalism doesn’t care what people say they want, it reacts to what they actually want—demonstrated through behavior. When you start from that premise, the problem becomes obvious.

Capitalism is neutral. As the most successful economic system known to man, it produces in such abundance that it amplifies all of our desires. If those desires are disordered—if we want junk, or vice, or meaninglessness—it will produce that.

But we need to be clear about causality.

Capitalism didn’t create those things. We did.

It didn’t choose them. We chose them.

It didn’t promote them. It supplied them in proportion to our demand.

This happens in every direction. Capitalism will just as easily give us porn as it will therapy. As easily TikTok as it will books. It’s not the system making the choice, we are. And often, those wants are virtuous. Only the most extreme anti-capitalists will deny what capitalism has done to decrease poverty, decrease infant mortality, increase life expectancy, and improve literacy rates.

This isn’t to say there aren’t bad actors. Some entrepreneurs exploit vulnerabilities in the system. But this isn’t unique to capitalism. There are exploiters in every system. The key difference is that capitalism requires consent. Coercion must be replaced by persuasion.

Vice Exists Outside Capitalism

To believe that capitalism is responsible for human vice is to believe that vice would vanish in its absence. This mistaken idea was the basis for the New Soviet Man who, it was thought, would emerge in the absence of capitalism. He never did.

In the Soviet Union—where markets were suppressed and morality was enforced top-down—alcoholism was so severe that in the early 1980s, nearly 40,000 people died annually from acute alcohol poisoning. The issue got so bad that in 1985 the Council of Ministers of the USSR passed a law severely restricting alcohol sales, but this had little impact on consumption, it merely redirected it to home distilleries; about 23% of the population engaged in its production. But one doesn’t need to look to the extreme case of the USSR to see that dictating morality by law is doomed to fail; Russia’s story is identical to that of prohibition in the United States.

What communist and other authoritarian regimes uniquely reveal is how vice not only survives the state, but is institutionalized and expanded under state power. Corruption is the famed hallmark of authoritarianism. Despite preaching equality, while regular Soviets stood in breadlines, members of the nomenklatura (Soviet elite) had access to steak, lobster, and caviar. In North Korea, where foreign media is banned for its purportedly immoral influence, police officers are some of the biggest consumers of it, and will allow citizens to watch it in exchange for bribes. In Venezuela, where the Maduro government publicly champions anti-narcotics efforts, high-ranking officials, including Maduro himself, have facilitated massive cocaine shipments using state resources like presidential hangars, with his nephews convicted for attempting to traffic 800 kg of cocaine.

Under statism, vice doesn’t disappear, it just becomes the privilege of the elite. Capitalism, by contrast, subjects its elite to the will of the consumers who gave them their wealth. But it has no control over the nature of that will.

Critics of capitalism often claim that free market capitalism requires a virtuous society, and since we don’t have one, we can’t have it. That isn’t right. All societies will bear the consequences of an immoral population, regardless of how they organize. The inputs come before the outputs.

It’s true that capitalism has made vice more abundant. But that’s because capitalism has made everything more abundant. It doesn’t want vice, we do.

If You Want Better, Capitalism Will Deliver

But just as capitalism amplifies our worst instincts, it also amplifies our best. When consumers want virtue, capitalism responds with innovation and abundance.

For instance, as public awareness of processed foods’ harms has grown, demand for organic alternatives has surged, driving the U.S. organic food market to $71.6 billion in sales in 2024 with double the growth rate of the overall food industry. American adult cigarette smoking rates dropped 17% between 2017 and 2022, enabled in part by the development of healthier alternatives like vapes and nicotine pouches. Looking back since 1965, adult cigarette smoking rates have fallen 73%, proving that even with an addictive product, people are capable of wanting better. Amid rising mental health concerns, the market for mental health apps—offering accessible therapy, meditation, and more—has exploded with an annual growth rate of 17.9% as users vote with their downloads. (Unfortunately, this fact has done little to satisfy many socialists, who literally want people less happy so they’ll be motivated to support revolutionary change.)

Are nicotine pouches and medication apps perfect solutions to our problems? Of course not. But they prove the point: when people actually want better, capitalism doesn’t resist—it adapts.

Moreover, as economist Deirdre McCloskey explains, one of the consequences of capitalism is an improvement in our society’s virtues, in enabling us to want better:

If we had gained a better material world, two cars in the garage and Chicago-style, deep-dish, stuffed-spinach pizza on the table, but had thereby lost our souls, I personally would have no enthusiasm for the achievement. I urge you to adopt the same attitude. A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. …

But fattening up the people, or providing them with inexpensive silk stockings, I will try to persuade you, is not the only virtue of our bourgeois life. … Capitalism has not corrupted our souls. It has improved them. … The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people, one person averaged with another, I claim, have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than their impoverished ancestors of the pastoral. … They are better humans—because they in their billions have acquired the scope to become so and because market societies encourage art and science and religion to flourish…

Capitalists ended slavery and emancipated women and founded universities and rebuilt churches, none of these for material profit and none by damaging the rest of the world. Bourgeois virtues led us from terrified hunter bands and violent agricultural villages to peaceful suburbs and lively cities. Enlightened people such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft believed that work and trade enriched people in more than material things. They believed that a capitalism not yet named broke down privileges that had kept men poor and women and children dependent. And for the soul they believed that labor and trade were on the whole good, not dishonorable.

The Blame-Shifting Impulse

The common thread in anti-capitalist critiques is the belief that capitalism is not simply efficient—it’s seductive, manipulative, even demonic. That it produces what we shouldn’t want.

But capitalism isn’t a deceiver. It’s a revealer. And there’s something deeply revealing about the fact that the very people most critical of capitalism’s moral consequences are often participants in the vices they denounce.

There’s a reason actor Leonardo DiCaprio argued that capitalism had locked the United States “into an addiction to oil” while his private flights alone were responsible for twenty-two times the annual carbon emissions of the average American—including his trip to receive an environmental award—and he dismisses individual action to reduce emissions as “greenwashing.” There’s a reason Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacks the 1% for owning too many yachts and cars while owning three houses, and a reason the same progressives who decry greed are the least charitable. There’s a reason far-right pundit Nick Fuentes criticizes the “pro-gay” agenda he alleges is “embedded in the fabric of capitalism” while going on a gay date with a “catboy” and watching transgender porn. And there’s a reason the purportedly trad conservative influencer who decries feminism, promotes modesty, and criticizes women who post bikini pictures for clicks does exactly the same thing herself.

Why criticize capitalism for what one has chosen to take part in themselves? It’s a psychological defense mechanism. It’s a hit to your self-image to acknowledge that what you truly want is different than what you want to want.

