I’ll admit that I hesitated to give this letter the title I did.

Talking about ethnic and religious groups is always difficult. As Westerners, we are hypersensitized to racism and prejudice.

So much so that we’d rather avoid the conversation about groups altogether.

But in multicultural societies, when people act as groups, we need to talk about the actions of groups.

And Muslims from the third world act as a group.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. All groups exhibit in-group preference.

But several of the ways this group in particular acts are in conflict with Western norms and values, because some third-world Muslim values are fundamentally incompatible with Western values.

(A note on “third world.” I know it’s not politically correct or technically precise anymore. In professional circles it’s considered an outdated Cold War term. But it’s still used colloquially, it’s familiar, and the average person knows exactly what it means: a descriptor of a country’s level of development. I don’t think it’s inherently offensive. So I’m using it here.)

Groups and individuals

Analysis of groups has to be different from analysis of individuals.

It would be irrational to meet a particular Muslim from the third world and assume he values Sharia over national law, sympathizes with Hamas, and supports rioting as a form of protest.

But it’s equally irrational to pretend that, evaluated as a group, there isn’t a disproportionately high expression of all three.

57% of French Muslims aged 15 to 24 say Sharia matters more than the laws of the Republic.

24% of them say they sympathize with Hamas. Among French Muslims of all ages, it’s 19%. Among French adults overall, it’s 3%.

In a hyperpolarized culture, you’re supposed to open with a list of caveats. The problem is that by the time you’re done listing them, nobody cares about the point.

Hence the title.

I’m hoping I’ve earned enough credibility with you for you to know I don’t approach anything from hate. There are 4.5 million Muslims in America, and the vast majority are great Americans. There are progressive Muslims, conservative Muslims, fundamentalist Muslims. None of that is in dispute.

What’s in dispute is whether we’re allowed to say that a significant subset of this population is extremely difficult to assimilate into Western culture, and that where they go, problems go too.

I’m saying it.

A coalition, and why that should alarm you

Third-world Muslims are not the only ones rioting in France.

The riots are the work of a coalition: white leftists, socialists, opportunists, and teenagers with no ideological commitments at all who just revel in the chance to act out.

So why single out one group?

Three reasons.

1. There is a clear pattern across Western Europe: this particular group grows in numbers and influence, and violence follows. In the UK, where Muhammad is now the most common name for newborn boys in England and Wales, we now know that thousands of British girls, over decades, were molested by predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani heritage (Pakistan is 96% Muslim), and that it was covered up by UK authorities for fear of appearing racist.

2. In Spain, this July, around 50,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta in a matter of days. 72 died in the rush. The Spanish military was called in. I wrote a whole article about it.

3. Germany has its own chapter. In August 2024, a Syrian man who had dodged deportation stabbed three people to death at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen. He was convicted of membership in the Islamic State. This July, an Islamist already known to German intelligence drove a van into crowds at Berlin Pride, killing one person and injuring 29.

There is a common variable in the disorder across Western countries, and it’s a particular group.

We need to talk about it.

And we need to talk about it without demonizing individuals, and without letting it collapse into a culture war over which group is superior.

Which software is better is the wrong question

Ironically, just as third-world Muslims are moving into first-world Western countries, first-world Westerners are moving into first-world Muslim countries. The UAE gained an estimated net 9,800 millionaires in 2025, more than any country on earth. Dubai is full of Londoners.

There have been Muslim empires that rivaled anything Christendom built: the Abbasids, the Ottomans, Al-Andalus.

People can hold their own views on which cultural software is “superior.” That’s a different argument.

The point is this: if you love the West and the Western project, Islam is the most difficult software to integrate. Within the broader Muslim community, there are significant subsets that are hostile to Western values, and the numbers above say those subsets are bigger among the young, not smaller.

Macron says the people blaming Muslim migrants are “stupid.” The people blaming Muslim migrants say Macron is deflecting. Both are working from half the picture.

This week Macron, speaking in Doha, said foreign leaders had made “unacceptable and even stupid comments” about the riots. He said France had been accused of being “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists,” and called that “totally false.” Trump had said the unrest “has to do with immigration.” Netanyahu called it an “invasion of extremist Islam.”

Here’s how that one story looked on Ground News.

Ground News has been my favorite news app for two years, since well before they ever sponsored me, and this screenshot is why.

Their Bias Comparison feature takes one story and shows you how the left, center, and right are each telling it. There’s a big difference between knowing the media is biased and seeing exactly where the bias is. Ground News makes that easy.

And it doesn’t rely on one source. It pulled from 204 sources for this story: 30% left, 38% center, 32% right.

Left-leaning coverage frames Macron as resisting xenophobic misinformation and emphasizes that Muslim migrants were not shown responsible.
Right-leaning coverage foregrounds disorder, looting, and security threats, and spotlights migration, Islamism, ultra-left groups, and domestic mismanagement.

Ground News flags the dividing line in one sentence: whether the unrest signifies xenophobic disinformation or a broader security and governance crisis.

That’s the question this whole letter is about.

I’ll continue to share my thoughts, but the best solution is for you to be fully empowered to form your own. Ground is an essential tool for helping you with that.

Ground is offering my readers 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

So is Macron correct?

So let’s consider Macron’s comments about the focus on Muslims being “stupid.”

It’s a fact that these riots started in the Paris banlieues, the ring of suburbs with the highest share of Muslim immigrants in France.

It’s a fact that the three big riot waves of the last twenty years all started in that same ring. Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005. Nanterre in 2023. Créteil in 2026.

It’s a fact that rioters stormed Marseille city hall and hung a Palestinian flag inside.

It’s a fact that Macron’s own government, in May 2025, published a 73-page report warning that “Islamist entryism” by the Muslim Brotherhood threatens national cohesion, and that Macron himself convened a Defense Council over it.

What’s happening in Paris sure looks like a lack of national cohesion.

It’s a fact that the protest is composed of a coalition that’s not just immigrant Muslims.

It also includes white leftists, socialists, yellow vests, opportunists, and teenagers with no ideology at all.

And it’s a fact that the same pattern of social disorder, disproportionately involving Muslims from the third world, is playing out across Western Europe, in the UK, in Spain, in Germany.

Multiple things can be true at once.

It’s not just third-world Muslims and their children.

But the epicenter, every time, is where the third-world Muslim immigrants live.

Two risks

There’s a risk in this conversation, and I’m aware of it.

Genuine bigots will use even the most carefully constructed argument to justify a hatred they already hold. Call that risk Islamophobia, understood colloquially as hatred of Muslims. Western liberals are extremely sensitive to it.

But there’s a risk on the other side, and the West has stopped weighing it.

The risk of social decay from never addressing the compatibility of a group whose norms and values are radically different from your own.

And the risk of admitting the radicalized subsets of that group: Islamists and jihadists, who threaten the physical safety and the institutions that Western societies run on.

The second risk is already here. Marseille city hall is the proof.

And the most alarming part is that it’s happening inside a coalition, with leftists and socialists marching next to the Palestinian flags.

We’ve seen this exact coalition before.

Iran. 1979.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Islam, Islamism, and jihadism: why the difference matters more than anyone admits.

• What happened in Iran in 1979, and why the history is harder to dismiss than it sounds.

• The exodus: who is leaving Europe, and what it says about where it’s heading.

Read more

(Clipped for brevity. Full episode here.)

Ah, so now Tucker Carlson is using a dead man’s words to justify his theories about Israel killing Israelis?

OK Fine. Then include this too.

And this one.

Yes, Charlie Kirk wondered if there was a stand-down order that allowed Hamas to commit October 7.

No, he did not accuse Israel of intentionally allowing October 7.

That’s why he said, in the clip Tucker himself showed: “I’m not willing to go so far as to say Netanyahu knew”.

Tucker Carlson is putting words in Charlie Kirk’s mouth.

Now - how could Charlie wonder if there was a stand-down order, but also think it’s insane to accuse Israel of a false flag?

Because he had the courage to ask questions and the discipline to not assume answers.

So if it’s not a conspiracy, what’s another explanation?

Perhaps, in the vacuum of information 5 days after October 7, he was suspicious that something had been allowed.

But he explicitly said he is not making that accusation - presumably because he was open to alternative explanations.

For example - maybe October 7 happened because:

• In April 2022, Hamas sent the same phone signals they did on October 7 2023, but it didn’t lead to an attack in 2022, so the Israelis thought it wouldn’t in 2023.

• Maybe that’s because before October 7, Hamas hadn’t attacked for two years.

• And maybe Israel assumed that Hamas was choosing to actually govern instead of attack, because Hamas asked for and received thousands of permits for Gazans to work in Israel.

• So maybe with that context, in the hours before October 7, when Israel saw signals that Hamas was up to something, they decided to stand down because they thought it was another false alarm.

• Maybe they decided to stand down because if they raised a real alarm, then Hamas would know how Israel was surveilling their phones.

• And maybe Hamas planned it that way. A Hamas source told Reuters the group spent two years acting like it didn’t want a fight, so Israel would believe it.

So maybe - just maybe - after decades of trying, Hamas managed to score a major blow against one of the most advanced militaries on the planet.

Because of mistakes and incompetence, not malevolence.

So that’s the high-level explanation. We don’t need to believe it, but it’s important that we at least know it.

OK, so why did some communities wait six hours for help?

Some towns waited six hours for help. Others got it in minutes.

Perhaps that’s because:

• Hamas specifically planned to attack on a holiday, Simchat Torah, where 50% of the country is off because it’s like Christmas for them.

• That was also a Saturday, which is the Jewish Sabbath.

• Hamas specifically attacked the headquarters that coordinates the response, delaying the response. The first thing they did was use drones to knock out the cameras and communications systems.

Ok, but Hamas’ attack was being livestreamed. Why didn’t Israel send reinforcements sooner?

Because there’s a difference between knowing an attack is happening, and knowing where to send whom.

A livestream is information that a town is under attack. It doesn’t tell you which of the 20-plus towns are under attack, how many fighters are in each, which roads are held, where your own soldiers are, or which bases still exist.

On a normal day, the Gaza Division at Re’im (the military base that was attacked) builds that picture from the cameras, sensors, and radios along the fence and turns it into orders.

Hamas blinded the sensors first and overran the division within hours.

The IDF’s own probe found the General Staff knew of roughly 40% of the infiltrations by 7:30 a.m. - about an hour after the attack began.

So IDF leadership knew there was a battle. But it didn’t have a clear picture of the battlefield.

Two other things the livestream argument misses:

1. The response began immediately. The attack started at 6:29 AM. Fighting started within minutes at the fence, at police stations, and in kibbutz security teams. Helicopters were in the air by around 7. The first units sent toward the border ran into Hamas on the roads and some died getting there. To say there was “No response for six hours” is false. “Some towns waited six hours” is true, and the reason is the second point.

2. Five thousand fighters at fifteen breaches is more than Israel was prepared for. Israel’s whole plan for the Gaza border assumed Hamas was only capable of a small raid. It was a holiday and Shabbat, and much of the force was on leave. The reinforcements that would have made a difference were located hours away.

So the livestream revealed that Israel was under attack.

It didn’t tell Israel where to fight, who to send, and how many to send, because Hamas first destroyed the system that supplies that information.

Being aware and coordinating are two different jobs, and Hamas crippled Israel’s ability to do the latter on purpose.

But I don’t think most people who entertain the theory that Israel intentionally allowed October 7 to happen know these technical details. I think they have a deeper, more basic, intuitive question:

How did a rag-tag terrorist organization draw blood against one of the most advanced militaries on the planet?

The same way the Islamic Republic of Iran kept the Strait of Hormuz shut for months against the United States.

The same way that in June 2025, Ukraine hid cheap drones in truck containers, drove them deep inside Russia, and launched them at airbases, hitting a big part of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet from the ground.

Asymmetrical warfare.

It’s been observed in military strategy (as well as cybersecurity) that the attacker holds fundamental advantages in cost, timing, and effort compared to the defender.

That is how:

• Thousands of dollars of drones can sometimes beat billions of dollars of military equipment.

• Thousands of rag tag guerrillas can sometimes beat tens of thousands of trained soldiers.

This is why terrorist organizations - who embed themselves in civilian populations, attack civilians, and don’t abide by the rules of war, sometimes succeed.

Moreover - it is easier to attack than defend, and over a long enough time frame if you stay on offense, you will get past the defense.

And Hamas now says the quiet years were the setup.

A Hamas source told Reuters the group spent two years building the image of an organization that didn’t want a fight.

Israel’s army even had the attack plan, codenamed Jericho Wall, more than a year in advance, and decided Hamas couldn’t pull it off.

Shin Bet’s own probe later concluded the attack was preventable.

None of that is secret. It’s in Israel’s own investigations.

So is it possible that Netanyahu intentionally allowed an attack?

From here, you’ll learn:

• My answer to the question above. It’s probably not the one you expect.

• The exact moment Tucker rewrote Charlie’s words, and the two clips he left out.

• The four-step move behind “just asking questions,” and how to catch it in real time.

• What blaming Israel has been worth to the people doing it.

• Who really runs the world, and why the answer is more unsettling than any conspiracy.

Read more

I didn’t make this video to defend Charlie Kirk, or to take down Tucker Carlson.

I made it because it’s bigger than both of them.

We’re living in an ecosystem of short-form clips, instant takes, and conspiratorial thinking, and it’s making us more confused every year.

It’s gotten bad enough that Tucker is now justifying his theories by selectively citing a man who said the exact opposite of that theory.

So let’s be precise about what Charlie did.

Read more

Yesterday was October 7, 2026.

It was the third anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.

Zohran Mamdani gave a statement.

This was the response from a significant portion of his own supporters:

They’re calling Zohran Mamdani a traitor.

This is how you know that much of the Free Palestine movement is extremists who are more interested in sides than solutions.

They’ll even eat their own.

There’s no level of nuance or responsibility on the Palestinian side that is ever permissible to them.

Everything needs to be entirely Israel’s fault all the time.

To see the problem, look at what he said.

Three camps

Various factions reacted to this in different ways.

1. The first camp viewed this as a fair, even-handed, moderate statement in which he acknowledged the wrongs on both sides of this conflict.

2. The second camp interpreted this as a deceptive and even anti-Semitic post with clever wording. We’ll call this “Pro-Israel” for simplicity.

3. The third camp is the one in that video - let’s call them “Free Palestine.”

What do they mean, anti-Semitic?

Let’s start with the second camp first - because once you understand them, it makes the third camp look even more irrational.

I’ve been educating myself on anti-Semitism recently.

As part of that, I listened to a conversation between Haviv Rettig Gur and Ruth Wisse, a former Harvard professor.

She pointed out something interesting that I’ve started to realize myself: when people hear the word anti-Semitism, the colloquial interpretation is hatred against Jews.

Actually, there’s a different way of thinking about anti-Semitism: viewing Jews as the central, responsible party in all issues.

Antisemitism is a theory of blame. Hatred is optional.

It’s treating Jews as the root of society’s problems, whether it’s saying that Jews are the reason we have too much immigration (a popular statement on the far right), that Jews control the media (a popular sentiment even in mainstream circles now), or that Jews control finance.

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The way it manifests in the Israel-Palestine conflict is not necessarily as actual hatred of Jews (though there is some of that), but as viewing Israel and Israel’s actions as the fundamental problem in the conflict.

It’s not necessarily that someone is going around hating Jews in their life, similar to the overt racism that historically some white people harbored against black people and that would lead to outright lynchings.

It’s a different idea: it’s a unifying theory of the world that implicates Jews as the source of its problems.

I think this is a very useful way to look at things, because it helps you understand, even if you don’t agree with it, why Jewish people view critiques of the state of Israel as anti-Semitic in nature.

It’s not necessarily that they’re saying there is outright hatred toward Jews, although that clearly is an issue, given what we see: two Israeli embassy staffers shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C., the recent attempted terror attack in Michigan, and the Bondi Beach massacre.

This is happening all over the world, which is actually pretty akin to the lynchings that black people experienced.

It’s something deeper: a mental model that seems to always find a way to trace every issue back to Jews.

It’s a lens - a filter for looking through the world.

What the Pro-Israel camp saw.

The concern from this crowd is about a few things:

1. Asymmetry in attention: Zohran devoted 50 words to condemning Hamas’s attack, but 164 words to condemning Israel’s counterattack.

2. Asymmetry in the language used: Zohran named 1,100 “Israelis” but did not mention the composition of those Israelis, who were predominantly civilians, including women, children, and babies. Zohran specifically called out 21,000 children being killed by Israel.

3. Asymmetry in intent: Zohran used words for Israel’s actions that describe intent, like genocide and apartheid. He used no such words for Hamas.

I would argue that for Hamas, you can be much more certain about intent than you can for Israel’s government.

Hamas went house to house through the peaceful communes killing families, and when they found a music festival, they raped, killed, and slaughtered attendees.

There’s also the fact that Zohran chose to bring up Israel’s actions on the anniversary of October 7.

To understand why this is a deliberate choice with important consequences, imagine if, on September 11, Zohran brought up Al Qaeda’s attack on 9/11 and then brought up, in the same breath, the subsequent devastation that the U.S. brought upon Iraq (which many people now agree was unnecessary and disproportionate).

It’s this deliberate choice that leads many people to reasonably conclude that Zohran’s post was anti-Semitic - again in the sense that it treats Jewish power, influence, and culpability as central and fundamental to key issues.

One could reasonably argue that Israel is not targeting civilians; they are targeting militants and killing civilians in the process.

Ironically, the genocide claim, as I discussed in a recent piece [LINK], turns on the interpretation of intent.

I would argue that, regardless of your feelings about who’s in the wrong, it’s pretty obvious that Hamas is much more genocidal in intent - they just lack the power Israel does.

Genocide, according to the UN definition, requires trying to destroy a group as a whole or in part.

It’s very clear that that’s what Hamas was doing: they were targeting Jews because they were Jews.

Even if you don’t want to call what Hamas did genocidal, there’s a very easy term readily at hand: a terror attack.

This is exactly what a terror attack is: intentionally targeting civilians, not as collateral damage, but as the goal.

I agree with the pro-Israel camp that Zohran’s statement was clearly biased.

I’ll also say that he at least is trying to provide some semblance of accounting on both sides.

I just don’t think it’s particularly thorough accounting.

What the statement leaves out

The biggest omission is not even the genocide claim. It’s what Hamas is doing to the Palestinian people: building tunnels and, in their own words, using people as human shields.

That’s a necessary fact to reckon with because it introduces a tremendously important question.

If Hamas was not:

• Embedding tunnels under schools

• Telling people to stand on roofs

• Telling civilians to ignore evacuation orders

• Using children to transport weapons, according to recent IDF footage

Would Israel be killing civilians at the rate they are, or would Israel exclusively be killing military targets?

As I mentioned in my previous piece, a normal army uses soldiers to block bullets from civilians.

Hamas uses civilians to block bullets from soldiers.

For a normal army, killing civilians is what happens in the process of hitting the military.

For Hamas, killing civilians is the process.

I personally think this is the single biggest blind spot for the West: they don’t understand radical Islam organizations like Hamas, or the Islamic Republic, which controls Iran’s government.

This is not even like Russia fighting Ukraine.

This is a completely different actor with a completely different calculus from what a normal government or army does, and still, despite 9/11, people don’t seem to understand this about radical Islamists.

Charlie Kirk pointed this out too:

That blind spot creates an asymmetry.

Whatever misgivings people might have about the influence of Jews in Western society, we have a very clear idea of what the influence of radical Islam is in Western society.

It’s been made clear not through abstract theories about influence and power, but through blatant incidents of terrorism throughout the West, ranging from 9/11 to constant terror attacks in Paris, Germany, and other Western bastions.

