This is one of those posts that feels like I’m shouting LEEROY JENKINS, but I don’t know how I avoid commenting on it. So here we go…

Mark Driscoll appeared on Jeremy Boreing’s podcast this week, and addressed some of the controversy around him in the midst of a broader conversation about the state of the nation, the conditions shaping young men, and his ministry more broadly.

In many ways it was vintage Driscoll, demonstrating the ability to articulate in fresh ways Christian ideas that are both true and controversial, and also distorting his history and how he exited Mars Hill.

What was also visible in the interview is how slick Driscoll is in understanding his audience, in this case being Boreing. When asked one specific question about the controversy around Mars Hill, Driscoll manages to slickly pivot to politics, not addressing any of the specific issues he was charged with. He also appeals to Boreing’s experience as a leader, asking him to reflect on times when employees were upset with his behavior. Boreing takes the bait and talks about friction with Candace Owens, a former Daily Wire employee, where Boreing helped lead, and says, more or less, “Who could have seen it coming?” (Someone page Jonah Goldberg on that question, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Boreing asked no direct questions about specific issues — the firing of Paul Petry, the Result Source effort to game the NY Times book list, other specific accusations of bullying and domineering, the graphic sexual content of some of Driscoll’s sermons and talks during those years, or the William Wallace II posts that were exposed.

One of the most bothersome (at least to me) elements of the interview is Driscoll deflecting criticism of him to criticism of his family, talking about how the attacks on them are far worse than what he’s endured. On the one hand, I’m sure that criticism exists; I believe I’m correct in stating that I’ve contributed nothing to it — I never saw it necessary to talk about the ministry or influence or opinions shared with me about his family as essential to the overall project of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. But at the same time, it seems blaringly obvious to me that if one is going to preach and teach and advocate that men set the tone for their homes, and if you’re a leader who takes advantage of church funds to game the bestseller lists, who bullies and domineers staff members, and who builds a reputation making controversial and scandalous statements about a variety of subjects, you need to do the “masculine” thing and take responsibility for what you’ve brought into your home.

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The trial of Lindsay Clancy is the latest installment in the emergence of a kind of death cult atmosphere in the United States. Supporters have gathered, dressed in pink, arguing that post-partum depression is to blame for the mother of three allegedly strangling her children with exercise bands. A report from the CBC quotes one supporter:

“I don’t think people really understand unless they’ve been through it,” said Danielle Buckley, who drove five hours from Maine to watch the closing arguments.

“They just want to see her be punished for what happened to her children.”

The passive voice construction of the final sentence speaks volumes: “…what happened to her children.” Were I to have reported that story, I would ask Mrs. Buckley, “What happened to her children?” Because the answer is that, by all evidence, they were strangled by their mother.

Mental illness is real. Post-partum depression is real. As someone who pastored for 15 years vocationally and another 5 non-vocationally afterward, I’ve seen many whom I love and care for struggle with depression, including post-partum depression that can be utterly debilitating. It’s also true that child-rearing is exhausting. We used to talk about how years 0-4 was “baby jail,” meaning that your life was essentially on lockdown until you reached the years were things like dressing yourself, potty training, snack time, feeding yourself, and entertaining yourself were attained by a growing child. I’m in no way denying that it’s hard.

I’m also one who has written in the past about the debilitating burdens of mental illness. One of my favorite quotes from Cormac McCarthy (which inspired the title of my friend Alan Noble’s book) is an exchange from the book The Road:

What’s the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

For those of us who struggle with depression, that’s an identifiable idea. Anxiety, depression, shame, a sense of failure — these things can all haunt us like ghosts throughout our days, and the act of resisting their voices can be profoundly wearying.

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But to take that reality — and it is real — and use it as a permission structure for solidarity with an alleged murderer like Clancy is a sign of a deep cultural sickness, where solidarity with the victim of psychological turmoil trumps our sense of solidarity, compassion, and sympathy for her murdered children, her bereaved husband, and the others who mourn this monumental loss.

This is only the latest installment in a cultural trend that must be acknowledged. The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met by some with a kind of triumph, a sense that the executive of a healthcare company had it coming because healthcare and health insurance are expensive, bureaucratic, and at times indifferent to their clients. Likewise, the 2025 murder of Israeli embassy workers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were followed by statements of solidarity by anti-Zionist activists.

And who can forget the plethora of statements during and after October 7^th. 2023, as Hamas raped, pillaged, and murdered its way through Southern Israel? Or one of the most disorienting moments of all, when support for Osama Bin Laden’s critiques of America became a TikTok trend?

All of this reveals a profound erosion of a central value that did not come easy to the West, but could slip away, it seems, far too easily: the concept of human dignity. It’s rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept that human beings are made in the image of God and have a profound level of dignity and worth, a concept that leads to statements like, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It drove the founding, and drove many aspects of the political reformations of the 19^th century around the globe. It drove the civil rights movement, in which Martin Luther King Jr. demanded that America make good on the “promissory note” of the founding for people of all races.

But in many ways, we’re talking about issues that are far more fundamental than those sought by the founders, or by civil rights leaders. We’re going straight to the fundamentals of the book of Genesis, that human beings are made in the image of God and “thou shall not kill.”

Yes, there is such a thing as war, and even just war, wherein we find ourselves in intense conflict with an evil opponent. Ukrainians today are fighting for their dignity against a force that seeks to rob them of it, and killing is involved. But if one cannot see the difference between the just violence against an invading military force that would seek to rape a community’s women, kidnap their children, and kill their men, and the murder of a healthcare CEO, or of diplomats of a country whose policies you don’t like, or of three children, then I believe we’ve lost the plot culturally.

We can and should have compassion on women who are suffering from post-partum depression. We can and should have compassion on those whom the healthcare system failed. But if that compassion has no limits, including the killing of one’s children, then we are inviting a violent and murderous spirit into our culture, and where it ends will be nothing short of a cult of death.

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By “the Squad,” I mean the group of progressive Democrats who arrived in Washington in the backlash to Donald Trump’s first presidency—most famously Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s own Rashida Tlaib. They were young, media-savvy, confrontational, and considerably further to the left than the Democratic establishment that preceded them. Just as Trump 2.0 is more brazen and less restrained than Trump 1.0, Squad 2.0 politics is more ambitious and radical.

I’ve come to believe there is something in human nature that makes this almost inevitable. We swing the pendulum. Trump returns to office offering a more aggressive version of right-wing populism. Democrats could have responded with sobriety, with a kind of kitchen table liberalism that was worried about the health of institutions, the cost of groceries, the quality of Americans’ healthcare. Instead, they’re increasingly drifting in the direction of a kind of progressivism that may win in the short term, but I feel certain will prove as polarizing and narrow-minded as MAGA.

I’m sure this is not good for us.

Something like 35 percent of the country is going to vote Republican almost regardless of circumstances. Another roughly 35 percent is going to vote Democratic. The exact numbers move around, of course, but the basic shape of American politics has been remarkably durable. Then there’s everybody else: voters with partisan leanings but weaker attachments, voters responding to economic circumstances, voters angry about immigration or abortion or Gaza or the price of groceries, voters who simply have an intuition that things are going well or badly and that somebody ought to be rewarded or punished for it.

Those people decide elections.

And this is what makes the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan so interesting—and, to me, troubling. If you’re unfamiliar with him, El-Sayed is a young, talented politician in the mold of Zohran Mamdani, and has a troubling record of comments related to Israel and the Jewish people.

El-Sayed represents something quite different from the technocratic liberalism that dominated Democratic politics a decade ago. His politics are populist, combative and distinctly of the post-2016 left. And one of the more revealing moments of his campaign came on April 7, when Hasan Piker appeared at an event supporting El-Sayed’s Senate campaign.

Piker is a social-media personality whose work demonstrates, among other things, the strange elasticity of modern political celebrity. On one hand, he is perfectly comfortable playing with the aesthetics and provocations of online progressive culture—including gender and sexuality. On the other, he has repeatedly made statements about Israel and Jews that have generated accusations of antisemitism, including extraordinarily inflammatory commentary surrounding October 7.

That El-Sayed was willing to campaign alongside him matters.

But there’s another part of this election that I find almost as interesting, and considerably wonkier: the polling. Allow me this rabbit trail for a moment…

Going into the primary, the public polling suggested that El-Sayed should win comfortably. Some surveys showed him ahead by double digits. The actual result was dramatically closer, with El-Sayed narrowly defeating his principal opponent, Haley Stevens, a member of congress from suburban Detroit with one of those fantastic Michigander accents and with mainstream, left-of-center views.

At a moment like ours — where the far right and far left are drifting deeper into populist sentiments — that’s not a small detail or footnote to the story. Polling matters not only because it helps campaigns and parties understand opportunities, stakes, and the need for investment. It also has an effect on enthusiasm in a race. It might have been the suburban and rural Democrats in Michigan were far more enthused by Stevens, but if the polling told them she had no chance and was going to lose by ten points, and if the primary election fell on a day when one might be juggling kids from activities or when a stack of bills came due or when a to-do list was too long, it’s easy to say to oneself,. “Stevens is going to lose by 10, my vote doesn’t make a difference.” And it doesn’t take too many people feeling that way to turn the election.

This is one of the reasons I think we ought to be considerably more interested in who conducts political polls, how those polls are sampled, and what assumptions are built into the models.

And this becomes especially important in a race like a Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where polling is relatively sparse. We tend to encounter a poll as a number—El-Sayed +11—and forget that underneath that number is an elaborate series of judgments.

Who was contacted?

Who answered?

Who was considered a likely voter?

How were respondents weighted for age, race, education and geography?

How many voters came from Detroit? How many from Ann Arbor? How many from suburban Oakland County? How many from western Michigan?

Those factors will change the outcome of a poll considerably without falsifying a single response. I’m not suggesting that polls were deliberately manipulated. There are plenty of perfectly innocent reasons polls miss elections, particularly primaries, where turnout tends to be low and only the most politically active tend to show up. In fact, there’s a case to be made for weighting polling in the direction of the more politically active, which might in face have led pollsters to favor the most progressive districts, which would have favored El-Sayed.

Even so, it leaves us with questions about the way races like this one get covered, especially when they get framed as a runaway victory long before the ballots are cast.

(This is the end of my polling excursus.)

The temptation for Democrats in the Trump era will be to look at Trumpism and conclude that the problem with American politics is not populism but insufficiently progressive populism. If Republicans can win by attacking elites, institutions and establishments, Democrats will find their own elites, institutions and establishments to attack. If Republicans reward politicians who refuse to apologize, Democrats will produce their own unapologetic fighters. If the right has influencers who thrive by saying outrageous things, the left will find influencers of its own.

To put a finer point on it, the influence of people like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and of course, President Trump, inflamed the right with deep and profound anti-immigrant sentiment. As that sentiment has taken hold, we’ve seen a parallel on the left in anti-Israel and antisemitic ideas drifting into the mainstream.

To be sure, the right has its own problems with antisemitism, perhaps most clearly exhibited by figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. It also has a history with antisemitism proffered by figures like Pat Buchanan, going back 50 years. But the right proved willing to do hygiene on its own ranks (thanks largely to the courage and conviction of William F. Buckley on the matter) and actively sought to drive antisemites out of the party and out of office. In the post October 7^th world, bafflingly, with a President who has been as staunchly pro-Israel as any in history, and who has empowered officials to sanction universities who have failed to protect Jews from violence, harassment, and intimidation, the poison of antisemitism remains within the ranks of right wing media and right wing influencers.

It’s all connected. Populism emerged as a cultural phenomenon among Americans who saw people like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama as “elites,” especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis of the late 2000’s. Somehow, Donald Trump managed from his perch on a golden toilet at Trump Tower in Manhattan to tweet his way into the hearts of right wing populists, assuring them that he was their champion, and they ushered him into power.

In 2018, the backlash comes in the form of the Squad.

Trump 2.0 produces Squad 2.0.

And then the machine feeds itself.

This is where I think Americans of both parties should be worried.

Every excess of the right becomes justification for an excess of the left. Every excess of the left becomes evidence for the right that its worst suspicions were correct. The Republican looks at El-Sayed and Piker and says, See? We told you what these people really believe. The Democrat looks at Trump and MAGA and says exactly the same thing.

And each side becomes increasingly convinced that moderation is cowardice, restraint is surrender, compromise is corruption and the only appropriate response to political extremism is an extremism that leans towards or at least hints in the direction of our own political convictions. To put it another way, what was once unacceptable in a candidate is now tolerable so long as that candidate shares a critical mass of my grievances.

That is why polarization has become a flywheel, and its momentum continues to ramp up grievance and hostility. American politics appears to be increasingly advancing into greater hostility, escalating stakes, and radical ideas, and both parties are willing to tolerate morally unqualified candidates because they are convinced that a loss at the polls is a loss of… well… something. Their way of life. Their children’s future. Control of the bathrooms. The environment. Oil. Manufacturing jobs. On and on it goes — and politicians make hay by escalating anxieties and promising that every election may be our last.

The result is that once again, we head towards elections where morally unqualified characters are getting begrudging support from politicians who know better. Because the only thing worse than electing a dangerously antisemitic Senator to office, or someone credibly accused of sexual assault, or any host of other accusations that could be leveled at any number of current-era politicians, is that the other side win.

Fauci, of course, has become one of the great punching bags of the New Right—the man held responsible for closed schools, lockdowns, mandates, and much of the heavy-handed public-health policy of the COVID era. And I should confess up front that I tend to talk out of both sides of my mouth about him.

I found his embrace of celebrity distasteful. There was something jarring about seeing him photographed in sunglasses beside his beautifully manicured pool, in his beautifully manicured backyard, in the middle of a pandemic that had turned millions of ordinary lives upside down. There is no question the man loved the camera. There is also no question that, for a while, cameras loved him back. Journalists wanted to hear from him. Television producers wanted him on their shows. He was treated as a kind of Doctor Jesus—the reassuring man in the white coat who seemed to have answers at a moment when everyone was very, very afraid.

But as many journalists have documented, and special credit goes to National Review’s Jim Geraghty, Fauci sometimes overstated his certainties. He sometimes overstepped his authority. And afterward, when questions arose about what had happened and why, he sometimes offered accounts that were difficult to square with the record.

None of that should be waved away.

But neither should it surprise us that a powerful person, confronted with evidence that he may have gotten consequential things wrong, would shade the story in ways that protect his reputation. That isn’t an excuse for Fauci. It’s an observation about human beings.

As Joan Didion put it, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Whatever else you want to say about him, Fauci spent a career doing work that saved an extraordinary number of lives. His role in PEPFAR and the fight against AIDS alone belongs in any honest accounting of his legacy. There was a reason, when a strange new virus began spreading around the world, that presidents and journalists and frightened Americans turned to Anthony Fauci. He hadn’t wandered in off the street.

But COVID mitigation policies were proved, in some cases, to be founded on flimsy science, and were functionally draconian. As the pandemic lumbered on, month after month, some public officials, and organizations like the Chicago teachers’ union, seemed eager to keep the status quo of shutdown in place as long as possible. A backlash was inevitable.

Which brings me to Rand Paul.

Paul has made attacking Fauci a brand. Fauci’s science, Fauci’s credentials, Fauci’s statements, Fauci’s emails, Fauci’s relationship to gain-of-function research: on and on it goes. It has become the centerpiece of a particular political identity, one that seems to assume there is still enough simmering resentment over COVID to build a national campaign around it.

But I would hope that most Americans have reached a much less satisfying conclusion about the pandemic: public-health authorities, politicians, journalists, and ordinary people made serious mistakes under extraordinary circumstances. One thing all-too-often forget is that more than 7 million people died of the disease, including more than a million Americans. (Some estimates put the global number closer to 14 million.) It was a nightmare situation, decisions were made in a frenzy, and many of them were wrong. Who among us wouldn’t prefer to pretend the whole miserable episode never happened?

But there is something deeper going on in the Paul-Fauci drama that is worth paying attention to, because it extends far beyond either man. And it is most evident in the way the world of “podcast bros” and a certain segment of the world of social media. It’s the conspiratorial habit of mind.

