Paid subscribers can drop a question for me using the link at the bottom of this letter. The focus will be Spencer Pratt and whether he lost because of fraud in the LA election but you can ask about any topic, no limits.

Then everyone, free and paid, can join the live Q&A on Friday, June 12 at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET). RSVP here.

I’ll also upload a recording in case you can’t catch it live.

Two weeks ago, I published my 80th letter and asked you to help shape the next 80.

One of the biggest takeaways I got was that you don’t just want to read what I think. You want this to be a discussion.

Good. That’s the entire point of this project.

So today I’m making it official.

Ask me anything

Starting now, paid subscribers can ask me anything using the form at the end of this letter.

Politics. Faith. Spencer Pratt and the LA election. Where I think I’ve been wrong. The business of doing this work. A topic you suspect I’ve been avoiding.

Nothing is off the table.

Then, on Friday, June 12 at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET), I’m going live to answer the best of them, and the livestream is open to everyone, free and paid alike.

RSVP for the Livestream

Why a conversation, not a broadcast

The mission of Clear Thinker has always been clarity in an age of confusion.

For 80 letters, that’s mostly meant me writing and you reading.

But clarity is a practice.

And nobody develops a practice by watching someone else do it.

You can read about critical thinking forever, but at some point, you have to do it - ask the question, push on the argument, and sit with an answer you didn’t expect.

That’s what this is for.

There’s another layer. I’ve always said this project is about transparent reasoning in real time.

There is no more transparent reasoning than answering a question you didn’t choose, live, with no edit button.

The second reason is about me

I’ve told you before to watch for bias in every commentator you follow.

Including me.

I meant that. The financial incentives in this industry reward telling audiences what they already believe. I feel that pull every week. I’ve written about it openly.

My discipline is one defense against those incentives.

You are a better one.

An audience that asks hard questions keeps a writer honest in a way willpower never will.

So ask hard questions.

One request

I’ve written before that many people asking questions in politics aren’t actually curious. They’re disguising accusations as questions.

This space works differently.

Ask because you want to understand - including when you’re sure I’m wrong. Especially then.

I’ll extend you good faith. I’ll steel-man your view before I respond. I’m asking for the same in return.

That’s not a request for soft questions. Disagreement delivered in good faith is the most valuable thing you can give me.

It’s also the thing American politics has almost none of.

What I’m hoping this becomes

I’ve described American politics as a bad marriage - two sides who’ve stopped extending good faith, interpreting every move in the worst possible light.

The way out of a bad marriage isn’t silence. And it isn’t shouting.

It’s hard conversations, held with discipline.

Most of the internet isn’t built for those. Comment sections became battlegrounds. Questions became ambushes. Listening became losing.

I think a small corner of the internet can work differently.

I think a small corner of the internet can work differently. The notes you've sent over the past year have already changed how I think and write.

So that’s why I want to have more conversations.

A monologue can inform you. Only a conversation can change you.

So: ask me anything.

I’ll see you live on June 12 at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET).

RSVP for the Livestream

-Kaizen

Click the link below the paid break to ask me your question.

Read more

Let me get the disclosure out of the way.

I wanted Spencer Pratt to advance.

I’ve written multiple pieces making the case for him.

As someone who lived in LA for over a decade, the prospect of Karen Bass winning again is bad, and the prospect of Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman winning might be worse.

I’m currently taking a sabbatical away from LA, but the outcome of this election might make that permanent.

When election night results showed Pratt comfortably in second place with a 40,000-vote lead over Raman, I was happy.

When subsequent batches of mail-in ballots narrowed that lead to 33,000, then 20,000, then within a single percentage point, I was disappointed.

When the Right started calling it fraud, I understood the emotional impulse.

I felt it too.

I’m writing this piece because the impulse, however understandable, is doing more damage than people realize.

Not just to election outcomes, but to our ability to think at all.

Why This Piece Is Hard to Write

Writing this is harder than writing a partisan piece, and I want to be transparent about why.

These articles take many hours to write. The videos take longer.

When they don’t perform well, it impacts my livelihood directly.

The honest reality is that it would be much easier and much more profitable for me to deliver partisan takes that validate what my audience already believes, and my audience is right-leaning.

That work gets rewarded with engagement, growth, and income. Telling people that their initial reaction might be wrong gets rewarded with unsubscribes.

Multiple times over the past week, I’ve had the instinct to post a tweet about how dumb California’s election system is, or how the left games everything.

Those tweets would have done well. They would have gotten attention, validation, agreement, and money.

They also would not have been principled. They would have been emotional reactions.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

First, I want you to stay open to what’s coming, even if you don’t like it.

This piece isn’t fun to write, but it’s necessary, and I’m hoping you’ll read it the way I’m trying to write it: as one American trying to think clearly with another.

We have to be able to do this if the country is going to work.

I’m trying to lead by example.

Second, because I want you to watch this dynamic everywhere you encounter political commentary.

Including with me.

The financial incentives in this industry overwhelmingly favor giving people attention-grabbing takes fueled by negativity, tribalism, and suspicion.

The incentives are not aligned with telling you the truth, especially when the truth is boring or uncomfortable.

Most political content creators, including ones you trust, are responding to those incentives whether they realize it or not.

The biggest influencers on the right have made millions feeding the audience what the audience wants to hear. So have the biggest ones on the left.

The model works financially. But it also produces a media environment where every outcome you don’t like becomes evidence of fraud, malice, or conspiracy, because that’s what generates clicks.

Watch for it. Watch for it in me. Notice when someone confirms exactly what you already believed with exactly the level of outrage you were already feeling.

That’s often a sign you’re being sold a story, not given an analysis.

The story might still be true.

But you should be more skeptical of stories that flatter you than stories that don’t.

People are confused and angry. The outrage machine is exhausting to live inside. I’m tired of every political moment being a death match without introspection.

Frankly, it’s burning me out and making me want to stop analyzing politics altogether.

I keep doing it because I’m drawn to topics where there’s confusion. I enjoy helping people think more clearly. And politics is the epicenter of confusion right now.

So with all that said, let me show you what I actually see.

How We Got Here

It’s worth taking a moment to ask why so many people instantly assumed fraud the moment Pratt’s lead started slipping.

The honest answer is that we no longer have the trust we used to have.

There was a time, even within recent memory, when American politics had a level of shared baseline. People were disappointed when elections didn’t go their way, but they didn’t routinely challenge the legitimacy of the outcome. There was a level of trust in the basic functioning of the system that covered the gaps in any one person’s knowledge of how it worked.

That trust is gone. COVID broke part of it. The 2020 election broke another part. Biden’s cognitive decline being denied for years and then suddenly admitted broke another. A long string of institutional failures and social media hallucinations has made consensus reality, a baseline that everyone agrees on, a thing of the past.

This makes skepticism a reasonable default. The people who tell you to just trust the system haven’t done the work to earn that trust back. Real reasons to doubt mainstream narratives exist, and dismissing those reasons would itself be dishonest.

But there’s a specific dynamic at play that’s worth naming. American politics right now is a bad marriage.

In a bad marriage, the couple fights about everything. The dishes. The schedule. The in-laws. The actual content of the fights almost doesn’t matter. The problem isn’t any specific disagreement. The problem is that the underlying relationship is broken. Trust is gone. Communication has collapsed. Every gesture from the other person gets interpreted in the worst possible light, not because the gesture is actually bad, but because the relationship has trained both people to expect the worst.

An absence becomes evidence of cheating. A mistake becomes evidence of malice. A moment of incompetence becomes evidence of intentional evil. Both people in a bad marriage do this. Both feel justified. Both can point to real instances where the other person actually was wrong, and they use those real instances to confirm that every subsequent ambiguity is also bad faith.

This is what American politics looks like right now.

Two sides who genuinely don’t trust each other, who interpret everything the other side does through the worst possible lens, who have stopped extending good faith because they’ve been burned doing it before.

Some of the suspicion is earned on both sides.

But when you’re in a bad marriage, adopting a default of suspicion is the road to divorce.

The discipline of a good marriage, or a functioning democracy, is exactly the discipline of not doing that.

Here’s what this means in practical terms.

The worse the relationship gets, the stronger your reasoning needs to be.

Because you can’t trust the relationship to provide the baseline.

You have to provide it yourself, through discipline.

I can’t tell you whether there’s fraud in this race. I can’t tell you if it’s the reason Pratt might lose.

No one can. The answer isn’t fully knowable yet.

What I’m going to do is offer a way to think about this clearly.

That will help you stay calm when everyone around you is panicking.

That will make you harder to manipulate by anyone who profits from your attention.

Including me.

One quick caveat before going further.

Nothing I’m about to write means zero fraud has ever happened in California. In any system involving millions of ballots, some people will try to cheat, and some will succeed. That’s true everywhere.

But individual fraud and election-flipping fraud are different claims at different scales. To flip a major race like this one, you’d need tens of thousands of coordinated fraudulent ballots, evading signature verification, escaping detection by Republican observers at every step, and staying unreported by everyone involved in counting. The first happens. The second requires evidence we haven’t seen.

How California Counts Votes

California’s vote counting works differently from most of the country, and most people upset right now don’t understand the mechanics, so understandably, they are suspicious.

Understanding the system is the prerequisite for evaluating whether it’s working as designed or being manipulated.

Let me be clear before walking through it: I’m not endorsing California’s system. I think there are legitimate critiques of how it operates, especially the lack of voter ID.

But to critique a system, we have to first understand what it actually does.

California allows three primary ways to vote.

1. In-person on Election Day at vote centers.

2. Early in-person voting in the weeks before the election.

3. Vote-by-mail, with ballots accepted as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days after.

Every registered California voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. They can use it or vote in person. This system was expanded significantly during COVID and has remained in place.

Counties have up to 30 days after Election Day to complete their canvass, verify signatures on mail-in ballots, and process provisional ballots. This is required by state law.

Mail-in ballots are processed in batches as they come in. The signature verification is labor-intensive. Each envelope’s signature must be compared against the voter’s signature on file. Mismatches can be cured, meaning voters are notified and given a chance to confirm their identity. This adds days or weeks to the process.

What this means in practice: election night results are nowhere close to final.

The ballots counted on Election Day are largely group 1: in-person votes and the mail-in ballots that arrived early.

The ballots counted in the days and weeks after are predominantly group 2: late-arriving mail-in ballots.

These two groups vote differently.

Understanding this will help you understand why it looked like Spencer Pratt was going to win, but now looks like he’s going to lose.

Why Mail-In Ballots Skew Progressive

Here’s the part that frustrates conservatives the most, and it’s the part that looks most like fraud if you aren’t given an alternative explanation.

Mail-in ballots in California, and increasingly across the country, lean Democratic. They have for years. The reason is structural and demographic.

Consider who is most likely to vote by mail and who is most likely to vote in person.

Voters who choose mail-in ballots tend to be younger.

They’re more likely to be renters who move frequently.

They’re more likely to be students who may be away from their registered address.

They’re more likely to work jobs without the flexibility to take time off on a Tuesday.

They’re more likely to have small children and limited childcare options.

Voters who choose in-person voting tend to be older.

They’re more likely to be homeowners with stable addresses.

They’re more likely to have flexible schedules or to be retired.

They’re more likely to view voting as a ritual to be performed in person.

Look at the demographics of each group and the partisan tilt is obvious. The younger, renter, lower-propensity voter skews Democratic. The older, homeowner, ritual voter skews Republican. This is true at the national level and especially true in cities like Los Angeles.

There’s a second factor, and it’s one Republicans have done to themselves. Starting in 2020, Donald Trump and a significant portion of the conservative media ecosystem spent years telling Republican voters that mail-in voting was suspect and fraud-prone.