As Ludwig von Mises explained:

“This search for a scapegoat is an attitude of people living under the social order which treats everybody according to his contribution…The fool releases these feelings in slander and defamation. The more sophisticated do not indulge in personal calumny. They sublimate their hatred into a philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism, in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failure is entirely their own fault. Their fanaticism in defending their critique of capitalism is precisely due to the fact that they are fighting their own awareness of its falsity.”

What You Want Is What You Get

I’m not a religious man, but it’s not an accident that religion speaks of both angels and devils, and that the devil is so often depicted sitting on one’s shoulder and whispering into an ear alongside the angel. We know the angel is right, but the devil is seductive. The question isn’t “Why does capitalism produce so much vice?” The question is “Why do people want it, and what can we do about it?”

It’s always easier to call for state power than to do the hard work of building something better. But there’s no shortcut to virtue. To bring about a better society, stop working on changing “the system” and start working on changing yourself and persuading those around you to do the same.

You want a more beautiful culture? Stop funding ugliness.

You want more religious participation? Proselytize better.

You want more dignity? Stop consuming degradation.

When we see our worst desires amplified on a societal scale, rather than viewing capitalism as the source of the problem, we should see it as a mirror that reflects back at us what we don’t like about ourselves. Just like a real mirror, if you look fat, it doesn’t mean you should smash the mirror, it means it’s time to start losing weight.

If we want a better world, we have to start wanting better. And we have to mean it—not just say it. If we do—if we really want it—capitalism will help.

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This essay was originally published in Sublation Magazine.

Classical liberalism faces unprecedented challenges today, threatened by authoritarian ideologies from both the Left and the Right. These ideologies, often labeled as identity politics, manifest in various forms such as intersectionalism on the Left and ethnonationalism on the Right. My career has been dedicated to defending classical liberalism—particularly its libertarian variant—against these threats. Over the past decade, I produced dozens of videos and films advocating for principled individualism, and collaborated with numerous prominent figures in the anti-identity politics movement while working at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism.

However, recent events, particularly following October 7th, have exposed a troubling hypocrisy among many of my former colleagues. While we once united under principles of treating everyone equally and applying the same rules universally, their embrace of Zionism—an ethnonationalist ideology—starkly contradicts these principles.

This has become painfully clear to me post-October 7th. I was raised as an Orthodox Jew (of the Modern Orthodox variety) and sent to private Jewish schools K-12 where instilling Zionism into students’ identities was an explicit part of the mission. Despite being fully American, I was raised celebrating Israeli holidays, taught modern Israeli Hebrew, took classes in Israeli history (or at least a certain perspective on it), and spent my final semester of high school touring around Israel, a trip which included a week when we participated in a replication of the IDF’s basic training and culminated in many of my classmates’ first time shooting a gun—an IDF standard issue M16. (To see what this life is like for young Jewish-Americans, see the recent film Israelism).

The indoctrination worked for almost all of my classmates, a number of them even joined the IDF after graduating; meanwhile, none joined the American military.

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I was different, however. I’m not entirely sure why—some have suggested to me I may be mildly autistic—but I have a need for logical consistency; its absence gnaws at me, and I find it difficult to let it go. As such, my libertarianism, atheism, and anti-Zionism developed in tandem. Classical liberal philosophy is rooted in “life, liberty, and property,” and a consistent application of property rights is core to the libertarian tradition. European Zionists coming to a land overwhelmingly owned by Palestinian Arabs (Zionists purchased only 6.6% by 1948) with the intention of forming an ethnostate for themselves, accomplishing this goal by expelling 750,000 Palestinians—many of whom owned their homes and continue to pass down their keys and property deeds to their children and grandchildren—and refusing them the right to return to their property for over 75 years (sometimes shooting unarmed civilians at the border to prevent it), is blatantly inconsistent with any reasonable interpretation of classical liberalism.

Last year, I published my first book, Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice.” The book tells the story of Leftist activists’ decades-long attempt to redefine the word “racism” away from its traditional definition of “prejudice or discrimination based on race” to “Power + Prejudice,” meaning any bigoted actions against a group with alleged institutional power—namely white people—cannot be called “racist.” The activists who developed and forwarded this redefinition were all themselves white, and while the story I uncovered reveals egregious behavior on their part, I recognize that they undertook their activism from a core of good intentions. They aimed to focus attention on the bigger racial problem, white racism, and so sought to remove any discussion of minorities’ bigotry. But by making the standard for racism unequal in application, I track how their redefinition backfired, creating far more racism than it solved.

Recently I attended a meeting of conservative activists to promote my book. I explained my research to a room that nodded along in agreement and ended to applause; I even sold a few copies in the room. But I was not the only activist presenting that day. Another activist told the room about his project, a push to get the Senate to legally instantiate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism.” He too received impassioned agreement from the crowd. As someone who needs consistency, you can imagine my frustration.

For readers unfamiliar with the IHRA’s redefinition of antisemitism, it’s the product of a 2016 meeting of the alliance’s 35 member nations (including the United States and Israel). It reads, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” The empty vagueness of “certain perception” makes the redefinition impossible to interpret on its own, so the definition was accompanied by 11 examples to clarify it. Seven of those examples make reference to Israel, including, “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Redefining “antisemitism” to include criticism of a foreign state is far removed from what most people think of when they hear the word. Dictionary.com defines “antisemitism” as “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.” Merriam-Webster as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” The Oxford English Dictionary as “prejudice, hostility, or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds.” Worse, many of the examples given by the IHRA are true.

There are numerous points of accurate comparison between Israeli and Nazi policy, as has been repeatedly pointed out by Jewish Holocaust survivors. Founding an ethnostate on shared land with unequal rights for obtaining citizenship, immigration, land ownership, and more is a racist endeavor by either the classic or activist definition.

Other examples from the IHRA list refer to Jewish people, but can also be true, such as “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” I don’t mean to claim that all or most Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own nations, but certainly a substantial volume are. Must I pretend I didn’t watch my Jewish-American classmates join the IDF rather than the American military? It’s not prejudiced to acknowledge this, it’s an accurate judgment based on fact.

Efforts to redefine language for activist purposes extend beyond the IHRA’s redefinition of antisemitism. Deborah Lipstadt, a historian and the former U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, successfully campaigned for the New York Times to alter its style guide to spell “antisemitism” without a hyphen. Lipstadt argued that the hyphen and capital “S” in “anti-Semitism” implied a racial category of “Semite,” which she sought to avoid. While I personally have no objection to this change and adopt it myself—recognizing that the term has long referred specifically to prejudice against Jews—it’s noteworthy that this move effectively deracializes Jews in language.