Yet the zeitgeist is more suspicious of Jews than of radical Islam, despite this difference in the tangible track record of attacks on the West.

To be explicit about it, on this particular point, I’m quite sympathetic to the Israeli cause - they are fighting radical Islamists - which are far less aligned with Western values than Jews.

Is Zohran being deceptive?

It’s a different claim entirely to say that this is evidence that Zohran is being intentionally deceptive.

There are two plausible explanations here:

1. Zohran is secretly an Islamist who is soft-peddling Islamism, and it’s a Trojan horse for Islamism in the West. He’s carefully calculating everything so he stays within the window of acceptable political rhetoric while still trafficking anti-Semitic ideas.

2. He’s like most politicians: well-intentioned, with his own biases. He has a side he agrees with more than another. He’s trying to be charitable to the other side, but at the end of the day, he has his convictions. He’s also trying to play to his political base, which got him elected and is a huge part of his power: the pro-Palestine movement and the Democratic Socialists who overlap with it.

I’m honestly not certain.

As I’ve said in other pieces, I think Zohran is a generational political talent, charismatic, and I find his personality attractive.

He’s also certainly capable of deception.

I genuinely find it hard to discern his intentions, and try to avoid mindreading as a rule.

Mindreading doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you, and I generally find it more useful to focus on actions over states of mind - which are usually unknowable.

We don’t know what Israel would do in a counterfactual where Hamas wasn’t using their people as human shields.

Would they be bombing entire residential neighborhoods?

I don’t think so, but we don’t know.

We certainly know, however, that Hamas is doing all these things and making it essentially unavoidable for Israel to attack Hamas without simultaneously wreaking devastation upon the civilians Hamas hides behind.

So if Zohran is sincere, the standard is simple: it is a responsibility of all, especially leaders like him, to clearly call out what Hamas is doing to its own people.

A quick note before we get to the third camp.

People tell me they like how I break down issues like this one.

Separating what someone said from what they meant.

Judging actions when intentions are unknowable.

Holding two explanations at once without picking a team.

That’s a skill. You can learn it.

I designed the Clear Thinker Course to teach it, because it’s so easy to be confused and overwhelmed by the information landscape.

The course uses principles of logic, philosophy, and psychology, modernized for the way information reaches you now.

You’ll learn the 10 cognitive biases and logical fallacies the media uses to manipulate your thinking, a framework for catching them as they happen, and exercises to sharpen your pattern recognition.

Here’s the link where you can get the course yourself.

Get the Clear Thinker Course

The Free Palestine cancellation

Now go back to the people in that video.

A statement that leans against Israel, on the anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, got him called a traitor.

It doesn’t matter that Hamas builds tunnels under schools.

It doesn’t matter that a Hamas MP said on Hamas TV, verbatim, “we have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen.”

It doesn’t matter that Hamas dresses like civilians, making them difficult to distinguish from actual civilians.

It doesn’t matter that Hamas has engineered a situation in which there is effectively no way for Israel to eliminate Hamas without killing large numbers of civilians.

No, these people are not interested in solutions.

They are obsessed with sides.

In their view - 100% of the responsibility is the Israelis and 0% is the Palestinians.

That’s the definition from earlier.

One party carries all the blame.

Israel.

Even a 1% deviation makes you a traitor.

Extremism is becoming the norm

This inability to accept any nuance at all is a sign of extremist thinking, and scarily, extremism is starting to become the norm.

We see it on a macro scale with movements like this constantly justifying every single thing Hamas does and either ignoring or being completely unaware of the way they behave.

We see it in France, where, in response to grievances about teacher shortages and run-down buildings, students are burning down schools, which, of course, is self-defeating.

We see it with an unsettling number of people saying that the killing of the United Healthcare CEO is justified.

We see it with people saying that the killing of Charlie Kirk is justified - or even celebrating it.

We saw it with the anti-ICE protests in LA as people burned cars in the street.

It’s ideological extremism, and it springs from a far-left ideology that is so certain in its righteousness that any tactic used to prosecute its goal is justified, even if it’s killing your fellow citizen or supporting an organization that uses its citizens as cannon fodder.

I’ll admit there’s an instinct for me to say, “Well, there are issues on the right as well.”

Of course there are.

In fact, when it comes to the attitude toward Israel and Jews, the far right and the far left are almost indistinguishable from one another.

Both seem to be adopting this form of anti-Semitism that views Jews as central to America’s problems, the world’s problems, and/or even their personal problems.

But saying I think they’re equal would be dishonest.

I don’t think, at this particular moment in history, far-right extremism and far-left extremism are equally a problem.

Extremism of any kind is almost always a problem. You’re seeing this with the Free Palestine movement: it shuts down critical thought and the nuance needed to actually make productive changes that last.

The deeper problem here is extremism.

It is manifesting itself most potently in the far left at this particular political moment, and I think it’s the enemy.

It’s the enemy of the West, the enemy of independent thought, and something we need to take seriously.

The thing with this extremism is that, if it’s unchecked, it doesn’t stop.

It begets more extremism.

And this alliance has been tried before.

The rest of this letter is for paid subscribers: what happened the last time the far left marched with Islamists, and why I keep meeting young British men who’ve fled to Colombia. Becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support this work.

Iran, 1979

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Yesterday, a FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv plummeted from 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet in under 2 minutes.

It was carrying 174 passengers, mostly Israeli, including women and children.

The sudden plunge was because the co-pilot stabbed the captain with a knife, and tried to crash the plane.

The only reason that he didn’t succeed is because the wounded captain got the cockpit door open, passengers rushed in and subdued the attacker, and off-duty pilots among the passengers landed the plane.

An Omani official confirmed the attacker is Omani, and Israel’s defense minister described it as an “attempted jihadist terror attack”.

Here is how the New York Times reported it:

Notice anything?

One pilot stabbed the other, unprovoked, and passengers had to intervene.

But it’s framed as “an altercation” between pilots.

The framing is technically true - but clearly sanitized.

By the time the Times posted, the plane’s hijack signal had been public for almost two hours.

Passengers had described a stabbing.

Israeli TV was reporting a suspected terror attack.

The Times called the hijack signal a “distress signal.”

And it called the stabbing a “clash between pilots.”

To be fair, nobody could have known who the attacker was yet.

I’m not saying they should have written “Muslim attacker.”

But “suspected terror attack” was available.

If that was too strong, mentioning the hijack signal was also available.

They went with “altercation.”

Imagine if 9/11 was presented as an “altercation” between the passengers and pilots?

Contrast this with how the US and Israeli strikes that hit a school in Iran were presented by these same outlets.

Do you see the difference?

Both incidents rely on reporting from one side.

In the case of the plane - it’s Israel.

In the case of the school - it’s Iran.

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BBC ran Iran’s claim, with Iran’s number, the same day.

“Iran says US and Israel strikes hit school killing 108” was enough for a headline.

A hijack signal and a stabbing got “clash between pilots.”

When the killer is potentially an Islamic extremist - that is downplayed.

But when the killer is potentially America or Israel - that is emphasized.

After receiving backlash, the New York Times argued that they did this because they “don’t publish speculation or unverified information”.

But that’s not true. They have reported unverified information:

1. In October 2023, Hamas - which is funded by Iran’s government, the Islamic Republic - claimed Israel bombed al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people. The Times ran it. It turned out the explosion was most likely caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the hospital parking lot - not the hospital itself. The Times later published an editors’ note admitting it relied too heavily on Hamas’s claims.

2. In May 2026, they published a column claiming Israeli guards used a dog to rape a prisoner. The source was a former detainee’s account. It remains unverified.

3. In July 2025, they put a photo of an emaciated child in Gaza on the front page, with his mother’s claim that he was born healthy. Days later, the Times admitted he had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and muscle development. This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t starvation in Gaza - but the picture is not proof. The photographer went on to win a Pulitzer for his Gaza starvation photos.

Now these are easy examples of NYT publishing unverified speculation that was later shown to be false, or never verified.

But the issue isn’t just getting things wrong.

They reported Iran’s claim about the school the same day it happened.

In hindsight - it was likely to be true.

But at the time, we didn’t know - all of the information was based on one party’s accounting - the Islamic Republic.

So if they are OK reporting one side’s unverified claim in that case, why not report the suspected terror attack Israeli TV was already reporting on the plane?

Particularly when the NYT themselves reported information from Islamic extremists that turned out to be false just 2 years prior, with the Al-Ahli hospital incident?

Now you’ve seen the bias in reporting around these stories dissected - so it should be more clear.

But often, it isn’t so clear.

Right now you’re being guided through the process, but normally, you’re not.

You’re busy, and you’re getting assaulted with heaps of information every day.

So how can you make sure you’re protected against this kind of bias during even your passive news consumption?

I recommend Ground News.

This is a plug - and it’s a plug for something I sincerely believe in.

You’ve seen how the New York Times presented the plane story.

Here’s how Ground News presented it:

Not as an “altercation”.

As a stabbing and an attempted crash. And they appropriately named the source so that you can decide what to do with that unverified information.

Ground News breaks down the bias between the left, right and center so you can decide what to think with full information, rather than be led to a conclusion with omission.

I cannot emphasize more strongly - we are in a crisis of critical thinking.

Social media is eroding people’s cognition.

AI, when used unintentionally, will erode it further.

And none of us is immune.

Having the tools to support your thinking is basic cognitive security for maintaining your mental sovereignty.

Because we’re all in the midst of an information war we didn’t sign up for.

I urge you to sign up for Ground News right now. I use it every single day and I think you will too.

You can get 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx

Join Ground News

This is not just about having a bias against Israel and American military action.

Endless pieces have been written by me and others about media bias.

BBC and NYT have a left-leaning bias - that bias makes them hostile to Israel and the Trump administration - but that’s not an interesting point, because all outlets have some bias in some direction.

This is a more precise issue: it’s about avoiding identification of Islamic terrorism when it happens.

This is a post from March 10, 2026.

The incident happened outside Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence in NYC.

There were two protests.

One was an anti-Muslim rally billed as “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City, Stop New York City Public Muslim Prayer.” It was aimed at Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The organizer, Jake Lang, showed up with about 20 followers and a goat.

The other was a counter-protest called “Run the Nazis Out of New York City.” About 125 people showed up for that side.

The teenagers were Muslim.

They were 18 and 19.

They threw homemade bombs toward the anti-Muslim protest.

They supported ISIS. Federal prosecutors charged them with it.

The day before CNN’s post, police said it was being investigated as ISIS-inspired terrorism.

CNN reported the terrorism charges itself.

And CNN presented them as “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather.”

Do those sound like terrorists, or just two teens on an adventure?

“But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during an anti-Muslim protest.”

Why is the protest labeled as anti-Muslim, but the bombers aren’t labeled as supporting ISIS - which was public info at the time?

Why are they presented in passive voice (their lives would change, they were arrested), rather than active voice (they went to a protest and threw bombs, endangering the lives of others)?

CNN deleted the post and admitted it “failed to reflect the gravity of the incident.”

The pattern is selective caution.

When America or Israel is accused, these outlets run the claim fast, unverified.

When the attacker might be an Islamic extremist, they suddenly discover caution.

To be fair, these attacks get plenty of coverage once the facts are in.

The difference is in the first hours, and in the words.

Why? I can’t read their minds. But I can read their headlines.

And here’s my inference:

The Left is afraid of being seen as Islamophobic.

That is why despite the fact that Islamist groups account for most terrorism deaths worldwide, the media avoids naming Muslims when there is yet another terrorist attack.

That is why when an armed man rammed a truck into a synagogue in Michigan with 140 children inside, Abdul El-Sayed condemned it - and then said “hurt people hurt people”. (He apologized five months later.)

That is why everything Hamas does - even if it endangers their own civilians - is justified by a large part of the pro-Palestine movement as “resistance” to Israel, when nothing Israel does is justified as resistance to Hamas.

Hamas’ evils are secondary, Israel’s evils are considered primary.

This is bias.

And it’s the worst kind of bias for a Western democratic country to have.

Because it’s a bias against Western values themselves.

Now to be clear, everyone has their bias - including me.

But some biases are worse than others.

Israel and Jews aren’t constantly launching terror attacks across America and Europe - Muslim extremists are.

But there’s infinite energy spent in the West on what’s happening thousands of miles away in Gaza - very little on the threat of Islamic extremism in the West itself.

Endless energy spent on Gaza, infinite avoidance of the Islamification of Western capitals - London, Paris, New York City - and how to reckon with that.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with Muhammad being the most common baby name in London - but we need to talk about it honestly.

But rather than confront the topic of Islam, these outlets conceal it.

25 years since 9/11, and Islamophobia is being treated as a greater threat than Islamic extremism.

It is not.

Islamic extremism is killing people across the Western world.

Islamophobia is creating a deeply unpleasant, isolating experience for Muslims.

Islamic extremism is killing Jewish people on the beaches of Australia, outside the synagogues of England, and in the cities of America.

Islamic extremism drove a truck through a Christmas market in Berlin and killed 13 people.

Counting 9/11, Islamic extremists have killed thousands of people in the West.

Anti-Muslim attackers have killed dozens.

Islamic extremism is so corrosive that even Islamic first-world nations like the UAE are banning it.

The UAE designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group in 2014.

This year it stopped funding its students at British universities.

A Muslim country is afraid its kids will be radicalized in England.

The West is excusing it.

Of course both Islamic extremism and hatred toward Muslim citizens should be eradicated.

But when everything is an equal priority, nothing is an actual priority.

We’re losing the ability to reason about what the first priority should be, to the point that we avoid confronting physical violence because of emotional discomfort.

We see this across virtually every dimension of politics and culture.

Lindsay Clancy kills her 3 kids - and the focus becomes Lindsay Clancy’s struggles.

The border was left wide open - allowing violent criminals and sex traffickers in - and deportations get framed in abstractions like white supremacy.

Massive fraud of hundreds of millions of dollars perpetrated by a subset of the Somali community happens in Minnesota - and the focus becomes preventing the negative perception of Somalis.

You don’t help populations by avoiding talking about bad actors within those populations.

Muslims are not helped by this avoidance.

The overwhelming majority of the 4.5 million Muslims in America are peaceful and have found a way to make their observance of their faith compatible with Western values.

But there are extremists who ruin it for them and everyone else.

They are the people who are driving the majority of Islamophobia.

Yes, there are idiots and shock-jockeys and loud mouths on the Right who critique Muslims in unproductive ways.

But the primary issue is, and should always be: those who are being physically violent toward their fellow citizen.

And unfortunately, there is an alarmingly large contingent of Muslims who are sympathetic to these violent extremists.

One in five American Muslims told Pew that the way Hamas carried out October 7 was acceptable.

And that conversation needs to be had so that people who value life, liberty, equality - Muslims and non-Muslims both - can address it accordingly.

This confusion and mental rot has an even deeper foundation.

It’s hatred of the West, and the elevation of extremists.

And we’re seeing this play out in the Israel versus Hamas conversation.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why Israel became the lightning rod for anti-Western sentiment, and why the colonialism charge is loudest in the countries that actually colonized.

• The two-question shortcut many people use to pick a side in Israel vs. Hamas.

• How to judge which side is better without it coming down to opinion.

• Why judging by body count alone would make the Allies worse than the Nazis, and what that measure misses.

• The litmus test that separates terrorists from armies, and extremists from governments.

Read more

So now people love Macklemore for using the G word.

And hate Ed Sheeran for not using the G word.

Genocide.

Ok, let’s say it is a genocide.

If that’s the case.

Why is Israel so bad at genocide?

They paused their attacks so half a million Palestinian kids could get polio vaccines.

But why help vaccinate kids you want to kill?

They dropped leaflets, sent texts, and made calls to residential areas before strikes.

But why try to evacuate civilians you want to terminate?

After initially not allowing food into Gaza, which the ICC has charged as a war crime, they allowed enough that a UN-backed source said the famine is over.

But why allow a famine to end for a population you want dead?

None of those observations prove this isn’t a genocide.

But what makes people so sure it is?

Maybe Israel is just a bunch of “tricky Zionists deceiving all of us goyim sheeple.”

Or maybe they are trying to kill Hamas, not the Palestinian people.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is horrible.

And genocide has a specific meaning.

It’s not a war where one side kills way more than the other.

It’s not a conflict where many civilians die.

It’s not even a war crime. It’s its own charge.

Genocide is not a “vibe”.

It has a specific meaning:

“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”

The key words here are “intent” and “as such.”

AKA intentionally killing people because they are Palestinian.

So, do you think Israel is killing Palestinians because they are Palestinian?

Or because Hamas made Palestinians the price of killing Hamas?

Now, when 74,000 human beings are dead, it can seem like this is just a semantic quibble.

But what we call this actually matters.

Because the description determines the prescription.

Genocide is an accusation, with consequences.

So is Israel doing what the Nazis did to the Jews, or what Bush did to Afghanistan to kill Al-Qaeda?

Because you don’t protest Nazis. You go to war with them.

You don’t post on social media about them. You execute them.

So as a thought experiment: do you believe America should go to war with Israel?

Should Netanyahu and the entire Israeli cabinet be hanged?

Because if it is a genocide, those become possibilities.

Now emotionally, when many people say genocide, they are looking for the strongest possible word to express their outrage.

And it’s natural to be outraged, because women, children, and the elderly are being killed.

Now why is that happening?

Well first, because Israel is the one dropping bombs.

And maybe it’s also because in 2008, Hamas described a strategy of using a “human shield of women, children, and the elderly.”

Maybe it’s also because in 2014, Hamas told civilians to “confront Israeli warplanes with their bare chests” by climbing to the roof of their homes.

While Hamas hides in tunnels placed under those homes.

Maybe it’s also because when Israel sends evacuation warnings to places they plan on bombing, Hamas tells civilians to ignore those warnings.

Maybe it’s because rather than using charity money from the rest of the world to build a better Gaza, Hamas built bomb shelters for their fighters.

And they don’t let civilians use those shelters because protecting civilians is “the responsibility of the United Nations” and Israel.

AKA, not Hamas’ responsibility.

So here’s a question.

Would this look like a genocide if Hamas didn’t wear civilian clothes, didn’t tell civilians to ignore Israeli evacuation orders, and didn’t put tunnels under schools?

Israel has almost certainly committed war crimes, for which they should be held accountable.

And is there anything that Hamas does that isn’t a war crime?

A normal army uses its soldiers to defend its civilians.

Hamas uses its civilians to defend its soldiers.

A normal army uses the military to pressure the enemy.

Hamas martyrs civilians to create global pressure.

A normal army targets enemy soldiers, and kills civilians in the process.

For Hamas, targeting civilians is the process.

So if Hamas wasn’t doing all these things, what do you think the death toll in Gaza would be?

Do you think Israel wants to kill Palestinians, or Hamas?

Hamas has said “We desire death like you desire life.”

So ask yourself.

Is this a genocide against the Palestinian population?

Or a hostage situation?

Where I stand

Now, to be transparent. I think what’s going on in Gaza is horrible.

I think Israel has committed war crimes that can’t be explained as merely the consequences of Hamas’ war crimes.

A war crime is a serious violation of the rules of war.

Rules written to protect civilians and prisoners from the worst of what armies do.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes both, distinguishes between war crimes and genocide.

Genocide is a different charge. It’s not a kind of war crime.

It has its own definition, and it doesn’t even require a war.

I think Israel has probably not committed a genocide, as of this writing.

Probably meaning there’s a chance it has, but the chances are higher that it hasn’t.

The reason I’m writing this is that this entire discussion has become emotional and tribal.

The clearest sign of that is the attachment to the word genocide.

I see three camps of people using it.

The first camp has thought hard about it, looked at the evidence, and concluded that’s what this is. I respectfully disagree, but there’s a reasonable disagreement to be had.