Republicans listened. Republican mail-in voting collapsed. Republican in-person voting held steady.

Democrats, meanwhile, invested heavily in mail-in voting infrastructure. They built operations to make sure their voters knew how to use the system. They invested in ballot collection programs.

The result: when mail-in ballots are counted in California, they break Democratic. Sometimes by 20 points. Sometimes by 30.

It’s the structural reality of every election since 2020.

So when election night shows a Republican leading and the lead evaporates as mail-in batches are counted, the most likely explanation isn’t fraud. The most likely explanation is that the Republican led among in-person voters and lost among mail-in voters, and the in-person votes got counted first.

This is exactly what happened to Spencer Pratt. He won election-night in-person voting comfortably. He’s losing the mail-in count. Both are by structural design.

This pattern has a name in election analysis: the blue shift. It’s been documented in California for over a decade.

Sometimes Mail-In Voting Favors Republicans

Conservatives reading this might assume mail-in voting just inherently favors Democrats. It doesn’t.

Florida is the one major state where Republicans dominate mail-in voting. Florida Republicans are more likely to vote by mail than Florida Democrats, according to data from the University of Florida Election Lab.

The result has been a steady Republican trend in Florida elections for over a decade, partly driven by Republican mail-in turnout operations that started before Trump’s anti-mail-in rhetoric and continued through it.

More recently, some Republican operatives have realized that ceding mail-in voting to Democrats was a strategic disaster. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA built mail-in operations in Arizona. Scott Pressler did the same in Pennsylvania. The RNC under new leadership pushed mail-in turnout in 2024.

The results were immediate.

The New York Times analyzed mail-in data across states and found Republicans made almost universal gains in mail-in voting in 2024.

Pennsylvania’s share of mail-in voters who are registered Republicans jumped from 24% in 2020 to 33% in 2024. Trump won Pennsylvania partly because of this shift. The same pattern showed up in Connecticut, Florida, and other states across the political spectrum.

Pre-2020, Republicans actually pioneered mail-in voting.

Older white voters, military families, rural voters, and business travelers were Republican-leaning groups that used mail-in heavily.

The Republican mail-in advantage was the norm for years before Trump’s 2020 rhetoric flipped it.

California is the holdout.

The state-level Republican Party in California has not built the kind of mail-in operation that Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania Republicans now have.

That’s a strategic choice, not a structural inevitability.

When California Republicans build the operation, they’ll capture more of the mail-in vote. Until they do, Democrats will keep winning the late-counted batches.

If conservatives in California want different results, the answer is the same answer it’s been in Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania: build mail-in infrastructure.

This Has Happened Before. In This Exact Race.

For anyone tempted to believe Pratt’s vanishing lead is unprecedented or suspicious, the precedent is right there in the same city, four years ago.

In June 2022, Los Angeles ran the same mayoral primary, with one candidate (Rick Caruso) running on tougher policing and clearing encampments, and the other (Karen Bass) representing the progressive establishment.

Caruso led on election night by 5 percentage points. He celebrated with confetti at his election night party. Pundits declared him the surprise star of the night.

Two weeks later, Caruso was trailing Bass by 7 points. The swing was 12 percentage points, entirely from mail-in ballots counted after Election Day. Bass went on to win the runoff in November and become mayor.

The Los Angeles Times wrote a piece at the time titled “California primary’s lesson for pundits: Don’t speak too soon in the age of mail-in voting.”

Political consultant Michael Trujillo gave the quote that ages perfectly for this moment: “If your race is within 10 points at the end of election night, it’s probably premature to call it a win. If you’re up 20 points, you’re probably safe.”

Pratt’s election-night lead over Raman was about 6 percentage points.

By the rule established in the last LA mayoral race, that lead was always going to be vulnerable to exactly the kind of mail-in shift that’s now happening.

What’s happening in the Pratt-Raman race is not anomalous. It’s the third documented instance in less than a decade of the same exact pattern playing out in California, with the same exact partisan implications.

If this pattern is fraud, it’s been fraud for a decade.

Across multiple election cycles. Affecting multiple races.

Documented in mainstream media at the time. Studied by academic institutions.

Predicted by political consultants who work in the state.

None of those entities have produced evidence the pattern is anything other than what it appears to be: the structural consequence of mail-in voting demographics combined with California’s counting timeline.

The boring explanation isn’t only more likely on first principles. It’s likely been the actual explanation every other time this has happened.

A Note for My Conservative Readers

I want to be clear about something before going further, because I know what I’m asking you to accept is uncomfortable.

I’m telling you that California’s election system is not rigged. I’m not telling you that California’s election system is fair, or that Democrats are operating in good faith, or that the structural advantages they’ve built are accidental.

I’m highlighting that there’s a difference between fraud and systemic design.

Democrats designed California’s election system to favor outcomes they wanted.

The auto-mailed ballots. The 30-day canvass. The legal ballot harvesting. The same-day registration. The voter roll maintenance practices.

Each of these individually has a defensible rationale.

The cumulative effect is a system that advantages Democratic-aligned political infrastructure (mail-in turnout, ballot curing, organized canvassing) over Republican-aligned infrastructure (Election Day voting, in-person turnout).

The same pattern shows up in other areas conservatives have legitimately complained about for years.

Take the southern border. The Democratic position has not been “we want millions of people voting illegally.”

The Democratic position has been functionally equivalent to: we benefit electorally from population growth in blue states, from eventual citizenship pathways for immigrants, and from generational demographic shifts that have historically favored Democrats.

Census counts shape House apportionment and Electoral College votes. Amnesty creates new voters. None of this requires anyone to vote illegally. All of it produces electoral advantages over time.

It’s not fraud. It’s politics.

Is this a power grab? Yes. Both parties do power grabs through systemic design.

Republicans are currently doing it through congressional district maps. Democrats designed immigration policy and California’s election system.

The structural complaint is legitimate and worth fighting through actual political channels.

But “Democrats designed systems that favor them” is a completely different claim than “Democrats are committing mass fraud.” That is an accusation that requires evidence.

The reason this distinction matters: if you conflate the two claims, you weaken both arguments.

The legitimate critique of structural advantages gets tarred by association with the fraud claims that don’t have evidence. People who would otherwise engage with the structural critique dismiss everything because they associate it with conspiracy theorizing.

You can be angry about systemic design without claiming fraud.

In fact, that’s the only honest position when there’s no evidence of fraud. The system can be unfair and not rigged at the same time.

The “Smoking Gun” That Wasn’t

There’s such a thing as healthy skepticism, and what we’re seeing online from the right-wing ecosystem isn’t it.

The most viral fraud claim from this race is a perfect illustration of how unhealthy skepticism operates, and worth walking through carefully because it shows the pattern we need to learn to recognize.

On election night, the Associated Press’s automated data feed pulled vote updates from LA County in two separate updates one minute apart.

The first update showed thousands of new votes for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, and zero new votes for Spencer Pratt.

Screenshots flew across social media. Statistical analyses were run showing it was impossibly unlikely for a candidate running second to receive zero votes in a batch.

One minute later, the second update came in. It showed thousands of new votes for Spencer Pratt and zero for Bass or Raman.

When the AP issued its official statement, the actual combined batch showed 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass, and 9,521 votes for Raman.

Pratt received more votes than either Democrat in the batch that “proved” he was being cheated.

The central “evidence” was a one-minute gap between two automated updates from a third-party data provider. The full combined batch actually showed Pratt receiving more votes than either Democrat. The screenshots that went viral captured the gap between the two updates. By the time the AP released the full picture, the screenshots had already gone everywhere and the narrative had hardened.

Sit with that for a moment.

The central piece of evidence cited by people calling fraud was a one-minute display lag in third-party software pulling government data.

And it spread because people wanted it to be true.

This is what cherry-picking looks like in practice, and cherry-picking is one of the cognitive biases I’ll go deeper on in the paid section.

The mechanism is simple: you find one piece of data that supports your preferred conclusion, you isolate it from its context, and you treat it as decisive. Everything around it that would have complicated the picture gets ignored.

It’s also a textbook example of what philosophers call the argument from incredulity. The structure is: “I can’t imagine how this could happen without fraud, therefore fraud.”

It treats personal inability to imagine an alternative as evidence about the world. It isn’t. It’s evidence about the limits of our imagination, often combined with unwillingness to explore reasons why we might be wrong.

Anyone with a phone in their pocket can construct a non-fraud explanation in less time than it takes to post an outraged tweet.

You can open any AI model and ask: “What’s the best non-fraud explanation for a Republican candidate leading on election night in California and losing as mail-in ballots are counted?”

The model will walk you through the blue shift, the demographic patterns, the organizational asymmetries. The information is free and instantly available.

The failure isn’t access. The failure is willingness.

Constructing the strongest counter-explanation requires entertaining the possibility that your gut reaction was wrong. That’s uncomfortable. The bandwagon of agreement on social media is comfortable.

Outrage gets attention. Steel-manning doesn’t.

The Occam’s Razor Test

Occam’s Razor is the principle that when multiple explanations are possible for the same set of facts, the one requiring the fewest additional assumptions is most likely correct. It’s a principle of formal reasoning that dates back to the 14th century and has held up across nearly every domain of human inquiry.

Apply it here.

To believe systemic fraud has produced the Pratt-Raman result, you have to:

1. Assume coordinated action across thousands of election workers, signature verifiers, county officials, third-party data providers like the AP, and observers from multiple campaigns.

2. Assume this coordination has been operating across multiple election cycles spanning over a decade.

3. Assume it has affected multiple different races with different stakes.

4. Assume not a single major whistleblower has emerged in any of those cycles.

5. Assume the results just happen to perfectly match documented demographic patterns.

6. Assume the conspiracy is invisible to every Republican observer at every level.

To believe the boring explanation, you have to assume:

1. California is the most Democratic state in the country (well-documented).

2. Mail-in voters skew younger and more progressive (well-documented).

3. Republicans abandoned mail-in voting after Trump’s 2020 rhetoric (well-documented).

4. Democrats invested heavily in mail-in turnout operations (well-documented).

5. Late-counted ballots are disproportionately mail-in (mathematically required).

6. Spencer Pratt is widely perceived in California as a Trump-aligned figure who motivates anti-Trump turnout (well-documented).

Every component of the boring explanation is individually documented. The fraud explanation requires accepting a multi-year, multi-race conspiracy with zero leaks, producing results that happen to look exactly like what the boring explanation predicts.

The fraud claim isn’t impossible. Things that look like one thing sometimes turn out to be something else.

But the fraud claim requires vastly more assumptions to be true. That makes it vastly less likely to be the correct explanation. Not impossible. Less likely.

This is the discipline Occam’s Razor demands. Not certainty in either direction. Weighting probabilities by how many assumptions each explanation requires.

The simpler explanation wins until positive evidence forces a reconsideration. That positive evidence has not emerged.

This doesn’t prove fraud is impossible. It shows why the burden of proof is on the fraud explanation over the boring explanation.

What’s in the Paid Section

Here’s why I point out the specific errors in reasoning people are committing so you don’t make the same mistake as them.

Next, I go deep on the seven cognitive biases and logical fallacies driving the fraud narrative, with the specific mechanism of each one and how to recognize it operating in your own thinking.

• Anchoring bias.

• Cherry-picking.

• Confirmation bias.

• Motivated reasoning.

• The argument from incredulity.

• Tribal asymmetry.

• The bandwagon effect.

By the end of the letter, you’ll understand how to use these to sharpen your critical thinking and your ability to discuss these issues with your loved ones - including those you disagree with.

Read more

Words shape how we see problems.

And when it comes to LA’s homeless crisis, we’ve been mincing words.

