Social Studies

Pedro Gonzalez recently published a very smart essay on art and the New Right at The Metropolitan Review, a Substack I’d never heard of but to which I have now become an unpaid subscriber. Pedro’s argument, distilled to the point of doing it a disservice, is that right-wing art sucks, and for the same reason that left-wing art sucks: because politics makes art terrible.

This isn’t a “response” to Pedro in the sense of arguing with his thesis, since I enthusiastically agree with it. But I have a lot of thoughts on this subject, as I, like Pedro, have a foot in each of these two worlds.

Before I was a journalist I was a left-wing political activist by profession. About a decade into my career I shifted from engaging in politics to writing about them instead. The reason was simple: I enjoy writing and I don’t particularly enjoy protesting and organizing.

So why was I an activist in the first place? If you had asked me that question 15 years ago I probably would have subjected you to a lengthy discourse about power and inequality, but in retrospect it really came down to two things: I believed that left-wing politics were a moral obligation, and collective action inspired me. As I got older I realized I didn’t like doing it and didn’t have any particular talent at it, either. Those are both very good reasons for changing careers, but I nevertheless felt selfish for doing so. I hadn’t found a way around that moral obligation part.

Because of this residual sense of moral obligation — and by that I mean guilt — I made the mistake a lot of journalists make: I chose to think of my new profession as a mission instead of a craft. Activism is tedious work and I didn’t want to do it anymore, but I still needed to believe I was purifying my soul by creating political change in the world. As a journalist, I could bring public attention to the things I cared about without the burden of the activist work ethic and lifestyle. I could pretend to have my cake and eat it, too.

Even at the time, I didn’t actually believe this act was real. But I wanted to believe it was, so I tried to cover topics and write stories that would expose the injustices of the world and elevate the noble work of the activist heroes who were combating them. For obvious reasons, the activists were happy to play along. It was a symbiotic relationship, like that between a bee and a flower.

It was fake adversarial journalism. It’s not that I did sloppy work — I’m still proud of a lot of that early stuff — but my self-assigned function was to write propaganda for non-profit advocacy groups I believed in. I wasn’t alone in doing this. My perception of my professional role was, I think, in the American media landscape, unremarkable. This is what most reporters were up to. Eventually I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t real journalism.

This recognition dawned on me slowly, but it was impossible to deny after Covid hit. Suddenly working in my industry felt like working for the Politburo. There was a rigid expectation of conformity from professional peers and a complete intolerance of dissent. If you entertained the lab leak theory you were racist. If you questioned the wisdom of defunding the police you were racist. If you humanized Trump voters you were racist. If you stuck to the assigned party line, and, better yet, led some witch hunts against a few heretics, your career might advance rapidly. Reporters were arguing explicitly for the kind of journalism I had practiced only with a sense of embarrassment — the kind that puts one’s political agenda first and everything else a distant second. It was self-destructive, but more than that, it was pathetic.

Journalism isn’t art, but it’s part of the same larger industrial apparatus of cultural production. It recruits from the same middle-class, urban, college-educated pool of talent. The “creators” who populate both fields share many of the same prejudices and predilections. There is the same sense of moral obligation to a certain kind of politics, the same self-confidence in one’s enlightened worldview, the same disdain for the same disfavored people.

And so politics corrupts art in the same way it corrupts journalism. Whether you’re a journalist or an artist, if you bow to its demands, your vocation becomes your moral purpose and your craft becomes propaganda. If you’re a novelist or a filmmaker, your plots become moral fables and your characters become two-dimensional stand-ins for various political constituencies. If you’re a painter or a sculptor your work becomes a mere vehicle for the lessons you wish to impart to an amorphous, less enlightened public. It becomes cynical and boring, which may not be the enemy of journalism, but it certainly is of art.

It doesn’t help that art and politics (and journalism) share the same incentive structure. If you’re a new or unknown entrant to either profession, the quickest path to attaining professional recognition is to collect some scalps. If you’re an artist, you turn your anonymity into an advantage by presenting it as a badge of your authenticity, and casting the fame and commercial success of your established incumbent rivals as evidence of their corruption. If you’re a revolutionary, you stake out positions more radical than your mainstream rivals are politically capable of embracing — the easier to condemn them as hopelessly compromised by power. The point is to attack the legitimacy of the consecrated leaders in your profession to position yourself as their more worthy successor. In both fields there is an ever-present gravitational pull upon the margins toward the avant-garde.