The second camp hasn’t thought deeply about it. They’re reaching for the strongest word they have for how they feel about the atrocity in Gaza.

I understand that too.

And the third camp is running a loyalty test.

Say genocide, or you’re canceled.

That’s what happened to Ed Sheeran. He said what was happening in Gaza was catastrophic. Unjustifiable. Disproportionate.

He got hammered anyway, because he didn’t say the password: genocide.

This piece is meant to help us escape that.

The tribalism. The confusion. The hostility.

The word genocide implicates only one side.

And once the conversation is about sides, it stops being about solutions.

Why does the word genocide even matter?

When confronted on use of the word, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed said that arguing this point is just quibbling.

But elsewhere in that same conversation he said the word has moral implications.

Watch the Raging Moderates interview. The Gaza segment is at the end.

So which is it? A semantic quibble, or a conversation with serious moral implications?

Now to be fair to El-Sayed, elsewhere in that interview he does make substantive points about why he thinks it is a genocide, centered around statements of intent from certain Israeli cabinet members, and the devastation in Gaza.

I’m going to take both of those seriously later in this piece.

But first let’s talk about the word.

Before we start: I know there’s a lot of suspicion of Israel.

So here’s what I’m going to do.

I’m only going to cite numbers that don’t rely on an Israeli source.

Either both sides have verified them, or an independent party that isn’t Israeli-backed has.

Abdul said two things I want to focus on:

A) That the word has meaning. And that it speaks to what we’re obligated to do.

B) That arguing over the word is quibbling.

These two statements cannot both be true at the same time.

If the word decides what we are obligated to do, then the word is extremely important.

And arguing over the word is much more important than a mere quibble.

The genocide label affects:

What we do about the conflict.

Who is responsible for the conflict.

And what we say about the conflict.

And I think people using the word genocide know it’s important to use it.

That’s why Macklemore was praised by the Free Palestine movement for using it, but Ed Sheeran was slammed for not using it.

What we do about genocides

In 1948, America and other countries signed the Genocide Convention. Article 1 obligates us to prevent and punish genocide.

And in practice, preventing a genocide has meant military action.

That’s why the stakes are so high.

It’s not a social media slogan. It’s a potential obligation to military action.

Here’s what happens when a President uses it.

August 2014. ISIS had tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped on a mountain in Iraq.

Obama went on television and said what ISIS was attempting “would constitute genocide.”

Then he said: “We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide.”

American jets were bombing ISIS the next day.

That was the start of a five-year war.

That’s the implication of genocide.

Another example.

In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the town of Srebrenica, separated the men and boys from the women, and executed about 8,000 of them for being Bosnian Muslims.

Six weeks later, NATO, which includes America, bombed the Bosnian Serbs for three weeks.

Clinton later called what happened in Bosnia “genocide in the heart of Europe.”

That was a clear case.

There was a written order from the top, then an army that executed 8,000 people in cold blood.

Gaza has polio pauses, evacuation warnings, and food relief coordinated by Israel with aid groups.

El-Sayed said people avoid the word “because of the moral implication of what ought to be done following it.”

Well, one of those moral implications is war with the genocidal actor.

So here’s a question.

Are you sure that Israel is killing Palestinians for being Palestinians?

Because if you’re sure they are, protesting is not enough.

Defunding Israel isn’t enough.

If you sincerely think this is a genocide, then we should be talking about America going to war against Israel.

So can you see how the words we use actually matter?

The levels of hell

All killing is horrible, but we don’t treat all killing the same.

This is why in the justice system, not every killing gets the same charge.

If you attack someone who’s attacking you, it’s self-defense.

But if you use far more force than you needed, like using a gun in a fistfight, in many states it’s manslaughter.

Fire into a crowd without caring who you hit, and it’s murder.

Plan it and do it on purpose, and it’s first-degree murder.

Do it because of the victim’s ethnicity, and it’s a hate crime on top.

War has the same ladder.

A strike on a fighter, with civilian deaths in proportion, is legal.

Firing blindly into neighborhoods with reckless disregard for civilian casualties is a war crime.

Targeting civilians to pressure the combatants to surrender is a war crime.

Targeting civilians because you want to exterminate that population is genocide.

We consider that the very top of the ladder.

Because it’s a hate crime, at the scale of a whole people.

And that’s why the definition reads the way it does: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

It’s going out of your way to kill people because they are a member of a people.

Which is why genocide is the most serious accusation, with the most serious punishment.

At Nuremberg, we hanged the men who did it.

NATO bombed the armies that did it.

The description determines the prescription.

The public perception of genocide

But that’s about what the term genocide does in the realm of governments and militaries.

Here’s what it does in the realm of public opinion.

On March 12, 2026, a man rammed his truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and opened fire. More than a hundred kids were in the school.

El-Sayed condemned the attack.

Then he explained it: hurt people hurt people.

But here’s the thing: hurt people don’t all hurt people the same way.

Plenty of hurt people don’t ram trucks into schools to intentionally fire on children.

Plenty of hurt people don’t hide behind their own children.

Plenty of hurt people don’t become terrorists.

But when the narrative is that you’re reacting to a genocide, suddenly people find ways to justify harming their fellow citizens.

Suddenly, “hurt people” are ramming trucks into schools.

Suddenly, “hurt people” are shooting Jews on a beach in Australia.

Suddenly, “hurt people” are shooting two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

Now to be clear, none of the implications of the word genocide change whether something is a genocide.

The truth is the truth, regardless of what follows from the truth.

But hopefully you now understand why arguing over whether something is a genocide isn’t “quibbling”.

It’s not a word you get to use because you want people to act.

It’s not a means to an end.

It’s the most powerful accusation there is, and it demands the most rigor possible.

Who is responsible for the deaths?

Now there’s a second thing that the label genocide implies.

And that’s moral culpability.

One of the slogans of the Free Palestine movement is “There are no ‘both sides’ in a genocide.”

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé put it this way last year: “In a genocide, there are no two sides.”

So when people say Israel is committing a genocide, and there are no two sides, what are they saying?

They are saying that Hamas’ actions don’t matter.

They are saying there is only one morally culpable side: Israel.

They are saying that it doesn’t matter that Hamas uses civilians, in its own words, as human shields.

It doesn’t matter that they wear civilian clothes, use civilian areas, or tell civilians to ignore evacuation warnings.

They are saying the only thing that needs to stop is Israel.

They are saying anything Hamas does is because Israel made them do it.

They are excusing anything Hamas does, even if Hamas does it to its own people.

Abdul El-Sayed is right: there is a moral imperative to stop this calamity.

And that moral imperative applies to both Hamas and Israel.

And if we accept the statement “there are no both sides in a genocide”:

Genocide means responsibility applies to just one side. Israel.

That’s why the word genocide matters.

That’s why it’s not a quibble.

That’s why you shouldn’t use the word without being extremely confident that it’s true.

Abdul El-Sayed says the word speaks to a moral imperative for action. And that if you wait to use it, it loses its power.

And mission accomplished. It does make people act.

But it makes them only act in one direction: against Israel and away from Hamas.

To see the practical implications of this, ask yourself:

How many anti-Hamas rallies have you seen in the West?

How many prominent leaders have you seen condemn Hamas, the organization, and not just October 7?

Hasan Piker is one of the most prominent figures in the Free Palestine movement.

In January, protesters outside a Queens synagogue chanted support for Hamas.

Piker’s response: “hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state.”

In an interview, he said Hamas’s tactics are “secondary to the conversation.”

As a reminder, those tactics include putting military infrastructure in civilian neighborhoods, encouraging Palestinians to act as human shields, telling Palestinians to ignore bombing warnings, and, according to families in Gaza, killing Palestinians for protesting.

Zohran Mamdani sat for an interview on Piker’s stream during his primary. Piker was in the front row at his biggest rally, and at his victory party.

Abdul El-Sayed held campaign rallies with Piker across Michigan this spring, and Piker campaigned with him before the primary.

And the New York Times published a feature fawning over him.

The movement’s leaders don’t run from him. They run with him.

Now, they occasionally condemn Hamas in extremely limited ways.

Zohran Mamdani, the most prominent politician in this movement, called October 7 a horrific war crime and stopped there.

He has never called on Hamas to disarm or give up power.

Asked twice on television whether it should, he said he doesn’t have opinions about the future of Hamas.

When protesters in his own city chanted “we support Hamas” outside a synagogue, it took him a day to respond. When he did, he called Hamas a terrorist organization without saying its name.

But he was more than willing to call Israel genocidal and an apartheid state without being asked.

We see anti-Israel protests everywhere, including inside Israel, where hundreds of thousands have marched against their own government.

Do you know where the only pro-Palestinian, anti-Hamas rallies happen?

In Gaza.

In March 2025, Gazans marched chanting “Hamas out.”

They risked their lives to do it.

A 22-year-old named Oday al-Rabay was found dead outside his family’s home after joining them.

His family says Hamas tortured him to death.

So some of the people with the most reason to fear Hamas said it out loud.

The people with the least reason, in the West, won’t.

Because to them, in a genocide, there are no two sides.

Now there are exceptions.

At least Abdul El-Sayed said Hamas is evil. He said it on CNN in April. “Hamas: Evil. Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.”

Credit to him. In this movement, that’s exceptional.

And unfortunately exceptionally rare.

Genocide = resistance movement

When El-Sayed, or Macklemore, or Zohran Mamdani say genocide, they are pointing people toward Israel and away from Hamas, whether they know it or not.

They could say what Israel is doing is excessive.

They could say Israel is committing war crimes in a war against Hamas.

They are not saying that.

They say Israel is genocidal.

They are saying Israel wants to kill Palestinians because they’re Palestinian.

And to many people in the public, it justifies anything Hamas does.

And we can see that in how many people describe Hamas as a “resistance movement.”

Gandhi’s movement was a resistance movement.

Martin Luther King’s was too.

The French Resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Solidarity in Poland. Ukraine today.

Even armed ones. The Black Panthers carried rifles.

Which of those resistance movements told their own people to stand on rooftops as human shields, while they hid in tunnels?

Which of them walked into a music festival to kill, rape, and kidnap unarmed civilians?

The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were the victims of an actual genocide.

When they fought back, they shot at soldiers.

We have a word for movements that are aimed at civilians.

That word is terrorist.

Calling Israel genocidal, and Hamas a resistance movement against genocide.

It makes everything Hamas does a necessary response.

So maybe Israel is committing a genocide.

But given the implications, are you sure?

“But the experts said it’s a genocide.”

So now let’s consider the substantive question. Is this a genocide?

Experts did say what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide.

Some of them.

The UN Commission of Inquiry said so in September 2025. Amnesty said so in December 2024.

And on the other hand, this month a letter rejecting the genocide charge was signed by Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Niall Ferguson, and other prominent scholars.

So the experts disagree.

And when the experts disagree, “an expert said so” is not a reliable argument.

You have to think from first principles, not defer to a group.

Because groups are susceptible to groupthink.

Institutions get captured. We’ve all watched it happen.

Smart people can stop thinking independently when the tribe becomes more important than the truth.

And when it comes to Israel, there is special attention placed on them far beyond other countries, and that’s been the case since long before the current conflict.

The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item, Item 7, dedicated to Israel. It’s been there since 2007.

No other country on earth has one.

Not Sudan, where the world watched a genocide in Darfur in 2003, charged its president with genocide in 2010, and watched another begin in 2023.

Not North Korea, where the UN’s own commission found crimes against humanity in 2014, in camps holding up to 120,000 people.

Not Russia, which poisons its critics, flattened Chechnya, bombed hospitals in Syria, invaded Ukraine, and whose president has an ICC warrant for deporting Ukrainian children.

So “the UN said” has to be weighed like everything else.

So how certain do you need to be to assign the genocide charge?

Here’s the standard the ICJ set. The ICJ is the judicial body of the UN.

And it’s a good standard, regardless of whether they abide by it.

When intent has to be inferred from conduct, genocidal intent has to be the only reasonable inference.

Not a reasonable inference. The only one.

That bar is high on purpose, because genocide is the most serious charge there is.

It’s not enough to say that Israel’s actions can be reasonably explained as genocidal. You need to prove it’s the only reasonable explanation.

So when a country pauses its bombing so half a million kids can get polio vaccines, is the only reasonable inference that it’s genocidal?

When a country coordinates with aid organizations to allow food into a population, is the only reasonable inference that it’s genocidal?

When a country warns civilians to evacuate before it strikes, is the only reasonable explanation that they are genocidal?

It’s not unreasonable to think that Israel is committing a genocide.

It’s unreasonable to be certain that they are.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The five statements from Israeli officials most often cited as proof of intent, and the three questions that test whether words amount to genocide.

• What the only genocide the world court has ever confirmed looked like, and how it compares.

• Why the casualty ratio everyone argues over can’t settle this, no matter whose number you use.

• What Palestinian pollsters in Ramallah found about support for October 7, then and now.

• The question to ask yourself if you still insist on the word.

Read more

1. Trump bans CNN, MS NOW and Politico

What happened

On Friday, Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House for reporting “FICTION and LIES.”

He named no specific story.

His stated reason: they write negative news on purpose to hurt Republicans.

Saturday, their reporters were turned away at the gate. He says more outlets will follow.

Monday, the White House blocked CNN from its scheduled turn running the shared TV camera on Trump’s trip to the UN.

The other four networks in the TV pool, Fox included, refused to replace CNN. The pool suspended its shared TV coverage of the president.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico have sued.

The camps

Defenders: nobody was censored. All three can still publish anything. Access is a privilege, trust in media sits at 28%, and presidents have always chosen who they talk to.

Critics: courts have long held that once the White House lets the press in, it can’t throw reporters out over their coverage. The correspondents’ association, led by a Fox News reporter, wants the three reinstated. The five TV pool networks, Fox included, said jointly: “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

My take

There’s what a president can do and what he ought to do.

“Can” is a legal question. I’ll leave it to the lawyers.

“Ought” is for the rest of us.

The law is the floor.

It tells you what you can get away with.

What’s right is a higher bar.

Much of what holds this country together is restraint: the President having power, but choosing not to use it.

This is a lack of restraint with very little upside.

It was wrong when Obama’s White House tried to cut Fox News out of a press pool interview in 2009.

It’s also wrong now.

The issue isn’t actually playing favorites.

Every president plays favorites.

He picks who gets the interview. He picks who gets called on. He can be combative with some outlets in interviews and friendly to others.

That’s his time and his voice, and they’re his to give.

But a White House press pass is access to the building where the public’s business gets done.

Playing favorites determines who the president talks to.

A ban determines who gets to watch what happens in the center of power.

The media is called the 4th estate because it helps keep the government accountable through their mere presence.

They watch the politicians. That creates both the perception and reality of accountability.

The people being watched shouldn’t pick the watchers.

Furthermore, bans like this change the behavior of the reporters who get to stay in the room.

Once a negative story about the president can cost you your badge, every reporter still in the room is incentivized to pander to the president.

Nobody is being censored here - the media can say whatever they want.

But the ban is prejudicial instead of principled.

If “fiction and lies” is the standard, it applies to all media.

Fox paid Dominion $787 million over false election claims, and Fox still has its seat.

The line Trump drew isn’t truth vs lies - it’s pro-Trump vs anti-Trump.

Who decides what counts as fiction? How far from the truth do you have to drift to lose your badge?

Yes, the media is biased. Its low trust is earned.

We still need it.

You can sue a newsroom. You know who owns it. They have peer review. Reporters can’t hide behind anonymity.

Social media has none of that.

Its advantage is that it gives exposure to underexposed truths that the media isn’t covering.

But it also gives exposure to every lie and confused conspiracy theory too.

It takes me five to eight hours to make a three-minute video, and I still wonder if I got everything right.

Most people don’t have that time.

We need institutions that do.

If these outlets publish something false, sue them. Trump has, and has won multiple times.

If they lie, defeat them with the inexorable power of the truth.

Not prejudicial removal from the town square.

It’s also a stupid fight six weeks before the midterms.

We need vision, unity, and a case to be made for why Republicans should be trusted over the Democrats.

But instead Trump’s messaging is majoring in the minors.

Endless relitigation of the 2020 election.

Polls on renaming AI “Superior Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence” - like he’s currently doing on X.

This is not the message Americans need right now.

And think about the precedent.

What ground will the Right stand on when President Newsom or President AOC bans Fox?

The pendulum always comes back.

And it will be vicious.

The media is biased.

We still need it.

That leaves every reader with the same problem: how do you read biased coverage without letting it do your thinking for you?

Ground News has been my favorite news app for two years, since well before they ever sponsored me.

The feature I use most is Bias Comparison. It puts left, center and right coverage of the same story side by side, so bias turns into data you can see instead of distortion you absorb.

Here’s what it shows for the press ban.

284 sources. 36% of them lean left, 25% center, 39% right.

The facts are the same everywhere. The White House blocked CNN from its turn in the pool. The other networks, Fox included, refused to replace it. Three outlets sued.

Left-leaning outlets call the restrictions an “assault on the First Amendment” and call the networks’ response “solidarity.” Trump is the villain.

Right-leaning outlets call that same response “retaliation” by the “legacy media,” and report conservative outrage that Fox took part. The press is the villain.

Same facts. Opposite villains.

Then look at what each side emphasizes. Center and right coverage reports the White House’s stated reason: “fake news.” Left coverage plays it down.

If you only read the left, you might miss why Trump says he did it.

If you only read the right, the networks look like the aggressors.

Either way, you’d walk away with half the story and full confidence.

Media bias is a problem. The outlets aren’t going to fix it for you, and I can’t either.

What you can do is become the kind of reader bias doesn’t work on.

That’s mental sovereignty.

You see the spread before you pick a side. You notice what each outlet plays down. You reach your conclusions yourself, from the facts.

Ground News is the best tool I’ve found for building that habit.

It’s how you get the useful parts of the mainstream media, while retaining the ability to think for yourself.

You can get 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

2. Trump’s $5,000 promise

What happened

At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump promised $5,000 to every adult citizen.

The condition: Republicans keep the House and Senate.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000.”

There are about 245 million adult citizens, so the bill is roughly $1.2 trillion.

It needs Congress to pass. Trump says it’s certain he will get it done.

This is the third check he’s floated. The $5,000 DOGE dividend and the $2,000 tariff dividend never arrived.

The camps

Supporters: the country is taking in money, and the people should share in it the way shareholders get a dividend.

Critics, including some conservatives: it’s a bribe, announced as the debt passed $40 trillion.

Election lawyers: it’s legal. A campaign promise like this is protected speech under a 1982 Supreme Court case.

My take

I’m not against the president putting money in Americans’ pockets.

Tax cuts do it.

Trump has floated abolishing the income tax and funding the government with tariffs, which is how Washington paid its bills before 1913.

Last December he sent $1,776 to about 1.45 million service members. (He credited tariffs. The money came from a housing allowance Congress had already approved.)

My issue is the condition and the math.

If there’s money to return to the people, it shouldn’t depend on which party wins an election.

It should exist because the system got better. You cut waste. There’s a windfall. You pass it on.

This is the reverse.

If Democrats win, does that mean Trump won’t try to deliver?

The payment is tied to a party and untied from results.

That’s a handout.

It’s the same pandering the right attacks in socialists:

“Here’s free stuff. We didn’t improve something to make it free. You just want it.”

And the number is arbitrary.

Zohran Mamdani promised groceries 30% cheaper at city-run stores. Why 30? Because food prices rose about 30% since 2019. The number matches the grievance. It has nothing to do with what a grocery store can sustain.

$5,000 is the same kind of number. It’s a marketing number.

$1.2 trillion is more than ten times what DOGE claims it saved.