To be clear - I’m not saying these people aren’t homeless. They are. They don’t have private homes of their own to go to. The word is technically true.

But it’s imprecise. And imprecise diagnoses lead to wrong treatments.

Consider someone with kidney failure. Saying they have “a health problem” is technically true. But it’s so vague that it doesn’t tell you what to do. Tell a doctor “kidney failure” - and the response becomes obvious. Treat the kidneys.

That’s where LA is. We’ve been treating “a homeless problem” when the patient has a specific condition - drug addiction - that requires a specific strategy.

This is also why the obsession with policing words - “don’t say homeless, say unhoused” - is a waste of energy. The substitution doesn’t change anything that matters.

Most of LA’s visible street crisis is a mental health and drug problem that’s been mislabeled as a housing problem.

If you treat addiction as a housing shortage, you build more housing. The addiction continues.

If you treat it as a mental health and drug crisis, you focus on rehabilitation, treatment, and the boundaries that make recovery possible.

That’s why we’ve spent $218 million in 5 years on interim shelter beds that sit empty every night.

We’re solving the wrong problem.

What I Saw on Skid Row

I’ve been to Skid Row. I’ve done charity work there. I’ve handed out food to people on those streets.

It’s hell on earth.

Hell that they’re choosing.

According to RAND Corporation’s 2025 LA LEADS study, less than 50% accept group shelter when it’s offered - the most common type of shelter offer. The LA City Controller’s audit found over 3,000 shelter beds sit empty every night.

Meanwhile, 27,000 people remain unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles.

They have options. They’re refusing them.

They Have Free Will. We’ve Stopped Believing It.

Homeless people have free will, just like everyone else. They’re exercising it. The choices we’re watching them make are choices.

This is the fact we have to start with, because it reorients everything else.

I want to be careful here, because this is where the conversation usually breaks down into two bad camps.

The right says: they have free will, so they should be acting responsibly. Their failure to do so is a moral failing on their part.

The left says: their circumstances are so overwhelming that talking about responsibility at all is cruel. They can’t be expected to choose better.

Both are missing the union of opposites.

Free will is inherent. Responsibility is developed.

Everyone has free will from birth. That’s not the variable. What varies - what develops or deteriorates over a lifetime - is the ability to exercise free will in ways that serve you and the people around you. That ability is what we call responsibility.

A two-year-old has free will. They want what they want. But they don’t yet have much responsibility - they can’t reliably channel their will toward outcomes that are good for them or anyone else. So we don’t give them unlimited freedom. We set limits. We provide structure. We let them experience consequences at a scale they can handle. And as they demonstrate more capacity, we expand their freedom.

But responsibility isn’t automatic. It doesn’t show up just because a person turned 18. It has to be built - through being treated as an agent, through encountering consequences, through having structure and support and standards.

What’s happened in LA, and in much of California, is that we’ve stopped doing the building.

We’ve decided that the visible street homeless population - many of whom are addicted, mentally ill, or both - can’t be held to standards. So we’ve removed the consequences. Removed the structure. Removed the expectations. Removed the very feedback loops that develop responsibility.

We didn’t decide they had no free will. They obviously do - they’re making choices every day, including the choice to refuse shelter that’s been offered to them. What we decided is that their underdeveloped responsibility means we shouldn’t engage them at all. We shouldn’t ask anything of them. We shouldn’t expect them to grow.

That’s cruel.

Because the only way responsibility develops is through engagement. Through being held to standards. Through experiencing both positive consequences when you make good choices and negative ones when you don’t. Remove those, and responsibility never develops - no matter how many programs you fund or how much housing you build.

The “treat them as victims” model has failed so completely because it doesn’t engage the human capacity to grow.

Treating someone as a moral agent capable of growth is what real respect looks like.

Treating them as someone who can’t be expected to grow - who must be permanently managed because they can’t develop - is what dehumanization actually looks like, no matter what compassionate language it’s dressed in.

The False Dichotomies

A trap gets erected whenever we try to discuss this honestly.

Individual or collective failure.

Personal responsibility or systemic factors.

Law and order or compassion.

But these are illusory choices. Both halves are required.

We can recognize the errors in someone’s choices while recognizing the collective responsibility to create better conditions.

We can acknowledge broken systems without evading bad personal decisions.

We can enforce law and order while constructing laws that are supportive, not punitive.

The solution is balance.

The problem is LA - which has been under one-party rule for decades - is the opposite of balance. Empathy has overridden logic.

And nature abhors imbalance.

What Support Without Limits Actually Produces

We’ve decided that the worst-off in society deserve total freedom without any responsibility.

The result is they get neither.

They’re free in the sense that living in chaos is “free.” They’re trapped in addiction, stress, and squalor. They have free will, but massive obstacles.

And they’re never asked to take responsibility for the choices that contributed to their situation - which means they never develop the skills to escape it.

Truly being supportive would mean providing both halves:

Positive incentives: safe, clean, healing shelters; a path to employable skills; dignity throughout.

Negative incentives: not allowing people to live on the streets or do drugs in public.

We’ve confused permissiveness with compassion. So we give the positive, but not the negative.

If you’re afraid to set limits for a child who’s misbehaving, that’s neglect, even with nice words.

If you’re afraid to enforce boundaries for a mentally ill family member who’s destroying themselves, you’re abandoning them.

That’s what we’re doing. Abandoning our fellow humans for fear of enforcing the negative.

What People Train You To Do

There’s a basic truth about human behavior that we’ve stopped applying to homeless people: people respond to incentives.

Everyone does. You do. I do. Every person on the street does.

When you allow someone to violate your boundaries without consequence, you’ve trained them how to treat you.

That’s exactly what’s happened at the scale of a civilization.

We’ve trained homeless people that they can defecate in public, do drugs in public, set up permanent tent cities in our nicest parks, threaten people walking by, and face zero consequences for any of it.

Then we act shocked when a portion of the population looks at that arrangement and decides, “You know what, I’ll take that deal.”

Humans respond to incentives, and the incentives we’ve created reward exactly the behavior we say we’re trying to reduce.

It seems complicated due to a lack of courage, not a lack of intellect.

What Real Compassion Looks Like

Real solutions require both compassion AND consequences.

Build genuinely good shelter - clean, safe, supportive, with the dignity people deserve. Make it the kind of place a person would actually want to be.

Then enforce a simple choice: shelter, rehab, or jail. Not three options that include “remain on the street.” Three options that all involve getting off the street.

This is what we’d do for a family member we love. If your brother was destroying himself with addiction, you wouldn’t tell him “you have the freedom to keep doing this in my home.” You’d insist on treatment. You’d set limits. You’d do it because you love him.

Democrat Matt Mahan has been doing this in San Jose. I wrote about it here. It works.

The principle is simple. The execution requires discipline.

Rejecting the principle is what confuses us into making this unnecessarily complicated.

What’s In The Paid Section

I’ve laid out the surface argument: LA’s homeless crisis is a drug crisis, the people on the streets have free will, and real compassion requires building the responsibility that lets them use it.

In the paid section, I go deeper on the philosophical problem underneath all of this:

• Why our entire framework for “compassion” toward the worst-off is built on a myth - and how that myth is making everything worse

• The principle that scales beyond homelessness to nearly every politicized issue in America right now

• Why a society that doesn’t hold everyone responsible can’t hold anyone free

Read more

I’ve published 80 letters on this Substack.

Most of you know me from videos. That’s how I built whatever audience I have, and I’m not stopping. But the longer I do this work, the more I keep running into the same problem.

A single 3 minute video takes me around five hours to make. Sometimes much longer than that.

It takes so long because I take great care to think about what I’m going to say, how to deliver it so it can be received even by those who disagree, how to make it engaging, make it visually pleasant (boy is it difficult recording outdoors), and make it constructive, account for both sides, and make sure it’s well-researched.

And while I love making them, it’s not sustainable to do daily. There are weeks where something happens in the world, and by the time I can get a video out, the moment has moved.

The news cycle moves faster than I can produce videos. So do the conversations happening in group chats, in DMs, on X. So do the misreadings I think someone should be pushing back on while there’s still a chance to change minds.

I want to be able to communicate more often and more quickly. So I’m going to start sharing more of my thoughts via text.

The mission of Clear Thinker

The goal of Clear Thinker has always been providing clarity in an age of confusion.

We’re flooded with more information than any generation in history and have less ability to sort through it.

I’m trying to help solve that problem with transparent reasoning, first-principles thinking, nuance, self-awareness, and honesty - in real time.

Sometimes I also just sharing what I’m curious about, or need to get off my chest as a human. Whether the topic is faith, foreign policy, immigration, the homelessness crisis in LA, or whatever else lands on the table that week.

Video is one way to do that. Writing is another. And writing has an edge: it’s faster, it goes deeper on the parts that need depth, and it lets you read at your pace, not mine.

I want more of both. Writing just lets me move at the speed the moment actually requires.

Thank you

If you’re reading this, you’re either someone who’s been with me a while on Substack, or you just clicked over from another platform. Either way, thank you.

The notes I’ve gotten over the last year have changed how I think, what I write about, and how seriously I take this.

What I’m asking

I just dropped a survey, and I’d really appreciate your input on it.

It’s longer than a normal survey because I want to know what’s actually on your mind. What topics you want me to cover. What formats work for you. What you wish I’d do more of, and less of. Where you think this project should go next.

The next 80 letters will be shaped by what I hear back.

Take the Survey

The clearer your signal, the better I can serve it. Thank you for being part of this.

-Kaizen

I’ve lived in LA for close to 12 years.

Seeing homeless drug addicts acting erratically in public is normal.

Smelling the stench of homeless encampments is common.

Having to cross the street because I see a homeless person behaving strangely is routine.

Getting threatened by homeless people has happened to me.

And I suspect I’m not the exception.

And yet, when the universal unpleasantness of these experiences is mentioned to other Angelenos, people get uncomfortable.

It’s more comfortable to have conversations about the words we’re told to call homeless people - “unhoused,” “homefree” - than it is to talk about the actions.

Because the moment a conversation starts about action, there’s a background risk that the conversation stops being viewed as a good-faith discussion on how to solve homelessness - which is obviously both awful for the homeless and unpleasant for everyone else.

Instead, the smallest misstep - the wrong word, the wrong tone, the wrong “energy” - and now the conversation becomes about whether you’re a good person. Whether you lack empathy. Whether you lack compassion.

It’s a rhetorical game of don’t step on the lava.

That’s why if you say something obviously true: like if you are endlessly permissive of someone’s behavior, they will not change it - it attracts retaliation.

To recognize that if you ceaselessly talk about compassion but avoid consequences, you will recreate the circumstances - you get called cruel.

It is true that we should have a heart for the worst off. But we should also have a brain.

The basic common-sense truths everyone intuitively knows have been suppressed by a decade of this rhetorical game:

• People respond to incentives, both positive and negative

• Being around homelessness is unpleasant for everyone involved, including the homeless - many homeless people have a drug problem and are uncomfortable at best, dangerous at worst to be around

• Public spaces are cultivated for public use, not for individual claim

• A civilization that doesn’t respect itself can’t expect its members to respect it

These are obvious. They were obvious to every previous generation of Angelenos. They’re obvious to anyone who walks down Hollywood Boulevard.

Logic without empathy is cruelty. But empathy without logic is lunacy.

Right now LA is suffering far more from the latter than the former.

I said something similar on a show last year:

Pratt’s Plan

Pratt recently announced a 5-step plan:

1. Stop giving drug users needles and tools to use drugs

2. Use California’s new SB 43 law (which Pratt credited Democrats for passing) to compel treatment for severely addicted people

3. End the body-brokering racket where NGOs profit off out-of-state addicts trafficked into LA

4. Bring in federal law enforcement against the cartels operating openly on our streets

5. Build a dedicated treatment campus instead of expecting residential neighborhoods to absorb the crisis

The predictable reaction has already arrived. Pratt is being attacked as heartless. His plan is being called “criminalizing homelessness.” Activists are framing him as a MAGA Republican with no compassion for the unhoused.