Conspiracism assumes that somewhere behind every catastrophe there must be a villain twirling his mustache. Someone planned this. Someone profited. Someone is pulling the strings. “Who benefits?” becomes the master question. and sometimes it’s the right one. Powerful people really do conspire. Corporations cover things up. Governments lie. Jeffrey Epstein existed.

But “Who benefits?” is not a skeleton key to history. Sometimes terrible things happen because institutions are lack policies, or they lack competence, or because events are moving way too fast. Sometimes, it’s because incentives are misaligned, people are frightened, experts are arrogant, politicians are cowardly, and human beings make bad decisions with incomplete information.

I happen to think the lab-leak explanation for COVID is the most obvious one. You had gain of function research on this kind of virus taking place in Wuhan, and you have a government in Beijing that is notoriously allergic to transparency. And the extraordinary speed with which discussion of a lab leak and gain-of-function research was dismissed during the early stages of the pandemic deserves scrutiny of its own. But I also understand what some scientists were hesitant to embrace it. Public health officials are obligated to make their judgments based upon available data, and in this case, the curse for our public health officials was that they could — and remain to this day — constrained to work from data presented to them by the Chinese Communist Party. And of course the CCP has no interest or incentive for disclosing a lab leak.

This is what we need political leadership for; persons (like Tom Cotton, for example) who are not afraid to take into consideration the scientific consensus, the political realities, the history, and a broader base of reporting and intelligence to make judgments. This is what political leadership is all about.

But none of that requires Anthony Fauci to be a Bond villain, and the witch hunt to make him one betrays both the impossibility of the task handed him at the beginning of the outbreak and the utter lack of incentives in our current media environment for transparency and full disclosure.

Several things can be true at once.

First, Fauci appears genuinely to have believed there was scientific value in certain forms of gain-of-function research. He was hardly alone. Serious scientists disagree about the risks and benefits of this work, which is precisely why governments around the world have funded it.

I don’t pretend to know enough virology to settle that debate. I know I don’t like it, but I also know that very smart people see value in it as a means of being better prepared for the next breakout virus.

Second, I think the record clearly demonstrates that the scientific and journalistic establishment moved far too quickly to close ranks around certain explanations for COVID, stimagtizing anyone who broke with their consensus. Questions that should have been investigated became markers of political identity instead. That was a profound failure, and reporters like Geraghty who kept pulling on those threads deserve credit for doing so.

Third, once conspiratorial thinking took hold, every new piece of evidence became evidence of the conspiracy. Ambiguity itself became suspicious. A bureaucratic email wasn’t merely a bureaucratic email; it was a clue. A grant wasn’t merely a grant; it was a breadcrumb. Every road led back to Fauci because the story had already decided who the villain was.

Here, for a moment, I want to say something about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — a document that is now canon among COVID mitigation skeptics and critics of Fauci. Authors of this document, like Jay Bhattacharya, current director of the National Institute of Health, were right about the resilience of younger populations against serious infection, and correctly warned about the possible consequences of social isolation, and learning loss. But if you read the authors of GBD at the time, you’ll also find that they greatly underestimated death tolls from the disease, and the general thesis of the GBD assumes an ability to insulate higher-risk individuals from lower-risk individuals that critics found implausible.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and it’s easy to champion the GBD as though it were the book of Jeremiah, a prophet in the wilderness predicting the failures of the public health establishment. To those who love to parade it around, I encourage them to simply read it, and note that while it got some things right, it got others wildly wrong. Kind of like, you know, the rest of our public health establishment.

Okay, back to Fauci… Fourth, Fauci became famous.

That matters more than I think either his defenders or his critics want to admit.

Celebrity is a drug, and Fauci got an enormous dose of it. He became a symbol of competence and sanity to millions of people. He appeared on magazine covers. He became a television personality. People put his face on merchandise. And like plenty of people before him, he appears to have discovered that being treated as the indispensable man can make it increasingly difficult to remember that you are, in fact, dispensable.

None of this absolves him.

But it does make him recognizable.

Because what I see when I look at the Fauci story is not an archvillain. I see a human being: accomplished, vain, intelligent, defensive, occasionally arrogant, capable of great good and serious error, caught in a crisis nobody fully understood and then caught again in the machinery of celebrity and politics that followed.

Which leaves us with the harder question: What do we do with him now?

We can investigate what happened. We should. We can demand honesty about the decisions that were made, the evidence available at the time, and the mistakes that followed. We should learn everything we possibly can before the next pandemic arrives.

But eventually there is another task, one that our politics has become almost completely incapable of performing.

Forgiveness.

Hannah Arendt understood that forgiveness is not sentimental. It is one of the things that makes human society possible.

Trespassing is an everyday occurrence … and it needs forgiving, dismissing in order to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Without forgiveness, every action becomes irreversible. Every injury creates a debt that can only be answered by another injury. The past acquires permanent jurisdiction over the future.

And that is increasingly what American politics feels like: an enormous ledger of unpaid debts:

You closed my school.

You made me wear a mask.

You cost me my job.

You lied to me.

You humiliated me.

You frightened my children.

You took something from me, and now I want it back.

Some of those grievances are legitimate. As Bill Mallonee once put it, in what I think is the most brilliant song ever written about suffering and regret, “My, my, how we proclaim our innocence // long after we’ve made our contribution.”

It would be a gift to a reactionary culture for public health experts, including Fauci, to acknowledge what they got wrong. Then we could forgive them. Then we could move on.

COVID policies, especially the most draconian of them, caused real harm. Forgiveness does not require pretending otherwise. In fact, forgiveness means almost nothing if there wasn’t actually a wound.

But a society cannot survive by endlessly picking at its wounds.

There should be investigations. There should be accountability. There should be a reckoning with what went wrong during COVID and why.

And then there has to be forgiveness. Let’s make space for Fauci to acknowledge mistakes. But let’s also look at his record, the hundreds of millions of lives saved via PEPFAR, the miracle of Operation Warp Speed, and let’s forgive.

Yes, even Anthony Fauci.

Because eventually a culture has to decide whether it wants to learn from its wounds or live inside them.

If we cannot forgive, the pandemic never ends.

I’m back, and I’m just gonna dive right in. If you want the personal update and details about what to expect, scroll to the bottom. In the meantime…

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*****

Last week in New York, Raul Morales allegedly stabbed two people on the streets, yelling phrases like “allahu akbar” and “justice for Islam” during the rampage. His first victim was an Asian man, his second, a Jewish man in a Kippah. The latter was leaving prayers at his synagogue to return to his apartment, where he was packing to move to Florida.

There are many questions to be answered. Why the choice of victims? What was the purpose, motivation, and intent of the attacker? I’m curious to hear why second victim was moving to Florida. Does it have to do with the changing climate of hostility towards Jews in New York? The election of Mayor Mamdani? Or was the move just a coincidence in the midst of an increasingly hostile environment for Jews?

Whatever the case, this is yet one more example of antisemitic violence coming home to American streets. In May of last year, two Israeli diplomats were gunned down in cold blood leaving an event where supplying food to Gaza was the topic of discussion. In January of this year, a person ran their car into a Jewish organization’s headquarters in New York. Chicago has seen several antisemitic attacks on the streets. Elderly Jews marching and asking for hostages to come home were attacked on the streets of Boulder, Colorado, and the fire bomb that wounded one woman would cost her her life.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked violence and hostile speech against Jews for decades, reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents that met the criteria for documentation in 2024. In all likelihood, those numbers will be higher in 2025 and 2026, since sentiment against Israel, comfort with anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric, and dislike of the war against Iran is all on the rise. It amounts to a permission structure for a certain kind of horribleness, and I genuinely fear for what it indicates for the days ahead.

*****

Last week, I found myself in Philadelphia, the city where this nation’s concept of liberty, individual freedom, and the pursuit of happiness first bloomed out of the quills of its founders. At some point, while riding in an Uber I passed a monument that was unmistakably a representation of George Washington. I happened listening to a podcast discussing the New York stabbing and the growing unease of Jewish Americans who wonder if they still have a place here.

What came to mind was a series of letters Washington himself wrote to Jewish Americans at the founding of our nation. Upon his inauguration several synagogues sent congratulatory letters to him, essentially saying, “Thanks for tolerating us in the midst of your new nation.”

Washington’s responses to them are, to my mind, among the most important testaments to the purpose of the American founding. To our first president, it was essential that these Jews understood themselves not merely as peripheral resident aliens within the new republic, but as fully vested members of society. He took pride in the fact that the Jews in Savannah had felt welcomed by their neighbors:

I rejoice that a spirit of liberality and philanthropy is much more prevalent than it formerly was among the enlightened nations of the earth; and that your brethren will benefit thereby in proportion as it shall become still more extensive. Happily the people of the United States of America have, in many instances, exhibited examples worthy of imitation.

Likewise, to the Jews at the synagogue in Newport, Rhode island, he wrote:

May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Fans of the musical Hamilton, as well as readers of the Hebrew Bible, will note that Washington is quoting one of his favorite verses from Micah chapter 4. For the General, the man who more than anyone else embodied the spirit of the founding and led it with unparalleled character and dignity, it was core to the very purpose and meaning of the founding that a diverse people would have the liberty to pursue their faith and fortunes and not be afraid.

There’s a saying, almost a cliché, that Jews are the canaries in the coal mine of culture. The idea is that once a society decides to stop tolerating Jews, and even more so, once a society starts targeting Jews for ridicule or persecution or isolation, it’s a sign that the air has grown poisonous.

On the morning of October 7^th, I was unprepared for the brutality of what I would hear the next day from the Democratic Socialists of America when they held an anti-Israel rally in Times Square the next day — privileged and happy middle class academics and professional agitators celebrating the very terrorists who flew in on hang gliders and committed mass rape and mass murder at the Nova Festival.

But even after the stark awakening to that experience, I was not prepared for those sentiments, and for people in those very ranks, to rise to national office. As the saying goes, the time has come for choosing. And it’s not about Israel, it’s not about the war with Iran, it’s not about the next election, really, since in some cases all the choices might be bad. The choosing is whether we’ll be a voice for decency, liberty, human dignity, and human freedom at a time when each of these is under threat.

*****

The Personal Update

Okay, so there’s some stuff to report and some more to come. The stuff to report: I’m relaunching this Substack, with a bit more content behind the paywall. Over the next two weeks, I’ll be launching a YouTube Channel, and be funneling more video content to social media.

So… Free subscribers will get one newsletter per week. Paid will get two, sometimes three when it’s especially busy. Paid subscribers will also get invitations to a monthly live Q&A (which will include special guests), and early updates on podcasts and books and whatnot.

A podcast is coming, which will be attached here. More soon on that, as well as the paywall structure.

Other stuff — longform storytelling, additional writing — well… more on that soon.

So here’s what I need. Do you benefit from this work? Subscribe today. Maybe subscribe as a founder. Or an annual subscription. This will help me finish building the infrastructure and launching this thing.

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Or if you just want to do some kind of one-time patronage thing to help me launch, reach out to me here or on social media. Every little bit helps.

I’m grateful to you all, and I look forward to sticking my neck out again, making good trouble, and as my friend Charlie Sykes is fond of saying, reminding you that you’re not the crazy one in this crazy world.

See you Thursday,

Mike Cosper

For those who are unaware, I’ve parted ways from Christianity Today. It was not something I anticipated or wanted, but circumstances unfolded this way. I am grateful for my CT colleagues, especially my boss, Erik Petrik, and my friends for nearly two decades, Matt Stevens and Russell Moore, as well as many others who supported my work and encouraged me in my six years there. I wish everyone at CT the very best.

A few of you have asked what’s next for me since my exit from CT. I thought I’d send out a quick note and update you.

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The truth is… I’m not entirely sure. I have a couple of interesting options opening up, but given the nature of what I do best — long form audio storytelling — it’s a unique role to find the right fit.

I do plan on doing some more work at Substack in the near term, and likely far less on social media, where one can rarely articulate fully-formed ideas. I am considering doing some video content for YouTube in the vein of news analysis, pop culture commentary, and historical reflections. I am also in conversations with a couple of friends about possibly launching a news and ideas podcast, and given that these are two extremely brilliant and much-better-credentialed persons than me, I think the idea has promise. Much has to be worked out there (including funding, which is always tricky) but if you’re appreciate my work at all, you’ll love this… should it come together.

I’m also still working on a manuscript I hope to finish shortly, and I’m excited to share more about that in the next few months.

I’m grateful for the encouragements and prayers. It’s been a surprising and surprisingly difficult few months, going back to last fall and all our family has been through, as well as my exit from CT, and many bumps along the road in between.

I would be grateful for your prayers for provision for our family. To that end, two quick comments:

First, on a limited and short-term basis, I’m taking on some consulting clients to help them think through and refine their podcast concepts. Also, if any readers might be interested in sponsoring or underwriting or being a patron to a larger a Substack initiative, including this news and ideas podcast, please reach out. I can fill you in with more detail.

You can reach me here and also on X (formerly Twitter) where my DM’s are open, or at mikecosper.net, where I have a contact page.

In the meantime, I’m grateful for your encouragement and support, I look forward to whatever comes next.

Mike

Dear Readers,

One of the highlights of my week was seeing this footage of Emily Damari, a former Hamas hostage released earlier this year, reuniting with Gali and Ziv Berman.

They were all neighbors in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz on the border of Gaza that was overrun and devastated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. I stood in their front yards a few weeks later, witnessing that devastation, a light rain falling, the sound of artillery in the near distance, and more than once during my visit, being forced to flee to bomb shelters as Hamas rockets flew our way.

Gali and Ziv were among the last 20 hostages in Gaza, and their return marks, for the time being, the end of the war. It also invites some reflection on the war, the rhetoric around it and insurgent antisemitism.

On October 8^th, 2023, before the blood had dried in the homes of Kfar Aza and the bomb shelters near the Nova Music Festival, and while bullets were still flying in the south of Israel, protesters gathered in Times Square carrying signs that read “Zionism is genocide.” Activists like Eugene Puryear celebrated Hamas terrorists who flew over the border on gliders to attack the Nova Festival, taking captive “several dozen hipsters, but I’m sure they’re doing fine,” he said.

The last of those living are home now. Many of them didn’t survive captivity.

For two years, the rhetoric of activists like Puryear was echoed and amplified by pundits, politicians, and evangelical leaders. Shane Claiborne has regularly called Israel’s war a genocide. Palestinian theologian Daniel Bannoura went so far as to say that the only difference between CT’s own Russell Moore, who argued that Israel had a right to defend itself, and Hamas, who killed 1,200 people, kidnapped 250 more, and committed countless rapes and atrocities in the process, was the holy book they used to justify their violence.

This week, as the IDF withdrew, and as Hamas emerged from tunnels, launching a large-scale crackdown on those they accuse of collaborating with the Israelis, these criticisms rang more hollow than ever. It is true that Gaza is devastated. It is true that there was a tragic loss of civilian life during this war. And yet, what countless people said from the beginning has also proven true: the war ended when Hamas returned the hostages.

During that two-year period, the Israelis proved a military and intelligence competency that is astounding. Hassan Nasralla, Yayha Sinwar, and numerous other figureheads of Israel’s enemies are dead, and their organizations are severely depleted. Even Iran, long the menacing power behind much of the threat to Israeli security, has been humbled by Israeli intelligence and airpower.

Whatever else one might think of Israel, it is unquestionable that the nation has established itself as the dominant military force in the region, a true David that has squashed the ambitions of multiple Goliaths who made chanting “Death to Israel” part of their national identity and parliamentary liturgy.

That success makes the accusations against Israel all the more slanderous. With all they’ve achieved, and with the insistence of so many western elites that the war in Gaza was a genocide, we should be shocked at their failure. Palestinians are coming homing. Aid is flowing in. The future of Gaza is increasingly in Gazan hands. While Israelis have proven competent at the assassination of those plotting against them and the defenestration of terror networks allied against them, they’ve proven profoundly incompetent at the much more blunt and brutal work of genocide.