The Tax Foundation says these checks would eat nearly all the new tariff revenue for a decade.

People call it a bribe. Legally it’s a campaign promise. In spirit the people calling it a bribe are right.

It’s a campaign to keep power - not the result of power being used effectively.

3. Macklemore, Robert Kraft and the word “genocide”

What happened

At Ed Sheeran’s MetLife Stadium shows on Sept. 4 and 5, Macklemore said “Free Palestine,” accused Israel of genocide, and showed images from Gaza.

Robert Kraft owns Gillette Stadium, a later stop on the tour. He barred Macklemore from playing there, called it hate speech, and cited a history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.

Macklemore says Kraft rallied other stadium owners into an ultimatum. Sheeran’s team dropped him on Sept. 14. Sheeran says venues threatened to pull the shows.

Four supporting acts quit in protest. Macklemore pledged $1 million from the tour to Palestinian aid. Kraft and Sheeran pledged $2 million each.

The camps

Kraft, the ADL and the Israeli-American Council: it’s a private venue with no duty to give him a stage. The ADL calls the genocide charge false and says he has a record of antisemitic rhetoric. Critics point to a 2014 costume widely read as a Jewish caricature. He apologized for it.

Macklemore’s side: it’s political speech, and a UN commission and human rights groups have made the same charge. A billionaire organizing venues to remove an artist is cancel culture.

Sheeran: there’s more than one way to work for peace. His critics say silence isn’t neutral.

My take

Whatever you think of what Macklemore said, saying it took courage.

He had something to lose. He lost it.

I respect courage as a virtue.

I also don’t see a free speech violation in banning Macklemore from stadiums for saying it.

The First Amendment protects you from the government.

Robert Kraft isn’t the government.

He owns the building, and he decides who plays in it.

Some platforms will drop Macklemore over this. Others will book him because of it.

Macklemore knew who owns the buildings he plays in.

Macklemore put the cause ahead of the business.

He’s free to do that. Kraft is free to respond the way he did. Other owners are free to follow. Fans are free to boycott Kraft’s venues.

Everyone is using their influence as they see fit.

On the claim itself, I think Macklemore is wrong.

Genocide means acting with intent to destroy a people. All war is evil.

But genocide is one of the highest degrees of evil there is.

He could have made a humanitarian statement about civilians dying in Gaza.

He could have called on Hamas and Israel’s government both to come to terms.

He chose the one word that accuses a government of trying to wipe out a people. It puts all the guilt on Israel and none on Hamas.

That’s a political claim. It makes sense that people who reject it won’t give it a stage.

I think it’s much more likely than not that Israel’s government - when considered as a whole - doesn’t have genocidal intent.

Some of its ministers say things that should be condemned. In June, Itamar Ben Gvir wrote that a thousand Lebanese mothers “must weep” for every Israeli mother’s tear.

Israel also cut off all aid to Gaza for eleven weeks last year.

But it warned civilians before strikes, and it let aid in for most of the war. I don’t think the conduct or the death toll shows an intent to destroy a people.

Reasonable people disagree. I may make the full case in another letter.

But both sides here are mindreading.

Macklemore is reading genocidal intent into Israel’s government.

Kraft and the ADL are reading antisemitism into Macklemore.

You can think he’s wrong, as I do.

Calling the statement antisemitic is a much harder case to prove, and it undercuts the rational case that this isn’t a genocide.

Someone can be confused and incorrect without hating Jews, hating Israel, or trafficking Jewish tropes for influence.

Maybe Macklemore is doing one of those things. We don’t know that.

But the best strategy to combat his claim is to refute what he said, not ascribe intent to who said it.

The woke movement made the same error when it called anyone saying anything that reflected poorly on black people racist.

My advice to the people who agree with me that this isn’t a genocide: drop the label. Focus on the logic.

Change people’s minds. Don’t tell them they’re hateful for what’s on their minds.

Macklemore is wrong.

Kraft is within his rights.

Calling it antisemitism is a strategic error.

From here, you’ll learn:

• How a sealed jury list failed to protect the Clancy holdout, and who handed the public the clues.

• The case for and against the juror now being picked apart online.

• Why a watched jury is a different jury.

• What happens to civic duty when every juror has an audience.

Read more

Today is the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death.

I was moved to write this because a few days ago, I saw reports that people are planning to disrupt his memorials.

What a shame.

A year since a man was shot in the neck for the crime of using his words.

And much of the apathy, even the glee, over his death isn’t a…

Read more

I have a long-form video covering the intellectual and moral confusion around the Lindsay Clancy case. You can watch it on my YouTube.

IQ scores are dropping for the first time in over a century.

Gen Z is the first generation ever with recorded IQ scores lower than the previous generation.

Attention spans are collapsing.

Anxiety and depression diagnoses are at record highs.

The Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023.

We are more confused, less cognitively equipped, and more emotionally dysregulated than we have ever been.

This is not happening to some other group of people.

It is happening to all of us. It is happening to me.

Every one of us is being dulled by the same feeds, the same algorithms, the same thirty-second units of information.

Nobody opts out of this by being smart. It requires constant, deliberate effort to resist, and most days most of us lose.

So when I describe a failure of thinking in this piece, I am not describing something I am above.

I am describing something I have to fight in myself every time I sit down to write.

We have an abundance of information and a dearth of discernment.

It’s against that backdrop that I’m writing this piece.

What this is and isn’t about

In my last piece I wrote about the moral dimensions of the Lindsay Clancy case. Here I want to focus on the failures in reasoning.

This is not an attack on women. It’s not an attack on feminists.

It’s also not about the people who acknowledge Lindsay killed her children but believe she should be found not criminally responsible - which means a psychiatric facility instead of prison.

I’ve made my position clear. I think she should go to prison.

But there’s a reasonable disagreement to be had there.

Those people - most of them probably women - accept the core facts. We just disagree on what the consequences of those facts should be.

I’m talking about a smaller group.

The people, also mostly women, who say Lindsay didn’t kill her children at all. That Patrick did.

Their failure to reason is a particularly florid example of what happens when attention and discernment get whittled away by technology.

You get identity politics, confirmation bias, tribalism, and conspiracism - wearing the costume of independent research.

This group is not uniquely susceptible to cognitive confusion and bias.

Every group is. Men, women, left, right.

I’ve spoken about the same failure among people insisting the 2020 election was stolen, or that the Spencer Pratt mayoral race was stolen, based on incomplete reasoning.

I’ve written at length about how these failures of reasoning are hidden under mounds of “receipts” in the Candace Owens Charlie Kirk investigation camp.

So read this less as commentary on the Clancy case, and more as commentary on the state of critical thinking.

Let me show you

In 2014, Timothy Ray Jones Jr. killed his five children. He said voices told him they’d be better off in Heaven. His lawyers pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Timothy Ray Jones Jr. in court, above the five children he killed.

Nobody printed a shirt. Nobody stood outside the courthouse. Nobody suggested his wife did it.

Matthew Coleman killed his two children in 2021, aged two and ten months. He told the FBI his wife had passed “serpent DNA” to them. A prison physician found he met the criteria for a psychotic disorder.

His delusion was literally about his wife. Nobody blamed her.

Chad Doerman killed his three sons in 2023. His lawyers pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and said he was in a state of psychosis.

Nobody blamed his wife either.

Now here’s Lindsay Clancy.

Some say she never actually confessed. Technically true. She never took the stand and said “I killed my kids.”

In fact, she never took the stand at all - likely because her lawyers wanted to avoid it as part of their legal strategy.

But her own lawyer said, in court, she killed her children.

And in April her defense filed a motion offering to stipulate formally, in writing, to her involvement in all three deaths - so the trial could be about her mental state instead. The judge denied the request it was attached to, so nothing got signed.

Then there’s the record.

At 4:13 that afternoon, Lindsay used Apple Maps to check how long it takes to drive to the restaurant.

At 4:48, she called CVS to ask whether they stocked the medicine. The manager testified she sounded completely normal.

At 5:15, she sent Patrick out.

At 5:32, a CVS camera two miles away shows him walking in.

At 5:54, a restaurant camera shows him walking in there.

At 6:11, he called 911.

And in three and a half years, Lindsay has never accused him of anything.

Neither have her lawyers - who had every piece of evidence in the case, who were defending three counts of first-degree murder, and who would have given anything for another suspect.

Despite the overabundance of facts confirming that Lindsay killed her kids, and the dearth of facts confirming that Patrick did it instead, this subset of Lindsay Clancy’s supporters insists that Patrick did it.

From here, you’ll learn:

• What happens when a celebrity’s therapy session becomes a public verdict

• Why free speech is an answer to a different question than the one being asked

• The shield people reach for when they’ve watched more than you have

• Why finding a gap in a story isn’t the same as having a better one

• What the evidence explains in one move, and what the alternative theory has to do instead

Read more

Two days ago, Nature published an editorial about Jason Arday.

Nature is one of the most prestigious scientific publications on earth. If journals had an Ivy League, Nature is Harvard.

The title: “The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection.”

When I saw it, part of me was hopeful.

Because there is so much to reflect on.

Maybe they’d reflect on how a man who:

• Lied about visiting professorships at three universities

• Lied about a book that was never published

• Lied about millions in charity money that doesn’t appear in any record

• Claimed to run 600 miles in 6 days

• Claimed to not be able to speak until 11

• Claimed to not read or write until 18

Rose to one of the most prestigious positions in academia without anyone checking.

Maybe they’d reflect on how suspicions were raised to Cambridge in May 2023 and they declined to look.

Maybe they’d reflect on what it means that his own peers had doubts and said nothing.

Maybe they’d reflect on why public confidence in higher education has fallen from 57% to 38% in eleven years.

Maybe they’d reflect on whether a system that rewards hardship stories might attract people who invent them.

No.

Here’s what we got instead.

Nature announced it would focus on two issues.

One: how academic institutions should handle misconduct investigations when the media is watching.

Two: how the media should report on misconduct without causing harm.

Just those two.

Not whether the allegations that Jason lied were true.

Not why nobody checked.

No - they focused on media conduct, and administrative procedure.

Instead of focusing on Jason’s actions, and the incentive structure that enabled it, they focused on everyone’s reactions.

The only Cambridge failure they actually specify is that Cambridge announced its investigation too publicly.

Not that Cambridge declined to investigate for three years.

Nature’s question is: “Why did it feel the need to announce its investigation publicly - and did this decision reduce Arday’s chances of getting a fair hearing?”

So the only institutional failure Nature identifies is a confidentiality breach.

Nature writes:

“There is systemic racism in academia. It is an unwelcoming place for many who enter it through hardship and struggle, as Arday’s story illustrates.”

Jason’s story of hardship and struggle is the thing that was fabricated.

The 600 miles.

The charity millions.

The professorships.

The book.

The claim about being on Seven Up.

All of it collapsed under the most basic checking.

Even now, when we know he fabricated his story of hardship, they make the story about his hardship.

Nature calls him “an autistic Black scholar who inspired a generation.”

There is no public documentation of that diagnosis. Nobody has produced it.

The only source for it is Jason.

And Jason lied about his professorships, his book, his charity totals, and his running.

Nature asserts it as fact, in an editorial about an evidentiary dispute, in the most prestigious science journal in the world.

They talk about him inspiring a generation, without mentioning that he lied to a generation.

And in an entire editorial about Jason Arday, Nature does not mention the fabricated CV once.

Americans' confidence in higher education was 57% in 2015. It's 38% today.

That’s a 19-point collapse.

Over the same period, confidence in other core institutions - Congress, the Supreme Court, big business, organized religion - fell 5 points on average.

Higher education is falling about four times faster than institutions people already hated.

Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education is going in the wrong direction. In 2020 it was 56%.

You can blame Trump. You can blame social media. You can blame the pandemic.

Some of that is fair.

But when things are going badly in your life, there are always factors outside your control and factors inside it.

And a person who focuses only on the ones outside develops learned helplessness.

So does an institution.

This was a terrible response from Nature.

The entire Jason Arday situation could have been avoided if academics - whose sole job is to seek truth - sought the truth.

Instead they bought Jason’s obvious lies, because he was black.

But even in their reflection, the academic establishment fails to understand why Jason was scrutinized so heavily.

They fail to understand that years of institutional focus on race - in admissions, in hiring - is the thing that built up the pressure that was unleashed on Jason, who lied grotesquely.

The racial promotion strategies of these institutions are what created a rational basis for suspicion of black intellectuals.

DEI put an asterisk on every meritorious black person’s achievements.

In an effort to correct past systems of racial discrimination, they created a new one.

The reaction to Jason was the consequence of that system.

Every academic should view the acceptance of Jason’s lies as the primary issue.

Because he did the opposite of what academics are supposed to do - present the truth.

But instead, Nature and others misdirect attention from his actions and the failings of academia, to the public’s reactions.

What a tragedy.

Our academic institutions disgrace themselves further with every passing year.

Please - stop being activists.

We need academics.

In the next section, we'll talk about the systemic racism claim, and how it completely derails rational discourse and accountability.

From here, you'll learn:

• Why an explanation that accounts for everything accounts for nothing

• The three conversations that become impossible the moment systemic racism is the answer

• Why being told the world is against you feels like power, and what it actually costs

• What the faculty numbers and the Harvard admissions data do to the theory

• Blumenbach’s five racial categories, the three we quietly dropped, and what’s still built on the rest

Read more

Seize the means of production?

What does that mean??

Well, that’s what socialism is.

It’s not universal healthcare.

Or free childcare.

It’s not what Nordic countries are.

It’s not what China is.

It’s not even what his “city-run” grocery stores are (more on that later).

Socialism is an economic system characterized by collective ownership of the means of production.

AKA, the government owning the farms, factories, and companies.

(You’ve seen me hammer this definition in several letters now. I’m going to keep hammering it, because definitions determine decisions.)

62% of Americans aged 18 to 29 have a favorable view of socialism.

But as of 2018, only 17% of all Americans could correctly define it.

Most Americans are confused about what socialism is.

Mamdani is not.

He is advertising socialism, and selling it with something else.

Before I go further, I want to be clear about something.

This isn’t a piece about Zohran Mamdani.

I’ve listened to hours of his long-form interviews. He’s sharp. He understands the practical problems better than most of his critics do. He is a generational political talent.

If he called himself a social democrat, I’d have almost nothing to say.

But he isn’t one man.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America this month, after her membership had quietly lapsed for seven years.

As of this writing, prediction markets have her as the favorite for the 2028 Democratic nomination.

This is a movement with a written end goal.

Mamdani is just its most talented marketer.

The Word He Didn't Choose

Under socialism, the government owns the farms, factories, and companies that produce things.

Cuba, where the state still produces about 85% of output, is socialist.

China, where state-owned companies produce about 25% of GDP, is not.

Denmark and Norway sit near 22%. America is at 13%.

But those numbers are measuring two different things.

In Denmark, the government runs the hospitals and the schools.

In Cuba, the government runs the hospitals and the schools - and the farms, and the factories, and the stores, and the hotels, and the banks.

That’s the difference between a welfare state and socialism.

There is a word that describes almost everything Mamdani is actually selling.

Free buses. Universal childcare. A rent freeze. Higher taxes on corporations.

That word is social democrat.

Social democracy is somewhere between capitalism and socialism. The best way to think of a social democracy is as a welfare state.

It describes Denmark. It describes Norway.

It describes a mainstream position inside the Democratic Party.

It is not controversial.

But Zohran doesn’t identify as a social democrat.

He picked democratic socialist.

Those two words are not synonyms.

They differ on exactly one thing: who ends up owning the farms, the factories, and the companies.

A social democrat taxes private companies and spends the money on people.

A socialist wants the public to own the companies.

A social democrat wants to exist within a capitalist framework, with limited state ownership.

A socialist wants to abolish a capitalist framework, with total state ownership.

The similarity of the terms is a point of confusion for a lot of people online.

This is not a minor semantic quibble - it’s a hugely important point.

Because if you sell people something they like, but brand it as something different, they start to like both the thing you’re selling and the brand - even if the two are totally different.

Think of it this way.

Imagine someone gives you a bottle labeled OxyContin.

Inside is Tylenol.

You take it for a headache. It works. You feel good.

Now you have a positive association with the brand OxyContin, not knowing it’s Tylenol.

Then one day the same person gives you a bottle that actually contains Oxy - and you take it the same way you took the last one.

Too much Tylenol gives you a stomachache.

Too much Oxy stops your breathing.

We can argue about whether you needed Tylenol.

There’s a legitimate argument for it, and it has a strong track record of having worked before.

But it’s much harder to justify Oxy.

Especially when Oxy has destroyed so many people’s lives in Cuba, Venezuela, China before 1978, the Soviet Union, and many other countries.

Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America are advertising OxyContin and selling Tylenol.

But their end goal is that we take Oxy.

That is a deliberate choice - they are not confused about what socialism is - even though most Americans are.

The Democratic Socialists of America say they want social ownership of ALL major industry and infrastructure.

They have chosen the socialist label.

They have chosen the socialist end goal - seizing the means of production.

And they are relying on social democracy and the successes of capitalism to make socialism more appealing.

Socialism’s Stolen Virtue

Mamdani keeps using capitalism to solve problems and calling it socialism.

1. The Budget

The promise:

Several months ago I wrote about how Mamdani balanced New York City’s budget, which had a $12 billion deficit.

He said he didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.

He branded it as a win for democratic socialism.

That second claim is false.

The reality:

Even if we stretch the definition of socialism to mean taxing the rich:

In reality, about 5% of the budget gap was closed by taxing the rich.

About 53% was mostly by taking money from people who don’t live in New York City, and future taxpayers - most of whom are working people.

So for example - I was born in the Bronx, which is in New York City, and when I was 10 I moved to Rockland County, a suburb in New York State.

If I still lived in Rockland, my tax money would be going to cover New York City’s tax deficit.

And about 35% of the budget gap was closed by predicting strong future performance from Wall Street - the capitalist center of the world.

(These are approximations. Budget rounds overlap across reporting periods, so the components don’t total to exactly 100%.)

But look at what that means.

They were counting on the revenues of companies that they want to eventually seize, to solve New York City’s financial problems.

And that might not sound like such a bad idea - after all, if they’re producing wealth, it’s not like that wealth will go away under socialism. The wealth will just go to the people who need it, right?

Well, we’ll talk about that in a moment.

But in summary, no, the budget deficit was not closed by socialism.

Unless you want to focus on the 5% of it that was closed by taxing the rich, and ignore the other 95%.

Mamdani is counting on the success of capitalists, taking taxpayer money meant to serve other parts of New York, and calling this a win for socialism.

2. City-Owned Grocery Stores

The promise:

A network of city-owned grocery stores. “A public option for produce.”

In his campaign video he said: “These stores will operate without a profit motive, or having to pay property taxes or rent, and will pass on those savings to you.”

The reality:

In July, the details came out.

The city owns the land, pays for construction, and covers rent and property taxes.

A private, for-profit grocery company runs the stores.

So the program built to prove that removing the profit motive lowers prices is being operated by a company that only exists because of the profit motive.

Which isn’t inherently a problem - that’s called a public-private partnership, and there are plenty of examples of them.

But remember - in socialism, there are no public-private partnerships. There’s just the public.

So he’s advertising something as socialist, but it relies on the productivity of capitalism.

And as I discussed in a previous newsletter - it’s pretty much the most inefficient model possible for creating savings for poor and working-class people. You can find a link to that letter here.

So he’s hiring capitalists to run the store, subsidizing them with taxpayer money, and yet again - claiming it as a win for socialism.

Mamdani’s city-owned grocery store project is perhaps the most inefficient way to help the poor, and unscalable.

It’s only optimal for one thing: marketing socialism.

But under true socialism - which is his goal - even the private companies he’s relying on cannot exist. Because the government owns the companies.