It would be too easy to say it’s because of Spencer’s provocative speaking style. Or because he’s white, wealthy, and privileged. Or because he’s “MAGA-coded.”

All of that falls apart when you realize one thing.

Moderate Democrats with the exact same policies get the exact same criticism.

The Mahan Test Case

Matt Mahan is the mayor of San Jose. He’s running for Governor of California as a Democrat. He’s the only mayor in California who has actually reduced street homelessness - by roughly one-third.

His approach is functionally similar to what Pratt is proposing. Shelter is offered. After three refusals in 18 months, there are consequences - typically referral to a behavioral health court. He pairs accountability with massive expansion of interim shelter capacity. He uses SB 43 - California’s own law signed by Newsom in 2023 - to compel treatment for people too lost in addiction to make the decision themselves.

Mahan’s philosophy in his own words: “compassion paired with accountability.”

For this, Mahan has been called heartless. His policies have been called “criminalizing homelessness.” Activists protested him at San Jose City Hall holding signs that read “Jail the billionaires, not the unhoused.” He’s been accused of being “punitive, immoral and ineffective.”

Those first two labels are opinions. The last one is untrue.

One of Mahan’s loudest critics is Alex Lee, a sitting California State Assemblymember and the chair of the California Legislative Progressive Caucus. Lee ran for office as a proud, self-identified member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He is, on paper, Mahan’s political ally.

Lee’s response to Mahan’s results-based approach wasn’t a counter-proposal. It wasn’t data. It was an insult:

“It’s clear that he’s having a public mask-off for the true conservative that he is.”

Lee called Mahan a “MAGA fellow traveler.”

When the same attack lands on a Democrat with proven results that lands on a Republican with a campaign promise, the attack is ideological.

Not logical.

What Compassion Actually Looks Like

Look at what a decade of “compassion” has built. Six to seven homeless Angelenos dying every day. $24 billion spent at the state level on homelessness in five years, and the State Auditor told us we don’t know if any of it worked.

This is what we call compassion. It is institutionalized neglect dressed up in compassionate language.

If someone you loved was on the street, addicted to fentanyl, defecating in public, harassing strangers for money - you’d grab him. You’d get him to rehab. You’d demand he get sober before he came home. You’d do it because you love him.

Shallow empathy is about words. True compassion requires action.

That’s what Mahan is doing. That’s what Pratt is proposing. And that’s what the DSA-aligned activist class calls cruelty.

What’s In The Paid Section

I’ve laid out the surface story: the attacks on Pratt come from the same coalition attacking Democrats like Mahan. The attacks aren’t substantive - they’re ideological.

But naming the problem is only half the battle. The harder half is knowing what to actually say the next time someone tries to shut down an honest conversation about homelessness - or anything else.

In the paid section, I lay out a field guide:

• The six most common rhetorical moves used to shut down honest conversation in America right now

• What each one is actually trying to do

• And what to say when it happens, in your own voice, without yielding or escalating

These are general-purpose tools. The examples I use are about homelessness because it’s fresh on the page, but you’ll recognize every move from a dozen other conversations. Once you can name the tactic, you can walk through it.

How to Walk Through the Lava: 6 Tactics That Shut Down Honest Conversation, And How to Handle Each One

The “don’t step on the lava” game I described above isn’t unique to homelessness. It shows up in every politically charged conversation in America right now - immigration, education, drug policy, crime, gender, race, foreign policy. The specific topics change. The rhetorical moves don’t.

What follows is a field guide. Six of the most common moves used to shut down honest conversation, what each one is actually doing, and what to say when you encounter it. I’ll use homelessness as the running example because it’s fresh on the page, but every one of these applies anywhere.

Read more

I’ve lived in LA for close to 12 years. I’m frustrated with the direction it’s going. I want to be upfront about that bias, so you can read this through that lens.

My frustration with LA’s leadership is also why I’m excited about what’s going on with the LA mayoral election.

Honestly, not because of Spencer Pratt as a candidate - I haven’t researched his policy positions deeply enough yet to endorse him.

And I’m not excited because he’s a Republican either.

I’d happily vote for a competent, authentic, sensible Democrat.

I’m just tired of the same empty suits.

Karen Bass is a carbon copy of every other machine politician we keep electing in California - polished, scripted, unimpressive.

I am excited that Pratt is a real threat to the political establishment that’s overseen this city’s decline.

I am excited that in a one-party city, in a one-party county, in a one-party state, we’re getting a healthy check that can bring some balance.

I love Los Angeles. I’ve spent my adult life there. As I write this, I’m in Medellín, Colombia. And I’m seriously considering leaving LA because it’s decaying under poor management.

The crazy property prices caused by regulations. The filth. The homelessness that just keeps growing despite billions of dollars being thrown at it every year.

And people’s complacency with it all.

LA’s star is falling.

So in Spencer Pratt’s candidacy, I see the possibility of radical change. He’s real. He’s honest. He understands the frustration of Angelenos who love this city and are exhausted from watching it be neglected.

That alone is exciting. Whether he’s the right answer is a separate question.

What I want to do in this piece is explain how we got here. How a former reality TV villain with no political experience is polling only 8 points behind an incumbent mayor in a Democratic city, what that says about California, and what the data shows so you can decide for yourself.

The Spencer Pratt Story

In 2007, Spencer Pratt was the villain on MTV’s The Hills. He played the heel on a scripted reality show. He earned roughly $10 million over the show’s run. He spent most of it - $4,000 bottles of wine, $30,000 shopping sprees, a $1 million crystal collection.

Not the best résumé for a mayor.

Then, on January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire destroyed his home. His parents’ home burned the same day. He watched on his security cameras while live-streaming the destruction. He lost everything he owned. The Palisades Fire became the third-most destructive wildfire in California history. Twelve people died, and more than 6,800 structures were destroyed.

Two weeks later, Pratt joined a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power, along with 20 other property owners, alleging the city’s failures turned a fire into a catastrophe.

Then he spent all of 2025 building a social media audience around one question: how did this happen, and who’s accountable?

On January 7, 2026 - exactly one year after the fire - he announced his mayoral campaign at a “They Let Us Burn” rally in the Palisades.

Standing near the ruins of his home, he said: “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles.”

Five months later, he’s polling at 22% in a May 14 Emerson College poll. He’s 8 points behind Karen Bass and just ahead of City Councilmember and Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman.

He has more than doubled his support since March.

He’s drawing seven-figure checks from people like hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, NYSE chairman Jeffrey Sprecher, Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, Tinder founder Sean Rad, and the Winklevoss twins. Lakers governor Jeanie Buss is a personal donor.

Pratt is a registered Republican, and LA hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1993.

Why He’s Winning

Pratt is resonating because he’s real.

He doesn’t speak like a politician. He speaks like someone who lives in LA and has suffered - because he is.

That story alone would be a competitive advantage.

But Pratt has another one: he understands social media the way other populist candidates - Mamdani, Trump before him - also have.

His recent viral ad shows it perfectly. He’s not in a studio. He’s not behind a podium. He’s walking the streets of LA, showing what most politicians refuse to acknowledge - the homeless encampments, the trash, the decay. The stuff every Angeleno sees every day on their commute, while the political class tells us things are improving.

The Bigger Picture

That’s what’s visible. Now let me show you what’s not.

And it’s bigger than LA.

Spencer Pratt isn’t running against just Karen Bass. He’s running against Nithya Raman too - a documented Democratic Socialists of America member.

And Raman isn’t a lone candidate. She’s part of a coordinated political movement that has been building in Los Angeles for six years, has its own slate of six candidates for 2026, and whose leadership is openly stating - on the record - that LA is a building block toward a democratic socialist presidential candidate in 2028.

Quite literally, a socialist takeover of America.

What’s in the Paid Section

In the paid section below, I go deeper on:

• The personal story of how I first learned about the LA socialist takeover - and why I dismissed it at first

• What “socialism” actually means, why Denmark isn’t it, and what the Danish Prime Minister wishes Americans understood

• The DSA-LA “Shake Up City Hall” slate - the documented plan to take over LA legislatively, with the on-the-record quote from their own co-chair about building toward 2028

• How the LA story connects to the national pattern - and why most LA voters going to the polls on June 2nd don’t realize what’s actually on the ballot

The Socialist Takeover of Los Angeles

Read more

The immigration conversation has become thoroughly racialized.

It’s regularly framed as White MAGA versus brown people.

And I had a sense that this framing was wrong.

I also suspected that people weren’t aware that the alternative to deportations - amnesty - had already been attempted ~40 years prior, but hadn’t stopped the cycle.

But I wasn’t sure - so I went to find out.

I drove to Downey, California - a middle-class city about 25 minutes outside LA that’s roughly 75% Latino. It’s sometimes called the “Mexican Beverly Hills.”

It’s aspirational, it’s diverse in thought, and it’s not staunchly left or right.

I wanted to talk to people in a community that actually lives with this issue, and was particularly interested to hear from Latinos who support deportations of non-violent illegal immigrants.

There were some surprises. But one thing was made evident that shouldn’t be a surprise: the division is not as bad as the media and social media would have you think.

Latinos Are Not a Monolith

Before we get into the conversations, here’s some context on the Latino community in America.

In the 2024 election, somewhere between 46% and 54% of Latino men voted for Trump, depending on which data source you use. That’s a dramatic shift from 2020 when Biden won Latino men by a significant margin. Cuban Americans went for Trump at roughly 58%. Even Mexican Americans - the largest Latino group in the country - saw Trump’s share rise meaningfully from previous elections.

The Latino community is one of the most ideologically diverse demographics in America.

There are progressives, there are conservatives, there are people who are deeply torn.

There are legal immigrants who resent illegal immigration.

There are children of undocumented parents who joined the military.

It’s a community that has sympathy for illegal immigrants, but memory of how lawlessness has harmed the countries those people are fleeing.

Join Us and Achieve:

• If you want to be part of a community where you can have rational conversations about sensitive topics that you can’t have anywhere else, while learning conversational and debate skills that will help you in real life - join us at Clear Thinker Academy.

• If you’re interested in Protagonist - my friend’s new cutting edge goal achievement app, go here.

From here, you will learn:

• The surprisingly reasonable compromises on illegal immigration proposed by the Latino community (including what one woman said the government should be targeting instead of the workers).

• The real reason a disabled white veteran proudly called himself a “racist” to my face, and the unexpected, non-racial root of his anger.

• The psychological breakdown of why calling people names creates behavioral compliance but destroys critical thinking.

• How the media’s name-calling and thought-policing actually pre-empts critical thinking and backfires into rebellion.

Read more

I grew up Catholic.

My parents weren’t particularly devout, but they put me in Catholic school because they believed it would give me solid values. I like to think they were right, andI’m grateful they cared enough to make that choice.

But the way Christianity was taught to me wasn’t compatible with the way my mind works. And I think it’s not compatible with the way a lot of minds work today.

The tradition was simple: here’s the word, believe it. That approach probably worked for most of Christian history. But as the scientific method became the default standard for how we evaluate claims about the world, “believe it because we said so” stopped being enough. Not for me. Not for a lot of people in my generation.

I was never taught the rationale. I was never told why we believe Jesus existed. I was never shown that there’s actual testimony from real people, or that we can triangulate on historical events even when we can’t fully prove them. Those tools weren’t in the curriculum.