Contrast this with another style guide change supported by The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, the controversial journalist best known for her work on the 1619 Project. The Times now capitalizes the “B” in “Black,” even retroactively in historical quotes, thereby racializing Black identity. Conservatives have rightly criticized this as treating Blackness as a pseudoscientific racial category rather than a mere pigmentation. However, the push to legally enforce the IHRA’s redefinition of antisemitism, which Lipstadt supports, is far more concerning. It seeks to use the force of law to redefine a term in a way that could stifle legitimate criticism and debate, a move that is antithetical to free speech and classical liberal principles.

When first adopted by the IHRA’s 35 member nations, the redefinition was specified as “not-legally binding,” but that’s slowly been changing. In 2020, the Trump administration issued an “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism” which instructed executive agencies to consider the IHRA redefinition when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Then in 2024, the House of Representatives passed the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” by a whopping 320-91 vote, which, if my conservative colleague’s efforts to get the Senate to pass it succeed, would go even further than Trump’s executive order by using the IHRA redefinition exclusively and banning the use of “alternative definitions of antisemitism” for “fail[ing] to identify many of the modern manifestations of antisemitism.” Should the law pass, it will likely be found unconstitutional, but the cultural damage it will cause will be substantial. Additionally, at the state level, 37 states have adopted the IHRA redefinition to varying degrees.

The effort to make antisemitism and anti-Zionism synonymous has already wrought enormous harm for Jews worldwide. As I found when activists tried to redefine “racism,” while much of their target audience went along with it unaware of the bait-and-switch, many went the other way and became racists.

This was an entirely predictable result. If one group is allowed to be racist toward another and the recipients of the racism are told that they’re not allowed to call it out, how many of the recipients do you expect will go along with that? If they’re no longer presented with an equal colorblind standard, how many do you expect will independently arrive at colorblind ideology rather than returning racism from whence it came? Similarly, if you’re not allowed to criticize anything that Jews do even when it involves a higher ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, but they’re allowed to call you antisemitic for bringing it up, what do you expect will happen? If they’re not presented with a distinction between Zionists and Jews (ideally with further distinctions between the various subtypes of Zionists and Jews), how many do you expect will identify the distinction on their own? This is the start of a pernicious spiral.

The rise of Nick Fuentes and other actively racist and antisemitic influencers on the growing identitarian-Right is the result of this spiral’s progress. For the first 25 years of my life I never experienced antisemitism once; now I see it multiple times a day on X. I’m not saying such speech should be censored—where it exists it should be brought to light and countered—but we should be alert to its causes. To be clear, racists and antisemites are solely responsible for their actions. But telling someone who doesn’t lock their doors and gets robbed that they should really start locking up isn’t “victim blaming,” it’s a necessary consideration for a responsible person. Here, unfortunately, the Zionists who put Israeli state interests above the well-being of Jews get to decide how to manage the locks for all of us.

Those funding the effort to institute the IHRA redefinition don’t seem to care much about this, they’re all in on helping to enable the most extreme Israeli desires whatever the costs. Research by Eli Clifton, an investigative reporter at the Quincy Institute, has exposed the leading role of the Adelson network in funding initiatives to institute the IHRA redefinition and other policies restricting speech critical of Israel. The late Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate and ardent Zionist, and his widow Miriam Adelson have poured hundreds of millions into groups like the Maccabee Task Force, where Miriam serves as president, and the Israeli-American Coalition for Action (IACA), which aggressively lobby for the IHRA redefinition’s adoption. For instance, IACA's executive director Joseph Sabag has claimed credit for drafting laws instituting that IHRA redefinition that have passed at the state level. Concurrently, Adelson openly conditioned her massive funding of the 2024 Trump campaign—over $100 million—on support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, as “God gave the West Bank to the Jews.” Adelson was sued along with a handful of other pro-settler American donors for funneling around $1 billion annually to provide violent West Bank settlers in racially discriminatory Jewish-only settlements with military hardware and arms.

In the woke-era, conservatives have worked to conserve the definitions of all sorts of words the identitarian-Left has sought to redefine. “Racism” is hardly the only example, there’s also “gender,” “woman,” “violence,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Anyone who has taken a position against the redefinition of these words for activist ends, but supports redefining “antisemitism” for an Israeli political agenda, is either a hypocrite or never held a principled position to begin with.

I sincerely hope that my conservative friends will come around to see their inconsistency and change. Unfortunately, their track record leaves me pessimistic. In the meantime, I stand ready to work with anyone anywhere on the political spectrum to defend our ability to communicate accurately and fairly with each other, free of dangerous activist manipulations.

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When Jake Klein, The Black Sheep’s co-founder and lead editor, wrote for The Black Sheep last winter about the sharp contradiction between opposing identity politics and supporting Zionism (Jewish identity politics), he was describing a conflict that has defined my whole adult life and vocation.

In 2011, while still in my twenties, my first book was published on the forgotten midcentury Reform Jewish anti-Zionists—nominally a biography of Elmer Berger, the highly polarizing long-time leader of their organization, the American Council for Judaism. After my third book was published a little over a year ago (an excerpt of which ran on this Substack), I’ve also now edited a primary source reader on the American Council for Judaism, being released this month by De Gruyter.

I was raised a minimally observant Conservative Jew, but I managed before knowing almost anything about American Jewish history to intuit that I would have liked to be a Reform Jew in the era before the Holocaust and Israel redefined everything. Indeed, the definitive statement of Reform Jewish belief, published in 1885, was quite clear:

We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

In other words, it was possible to be a proud Jew and reject the first principle of Zionism—that the Jewish people is a political collective that should be taken for granted as having any “national” or group rights—as a fundamental category error. Moreover, not only was adopting this view considered essential to Jewish emancipation in the 19^th century, but contrary to the labeling of critics of Zionism as “self-hating Jews,” it was Zionism that upheld the core belief of classical antisemites; that the Jews are a collective body with a singular political agenda.

Far more importantly, this issue is at the heart of the Trump administration's war on what it portrays as “campus antisemitism”—the suspension of the Bill of Rights in the lawless arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Badar Khan Suri in the name of equity and inclusion for a small number of hard right Jewish nationalists. In September 2010, awaiting the publication of my first book, I read the architect of this campaign, Kenneth Marcus, lay out his deeply disturbing vision for civil rights law in Commentary magazine. While early Obama-era racial optimism was still very much in the air, Marcus considered it a scandal that the Justice Department Office of Civil Rights “has been reluctant to suggest that Jews are members of a biologically or nationally distinct group.”