The two fields flow in and out of each other. Novelists, filmmakers, songwriters and conceptual artists naturally borrow from the arsenal of radical politics to establish their standing as rebels in the artistic field. Political radicals likewise have a convenient affinity for art that codes as subversive. These cultural assets are fungible. If you have a professional interest in cultivating an image that distinguishes you from the establishment, you’ll use whatever’s within reach.

We’ve become accustomed to thinking of this dynamic as a left-wing phenomenon only because we became accustomed by the experience of the twentieth century to thinking of the left as the cultural transgressors against a relatively more conservative political and cultural establishment. But that paradigm came apart years ago. Once left-wing political radicalism was embraced by every establishment figure from Kamala Harris to PepsiCo, it was no longer possible to subvert anything from the left. Suddenly it was the edgelord right, with their “ironic” swastikas and Kekistan flags, that had the prudes of the establishment clutching their pearls. Now it’s wearing a MAGA hat that confers transgressor status, and early adapters from Kanye West to Dimes Square scenesters have seized the opportunity.

But now that the right is the political establishment and billionaire tech tycoons are reinventing themselves as anti-woke, the subversive pose of the avant-garde right is as ridiculous as the Nike-endorsed revolutionary politics of police abolitionists. That’s why Babylon Bee is so unfunny and the Daily Wire has lost every shred of edginess and now just seems mean. It’s all transparently fake and nobody buys it except those who have an interest in pretending to.

Lately I’ve been trying my hand at writing a novel. I was going to write a book of commercial nonfiction but I don’t really have anything to say anymore. I don’t know exactly where a book by me would fall in the left versus right political marketplace, but wherever it ended up I suspect it would be cynical and derivative, because that’s what most books about politics and policy are now, in my jaded opinion. I find myself even reading far less about current events these days. When I read nonfiction it’s not about what’s happening now but what happened 250 or a thousand years ago. The book I just finished was about the War of Independence, which was relatively recent history for my tastes. But mostly I read fiction. I never used to read novels; now I can’t stop. I devoured three Cormac McCarthy books in a month and a half. I’m now reading my first Stephen King novel. Why did I not do this decades ago?

I actually know the answer to that question. When I read books about politics and policy it’s largely to accumulate knowledge, which can be deployed as cultural capital in the daily struggle of professional and social status competition. It’s part of the endless quest for recognition, which is at its starkest in the world of politics, where the objective is power. For a politician, that means, more or less, the raw power of state violence, which has been pacified by civilization into law. The more that journalists have become absorbed into the political field, the more they tend to seek a thinly veiled version of the same thing. Their professional objective becomes the accumulation of the symbolic power of mass opinion formation, which is another word for propaganda.

Art is different, and, in my opinion, better. We seek art — or at least I seek art — as a refuge from the Hobbesian muck of politics. At its least corrupt, art is not about power but about meaning. It’s about complicating our understanding of the world and thus enriching it, while politics is about reducing our worldview and, in the process, impoverishing it.

In his essay, Pedro discusses The Road, which is the best novel I’ve ever read. The world of The Road is Hobbesian in the extreme, but that’s not really what the story is about. It isn’t about good and evil, or about saving the world. It’s about the daily plight of human existence in a world without purpose, and it’s about the love between a father and his son. I wouldn’t want that story to be reduced to some stupid melodrama of oppressors and resisters, with a neat and tidy life lesson at the end. I don’t want art to cheapen the human experience. I want it to reflect its complexity and fullness.

I have a couple of Oakland pieces up today, one for locals and one for everyone.

For the San Francisco Standard, I gave Oakland’s new mayor, Barbara Lee, some advice she didn’t ask for on how to deliver for this disastrously misgoverned city. (This is the one for the locals.)

In the Free Press, I wrote about the Ballers, Oakland’s new independent league baseball team, which is providing some hope for a city that desperately needs it. (This one is for everybody.)

For those who care about non-Oakland topics, I highly recommend this grim analysis of the geopolitics of the Gaza genocide at this pivotal moment in the conflict, by my friend Murtaza Hussein:

Have a happy long weekend.

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I said my last post about Matt Taibbi would be my last post about Matt Taibbi. Turns out I was wrong. I have something more to say.

Matt wrote a truly outstanding essay 24 years ago. The whole thing is worth reading, not just for the points it makes about media propaganda but also for the masterful quality of its writing.