What that produced - in me and many others - was a feeling of being forced toward deep metaphysical beliefs rather than led to them. Add to that the abuse scandals, the institutional failures, the difficulty of reconciling an all-loving God with eternal damnation. The connection broke. I became an atheist.

The problem with where I landed

Atheism is a negative claim. It says there is no God. But it doesn’t replace what’s removed.

It doesn’t replace an absolute sense of good and evil. It doesn’t replace meaning that feels eternal rather than instrumental. It doesn’t replace the stable ground people stood on for thousands of years. There are philosophical traditions that attempt to do that, but atheism itself does not.

Lest I sound like a doomer: I’m not claiming the world is getting worse, or that you can’t feel fulfilled without religion. Plenty of people do. What I’m saying is that even if you treat religion as just civilizational software - the operating system of meaning, morality, and orientation - it was doing real work. And we haven’t built anything that fills the void it left.

You see the cracks. The meaning crisis. The purpose crisis. The collapse of trust in institutions. The rise of conspiracy thinking to fill explanatory vacuums. The loneliness epidemic. We are wealthier and more connected and more informed than any humans in history, and we are, by many measures, less okay.

I’m not saying religion is the only answer to that. I’m saying it was an answer, and we removed it without replacing it.

What I’m actually doing

This is the part where you might expect me to tell you I’ve found Jesus.

I haven’t. I’m not there.

What I am is curious. I’m Christ-curious - to use a phrase that’s becoming a thing. And I’m trying to do something specific with this exploration.

I’m trying to apply first-principles reasoning to Christianity. The same way I try to apply it to politics, geopolitics, and culture. Not “trust the tradition.” Not “trust the scholars.” Trust the reasoning, see where it leads.

I don’t expect rationality to lead me, or anyone else all the way to divine revelation. But I suspect it can help a leap of faith feel more like a step.

Plus, it’s fun.

In the next section I’ll share some of the mental models and critical thinking tools I’m applying here. They’re useful for thinking about uncertainty in any arena of life - including politics, current events, history.

And these days, with so much uncertainty, they are more important than ever.

From here, you’ll learn:

• How to identify the hidden incentives of witnesses to determine what is actually true.

• Why the most powerful proof of a claim is often found in what the enemies agree on.

• How to prove when someone is telling the truth or crafting a myth.

• The exact method to stop thinking in paralyzing binaries — and what to do instead.

Read more

My journey talking about politics started on July 13, 2024. The day Trump got shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Twenty-one months later, I’m writing about another assassination attempt on Trump. The shooter this time was Cole Allen, 31, from California — a man who donated to Kamala Harris, attended No Kings protests, and posted anti-Trump rhetoric for years. He showed up to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with a shotgun, a handgun, and three knives, sent his family a manifesto calling himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin,” and shot a Secret Service agent in the chest. The agent survived because of his vest.

I almost didn’t write this piece. To be honest, it feels like the same story, different day.

We’ve made no cultural progress on understanding the political violence problem since July 13, 2024.

None. People are getting their emotional hits from the news cycle, scoring points for their team, and moving on. There’s no introspection. No deeper reflection on what any of this is reflecting about us.

But here we are again. So let me try.

The cafe lady

On Sunday morning, I was in a cafe in Venice, California, looking for a breakfast burrito when I overheard a server say:

I doubt she formed that conclusion based on facts. I doubt she knew Cole sent his family a manifesto minutes beforehand. I doubt she knew his family tried to turn him in. I doubt she knew he donated to Harris and posted anti-Trump rhetoric for years. I doubt she thought through the obvious problem with the staging theory — if it was staged, why was Cole stopped in the lobby instead of being allowed into the ballroom for the photo op?

She did what most people do in this era of confusion: reject reality the moment it benefits the other side.

This is the disease we’re living through. The first lens through which we filter political violence is no longer “what happened.” It’s “is this useful to my tribe.” If the shooting helps us, it’s real. If the shooting hurts us, it’s staged. The facts don’t change. Our willingness to accept them does.

The data

Both parties have held the title of “most violent” at different points in American history. Right now, the left holds that dubious distinction.

By mid-2025, incidents of left-wing political terrorism outnumbered right-wing for the first time in over thirty years. The historical baseline is the opposite — right-wing attacks have killed far more people over the past decade.

But the recent trend is real, and most of the high-profile political assassinations and assassination attempts in recent memory have targeted figures on the right:

• July 2024 - Trump in Butler

• September 2024 - Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course

• December 2024 - UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

• September 2025 - Charlie Kirk

• April 2026 - Trump at the WHCD

The notable exception: Minnesota Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in June 2025, likely by someone right-leaning.

But it’s not just the high-profile incidents. It’s the cultural soil they grow in.

Forty-one percent of voters under 30 said the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was “acceptable.” Half of college students view Luigi Mangione favorably. Twenty-eight percent of self-identified liberals supported his murder. Nearly forty percent of young Americans now say political violence is acceptable in some circumstances, according to the Harvard Youth Poll.

There’s something particularly destabilizing about political violence. Trump’s life isn’t worth more than the common man’s — but it has a greater impact on society. Because the moment we start resolving political disagreements through assassination, the entire premise of civilization falls apart. Civilization is the agreement that we replace bullets with ballots. Every act of political violence is a vote against that agreement.

What I see

I live in California. I’m in liberal circles.

Days after Trump was shot in 2024, an acquaintance told me she had no sympathy for him because he was “not even human.”

That was said in earnest, days after a man was shot in the head in front of an American crowd.

I also met a young woman from the United States while I was in Osaka who said “Trump and JD Vance need to die”.

And yet

These are expressions of casual attitudes about violence at best, and active malevolence at best, from the left.

But we can’t speak seriously about the left’s attitude toward violence without addressing what the right has done with violence against the left.

When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was beaten with a hammer in their home, Trump made it the punchline of campaign rallies.

When Ilhan Omar was attacked at a town hall earlier this year, Trump suggested she staged it.

And in December 2025 — less than four months before the WHCD shooting — Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home, allegedly by their own son.

Less than 24 hours later, Trump posted on Truth Social that Reiner died “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

None of this justifies actual physical violence against Trump.

But the question I want to ask the right-leaning readers honestly is: do you see the cycle?

Do you see how it’s counterproductive to getting the left to take violence against the right seriously when Trump team mocks violence against theirs?

This is what I mean when I say the violence problem is unevenly distributed but the solution is shared.

The left has the bigger violence problem right now.

The right’s response to violence against the left is part of the moral atmosphere that makes the bigger problem possible.

A Vicious Cycle

What’s predictable about every cycle of this is the same:

1. Violence happens to a figure on the right.

2. The right is outraged, and rightly so.

3. Parts of the left downplay or rationalize it.

4. The right uses that downplaying as evidence of left-wing depravity — which it is.

5. Nobody on the right asks whether the right’s behavior toward the left contributed to the moral atmosphere they’re now condemning.

Predictably, social media right now is on fire with partisan finger-pointing. X is the capital of right-wing vindication. Bluesky is full of leftists downplaying the shooting. On the fringes of both sides, people are claiming it was staged.

And as my Venice cafe anecdote shows, conspiratorial thinking is now mainstream.

People are so focused on the log in their enemy’s eye that they’ve missed the speck in their own. And the only thing more frustrating is watching everyone challenge the other side to introspect while doing none themselves.

To be fair, some figures on the left have condemned the WHCD shooting in clear terms. They deserve credit. But the broader pattern is the same: too many people are sidestepping the moral conversation about what’s happening by disputing whether it’s happening at all — and then wondering why people on the other side won’t take violence on their side seriously.

Here’s the honest truth: people are tribal. I’m tribal. You’re tribal. We’re all tribal to some degree. The question isn’t whether you’re tribal. The question is whether someone is tribal. The question is whether they’re aware of their tribe enough to break from it when the principle requires it.

The question

There’s a time to be right. There’s a time to show why you’re right. And there’s a time to come together.

Watching this cycle play out — again — what’s disheartening isn’t just that the left has a violence problem. It’s that nobody is willing to do the introspection that would actually break the cycle. Both sides are entirely focused on demonizing the other.

Here’s the question that will determine whether you’re part of the solution or part of the problem, regardless of which side you’re on:

To what extent is my side responsible? Even if it’s only ten percent. Even if it’s only one percent.

If someone can’t honestly ask that question, they aren’t interested in solving the problem. They’re interested in winning the argument.

And here’s the thing about that: vindication might feel good. But one must eventually ask oneself — is it working?

From here, we’ll discuss:

• The one principle that actually ends political violence, and why both sides keep abandoning it the moment it gets inconvenient

• How Trump himself articulated the prescription after Charlie Kirk was killed

• The instinct that’s quietly destroying the right’s moral standing, and how to catch it in yourself before it does more damage

• Why you, my audience, have more leadership room than the left right now

• The hardest thing I’m asking you to do in this piece

Read more

That’s from Chapter 2 of The Art of the Deal, published in 1987.

39 years later, Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Today, it looks like things are de-escalating.

So maybe it worked. And that’s the problem - because it probably did work, and that makes it harder to talk about why it was still wrong to say.

I’m about 60% through The Art of the Deal right now, and what struck me most is how little has changed. The playbook is identical to what he’s running today - 39 years later. I’ll share more quotes that reveal the pattern later in this piece. But first, let’s talk about what that pattern looks like when it’s applied to war.

In today’s letter, you’ll learn:

• Why the “unhinged” maximalist approach to foreign policy actually produces real results.

• The critical difference between hard power and soft power, and why one is rapidly eroding.

• The four levels of war, and how current rhetoric dangerously blurs the lines between them.

• The exact 6 strategies from The Art of the Deal that are being used to dictate the Iran war.

High stakes

You can see the same approach everywhere in this administration:

With Greenland - he threatened to take it. Got concessions on mining rights and military access.

With tariffs - he threatened catastrophic rates. Got trade concessions from multiple countries.

With the deportation agenda - he used maximalist rhetoric. Deportations hit record highs.

With Iran - he threatened to wipe out a civilization. Got what appears to be progress toward a ceasefire.

This approach produces results. Trump’s critics would have you believe it never works. That’s dishonest. It often works. He gets concessions that more conventional approaches failed to achieve.

But “does it work?” is only half the question. The other half is: what does it cost?

Soft power

There’s a concept in international relations called soft power. It was coined by Joseph Nye at Harvard in 1990, and the simplest way to understand it is this: hard power is the ability to force people to do what you want. Soft power is the ability to make people want what you want.

America’s greatest strategic achievement of the 20th century was what came after World War II.

The Marshall Plan rebuilt a devastated Europe. The United States spent the equivalent of over $150 billion in today’s dollars to reconstruct the economies of countries that had just been at war with each other. The result was a Europe that wanted to be aligned with America. NATO wasn’t imposed at gunpoint. European nations joined voluntarily because the U.S. had demonstrated that it was a partner worth having.

As Nye put it: “The Berlin Wall didn’t go down under a barrage of artillery. It went down under hammers and bulldozers wielded by people whose minds had been affected by American ideas.”

PEPFAR - the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched under George W. Bush - saved an estimated 25 million lives in Africa. It cost a fraction of a single military operation and generated enormous goodwill across an entire continent.

This is what soft power does: it makes the world want to work with you, invest in you, align with you, and follow your lead. And it compounds over decades.

It’s also eroding.

Pew Global surveys from 2025 show sharp declines in how favorably the world views the United States, with the steepest drops among America’s historically closest partners. Across 24 countries, only 34% of adults expressed confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing regarding world affairs.

At home, the erosion is even sharper. In 2003, 60% of young Americans said they were “extremely proud” to be American. By 2023, that number had collapsed to 18%. A 2025 Harvard Youth Poll found that 29% of young Americans - nearly one in three - said they were explicitly “embarrassed” to be American.