To possess such power, with genocidal intent, a free hand from the international community after 10/7, and two years to impose their will, the numbers of casualties out of Gaza — in contrast to those out of the Syrian civil war, or the American war against ISIS, or the civil war in Yemen — reveals either a profoundly incompetent Israeli effort at genocide, or a different intent to the entire offensive.

The obvious answer is that there was never, at any point, an effort at genocide in Gaza. Instead, what we should see when we look at the devastated landscapes — the destroyed buildings, the rubble, the long lines of civilians fleeing destruction or seeking food and water — is in fact exactly what Israel told us it was. Hamas had hostages. It hid them in tunnels and amid Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. The Jewish state had a burden to bring them home. And they had a commitment to move heaven and earth — rewriting the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East — to do so.

That commitment doesn’t come from a vacuum. Maimonides, writing in the 12^th century, argued, “there is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives.” In Jewish tradition, this is known as “pidyot shvuyim.” To do a mitzvah is to fulfill a commandment, and in this case, the author is building on passages like, “Do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” (Leviticus 19:16) and “Do not harden your heart or shut your hand against your needy brother” (Deuteronomy 15:7-8).

Maimonides wrote at a time when Jewish life was defined by displacement. It had been for more than a millennia, since the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century. Jews in Maimonides’ world were vulnerable to kidnap and ransom, utterly dependent on the strength of their local Jewish communities to rise up to rescue them or ransom them. So it was for centuries, as Jews — forever pariahs and foreigners among the nations — had to navigate the social and political tides that emerged around them.

Modern Israel was a reaction to displacement, and to it’s most ghastly consequence, the Holocaust. Its founders were less concerned with the shape of its borders and more concerned with national sovereignty. They had no confidence in the community of nations’ commitment to provide for the basic rights of Jews, given that in the years before, most of the “civilized” Western world had collaborated in the extermination of more than 6 million people. A modern Israel, with sovereignty over its borders, and with a military that could fight to protect its citizens could liberate Jews from their pariah status — if not socially (antisemitism wasn’t going anywhere) perhaps militarily.

What followed the founding was a story of remarkable survival. Victory in 1948. Victory in 1967 and 1973. And after October 7^th, victory over Iran and the proxies they’ve funded to wage war against them. The hostages are home.

That victory is what makes the “genocide” chorus look so laughably grotesque. If these activists, pastors, professors, and TikTok revolutionaries genuinely cared about mass slaughter, there’s no shortage of real genocides to fuel their outrage. They could have Googled the Christians butchered in Nigeria. They could have glanced at the bodies piling up in Sudan. They might have spared a tweet for Yemen, or the Uyghurs, or the Rohingya, or any of the dozen actual humanitarian catastrophes unfolding around the world.

But they didn’t, because this was never about dead civilians. It was about a narrative. Israel — uniquely among the nations — could be accused of “genocide” not because the facts supported it, but because the accusation itself served a purpose. It flattered the protestors’ moral vanity. For many left-of center Christians, it showed solidarity between the faculty lounges of elite Christian institutions and the Ivy League and media worlds whose respect they crave. For some on the far right, it allowed them one more chance to buck longstanding consensus and indulge an image of themselves as bold reformers (in spite of the fact that they’re serving up lukewarm leftovers dug up from the grave of Pat Buchanan). It also allowed theologians, professional activists, and progressive Christian to LARP as freedom fighters, thrilling at the chance to embrace a view that would have offended their parents, Kirk Cameron, and the often feverish end-times culture that fueled a lot of book sales at the end of the 20^th century.

Our Israeli neighbors couldn’t afford to indulge their generational bitterness, nor their moral preening. They were too busy thinking about how Hamas wanted to murder their kids, or they were too busy serving the IDF in the thick of the fight, or they were too busy hiding in bomb shelters while rockets flew from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran with the hopes of killing them and those they love.

Even so, the hostages are home, and we eagerly face the possibility that the war is over. Hamas has emerged from tunnels and taken to the streets with brutality for those it accuses of collaborating with the enemy — whether sharing intelligence or distributing food. Israel’s Arab neighbors are ready to start new, if Gaza can be calmed.

More importantly, the supposed genocide never happened — not because Israel lacked the firepower or capacity, but because it was never on the table in the first place. As much as the evangelical influencers who insisted otherwise wanted to emerge from this war as prophets and truth-tellers, I hope we see them for what they really are: wrong. And reckless. And in many cases, seduced by antisemitic tropes that villainized the Jewish people.

If those folks still want to gather with their friends, bang drums, and chant about genocide, great. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Sudan, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Ethiopia would love someone to give voice to their shed blood as it cries out from the ground. Likewise, they could cry out on behalf of the Uhygur Muslims being gathered in camps and systematically annihilated in China.

I suspect they won’t. Which leaves it for those of us who are privileged to live away from this conflict to ask, “why?”

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In the last three weeks, I have experienced two of the most stressful events of my adult life.

In one of them, which I shared briefly about a few weeks ago, my daughter Dorothy was bleeding internally, and we almost lost her. Thanks to good doctors, good medicine, a diligent mom, and a teenager who knew to advocate for herself, she’s well on the way to recovery.

Yesterday, that same daughter and I — during her fall break from school — hopped in my car to drive north to see Elbow’s Chicago show. Elbow is my favorite band by far, and is among her favorites (though no one will unseat Taylor, especially on the week of an album release). We were a little north of West Lafayette, Indiana, at an exit that would have taken us into a town true crime afficionados would know, Delphi, Indiana. (Google the Delphi Murders, and prepare to fall down a rabbit hole of truly bewildering, psychotic stuff.)

Anyway, on the highway, out of nowhere, my car started acting up, including a sudden and violent shift out of gear. Every light on the dash lit up, the car began slowing suddenly and the accelerator stopped working. I looked instinctively in the rearview mirror and saw a semi truck barreling towards us. I started very lightly tapping my brakes to try and flash the brake lights, but realized, the electrical system is dead… nothing is happing. I yanked the wheel to take us out of the way, but the car was crawling. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the accelerator came back. I had it pressed to the floor, and the engine roared, the car dropped into gear, and we lurched out of the truck’s way, hearing its deafening horn as it passed us.

In this part of Indiana there is nothing for miles. Lots of windmills, but no gas stations or rest stops. I didn’t want to stop the car moving, though, because I at least wanted to get to the next exit. So we continued on — my daughter pounding the dashboard and praying imprecatory prayers; I’m watching frantically to see how close we were to death from another truck behind us.

The car acted insane. Systems went on and off at random. We lurched and jerked and my kid yelled and I tried to roll down the window so I could wave the old “steer clear” at everyone driving 90 miles an hour behind us trying to stay the heck out of Delphi.

Within a couple of miles, we found an exit, and I followed the shoulder up the ramp. The car died completely just as we got to the top.

I figured it was the alternator and went to my trunk for something metal to tap it with. (Spoiler alert, it was the alternator.) Wildly, tapping the battery posts brought it to life… for about five seconds.

For the next hour and a half or so, Dorothy and I sat at the top of this ramp, car after car passing us. At one point, a large semi truck pulled up and stopped behind us. I was frantically calling tow truck companies I found on Google Maps and finding no success in connecting with one. Like I said, middle of nowhere. I thought maybe this truck driver was in the mood to be a good Samaritan, but he ended up creepily lurking about 75 yards behind us behind tinted windows. (Here’s where I remind you, it’s Delphi, Indiana, or very close, and I’m wondering if I’m about to be brutally butchered by members of an Odinist Cult.)

At a certain point, I have a tow truck driver on the line, and we’re talking about my location. I’m fiddling around in my trunk looking for the emergency flashlight I usually carry with me so I can read him the VIN number on the car. Once I found it, I began walking back towards the front windshield, to read it off. Unbeknownst to me, this truck had pulled back onto the ramp, but not fully on the ramp — still partially on the shoulder. I heard a strange whooshing sound and looked behind me just in time to watch his passenger side mirror nearly scalp me. It was so close I thought he’d take my head and my driver’s side door off, and I dropped to the gravel. I can only suppose this “scare” was great fun for the truck driver, who silently continued across the cross road and onto the ramp that took them back onto the interstate.

God was kind to us, I don’t know how else to describe what came next. I’m on my phone arguing with my insurance company about how I haven’t owned a Honda Odyssey in years, and in fact I still drive this crappy Honda Accord Crosstour and it’s not my fault she doesn’t see it on my policy, I just need a tow truck, when behind me I hear, “You need some help?”

My fellow children of the 1980’s will remember the film Adventures in Babysitting. The men will all remember Elizabeth Shue, but the women will all remember the tow truck driver who looked like Thor. Well, this was not Thor, but he might as well have been. This was Ryan, a steel mill worker and what I will forever think of as the “goodest” Samaritan I’ll ever meet.

I’ll spare you, dear reader, the blow-by-blow of what happened next by simply saying that for the next two hours, this kind hearted young man with a trunk full of tools devoted himself to trying to get Dorothy and I back on the road. My gratitude for him, though, is more than I could ever type out. He jumped the car, he helped me clean the contacts on the battery and jump it again. And then he took us miles out of his way to an Auto Zone, waited patiently while they tested the battery, and then drove us back to the car to install a new one.

When we hit the road, I started getting error messages again, confirming for me that the alternator was also bad, and ultimately we chose to head back towards home. We only got as far as Indianapolis. I’ll never forget the last few miles we drove, on roads near pitch black (the headlights were failing) my pounding on the steering wheel and swearing in ways I deeply regret, Dorothy laying hands on the dashboard and praying, and her boyfriend on speakerphone encouraging us we’d get to our destination. The car breathed its last literally as we coasted up in front of my brother-in-law’s house, and given the stress and exhaustion of that day, I was ready — to borrow a line from JK Rowling — to “welcome death like an old friend.” Instead, Dan and his wife Jenny walked us inside, offered drinks and snacks, introduced us to Zeus, the best cat I’ve met in a while, and gave us comfortable couches to stretch out on for the night. In the words of Langston Hughes, “I slept like a rock / or a man that was dead.”

In the morning they took Dorothy for a breakfast of pancakes while I ate a breakfast of Tums, and I’m happy to report the car is being repaired, I am back home, and Dorothy and the previously aforementioned boyfriend are off watching a movie.

I missed Elbow, my favorite band whom I’ve only seen once. I missed the chance to see them with Dorothy, which would have been amazing. But I also (narrowly) missed having my head taken off by a driver’s side semi-truck window in Delphi Indiana, and having our whole enterprise smashed to pieces a little while earlier on the interstate when the car failed.

Yuval Levin says conservatism is fundamentally about gratitude, and I write all this today to express gratitude. I also feel the tension of it, because it’s the two-year anniversary of 10/7, and I’ve mostly had to stay off social media because the long lists of remembrances of those killed just makes me want to weep my eyes out. I am grateful to be home and alive with all the people I love most.Far too many in the world can’t say the same, including the family and friends of more than 1200 in Israel.

There are lots of people on the farthest Left and farthest Right who insist the US is some kind of terrible country, and today, I couldn’t disagree more. I know it isn’t because of people like Dan and Jenny, and even Zeus. Even more, I know it because of Ryan, this generous soul who — I swear this is true — went straight from helping us to helping a woman who was pulled over a little further down the road with a flat tire.

Ryan… if you ever read this, the offer I made was true, and so was my advice to wife that girl and have lots of little Hoosier babies. I’ll dig out my ordination certificate and do the wedding myself. You’ve got a giant heart and will make a great dad. And I’ll commit here and now that you’ve got babysitters in Louisville when you want a weekend away.

Most of all I’m thankful for Dorothy was calm when I was losing it and patient when we were trapped in circumstances out of our control. The kid has seen it all in the last few weeks. Big Pharma. a few blood donors, and some very devoted, smart, and hard-working Americans saved her life.

There’s much to be sad about today. We missed our show. It’s a grim anniversary. And I’m sure, dear readers, that you could fill in the blanks with many sad elements of your own. But I’m certain there’s much to be grateful for too. And as tired, overwhelmed, and frustrated as I am, I’m choosing gratitude. For God’s surprising mercies. For good neighbors. For family. And for life.

First, my reporting for CT on why young Christians loved Charlie Kirk. I talked to college students, recent grads, and young married bible study to hear what kind of influence he had. It was one of those pleasant experiences in being surprised — I thought I knew Kirk, but I was wrong. Their appreciation had far less to do with his reputation as I knew it — MAGA flamethrower, political organizer, Trump booster — and far more to do with his willingness to engage people with ideas and values in a way that was marked by charm, humor, quick wits, and a genuine belief in the power of conversation. You can read the whole thing here.

Second, over on The Bulletin this week, I sat down with my friend Roger Berkowitz — the director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and one of the most thoughtful analysts of politics and culture that I know. The conversation centered on how Trump is best understood as the leader of a political (or even revolutionary) movement. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Finally, a personal note. Two Sundays ago, I took my daughter to an emergency room because of abdominal pain. She was diagnosed with GI issues that weren’t too significant, and sent home. She got a little better after a few days of medicine, and then a lot worse. A week later, last Monday night, she went back to the urgent care. A blood test showed that her hemoglobin had dropped by more than 50% in a week. That is, as medical professionals have put it, “Not Good.” She was rushed from the urgent care to the hospital in an ambulance.

I, meanwhile, was home with a respiratory virus. Her second day in the hospital, I was spiking fevers of 103, delirious, and exhausted. Her mom was valiant, resilient, and unshakable as she sat by her side for five days.

A blood transfusion that day may well have saved her life. (She had multiple.) A blood transfusion saved my life in 1981, when I was 18 months old. (That’s a much longer story, for another day.) It turned out — and this took five days in the hospital to sort — that she was losing blood through a large ulcer in her GI tract. Cutting edge medication helped to regulate her GI and begin the process of healing. She’s no longer bleeding internally, came home this morning, and even plans to make an appearance at Homecoming at her high school tonight, for her senior year (if only for long enough to take a few selfies and hug a few friends).

I shared about her sickness on Twitter and am grateful for the wildly diverse lot — from David French to Sebastian Gorka — who expressed sympathy and prayed for her. I’m grateful to the strangers I’ll never know whose blood saved her life, and whose blood saved mine 44 years ago. I’m grateful, as Erick Erickson would put it, for the Big Pharma drugs that tamed her out of control GI system and made sure she didn’t have an allergic reaction to the blood as it was introduced into her system.

Yuval Levin says the heart of conservatism is gratitude. Today of all days, I’m a conservative, because I’m incredibly grateful.

I find myself with much to say and few words to say it in the hours after the murder of Charlie Kirk. A 31-year-old husband and father of two is dead. A voice that helped many young Christian men I know feel a little bolder, a little more confident in their faith, was silenced. Far too many of us witnessed the gruesome act, either in person or on the dozens of videos that captured the scene and were cruelly and voyeuristically uploaded to social media. Tonight, the internet seethes with righteous anger, rage, fear, and in some loud but small corners of the Left, a Satanic glee.

I couldn’t agree more strongly with Damon Linker, who wrote on X:

Two smallish groups of people who should be drummed out of public life: Anyone posting gleefully about the assassination, & anyone saying that "this" is what "they" want. The overwhelming majority of Americans are horrified by what happened today. We must drown out the remainder.

The places where Kirk and I differ in faith and politics don’t matter on a day like today; what matters most is to simply say to those who loved him, followed him, respected him, were inspired by him, that this was a crime against the image of God, and I weep with you. Truly.

I am particularly bothered because there was a central talking point for Kirk with which I couldn’t agree more. It’s something he articulated many times, the animating sentiment that took him to campus after campus, including his fateful visit to Utah Valley University today. He describes it in this video (I’ll quote the most relevant part below):

In the clip, a woman asks Charlie why he’s setting up a table in the middle of a college campus to engage with and debate students — something that was central to his work. He talks about how young conservatives are afraid to speak up, and shares his own experience with threats of (and actual) violence. The clip ends with this quote:

When people stop talking, that's when you get violence. That's when civil war happens because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.