And that is the thing that is difficult for people to see.

There is a difference between redistributing the money generated by companies and the government owning the companies.

The first redistributes the wealth.

The second destroys the same source of wealth that you want to redistribute from - because the government is not good at creating wealth.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves on earth.

In the 1990s they opened those reserves to private investment. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and others put in billions and added more than a million barrels a day of capacity.

The state oil company already existed - Venezuela nationalized oil back in 1976.

But it was run by career professionals, working alongside private partners, and it worked.

In 1998 the country pumped 3.4 million barrels a day.

Then in 2002 and 2003, Hugo Chávez fired 19,000 of those professionals and replaced them with political loyalists.

In 2007 he seized the private stakes too - and they went from a public-private partnership to fully public.

By 2018 production had fallen to 1.3 million barrels a day.

And that was before a single US sanction hit the oil sector. Those didn’t start until 2019.

By 2021 Venezuela was pumping around 527,000 barrels a day.

Oil export revenue went from $73 billion in 2011 to $22 billion in 2016.

Some of that was the oil price crash.

And some of it was that they were producing a lot less oil.

Between 2013 and 2021 the economy shrank by 80%.

Venezuelans lost two-thirds of their wealth per person.

They went from one of the richest countries in Latin America to one of the poorest.

The oil never went anywhere. The people who knew how to get it out did.

3. Free Buses, Childcare, Rent Freeze

Free buses. Universal childcare. A rent freeze.

These aren’t examples of socialism. They are wealth transfers.

And some of them are defensible as transfers. Reasonable people can argue about whether a city should subsidize buses or childcare.

But none of them are socialism. And branding them as socialism is the tell.

Because every dollar of it comes from taxing people and private companies.

Which is fine - until you get what you asked for.

Because the goal of socialism is for the government to own those companies.

And a lot more often than not - when the government has taken over a profitable industry, it has stopped being profitable.

So what exactly funds the free buses after you seize the bus manufacturers?

What funds universal childcare when Wall Street is a state agency?

And this is the problem with socialism.

It puts management of wealth under people who don’t know how to create wealth.

It’s the political version of a founder who’s brilliant at raising money and bad at building anything.

The PowerPoint deck is beautiful. The story is compelling. Investors keep writing checks every round.

But he’s spending other people’s money, and eventually there isn’t any more to raise.

The philosophy is clear. Rich people have money. Poor people don’t. So take from the rich and give to the poor - fine.

Then what?

At some point somebody has to create new wealth.

And socialist ownership has a terrible record of preserving the wealth it wants to redistribute.

The socialists are marketing an agenda financed entirely by the thing they’ve promised to abolish.

They are funding a marketing campaign for socialism with capitalism.

What The Label Does To The Policies

So now you understand how Mamdani isn’t actually implementing socialism - he’s implementing social democracy, or relying on capitalism, while building public support for socialism.

If the socialists actually had power, their goal of seizing the means of production is fundamentally incompatible with the reforms Mamdani is producing.

So what is this strategy?

There’s a term for it in socialist strategy - “non-reformist reforms.”

It’s the centerpiece of the democratic socialist playbook: advertise socialism, deliver capitalism, and use the credit to eventually abolish capitalism.

It’s the same sequence Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Mao Zedong each used to take power.

And we need to study it.

Because those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

In the second half of this letter: how big this movement actually is, how we can have a socialist president in 2028, and the exact timeline each of those three men followed - including the quote where Castro explains, in his own words, why he lied about being a communist for 32 months.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The difference between social democracy and socialism, and why it comes down to who owns the farms, factories, and companies

• How Mamdani’s budget, city-owned grocery stores, free buses, and childcare plans rely on capitalism while being marketed as socialism

• The problem with funding socialist promises through the companies socialists ultimately want the government to own

• The strategy known as “non-reformist reforms,” and how the Democratic Socialists of America use popular reforms to build support for a complete break with capitalism

• The sequence Castro, Chávez, and Mao each followed

Read more

Lindsay Clancy did need help.

Mothers do need postpartum support.

She should get care.

In prison.

What happened

The date of the incident was January 24th, 2023. Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Lindsay Clancy was 32. A labor and delivery nurse at Mass General with three kids. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months.

She sent her husband Patrick out to pick up takeout and grab a prescription at CVS.

While he was gone she strangled all three children with exercise bands in the basement.

Then she cut herself and jumped out of a second story window.

She lived. She’s paralyzed from the waist down.

Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that day. Callan died a few days later.

Patrick came home to it. His 911 call is in evidence. It’s mostly screaming.

Why people are talking about it now

The trial is happening right now in Plymouth Superior Court, and it’s being livestreamed.

Closing arguments are this week.

Lindsay said she killed her 3 children.

Her lawyers aren’t arguing she didn’t do it.

They’re arguing she isn’t criminally responsible, because she was suffering from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis.

Guilty means life in prison without parole.

Not criminally responsible means a state mental health facility.

Her husband

Police ruled her husband Patrick out immediately.

There’s video of him in the pharmacy.

Video of him in the restaurant.

Text messages.

His drive home tracked.

The food and the medicine still sitting on the kitchen island when officers arrived.

Hours before it happened, he texted her calling her a good mama.

Days after, he released a public statement asking people to forgive her, the way he had.

He later said he wasn’t married to “a monster”.

He was married to someone who got sick.

He has since divorced her, remarried, and moved to New York.

The reactions

Outside the courthouse, there have been hundreds of women in pink, with shirts reading “Justice For Lindsay” and “She Needed Help”.

Women in pink rally in support of Lindsay Clancy outside her trial. (AP)

On TikTok, mothers filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay.”

Mothers filming themselves screaming, sobbing on camera in front of their toddlers, throwing things, and framing the rage as solidarity.

It has been widely embraced in the mom corner of TikTok as a healthy way for mothers to express anger.

And then there’s the “alternative theory” wing, which says Patrick did it.

One theory making the rounds: he drugged her, pushed her out the window, strangled the children himself, and framed her so he could marry someone else.

This wing treats his remarriage and move to New York as evidence of this theory.

This wing treats his testimony as evidence too, because people watched him take the stand and decided he sounded wrong.

Lindsay agreed to a stipulation of facts, which meant prosecutors didn’t have to present all of their evidence in court.

That left gaps in a televised trial, and content creators filled the gaps.

The man who begged the public to forgive his wife is now being accused of murdering his own children.

I’ve written about this pattern before — Spencer Pratt's LA mayoral run, Candace Owens' theories about who killed Charlie Kirk, Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It's a similar pattern every time.

1. Something happens.

2. People want answers within hours or days, and rush to find answers.

3. People have pre-judgments about who is guilty that are informed by their bias.

4. People confirm their bias by working backward to evidence and call it research.

5. They say “things don’t add up” or “something doesn’t make sense” — when in reality, they just don’t understand certain systems or technical details.

6. They say they “just are asking questions” when they are in fact not just asking questions — they are suggesting answers — and those answers are the low probability, high flammability answers that tend to get attention.

7. They are skeptical of the mainstream narrative as a rule, but don’t apply the same level of skepticism to the alternative narrative. They require perfect evidence to believe the mainstream, and merely possible explanations to believe the alternative.

The Lindsay Clancy case is about as clear a case as exists.

She confessed.

Her own defense team isn’t disputing that she strangled her children.

I’m not going to spend this letter on that theory.

What matters is what these reactions have in common.

Every one of them moves the weight off Lindsay. The alternative theory camp moves it onto Patrick.

The solidarity camp moves it onto her illness and onto a system that failed her.

Almost nobody in this conversation is arguing she should face no consequences at all.

The move is subtler and more corrosive. It’s a reordering of moral attention.

The conversation leads with her suffering.

What is put in the foreground is her mental illness.

The failures of the medical system.

The lack of a village for mothers.

The murder itself recedes into the background.

The three children recede into the background.

The moral center of gravity shifts from what was done to how the person who did it was feeling.

I didn’t hear about the Lindsay Clancy story until last Friday. A friend brought it up over dinner. My first reaction was pure disgust and shock. Three kids. Strangled. How could anyone look at that and start talking about justification or solidarity?

That was the emotional response. After I sat with it for a minute, I realized I didn’t actually know what the people defending her were saying. I only knew my own reaction. So I went looking.

One of the tools that helped me map the conversation quickly was Ground News.

Their bias comparison showed the split in real time.

Left-leaning coverage was framing defense of Lindsay as a maternal-health reckoning — language about women being “dismissed, neglected and ignored,” and the repeated line “care over prison.”

Right-leaning coverage stayed locked on the children’s deaths and treated the attendees as a “feminist mob” defending a “killer mom.”

Seeing those frames side by side did two useful things.

First, it showed me the actual argument the supporters were making instead of the cartoon version that shows up in quote-tweets.

Second, it surfaced details that hadn’t come up at dinner, including that a forensic psychiatrist had diagnosed her with postpartum psychosis after the fact.

I still think the emphasis in the coverage defending Lindsay is wrong — but now I understand the best argument for what I think is wrong.

I would rather disagree with the real position than the one I invented in my head.

This is the exact reason I’ve used Ground News for two years, long before they ever sponsored anything I made.

Most of us live inside feeds that validate us.

When a story is this emotionally charged, that becomes dangerous.

You end up reacting to a filtered version of events and calling it clarity.

Ground News is one of the few tools that forces the other framings into view without requiring you to go hunt for them yourself.

I use it on basically every major story I cover now.

If you want the same view, you can get 40% off their Vantage plan through the link below.

It includes the bias comparison feature and the rest of the tools.

Signing up for their Vantage plan empowers you, supports a great company, and enables my work.

Get 40% Off Ground News

Consequences and Compassion — In That Order

Lindsay is a mentally ill person who did a profoundly evil thing.

Her sickness, we should have compassion for.

Her actions, we need consequences for.

And we need to emphasize the consequences first.

The consequences must be in the foreground.

Because the reverse order has consequences of its own.

Internal states are difficult to verify and easy to narrate after the fact.

External actions are not.

A civilization that begins treating the internal state as primary and the external act as secondary will eventually weaken the very incentives that keep disordered people from acting on their worst impulses.

Sometimes humans do the right thing because it is right.

Sometimes we do the right thing because it benefits us.

Sometimes we do it because we fear the social and legal cost of doing the wrong thing.

All three of those motives are required for civilization to function.

Remove or muddy the third, and more evil will follow.

This is why the first and loudest statement must be about the boundary, not the explanation.

That should lead in the rhetoric.

Compassion should follow.

If the first and loudest thing is “she was failed by the system” the lesson is that being failed explains killing three children.

If the first and loudest thing is “this is evil and there will be consequences,” the lesson is that nothing explains killing three children.

Both should be said — and what we choose to emphasize has a meaningful difference.

Lindsay must face consequences.

Not out of spite.

Out of necessity.

Her judgment was compromised by her biology and psychology.

She was on thirteen medications in four months, as providers treated her symptoms and then treated her reactions to the treatments.

A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis after the killings.

Her husband went to her doctor the week before and said they were turning her into a zombie.

All of that is true.

And — Lindsay could have chosen good. She did not.

The voice

She told a hospital chaplain she heard a voice telling her to kill her children and herself.

If she heard a voice, there was a Lindsay hearing it. The hearer and the voice are two different things. That is what hearing means.

She could have refused it.

She chose to obey it.

Lindsay is not just her thoughts, feelings, and voices.

Just like you are neither your thoughts, nor your feelings, nor that voice that whispers dark thoughts.

You are you.

You are the one experiencing and responding to your conditions.

You are the cause of your actions, not just the effect of your circumstances.

Every court, every contract, every apology you have ever given or accepted assumes there is a you in there doing the choosing.

No matter how loud that dark voice was, there was another voice that Lindsay did not listen to.

Because even in the most chaotic consciousness, there is a voice that knows right from wrong.

That is called our conscience.

It is harder to hear for the sick. But it is always there.

The voice of society

When the sick struggle to hear their voice of sanity, they need to hear the voice of society.

Which says: if you won’t respond to your conscience, then we must ensure you respond to incentives.

Not to hurt you — to protect everyone.

People do the right thing for three reasons:

1. Because it’s right

2. Because it benefits them

3. Because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t

The first is not enough and never has been. Before civilization, in a state of nature, there was far more violence.

The triumph of modern civilization is that it replaced merely trusting people to do the right thing with laws, contracts, and incentives.

The result is over 8 billion people being able to live on the planet in relative peace.

Consequences are the last defense against the individual not listening to their conscience.

The sicker someone is, the louder the backup needs to be.

That is why the first and loudest thing that all of us, men and women, must say when we see an atrocity like this is: Killing Children Is Wrong.

And we will help you heal, but we won’t let you harm.

Say it clearly. Because softening that boundary doesn’t help the sick.

It weakens the incentive stopping them from acting on their worst impulses.

Blur the line and you remove the last thing standing between a disordered person and ruination for them and those around them.

What compassion is

We need compassion and consequences.

To have compassion means to suffer with another, and to want to alleviate their suffering.

We can feel Lindsay’s suffering.

She sought help.

She went to the emergency room.

She called a hotline.

She was turned away from inpatient care.

She is paralyzed from the waist down and will spend the rest of her life knowing what she did.

It is genuinely difficult to be a mother.

After all, it takes a village to raise a child.

And mothers no longer have a village.

But we must never let a desire to alleviate suffering mean alleviating consequences.

The moral center of gravity must be someone’s external actions, not their internal state.

External actions can be verified. Internal states cannot. They are hard to check and easy to narrate after the fact.

Move the center of gravity to how someone felt — no matter what the pathology that led to those feelings — and you have moved it to the one thing nobody else can examine. The one thing that can be rewritten later by whoever tells the story best.

A society that treats the internal state as primary and the external act as secondary weakens the exact incentives that keep disordered people from acting on their worst impulses.

And the message that your internal state takes moral primacy over your actions has mortal impact.

Because the next Lindsay will also choose to obey the voice of evil, because society told her she was powerless to her feelings.

We must speak in one voice and say: she did not do the right thing. Not “she could not do the right thing.”

So yes, call for more care for mothers.

After saying that even the sick make choices.

Because there were only 3 people in this case who had no choice.

And they were all her children.

Underneath the division of this story are four additional layers:

1. The relationship between mental illness and evil.

2. Belief in, and the role of, free will.

3. The gender war between men and women.

4. The purpose of prison.

I address all of this in the paid section.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why the Greek word for sin is an archery term, and what “missing the mark” tells you about every evil act you’ve ever heard about

• The claim that all evil is mental illness, and the reason accepting it fully makes pathology useless as a defense

• The four words in Lindsay Clancy’s own account that establish she still had a choice, and why they hold up even if you don’t believe in free will

• The two grievances men and women each read into this case, both of them partly right, and the point where each one stops being an argument about her

• The thought experiment where she gets perfect care: the screening, the bed, the village, and the outcome that remains possible anyway

Read more

Last week, CBS News asked Americans what “socialism” means.

Socialism is defined and distinguished by the collective or government ownership of the means of production.

In the poll, 29% named some form of government control, government ownership, or collective ownership of production.

That’s the distinction and definition. Which means 7 in 10 Americans don’t know it.

12% said they didn’t know. 4% thought it had something to do with being sociable.

Republicans: 41%. Independents: 29%. Democrats: 23%.

It’s not a rosy picture. No group had a majority of people providing the right definition.

But Democrats want socialism the most, and understand what it is the least.

So the group most likely to like socialism is the group least likely to know what it is.

Here’s what Democrats said instead:

19% said government or public services.

15% said equality and fairness.

13% said the common good, or helping people.

None of those are what define and distinguish socialism from other mainstream political and economic theories.

Every one of them is an outcome somebody hopes socialism will produce.

AKA they’re describing what they want, not what the word means.

And they want it badly. 58% of Democrats view socialism positively. Only 32% say that about capitalism.

Then CBS asked those same people a question with no label attached: should the U.S. government own stock in private American companies?

7% of Democrats said good idea.

63% said bad idea.

Government owning shares is the mildest version of socialist ownership there is. Not control. Not operation. Not seizure. Just stock.

The people who like socialism most rejected it 9 to 1.

Now to be fair, you could argue those are two different things. Owning a slice of a private company is a sovereign wealth fund. Owning the company outright is socialism. Someone could reject the first and still want the second.

But that would mean they oppose the mild version and support the extreme one. Possible, but unlikely.

The simpler explanation is that most people who like socialism don’t know what it is.

So when you argue with someone about socialism, you’re usually not arguing with a socialist.

You’re arguing with what they want socialism to achieve.

That’s the foundation of why these conversations break down. When people who like socialism hear someone attacking socialism, they hear an attack on equality, fairness, the common good, helping people, and government services.

This helps illuminate why this conversation fails so often.

The term isn’t defined properly.

You can’t disagree with a word nobody defined.

You can only take turns being angry at different things.

The second problem is that the conversation gets abstract almost immediately. It becomes about philosophies rather than what people practically want.

So one person is arguing against what socialist countries have produced — poverty, ruin, and the erosion of freedom.

Meanwhile the person across the table is thinking about unaffordable housing, insufficient healthcare, and student debt.

On the last Clear Thinker Academy call I asked for a volunteer to play a belligerent socialist so I could demonstrate another way of having this conversation.

Here’s the clip.

And here’s the framework.

Step one: ask them to define it.

“When you say socialism, what do you mean by that?” Nine times out of ten you’ll hear: healthcare people can afford, housing people can afford, childcare, education.

This is a valuable opportunity to first understand what they think socialism is and what they want it to accomplish.

Step two: agree with the goals.

“I want people to have healthcare and housing they can afford too.”

That’s how you establish that you’re not competing — you’re collaborating.

Not identifying where there is shared alignment is how conversations become adversarial, and if you ever feel like the other person thinks you’re a bad person for disagreeing, establishing common ground will help dramatically.

Step three: offer the actual definition.

Now that you’ve established what they think socialism is, and how you support what they want it to achieve, you can say something like this.

“Can I share what socialism technically means based on the dictionary definition? It’s about who owns the farms, factories, grocery stores, and companies that produce everything. Socialism moves that ownership from entrepreneurs and businesses to centralized control — usually the government. The question it answers is who owns production, rather than which services people receive.”

If you just keep going without pointing to the dictionary definition of socialism, you’ll be arguing over the value of healthcare, housing, childcare, and education. By introducing the definition after letting them express what they really want (better healthcare/housing/etc.), you can ground the definition in facts without immediately rejecting their definition.

It’s an emotionally intelligent way of correcting a misunderstanding by gently guiding them toward the truth, rather than confronting them with it out of the gate.

Step four: If they bring up Nordic countries — Finland, Denmark, Norway, or Sweden.

“The countries you’re pointing to are capitalist with strong safety nets, funded by taxing private wealth creation. Their own leaders insist on this. So what you might want is better capitalism, and that, we can build.”

Here’s a useful fact you can cite. In 2015, after Bernie Sanders held Denmark up as a socialist model, Denmark’s prime minister flew to Harvard’s Kennedy School and said this:

“I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Look at where these countries actually sit. In Denmark, 22% of GDP is produced by the government. That’s a big public sector, and it’s nothing close to socialism, because the farms, factories, and companies stay in private hands.

They might also bring up China. Today about 25% of China’s GDP comes from state-owned enterprises, and China’s own government leaders say private firms produce more than 60% of it. That’s the World Bank’s estimate and Beijing’s own number, not mine.

When China had actual socialism, with roughly 100% of the economy owned by the government, 15 to 55 million people starved under the Great Leap Forward. You can read more about that here.

Step five: Show the failures of socialism.

There are myriad examples of failed experiments in socialism.

There’s also Cuba and Venezuela in the 21st century.