Yet, unfortunately, it’s hard to think of any group more ill-equipped to combat this new authoritarianism racializing the Jewish people than the pro-Palestine movement in America, whose arguments often rely on an intellectually lazy paradigm of opposing “settler colonialism,” or worse on baroque, direct appeals to blood and soil.

It has been especially striking over the last year just how much the midcentury political scientist Richard Hofstadter’s “projection principle” vis-à-vis American Zionism is evident in its Palestinian nemesis: the conviction of being “a people – one people” expressed through a mix of grade school-level pedantic kitsch and simulated drill indoctrination in a militant foreign nationalism.

Most of all, there has been a scandalous lack of interest by the pro-Palestine Left in what Zionism even is—in knowing their enemy. This has been revealing of no one more than the more thoughtful element around the leftist magazine Jewish Currents, particularly given that milieu’s major “Know Your Enemy” conceit toward the American right. It’s hard not to conclude that they complacently fall back on the “settler colonialism” paradigm precisely to evade what knowing their enemy would reveal about themselves. The roots of what we now call identity politics can be found in American Zionism, particularly the Progressive Era ideologue Horace Kallen. Indeed Labor Zionism, the dominant ideology behind the foundation of the State of Israel, owed a large debt to Lenin that David Ben-Gurion acknowledged. That revolutionary ethos of Zionism, in short, is exactly what the “settler colonialism” narrative misses.

Through many years of political isolation before the October 7^th massacres, my early discovery of a lost, humane Jewish anti-Zionism seemed only to have left me feeling helpless from reproaching both sides of the culture war. But now that great contradiction in our political culture surrounding identity politics – the shameless Jewish exception – has reached a more dramatic climax in the second Trump administration than could have ever been imagined, there is unrivaled ground on which to prove that a principled defense of the liberal third way is possible.

I grew up about five miles from Jake Klein in Maryland, and though several years older than Jake had friends who attended the same Jewish day school. At 16, having just begun community college on 9/11, I was already familiar with the prolific and fiery libertarian polemicist Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, who railed against the neoconservatives at the heart of the post-9/11 war party, expounding at length on the neocons' roots in the Left, and in particular Trotskyism. Imagine my shock to learn from my father that not only were Raimondo’s claims about the Trotskyist inheritance of the neocons true, but that he had known many of the era’s neocons during his youth as an activist in the Young People’s Socialist League.

Inheriting the interests that accompanied my father’s political history, I soon began to recognize that so many of the New Deal-era “old right” figures Raimondo celebrated were really just Norman Thomas Socialists (i.e., the more idealistic side of liberal anti-Communism), setting me on a path that would ultimately culminate in my book on the history of the Socialist Party of America published in 2015. But it was more or less inevitable that this draw to what had been obscured about the largely Jewish vanguard of the anti-Communist left in the 1930s and 1940s, including many friends of my mother’s parents, would lead to probing their views on Israel and Zionism before the 1960s and thus to the subject of the American Council for Judaism.

I was active in the early years of Mondoweiss, a Jewish anti-Zionist blog that began in the left-liberal mainstream before adopting a more militant posture, and simultaneously active with an unaffiliated synagogue in Brooklyn, from which I had to part ways when… well, Jake wrote a book about the woke ideological trend it embraced. When I attended a Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) national conference in 2011, they were still rooted in the 1990s Bay Area activism typified by the late Rabbi Michael Lerner, a memorable critic of the purity spiral that tore apart the New Left (and one of the “six other guys” of Big Lebowski fame!).

It was possible to believe then that vintage late-Cold War “third-worldism” glorifying violent revolution in the Global South was a thing of the past, and that JVP were more or less normie liberals. But by mid-decade they were feteing the “black power”-era celebrity and unrepentant Stalinist Angela Davis, and it was just as disillusioning around the same time that the main complaint of the short-lived “Open Hillel” coalition, organized to liberalize that behemoth of Jewish campus life, seemed to be that the national Hillel leadership dared deprive them of the opportunity to hear from the sainted “gender theorist” Judith Butler.

In the wider zeitgeist, the mass echoing praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates in the summer of 2015 was my real soul-crushing turning point. Regarding Coates, I cannot improve on what I wrote in my third book published last year, The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism:

What Coates wrote in Between the World and Me is the sacred text of an atheist and materialist version (i.e., along the lines of Max Weber’s narrative of the Protestant ethic) of the theology of the Nation of Islam. Coates’ first article of faith is strikingly indistinguishable from the Nation of Islam; indeed if anything more literal. In a logical extension of passionately avowed atheism, Coates declares “the black body” to be “the holy vessel,” all that exists, his sacrament.

Coates does not believe in the mystical immutable evil of the white race, but his reformulation of the historic Nation of Islam belief owes an obvious debt to David Roediger: “However it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” In other words, white people do not exist, only those led over the course of generations to believe themselves to be white. Some idealistic souls may still believe this is more or less true of all nationalisms, but Coates insists the black race is eternal across space-time.

The Coates cosmology, like that of the Nation of Islam before it, bears a curious resemblance to the mystical doctrine of Leo Pinsker, the first major popularizer of Zionism in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Pinsker believed the cause of anti-Semitism was the innate human fear of ghosts—that is, horror at the sight of the “ghost nation” of the Jews wandering the earth after 2,000 years of exile—and that therefore the cure to anti-Semitism was to restore the Jews to a “normal” existence as sovereign in the Land of Israel. (After publishing Between the World and Me, Coates would describe “whiteness” as an “amulet” bearing “eldritch energies”). Parallels with Jewish nationalism in Coates’ thought are especially striking. A long shadow can be traced to the speech of the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann at the 1943 conference that effectively inaugurated the American Jewish establishment and Israel lobby:

“Whatever else we demand of the world tomorrow—equality of rights, protection of minorities, punishment of criminal—is not specifically Jewish. It is the application of the elementary principles of democracy to the Jewish people. There is one specific demand we have to make today, and this is the demand to end the anomalous position of the Jewish people and to allow us to live as a normal people.”

Here are all the distinctive traits of American identity politics that are now so disturbingly and rudely unambiguous: disdain, if not contempt, for “elementary principles of democracy” as inadequate for achieving justice, which somehow must contain principles bearing the innate character of the identity group in question, all expressed in the belligerent language of demands. The demands “to end the anomalous position” and “to allow us to live as a normal people” even bear a striking resemblance to current activism as therapy.

Indeed, there is no public intellectual in American history to whom Ta-Nehisi Coates bears a stronger resemblance than Norman Podhoretz—their writing defined by a narcissistic blend of chauvinist race-pride and self-important name dropping, delivered in five-digit word essays of pompous prose that have hypnotized a critical cohort of elite middlebrow minds into seeing world-historic profundity. The single most Coatesian essay by Podhoretz was undoubtedly “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” his interminable 1986 narrative of frustration over limited success in attacking Gore Vidal as an anti-Semite.