I’m writing this late on Wednesday night, unable to sleep, unable to shake the sense that something is amiss in our culture, and we are slipping into madness. Many of my right-leaning friends have bought the narrative that violence is a tool of the political left, ignoring the very real political violence that led to the death of two Minnesota lawmakers, or the assault on Paul Pelosi, or the violence of January 6^th. Others on the Left, in a dodge of their own escalating rhetoric of “the end of democracy,” “genocide in Gaza,” and “Trump is Hitler,” have blamed guns, or the provocations of Right-wing rhetoric.

I wrote about the rhetoric of violence last week, and I won’t repeat those comments here, but I do what to point out again that it’s grievance all the way down. However great our failures may be, we think, our enemy’s are obviously worse. And whatever actions our side has taken, it’s because of the other’s provocation.

I suppose it’s fair to say that there’s some truth to that logic. Both sides have been provocative, and both sides seem to escalate their rhetoric with regularity. White nationalist pastor Joel Webbon tweeted yesterday, “A race war is coming.” Steve Bannon, a self-described Stalinist who cosplays revolutionary in between layering shirts and combing coats of pomade through his hair, likened the murder of Kirk to an act of war. They’re itching for a fight… from the comfort of their podcast studios, of course. But such rhetoric lands on irresponsible and dangerous ears, and leads others to much worse places.

It's the fatalism of grievance politics that I find particularly repugnant. Violence, we are told, is an inevitability because of whatever “they” are doing. We enact violence to stop them, or to call attention to the cause, or as a warning sign to their allies so that whatever is the cause of our grievance stops.

As Hannah Arendt describes in her essay, On Violence, such an understanding presents violence as almost a biological product of humanity living together. It is the “handmaiden of history” as Marx called it, because it’s part of the life-cycle of a culture, a necessary process of “creative destruction” in pursuit of revolution or reform.

But as she describes, “Violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction; but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention.”

In other words, no one built a healthy institution during a riot. No one reformed or streamlined a bureaucracy through an ideological purge. No one ended the growth of an ideological movement with an assassination. But in each case, they created a pyrotechnic historic event that got society’s attention, shining a spotlight on their grievance.

Additionally, violence of this sort — terrorism, mobs, riots, assassinations, looting, street violence of many kinds — is, in the end, mostly theater, and mostly ineffective. As a Christian, I would add that justifying it, regardless of the ends one is pursuing, requires treating a human life as a piece of inventory on a balance sheet, and not as an image bearer full of ultimate dignity and worth by their very nature. And in the end, Arendt says, “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

I fear this is the threshold we just crossed.

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Violence against MAGA will not end MAGA. Violence against progressives, or trans persons, or Never Trump conservatives, will not end their movements either. In the face of violence, some might become more galvanized to their core convictions. Some might become even more radicalized. And some will be provoked to pursue retribution.

I don’t know what comes next. No one does. It is a moment for civic and moral leadership to demand a stop to the mob-inciting rhetoric. Trump got halfway there in his speech tonight, but couldn’t get the whole way. He could denounce the assassination of Kirk, the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise, the attempt on Justice Cavanaugh, but he couldn’t seem to call to mind the murder of two Democratic law makers in Minnesota earlier this year, the attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband awhile back, or of course, a mob chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” on January 6^th.

I pray he will. I mean that. The one thing I’ve come to believe about Trump is that he’s his own man, meaning that he follows his own instincts and impulses. I pray that the poisonous rhetoric of people like Bannon and Webbon will become as distasteful to him as that of his political enemies.

We need that to happen, because the temperature is rising and I’m not sure how else we make it stop.

It’s been a heck of a week on the internets for observers of the Israel-Hamas war. I don’t intend to write a long newsletter here, more an addendum to a previous post about how the information war was about to get a lot worse. TLDR: it has, and not because news about Israel or the IDF has proved worse; but because the media has proved more inept, gullible, and antisemitic than I would have predicted.

In that spirit, I want to offer three quick anecdotes that illustrate the dynamics of the information war, and a quick admonition. Also, there’s an unrelated announcement at the end of this email.

The first, perhaps the least significant of the three, is one example of a flood of stories over the weekend in which critics of Israel and fans of Hamas claimed that four IDF soldiers had been taken captive in Gaza.

Hostages are the most important weapon Hamas has in this war, and this announcement, which spread like wildfire on social media, would fill almost any Israeli family with dread. Every Israeli has a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or neighbor fighting in Gaza. The prospect that after October 7^th, the IDF could fail so extensively as to allow another group of Israelis to be taken captive in the tunnels, would be profoundly demoralizing.

Except, the story wasn’t true. Hamas had not captured four soldiers after all. One could graciously blame reporting like that on Middle East Monitor or Drop Site News on the “fog of war,” or one could more honestly name what is going on — these outlets serve as propaganda hubs for Hamas.

Not that it matters to the hoards on TikTok or Twitter. The lie was told. It was believed. Even if only long enough to terrify a few soldier’s families.

A second story began with a headline from the BBC reading, “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, world’s leading experts say.” The article credited a resolution from the International Association of Genocide scholars, which stated unequivocally that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the International Association of Genocide Scholars would have some creditable bona fides to back their assertion. But as Salo Aizenberg discovered, the barrier to entry to the International Association of Genocide Scholars amounts to $30 and a functional credit card.

In addition, Aizenberg did a little digging on the official roll of the AGS, discovering that Iraq — no friend of Israel — is home to 13% of the association’s 600 or so scholars. Indeed, as others who followed Aizenberg’s lead discovered, the association wasn’t working very hard to police its membership.

Whatever else one takes from this story, I would hope it would be a healthy amount of skepticism towards the pronouncements of fancy-sounding academic or research institutions about the status of the war in Gaza.

Finally, there’s the story of a Gazan boy reportedly murdered in cold blood at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution location in May. This story, reported by ex-GHF whistleblower Anthony Aguilar, spread with intense virality about a month ago. Aguilar described a touching and intimate encounter with a young boy seeking food for his family, and tragically witnessing his death moments later at the hands of reckless Israelis.

It was a damning vignette of dysfunction at the GHF food distribution sites, and an indictment of a lack of discipline and morality on the part of the IDF. Except, like the other examples cited above, it simply wasn’t true. The child turns out to be very much alive, and Aguilar appears very much to be a liar.

I understand how this stuff happens. I too, a couple of weeks ago, was seduced by outrage when video circulated of an Israeli tank shelling Nassar Hospital, and then shelling it again as press and aid workers rushed to the scene. Many on social media called it a “double tap” strike, like a scene in The Hunger Games where a conniving evil strikes an area to draw aid and first responders to the scene, and strikes again once they arrive. I criticized the IDF for what appeared to be reckless (at minimum) or especially cruel.

But I jumped the gun on that judgment. It turned out that Israel struck twice at Nassar — a hospital where hostages were kept and terrorists have operated throughout the war — because there were two targets: a camera Hamas was using to monitor IDF troop movements, and a sniper position. The fact that both existed inside the boundaries of a hospital is a war crime — on the part of Hamas.

It also turns out that of the dead in the aftermath, 6 of the 20 were Hamas operatives.

In other words, there was legal and moral justification for the whole series of events. The pile-on came so hard and fast, though, that the truth struggled to catch up to the falsehood, even with someone like me who is generally pro-Israel.

The takeaway from these events is pretty simple: if you think some atrocity has occurred… wait. Give it a day or two. See what unfolds. Hamas wants to convince the world of lies, but is never invested in sustaining the lie longer that a 24-hour news cycle, so the truth often presents itself, and it’s often less damning of Israel than first blush.

It shouldn’t be this hard. I agree with Haviv Rettig Gur, who has lamented the Netanyahu government’s failure to prioritize communication with English language journalists, even while I sympathize with a sentiment that must be part of the equation: if they lie about us either way, why bother informing them?

Nonetheless, it makes not only Israel’s allies’ jobs harder, it makes journalists jobs harder. Because at the end of the day, we should want more than anything else to be able to tell the truth. And when the IDF is slow, when Netanyahu worries more about his psychotic right flank than the English speaking world, and when social media algorithms thrive on amplifying ever more libelous and outrageous claims against Israel, it makes the work of people like me — who want to tell the truth first and foremost, but want to dismantle lies about Zionism with equal ferocity — much harder.

The battle is far more uphill than folks like me want to admit. But it’s the world we live in.

Quick Announcement

At the request of a couple of folks, I decided to host another Spiritual Formation Cohort this fall. I’ve done these a number of times over the years, and the group that’s forming up is exciting. From September 10-November, we’ll meet eight times to discuss cultural and spiritual formation, the role of spiritual disciplines, the difference between disillusionment and deconstruction, and the stages of the spiritual life. We’ll also talk about developing a rule of life, and I’ll end the cohort with a 1:1 with each member of the group.

There’s some more info here and anyone interested in more details, registration fees, or other questions is welcome to either DM me there or request information via email at mcospernews@gmail.com. There’s only a handful of spots left, so don’t wait!

Okay. Done being a pitch man. See you next week.

The mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic church has stirred an online frenzy. Immediately after word was released that the shooter identified as trans, right wing social media was flooded with videos and commentary connecting it to the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, where that shooter also identified as trans. Other posts connected it to viral videos of trans-identifying biological men erupting in anger or violence — harassing people in restaurants, throwing punches at protests, screaming vile things.

Anyone who’s followed the public debate around trans ideology knows that there’s a dark undercurrent that accompanies it. Women like J.K. Rowling and Riley Gaines who have objected to biological men in women’s spaces — bathrooms, locker rooms, women’s sports — have found themselves inundated with threats of violence, rape, and death from men who identify as trans-women. Even in my own coverage of this issue, on CT’s The Bulletin, here on Substack, and on X, I’ve found the intensity of the rhetoric and pushback shocking.

With all that said, I’m concerned that focusing on this angle is yet one more example of the Right missing the point.

It’s one thing to say that trans ideology is dangerous and distorting, and that normalizing and valorizing the experience of gender dysphoria is doing more harm than good. It’s another thing to stigmatize people suffering from gender dysphoria as especially dangerous or prone to violence. Frankly, if we’re going to play identity politics with mass shooters, then all eyes should go first to straight white men. This, I doubt, is a game the Right wants to play for very long. Moreover, making this mass shooting about trans issues invites a narrow focus on an issue that is but one symptom of a much larger cultural disease.

A story at the New York Post offers a summary of the shooter’s YouTube videos and manifesto, as well as photos of the slogans and jargon he scribbled on his weapons and ammunition clips. The picture is fairly clear. He idolized the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, fantasized about amassing a similar death toll, and predicted he’d take his own life in whatever incident he eventually attempted. But he also described himself as antifascist, fantasized about killing President Trump and Elon Musk, and he was clearly not only anti-Israel, but antisemitic. A smoke cannister had the words “Jew Gas” written on it, and an ammunition magazine had the words “6 million wasn’t enough” written on it, a reference to the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He called Jews “penny sniffers” in one video, and punctuated a number of comments, spoken and written, with “Free Palestine.”

To be sure, this is no more to be reduced to a story about antisemitism than it should be reduced to a story about trans ideology. But it is a story about violence, and more particularly, it’s one in which the perpetrator wanted to tie their act of madness to political motivations. And while it isn’t always fair to read backwards from crazy people to the ideologies they attach themselves to, it’s worth at least exploring to what degree the ideologies informed or gave a permission structure to their murderous acts.

(Here's where we go down the rabbit hole.)

In one of Dostoyevsky’s most famous lines, Ivan Karamazov says, “Without immortality, everything is permitted.” This is often translated (or mistranslated) as “Without God, everything is permitted,” but even the mistranslation gets at the essence of the original. If there is no immortality, there is no ultimate judgment, and thus there are no ultimate consequences. Such a worldview liberates a person to pursue their desires and impulses with abandon, since, so long as they can get away with it, they can, well, get away with it. A similar idea appears in his work The Possessed in which a radical ideologue says, “If there is no God then I am God.” If no one ‘on high’ is dictating moral limits, we get to draw them where we want to.

For Dostoyevsky, these weren’t abstract ideas. Post-enlightenment, materialist, and atheist thought was informing violent political movements in his day, from the French Revolution to violent Marxist student movements in Russia itself. Dostoyevsky understood that humanity, cut off from the transcendent, could no longer look to God to save the world, nor could they take comfort in notions of redemption that included some hidden purpose in suffering or some reason to hope in spite of grief. Absent the ability to make meaning of dark times, the soul is left with one of three choices: despair, malaise, or fanaticism. In despair the individual enters a long downward spiral into cynicism and gloom. In malaise, one attempts to avoid contemplating their reality, choosing all manner of distraction and avoidance. But in fanaticism, a person embraces the sense that history is in their hands, and the choice of radical action is an attempt to either change the world or wake their sleeping neighbors.

The Possessed imagines such an ideology taking over a community like a legion of demons. (The title was often mistranslated as Demons.) It’s a perfect metaphor; Dostoyevsky understood that the human spirit, like nature, abhors a vacuum. When a person is raised in a world without God, they nonetheless crave transcendent purpose and meaning, and apart from religion, they often find it in ideological and utopian notions of politics and history. As David Foster Wallace once put it, “We’re all dying to give ourselves away to something.”

Along with that exchange of worldviews comes a Darwinian frame for anthropology, one in which human beings are not uniquely bearers of God’s image, but rather one animal species among many that are fighting for survival and no more worthy of dignity than our animal and vegetable neighbors. In such a framework, human life can be judged superfluous or even an obstacle to history, should it fall out of line with the utopian vision.

With God taken out of our moral imagination, humanity reduced to mere organism, and violence introduced by Karl Marx (and for that matter, the architects of the French Revolution) as “the midwife of history,” everything indeed was permitted. Moreover, as Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the architects of the greatest evils of the 20^th century understood an even more radical truth. Not only was everything permitted, everything was possible.

This is because the Enlightenment didn’t just give us new ideas and deconstructed notions of God and humanity; it gave us the industrial revolution, mass transportation, mass communication, and heretofore unimagined weapons of mass destruction. All of which were put to use to bring about the most morally incomprehensible inventions in human history: the death camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Treblinka — what Arendt first described as “factories where corpses are manufactured.”

The march of these ideas slowed, at least in the mainstream, after the second World War. I tend to believe that the horrors of the camps, the particular brutality of the war in the Pacific, and the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided some kind of inoculation against revolutionary violence in the Western allies, at least for a generation or so.

But bad ideas die hard, and many of the bad ideas of the 19^th century found new life among other valences in the 20^th. Postwar animosity towards notions of empire and colonialism made the work of Frantz Fanon particularly appealing to westerners. Fanon was a Martinican who fought with the French against the Nazis in WWII. After the war, he trained as a psychologist and went to work in Algeria. His encounters with Algerians’ trauma, due to colonial repression, led him to join the Algerian resistance (the FLN) and inspired him to become a propagandist and pioneering anti-colonial theorist as the Algerian revolution began.

As Haviv Rettig Gur once described it, the Algerian revolutionaries’ strategy was twofold: make life an unpredictable and terror-filled hell for the French and their allies, and provoke the French into committing atrocities in their reprisals. On the first front, the revolutionary forces of the FLN planted bombs on buses and in cafes. They slaughtered men, women, and children in their homes, often beheading, castrating, and otherwise desecrating them before leaving them to be displayed publicly as a symbols of intimidation.

The French responded with lethal brutality of their own. Algeria was placed under martial law, and a policy of torture and collective punishment was put in place. Villages were burned. More than two million Algerians were displaced. An unknown number of Algerians suspected of collaborating with the FLN were taken captive, tortured, and “disappeared” in French-run prisons. Somewhere between 300,000-500,000 civilians were killed in the war, and the world took note. French intellectuals began criticizing the government’s colonial project. Public sentiment turned against the war at home in France and abroad.

Eventually, the colonial French in Algeria reached a tipping point. They were simultaneously terrified to go about their daily business, knowing that a trip to a market, a ride on a bus, or an espresso at a café could make them subject to terror, and they also couldn’t look themselves in the mirror. The extent and brutality of French violence against the Algerian people, the collective punishment, the tactics of psychological warfare and propaganda — all of it became too much to stomach. So, the French went home.