In it, Matt explained the Israel-Palestine conflict in as clear terms as any description I’ve seen:

But Palestinians have a very simple reason to hate Americans. Americans are supporting the occupation of their country by Israel. Israeli armed forces, the same people who are bulldozing neighborhoods and shooting into crowds, use American weapons— even American missiles. The United States is basically a colonial aggressor to most Palestinians, some 360,000 of which are living as refugees in Lebanon.

Things have obviously gotten somewhat more complicated and a great deal more violent since October 7, 2023. But not that much more complicated. The occupation is still the occupation. The Palestinians are still stateless. And now they’re being ethnically cleansed in Gaza and as we lose our free speech rights here in America. The factor that has changed is that there was a horrific massacre and mass kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and civilians by Hamas which was the proximate cause of Israel’s current genocidal military campaign. Israel is now exacting its revenge. These are the basic outlines of the situation today. This isn’t rocket science, or sophisticated financial instruments.

Yet this is Matt from a year ago, after being asked where he stands on Israel’s genocide in Gaza:

Israel Palestine is a story I have never liked to comment on . . . it’s a very, very complicated story with a lot of history and I don’t know anything about it.

There are things about this story that make me nervous and i feel like the first rule in medicine is “do no harm,” so if I don't say anything, I'm not doing any harm.

I don't want to talk about this thing, I just . . . don't.

I don't feel like I need to be in the middle of it . . . I just don't want to chime in.

And here’s Matt from yesterday:

I’m not on anybody’s side, don’t want to be.

Since I’m not going to be reporting from Gaza, what’s being demanded is that I provide commentary on a subject about which I know very little but the whole world already has Extremely Strong Opinions.

A younger Matt Taibbi didn’t show that this kind of hesitation or lack of confidence on this particular topic. What changed between 2001 and now? Has he become less knowledgable about the conflict in that nearly quarter century? Or have the incentives shifted?

Miss Rachel is not an expert on the Middle East, either. She’s never gone and reported from Gaza. My kids love her. They learn a lot from her. So could Matt.

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Matt Taibbi has every right and reason to come back at me for the piece I wrote about him last week. It wasn’t a nice piece, and it wasn’t meant to be. I questioned his integrity, because I think his integrity is questionable. I took a swipe at him, and in return, he called me “scum” and a “cunt.” Seems a little disproportionate to me, but whatever, I guess that’s his “gonzo” style.

There are obviously more important things happening in the world than a squabble between Matt and me, and I don’t want this to descend into kayfabe. But in the absence of any more important insights to share about the world this week, I’ll say a few brief words in response.

Matt accuses me of calling him a “money-grubbing coward.” I never used that phrase, but as long as he’s imputing it to me, I won’t refute it. Matt has made many millions off of his writing and reporting. Good for him: he worked for it, he’s talented at what he does, and nobody handed his readership to him. But to pretend that professional success in journalism does not beget self-censorship would be a very un-Taibbi like thing to do. Matt includes as an appendix to Hate, Inc. an interview he did with Noam Chomsky about Manufacturing Consent, a book whose entire premise is that journalists censor themselves to advance their careers. He devotes a whole chapter to the “assholes” John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, who he accuses of “making assloads of money being wrong about presidential politics” and whose expressed opinions about Trump, he suggests, are shaped by whether or not they have a book deal in play.

He’s probably right about all of those things. But when a very mild version of the same doubt is cast on him, it can only be the work of a conniving cunt.

Matt then lumps me in with his critic Eoin Higgins, who wrote a book about how Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald “sold out to conservative media,” and uses that feint as an opportunity to defend Glenn and himself against those slanderous charges. That’s quite a strawman to pivot to, since I never said a word of criticism about Glenn and in fact would hold him up as my moral counterexample to Matt. Glenn, like Matt, has made a heap of money off of his commentary and reporting. But that has never for a split second stopped him from criticizing Trump on free speech or Israel on its genocide, despite losing viewers and subscribers by the boatload for it.

I’m hardly the only one to notice Matt’s reluctance to take risks such as the ones Glenn takes on a daily basis. In fact, according to Matt, I’m “roughly the 6,000th” person to register the same complaints about him. If that’s true, then there’s a point where, if I were Matt, I might start wondering whether my thousands of critics might have a point.