This decline preceded Trump. It started with Iraq, accelerated through the War on Terror, and deepened through a decade of partisan dysfunction. But rhetoric like “a whole civilization will die tonight” accelerates it further.

And the cost compounds. Every time American rhetoric sounds indistinguishable from the language of the regimes we’re fighting, three things happen:

Extremists abroad use it as recruitment material. You can guarantee that Islamist propagandists are already circulating Trump’s quote to tell young men that America wants to destroy Muslim civilization. This is exactly how Al-Qaeda and ISIS built their recruitment pipelines after Abu Ghraib.

Extremists at home - on both the far left and far right - use it as evidence that America has no moral standing. That narrative erodes the domestic cohesion that makes sustained military operations possible in a democracy.

And allies distance themselves. When you threaten to destroy civilizations on social media, allies calculate the reputational cost of being associated with you.

Think of it like starting a company with a friend. You’re wealthier, more experienced, and you need the partnership less than they do. So you use your leverage to negotiate 70-30 in your favor instead of 50-50. You keep extracting concessions because you can. Short term, you win every negotiation.

Then one day there’s a hostile takeover attempt, and you need your partner’s vote against the board. But your partner, who’s been quietly building resentment for years, doesn’t have your back. The board votes you off. You had the leverage. You used it. And when you needed loyalty, you discovered that leverage and loyalty are different currencies.

The bill for hard power used without soft power doesn’t come due immediately. It might not come due before Trump’s presidency ends and his legacy is secured. But it does come due. It always comes due. Eventually, when you need the goodwill of others, they remember how power was used by you.

The real threat

Let me be clear about something, because this conversation only works if we’re honest about the baseline.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity. There is no peaceful use for 60% enriched uranium. None. Civilian energy needs 3-5%. Research reactors use 20%. The jump from 60% to weapons-grade 90% takes weeks.

At minimum, this regime has been exploiting nuclear ambiguity to extract concessions from the world for over two decades. At worst, they are sincerely pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Either way, it’s unacceptable. And the United States is doing what the international community failed to do: stopping it.

So when I critique Trump’s rhetoric, I want to be extremely clear that I’m not confused about who the enemy is. This is a regime that has killed tens of thousands of its own people for protesting. That has arrested over 30,000 women since 2022 for not covering their heads. That, in response to Trump’s threat yesterday, told its own civilians - including women and young people - to form human chains around power plants. They told their own people to stand in front of buildings that might get bombed.

That is who we’re dealing with. And the threat is real.

Which is precisely why clarity about standards matters.

Four levels

To think clearly about proportionality, it helps to distinguish between four levels at which a country can be engaged in war.

Level one: leadership. This is what we did in Venezuela - a targeted operation to capture Maduro. Minimal broader damage. Surgical.

Level two: the military. This is what Trump’s four stated objectives in Iran target - missiles, navy, proxy networks, nuclear infrastructure. Soldiers accept the risk of being targeted when they serve. War at this level operates within a framework that most of the world accepts as legitimate.

Level three: civilian infrastructure. Power plants, gas fields, desalination plants, pharmaceutical facilities, bridges. When you target these, you’re degrading the systems that keep 90 million people alive. The argument is usually “dual use” - the military also relies on this infrastructure. Sometimes that’s true. But “dual use” can justify bombing virtually anything in a modern economy, which is why it requires extreme discipline to apply honestly.

Level four: civilians themselves. Intentionally killing non-combatants. This is what terrorists do. This is what the Islamic Republic does when it fires missiles at residential buildings in Israel and uses its own people as human shields.

When Trump says “a whole civilization will die tonight,” he’s using language that blurs the lines between levels two, three, and four. People who defend the statement say he obviously didn’t mean level four. Maybe. But “obviously” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

How sure are you that he wouldn’t follow through?

30% sure? 50%? 90%? 100%?

We don’t know what any leader would do if pushed to the absolute extreme. Most of us don’t know Trump - certainly not intimately. We should be skeptical of our own certainty about the inner workings of any person’s mind, especially under the pressures of war.

Win well

I want Trump to succeed. I want this operation to achieve its objectives. I want the Iranian people to be free. I want the nuclear threat eliminated.

But the quality of a win matters. There are wins with small costs and wins with enormous costs, and the cost isn’t always measured in dollars or casualties. Sometimes it’s measured in how the world sees you afterward, and whether your own people still believe in what you stand for.

Obama and Clinton didn’t just threaten to bomb civilian infrastructure - they actually did it. We should hold Trump’s actions to the same standard we hold theirs. And by that standard, his actions in this war have been more disciplined than his words.

But words set standards. And the world is watching what standards America sets.

If the Islamic Republic’s conduct is a ten on the scale of moral failure, Trump’s statement is a two. But a two still matters. Because the thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys is the limits we place on our own power.

So celebrate the ceasefire. Root for the operation to succeed. Acknowledge that Trump’s pressure tactics get results that diplomacy alone hasn’t achieved.

And hold the line that “a whole civilization will die tonight” is language that costs us something - even when it works. Especially when it works. Because the wins that feel free in the moment are often the ones you pay for later.

Eventually, when you need the power of others, they remember how power was used by you.

For paid subscribers, I wanted to do something different. I am breaking down 6 direct passages from The Art of the Deal that map flawlessly to this week’s geopolitical chaos.

Read more

Since Operation Epic Fury began, Israel has conducted a series of strikes that raise a question most people aren’t asking carefully enough.

They struck South Pars - the largest natural gas deposit on earth.

They released evacuation maps warning civilians near pharmaceutical companies in Tehran’s Vardavard district - and then struck them.

After the gas field strike, Trump posted on Truth Social that “the United States knew nothing about this particular attack,” and described Israel as having “violently lashed out out of anger.”

Taken at face value, these are not the words of a president whose ally is executing a shared playbook.

And yet, the public conversation about Israel’s role in this war is stuck between two caricatures.

On one end: Israel is the invisible hand behind everything, and the war is really about them, and America is controlled by Israel.

On the other: any criticism of Israel is disloyalty to an ally, and their interests are indistinguishable from ours.

Both positions are lazy. And they’re preventing a conversation that Americans need to have.

Israel and the U.S. share most of the same goals in Iran.

They do not share all of them.

And the gap between “most” and “all” is where potential problems live.

America’s goals

On March 2nd, Trump stated four objectives:

1. Destroy Iran’s missile capabilities

2. Annihilate their navy

3. Remove their support for terrorists like Hamas

4. Make sure they can never get a nuke

He restated these same objectives in his prime-time address on April 1st, and added: “Regime change was not our goal. But regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death.”

The leadership of the Islamic Republic has been decimated - Khamenei is dead, dozens of senior officials are dead. But the regime itself is still in place. Its old leadership isn’t.

But Trump’s framing reveals something important: he wants to be able to claim credit for regime change without committing to it as an objective.

Every American president since Carter has wanted the Islamic Republic gone.

But wanting regime change and making it a strategic objective you commit resources to are fundamentally different things.

I can want to run a marathon without training for one.

Wanting is free. Objectives cost something.

What Israel is doing and why

Israel’s objectives cost something too - and they’re willing to pay more than we are.

Netanyahu has made it clear that he’s not just wishing for regime change. He’s prioritizing it as an objective:

• February 28, day one of the war: “This will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to rid themselves of the yoke of tyranny.”

• March 12 press conference: “We are creating the optimal conditions for a toppling of the regime.”

• Same press conference: Israel has “an organized plan with many surprises to destabilize the regime, to enable change.”

Regime change is not a wish for him, it’s a commitment.

And that distinction - between wanting something and building a plan to achieve it - is where American and Israeli interests diverge.

Israel’s perspective

As mentioned - there is a gap between American and Israeli interests. This is normal - alliances are built on aligned, not identical, interests.

Understanding what those interests are, how they diverge, and what the rational implications of that divergence are, helps us immunize our minds against excessive conspiracism on one extreme, and naivete on the other.

So to understand the gap, let’s examine Israel’s interests by constructing a good faith argument, or “steelman” of their perspective.

To be clear - I’m not interested in telling Israel what to do. They live next door to a regime that has promised to destroy them. Their security calculus is their own.

I’m also not Israeli, and thus have a limited understanding of their perspective, so this will be incomplete.

But at minimum it will be a demonstration of what careful, critical thinking looks like, rather than the hysteria we see on social media.

The South Pars gas field strike. Israel’s interests:

1. Cut Iran’s energy revenue

2. Starve the regime of cash,

3. Accelerate its collapse.

   1. South Pars supplies roughly 70% of Iran’s domestic gas production. Striking it cripples the economy and creates the kind of internal pressure that could contribute to regime collapse.

This is a legitimate strategic argument - for Israel.

There is mixed reporting on whether the U.S. was on board with the strikes - Israel said the U.S. was aware, a Department of War official said they were aware, but Trump himself called it unauthorized.

Someone is either lying or misinformed, but let’s take Trump’s public statement at face value, because at minimum it’s useful for thinking about where America and Israel’s priorities diverge.

Iran retaliated by striking Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which shares the same geological formation as the site Israel struck, taking out 17% of Qatar’s liquid natural gas capacity.

Analysts estimate it will take 3-5 years to repair - a significant blow to global energy markets.

Oil surged past $110.

An ally’s action triggered retaliation against another ally and spiked costs for American consumers.

It also risks alienating the Iranian people - many of whom support American-Israeli action.

Attacking an energy source that civilians and militants rely on is harder to stomach for an already suffering people than just targeting military infrastructure.

The pharmaceutical strikes.

Israel released aerial evacuation maps warning civilians near pharmaceutical companies in Tehran’s Vardavard district before striking them. The evacuation maps confirm intent - this was likely not collateral damage.

The steelman of the Israeli perspective is that these facilities might be dual-use - both for civilian and military purposes.

Pharmaceutical production can involve chemical precursors relevant to weapons programs.

So from the Israeli perspective - they may have degraded a potential chemical weapons capability while minimizing civilian harm.

But which of Trump’s four objectives does bombing a pharmaceutical company serve?

• It doesn’t destroy missiles.

• It doesn’t sink ships.

• It doesn’t defund proxies.

• It doesn’t prevent a nuclear weapon.

What it does is degrade Iran’s ability to function as a society - which serves regime change, not America’s stated goals.

This is the pattern. Actions that make sense under a regime-change objective but don’t map onto any of the four objectives America has stated.

The risk calculus

Here’s what I think both critics and defenders of Israel miss.

The critics say Israel is “dragging us into war” or “controlling America.” This gives Israel far too much credit and America far too little. The United States is the most powerful country on earth. We supply a large portion of Israel’s weapons, and give them diplomatic cover.

If Israel is doing things we don’t want, it’s not because they’re controlling us - it’s because we’re allowing it. We have more power in the dynamic.

The question is whether we’re clear-eyed enough to use it.

The defenders say Israel’s interests and ours are identical, and any daylight between us weakens both. The error of this thinking is that it makes American interests subordinate to Israeli ones by default.

Our interests overlap substantially. But overlap is not identity.

A doctor and a patient both want the patient healthy, but the patient might want painkillers the doctor won’t prescribe.

The patient will always have a higher tolerance for risk, because they are the one suffering the most.

The real framework is simpler than either side admits. Israel and the United States are allies with overlapping but non-identical interests, operating under different threat perceptions, with different risk tolerances, pursuing different levels of ambition in the same theater.

On the four objectives Trump stated, we’re aligned.

On regime change, we’re not. And every Israeli action that serves the fifth goal at the expense of the first four is an action that costs the United States - in credibility, in diplomatic leverage, in oil prices, in allies like Qatar taking damage they didn’t sign up for.