(You may be asking yourself what any of this has to do with a mass shooting in Minnesota last week, and I promise you I’m getting there.)

The Algerian revolution taught the global Left two things: the power of narrative, and the power of sacrifice. On the former, the first step was to present the revolutionary as fundamentally oppressed by the enemy. The second was to present their acts of violence as an inevitable response to their oppression. The narrative then allows the revolutionaries to behave in the most barbaric ways imaginable, knowing that their enemy will get the blame at every turn. “What do you expect when you oppress a people for so long?”

On the power of sacrifice, the FLN demonstrated that so long as the narrative held, one could endure incalculable losses of life. Every civilian death would be blamed on the French, and there was actually an advantage in raising that number — it intensified international scorn for their oppressor.

This has been the playbook for a number of other revolutionary movements, most notably in Palestine. It is almost precisely the playbook of Yahya Sinwar and Hamas in Gaza. But it has also been attempted by others. Russia’s narrative for the invasion of Ukraine is a version of it, concocted out of the fiction that Ukraine’s alliance with Western powers was somehow an oppression of the Russian people. Comment on the war in Ukraine online and you’ll almost certainly get some version of “What do you expect…” in your replies.

Or look at the case of the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The shooter has been the subject of an online campaign to make him a kind of folk hero for similar reasons. “What do you expect people oppressed by America’s rotten healthcare system to do?” Never mind that the shooter was a person of immense privilege, with access to good healthcare. Facts don’t matter, only the narrative.

Similar justifications were offered for the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” of the summer of 2020. Apologia for vandalism, rioting, and looting — which as Nellie Bowles reported in Morning After the Revolution, had a disproportionate impact on minorities and people of color — used an oppressor/oppressed narrative for validation.

And let’s not pretend that only the Left is seduced by it. The riot on the Capital on January 6^th, 2021, was justified by many with a similar narrative. “People believed the election was stolen and their country was being taken away from them. What did you expect them to do?”

I, for one, expect them not to beat up cops with flagpoles, nor to take a dump on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, but I also happen to still believe in moral agency.

I’ve heard evangelicals use similar justifications for the embrace of Donald Trump, in spite of his lack of moral fitness. “Finally,” one told me, “someone’s going to stand up for the white man.”

Here, we can return to the shooting in Minnesota. Why would someone who calls themselves “antifascist,” is scandalized by the perceived oppression of the Right, is horrified by images of innocent dead citizens in Gaza, resort to the wholesale slaughter of children at prayer? Why are they unable to see the ludicrousness of their contradictions? How can they shed innocent blood when they say they’re against oppression?

One answer is simply madness. As Dave Cullen reports in his masterful book Columbine, most of the explanations initially offered to describe the motives of the shooters in that tragedy were wrong. They weren’t particularly bullied. They weren’t particularly motivated to persecute Christians. They had no ideology. They had no grand goal beyond bloodshed, mayhem, and infamy. As Cullen describes it, the main architect of the massacre was likely a rare specimen — a true psychopath — and his accomplice was caught up in his narcissistic fantasies of glory. Perhaps that’s the core issue here in Minneapolis.

But we also live in a moment of escalating violence and irresponsible rhetoric from politicians and media figures on both sides of the aisle, and that shouldn’t be ignored as we think about the motive of this shooter and the milieu in which he arose. If one believes Donald Trump is a modern-day Hitler, or that the US is sponsoring a genocide in Gaza, or that a cabal of billionaires is trafficking children and consuming their adrenochrome, or that an election was stolen right before our eyes — if one believes any one of a dozen tinfoil hat theories that dominate the internet these days, and if one also believes that we are trapped in a world of immanence, without a God or a final judgment to punish the wicked, why would you not reach for violence to try and change something?

Violence is the sacrament of secular revolution, and it has been increasingly not only normalized, but glorified. The murderer of Brian Thompson has thousands of fans, including Taylor Lorenz, formerly a writer for The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Lorenz said on CNN of his killer:

"You're gonna see women especially that feel like, 'oh my God, here's this man who's a revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart, he's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.'"

Indeed, Taylor, a good man is hard to find.

Meanwhile, college campuses are flooded with students chanting about their love of Hamas, who raped an untold number, murdered 1200 people on October 7^th, and glory in the deaths of their own citizens. Violence was justified by the Right after January 6^th and it was justified by the Left in the summer of 2020.

And while many who echo the galaxy-brained conspiracies of Alex Jones or the campus radicalism of pro-Hamas student groups do so out of boredom, or with a half-hearted commitment at best, their stories and activism are bound to take a toll. The time will come — indeed, is upon us — when others will take them much more seriously. Feed that kind of paranoid, apocalyptic rhetoric into the fractured mind of a person who idolizes school shooters, and you’re give a lonely fanatic a purpose for their twisted fantasies.

Ever-escalating political rhetoric, along with constant demonization and polarization on Right and Left, is driving us towards something much more extreme than anything we’ve seen yet. I’ve sensed this trajectory ever since the murder of Brian Thompson, and it sharpened with the murders of Israeli Embassy workers in Washington DC last May. To read that New York Post story, see the scrawl of political justifications and revolutionary language on smoke cannisters and magazine clips, and to hear the shooter’s own words frightens me as to what’s to come.

The FBI has distilled a pattern that unfolds in a six-step progression for mass shooters: Grievance / Personal Crisis, Ideation, Research and Planning, Preparation, Breach (boundary testing the target), and Attack. What I’m getting at here is the idea that in those first three stages, the cultural milieu is such that there is far more reason for fractured minds to find grievance than a few years ago, and as they fantasize and research methods for mass killings, they’ll find these escalating polemics and apologia for violence in our political, media, and social media culture.

This is why rhetoric matters. It’s why character matters — and temperate speech — in political and spiritual leaders. It’s why Trump saying, “Punch that guy in the face” was a problem. It’s why the Lieutenant Governor wearing a shirt with a dagger that read “Protect Trans Kids” was a problem. It’s why the vile rhetoric of white nationalist pastors matters. It’s the product of a world unmoored from the Judeo-Christian tradition that said all life was sacred, and while politicians and podcasters can indulge that extremist language as a kind of boob bait and cosplay, not everyone is in on the joke. Fractured, deranged, and evil minds will take them literally and act accordingly. They’ll raid the capital. The shoot congress members at a baseball game. They’ll shoot through the stained glass windows of a church where children are at prayer.

Every mass shooting should shock us. And to say that our political rhetoric is reckless and dangerous is not to suggest that anyone but the shooter is responsible for his actions. But indulging conspiracy theories and violent fantasies, casually using polemics about genocide, or allegations of child trafficking and murder creates an atmosphere where dangerous and deranged people can ever more easily justify acts of violence and terror, crossing the threshold from dark fantasy to action.

We can name authoritarian overreach when we see it, and we can condemn it without indulging fantasies of revolutionary violence. But in a culture so devoid of meaning and purpose, the rhetoric of violence itself becomes a kind of tribal identifier and source of meaning. Given how long such rhetoric has been escalating, it is only by the grace of God we haven’t seen more bloodshed on American streets, in schools, or in churches.

We are playing a dangerous game. Reckless politicians, polemicists, social media influencers, and terminally online wealthy fools will be able to protect themselves with security systems, body guards, Secret Service, and Capitol Police. It will be children, teachers, and any number of innocent bystanders who pay the price for it.

Over the past few days, a number of progressive and evangelical Christian leaders have raised alarms about the situation in Gaza. Rightly so, given the intensified fighting, Israel’s declared intent for more permanent control and demilitarization of the Strip, and the declarations of famine from a number of humanitarian organizations. Conditions in Gaza are worsening and images of the war are bone-chilling. Media reports of suffering have also continued in a flood.

As I read some of these Christian leaders (and I against my better judgment, interacted with some of them online), I noticed some patterns of language, some stock phrases that were continually used, and of course the constant repetition of the word “genocide.” It reminded me of something I noticed in the days shortly after the October 7th attacks, when every post I wrote about Israel’s right to defend herself was met with a dozen or so Christians saying something like, “Yes, these attacks were awful, but we also need to be sure to listen to the perspective of our Palestinian brothers and sisters.” That last phrase — “listen to the perspective of our Palestinian brothers and sisters” — appeared in more tweets, Facebook and Instagram comments, and emails than I can count, enough so that a colleague and I began to wonder if it was somehow coordinated.

Upon reflection, though, I doubt it was. Coordination isn’t really necessary in today’s information environment. Much of what goes on online isn’t about self-expression or the actual sharing of ideas; it’s about tribal signaling, and it’s purely reflexive. Displaying a particular flag, hashtag activism of all sorts, quote-tweeting the latest outrage from whichever politician you hate-follow — these can at best be considered expressions of solidarity, toothless as they may be. More often they’re something like what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “mutual display,” cultural signifiers indicating that a person is (or is not) part of a particular cultural in-group.

I’m not suggesting that the sentiments aren’t necessarily sincere. They may well be. But they might also be utterly thoughtless.

The pattern that becomes visible in online activism is fairly straightforward. An outrage occurs, some band of influencers — activists, Christian leaders, media figures, politicians — declares it an outrage and tells their followers they too must be outraged. And in short order, some phrase or meme becomes the essential expression of that outrage, and everyone in the in-group aligns and shares that expression.Sometimes it’s simply an idea or image that gets thrown out into the void. Others, it’s a pile-on for someone outside the group who has violated one of the group’s shibboleths.

For some, that expression comes at the tail end of serious reflection. But I suspect for most, it’s reflexive and thoughtless. I’ve come to think of these thoughtless, reactive, signaling posts as cliche-memes.

There is sometimes a price to be paid if one doesn’t participate in the cliche-meme. During the BLM protests, there was tremendous social pressure to use the hashtag or post a black square on your Instagram page, and your commitment to racial equality was questioned if you didn’t. That pressure also shows up in the oft-asked question, “Why haven’t you talked about X or Y topic yet?”

If people were honest, they would often answer, “Because I haven’t thought about it.” But the expectation is that the very existence of the cliche-meme — the fact that everybody else in the in-group has been posting about the issue — is expected to be enough. It reminds me of the scene in the Governor’s office in Blazing Saddles, where after Governor William J. Le Petomane makes a declaration, all of his entourage start loudly “harrumphing.” When the Governor notices one who doesn’t, he angrily points and says, “I didn’t get a harrumph out of that guy.” Quickly, Hedley Lamarr shouts, “Give the Governor a harrumph.”

That’s a fair representation of our online culture: lots of folks know that when it’s time to harrumph, you harrumph, and by doing so, you maintain your place in your tribe for another day. And doing so reflexively also spares you from having to think. As Hannah Arendt wrote of the cliches that abounded after the Second World War — ideas that sought to explain the loss of life among poor European Jews, such as their “ghetto mentality” or notions of collective guilt of all Germans and collective innocence of all their enemies — “…cliches have in common that they make judgment superfluous, and to utter them is devoid of all risk.”

That isn’t to say they are devoid of ideology, however. And that is what makes them so pernicious.

On the online Right over the weekend, there was an absurd outpouring of outrage over the updated Cracker Barrel logo. While many normal people saw it simply for what it was — an ill-conceived refresh of a brand that is associated with nostalgia and road trips — some saw it as a Bat Signal for white identity politics. The new logo removed a figure from the old one, presumable a white country store owner, seated and leaning on a cracker barrel. This was clearly, to them, DEI run amok, white erasure, an assault on white identity. Others on the “woke” right got in line, rushed to join the pile-on, and lament the assault on “heritage Americans.”

From the outside it all looks incredibly stupid, but from the inside, it provided a kind of litmus test for who was willing to stick their necks out and defend the ideology. It also provided a kind of test of the Right’s Overton window, like the velociraptors testing the fences in Jurassic Park. How far can they push white identitarian politics and language?

We’ve seen this pattern of cliche-meme-ing on the Right and Left for years now, and the very repetition of the ritual by an in-group, like the repetition of stories, frames how people think, how they understand politics, and what they understand to be true.

Which brings me back to progressive evangelicals and the war in Gaza. Let me stipulate again that there are legitimate humanitarian concerns in Gaza, and that Israel’s execution of this war has been far from perfect. Just yesterday, an incident occurred at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. From what has been reported thus far, it appears an Israeli tank fired twice on a staircase outside the hospital, where journalists tend to congregate and shoot video of the area. Reports indicate that twenty were killed in the strike, including five journalists and an aid worker.

As one might expect, there is already international outrage about the incident, and the cliche-meme-ing has begun. “Israel targets journalists.” “Israel targets aid workers.” “Israel targets hospitals.” These phrases, familiar to any who have followed the war thus far, have been given new life, alongside the cries of genocide.

Now it is my belief, based on what I know from numerous articles and statements, that this was either a grievous error or a terrible act of malfeasance. The IDF has opened an inquiry into it, and I would hope that in either case, those responsible will be held accountable.

But what’s missing in the outrage is an understanding of how such a mistake can happen. For starters, the IDF stated that there was a legitimate target for the first round from the tank. They had intelligence that a camera, positioned where the first round was fired near the staircase, was providing a feed to Hamas that allowed them to observe troop movements in the area. Note that this, itself, is a war crime — using civilian infrastructure for military operations.

In addition, Nasser hospital has been a base of operations for Hamas throughout the war. When the IDF first took Nasser hospital, early in the war, they located vehicles on the premises that had been used on October 7th to invade Israel. They found evidence that hostages had been kept there. They located command and control operations in tunnels. They later detained a number of hospital workers, believed to be Hamas but wearing the uniforms of hospital employees.

Similar operations occurred at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where intense fighting has happened on multiple occasions. Last May, Mohammad Sinwar, leader of Hamas’ military operations in Gaza after the death of his brother Yahya Sinwar, was killed by an airstrike on another hospital in Khan Younis.

One could assemble a similar list regarding the deaths of journalists in Gaza. While the world scolds Israel for killing more than 240 journalists during the war, it ignores how often those same journalists can be found on the Hamas payroll, or seen on videos of October 7th riding with Hamas militants into kibbutzim and saying, “May God bless their work.”

Don’t mishear me, I’m not suggesting innocent journalists haven’t been killed. What I am suggesting is that Israel is operating in an incredibly complicated environment, one in which its enemy is constantly and deliberately violating the laws of war in an attempt to provoke the very incident that took place at Nasser Hospital yesterday. They nonetheless have the burden of responsibility to judge and act morally. But we too, as outside observers, have a responsibility to judge and act morally.

Instead, all too often, progressive Christians join the cliche-memes of anti-Zionists everywhere, parroting the language that this is a “war on journalists,” or a “war on children,” or that those who support Israel’s war effort “celebrate the massacre of children.” When the tribe starts sharing memes of starving children, they quickly signal their belonging by sharing them as well, but when those images prove false or misleading — when it proves to be a child with a genetic disorder, or photos from another war altogether, or images doctored by AI, they never correct themselves. I would at least expect them to be angry for being lied to. But such anger would require a degree of self-reflection, thinking, and judging that is simply not part of the cliche-meme environment. It’s all signaling, all the time.

They join the fray to condemn Israel for killing journalists without ever stopping to wonder, “Why are there so many journalists in Gaza?” They parrot the accusations of genocide without ever considering how ludicrous the claim is when placed in context with actual genocides. As Coleman Hughes recently wrote:

Assuming 60,000 people have been killed, that’s about 3 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population. The Nazis killed over 60 percent of European Jews. The Ottoman Empire killed over 50 percent of the Armenians in its territory. Hutu extremists may have killed close to 80 percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda over 100 days in 1994. Those were genocides.

In legitimately identified cases of genocide in which a smaller percentage of people were killed, it was because the perpetrator didn’t have the power to kill more. That’s not the case with Israel. If the IDF wanted, it could kill almost everyone in Gaza in a matter of weeks. Why hasn’t it?