Whereas Podhoretz, in the wake of the 1960s New Left, tapped into the demons of a rising generational cohort of American Jews—and the bitterness of many older, tragically misled Cold War liberals—to construct neoconservatism from the helm of Commentary, Coates’ great windfall was discovering that what his elite white audience in fact wanted to hear, in their highly analogous great disappointment with the course of the Obama presidency, was his black nationalist patrimony repackaged to suit their intellectual fashions.

With that Nahum Goldmann quote, I was very consciously channeling Irving Reichert, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco who quoted it in his Yom Kippur sermon attacking the 1943 American Jewish Conference. Reichert’s sermon, whose lasting infamy in some quarters may have inspired the rabbi character in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, concluded thus:

I protest as a misleading and dangerous distortion of truth the implication that American Jews are fighting and dying, not so much to secure a just and lasting peace under the Four Freedoms for all men everywhere, not so much for love of America and devotion to it as their homeland, as for special rights and favors and privileges for Jews that go beyond “the elementary principles of democracy.” It is for you, on this solemn night when our actions are judged by God, to search your own hearts and souls on this crucial matter.

This direct attack on the very proposition at the heart of the Trump administration's “war on antisemitism” was not only a prophetic witness for the ages to the many and enormous crimes committed by the State of Israel over eight decades, but anticipated the two great afflictions that have defined 21^st century America: the “War for the Greater Middle East” enabled in no small measure by the Israel lobby, and whose follow-on effects prominently include accelerating the collapse of a common American identity and social fabric—“the disuniting of America.”

But the summer of Ta-Nehisi Coates was also the summer of Bernie Sanders, and I joined that good fight to retrieve the social democratic promise so many of us once associated with Barack Obama, when it was possible to believe that his first campaign was one to arrest the disuniting of America. But then, in the resurrection of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) the following year, I saw the political class welcome the rise of a new socialist movement in America that lacked a fundamental belief in freedom precisely because their “resistance” mania led them to forget what a fundamental belief in freedom even meant.

Against this backdrop, and steadfast to the honor and memory of the non-Communist old Jewish Left (that contrary to bad history on all sides had a better record of principled opposition to Zionism than the Communists), I beheld the reboot by young Jewish members of DSA in 2018 of the historically Communist publication Jewish Currents with complete and utter horror. Yet I mournfully seized on the comforting assumption that this was just the last gasp of secular American Jewish identity, like the last stand of Irish-American identity in the 90s. Back in 2013, when I was still in the late stage of breaking with my old synagogue, the momentous “Pew Report,” which effectively projected the demographic disappearance of non-Orthodox Jews in America, liberated me from believing there was ever any “what might have been.”

But five years later, my most decisive return to life after the pandemic came amidst a sudden burst of renewed intellectual interest in Judaism, though I’m doubtful I’ll ever belong to a synagogue again, still coming home to an affinity for vintage Jewish existentialism. I'm now in the later research stage of a history of Menorah Journal, a forgotten magazine in the first half of the 20^th -century of untold import to both Jewish and American intellectual history, for which I was awarded an American Jewish Archives fellowship that afforded me a blessed escape from the September 2024 election vibes in an enchanting old ruin on the banks of the Ohio.

Underlying my pursuit of this new project was a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough in the quest to know thyself, through a reacquaintance with Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism. The thread through all my historical scholarship has been dismantling the shared postwar sacred story of Jewish and American nationalism—the quasi-biblical narrative of the Holocaust, American victory in WWII, and the founding of the State of Israel. Learning how absolutely nuts the teenage Scholem was in the antiwar fringe of WWI-era Berlin, not unlike myself in post-9/11 DC, led it to dawn on me:

If Scholem’s life’s work was to build a grand scholarly edifice from which to enact the primal Freudian desire to demolish everything his father’s generation believed in—the late 19^th century fusion of Jewish identity with German patriotism—such am I vis-à-vis the analogous late 20^th century American Jewish narrative. Elmer Berger said in his last years that his one regret was having never written his comprehensive, systematic critique of Zionism. But while he would have only written a dry political science textbook, my aim in writing a history of Menorah Journal, an important voice of the "cultural Zionist" vanguard that opposed the drive toward statehood, is to take a more rewarding historical approach – in effect, an intellectual history of American Zionism from roughly 1900 to 1960.

It goes without saying how grateful I am to have begun this new chapter of my life before the October 7 massacres—I shudder to think of the absolute despair I would have otherwise experienced through all that followed. When the brief ceasefire this past winter was announced, I made a point of looking back at Andrew Sullivan’s column in the immediate wake, which spoke eloquently to many things true at once, to remind myself why I had as much righteous anger as anyone toward Hamas and its apologists. Two months earlier, the New York Times published a thorough exposé on how legacy outfits from the Bush-era antiwar left were refashioned into a sprawling network of CCP propagandists, who were behind the major organized Gaza protests. Yet it was my historical understanding of what we were witnessing—the "Weatherman" stage of the whole phenomenon of “wokeness”—that allowed me to reach a sober and sensitive understanding of the protest movement’s true nature and the limits of its menace.

I never had any illusions about Israeli depravity, but I was sensitive to how the concept of “whiteness” had led to the use of “white” and its derivatives precisely as left-wing antisemites deploy derivatives of “Jewish”—as a superfluous and arbitrary descriptor that serves no other purpose than to ascribe unique and intrinsic wickedness to the subject, to a group based on their immutable characteristics. The recent Harvard “antisemitism report” cataloged a long list of appalling incidents of this kind. Yet one could hardly ask for a better case against the identity-first approach to fighting antisemitism (to say nothing of fighting for the humane values of the liberal arts against high intersectionalism) than going after scientific research and basic academic freedom through an (at best) ham-fisted application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against the vaguest insinuations about “an unsafe campus environment.”

The encampments in 2024 that began at Columbia were a grotesque insult to any disciplined campaign like those of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that could have effectively pushed for divestment from the Israeli war machine—though I recoil from any kind of cultural or even ordinary commercial boycott, and always found the BDS movement deeply unserious and thus the official American Jewish obsession with it downright silly.

But I am also, after all, a student of the American left, and such episodes are historically a necessary education from which their best and most principled minds emerge.

As the encampments were winding down, I attended “Dissident Dialogues,” where Jake Klein was a last-minute addition to their debate on Israel and Gaza. I texted him a review of my first book in hopes he might reference it to highlight the contradictions we both saw in this emerging anti-identity politics pro-Zionist movement. Indeed, I doubt the pro-Zionist audience of that debate could even articulate the Zionist first principles Jake and I have found kinship in striking at the root.