Mind the gap

I’m not interested in opining on what Israel should do right now. They live next door to a regime that has promised to destroy them. Their security calculus is their own.

But as an American, my concern is American interests.

And there is a category of Israeli action in this war - targeting civilian infrastructure and striking energy facilities that trigger retaliation against our own allies, specifically for regime change - that falls outside the objectives our president stated and restated.

That is the gap that Americans should mind.

Now let’s explore what may be going on in Trump’s mind.

What Trump actually thinks

This is the question nobody can answer with certainty, but it matters more than almost anything else in determining how this war ends.

Read more

If you watched my video, you saw what happened a few weeks ago outside Gracie Mansion in New York City.

A right-wing influencer brought a cooked pig during Ramadan to antagonize the city’s first Muslim mayor.

Counter-protesters showed up to call them Nazis.

And then two young men inspired by ISIS threw homemade bombs into the crowd.

That situation captures, in miniature, everything that’s broken about how the West talks about Islam.

At the extreme, the Right is cruel - they provoke in ways that alienate the very people they need.

At the extreme, the Left is crazy - they confuse priorities in ways that blind them to the threats to everyone.

And actual extremists exploit the chaos.

I want to go deeper on this than I did in the video. But I also want to be clear about what this essay is and isn’t.

This is not about whether Islam is fundamentally a religion of war or peace. I’m not a religious scholar and I’m not going to pretend to be.

This is not about the cultural question whether Western and Islamic values are better, whether immigration is too high, whether the character of American or British society is being changed for better or worse.

Those are real discussions that deserve their own treatment.

I’m sidestepping them here on purpose.

What this essay is about is something much simpler. Something we should all be able to agree on:

Political violence is completely unacceptable in Western democracies. And there is a significant contingent of radicals who interpret Islam in a way that advocates for turning Western countries into religious states, and condones violence against civilians.

That contingent is larger than most Westerners realize. And we can’t seem to talk about it honestly.

That’s what I want to address.

The Concern That Gets Buried in Noise

The right has concerns about Islam. Some of those concerns are legitimate.

Some are legitimate concerns expressed in bigoted ways, which is maybe the worst combination because it discredits the concern itself.

The left has concerns too — about Islamophobia, about the demonization of an entire faith community, about vulnerable people being targeted for their religion. Those concerns are also legitimate.

But here’s what happens: the left’s concern about bigotry and the right’s concern about Islam crash into each other so violently that neither side can see clearly.

The left is so focused on protecting Muslims from bigotry that they miss the extremists exploiting their protection.

The right is so focused on the threat of Islam that they antagonize the peaceful majority who are their best allies against that very threat.

And what gets buried in all that noise is the thing that actually matters most: people are being killed.

In the last six months, ISIS-inspired attackers have struck in New Orleans, Austin, Bondi Beach, and outside the mayor’s mansion in New York. Nine of the ten deadliest terrorist organizations in the world are Islamist. This is not a fringe phenomenon. And we can’t address it if we can’t even name it.

Islamism Is Not Fringe

Here’s what I need people to understand: the concern about radical Islam is not about a handful of extremists hiding in caves. Islamism — the political project of imposing religious governance — is a substantial movement within the global Muslim community.

An analysis of forty years of parliamentary elections in Muslim-majority countries found that Islamist parties carried a median of about 15% of the vote. Some estimates put the true proportion of Islamists worldwide at closer to 20%.

But the vote share is actually the less alarming number.

The Pew Research Center — the gold standard for this kind of data — surveyed over 38,000 Muslims across 39 countries.

They found that in the Middle East and North Africa, 74% of Muslims favor making sharia the official law of the land. In South Asia, 84%. In Southeast Asia, 77%. A January 2025 Pew update confirmed this pattern holds: roughly nine in ten Muslims in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia favor a legal system in which Muslims are bound by Islamic law.

Now, “sharia” means different things to different people. Some interpret it as personal moral guidance.

But when you look at poll results on the specific implementations — killing adulterers, cutting off the hands of thieves, executing people who leave Islam — the support is much higher than most Westerners would expect or find tolerable.

Compare this to any other major religion. Christian nationalism exists in America, but it polls in the single digits as a political movement. There is no equivalent movement within Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism that commands anywhere near this level of support for religious governance.

What’s Happening Across the Pond

If you want to understand why reasonable people are concerned — look at Britain.

The most common baby name in England is now Muhammad.

That fact alone isn’t a problem. But it signals a demographic shift that is happening fast, and what’s coming with that shift is what concerns people.

In Britain, a 2006 study found that 30% of British Muslims wanted to live under sharia law. 28% wanted Britain to become an Islamic state. And 31% of younger British Muslims endorsed or excused the July 7 London bombings that killed 52 people — compared with just 14% of those over 45.

The generational trend is going the wrong direction. The problem is getting worse among exactly the people who will shape the future.

Maajid Nawaz — a former Islamist who founded the counter-extremism organization Quilliam — puts it bluntly.

His former Islamist group didn’t exist in Pakistan until it was exported there from Britain.

When a Muslim reformer based in London is telling you this, maybe the West should listen.

Global Islam and American Islam Are Not the Same

Now — this is important, and it’s not something I’m saying to be diplomatic. It’s something I’m saying because it’s true and it’s strategically essential.

The global Muslim community and the American Muslim community are not the same thing.

The roughly four million Muslims in America are self-selecting into a system that is fundamentally incompatible with sharia law. They chose to live in a country with separation of church and state. A country with equal rights for men and women. A country where you can leave your religion without being killed for it. The vast majority of American Muslims are peaceful, productive Americans.

When you have four million members of a religious group and you’re concerned about extremists within that broader religious community, it makes sense to form an alliance with the people who are in good standing — so they can help identify and ostracize the people who are not. You don’t win this fight by alienating your best allies.

The concern — and it’s a legitimate one — is about what happens at scale. People look across the Atlantic at England and they see what a larger demographic shift has produced. That concern is understandable. But the solution is not to treat the four million who are already here as the enemy. The solution is to work with them against the actual enemy.

So we have a real problem. Islamism is not fringe. The data is clear. The trend among young Muslims in the West is going the wrong direction. Islamist ideas are contaminating Western universities.

But we also have four million American Muslims who chose this system and are our best allies against the very threat we’re worried about.

So how are we screwing this up?

Both sides are making the problem worse in ways that are almost tragically predictable.

And to be clear — these failures are not equal. Bringing a pig to a protest is ugly. Failing to identify and confront an ideology that is killing people is dangerous.

The left’s blind spot is the more consequential failure at present.

But as in every relationship - it’s important for both sides to have self-awareness, even if they’re concerned the other side is the bigger problem.

The left is doing something specific that makes us all less safe. The right is doing something specific that makes the shared problem solving difficult.

And until both sides can see their own blind spots, we’re going to keep having the same unproductive conversation while people die.

Now let’s talk about what those blind spots are, and how to reveal them.

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On Tuesday, Joe Kent - the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center - resigned, posting a letter to President Trump on X.

His core claims: Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, the war was started due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby, and the administration was deceived into action by an Israeli misinformation campaign.

Within hours, the letter had millions of views. Tucker Carlson gave him a two-hour interview. Anti-war voices on the left and right celebrated it. “I knew it,” people said. “Finally, someone on the inside confirmed what we’ve all been thinking.”

I get why this went viral.

Kent isn’t some random guy on the internet. He was the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center - the president’s principal counterterrorism adviser. He’s a retired Green Beret. A former CIA paramilitary officer. Eleven combat deployments.

When someone with that résumé and that title says something, people take it more seriously. And they should. Of course you’re going to give more weight to a claim from the Director of Counterterrorism than from a stranger in your comments section.

But here’s where clear thinking matters.

Authority is a complement to evidence. It is not a substitute for it.

Now let’s examine his letter to see what’s going on.

-----

Read Kent’s resignation letter.

Here’s what you’ll find: a lot of strong opinions, stated emphatically, as if they’re obvious. What you won’t find is evidence.

The only verifiable fact in the letter is that we are at war. Everything else - that Iran posed no imminent threat, that Israel deceived Trump, that this is Iraq all over again - is opinion.

Those opinions might be right. But we shouldn’t evaluate whether they’re right based on whether they fit our current view of the world. We should evaluate them based on whether there is evidence.

Take his central claim: this war is about Israel.

I’m not going to pretend Israel has no influence here. Of course they do. But influence is a spectrum. How much are we talking about? 1%? 10%? 50%? 100%? Kent states it as if it’s simply about Israel - without acknowledging any of the other reasons why Iran might be a threat independent of Israel.

Every single president for the last two decades has considered Iran a nuclear threat. They’ve disagreed on methodology - Obama tried the JCPOA, Biden tried sanctions, Trump is bombing them - but the underlying assessment that a nuclear Iran is dangerous has not changed across administrations, across parties, across intelligence agencies.

You can disagree on methodology.

You can argue there were better options than war. You can argue we should have exhausted diplomacy first.

Those are legitimate debates.

But Kent doesn’t make those arguments. He skips past all of that and goes straight to: it’s Israel’s fault.

This is called a strawman.

I should also note context that emerged after the resignation.

According to Fox News, Semafor, Axios, NBC, CBS, and the AP, Kent had been under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information - and that investigation predated his resignation by months. According to administration officials, he had been cut out of presidential intelligence briefings months ago. It’s also worth noting that in 2020, after the Soleimani strike, Kent publicly urged the administration to “wipe Iran’s ballistic capability out” - which is essentially what Trump is now doing.

Does that mean his claims are wrong? No. Could Trump just be retaliating? Yes. We’ll see what details come out about the timing of the investigation in the coming days.

But it’s context that matters when evaluating a source’s credibility and motivation, and most people who shared the letter never saw it. That’s the problem with authority-based reasoning - it asks you to trust the messenger instead of examining the message.

Then there’s the word “imminent.”

Kent says Iran posed no imminent threat. What does imminent mean? Days? Weeks? Years?

Here’s what we know. As of June 2025, Iran had stockpiled 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity - enough for multiple nuclear weapons if enriched further to 90%. The IAEA said this level of enrichment has “no civilian justification whatsoever.” Going from 60% to 90% takes weeks, not years.

After that, it’s much harder to track what they do — especially if they move operations underground.

Iran’s parliament - 71 members of it - formally called for changing the country’s nuclear doctrine to permit weapons. Their intelligence minister said a “cornered cat may behave differently.” Their Supreme Leader’s own fatwa against nukes was never even written down - it was oral, never listed on his website alongside his other fatwas, and after his death, his successor’s first public letter didn’t mention the nuclear program at all.

Fast forward to recent months: Iran was rapidly replenishing its conventional missile stockpile.

The logic here matters: if Iran rebuilds enough missiles, it becomes exponentially harder to take military action against their nuclear program - because now they can retaliate at scale against the entire region.

Rubio has been quite clear about this reasoning. You don’t have to agree that it justifies war.

But we should at least know the argument exists before dismissing it.

Is that imminent? Reasonable people can disagree. But it’s not nothing. And stating “no imminent threat” as if it’s self-evident, without engaging with any of this, is not the mark of someone making a rigorous case. It’s the mark of someone making a persuasive one.

But there's something deeper going on here - a blind spot I keep seeing on both the left and the right - and it’s about the nature of radical Islam.

The Western Mind Doesn’t Understand Radical Islamists

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You know what happens when someone says “Trump” in a room full of people?

Half the room gets emotional and reactive.

Whatever comes next gets filtered through years of accumulated feelings about Trump - good or bad - and the actual substance of the conversation disappears.

The word “Israel” does the same thing.

The moment rumors of the strikes on Iran began and Israel got implicated, the conversation collapsed.