The answer, of course, is because they’re not committing a genocide; they’re conducting a war to end Hamas and return their hostages. Imperfectly? Yes. Have their been inexcusable incidents of targeting innocent people, misidentifying targets, and poor strategic decisions? Yes. But these happen in the most moral militaries on earth. Humans are fallible. There are bad seeds in every culture. But we don’t define the character of the American military by the choices of its worst actors.

Online life is so inundated with slanderous claims about Israel targeting children and innocents, and the draw of joining the cliche-meme and signaling to your in-group is so strong, it creates a massive counter-incentive against taking the time to think and judge for oneself. To say, “The war is terrible, and the suffering is real, but it’s not a genocide” is to invite most of your progressive in-group to respond with an angry, “Why didn’t I get a harumph out of that guy?”

To grow curious as to why all the social incentives run one way in this war is to open a massive can of worms as well. It provokes a conversation about the role of grievance politics, identity politics, culture in the West and Middle East, and antisemitism at a level most folks don’t want to get into. (I’m tempted to here, but I’ll spare you any more length. I’ll just commend the Hughes piece, linked above, as a good starting point.)

None of this amounts to a moral blank check for the IDF. None of it requires a dispensational theological perspective that sees modern Israel as playing some key role in the coming eschaton. None of this amounts to contempt for Palestinians, who are made in the image of God and worthy of dignity and respect.

Rather, it invites us to take moral reasoning and thinking seriously. To make judgments not based on emotional reactions to TikTok videos and passionate posts from influencers, but on deep inquiry and curiosity. To notice how often stories of Israeli atrocities turn out to be false or misleading. To see how often, in moments of populist upheaval throughout the last 200 years, contempt for the Jews has arisen with it. To take seriously that only one side of this conflict has, as its policy goals, the genocide of the other, and that’s Hamas. To consider that maybe the consensus on the world’s most contentious conflict is wrong. And to maybe, once in a while, refuse to give your “harumph.”

I was already tearing up as I dug my phone out of my pocket and backed the podcast up, hoping I was wrong.

I wasn’t. Jill Sobule had died.

If you don’t know the name, you might know one of her hit songs. In the soundtrack to the 1995 film Clueless, Jill provided the pop punk masterpiece, “Supermodel,” a song that skewers the absurd expectations of beauty imposed on young girls with a video based on Stephen King’s Carrie. That same year, she had a Billboard Top 40 hit with the song “I Kissed a Girl” (not to be confused with the Katy Perry hit from a decade or so later), a folksy pop song that was transgressive for its time, made even more so with a video parodying 1950’s sitcoms and featuring the longhaired model Fabio.

She had many more songs, albums, and artistic endeavors beyond those two. She was something of a fixture in the New York singer-songwriter scene. She appeared in films and television shows, including Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. And improbably, she showed up in my DM’s one day asking questions about evangelicalism and spirituality. We became fast friends.

To say the least, it’s not obvious that Jill, a trailblazing LGBTQ artist and activist, would be friends with someone like me, a right-of-center evangelical and traditionalist. The fact that we did was a credit to her own curiosity and generosity of spirit.

I first heard from her in the fall of 2021, sometime after an episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill released in which I spoke at length with Joshua Harris. Harris, famous for his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, told the story of his own spiritual deconstruction, the collapse of his ministry under the weight of controversy, and his rethinking of spirituality and dogma. It was of interest to Sobule, apparently, because in the 90’s — when Harris was a popular speaker with evangelical teens and homeschoolers — Harris too issue with “I Kissed a Girl” in talks or interviews given at the time. As one might imagine, the world’s leading advocate of evangelical courtship was not a fan.

What’s fascinating, though, is that Jill reacted not primarily with anger or even hostility; she reacted with curiosity. She wanted to understand where he was coming from, why he’d made her a target of criticism, and what this strange evangelical world of courtship and homeschooling was all about.

She kept that curiosity for the better part of two decades, following Josh’s career enough to know that he’d become an influential pastor, left ministry, and deconstructed. When I interviewed him in 2021, she listened, and found herself full of questions. Still curious, she reached out to me, and a conversation began that continued for the better part of four years.

Our conversations were sporadic and often fleeting, but whenever something from my weird world of evangelicalism would cross her radar, I’d hear from her. She never wanted to argue; she wanted to understand, and her curiosity piqued my own — I wanted to understand her too. It’s fair to say that a guy like me was not a natural Jill Sobule listener, but hearing from her, hearing the questions she asked, encountering the curiosity that probed my own spirituality and faith, made me curious about her too, and I found myself diving into the Jill Sobule catalogue over the years. What I found was a thoughtful, searching, wickedly funny, generous, and creative soul. Whatever else I am as a creative person, a storyteller, a writer, I hope I can cultivate the kind of generosity she demonstrated to me.

Knowing Jill the little I did, from a distance, mostly from DM’s and texts, nonetheless allowed me to encounter something Lewis Hyde describes in his book, The Gift. “The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.” Hyde’s idea is that art is best offered to the world in a spirit of hospitality and generosity. It is given, not exchanged. How that works in a world that commodifies everything gets very tricky, but preserving art’s quality as a gift relies largely on the spirit of generosity of the artist, on a certain detachment from the work, and a spirit of hospitality. My friend Dan Siedell once said that all creativity is a gesture by an artist, a kind of invitation to see if the world wants to reciprocate and join their dance.

Knowing Jill, even mediated through great distance and digital devices, it is easy to see that she was that type of artist. She was asking us to join her dance. Moreover, she was asking us to be as interested and probing as she was. Somehow, through our often lengthy back-and-forth messages in social media DM’s, I was able to encounter a person who embodied that kind of creative generosity, a humane curiosity and interest, a person who saw those around her as human beings that were more than the social, cultural, and ideological differences that separated us — even weirdo evangelical conservatives like me. I think that spirit of generosity and open-heartedness somehow made my own heart a little more generous and open too. And for that gift, I will always be grateful.

In one of our last exchanges, we had a long back and forth about Jesus. She had apparently been reading the gospels and was trying to make sense of them — not for the first time, I think, but anew. She said, “I’ve always felt attracted to Jesus and his message and sorta wished I could figure out how to believe.” She then shared a link to this song, adding, “Here is a song I wrote years ago about that — about wishing I believed in something.”

I only heard from her one more time, when she was inviting me to come up to see her in Indianapolis. I wish I had — I’d been out of town, though, and couldn’t. She died a week later.

Listening to “Somewhere in New Mexico,” I found myself thinking about an oft-quoted prayer written by Thomas Merton:

My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.

Of course, Merton’s prayer echoes one that’s much shorter, and much more famous: Lord I believe, help my unbelief.

I want to believe for Jill that Jesus met her in her unbelief. Frankly, I kind of assume that Jesus was helping her in her unbelief for much longer than I ever knew her. I know that I need a grace big enough for myself.

I am grateful for her, heartbroken at her loss, and heartbroken for those who knew her so much better than I did. Jill and I made for oddball friends, for sure, but the ease of conversation across the cultural divide reminds me that none of us — regardless of our tribes, our differences, our reasons for hurt or hostility — are impossibly separated. At the end of day, each of us, as image bearers, if we look closely, ought to recognize something beautiful in the other. I saw that in Jill because of her generous spirit, creativity, and kindness. It’s a gift I hope to give to others. She taught me how, and I’m grateful.

The strike was condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists and called "murder" by Reporters without Borders. Amnesty International celebrated Al-Sharif as "brave and extraordinary" and called the strike a war crime. United Nations, Secretary‑General António Guterres’s spokesperson extended condolences and demanded an investigation. CNN wrote “Anas al-Sharif became the face of the war for millions. Then Israel killed him.” An Associated Press headline read, “Israel targets and kills Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif in Gaza as journalist toll grows.”

Based on the above, the story sounds pretty bad.

But each of these organizations barely mentioned or account for the fact that as far back as October 2024, the IDF published evidence that Al-Sharif was an active member of Hamas, involved in rocket brigade attacks against Israeli citizens and the IDF. Nor did they mention his Telegram post from the midst of the October 7, 2023 attacks, where he wrote, "9 hours and the heroes are still roaming the country, killing and capturing... God, God how great you are." Nor did they mention the regular cheerleading for Hamas, or the numerous photos taken with senior Hamas leadership that he posted on social media, or the gleeful reporting he did from Hamas’ ritual humiliation of hostages during their release.

Much of the above has not mattered, and coverage has focused on hagiographic presentations of Al-Sharif as a brave war correspondent advocating for human rights. But all such talk is hollow when it ignores the human rights of Israeli civilians whose slaughter he cheered on October 7th, or were the targets of his unit's rockets.

Every death is a tragedy, and Al-Sharif's death was preventable. He could have waved the white flag any time in the past two years of war, surrendered, and gotten out of the fight. Or better yet, he could never have joined Hamas in the first place. But because he took part in Hamas' campaign of terror, he was a legitimate target. Putting on a flack jacket with the word "Press" on it is not a get-out-of-jail free card.

It brings up a point I think many in the US don't fully understand: the extent to which Gazan institutions, including media, were permeated with Hamas. There are two key reasons for that permeation. The first is Hamas’ modus operandi. They’re more than just a terror militia; they were the ruling power in Gaza, and their approach to rule in Gaza was something more like a mafia family (or, as Jonah Goldberg wrote this week, a prison gang) than a government. One could not do business in Gaza without making accommodations for Hamas.

The most familiar analog might be protection rackets, a favorite of the Italian mafia in the US. In a protection racket, the mob approaches a neighborhood business and says, “Pay us a certain fee and we’ll make sure nothing bad ever happens here.” This had a twofold appeal. On the one hand, many immigrant business owners at the time had reason to suspect that the cops weren’t going to be terribly responsive to their problems. On the other hand, the mob had its own network of gangs and thugs who could make trouble for those who didn’t pay the fee.

Something similar has been going on in Gaza ever since Hamas took control. Their grift related to aid has been widely reported, but their top-to-bottom infiltration and control over all of civil society is less discussed. To operate in Gaza, whether involved in medicine, education, or media, one had to maintain at least the tacit approval of Hamas. (Ironically, one of the better stories describing their control over media is over from the Committee to Protect Journalists. I guess the committee can identify threats to journalists, but not when their ranks have been infiltrated.)

Given their widespread influence in Gaza, it shouldn’t surprise us that Hamas had a militant operative working under the cover of a journalist. What is shocking is that the world is so numb to this scandal. Four other journalists died because they were working side-by-side with al-Sharif. That ought to be a cause for outrage, not because they were killed by an Israeli strike, but because al-Sharif put on a flack jacket with the word “Press” on it and continued to work to kill innocent Israelis and support the work of Hamas.

Somehow, observers of this war are supposed to turn a blind eye to the selfies with Yahya Sinwar, the praise of 10/7, the evidence that al-Sharif was on the Hamas payroll, and in the wake of his death say, “How could Israel do this?”

Such a reaction says far more about us than it does Israel.

I said last week things would get worse before they got better. This is a perfect example. The readiness of the world to lament a terrorist who sent rockets to kill innocent Jews and that condemns the nation that would kill him in an effort to protect their own citizens is a scandal. It gets to the heart of why I focus on this issue so much.

If there were evidence that a “journalist” covering the Russia-Ukraine war was covertly paid by the Russian military, or more precisely, that in between filing stories for Russia Today (as opposed to Al-Jazeera) he was serving in a unit that fired rockets or operated drones that specifically targeted civilians, there would be no outcry against the Ukrainians for targeting a journalist. Instead, there would be enormous outrage against the Russians for violating the laws of war, allowing an operative to pretend to be a journalist, and endangering the lives of his colleagues. In other words, we would be outraged at Russia for using this journalist to commit war crimes, rather than Ukraine for doing what any reasonable nation would do to defend itself from an existential threat.

Call me paranoid. Tell me I’m Uncle Leo from Seinfeld, who thought every mistake in a restaurant kitchen was a personal, antisemitic attack. Tell me I’m indulging conspiracy theories. But show me another western ally who, while at war against a known terror regime, gets no benefit of the doubt in their war effort. Show me where, in the fight against Russia, we second guess every Ukrainian initiative or strike. Show me any conflict in the world where we don’t trust our allies’ intelligence in decisions like this.

You can’t, because there isn’t. I’m certain — largely because of the criticism of Haviv Rettig Gur — that Israel could do a better job advocating for itself on the world’s stage. But I reserve my own frustrations for a West that holds Israel to different standards than it would ever demand of itself.

· Disarming Hamas

· Freeing hostages

· Demilitarizing Gaza

· Establishing IDF control over all of Gaza

· Enabling a new civilian administration independent of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas

One wonders if the Prime Minister has been reading David French lately, whose recent column about the war effort challenged Israel to adopt a “clear, hold, build” strategy like that of US forces in Iraq: clear areas of Hamas, stabilize and secure (hold) them, and rebuild with an eye toward a better future for Gazans. Such an approach is ambitious, but if achieved, could deliver on the promise Netanyahu made at the outset of the war — defeating Hamas and bringing the hostages home. Based on reporting from the likes of Haviv Rettig Gur and John Spencer, it would seem that the IDF has developed competencies for urban warfare that ought to make the military goals of the plan achievable. As to freeing the hostages and empowering a new civilian administration, much remains to be seen.

One might wonder why this wasn’t Israel’s approach in the first place. Gaza is a territory of about 140 miles, less than half the size of the five boroughs of New York City, and a little smaller than the official borders of Detroit. The IDF activated somewhere between 300,000-450,000 troops for the war effort, and they no doubt possessed the technology, materiel, and capacity to do so. Instead, they took on an approach that was almost literally terrorist whack-a-mole — entering a region, fighting Hamas and driving them out, and moving on.

While there are examples where that approach had its advantages — the remarkable events at Al-Shifa Hospital in March, 2024 being chief among them — as a long term strategy, it has been profoundly flawed. Hamas could survive the war effort by simply moving on or doubling back once the IDF exited a zone. This approach also left civilians in a destabilized and shifting enclave. Hamas could pressure Gazans to not comply with evacuation orders, could create terror on evacuation corridors, and of course, could further weaponize aid.

So, why hasn’t the IDF adopted a “clear, hold, build” strategy up to this point? Well, you’re about to see in technicolor, starting with Germany’s decision on Friday to halt arms exports to Israel. (One might hope that the world wouldn’t take their cues from Germany on how to treat Jews, but I predict that, as they have in the past, many in Europe will all-too-quickly follow their lead.)

The decision to occupy Gaza City comes after several weeks of bad press for Israel. The New York Times accused Israel of lying about aid being stolen by Hamas. They then published a front-page story about starvation featuring a stark and heartbreaking photo of an emaciated child. Haaretz published a story accusing the IDF of making food lines a “killing field.”

In the wake of these stories, public sentiment towards Israel shifted, including among a number of writers and pundits that are generally pro-Israel, including Ross Douthat and my aforementioned friend David French. The UK’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, gave Israel an ultimatum: end the war or he will recognize Palestinian statehood. It didn’t matter that the stories weren’t true. As I wrote when the corrections were being published, the truth or fiction of the stories was less important than their volume. What was clear at the time was that a sort of campaign was on to shift the conversation around the war, and it worked.

It doesn’t help that members of Netanyahu’s coalition continue to talk about annexing the territory and ethnically cleansing it, or that West Bank settlers continue to act like thugs. Nor does it matter that violent settlers are a fringe of Israeli society, that a majority of Israelis see the settlements as an obstacle to peace, or that those coalition members aren’t directly shaping IDF strategy. People like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich will always get amplified in mainstream media outlets because they confirm the biases of anti-Zionists, giving them an example to share that makes Israelis look like ghouls.

But it is precisely because of the limits of their influence that the IDF has resisted this strategy thus far. Pulling out of Gaza in 2005 was a gesture on behalf of Israelis to a global community that had long been accusing Israel of apartheid, calling the occupation illegal, and calling Zionism racism for three decades. In response to their withdrawal, Gazans elected Hamas, Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority, and Israelis got twenty years of rocket fire, terror, and 10/7.