I had only briefly met Jake twice before at events of his old employer, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), whose emails throughout the 2021-22 hangover from the long hot summer of 2020 gave me the feeling of how it must have been receiving frequent literature from the American Council for Judaism in the 1950s—to have fallen all the way from having to plead in vain that racism is no substitute for Judaism to having to plead in vain that racism is no substitute for liberalism. Indeed, a key reason I so identify with Andrew Sullivan is his role as the gay Elmer Berger, one voice against many defending ordinary gays and lesbians from being forced into peoplehood with the T and the Q and the God knows what else.

Most of the figures formerly affiliated with FAIR that Jake called out as "hypocrites" last winter are not worth the bother. Douglas Murray is as creepy as he is pathetic. Jordan Peterson on a good day brought to mind historian Shlomo Sand’s description of the late Israel Shahak—“a tremendous moral force who just doesn’t know the material”—though Oliver Traldi’s “Clean Rooms and Dirtbags” has stood the test of time. Nothing could have been sadder at Dissident Dialogues than emotional trainwreck Ayaan Hirsi Ali needily tossing out a dirt cheap applause line about Queers for Palestine.

The figure worth a closer look is Bari Weiss.

I long recoiled from the typical online leftist view of her as an avaricious opportunist, and hear from more than one source that she’s simply out of her depth. I fell for her stated post-2020 mission to save the humanities, and even if The Free Press can still produce good journalism, their “March of Dimes looking for a new cause after polio” problem is only getting worse. Their non-response to the arrest without a warrant of Mahmoud Khalil destroyed any editorial integrity the publication once had, and I suspect a Daily Wire-level implosion and tell-all will not be long in coming.

The emotional investment I placed in Bari Weiss during and after 2020 was basically the same I placed in Tulsi Gabbard throughout Trump’s first term; I am consistently stunned to look back on just how invested I was before 2020 in the Left and the Democrats having the right answer to Trump. Not long ago, I reread her original mission statement from the summer of 2020, and had to look at it five times before realizing this was actually what I was looking for. A few short paragraphs stating the basic values of a free society were buried in an avalanche of Jewish special pleading, and the shock of recognition actually made me sick to my stomach.

Nevertheless, I must do justice to the whole arc. There is a lot, to be sure, that I now look back on with great bemusement of believing in June 2020 that we were actually on the brink of a Year Zero-level demolition of our nation’s cultural heritage. But in particular, what went down at the New York Times during the peak days of rage remains profoundly disturbing. Discussing it in real-time with my late mentor Ernest Evans, he immediately invoked La Prensa, the lone independent newspaper in 1980s Nicaragua suppressed in large part by the internal direct action of its regime-controlled union. A decade earlier, I had taken Ernie to meet Leonard Sussman, the guiding force behind my first book, to share stories of their common human rights work in that era. Half the conversation was about La Prensa. We have only just begun to reckon with how much this phenomenon of regime suppression was the whole story of the last decade.

The larger context was my at times hysterical anti-anti-Trumpism throughout his first term. As historian of the Socialist Party of America, how could I see it otherwise when the underlying premises of Russiagate were a carbon copy of the World War I classification of journalism and political speech as espionage if not treason, and the October 2020 Twitter suppression of the New York Post the clear 21^st century version of banning antiwar newspapers from the mail. But now, of course, the Trump “war on antisemitism” has outdone it all by actually bringing back Woodrow Wilson’s infamous “Palmer Raids.”

Alas, between general reconciliation to the blue tribe and tenuously reaching out to any glimmers of decency on the Jewish left, it can be easy to feel that, like the tragic early Jewish freethinker Uriel da Costa, I am resigned to be an ape among apes.

The apparent determination of wide swathes of non-Orthodox American Jews to die on the hill of the last decade’s abandonment of liberalism is discouraging to say the least, and the conceit to small-l liberalism typified by Bari Weiss is increasingly overshadowed by a bizarre Modern Orthodox Jewish brand of wokeness.

Yet in response to Trump’s “war on antisemitism,” there has been a heartening critical mass of individuals from both sides of the last decade’s divide to vindicate how, as a Jew, I feel impelled to hope that this can be the moment to recover a lost humane idealism, whose stalwarts in both the Jewish and American past I have had the privilege, through the vocation of historical scholarship, of seeking to give voice.

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For more from Jack Ross, read his essay “John Ganz Shares the MAGA Idea of the Left,” published today in Sublation Magazine.

Being a black sheep means being the odd one out—someone unlike others, often hated or considered worthless by their group. Remarkably, the world’s largest religion, with over two billion adherents—over 30% of the global population—is centered around a black sheep: Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus challenged the religious authorities of his day, taught revolutionary ideas that were extreme and radical for his time, and spent the majority of his time with society’s outcasts. He was rejected by his hometown, abandoned by his Jewish people, and ultimately tortured and killed by those he sought to save.

Despite Christianity’s popularity, few figures, past or present, are more polarizing than Jesus. People have performed some of the most selfless acts in his name, yet others have committed deeply evil deeds while wielding his name as a vehicle for power. Jesus’s story proves that, despite the severe consequences a black sheep may face, they have the unique ability and duty to bring revolutionary positive change to civilization.

During Jesus’s time, Jewish power rested among three groups: the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians. The Herodians were a political party loyal to King Herod Antipas, the Roman ruler of Jewish land from 4 B.C. to A.D. 39. The Sadducees were the political and religious elite who collaborated with the Romans, overseeing Temple rituals and sacrifices. The Pharisees, though less politically powerful than the Sadducees, were the religious leaders most influential with the common people of Judea, emphasizing strict adherence to the Law of Moses and oral traditions, which elevated personal piety. These groups disagreed on much, yet they united to condemn Jesus, illustrating how threatening his teachings were to the religious, political, and social norms of their time.

Jesus was born into poverty. His mother was a woman shamed by society. He grew up in Nazareth, a low-class, poverty-stricken town that prompted people to remark, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” As he gained prominence, many scoffed and rejected him because of these humble origins.

What was Jesus teaching that upset so many?

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Love Your Enemies

When asked to summarize the most important commandment, Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declared: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” This teaching was radical because it rejected retaliation, disrupted social hierarchies, and undermined authority based on fear and division.

To understand the depth of this challenge, consider the societal context. The Jewish people were under Roman occupation, facing oppression and cultural erosion. The Pharisees maintained their influence by upholding the Law as a bulwark against assimilation, while the Romans enforced order through fear. Jesus’s teaching of grace and reconciliation—not just tolerate one’s enemies but actively love them and pray for their well-being—directly opposed the prevailing ethos of retribution and tribalism, making it a profound act of defiance against both religious and political authorities.