Rather than having a sophisticated conversation about the history of U.S.-Iranian relations since 1953, nuclear enrichment, the theological nature of the Islamic Republic, the nuclear deal that Obama made and Trump repealed - the entire discussion became about one question: is this Israel’s war?

Concerns about Israel’s involvement are well-founded.

But Israel has become a cognitive trigger that prevents people from seeing the rest of the picture across myriad topics - 9/11, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Epstein files, and now Iran.

This article goes deeper into what I think is actually going on - not just with Iran, but with how we think about Israel more broadly.

Let’s Start With Honesty

There are legitimate reasons people are suspicious of Israel’s influence on American foreign policy.

AIPAC is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington. Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than almost any other country.

When Congress considered an antisemitism bill that would have effectively criminalized certain criticisms of Israel, that was an overreach - and people were right to push back on it.

Israel is a small country that exerts influence well beyond its size, and asking whether that’s proportionate is a fair question.

I commented on this honestly when Kanye’s rant about Jews brought it into the spotlight - the influence is real, and pretending it isn't helps no one.

But think of it as a scale. If Israel has level 10 power but exerts level 20 influence, that's a legitimate conversation about proportionality.

Some of the voices dominating this debate aren't having that conversation.

They're claiming Israel has level 100 control - that the only reason we're at war is because Israel wanted it.

This is appealing because it gives us a simple, universalizable explanation for everything we don’t like.

And it also causes us to miss things.

The Rubio Clip: A Case Study

Here’s a perfect example.

A clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated widely after the strikes. In it, he acknowledged that Israel’s actions influenced the timing of the U.S. operation. Anti-war voices seized on it immediately: “See? Rubio admitted it. Israel controls American foreign policy.”

But as people tend to do when they’re trying to create a narrative, they didn’t include context in the rest of his explanation, which came literally seconds later.

In the full context, Rubio laid out a detailed case for why the strikes were independently justified - the conventional missile buildup (over 100 per month), the nuclear enrichment timeline, the approaching point where military action would become too costly to attempt. His explicit conclusion: this had to happen regardless.

So here’s the situation Rubio was actually describing:

1. The U.S. knew Israel intended to strike Iran preemptively.

2. They also knew that if Israel struck first, Iran would retaliate - not just against Israel, but against American bases across the region.

3. American servicemembers would die.

That leaves two options.

1. You can let Israel attack first, wait for Americans to get killed in the retaliation, and then respond.

2. Or you can act preemptively alongside your ally, knowing you were going to do this anyway, and protect American lives in the process.

If you’re the president, which do you choose?

Most people don’t understand why this war is happening, and that’s a failure of the Trump administration, and the media.

Humans don’t like uncertainty.

So “Israel controls America” narrative is a satisfying, simple narrative that gives people a sense of certainty.

The reality is messier: two allied countries sharing an enemy, coordinating timing because that’s what allies do, with each acting in their own national interest.

You can call that problematic. But calling it puppet mastery requires ignoring the full picture - which is exactly what the partial clip was designed to help you do.

This is what I mean when I say Israel breaks people’s brains. The initial clip feeds people’s confirmation bias, so they don’t think to question “is there more context", even though that’s exactly what they’d look for if someone they agreed with was being attacked by someone they dislike.

Israel’s influence on American foreign policy deserves scrutiny and some of the loudest voices “scrutinizing” it are doing something else entirely - using Israel as a universal explanation that lets them skip the work of understanding complex situations, but makes people feel validated - like they have insider knowledge on the secrets of the world - unlike everyone else, who is a sheep, of course.

That strategy is so effective because it leverages tribalism, emotionality, confirmation bias, and social media dysfunction - the perfect storm of confusion.

Now let’s talk about how to see through it.

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A few weeks ago, Billie Eilish said America is “stolen land.”

I had some thoughts.

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Two weeks apart. Two politicians. Two racial controversies.

Both went viral.

Both generated immediate outrage.

Both were reported inaccurately.

And both reveal something about us that we’d rather not see.

This is a story about Trump. And Newsom. But mostly, it’s a story about humans.

Act One: The Ape Video

A few weeks ago, a headline swept across social media:

“Trump posts racist video depicting the Obamas as monkeys to his Truth Social account.”

If you saw that headline — and tens of millions of people did — what did you think?

If you’re on the left, you probably thought: finally. Incontrovertible proof. The mask is off.

If you’re on the right, you probably thought: here we go again. Another hoax.

Both reactions happened before anyone watched the video.

Here’s what actually happened.

Trump’s account posted a 62-second video. The video was about the 2020 election — the same allegation Trump has been making for five years. Nothing new. Nothing unusual.

But embedded in that 62-second video was a one-second frame from a completely different video. A Lion King-style animation depicting various politicians as animals. Trump as a lion. Biden as a baboon. Hakeem Jeffries as something else. And the Obamas as monkeys.

One second. Out of sixty-two.

Here are the last 15 seconds of the video so you can see what I mean.

It looks like whoever screen-recorded the 2020 Election video auto-advanced to the Lion King video in their X feed and did not cut it out.

We don’t know why they didn’t cut it out - but that’s what happened.

Now. Watch what happens when you add context one layer at a time.

1. Trump posted a picture of the Obamas as monkeys. What do you think?

2. Actually, it was a video. Does that change anything?

3. Actually, it was one frame in a 62-second video. What now?

4. Actually, the rest of the video has nothing to do with the Obamas, monkeys, or animals at all. Now what?

5. Actually, the frame appears to have been included accidentally. And now?

6. Actually, Trump’s claiming that he only saw the first part of a video and it was posted by a staffer. And by the way, over 60 posts went out that night - so perhaps that 1 second frame was missed in the flurry of activity. How about now?

Each layer of context shifts the picture. Not completely — we don’t know for certain it was an accident. But enough to introduce doubt. Enough to ask: before we convict, did we look at the evidence?

Most people didn’t. In this short-form, hot take driven attention economy, most people decided the moment they heard the headline.

To be clear: you can know all of this context and still think Trump did something wrong.

And I’d agree with you.

A president’s social media account posted a frame depicting a black former president and first lady as monkeys.

Whether it was intentional or not, Trump is responsible for what goes out under his name.

The appropriate response was acknowledgment, an apology, and accountability. That didn’t happen. Instead, we got defensiveness and defiance from him and press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

But here’s the key point: the additional context doesn’t determine whether something was wrong. It determines how wrong.

Without context, this is a 10 out of 10 — a president deliberately posting racist propaganda. With context, it’s closer to a 5 — a serious failure of accountability from a team that should have caught a careless mistake.

Those are very different things. And conflating them doesn’t make you more anti-racist. It just makes you less accurate.

There’s a psychological reason most people never got that far. It’s called anchoring bias.

The Anchor

Anchoring bias is a cognitive tendency to over-rely on the first piece of information you encounter.

The first headline becomes the anchor. Every subsequent piece of information gets measured against it — not evaluated independently.

This is why falsehoods are so dangerous. Not just because they spread fast, but because they arrive first. And once the anchor is set, you’re not just fighting for the truth. You’re fighting against the resistance of people who’ve already made up their minds.

Changing a formed belief is ego-threatening. It requires admitting you were wrong. It can bring up shame, embarrassment, the uncomfortable feeling of having been fooled.

So people don’t change their minds. They defend their anchor. They look for new evidence to support it. And when someone points out contradicting evidence, they attack the messenger.

You’re biased. You’re a grifter. You’re carrying water for racists.

It’s easier than being wrong.

I saw this play out in real time with the Trump video. By the time I posted context, the world had already decided. And pointing out the truth didn’t change some minds — it made me a target.

Act Two: The SAT Score

Last Sunday, another headline swept across social media:

“Gov. Newsom to a black crowd in GA: ‘I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read.’”

If you saw that headline — and tens of millions of people did — what did you think?

If you’re on the right, you probably thought: finally. Incontrovertible proof. Democrats are the real racists.

If you’re on the left, you probably thought: here we go again. Conservative manufactured outrage.

Both reactions happened before anyone watched the video.

Here’s what actually happened.

Gavin Newsom was on a book tour in Atlanta. His book is a memoir — about growing up, about struggling, about dyslexia. He was on stage at the Rialto Center for the Arts, in conversation with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, in front of a ticketed audience that paid $45 to $100 per seat.

When asked what he wanted readers to take from the book, he said:

“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you — I’m like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. You’ve never seen me read a speech, because I cannot read a speech.”

The viral clip framed this as Newsom telling a black crowd he’s just like them because he can’t read.

Now. Let’s add context one layer at a time.

Newsom told a black crowd he can’t read. What do you think?

Actually, he said he can’t read a speech. Does that change anything?

Actually, he’s been publicly open about having dyslexia for years — and the entire book tour is about that struggle. What now?

Actually, the crowd wasn’t even black. Multiple videos from attendees, including footage show a diverse audience that appears majority white. The mainstream media journalist that called it “predominantly black” has since issued a correction. Now what?

Each layer of context shifts the picture.

But let’s steelman (i.e. give the best argument for) the most reasonable objection: okay, maybe he wasn’t talking to a black crowd, but he was talking to a black mayor, and he was looking at him when he said it.

Sure. You can say that. But any experienced speaker knows that when you’re being interviewed by a host, you naturally alternate between looking at your host and looking at the crowd. That’s not talking down to someone — that’s basic public speaking. The entire 30-minute conversation between Gavin and Mayor Dickens followed that pattern.

And even if we grant that he was speaking directly to Mayor Dickens — he wasn’t implying the mayor can’t read. Gavin was saying he can’t read a speech. Because of his dyslexia. That’s humility, not condescension on the basis of race.

Fine, but he was pandering.

Maybe.

Politicians pander. All of them. But pandering means being inauthentic — saying something to seem relatable that you don’t actually mean.

That’s a different category of wrong than implying black people are unintelligent. One is a 3 out of 10. The other is much worse.

Treating them as the same isn’t principled.

This is why it’s important to sit down and analyze a data point before we condemn people, rather than just retrofitting the point to a pattern.

Points sometimes match a pattern. Sometimes they don’t.

And sometimes the pattern itself is poorly founded.

When you skip examining the point and go straight to fitting it into your existing pattern, you are more susceptible to emotions and tribe dictating your decisions, rather than your logic.

To be clear, I'm not arguing either of these men is above criticism. I'm arguing these specific incidents were reported inaccurately and used as weapons rather than examined as evidence.

So why does this keep happening? And more importantly — what do we do about it?

That’s what I get into below for paid subscribers. Specifically: why the burden of proof always unfairly falls on the person trying to correct misinformation rather than the person spreading it, why even well-meaning people attack the messenger instead of updating their beliefs, and what it actually looks like to break this pattern — in your own thinking, your own conversations, and your own media consumption.

If you’ve ever wondered why pointing out the truth seems to make things worse — that’s exactly what we’re going to unpack.

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But I didn’t just want to theorize about miseducation - I wanted to verify it for myself.

So I went to UCLA - one of the top public universities in America - and asked students four questions about slavery:

• When did it start?

• Who started it?

• How did Europeans get African slaves?

• Who led the first global abolition movement?

The results were better than I feared, but worse than I’d hoped.

Over 25% thought slavery started in America or Europe. Most didn’t know that Africans sold other Africans to Europeans - they assumed Europeans conquered the continent primarily by force.

Only one student could name the British Empire as the leader of abolition.

I don’t blame them. I didn’t know these facts until a few years ago either.

The American education system simply doesn’t teach this. Instead - as one student revealed - social media is filling in the gap.

This is how a selective history creates a selective morality. When you only teach the sins, you create shame. When you hide the redemption, you breed resentment.

Here’s a 6-minute highlight (and lowlight) reel of my conversations:

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