The enclave itself restructured society under the mafia-like control of Hamas. Loyalty to the regime became paramount. Ordinary Gazans were subjected not only to sharia law and brutal repression, but to protection rackets. Humanitarian aid agencies like UNWRA were faced with a kind of Hobson’s choice: allow their ranks to be infiltrated and their work coopted by Hamas, or get out of Gaza. As Gaza became more violent and Hamas’ terror efforts escalated, Israel clamped down on its borders and upped the ante on its own security apparatus. Rather than see this as the natural result of living next door to a genocidal terror regime, many in the global community escalated their own rhetoric in their criticisms of Israel, accusing it of genocide long before October 7^th, 2023, calling Gaza an “open-air prison”, and most grotesquely of all, likening it to a concentration camp.

Today, as much of Gaza lay in ruins, it’s not hard to find pro-Palestine accounts on social media that post sizzle reels of all that Gazans have lost: beautiful beaches, swimming pools, shopping malls, restaurants. I am not aware of any open-air prison, let alone a concentration camp, that ever had a swimming pool or a gastropub. Nor am I aware of a decade-plus long effort at genocide in which the subject’s population grew. But I digress...

All of this is predicate to Israel’s approach to this war. Israelis and their allies understood before the first IDF boot touched down in Gaza that their war effort would be interpreted in bad faith. To be sure, that doesn’t justify a bad strategy — and I do think that their resistance to “clear, hold, build” from the outset was a bad strategy — but it does help to explain why the choice was made. They knew that anti-Israeli voices across the globe would rise up in outrage over any response to 10/7 that fell short of, “Thank you sir, may I have another.”

In light of that reality, it’s somewhat miraculous that support for the war has lasted as long as it has, and that it’s taken this long for Western allies to start undermining the war effort. As recent talks were under way with Hamas about a ceasefire and hostage deal, French president Emmanuel Macron declared his unilateral intent to recognize a Palestinian state. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio blames that decision for the collapse of hostage negotiations. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has announced that if Israel doesn’t achieve a ceasefire deal, they too will recognize a Palestinian state. This, I believe, will go down in history as one of the most grossly irresponsible diplomatic decisions of my lifetime. It literally incentivizes Hamas’s hostage taking, and it sets up the very likely probability that October 7^th — rather than living in infamy as a day of murder, rape, and kidnapping — will go down in history as Palestine’s independence day.

The person who understood this landscape, knew he could rely on “enlightened” liberals to twist their moral logic into pretzel shapes, and turn on Israel was Yahya Sinwar. His intense study of Israeli culture while in an Israeli prison (where he got life-saving medical care) led him to make hostage-taking central to Hamas’ strategy. This was the most important strategic decision in the 10/7 attacks. Taking hostages invokes a cultural and religious obligation on behalf of Israeli Jews — pidyon shvuyim, a religious and theological requirement that hostages must be ransomed at almost any cost. Sinwar understood that the hostages themselves were a kind of political force multiplier, and that Israelis could be counted on to pressure their own government to make concessions in an efforts to bring them home.

This is why Hamas is so theatrical with the hostages. It’s why hostage releases are humiliation liturgies, including one instance when Hamas brought a van full of hostages to witness the release of others, but promptly swept them back in the tunnels of Gaza. The more they can wave their suffering before the Israeli people, the more they can count on Israelis to demand a deal.

What’s perverse about the most recent events with hostages is that Hamas has also learned they can rely on the broader world to act like useful idiots, studiously ignoring or dismissing their treatment of their captives. Thus, when the New York Times publishes a misleading picture of a child who looks emaciated, Hamas can cruelly and cynically publish images of a genuinely malnourished and starving hostage, whom they are forcing to dig his own grave, confident that it will cost them nothing in their broader diplomacy. Only Jews, Israelis, and a handful of their allies will note that it is the one and only image we have of a genuinely starving Gazan during this food shortage, or that it’s a war crime. The Starmers and Macrons of the world will continue advancing the Palestinian cause.

Point being, Israelis understood, from the outset of the war, that any of their actions in Gaza would be framed in the worst possible light, and thus approached it with a strategy that allowed them to keep the narrowest possible footprint. That strategy failed, because it didn’t prevent any devastation in Gaza, the world awarded them no points for a gesture that was meant to signal that they didn’t want to annex Gaza, and it gave too much breathing room for Hamas to survive.

Implementing this new approach on the heels of the failure of this one, as pressure mounts from the international community, as Hamas prepares to celebrate the recognition of a Palestinian state from two of the world’s great powers, and as the clock still ticks on the survival of the remaining hostages, is a depressing prospect. But here too, they have a Hobson’s choice. The alternative is to make concessions and end the war, leaving Hamas to rule Gaza. If the war were to end under those conditions, Hamas would crawl out of the tunnels and wave victory flags, much as they did when they returned the bodies of the murdered Bibas family. They would also still possess 20 or so living hostages — whom they’ve proudly shown the world they are starving to death. They would continue to weaponize aid and begin rebuilding their tunnel network and rocket arsenal. And they would redouble their efforts to orchestrate another 10/7-like attack, knowing that they can wield hostages like weapons of mass destruction and that the broader world will pay little attention to them.

Israel can win the battle in Gaza. They can demilitarize the region, criminalize Hamas, and implement some kind of administrative control that would hold terrorists accountable. What they almost certainly can’t do is win the hearts and minds war. Until the world is as horrified by the actual brutality of Hamas as they are seduced by the manufactured outrage that floods western media, until they take the words of Hamas’ senior leadership as seriously as they do Itamar Ben-Gvir, and until the rape and murder of hundreds at the Nova festival is seen as a war crime that any nation on earth would have to respond to with lethal and brutal force, Israel will be fighting a losing battle in the public sphere.

Haviv Rettig Gur this week lamented that much of the failure to make that case falls on the shoulders of the Prime Minister’s office. He’s not wrong. And frankly, one of the most tragic elements of this moment in history is Netanyahu himself, a polarizing figure with a brittle coalition that includes some indefensible characters. Even so, I worry that such a critique is too generous to a global community that has shown little empathy to the Jewish people. Yes, the Prime Minister should be doing more to respond to the slanders that flood headlines. Yes the IDF should be more responsive to accusations of war crimes. But I don’t entirely blame either office. “Why bother” becomes quite appealing when the deck is so clearly stacked against you.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, congratulations. It means you’re not on social media and your internet search algorithms haven’t been formed by the shopping habits of your teenage daughters. To catch you up, though, Sidney Sweeney has appeared in a new ad campaign for American Eagle, and as one might expect in an ad campaign featuring Sweeney, it plays on sex appeal. In a voiceover, we’re told, “Sidney Sweeney has great jeans.” There’s an obvious wordplay going on here, with “great jeans” hinting at “great genes,” i.e., playing on the fact that Sweeney is attractive. And it’s on that front that people have lost their ever-loving minds.

For her part, Sweeney has leaned into a conception of beauty and sexuality that is, for better or worse, somewhat retrograde. One need only watch her appearance on Saturday Night Live, in which she leaned into dozens of references to her figure for laughs, to recognize that Sweeney is in on the joke. And that seems to be the case with the American Eagle ad as well. I highly doubt that Sweeney is surprised by the backlash to the ad. It’s intentionally provocative.

And that is part of what makes the backlash so stupid. Pardon me for what might seem to be a crude pun, but the Sweeney ad is a quintessential example of boob bait. American Eagle’s ad lured deranged progressives into virulent denunciations — which only elevated its exposure.

According to critics, “great jeans” isn’t simply meant as a compliment to Sweeney’s figure. It’s also about her blonde-haired-blue-eyed “whiteness.” Which, of course, links the notion of “great genes” to Nazi-era ideas about eugenics and Aryan supremacy. We should be outraged by the ad, we are told, because it suggests that blond-haired, blue-eyed women are a standard of beauty by which all other women are judged.

Color me skeptical.

Look, if you want to have a conversation about how the ad contributes to the objectification of women, I’m here for it. If you want to talk about the cult of youth, or have a serious conversation about standards of beauty, let’s do it. But if you want to make this American Eagle about Nazism, count me out. To borrow a phrase from Hannibal Burress, I only want to get angry about “real stuff.” And a provocative ad for denim using a phrase that is often applied to the children of athletes, celebrities, models, and great intellects — regardless of their race — is not “real stuff.”

The online uproar about the ad reminded me of one of the weirder incidents that took place during the run of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. While in production, a friend connected me with a source for the story, whom he suggested was a critical figure in the downfall of Driscoll. I spoke to them by phone, and while they had never been part of Mars Hill Church, they’d lived in Seattle during a large part of the church’s meteoric rise. They also were connected to lots of former members, and had been part of some spiritual abuse survivor groups. During our call, they shared some of the stories they’d heard from women who had been Mars members. They were bone chilling. Physical abuse. Psychological manipulation. Husbands tracking their wives weight and fitness. Sexual abuse and pressure of all sorts. Stuff that was well outside the realm of anything I’d heard thus far.

One story that caught my attention was about weigh-ins. According to this person, some husbands at Mars Hill had the habit of doing weekly weigh-ins with their wives and daughters, and that the results of the weigh-ins affected the portions they’d be served at mealtimes throughout the week. To be clear, the moment I heard this, I thought it sounded deranged and false, but I did the necessary due diligence to check it out. I called or texted at least a dozen former Mars Hill members to see if anyone had heard of such a thing. Even the most virulent critics of the church laughed at the absurdity of the accusation.

As a joke about Driscoll, the idea was funny. It made for good satire. But as a declared fact, it was absurd. It was also provably untrue. In fact, the only thing even resembling such an idea that I could find was a tweet from a Twitter account that parodied Driscoll, in which the fake Mark said it was Taco Tuesday and weigh-in night, and suggesting that there would be extra guacamole for the ladies who came in on-target.

As a result, I chose not to use this source, and that was nearly the end of the story. However, to my surprise, I saw it emerge again a few months later. Another writer, covering issues of gender and sexuality among evangelicals, credulously quoted this same source and story. I was surprised, since only a modicum of fact-checking could discredit it. But, as I’ve learned in this work, this story fell into the category of “too good to check.” When you want the thing to be true, you can believe in almost anything.

We see it constantly. In Trump coverage, wild stories often get repeated as fact. After all, Trump makes believing those wild stories all too easy. For instance, there would be no “Russiagate” if Trump had not asked Russia, on national television, to hack Hilary Clinton’s emails. But the fact that that happened does not also mean that the latest fever-dream conspiracy from Adam Schiff or Rachel Maddow is also true.

Likewise, the idea that President Joe Biden was in cognitive decline seems indisputable at this point. But that does not mean that the President farmed out all of his responsibilities to others.

My point is this; the truth ought to be enough for us. Mark Driscoll’s misogyny was on vivid display in the pulpit of Mars Hill. He encouraged women to act out stripper fantasies for their husbands. He held up goofy and arcane stereotypes of male and female roles in the home. One need not lie or exaggerate in order to find something to criticize.

The principle applies to the rest of life. If someone or something is corrupt or evil, there’s no need to exaggerate or indulge in fever-dream fantasies about them. Donald Trump asked Russia to hack Hilary Clinton’s emails on national television. That action was by itself, un-American and beneath the dignity of any office. (Frankly, that’s an odd thing to do for someone who has for forty years been cultivated as a Russian asset. I would think in your earliest meetings with your KGB / FSB handlers, they’d probably mention, “Hey, don’t ask us to do stuff for you on nationally televised broadcasts.”) Likewise, it has become clear that Joe Biden was experiencing symptoms of cognitive decline while in office. One need not invent a narrative in which he was a barely-functional, drooling idiot to say that the efforts to cover this up were repugnant and made our nation less safe. When the facts are bad enough, let them stand on their own merits.

As for Sidney Sweeney, if one is bothered by the ad, I get it. I’m the kind of conservative who doesn’t like the sexualization of every imaginable consumer product, but the fact is — that ship has sailed, and sex sells all too well. Criticize it all you’d like, but turning it into a racialized assault on brown-skinned girls, or framing it as an exercise or expression of Aryan supremacy doesn’t just make you sound crazy, it reveals that you are genuinely out of touch with reality. Moreover, it’s a slanderous thing to accuse Sweeney of being complicit in neo-Nazi propaganda, and I wish we, as a culture, were a little slower to pull the trigger on such accusations.

Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are spewing antisemitic bile on a daily basis. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein is airing Hamas apologia in his interview with Mahmoud Khalil. Qatari money and influence is flooding Ivy League campuses with antisemitic ideology. Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the world, is airing antisemitic conspiracy nonsense from Ian Carroll. Piers Morgan is perpetually platforming clowns like “comic” Dave Smith. More than ever in my lifetime, if you’re among those who think the Nazis were the bad guys in WWII , there is plenty of reason for outrage. There is no need to manufacture it over a denim ad.

Rather predictably, last night, the New York Times published a statement about the child featured in that image, which reads in part, “We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems.” They published this on the Times’ PR account on X, which has about 89,000 followers, rather than their main account, which has more that 55 million. They also edited the article and affixed an editor’s note, none of which tells us much beyond the child having preexisting conditions.

According to independent journalist Dave Collier, the child suffers from cerebral palsy. According to the child’s mother, interviewed on CNN, he has a “muscular disorder” but he’s “happy” and “sits up.” On the site Honest Reporting, Rachel O’Donoghue notes that the image was sourced from a reporter connected to Turkish state media, and that in other images, the child’s older brother is visible and appears to be well-nourished and healthy.

It is plausible that, due to his genetic disorder, he requires special nutritional support and would benefit from access to first-rate medical care — both of which are difficult to source in Gaza right now. And there is a worthwhile conversation to be had when war disrupts access to life-saving food, drugs, and technology. But that is not the conversation the Times was interested in pursuing. Instead, they took an obviously moving and artful photo and deceptively attached it to their coverage of food shortages in Gaza.

This has happened before. In May of 2024, a Palestinian official presented a picture to the UN of Yazan al‑Kafarneh, a ten-year old he described as dying of starvation in Gaza. Here too, it was later revealed that the child’s severe disfigurement was due to underlying genetic conditions, rather than a direct result of starvation or malnutrition. Wartime conditions made access to life-saving medical care difficult, and this child tragically died. But like the incident this week with the New York Times, the marriage of image and headline, linking a suffering child to “starvation in Gaza” was fundamentally dishonest.

My sense that the fix was in when I saw the cover of the Times was admittedly, based largely on a hunch, perhaps inspired by the fact that the child’s mother did not appear emaciated and starving, and perhaps also on memory of this previous incident. I literally thought to myself as I looked over the page, “Let’s see if this stands in 48 hours.” I was right, but that’s beyond the point. Because by the time the Times issued its correction, to a much smaller audience than the one it shared the image with, the damage had been done.

It's a disturbing pattern, but one that’s been predictable since October 7^th. An atrocity is reported (“Israeli Airstrike Kills Hundreds at Gazan Hospital”) and then slowly, quietly, the story changes (“Oops, only a dozen died and oh, by the way, the explosion was an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, not an Israeli airstrike.”)

I confess to feeling more enraged about this example than usual, though. I think that’s for a few reasons. For one thing, I’m engaged in a project that has me doing lots of Holocaust-related research, and I can’t escape the sense that antisemitism is a spiritual disorder before it is a cultural or political one. For another, I see antisemitism in the Christian nationalist right amplifying daily, as ghouls and clowns seem to be expanding their influence and platform. But most of all, I’m bothered by the number of thoughtful voices, including conservatives of my ilk who are now finding themselves wobbly on their support for Israel. It’s as if a memo went out with the photo of Muhammad and his mother, reading, “It’s time to start blaming Israel for the suffering in Gaza.”

But again, it turns out the story about aid was wrong. The photo in the Times was a lie.

If it weren’t so demoralizing to Israelis, including soldiers who are fighting to remove a force that killed 1,200 of their fellow citizens, fired thousands of rockets into their cities, and promised to keep doing it until every Jew was driven out from the river to the sea, it would amount to an interesting study in media literacy. But it’s so much more than a problem of bias. It’s a problem of manipulation, and the roots of it reach all the way back to the source of the conflict.