For example, in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus heals a man’s withered hand and allows his disciples to pick and eat heads of grain on the Sabbath, an act considered harvesting and thus work. The Sabbath was a sacred law, and his followers were accused of breaking it. However, Jesus argued that there are always circumstances where it’s worthwhile to violate rigid laws, so long as the violation serves mercy and human need. 

This challenged the Pharisees’ authority, as their role was to enforce Jewish Law, and demonstrated Jesus’s prioritization of compassion over legalism.

Befriend Sinners

Jesus also became a black sheep because of the company he kept. His followers included fishermen, tax collectors, and sinners. The Jewish people despised tax collectors, who were seen as traitors collaborating with the Romans, yet one of Jesus’s closest followers, Matthew (also known as Levi), was a tax collector. Jesus also defended women accused of adultery and those involved in sex work, saying, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” By associating with sinners, Jesus challenged norms around purity, morality, and inclusion.

In Jewish society, purity laws governed social interactions, dictating who was clean or unclean, righteous or sinful. Associating with sinners risked ritual impurity and social ostracism, as the Pharisees believed it compromised one’s standing before God. Jesus’s actions directly violated these norms. Today, we recognize the beauty in helping the needy, but it was Jesus’s teachings that helped make this a cornerstone of Western moral thought. 

When the Pharisees saw Jesus building relationships with those who disobeyed the law, they viewed him as guilty by association, much like many Christian conservative leaders today who shame and ridicule sinners.

What Jesus understood, however, aligns with modern psychology: shame and ostracism are not the most effective ways to change behavior. Connection, love, and community foster transformation. Consider Daryl Davis, the jazz pianist known for converting hundreds of Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members away from hate. Could Davis have achieved this through shame or ridicule? No, he did it by developing friendships and maintaining long-term relationships.

Conversely, when conservative pundit Matt Walsh tweeted “A heartfelt message to Dylan Mulvany,” a self-described trans-woman, calling her “eerie,” “weird,” “lifeless,” and “unearthly,” it amassed over 18 million views but exemplified how Jesus would not handle such a situation. Walsh, who identifies as a Christian, sought to cut Dylan down rather than uplift her. Jesus, while not condoning sinful actions, sought to draw sinners toward something better through love, not anger. If Walsh truly wanted to act Christ-like, he would have invited Dylan for a meal instead, maintaining his values while seeking friendship. Yet, had he done so, many of Walsh’s conservative peers would likely have been disgusted—not unlike how the Pharisees felt toward Jesus. How quickly would Walsh become a black sheep among conservative influencers if he publicly broke bread with transgender “woke” people in a fully loving manner?

Speak Boldly

When Jesus returned to Nazareth, he declared himself the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, reading from the book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The townspeople, who had known him his whole life, were so enraged that they tried to throw him off a cliff. In response, Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

This experience resonates with many modern-day black sheep, especially those who have found success away from home. Perhaps you moved to the big city for opportunities and adventure, or grew a social media following. Being recognized for your unique value feels great, especially for those not acknowledged for these qualities growing up.

But when you return home, you’re often still seen as the same awkward person you were when you left. I’ve personally experienced this. I’ve built a small social media following by sharing my teaching approaches to controversial topics and hosting a podcast discussing these issues. I’m no household name, but it’s not uncommon to be stopped at the mall, Disneyland, or the movies by people who say they love my content and that it’s helped them better understand our culture. Whenever this happens, I’m grateful my voice has made an impact. But my best friends from adolescence—the men who stood beside me at my wedding—as well as my cousins, siblings, and other relatives, often see my work as insignificant or silly. It wasn’t until I appeared on Fox News discussing Critical Race Theory’s impact on schools that my father even knew I had a podcast. In the outside world, people see the you of today, but at home, they see the you of the past—the you evolving through failures and awkward transitions.

Jesus was no different. Christians recognize him as the Son of God and the Perfect Man, but as 100% God and 100% man, Jesus was also human. He was an awkward teenager, just as we all were. He fumbled and fell while playing games with friends, just as we have. Those in Nazareth knew him from the beginning, and even if they recognized his talent, to claim to be the Messiah and challenge the most powerful people in his culture, government, and religion was too far.

So what did they do about it?

Being a black sheep isn’t merely about being different; it’s about risking shunning and rejection from your flock.

Be Willing To Suffer For Your Values

Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot, one of his closest followers. When Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus’s feet with perfume in front of Jewish authorities, Judas was appalled by the wastefulness, believing the money spent on the perfume could have served the poor. Judas saw Jesus’s approval of this act as hypocritical, leading him to betray his Rabbi.

The Pharisees, despite their hatred of Roman rule, aligned with Rome to demand Jesus’s arrest for being a threat to Roman authority in Jerusalem. A crowd turned against Jesus, even choosing to release a known murderer, Barabbas, to ensure Jesus’s death for his heresy. The fact that Jesus was chosen to die rather than a murderer shows how vilified he was. The same people who had laid down palms to welcome Jesus to Jerusalem—symbolizing triumph, prophecy fulfillment, and hope for salvation—flipped under the influence of the Pharisees, who saw Jesus as a political threat and blasphemer. The Pharisees wielded their power to turn the masses against him, defending their traditions and way of life, which they believed Jesus endangered.

Jesus was spat on, beaten, humiliated, and tortured before being nailed to a cross. Matthew 27:27-30 reads:

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head.

What was the charge for this treatment? Claiming to be the Messiah, the Son of God—a claim that, if seen as true, would have demolished the Pharisees’ power. Christians believe Jesus was killed for speaking the truth, but all can acknowledge his unwavering dedication to his mission.

Jesus’s story proves that being a black sheep is ultimately worth the cost. Despite the immediate consequences—rejection and death—his teachings reshaped the moral and spiritual landscape of the world. His emphasis on love, compassion, and truth inspired a movement that grew from a small band of followers to a global faith, influencing laws, ethics, and cultures for centuries. For nearly a hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion, the Jewish people persecuted Christians, including Saul before he became Paul, the writer of much of the New Testament. For another two hundred years, the Roman Empire hunted and executed Jesus’s followers, ending with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. Yet, their courage, inspired by Jesus’s example, gave them the strength to stand firm, showing that standing for truth can yield transformative change, even if the fruits are not seen in one’s lifetime.