Matt described me in his “ode” as “sort of a friend.” He used those words in the context of suggesting that I could have just picked up the phone and expressed my gripes with him directly. I don’t know that I would have described us as “friends,” even “sort of” — I’d say we were “friendly,” maybe “collegial.” But ok, yes, I do have his phone number and could have just called him instead of writing a public post about his hypocrisy.

But I find this criticism a little awkward coming from someone who has written entire books on the incestuous culture of professional journalism and how it corrupts their coverage. If I had written about Matt dissing me at a dinner party, then yes, my grievance could have been better handled by a private conversation. But that’s not my issue with him. My issue is his hypocritical silence around Trump’s threats to free speech. That’s an issue of public concern and one, I would argue, that absolutely should not be resolved quietly in a personal call between colleagues. We’re journalists. We should have these conversations in public. Just because we’re both labeled “heterodox” or “post-left” or whatever doesn’t mean that we should act like another of the professional media cliques Matt has made a career out of despising.

“Money-grubbing coward” seems pretty harsh, and again, those aren’t the words I would choose. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think they describe Matt at all. They’re too vulgar and overt. What Matt is caught up in is far subtler. But if we’re trading words like “cunt” around then I guess we’re way past subtlety and I’d note that the words Matt put in my mouth are no harsher than the ones he chose for Heilemann and Halperin when they were doing the same thing he is. Matt just doesn’t believe that the standards he sets for beltway reporters apply to him.

I don’t plan to write anything more on this subject. I doubt Matt will, either. I said my piece and he’s said his. We’ve probably torched whatever collegiality we once had and I honestly think that’s too bad. But it’s about the least important factor in this whole dust-up. Matt has a huge platform and a lot of influence over the public discourse. In a recent tirade against Ezra Klein and Ben Smith, he noted that they were probably “nice enough guys, but what the fuck?” I feel roughly that way about Matt.

There’s a certain kind of formerly dissident writer who pretends to believe that in the last few months nothing has fundamentally changed. Trump may have won, but the rest of the status order in America is basically the same. The same people and the same institutions hold the same power over the public discourse that they did before. The same media outlets and the same class of Americans wield the same influence they always have and deserve the same mockery and ridicule. The elites of last year are the elites of this one. There’s no reason to change the cast. The soundtrack is the same.

With all due respect to Matt Taibbi — and I know him, like him, have collaborated with him and do indeed have a good deal of respect for him — he is one of those writers. Though he is not the only one.

Matt has earned a reputation for being a free speech warrior. He spent the last four years exhaustively reporting on Biden’s online censorship regime. More than once, he testified before Congress about it. He was not only right to do so, but perhaps even brave, given the potential and actual backlash from his left-leaning fans, a creepy visit from the IRS, and a member of Congress threatening to imprison him. He also benefited from it, of course, building for himself a massive new audience of conservative readers and a lot of powerful allies in the Republican caucus. Those benefits were well-deserved — good, principled journalism should be rewarded with new readers and maybe even with new champions in Congress. But they appear to come with strings attached.

In contrast to his First Amendment advocacy under the Biden administration, Matt has spent the last few months saying almost nothing critical about Trump’s blitzkrieg on free speech, and writing quite a bit on why it’s either justified or no-big-deal-when-you-think-about-it. He shrugs off the Trump administration’s campaign to strong-arm colleges and universities into adopting anti-woke speech codes — it’s nothing new, just the shoe on the other foot. He thinks Harvard should have its non-profit status rescinded for the sake of its comeuppance; never mind that the threat is being wielded to suppress student protests and stifle academic dissent from those whose viewpoints the administration wants silenced. He defends Trump’s defunding of public media as long overdue, since NPR and PBS have long been cringey libtard state media.

You can consider these arguments on their own merits and find each of them defensible. But the overall pattern is a willful refusal to see the forest for the trees. What’s happening under Trump is not subtle or complicated. The administration itself is barely pretending not to be suppressing constitutionally-protected speech. It has demanded that disfavored departments at Columbia be forced into academic receivership. It has insisted on audits of departments at Harvard that “fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.” It has accused Harvard of teaching its students contempt for the free market system and used that charge to help justify cutting federal funds. Along with its blackmailing of law firms and its detention and deportation of international students who criticize Israel, it could hardly be more obvious that Trump’s goal is to make it unsafe to express political dissent in America. That isn’t hyperbole or some kind of ominous warning, it’s what’s plainly happening before our eyes. Matt was exquisitely attuned to the insidious erosion of free speech under the Biden administration’s secretive program of surveilling and flagging social media posts, but can barely acknowledge Trump ramrodding the First Amendment with all the artfulness of the Kool-Aid Man punching through a brick wall.