Yahya Sinwar famously admitted that the deaths of Gazan civilians were “necessary sacrifices,” understanding that their suffering would lead to pressure not on him or Hamas, but on Israel. More recently, another Hamas official referred to civilian deaths as “material calculations,” saying of the dead, “the womb’s of Gaza’s women will give birth to twice as many. This is the price that must be paid.”

Perhaps, given that a terror organization with genocidal ambitions has admitted that the suffering of their own people is key to their strategy, readers ought to be skeptical of a single New York Times story that would uproot two years’ worth of stories about stolen aid in Gaza — particularly when that story is sourced by two “Israeli officials” clinging to anonymity. On the Gazan starvation story, this is as good a reminder as any to “beware the images.” We should be skeptical of the stories told through photos and videos, divorced from context. It’s no wonder that TikTok has been the source of rising anti-Israel sentiment in young people. If you’ve followed this stuff closely for very long at all, you’ll understand why. Hamas and its allies have a sophisticated approach to social media that assumes a very shallow level of engagement and the need to create outrage. This includes liberal use of staged videos and AI, and it is almost comical to watch as it unfolds — men holding what is meant to be understood as a dead child, but the child scratches an itch on their leg. AI-generated Images of weeping mothers holding babies with obvious glitches like too many fingers.

The brilliance of Hamas and her allies is not in the content itself, but in their adoption of the Steve Bannon motto — “flood the zone with sh**” — counting on volume inside social media algorithms to be more important than precision. In a sense, it preys on our capacity as liturgical creatures, whose stories and habits make us who we are. If one were primarily concerned with the positive moral and spiritual formation of their soul, they would be very careful to curate what they consume — rather than have someone in Silicon Valley or Beijing. One might also recognize that blurring the lines between news and entertainment inside our social media platforms creates a kind of Trojan horse for lies and half-truths to take root in our moral imaginations. We talk often about how this is driving political polarization, or how it’s creating a crisis of anxiety and depression among young women or radicalization among young men. But we don’t talk enough about how it might be a spiritual breeding ground for antisemitism.

It is also to Hamas’ advantage that the newsrooms of places like The New York Times are full of people who share their ideological anti-Zionism. As we have seen time and again in this war — including in most recently in the stolen aid story — the Times won’t give any credence to people like IDF spokesman Nadav Shoshani, but they take the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is run by Hamas, at their word. That’s a deliberate choice, and it speaks to desire. You have to want to believe what Hamas is telling you.

Today, we can say two things with certainty: First, life in Gaza is hell, and it benefits no one — including Israel itself — to deny that fact. Even as organizations like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation seek to maximize the supply of aid to the region, the conditions on the ground are wartime conditions. For most Gazans, food is hard to come by. Medical care is limited. An untold number of homes, schools, and businesses are destroyed. It is a life one should not wish on their enemies.

Second, the moral burden for those hellish conditions lies primarily on Hamas and her allies. They invaded Israel on October 7^th, fired thousands of rockets at her citizens, killed more than 1,200, and kidnapped another 250. Should Hamas spontaneously evolve a conscience and find deep concern for the suffering of their people, they could end the war in about half an hour. All that’s necessary is that they would relinquish control of Gaza and return all living and dead hostages.

I’m not holding my breath.

Nor am I surprised that Hamas would act like Hamas. They are religious fanatics, driven by the belief that their great historical shame was the return of Jewish self-governance to a region that was once their caliphate, and they’ll stop at nothing — including the deaths of their own wives and children — to try and rewrite history and restore Islam to glory. Until they are defeated or profoundly reformed from within, they will cling to violence, to hostages, and to lying on the world stage.

Likewise, I’m not surprised that Israel is being Israel. Remember that no army is under obligation to feed their enemy’s civilian population at a time of war. I think it is a credit to the state of Israel that they’ve worked to establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and have attempted to negotiate for the release of Aid through the United Nations. That Israel gets no credit in the media and in international opinion for this is an indictment of our supposed convictions, not theirs. That the UN gets no scorn for eschewing that cooperation, or for letting hundreds of trucks of aid rot inside the Gaza border because they refuse to commit to the one thing Israel asks of them — to keep the aid out of the hands of Hamas — is beyond contempt.

The challenge, then, for those who want to see the Jewish state survive and the Jewish people kept safe from harm, is to remain vigilant in the face of increased pressure. Remember why the war started. Remember the captives that are suffering even now in Hamas tunnels. By all means, advocate to flood Gaza with aid. Criticize Israel’s right wing when they make dangerous and irresponsible suggestions about settlements and ethnic cleansing. Hold Israeli soldiers accountable when they violate international law, and hold Israeli leaders — Netanyahu included — accountable for the ways they were asleep at the wheel in the build-up to October 7^th.

But don’t be seduced by the images. Don’t be harangued into sinking your shoulders and saying, “The war has just gone on for too long.” Ask yourself how long you’d fight to bring back your son or daughter from a Hamas tunnel. If a terror group murdered your loved ones and promised to come back and do it again, how long would you fight to ensure they had no capability to follow through on that promise?

Losing sight of these fundamentals is again, an indictment on us. We can lament the grotesque imagery of war from the comforts of home, but Israelis have to go to sleep at night wondering if they’ll be awakened by a rocket alert, gunfire in their kibbutz, or a knock at the door.

And perhaps the clearest lesson of all of this, don’t fall for ideologically-driven nonsense — especially when you’ve seen it before.

More broadly, Mamdani is a creature of the Squad politics of 2018. He’s advocated to defund the NYPD, proposed $65 million for gender-affirming care, wants to strengthen New York’s position as a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants, wants to raise the corporate tax rate in the city, and of course, has regularly accused Israel of committing genocide. He is what would happen if the Columbia tentifada came to life as a political candidate.

Is he a harbinger of the trajectory of the Left for the next three years? Maybe. But Mamdani benefits from being surrounded by candidates who aren’t terribly serious — like the GOP’s cat-loving Curtis Sliwa — or have the stink of corruption on them, like incumbent mayor Eric Adams or former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 ought to have caused the Left to have a gut-check. They didn’t just lose because Joe Biden was old, or because Kamala Harris was a bad candidate; they lost on the issues. Biden’s execution of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster, as was his “Inflation Reduction Act” and the refusal to do any kind of mea culpa on COVID policy. Add to that the Biden administration’s approach to trans rights, which included barring blanket-bans to transgender athletes in K-8 sports and hosting a Pride month celebration where a trans activist exposed their breasts on the White House lawn.

Harris, of course, created no room between herself and Biden, and the unpopularity of these issues — among others, of course — were enough to cause swing voters to either stay home or vote for the twice-impeached (if not convicted) guy who not only stood behind the lies that inspired the January 6^th riot on the Capitol, but who called convicted rioters “hostages” and promised to pardon them.

All evidence seems to indicate that Democrats are uninterested in soul searching, though. Instead, the energy in the party is coalescing around its most progressive members. Democrat activists and media figures have been wowed by the crowds at rallies hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, creating a narrative that indicates their platform as the future of the party. Mamdani’s win in the New York mayoral primary also adds fuel to that fire.

As a conservative, I see all of this as both bad faith (on the part of spinners) and bad news. It’s bad faith because no one seems to be asking the obvious question about the Sanders-AOC rallies: what kind of person goes to a political rally in the Spring of an off-year? (I’m reminded of Bill Burr’s joke about “What kind of person joins a group?”) Only the most politically animated elements of your party. Additionally, the rallies benefitted from the aggressive approach taken by the Trump administration to its first 100 days, which stirred the pot and created an appetite for dissenters to do something, anything. The success of the No Kings rallies were a similar case-in-point. But if the Democrats look at those crowds and the success of Mamdani as a permission slip for swinging to the far left, I suspect they’ll be in for a rude awakening in 2026.

I think often of something Yuval Levin said shortly after the election in 2024. In an interview with Ezra Klein, Levin predicted that many of the Trump administration’s policies would produce outcomes that he, as a conservative, liked. But he also predicted that the means by which those outcomes were produced he would not like. I agreed, and a perfect case-in-point has been the Trump administration’s battles with higher education institutions. I am in favor of cracking down on institutional antisemitism and ending the tolerance universities like Columbia and Harvard have had for terrorist sympathizers. I’m deeply disturbed by the draconian means by which that goal was pursued. Likewise, I’m glad to see the Trump administration crack down on the NCAA’s irrational policies towards transgender athletes, which risked the erosion of girls’ athletics in any meaningful way. The news out of the University of Pennsylvania last week was frankly, extraordinary. But the heavy-handed approach of the Department of Education has struck me as bad precedent, and one we especially won’t like if a Democrat takes office in four years. Couldn’t the tools brought to bear — cutting off funding and access to federal research grants — be used to impose left-wing ideas in the very same way? We shall see.

Which brings me back to the Democrats, and the lessons they’re learning from all of this. Mamdani’s victory seems to signal that Trump 2.0 is being met with Squad 2.0 politics. If that’s correct, New York is about to get its most progressive mayor in my lifetime, and a host of young, ambitious progressives are going to be eyeing races in 2026 and 2028. A success by Mamdani will mean the party’s money and energy will be there to support them, and that — I believe — will be a huge miscalculation.

Given the choice between the left-wing authoritarian populism of Mamdani — with its accompanying anti-Western rhetoric and ideology of deconstruction — and the right-wing authoritarian populism of MAGA, it’s hard to believe that the average American swing voter will embrace the left-wing vision. It’s too unpatriotic and anti-American, too easily saddled with the excesses of transgender ideology, too associated with ideas that make little sense (as James Carville has put it) outside of Ivy League faculty lounges.

For classical liberals and conservatives like me, all of it seems like bad news — a conflict in which one wishes both sides could lose. Because there will come a point (and I suspect it will come sooner than later) when the authoritarian overreach of the right no longer produces outcomes I can appreciate. Frankly, when it comes to aid to our allies and the right to Habeas Corpus, we’ve already gotten there. For folks like me, there’s been at least some hope that centrist Democrats might win the day and carve out a vision for a new, centrist politics to counter the transformation of the GOP. But if I’m right about Mamdani’s victory in the New York primary, it’s a foreboding signal and not a hopeful one. If we wanted to restore sanity to American politics, help is not on the way.

· Seven B-2 Bombers, launched from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew a 36-hour round-trip mission to deploy 14 Massive Ordinance Penetrator “Bunker Buster” bombs.

· Dozens of precision-guided tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from naval vessels to hit other targets related to the nuclear program.

· Including the B-2’s, more than 125 aircraft were deployed to escort, defend, and support the mission.

· All of the ordinance was delivered to its targets within a window of about 20 minutes.

If that’s not enough to impress you, the level of precision with which these weapons were delivered should. Unfortunately, with brains rotted by video games, AI, social media influencer-class morons, and movies, almost nothing impresses us anymore. But this was real life, not the movies. American soldiers put their lives on the line, flew into hostile territory, and accomplished things that math, science, murphy’s law, the crooked temper of humanity, and bad luck should have made impossible, and did it with a level of perfection and precision that would make any rational person’s head spin — all in service of making it easier and safer for you to go to bed tonight, flip on Netflix, and not worry about an Iranian ICBM landing in your backyard.

In a world where American politics still had a hint of virtue in their DNA, we would look at the impossibly complex achievement of the U.S. military and have a little awe and respect for their achievement. We would honor the bravery of those who flew planes in harms’ way, the precision of the execution, and the noble nature of the goal — protecting a genocidal Jihadist regime from having weapons of mass destruction — and have a little gratitude. But instead, partisanship rotted minds.

On Tuesday, someone leaked to CNN a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that suggested that the attacks may not have been terribly effective. CNN published that analysis, and the entire American media ecosystem had a field day with it, eager to promote the idea that the Trump-initiated effort to cripple Iran’s nuclear program failed.

Now, I take a backseat to no one when it comes to criticism of the Trump administration. Anyone who doubts that can examine a decade of Twitter posts, public statements, and commentary on The Bulletin to hear that quite clearly. But this strikes me as a perfect example of how partisanship rots the brain.

Obviously, a president as polarizing as Trump is going to attract critique, no matter what he does. But the pile-on in this case was extraordinary. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Axios, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek are just a few of the outlets that amplified the CNN story. And while the impulse to question official accounts is a good and healthy part of the media’s job, this struck me as an especially unscrupulous example of it.

Before you misunderstand me, let me be clear: if our efforts failed in Iran, we should know it. Operation Midnight Hammer has a price tag that is hard to account for. It resulted in significant depletion of the resources of our armaments. It cost a heck of a lot of time, money, and energy to deploy our troops to pull it off. We put some of those soldiers in harms’ way. If it was all for naught, we should know, and the people who planned, recommended, and gave the go-ahead for it should be held accountable.

That’s not what happened here.

The report itself was categorized as low confidence and preliminary — labels that ought to be self-explanatory. It also was released as an anonymous leak, which in a matter as sensitive as this, and without any corroborating analysis from other agencies, makes it more suspect. And the report contradicted other early assessments from US and Israeli officials.

In short, a person must have not only an extremely high level of confidence in the incompetence of the Trump administration — a perspective I would not fault them for — but also the incompetence of our allies in Israeli intelligence and the US military. To put it another way, one must either believe that our military officials either had no clue what they were doing or were so bowled over by the Trump administration’s desire to march to war that they greenlit this attack without any public controversy or drama.

To construct that version of the story, one might start with the cartoonish caricature of Bibi Netanyahu — starting an air campaign against Iran with the express interest of drawing the US into it. Trump, either bullied by Bibi (an amusing thought, though contrary to most of what we know about Trump) or eager to get in on the action, orders the attack. Our own military leaders might be competent enough to assess the situation — knowing the whole thing won’t work — but approve it anyway, putting the lives of hundreds of American soldiers at risk to drop bombs that deplete critical ordinance stores with no benefit that they can imagine for the sole purpose of pleasing the whims of “Dear Leader,” Mr. Trump.

Color me skeptical.

Again, you won’t find me being Pollyanna about the corruption of our politicians, and certainly not about those who fill their staffs or run the political machines that bring them to power. Soulless flunky, thy name is Legion. But when it comes to the US Military, to deploying our resources and risking the lives of our people, I just don’t buy it. Soldiers have an oath and a bond to one another, and I respect that far more than I do most of our (admittedly failing) institutions in American life. And I wish more of my Trump-skeptical friends shared that skepticism. Our men and women in uniform were tasked with destroying Iran’s nuclear capability. Our allies in Israel, who seem to be swarming all the important places in Iran right now, are more committed to it than we are. I think we owe these men and women, who serve regardless of the party or the apparent competence of our Commander in Chief, deserve much more benefit of the doubt. And denigrating their work in the interest of stupid, partisan points-scoring against the executive strikes me as among the most craven, soulless, and most unpatriotic efforts I’ve seen in my lifetime.

So let’s give it some time. This lesson is certainly not lost on the Iranians, who have at least lost billions in infrastructure — after watching all of their proxies be humiliated and defanged. It’s also not lost on the Russians or the Chinese, who now know we can launch strikes from American soil and be home in time for little league on Sunday afternoon.

Deterrence depends on a kind of haunting. We should hope that our geopolitical enemies — totalitarian regimes, terrorists, authoritarians, you name it — can’t contemplate harming us without the specter of what we might do in response looming over them like a big, grey shadow. And after what we did in Iran — the extent of the operation, the flawlessness of the execution, the insight and perfection of its design — you can be sure that China, Russia, and North Korea are reassessing their plans of expansion and aggression. The right response to that — regardless of one’s partisan loyalties here at home — ought to be awe and gratitude.

In that, I can’t help but think of that scene in Blazing Saddles, when the villainous thugs dismiss both Sherrif Bart and his deputy. That deputy — played in understated perfection by Gene Wilder — proceeds to shoot the guns out of all of their hands before they can even see him draw. Sherrif Bart says, in response, “Don’t just sit there, looking stupid, grasping your hands in pain. How about a little applause for the Waco Kid?”

That ought to be the response of every patriotic American, in the wake of what our men and women in uniform achieved a few days ago. That it doesn’t is a reflection of how deeply the poison of partisanship has infected us.