Being a black sheep means having the bravery to speak truth despite the consequences. During the COVID pandemic, those who challenged mainstream narratives about the virus’s origin or vaccines were shunned. Friendships ended over claims that George Floyd’s death may have involved factors like fentanyl and methamphetamine, not solely Derek Chauvin’s actions. Stating that “men can’t be women” can lead to ostracism by those adhering to gender ideology.

Whether or not you share the Christian faith, Jesus’s story exemplifies the ultimate black sheep experience. He was a black sheep not only for his teachings but because he was human. Rejection is something we all will experience at various times throughout our lives, and Jesus’s story reminds us that being an outsider can spark incredible change, even if it takes beyond your lifetime to see it.

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In times of chaos, most people cling to the crowd. But for a rare few, collapse is the proving ground.

Collapse doesn’t just expose the fragility of institutions—it reveals who can think, who can lead, and who can remain clear when everyone else is swept up in the chaos. While this kind of disintegration usually happens once, if ever, in a single lifetime, you and I have already experienced multiple cycles. From the legacy media being undermined by social media to institutional experts being revealed as more institution than experts, we’ve seen what falls and rises amid collapse.

Yet, despite living through multiple rounds of this clear-cut pattern, most people still don’t see it. The modern world is full of noise: ideological hysteria, clickbait outrage, performative politics, and collapsing trust in legacy systems. It’s no surprise that more people will run for cover in a crowd or become beholden to their biases. But if you know how to use it, collapse isn’t a tragedy, it’s an opportunity:

it weeds out the NPCs and ideologues to elevate those who can offer true insight.

Collapse culture isn’t just about political dysfunction or economic volatility. It’s a breakdown of consensus reality. When the institutions and individuals we trusted begin to contradict themselves, lose credibility, or weaponize narratives, the average person becomes disoriented. This disorientation is fertile ground for manipulation.

In times of chaos, people will cling to anything that offers them certainty. Often, that certainty comes in the form of slogans, mobs, and moral absolutes.

Today, you can see collapse culture causing the decline of yesteryear’s anti-woke leaders—James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin, Douglas Murray, just to name a few—who’ve gone from offering insight during peak wokeness to constantly contradicting themselves by embracing Jewish identity politics, levying vague threats against Joe Rogan for talking to people they disagree with, and even trotting out the old “leave it to the experts” last resort. This should sound eerily familiar: they’re exactly the tactics woke leftists used to push their own flawed narrative and suppress valid criticism.

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This was a fun one! In our conversation, we covered:

• My ideological journey to libertarianism, atheism, and anti-Zionism.

• The selective application of anti-identity politics rhetoric by figures who defend Israel’s ethnonationalism.

• How the American far-Left has damaged the Palestinian cause.

• The failure of many libertarians to uphold libertarian philosophy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• How the weaponization of false allegations of antisemitism parallels the weaponization of allegations of racism by Black Lives Matter.

• The collapse of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).

• The historical and religious roots of Jewish separatism.

• Strategies for fostering empathy and common humanity in a polarized debate.

Lee Fang is an investigative journalist known for his in-depth reporting on how organized interest groups and ideological systems shape public policy. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The Nation, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Now publishing primarily on Substack, he aims to deliver independent, nonpartisan journalism that goes beyond tribal narratives through original reporting and sharp analysis. Lee has built a reputation for his commitment to transparency and accountability.

Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. He has written for numerous publications, including The Intercept, The New Republic, The Nation, Vice News, The Free Press, UnHerd, Real Clear Investigations, Tablet, and The Spectator. He has produced dozens of short documentary videos for The Intercept, The Washington Post, PBS Frontline and other outlets, and directed two feature documentary films, one of which was nominated for an Emmy Award. He has a Masters Degree in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

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Losing touch with your values and getting swayed by the group ends in the quintessential mid-life crisis movie scene, where the protagonist realizes their life hasn’t been their life for as long as they can remember. Especially for people pursuing unconventional lives, withstanding public criticism on a mass level while pursuing what matters most is the key to success. But how exactly do you do it?

I talked to Ali Tate about her journey from canceled model to thriving entrepreneur and how being a black sheep is often a painful but necessary catalyst for growth. After going through a highly public cancellation attempt, she did exactly what the mob most wanted to rob her of: built a business that gave her both financial and personal freedom.

In our conversation, we covered:

• How cancel culture trains us to accept empty lives and become NPCs

• Unconditioning the habit of deferring your authority to other people

• Accepting instead of avoiding the outcomes you fear

• Common ways that people disempower themselves today

• Opting out of destructive group behavior and beliefs

• How having high potential often correlates with being a black sheep

A ton of misinformation regarding Khalil’s case has been disseminated into the public discourse, which Jake has been covering on social media. Unfortunately, when someone speaks so powerfully against the herd, such malice is par for the course. To help clear up this misinformation and gain an understanding of Khalil’s legal situation, we spoke to friend of The Black Sheep Jenin Younes.

Jenin is an experienced impact and strategic litigator. A graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law, for 13 years she has litigated criminal and constitutional cases in state and federal courts. For the past several years, she has focused almost exclusively on First Amendment free speech cases and took an original legal argument to the Supreme Court last year in Murthy v. Missouri, which challenged the Biden administration’s pressure on social media companies to suppress conservative speech and alleged COVID-related misinformation. She also has extensive experience communicating legal issues and arguments to the public, and has appeared on hundreds of podcast, radio, and television shows for this purpose, participated in panel discussions and debates, and published opinion editorials in a range of outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Free Press, Compact Magazine, and Tablet.

In our conversation, we covered:

• Khalil’s constitutional rights as a green card holder.

• The evidence, or lack thereof, against Khalil.

• The conflict between the First Amendment and the immigration statutes being used against Khalil.

• The relevant legal precedent in Khalil’s case.

• The social contagion of hatred and lies against advocates for Palestinians.

• What will happen next in Khalil’s case and in the Trump adminstration’s broader efforts against pro-Palestinian activists.

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Join our next livestream for a real-time black sheep hangout + discussion on topics like groupthink, the philosophy of individualism, radical self-reliance, and other topics people seeking meaningful lives in modern times need. Stop by via YouTube, Rumble, Instagram, Substack, or X, [almost] every Tuesday and Wednesday evening.

If you want a community based on your values, help build it!

You don’t have to know about something to have an opinion on it.

Thanks to the bandwagon effect, you can bypass the messy business of thinking for yourself. As soon as you see the masses moving in one direction, your brain gets to work concocting reasons for why you should do what you were designed to: conform. You probably won’t even realize what’s happening. For a social species like us, sometimes conformity feels like conviction.

When our group isn’t a tribe of 100 people we depend on directly, but a revolving door of total strangers, the bandwagon effect becomes our Achilles’ heel.

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