Matt is accustomed to criticisms like this from people like me. He has long been the black sheep of liberal journalists. His unpopularity with them began with Russiagate, when he took a fact-based and principled stand against the conspiracy theories that had infected the brains of half of Congress and nearly all of the establishment media. Left-leaning readers badgered him endlessly to balance his criticisms of Democrats and the press with the occasional tirade against Trump. Matt’s consistent response was that journalism is not activism, and that almost every national reporter in America was doing nothing but inveighing against Trump — what was the value of piling on other than to enforce groupthink?

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Matt was right. But that was then, and this is now. Things have changed quite a bit over the last few months, but Matt seems loath to admit it. Doing so would surely alienate a significant portion of his new readers and allies. His reluctance to cross that line has led him to continue portraying his habitual handwaving away of Trump’s authoritarianism as a reflection of his adherence to journalistic principle rather than a surrender to audience capture, no matter how obvious it is to everyone else.

The other day, he wrote this on Notes:

The criticism “You don’t criticize Trump enough” is maddening because you learn it has to be constant to be accepted, and there’s seldom any effort to acknowledge opposing factors . . .

The Öztürk story for instance really would be an ominous development if it were for sure true that she was detained for writing one op-ed, which is the contention of her attorneys. But Marco Rubio has specifically denied this, saying there’s more to the story, and though he easily may not be telling the truth, it’s infuriating to see that key detail ignored in coverage of the top papers.

He’s referring here to Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was arrested and imprisoned by ICE for co-writing a year-old op-ed that criticized her university for refusing to endorse a boycott of Israel. When I asked Matt a few days ago when exactly Marco Rubio “specifically denied” that Ozturk did no more than co-write an op-ed, he pointed me to a press conference on March 27 in which this exchange occurred:

QUESTION: Hello, Mr. President. Thank you for taking questions from us. We appreciate it. Humeyra Pamuk from Reuters. Mr. Secretary, a Turkish student in Boston was detained and handcuffed on the street by plainclothes agents. A year ago she wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza war. Could you help us understand what the specific action she took led to her visa being revoked? And what was your State Department’s role in that process?

SECRETARY RUBIO: We revoked her visa. It’s an F1 visa, I believe. We revoked it, and here’s why – and I’ll say it again; I’ve said it everywhere. Let me be abundantly clear, okay. If you go apply for a visa right now anywhere in the world – let me just send this message out – if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.

If you read his comments carefully, or even not that carefully, you’ll find that Rubio in fact “specifically denied” nothing about Ozturk. He pivoted from a question about her case in particular to a hypothetical example, which afforded him the freedom to suggest that she had done things that she had not, such as “vandalizing buildings,” without actually saying she did those things. It was a deft exercise in smearing someone while retaining plausible deniability. And Matt, usually such a cautious and skeptical reader of just such government double-speak, ate it up.

The next day, Rubio had another press conference in which he came closer to claiming what Matt suggests he claimed. In response to a question about Ozturk, he said this:

But I would add to this that I would caution you against solely going off of what the media has been able to identify, and those presentations, if necessary, will be made in court.

The insinuation in that case was pretty flagrant, but even this statement fell short of any specific claim about the evidence against Ozturk. (I’m going to lengths here to steelman Matt’s argument, since he never actually referenced this remark at all.)

Matt’s frustration with the “top papers,” then, is that they failed to attribute to Rubio, in some kind of warped quest for balance, a claim he did not make. Matt has criticized NPR for acting like state media, but here he’s demanding that reporters literally invent propaganda on behalf of the Trump administration.

It’s a good thing for mainstream reporters that they didn’t listen to him, because it is now, in Matt’s words, “for sure true that she was detained for writing one op-ed.” Matt himself has finally (sort of) acknowledged it. After spending six miserable weeks in ICE detention, where she was deprived of access to treatment for her asthma, Ozturk had her bail hearing on Friday, and the court released her. “There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” the judge stated.

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Matt once wrote a very good book about the demise of the modern media. In it, he cautioned readers against falling for government propaganda slipped into news reports by agencies “salting audiences with scary warnings, so later action looks more proportionate.” But in this case he not only fell into that trap himself; he helped construct it, by salting his audience with scary warnings that even Rubio himself stopped short of issuing.