Now that you’ve listened to their desires, offered a definition, and shown that what people think is socialism is not, they will be more willing to hear about how it’s failed every time it has been tried.

Present it as data to consider, rather than as a gotcha.

Step six: offer an alternative.

“Here’s what I think would fix the thing you’re describing: get corporate money out of lawmaking, make it legal to build housing again, force price transparency in healthcare. Same goals you named. I think we can do it within capitalism, which is flawed but functional, rather than socialism, which has never been functional.”

Nobody trades a bad answer for no answer.

If your entire contribution is that their idea won’t work, they’ll keep it, because at least it points at their problem.

The person across from you isn’t your enemy. They’re looking at the same broken housing market you are and reaching for the only word anybody handed them.

Give them a better one.

That’s the method. Try it and watch your conversations transform from deathmatches to dialogues.

But knowing how to have the conversation only gets you halfway. You also need to know what to say when they push back, and they will.

Below the paywall, five more analyses, the specific objections you’ll hear, and how to answer each one:

• The one question to ask instead of rebutting “that wasn’t real socialism” — and the reframe that makes corruption a design feature rather than bad luck

• China and Venezuela — the year one country reversed course, the number of people it moved out of poverty, and the number who have left the other

• The billionaire tax argument you should concede immediately — what conceding buys you, and the single move that turns an ideological fight into a negotiable number

• Denmark’s top tax rate applied to American incomes — the salary threshold that ends the “just tax the rich” version of the conversation

• “Healthcare is a human right” — why agreeing is the strongest opening, the three countries that deliver universal coverage through private insurers, and the spending figures showing we’re not short on money

Read more

This video is also available on YouTube.

Jason Arday should not be dead.

He’s dead because he didn’t tell the truth.

And universities didn’t look for the truth.

And his peers didn’t ask for the truth.

Some of the attention on Jason was racist. The majority was not.

And focusing on a minority of racists to dismiss the majority of people who are rational is making us all irrational.

People avoided the truth, and it caused a tragedy.

Jason was a Cambridge University professor of sociology.

In March 2023 he was made Professor of Sociology of Education - one of the most prestigious positions in his field.

The 37-year-old was the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history.

And he had an extraordinary story.

Jason said he was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at three years old.

He said he couldn’t speak until he was 11, communicating in sign language.

He said he couldn’t read or write until he was 18.

And then he became a Cambridge professor.

Cambridge put that story in the press release announcing his appointment.

They called him “an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education.”

The story went global. BBC. CNN. The Guardian.

There was more.

Jason said he ran 600 miles in six days.

He said he raised £5.5 million for over 70 charities.

He said he held visiting professorships at Ohio State, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela University.

He said he had a book with Palgrave Macmillan.

Jason published his first peer-reviewed paper in 2018.

He became a full professor in 2021.

In three years.

The normal path takes fifteen to twenty.

And his scholarly record was thin. Around 30 published works.

It looked like a mid-career lecturer’s record, not a Cambridge chair.

Somebody noticed.

In 2023, a sociologist named Martyn Hammersley wrote to Cambridge with evidence that Jason’s work was plagiarized.

Cambridge’s integrity office wrote back and said the alleged plagiarism happened before Jason arrived, so it wasn’t their remit.

Fair enough, that is in their rulebook.

But they had the option to recommend an alternative course of action.

It looks like they didn’t.

Instead of looking into the accusations, the head of the Faculty of Education wrote that Jason had spoken movingly about his experiences of racism and about health issues.

And that he had the department’s full support.

Nobody looked.

Two years went by.

The university where Jason was a PhD student, LJMU, investigated the claim.

They acknowledged citation failures, but called them honest and reasonable errors.

They said the overlap was well within the academic standards of the time.

And they blamed his supervision.

Then, in July 2026, an academic named Nathan Cofnas published the plagiarism evidence publicly.

Cofnas is a self-described race realist. Some people consider him a racist and dismissed Nathan’s evidence on that basis.

Cambridge called the criticism from people raising concerns “a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”

A letter of solidarity with Jason got 13,000 signatures.

But now that the evidence was public, publications started to dig.

The Telegraph is considered right-leaning. The Guardian is left.

And the Guardian originally celebrated Jason’s achievement in 2023.

The Telegraph’s analysis found 188 matching sentences.

The Guardian investigated Jason’s biography and discovered:

The professorships Jason claimed to have? Fake.

The book he claimed to publish? Fake.

The charity numbers? Fake.

Ohio State, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela University all said he never held the visiting professorships.

Palgrave said they took a proposal and never published the book.

One children’s hospice said he’d raised £10,800, not millions.

After questioning, Jason’s 600 miles in six days became 600 miles in twelve days.

When the Guardian asked him about the missing evidence, Jason said:

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

Then on August 5th, Cambridge opened an investigation into his qualifications and honorary appointments.

Jason resigned hours later.

Nine days later, he was found dead in south London.

We don’t know how.

But it seems likely that he killed himself.

It seems impossible to have a rational conversation about race-based policies in education and college admissions or hiring.

So to help, here’s an analogy.

The NBA is roughly 78% black and 19% white.

But the U.S. is 13% black and 57% white.

So the NBA is not representative of the diversity of the United States. Not even close.

Now imagine the NBA looks at that data and concludes its system is broken, and must be fixed.

Imagine supporters of this decision say these gaps in racial achievement are explained by discrimination.

The NBA must be discriminating against white people.

So alongside points, assists, and rebounds, they start weighing abstract, subjective factors that are not performance-based - like lived experience and hardship.

Next year, the number of white players increases in the NBA by 50%.

The NBA immediately comes out with a statement and says “This record rise in the number of white players is a credit to their hard work and ability. We have not lowered entry standards.”

One day, a new player gets signed to the Lakers.

His name is Bob.

Bob’s white.

Bob’s STATS are mid.

Bob’s STORY is amazing.

He says he played college ball at Duke, Michigan, UConn - elite basketball schools.

He says he couldn’t even walk until 11.

He says he ran 600 miles in six days.

That he raised millions for charity.

Nobody checks - despite the fact that these are easy to check.

After all, he’s a minority, he needs protecting.

In fact, people who bring up doubts are called racist.

Now, on the court, other players notice that Bob isn’t very good.

They wonder - how did he make it to the league?

But black players don’t say anything publicly - they don’t want to be called racist.

White players don’t say anything - they don’t want to feed the racists.

Years go by.

And then another player, Nick, says Bob is lying.

Nick publishes evidence.

People say Nick is a racist.

Maybe they’re right.

But Bob is still lying.

Bob lied about his story, lied about his achievements, and lied about where he played.

The story goes viral.

Fueling that virality are 3 groups of critics.

Group A: Are actual racists who hate white people.

Group B: Is bigger. They don’t hate white people. They hate double standards. Because humans abhor an imbalance.

Group C: Is the biggest. They’re people who regularly watch basketball, who quietly suspected not all white players were the best, but didn’t have proof.

Now Bob’s defenders say all the critics are just group A - racists.

But B and C didn’t care about race.

They just care about the sport.

They just wanted to watch basketball played by the best.

Not those who are just good enough - the best.

Before the NBA said they need to be more diverse, and before the 50% increase in white players, groups B and C never doubted whether a white player was the best.

Because the NBA never gave them a reason to.

All the system selected for was performance.

But the NBA changed the system.

So fans rationally responded to the changed system.

Fans didn’t want to spend time thinking about whether a white player was the best.

They just wanted to watch the best players ball.

But now, every time they watched a game, of course they wondered if a white player was truly the best.

And now, even the white players who were there before the NBA’s racial equity initiative are getting questioned.

Because when you make race a factor in a system, people are going to wonder if race is a factor.

Even if the intentions were good.

Even if you say the bar wasn’t lowered.

Even if you’re trying to correct for the effect of past oppression.

Now - this hypothetical isn’t so hypothetical.

In 2018, Cambridge said it wanted more black students.

Their words: “committed to doing more to encourage young black students to aspire to the top grades to apply.”

And they’d just increased funding for Target Oxbridge - which Cambridge describes as “a programme which helps black students secure places.”

Within a year, black admissions jumped 50%. Cambridge credited the campaign.

And here’s Cambridge’s senior pro-vice-chancellor, Professor Graham Virgo, in 2021:

“Since the Stormzy Scholarships were announced in 2018 we have seen a significant increase in the number of Black students applying to study here and being admitted.”

Applying AND being admitted. Cambridge’s words, not mine.

And here’s what Virgo said about that 50% rise back in October 2019:

“This record rise in the number of black students is a credit to their hard work and ability. We have not lowered entry standards.”

That’s the same statement I put in the NBA story.

Because I didn’t write it. Cambridge did.

Now remember - admissions are competitive.

So if one demographic becomes more represented, another gets less represented.

But you don’t need to lower the bar for more black students to get in.

You either need a sudden influx of black students who are outperforming their peers but for some reason weren’t applying.

Which is possible.

Or, you pick black students who are underperforming their peers, but still clearing the bar.

Because meeting the bar is not the same as being the best.

Now here’s Cambridge’s own math, from Cambridge’s own website.

In 2017, Cambridge admitted 58 black students.

That was a third of all black students in the entire country who got the grades Cambridge requires.

Two years later, they admitted 91.

So where did the sudden influx come from?

Now, when you see a 50% increase in black students at Cambridge.

And endless initiatives aimed at increasing representation.

And endless slogans about diversity being a strength.

And you go from a system that had 1 priority, performance, to two priorities - that AND diversity.

Of course people are going to think that both admissions and hiring are no longer a pure meritocracy.

Of course they’re going to wonder if a black person who got in under the new system would have gotten in under the old system.

Of course there’s going to be a big reaction when one black person turns out to have told multiple major lies.

And you know who suffers?

The black people who are the best.

Not just met the bar - the best.

Because now, there’s an asterisk on their achievement.

Now, a suspicion that would have been irrational under a merit-based system, becomes rational under the new system.

And in Jason Arday’s case - black academics had private concerns about his competence.

To quote Afua Hirsch from The Guardian:

“The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted... They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.”

A valid concern.

Because when you’re in a high-profile position as a public person - you won’t be treated fairly all the time.

There are racists.

The media is biased.

People can be mean.

People have misinformation.

People have scores to settle.

And despite ALL OF THAT - WE MUST TELL THE TRUTH.

Because as much as we want to control reality by lying about it, reality cannot be controlled.

And given enough time, lies do backfire, as do double standards.

The black academics were right.

Everyone was damaged.

Not because black people can’t be the best.

But because this particular black person wasn’t the best, and he lied about it.

And he rose up in a system whose design creates reasonable doubt about whether the black people in elite positions are there because they are black, or the best.

Jason lied.

And everyone covered for him.

And in a well-intentioned attempt to protect him, and protect black people, they hurt both.

You know - I graduated from Harvard.

I’m grateful for that.

I’m also grateful for the black Americans and civil rights advocates who made that possible - because there has been genuine oppression and discrimination that they fought to overcome.

I’d also like to believe I would have been admitted under any system, merit-based, or merit plus race.

But you know what? I’ll never know.

It will always be an asterisk until proven otherwise.

I could yell at people who doubt me.

I could call them racist.

But the fact remains - in a system that makes race a factor, it’s reasonable for people to wonder when race was a factor.

And you know what - maybe you think it’s worth it.

Maybe you think we need these new race-conscious systems, to make up for old racially oppressive systems.

Perhaps that’s true.

But let’s just be honest about the downside.

Jason Arday was given a job he didn’t deserve, because he lied.

Cambridge avoided scrutinizing him, because he was black.

Cambridge attacked those who asked questions, because he was black.

Other black professors didn’t raise their private concerns publicly, because he was black.

This was all so avoidable.

Jason could have told the truth.

Jason’s employers could have looked for the truth.

Jason’s peers could have too.

And this could have all happened years ago, quietly.

Before Jason flew so close to the sun on waxen wings.

Before he fell from a height so great the crash killed him.

But for years, people decided the truth was not the most important thing.

Racial solidarity was.

They cared more about the reaction to Jason than about Jason’s actions.

Institutions tried to replace old discrimination with new double standards.

But double standards eventually collapse.

And now a troubled man is dead.

Because a life built on lies always falls apart.

A lot of Jason Arday’s defenders seem to believe that the media frenzy around Jason is because the media is racist and that this is some sort of “digital lynching.”

I see where they’re coming from.

Some of the attention on Jason is due to genuine racial animus.

When you have 9 billion people on the planet and something is a public event, you’re going to attract attention from the best elements, the worst elements, and everything in between.

But much of the attention is not about racial animus at all.

It’s animus toward a system of double standards in university hiring and admissions that people have felt afraid to speak up about.

Jason Arday, as a black professor who lied in a manner that specifically exploits that double standard, was the perfect fuel for a fire that was already simmering.

In the next section, I’m going to explain exactly why there’s so much media attention on this and a way that you can understand.

So you don’t have to settle for the claim that all the scrutiny is because of just racism.

It’s the cost of the system. It’s the logical consequence of creating double standards.

Below the paywall, five more analyses:

• The demographic gap: why unequal representation gets treated as proof of discrimination, and why the gap itself proves much less than people think

• The double standard: what happens when race becomes a criterion alongside performance, and why good intentions don’t change how it behaves

• The suspicion problem: why race-conscious standards create doubt about everyone who benefits, including the people who never needed them

• Why the reasonable go quiet: how fear of being called racist suppresses legitimate scrutiny and leaves the worst voices carrying the argument

• The pressure release: how years of silence turned one fraud story into 249 articles, and why other black academics now pay the cost

Read more

Yesterday, Luigi Mangione admitted that he shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

He killed Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024.

The following week, Emerson College ran a survey.

24% of registered voters age 18-29 said Luigi killing Brian was “somewhat acceptable,” 17% “completely acceptable.”

So 41% of people age 18-29 considered the murder at least somewhat acceptable.

This is a problem.

And it’s not helpful to simply dismiss these people as depraved.

That’s not going to change their minds.

My goal with this piece is to help you put words to exactly why this is a problem.

Because that’s our best shot at both fixing the fact that 41% of young people are sympathetic to murder, and fixing healthcare in this country.

Of Course We Need to Fix American Healthcare

The American healthcare system needs major reform.

Luigi Mangione wrote three words on the shell casings he left behind: deny, defend, depose.

Whatever you think of him, he did not invent those words.

They came from a book about how the insurance industry handles claims, and millions of Americans recognized them instantly, because they have lived them.

You pay every month for years.

Then the moment comes when you need it.

And what you meet is not a person saying no. It’s a process of endless obstacles.

A form that needs another form. A code that was entered wrong. A specialist who is out of network for a reason nobody can explain. An appeal window that closed while you were in the hospital. A phone number that puts you on hold and then disconnects you.

And eventually a lot of people just stop.

They give up.

It’s easy to see how this labyrinth gets constructed.

When a company saves money every time a customer quits, that company will never be in a hurry to make the process simpler.

Sometimes it’s by denying people coverage that they had a reasonable expectation of receiving.

Sometimes it’s by not denying coverage, but making people go through a maze to access it.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s not a necessary evil of capitalism.

Because the healthcare market does not behave like a healthy free market.

It is a market distorted by regulations that excessively favor corporations, because those corporations are influencing our politicians.

The healthcare lobby is the biggest lobby in America.

A record $868 million was spent by the healthcare industry to lobby politicians in 2025.

They aren’t lobbying to make healthcare affordable.

Or to have laws that are fair to both the companies and the customers.

These are companies acting in their self-interest - and the primary incentive of a business is to make money, just like the primary incentive of a living being is to live.

That’s not inherently a problem.

The problem is that customers’ self-interests are not getting properly represented - because the politicians who are supposed to be representing our interests are beholden to corporations.

As I’ve mentioned in prior pieces - we simply have too much money in politics.

But just like socialism is not the solution to the problems of capitalism, killing healthcare CEOs is not the solution to healthcare.

It feels emotionally validating to people who are understandably frustrated.

But it’s strategically ineffective, self-defeating, and morally confused.

Let’s address the strategic inefficacy first.

The Two Halves of the Story

If you look at the media coverage of this case, you’ll see a very clear difference between how the left and the right are framing this.

Left-wing media emphasize Luigi’s grievances and the grievances of his supporters.

Right-wing media emphasize what Luigi did, how it was pre-meditated, and condemnation of his supporters.

As you can imagine, if this is where the conversation ends we’ll have gone nowhere - the two sides are talking past one another.

That was a screenshot from the Bias Comparison feature from Ground News.

Ground News has been my favorite news source for two years now, since well before they ever sponsored me.

It aggregates reporting from thousands of sources and gives you a summary.

But its most useful function is that it helps me see exactly what the biases in reporting are, so I get a clearer picture.

Every time I check the Bias Comparison tab, I see essentially the same trend when there’s political violence.

The Left explains the emotional state and legitimate grievances of the people doing the violence.

The Right emphasizes the immorality of the violence.

The Left fails to properly explain why the violence is a problem, irrespective of legitimate grievances.

The Right fails to properly acknowledge the legitimate grievances.

I recommend you give Ground News a try so you can see this for yourself.

It has greatly enhanced my ability to see the gaps in reporting from both sides and see outside of my algorithm, which is right-leaning.

You can get 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

The Logic Chain

Calling people fanatics, depraved, or crazy doesn’t change those people’s minds.

Ad hominem - attacking the person, rather than the point - is an effective strategy for galvanizing people who agree with you, but it’s a terrible strategy for persuading those who don’t.

So I want to help you put words to what the issue is with 41% of young people thinking Luigi’s action was even somewhat acceptable.

This is a tweet from left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, made on the day Luigi Mangione publicly confessed.

I don’t know if he was commenting on Luigi. It’s reasonable to guess he was, though.

Regardless, the comment is a useful anchor for how a lot of people are thinking right now.

Note the word “kills.”

The logic chain goes something like this:

1. Healthcare is a human right.

2. When you deny someone a right, you aren’t refusing them a service. You’re taking something that was already theirs.

3. So when an insurance company denies a claim and that person dies, the company killed them.

4. Brian Thompson ran the largest health insurer in America.

5. So Brian Thompson killed people. A lot of them.

6. So killing Brian Thompson is acceptable.

The confusion arises from the first 2 links in the chain.

“Killing” vs “Saving”

That 114,000 figure is from a study. Yale School of Public Health, posted July 24 of this year. It hasn’t been peer reviewed yet.

Here’s what it says: if America switched to a single-payer system, we would save 114,174 lives a year.

Save.

The tweet says “kills.”

The study is measuring lives a different system would save.

The tweet is describing the system as killing people.

Those are not the same claim.

The first positions a person, system, or company as not saving the people that it can.

The second positions them as a murderer.

And in most societies, murderers get the death penalty.

This is a crucially important point, because it determines whether you view a healthcare CEO as a mass murderer who got the death penalty, or the leader of a business that could be saving more lives if it focused less on profits, but isn’t.

You can think both are bad, but they are distinctly different moral categories of bad.

To make this intuitively obvious - I’m sure you’ve all seen ads that say something like “You can save an African child from starving for just $3 a day.”

That is different from saying “If you do not give a starving African child $3, you will kill them.”

But equating the healthcare industry or its leadership with killing people is the exact kind of category error that causes 41% of young people to think that a young man shooting another man with a gun is acceptable.

Words have precise definitions.

Definitions determine decisions - like the decision to murder someone versus condemn them.

This is not a semantic quibble.

It’s a fundamental point, and the stakes of getting the semantics wrong are life and death.

So in Brian Thompson’s case, what could someone reasonably call a moral failing?

Brian was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

In 2023, UnitedHealth denied 33% of in-network claims on the ACA marketplace, against a market average of 19%.

A federal watchdog report this June found UnitedHealthcare denied 66% of inpatient rehab requests.

Sixteen other Medicare Advantage insurers denied 41%.

That’s a company denying care at higher rates than its competitors.

There’s a good case to be made that even in a bad healthcare system, UnitedHealthcare was particularly bad.

Now - in a world with better healthcare industry regulation, less healthcare lobbyist influence over our politicians, and the proper balance of customer vs company incentives - would UnitedHealthcare have provided coverage to more people?

Yes.

In that world, would fewer people be dead?

Yes.

Does that make Brian a murderer?

No.

Does that mean Brian deserved to be murdered?

No.

Why Political Violence Is Never Acceptable

Hopefully that helped you put words to the moral confusion gripping the 41% of young people who think Luigi Mangione’s action was even somewhat acceptable.

But there’s a deeper, and even more important reason why it was completely unacceptable.

Political violence is violence used to accomplish some political goal.

Luigi murdered Brian to make a point about healthcare. So it’s political violence.

Some people may legitimately think Brian Thompson was an evil person by virtue of his position as UnitedHealthcare CEO.

So this section is addressed to them.

Maybe you think Brian got what was coming to him.

Maybe you think that this is what needs to be done for change.

I won’t tell you to feel sad.

But I do want to show you where this is headed.

Because when Luigi squeezed the trigger, he didn’t just shoot at Brian.

He shot at all of us.

Political violence is on the rise, against political and business leaders.

Melissa Hortman. Paul Pelosi. Josh Shapiro. Donald Trump. Charlie Kirk. An arson attack at Sam Altman’s home.

In every single one of these cases, there was someone absolutely convinced they were doing the right thing.

Someone who found a way to justify physical violence.

Someone who said “what about what he did?”

They didn’t just think they were right, they were so convinced in their moral authority that they acted as judge, jury, and executioner.

Our opinions are abstract.

But physical violence is concrete.

It’s understandable that you’re frustrated with the American healthcare system.

It can and should be a lot better.

But amidst your critiques, do not forget this.

Nature is governed by violence.

For most of human history, disputes were settled by violence.

Before civilization, in some places 50% of people were murdered.

Half the people would kill the other half.

That’s why we gave governments - not individuals - the right to use force.

But sometimes as individuals, we find an individual so repulsive we are convinced it’s okay, just this one time.

“I don’t condone violence…but” the statement begins.

That “but” is a dark whisper.

There should be no “but.”

Everything after “but” is permission for the next bullet.

Any political killing should be considered the highest threat.

But we’ve become desensitized to violence.

We think it’s just pixels on a screen.

We think it will go as far as we want, but no further.

So we judge people we don’t know.

Our tribe becomes the jury.

And we applaud the executioner.

But here’s the thing.

It’s never just one bullet.

The gun that is aimed at your enemy today gets aimed at you tomorrow.

Today, the bullet might be aimed at a leader you hate.

Tomorrow, it might be aimed at someone you love.

Next week, it could be you.

Suddenly, the cheers around you now become the silence around your own grave.

This is why we must condemn everything that comes after the “but.”

Even if it comes from our own side.

Yet, we’ve become arrogant.

Certain we know the whole truth.

That all the angels are in our tribe, all the demons in theirs.

We are obese with knowledge, but starved for wisdom.

We think we see the world as it is - when in fact we see the world as we are.

The message that was sent by Luigi was clear - I am above civilization.

I know what’s right and wrong.

I get to express my grievances with bullets.

This wasn’t just an assassination.

It was an attack on civilization.

Our nation is held together by a thread, and that thread is fraying.

Social fabric is tearing, and we must unite to weave it anew.

We need humility.

We need to attack ideas with words, not people with bullets.

So we all have a choice to make.

We can choose to heal.

Or we can choose an eye for an eye.

Until we are blind and cannot see.

When the next bullet is aimed at you.

Or, it could be me.

Destructive vs Constructive Anger

People are understandably angry about healthcare in this country.

The question is not the validity of the emotion, but the efficacy of the solution.

When confronted with the challenges of life, we are perpetually faced with two choices - to be constructive or destructive.

Luigi chose destruction. Not just of Brian’s life, but his own.

But there is a constructive path ahead.

And we need to be aware of it, lest it become the road less taken.

So let’s talk rationally about what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Below the paywall, five more analyses:

• The 41% — who they actually are, what the polling says about the age split, and why the number is a warning rather than a verdict

• What Brian Thompson actually controlled — the decisions a CEO makes versus the ones written into statute, and why the distinction is the entire argument

• The denial-rate numbers everyone cites — where they come from, what they do and don’t prove, and how to use them without overstating them

• Why the killing set the cause back — the specific reforms that lost momentum in the weeks after, and who benefited from the shift in attention

• The four-second conversation — what to say when someone in your family posts the meme, and the opening line that keeps the exchange alive

Read more

This letter is part of my ongoing series on socialism and capitalism. The last entry: South America Just Rejected the Ideology Mamdani Is Selling. So Why Is North America Buying It?

A few days ago I made a video about the fact that most Americans don’t know what socialism is.

This was one of the top comments.

Man. What are we teaching people in schools?

The comment is right about the 900 million people being lifted out of poverty.

And wrong about everything else.

This letter is about that comment.

Because it shows the biggest problem with the discourse around socialism.

We have a massive education problem in America, and it has left us vulnerable to bad ideas.

It’s virulent in both lower and higher education.

It’s showing up in the belief that socialism is universal healthcare - which is false.

That it’s what Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have - false again.

Socialism is defined by one primary economic feature - a collective (e.g. the government) owning the means of production - aka the farms, factories, and companies.

Americans are confused on this point.

According to a Gallup poll from 2018, only 17% of Americans were able to identify socialism as defined by government ownership or control of the economy.

And that confusion is making socialism appeal to those who never lived it.

While people in countries who have lived under socialism are rejecting it.

Before talking about the larger problem, let’s correct the comment.

Because the mistake inside it is the same mistake driving socialism’s rise in America right now.

China is not socialist.

China is not a socialist country.

China is not a communist country.

It’s understandable why people think that it is.

After all, China’s ruling political party brands itself the “Chinese Communist Party.”

And the Party’s official doctrine is “socialism with Chinese characteristics” - a phrase Deng coined in 1982 that Xi still repeats today.

But the condition for whether a country’s system is socialist is not what its leadership self-identifies as.

It’s what the leadership actually does.

Socialism always requires that a collective - usually the government - own the means of production.

This is a necessary condition.

If that condition is not met, the country is not socialist.

Private firms contribute approximately 60% of China’s GDP, 70% of its innovative capacity, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs.

That’s according to China’s own business federation - All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.

The confusion on this point likely arises from 3 sources:

1. China’s ruling political party calls itself the Chinese Communist Party

2. China is less capitalistic than America, in the sense that more of America’s GDP comes from the private sector

3. China has an authoritarian political system, not a democracy - and people are equating authoritarian with socialist.

But intuitively, it’s understandable why calling America and China capitalist in the same breath feels incomplete.

Surely the people who think China is socialist or communist aren’t completely wrong.

Surely there’s a term that expresses the legitimate differences between America’s economic system and China’s?

There is. That term is “state capitalism.”

Cambridge University Press published a full volume titled The State and Capitalism in China in 2023.

Branko Milanovic, the former lead economist at the World Bank, wrote an entire book for Harvard University Press called Capitalism, Alone. His thesis is that capitalism is now the only economic system on earth, and that it comes in two varieties: the liberal capitalism of the West, and the political capitalism of China.

The Economist ran a special issue on state capitalism in 2012, focused on China.

The term is well-established in the literature.

There is some debate regarding the term.

“State capitalism” is a standard academic term but not universally agreed upon.

Some economists argue the category is incoherent and China is simply a mixed economy.

What is overwhelmingly agreed is the underlying fact: private firms drive the economy.

Whatever you want to call that, it isn’t socialism. Because socialism means the public owns production - and in China, it doesn’t.

A quick note on terminology, because I’ll use both words.

In Marxist theory, socialism and communism are closely related. Socialism is the stage where the state owns production. Communism is the theoretical endpoint - stateless, classless. No country has ever made it to full communism.

Communists often use socialism as a transitional state to communism. Not all socialists are necessarily communists, but all communists utilize socialism.

So communist parties governed socialist economies.

That’s why the Soviet Union was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics while being run by the Communist Party.

The party name described the destination.

The country name described the system actually in place.

Mao’s China was the same. Communist Party, socialist economy.

But China WAS Socialist. And It Was A Disaster.

For about thirty years. 1949 to 1978.

Do you want to know what happened during the years China was actually socialist?

That’s the death rate in China through the middle of the 20th century.

You see that spike?

That was the Great Leap Forward. 1958 to 1962.

In 1958, China adopted a policy called the Great Leap Forward, under Communist dictator Mao Zedong.

During the Great Leap Forward, the government collectivized farms and abolished private farming. Pulled farmers off the land to make steel in their backyards.

AKA, seized the means of production.

Grain production collapsed.

And peasants were forbidden from leaving their villages to find food.

Around 20 to 30 million people starved to death. Some estimates go as high as 55 million.

The national death rate more than doubled, from 10.8 per thousand to 25.4.

By the end of 1960, China’s population was 10 million lower than the year before.

That’s the most populous country on Earth shrinking.

In peacetime.

Because of policy.

China’s own statistics bureau confirms it. When the population declined again in 2022, it was reported everywhere as the first drop since 1961.

The Failed Experiment Was Run Twice.

The Great Leap Forward was abandoned in 1962.

Private farming came back and output began recovering almost immediately.

Then Mao reversed it.

In 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, purging the officials he called “capitalist roaders” - the ones who had allowed those small market reforms.

Universities closed.

The economy stagnated for a decade.

So what is it that turned China from a place where tens of millions of people starved and languished in poverty?

Capitalism.

Socialism Crushed China. Capitalism Saved It.

Mao died in 1976.

Two years later, Deng Xiaoping took power.

And Deng did a bunch of capitalist things.

He broke up the collective farms.

Every family got its own plot.

Grow a quota for the state, keep the rest, sell it for profit.

AKA - private property.

He legalized private business.

In 1978, having a private company in China was a crime.

Today, China has more than 50 million of them.

He opened the country to foreign investment.

Coca-Cola came back in 1979. Boeing and Volkswagen followed.

And he created Special Economic Zones - cities where market rules applied.

The first was Shenzhen, a fishing town of about 30,000 people.

Today Shenzhen has 17 million people and makes your iPhone.

Deng summed up his whole philosophy in one line: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

Translation: I don’t care about ideology. I care about what works.

He wasn’t committed to communism, socialism or capitalism.

But it just so happens that the reforms he made were what we’d call capitalism.

And it worked.

In 1981, 88% of China lived in extreme poverty.

By 2015: 0.7%.

By 2019: 0.2%.

That’s roughly 800 million people out of poverty.

The largest and fastest escape from poverty in human history.

Now, did the socialist era leave anything useful behind?

Yes. Literacy improved. So did basic rural health.

But those things existed in 1978 too - when 88% of the country was still in extreme poverty.

The decisive change was the move toward capitalism.

The poverty didn’t end while the state owned the farms and the factories.

It ended when families, entrepreneurs, and businesses got to own things again - and keep what they produced.

Socialism starved China.

Capitalism fed it.

The Strongest Counterarguments

Two objections worth taking seriously.

Objection one: “China’s state sector is growing.”

True.

State-owned enterprises went from about 10% of GDP in the mid-1990s to roughly a quarter today.

That’s significant.

And it’s a quarter. The other three quarters is private industry competing in markets.

Now, this is a good place to be honest about something.

No country is 100% anything.

America isn’t 100% capitalist - our government produces about 12% of GDP.

China isn’t 100% capitalist either - its state produces about 25%.

Capitalism and socialism describe what characterizes an economy - who owns most of the means of production.

Draw the dividing line at 50% if that makes you feel better.

China sits at roughly 25% state ownership.

There is no world in which China is socialist.

You could argue that China is now driving in a more socialist direction - and we’ll see how that fares in the coming decades.

But that’s a different claim than saying China is a successful example of socialism.

Objection two: “America has gone too far toward capitalism.”

Now this is a conversation worth having.

I don’t think the issue is that we’re “too capitalist.”

Again - definitions determine decisions.

Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production.

Not billionaires and corporations having too much influence over politics.

Not unaffordable housing.

Not unaffordable healthcare.

I agree that all of those are issues.

But they are not a problem of “too much capitalism”.

We don’t need to be “less capitalistic” - that would mean nationalizing industries and putting them under government ownership.

Our problem is that the regulations are designed to help companies - because companies are lobbying the Congresspeople who write them, and paying for their political campaigns.

They are issues of bad incentives, bad regulations, and bad influences on our politicians.

The solution to that is not companies, farms and factories being owned by the government.

The solution is to return to the Founding Fathers’ vision - a country that is regulated by laws that represent the people instead of the corporations.

Regulating a company and owning a company are two different things.

The first is about fixing our politics.

The second is socialism.

And that experiment has been run.

Tens of millions of people paid for the results.

Quick note before we go further.

Notice what I just did in that section. I gave the other side their strongest argument before I answered it.

That’s called steelmanning.

Steelmanning does more than just make my arguments better.

It also makes people more open to listening to my arguments because it shows that I understand what they think and that I’m taking them seriously.

This is a conversational technique that, when mastered, will completely transform how you converse with others.

Not just about politics, but about any topic.

You’ll become better at changing both minds and hearts - and that’s the key to having these conversations without losing loved ones.

It’s easy to understand conceptually.

It’s hard to do when you’re discussing socialism with your son and he just won’t listen to you.

That’s what Clear Thinker Academy exists to fix.

It’s a dojo for having rational conversations about difficult topics, without losing relationships.

You get live practice sessions with me, plus a course on seeing through the bias in mainstream and social media.

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Words Have Precise Definitions, And Precision Matters.

Socialism always requires collective or government ownership of the means of production - the farms, the factories, the companies that make things.

That is the necessary condition. Not high taxes. Not a big welfare state. Not universal healthcare.

If that condition is not met, the country is not socialist.

Socialism is not healthcare for all.

It’s not affordable housing.

It’s not a synonym for “all the things I want but am not getting in my capitalist country.”

It’s not a “vibe.”

It’s about collective or government ownership of the means of production.

But people believing it means all those other things is exactly why it’s winning.

62% of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism.

66% of Democrats view it positively.

And among Americans aged 18 to 34, socialism now polls better than capitalism - 49% to 43%.

China is not socialist.

The Nordic countries are not socialist.

And the belief that these countries are socialist is a large part of what is making socialism appealing.

Which brings me to the real problem - the one underneath the comment sections.

The voters are confused about what socialism is.

The socialists are not.

In the second half of this letter, I’ll show you Zohran Mamdani defining socialism two different ways.

One version when he’s talking to the general public.

One version when he’s talking to other socialists.

They are not the same.

And there’s a name for that rhetorical tactic. I’ll teach it to you, so you can spot it every time someone runs it on you.

Plus: why this confusion is a threat no military can defend against, why democracies are uniquely exposed to it, and what we actually do about it.

Below the paywall, five more analyses:

• The three-sentence definition of socialism that ends the Denmark argument — and why Danish officials keep saying it themselves

• What actually pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty — the year the policy changed, what replaced it, and why the timeline is the whole argument

• Motte and Bailey in the wild — how to catch the swap in real time, and the exact phrases that signal it’s happening

• The response to “that wasn’t real socialism” — what to concede, what not to, and where the conversation actually turns

• Why the failures weren’t accidents — the mechanism that produces the same outcome in Venezuela, Cuba, and the USSR regardless of who’s running it

Read more

You can check out Clear Thinker Academy here.

I’ve been in Colombia for the last three months.

Yesterday, right-wing Abelardo de la Espriella, aka “The Tiger,” was sworn into office, succeeding left-wing self-proclaimed socialist Gustavo Petro.

Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador — all of these Latin American countries had explicitly socialist, far-left, or Marxist governments that they rejected within the last three years:

Bolivia. Last October, voters ended two decades of rule by a party named the Movement Toward Socialism.

Chile. In December, voters chose José Antonio Kast over a Communist Party candidate.

Honduras. In November, they voted out the democratic socialist party of President Xiomara Castro.

Ecuador. Rejected the heirs of Rafael Correa’s socialist project for the second time in two years.

El Salvador. In 2024, the party of former Marxist guerrillas that governed for a decade — during which the country became the murder capital of the world — was wiped from the legislature entirely. Zero seats.

Peru. Two weeks ago, Keiko Fujimori was sworn in after defeating a leftist who served in the cabinet of Pedro Castillo, the Marxist president Peruvians impeached and imprisoned.

Argentina. The left-wing governments that ran the country for most of two decades nationalized the oil company, the airline, and private pension funds. Inflation passed 200%. In 2023 voters elected Javier Milei, who campaigned on reversing all of that.

Applying the socialist label can be tricky, because it’s an abstract ideology.

Some will argue that a few of the examples I gave aren’t socialism.

They’re right — about the labels.

These movements went by different names.

Some called themselves socialists.

Some were Marxists who never used the word.

Some skipped labels entirely and just governed the same way — nationalizing industries, centralizing control.

Different branding. Same ideology: state control over the market, and wealth as something to seize and redistribute rather than create.

That’s what I mean by “socialism” in this letter.

That’s the worldview that the leaders of all of these countries had.

And it’s what voters rejected.

It’s an abstract ideology, with some variation.

I’ll get more into what socialism technically is later to make things concrete.

But what wasn’t abstract were the results these administrations produced: increased crime, gang violence, unchecked immigration, economic problems.

What wasn’t abstract was the experience of voters who had to live with the actual results of abstract theories — and rejected them.

Meanwhile, in America — the country people fleeing socialism risk everything to reach — socialism is growing in popularity.

66% of Democrats now view socialism positively.

62% of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism.

South America is moving away from socialism, after having tried it.

North America is moving toward socialism, having never tried it.

We shouldn’t have to learn this lesson the hard way.

In my first month in Colombia, on my way back from Spanish class, I met a man who explains all of this better than any thinkpiece could — a deported Venezuelan who called Trump the modern-day Hitler.

But then thanked him in the same conversation.

More on that later.

Americans Don’t Know What Socialism Actually Is

The problem with discussing socialism is that often when it’s discussed, we’re not all talking about the same thing.

Many of the Americans excited by socialism think it’s defined by universal healthcare, affordable housing, free childcare.

That is incorrect.

Many Americans also think socialism is what Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) do.

That is also incorrect.

In the words of Denmark’s own prime minister, from a talk he gave at Harvard in 2015: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

AKA — capitalist.

The confusion is measurable.

According to Gallup polling: in 1949, 34% of Americans defined socialism as government ownership or control of the economy, and only 2% said “benefits and services.”

The 34% were correct.

By 2018, government ownership had fallen to 17% while “equality” had climbed to 23% — the single most common answer.

The word has drifted from being understood correctly as a description of how an economy operates, to a vibe about fairness.

So let’s restore the definition, because clear thinking requires clear definitions.

Socialism is defined by one thing: who owns the means of production.

The “means of production” are the infrastructure used to produce goods and services — factories, land, firms, capital. Whoever owns them captures the wealth they generate.

Under capitalism, private individuals own the means of production and keep the profits.

Under socialism, that ownership is through collectives, or the government.

In practice, it’s almost always the government.

That’s the dividing line. Not tax rates. Not government benefits. Not wealth inequality. Not social justice.

You can have a capitalist system with high taxes, high government benefits, and low wealth inequality — that’s what Scandinavian countries are.

You can also have a capitalist system with low taxes, low government benefits, and high wealth inequality — like Singapore.

Or you can have America — which is in between.

And there are socialist countries where the state controls the money, benefits are generous on paper, and inequality is low. Venezuela. Cuba.

Countries where the taxes are high, but the money doesn’t actually help people.

Countries where government benefits are high on paper, but low quality in reality.

Countries where there’s low wealth inequality — because everyone is poor.

Fortunately for the Latin American countries that recently rejected socialism, they cut the socialism experiment short before it wrecked them.

Some countries, like Venezuela, weren’t so fortunate.

The Venezuelan Who Called Trump Hitler — and Thanked Him

While in Medellín, I met a man who was born in Venezuela and brought to America by his parents when he was a boy.

He lived in America for 34 years.

He was deported by ICE and is now homeless on the streets of Medellín.

He asked me for money, so I gave him some.

We had a conversation about his experiences.

He described Donald Trump as the modern-day Adolf Hitler.

Now you might wonder — why is a Venezuelan-born man who was deported from America living in Colombia? Why not go back to Venezuela?

Because Venezuela has been ruined by socialists.

How bad must the effect of socialism be for a man who literally thinks Trump is the new Hitler to be grateful to him for invading his country of birth and removing its leader?

I’ve heard this story over and over from the many Venezuelans I’ve met here.

Because it turns out that there are many Venezuelans in Colombia.

Because they left Venezuela.

Because of socialism.

Venezuela, which used to be a thriving society — with a capitalist system, oil wealth, and a well-educated population — is just one of the many countries that fell victim to the false promises of socialism.

And in doing so, it’s impacted other countries too.

Like Colombia, which has a large population of Venezuelans looking for a better life, and now has to deal with the challenges of integrating a large foreign population fleeing socialism.

While Colombia itself suffers from the effects of guerrilla violence, which increased under Petro.

Most Americans, especially those under 30, aren’t well-educated on the actual impact of socialism in history or modernity.

I’ve had multiple Venezuelans tell me in frustration that they see Americans who don’t know anything about Venezuela standing and protesting Trump’s arrest of Maduro, while those who actually lived under Maduro are thrilled to see him go.

Venezuela followed a familiar pattern:

1. Socialists and Marxists promise people abundant free services and equity, and get in power.

2. They redistribute wealth — through taxes, seizures, and state revenues.

3. They replace private industry with government control.

4. Initially, things seem to be going well.

5. Over time, less wealth is created, because private industry is always better than government at creating wealth.

6. Over time, the public sector goes from being controlled by the people to being controlled by the bureaucrats.

7. Bureaucrats continue to seize control, because the people don’t have economic leverage (the wealth has been seized) and don’t have physical leverage (they don’t have weapons).

8. Removal of the bureaucrats becomes impossible without force — which the people no longer have.

At least everyone is equal now — equally poor.

Socialism hasn’t just “not been done right.”

It almost certainly can’t work, because it destroys the source of wealth it seeks to redistribute.

I say “almost” because there’s a nonzero chance technology someday makes massive, efficient government possible.

Unless today’s socialists have a secret AI model that can do this — that day is not today.

“But That’s Not Real Socialism”

Most of these countries never completed the conversion to socialism.

That doesn’t mean socialism wasn’t tried. An ideology is tried whenever the people who hold it get power — and it’s judged by what they do with it.

Petro said it plainly in 2025: “I am a socialist.” He never made Colombia socialist. His worldview still ran the country for four years.

Mamdani is running New York right now. If the city declines under him, “but New York never became fully socialist” will not be a defense of socialism. A socialist with power, governing from a socialist worldview — that is socialism being tried, whether or not the conversion completes.

That’s what happened across Latin America.

Voters didn’t reject an abstract ideology.

They rejected its concrete results.

And the deeper the conversion went, the worse it got — Venezuela went furthest and fell hardest.

“It just needed more time” is not the lesson.

The reverse objection comes from the other direction: “Norway’s government owns oil companies, so Norway is socialist.”

No. Socialism is when public ownership is the rule. A few state-owned companies are the exception that proves the rule — Alaska has oil revenue too.

How to Talk Someone Out of Socialism Without Losing Them

I’m writing a lot about socialism because I think it’s a bad idea.

That said, simply calling something a bad idea doesn’t change people’s minds.

Many of you have friends or family who find socialism appealing.

Here are some concrete instructions to help you in those conversations.

First. Never argue against socialism in the abstract. You’ll both lose. Do this instead.

Step one: ask them to define it. “When you say socialism, what do you mean by that?” Nine times out of ten you’ll hear: healthcare people can afford, housing people can afford, childcare, education.

Step two: agree with the goals. Sincerely — assuming you share them, and I do. “I want people to have healthcare and housing they can afford too.” You’ve just converted a duel into a collaboration. Most political conversations die before this sentence gets said.

Step three: offer the actual definition. “Can I share what socialism technically means? It’s about who owns the farms, factories, grocery stores, and companies that produce everything. Socialism moves that ownership from entrepreneurs and businesses to centralized control — usually the government. The question it answers is who owns production, rather than which services people receive.”

Step four (if they bring up Scandinavia): “The countries you’re pointing to are market economies with strong safety nets — funded by taxing private wealth creation. Their own leaders insist on this. So what you might want is better capitalism — and that, we can build.”

Step five: only now, the evidence. Venezuela, where socialism went all the way. A continent’s rejections everywhere it went partway. Presented as data to consider, rather than as a gotcha.

We practice conversational strategies like this in Clear Thinker Academy, and help people be honest without losing relationships.

If you’d rather train these skills than just read about them, that’s what the Academy is for: clearthinkeracademy.com

The Fix: Revert to the Previous Working Version of Capitalism

The worst way to fight socialism is to defend the current version of capitalism. The current version is the recruiting poster for socialism.

What we’re running now is captured capitalism.

Since Citizens United, outside political spending exploded from $574 million in 2008 to $4.5 billion in 2024.

A single billionaire matched the combined donations of three million small donors.

Corporations shipped labor abroad, institutional investors outbid families for starter homes, and the rules are increasingly written by the industries they’re supposed to govern.

Young people conclude the game is rigged because, in the ways that touch their lives most, it is.

Socialism’s appeal is a symptom. Captured capitalism is the disease.

And the cure isn’t even theoretical.

We can start by just reverting to the previous working version of capitalism.

In 1996, socialism had no constituency in this country.

Because capitalism was delivering: rising wages, attainable homes, a middle class that could plan a future.

That system — markets that compete, a government that isn’t totally for sale — was the last working version, and restoring it is a repair job: through campaign finance reform and smarter laws so more housing can be built.

The way to beat socialism is to give people a capitalism worth keeping.

Know a Tree by Its Fruits

You don’t need history books to evaluate socialism anymore.

You don’t even need a passport.

You can go look at the results in the present day — or talk to the people in America who escaped them.

The evidence is alive, it speaks Spanish, and for three years it has been voting — in country after country — against socialism.

An entire continent tried this worldview at every level of intensity and is climbing out of the hole.

America needn’t stand at the edge of that hole, asking what would happen if we jumped in too.

Below the paywall, four more analyses:

• A Latin American socialist associated his opponent with “Hitler” — sound familiar?

• The socialist playbook — the same tactics, in every country, and the tells to watch for as they arrive here

• The strategic errors the right is making in response — and why they’re handing socialists easy wins

• And the USAID question: was this socialist control paid for with U.S. money?

The Socialists Use the Same Tactics Everywhere

Read more

Last week, between Wednesday and Friday, somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people forced their way into Ceuta — Spain’s territory on the North African coast, bordered by Morocco.

Ceuta has 84,000 residents.

Proportionally, that’s like 240 million people entering the United States. In three days.

They came around the border fence, swimming past the breakwater in wetsuits and on inflatables.

It was the largest mass crossing in the territory’s history, and the largest single surge of irregular arrivals ever recorded on EU soil.

At least 72 people died trying.

And within days, it was essentially over.

Spain deployed the military, installed a floating barrier, and returned almost everyone to Morocco — some expelled under a 1992 agreement between the two countries, and many walking back on their own once they discovered there was no food, no shelter, and no future waiting for them.

By Saturday, Spain’s interior minister said the situation was practically back to normal.

By next month, the invasion itself will be a footnote. The feed will have moved on, and this crisis will just be another news cycle that came and went.

So why write about it?

Because I’m not writing about what happened at Ceuta.

I’m writing about what Ceuta surfaced: the quality of thinking about immigration in the West is abysmal.

Not just the quality of the policies — the thinking.

And I can tell you exactly how it got this bad.

For a decade, the West ran a censorship regime on this topic.

Not just through laws — through social annihilation.

Say you want to be selective about who enters your country — racist.

Say you care whether newcomers share your values — xenophobe.

Suggest there should be a limit, any limit at all — far-right.

Is racism real? Of course.

And the racism of a few has been used to shut down the concerns of the many.

Because the accusations didn’t eliminate racism.

They eliminated honesty.

And when honest conversation ceases, two things replace it:

1. The first is avoidance presented as complexity: “Well, it’s complicated. There are systemic factors.”

2. The second is shutdown: “We’re not having this discussion because you are a bad person, or have bad intentions, or lack empathy.”

A decade of that, and the West has forgotten how to talk about immigration at all.

A fundamentally simple question — who should enter your country, and on what terms — became untouchable.

And as we all know from our personal lives — when you avoid problems, they compound.

That’s why immigration is now a legitimate problem in America.

And a full-blown crisis in Europe.

So this essay uses Ceuta as an anchor for the conversation we need to have.

Immigration is one of the simpler policy questions a country faces.

We already know the right answer.

We practice it every day at our own front doors.

We just need permission to say it out loud, and the skill to speak about it gracefully.

Humans Are Hardware. Culture Is Software.

Permission is one thing. You also need a way to actually have the conversation.

When a censorship regime punishes everyone who raises a concern, the only people left willing to talk are the ones with nothing to lose: the angriest, the most resentful, and sometimes the outright racist.

The unreasonable, extreme minority of voices become the mascots for the reasonable, moderate majority.

Because the reasonable, moderate majority decides to stay quiet — both for fear of being canceled, and for fear of being associated with extreme voices.

But extreme voices dominating a conversation doesn’t mean no honest, reasonable, compassionate version of it exists.

There is a way to talk about immigration that never demonizes an individual and is still honest about demographics and compatibility.

Here’s the framework, from the full piece I published last week:

Humans are hardware. Our biology. There are variations between individuals, but they are relatively small. Fundamentally we’re all running the same machine. Nobody is a better or worse human by birth.

Culture is software. The beliefs, norms, and behavioral expectations a population runs on. And software varies far more than hardware.

Some software is highly compatible. Like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

Some has major compatibility issues — try getting Adobe Photoshop and Excel to work together.

That’s not a judgment about which system is “better.”

It’s a statement about integration: try to get two programs with low compatibility to work together without doing the integration work, and you get crashes, no matter how good each program is on its own.

Why does this matter? Because right now, an honest conversation about immigration requires an hour of preamble. You have to:

1. Prove you’re not a racist

2. Prove you’re empathetic

3. Prove you care about the less fortunate

Checkpoint after checkpoint, always on the defensive — before you’re permitted to say anything true.

The hardware vs software framework ends the preamble.

It’s not about anyone being a better or worse person — same hardware.

It’s about software being more or less compatible, and how much unintegrated software a system can absorb at once.

Say it that way, and you can be honest while being tactful.

Knowing the framework isn’t the hard part. Using it in front of your sister-in-law is.

The social risk is high.

People are losing friendships over this.

Losing family.

Watching their own kids look at them like they’ve become something ugly.

So they go quiet — and we end up with the two worst possible extremes at once: in real life, nobody says anything true, and online, everybody says it in the worst possible way.

That’s what Clear Thinker Academy exists to fix.

It’s not just about thinking clearly on these topics. It’s about communicating calmly and clearly under pressure — saying what you actually believe, honestly and without cruelty, without torching the relationships that matter to you.

Join Clear Thinker Academy

Now let’s apply the framework to Ceuta.

The Filter

Reuters interviewed one of the men who made it in — a young Moroccan who climbed a wall, crossed the sand, and swam 200 meters around the border.

He has fundamentally the same hardware as you and me, and is responding to the incentives in front of him.

If he manages to break into Ceuta and stay there, he stands to gain:

1. Food, housing, and support paid for by Spanish citizens

2. Easier access to the rest of Spain and Europe

3. Asylum status

4. Eventually, full legal residency — as Spain demonstrated in January, when it launched an amnesty that drew over a million applications

Given the same situation, we’d probably take those odds too.

Because wanting a better life is universal.

It’s the same thing wanted by the millions of people waiting in line every year to enter Western countries legally.

So if everyone has the same desire, but a country can’t absorb infinite people — how should that country decide who gets in?

By assessing whether the applicant is a net positive for the current inhabitants.

Imagine you’re designing the perfect legal immigration system from scratch.

You get to choose who enters your country.

Would you choose the people whose first act on your soil is breaking your law?

Would you choose based on who can climb a fence or outswim a coast guard?

Would you choose a crowd that is, by every image and account, overwhelmingly young men — no families, no vetting, no paperwork, no idea who anyone is?

Of course not. Nobody would.

Open borders, or policies that indiscriminately admit people based on specious asylum claims, select for exactly the traits no sane country selects for, and filter out exactly the people every sane country wants — the patient, the qualified, the ones respecting your rules from day one.

Last week I argued that immigration policy should screen for four things:

Similarity. How close is the incoming culture to the host culture — language, religion, shared history?

Screening. Who arrives, and how carefully are they chosen? Their skills, their reasons for leaving, and whether anyone checked for fit at all.

Concentration. Where do they settle — dispersed through the society, or packed into parallel enclaves?

Pace. How fast is the change happening, relative to the society’s capacity to absorb it?

The Ceuta invasion obviously fails all four, visibly.

But Western immigration policy has been failing all four, invisibly, for years.

We’ve been merging code without checking for compatibility.

It’s About More Than Just Crime

Now, the argument everyone fixates on: crime.

The left has a favorite statistic here: in America, illegal immigrants — largely from Central and South America — commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born.

It’s true.

It’s also not the point.

Crime is one item on a long list. Introducing a new population without the consent of the governed erodes trust, creates compatibility issues, and breeds resentment between groups.

Fixate on the crime rate and you’ve agreed to argue a narrow part of the problem.

But fine — say crime is the only thing that matters.

Even then, the crime rate isn’t the only thing that matters.

Admit a million people illegally, and if 10,000 of them commit crimes, that’s 10,000 crimes that would not have happened.

The issue is not that the illegal immigrant population is more crime-prone than the native population — it’s that they were never supposed to be admitted in the first place.

They were admitted through an illegal process without the consent of the governed.

Every one of those victims is the cost of a process that got skipped.

A low crime rate doesn’t undo that.

And an influx of illegal immigrants who aren’t crime-prone in one place doesn’t tell you anything about the next one.

Because when you let people in unchecked, you don’t know what you’re getting. You get whoever shows up. It’s roulette.

Maybe you draw a population that commits less crime than your natives.

America largely did, with Latin America.

Maybe you draw one that commits more crime.

France did — and I spent last week’s essay documenting the results.

Maybe you draw tens of thousands of military-age men with no records, no families, and nothing to lose.

Maybe you draw the guy who chases a reporter down the street with a knife.

Obviously, not all immigrants are the same.

Many are just responding rationally to irrational incentives set by Western governments.

Many are hardworking and not seeking welfare payments.

Some will even provide more economic value than natives.

Without rigorous vetting, you don’t get to choose which ones you get.

You’ve handed the decision to chance.

It’s like leaving the front door to your home open.

Maybe the person who walks in becomes your best friend.

Maybe they clean your apartment and leave.

Maybe they trash the place and take the valuables.

Maybe they refuse to leave and demand you fund their life — they’re just trying to have a better life, after all.

Maybe they start imposing their house rules instead of honoring yours.

You don’t know. That’s the problem.

Not that every stranger is dangerous — but an open door means you find out after they’re inside.

Which is why nobody runs their home this way.

You don’t let someone in just because they want in.

You assess whether they’re safe.

You assess what value they’re bringing.

You assess whether they’ll respect the place.

Every person on earth practices this at their own front door.

And we should be doing it at the doors to our civilizations.

The Invitation

Now the question the coverage keeps dancing around: why did 60,000 people decide, in the same week, that the invasion would work?

Definitely because Spain created the incentive structure. Possibly because Morocco’s government exploited it.

Incentive one: the court ruling. On July 8, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted at sea cannot be summarily returned.

The ruling doesn’t apply to land entries — but that nuance was lost.

Spain’s interior minister says trafficking networks spread misleading interpretations of the ruling to vulnerable people: the door is open—go now. Seventy-two people died — at least some of them acting on legal advice from criminals exploiting illegal immigrants.

Incentive two: the amnesty. In January, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez launched a mass regularization program for migrants living in Spain illegally.

More than a million people applied.

When a country periodically converts illegal presence into legal status, illegal entry becomes a way of entering a waiting room for legal status.

Amnesty becomes an advertisement.

Incentive three: Morocco. Ceuta has been Spanish since 1580, and Morocco has claimed it since independence in 1956.

In 2021, after a diplomatic dispute, Moroccan border forces stood aside and let roughly 8,000 to 12,000 people cross in two days.

Spain’s defense minister called it “blackmail” at the time.

This time, a veteran Spanish journalist who covers the region observed that Moroccan security forces appeared to be doing the same thing they did in 2021.

Notice what Morocco’s government understands that Europe pretends not to: migration is leverage.

Morocco’s government doesn’t believe the “all immigration is good” platitude — it weaponizes its own poor precisely because it knows Europe experiences mass arrival as a crisis.

The gate opens when Morocco’s government wants concessions, and closes when it gets them.

People respond to incentives. Migrants do. Smugglers do. Governments do.

Rational policy is built on rational incentives.

Western Civilization Is Worth Protecting

I was traveling through Europe when the invasion happened, and spent a week of those travels in Madrid.

Something happens when you walk through a city like that.

Stone walkways worn smooth by five centuries of feet.

Buildings older than my entire country, still standing, still beautiful, still used.

Walking those streets, I felt elevated as a human being — inspired by what humans can build when they build across generations.

Then I remembered Washington, D.C., in January 2025, when I was there for the inauguration. Our capital.

The seat of American power. And large stretches of it feel like a place nobody loves.

It is much, much easier to destroy than to create.

It took centuries to build Madrid into what it is now.

Two thousand years to build Paris and London.

One generation of bad decisions to destroy them.

A civilization is not a landmass with an economy attached.

It’s an inheritance — and the most natural instinct in the world is to protect what you love.

Guarding the door is love of the thing behind it — the inheritance that makes people swim oceans to reach it in the first place.

A civilization that won’t guard its door will eventually have nothing behind the door worth reaching.

Love your civilization enough to decide who enters it.

Because love is not just about empathy.

It’s also about boundaries.

That’s the case for guarding the door.

But you’re not going to win this argument by loving your civilization. You’re going to win it by answering the specific things people say.

And the Ceuta invasion surfaced every misguided argument used to justify unchecked immigration and open borders in the Western immigration debate at once — about colonialism, climate change, jobs immigrants fill, etc.

Nine of them, all with real emotional appeal, all of which fall apart the moment you think about them.

Here they are, and here’s how to answer each one.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why “they just want a better life” can be true without answering who a country should admit.

• How turning asylum into a backdoor hurts the genuine refugees the system exists to protect.

• Why climate, labor shortages, and “diversity is a strength” all fail as defenses of unvetted immigration.

• What America’s immigration history, Ceuta’s legal status, and the record of former colonies actually show.

• The one population missing from all nine arguments—and how censorship manufactured the backlash it was supposed to prevent.

The “Pro-Immigration” Arguments

Read more