This is just one case, and anyone is entitled to make a bad call from time to time. But for Matt, it’s a mistake that fits into a recent pattern. To him, almost nothing is an actual, bona fide abuse of power by the White House. With the occasional caveat, everything is Democrats or the media lying or exaggerating on behalf of the elites. The media, to be sure, has earned his contempt in countless ways, but if you keep using the same line for long enough, eventually it becomes a bit. That’s what it is now for Matt.

In the last few months, instead of reporting on the Trump administration’s full frontal assault on free speech, Matt’s publication, Racket, has picked on all the usual suspects: Harvard, The New York Times, David Brooks, Antifa. They’re deserving targets; I’ve picked on many of them myself. But the reason such attacks felt so satisfying a year ago is that back then they were all part of the same suffocating, hegemonic political monoculture that pervaded every elite cultural institution in the country. That was true even when Trump was president the first time around.

But it isn’t true anymore. If there’s a suffocating, hegemonic political monoculture today, it’s MAGA. But rarely do you hear Matt’s trademark caustic sarcasm pointed in that direction. Matt isn’t punching up anymore. His flogging of all these dead liberal horses, alongside his tip-toeing around the most egregious attacks on free speech in the better part of the last century, now amounts to caping for the truly powerful.

Matt is hardly the only one. My own former publication, Public, runs attack after attack on Democrats, European elites, and even the Obama administration, as if any of these parties are still determining the present course of world events. On the day that Ozturk was released from custody and the judge in the case expressed concern that noncitizens “may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center from their home,” Public ran a piece praising Trump for his free speech advocacy.

But Matt is a guy who should know better. His dissent on Russiagate demonstrated his journalistic integrity at a time when it really mattered. He’s shown little of that quality lately.

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Yesterday we skipped our regularly-scheduled livestream because Lee was sitting in for Glenn Greenwald as host of System Update. He kindly invited me on the show to talk about the last 100 days of train wreck. Give it a watch:

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Ever since the ACLU forfeited its status as the premiere free speech legal advocacy group in America by becoming little more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has thrived. It filled the space the ACLU has left vacant since at least 2016, filing lawsuit after lawsuit in defense of the First Amendment rights of both liberal and conservative speakers.

But on one issue — Israel’s war on Gaza — FIRE’s defense of free speech appears less than absolute. On the surface, FIRE has appeared to staunchly defend pro-Palestinian activity, at least in the context of clear-cut free speech violations. The group has fought to protect speakers critical of Israel, including Mahmoud Khalil, and has repeatedly condemned the Trump administration’s ideologically motivated attacks on universities.

But outside of those clear-cut cases, FIRE’s defense of the rights of pro-Palestinian protesters is lackluster at best.

Last Wednesday, Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, visited the campus of Yale University. Ben-Gvir is an extremist even by the standards of Israeli politics. He has used hunger as a weapon against Palestinian prisoners and publicly celebrated the memory of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish terrorist who in 1994 massacred dozens of Palestinians as they prayed. By his own count he has been indicted over 50 times and convicted at least eight times, including for incitement to racism and assisting a terrorist organization.

Ben-Gvir met with students at a location nearby, but not on, the Yale campus. He was greeted by a group of protesters who chanted and hurled water bottles at him. The night before, the protestors had erected eight tents in violation of university policy for about three-and-a-half hours.

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At one point during the Wednesday demonstration, the protesters were confronted by a pro-Israel student named Netanel Crispe who demanded they unlock arms so he could walk through the space they were standing in. There was a clear path for him to walk around them perhaps 50 feet from where he stood. The protesters repeatedly invited Crispe to take that path. Instead, he insisted on walking straight through the protest. The protesters refused to allow him to.

When Crispe posted a video of the confrontation online, Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE, tweeted this:

Pro-Palestinian students have pulled these kind of blockades for years now. They have the right to protest, but don't have the right to block students, and if they're specifically targeting Jewish students to prevent them from crossing, then that is not just harassment, but even assault, as blocking comes with an implicit threat that anyone trying to get through will be met with physical force.

Yale needs to investigate this.

A couple of hours before Lukianoff tweeted his demand for an investigation of the protesters, FIRE’s Legal Director, Will Creeley, wrote a similar tweet: “Blocking passage through parts of campus isn’t protected expressive activity. Pretty straightforward.”

But when asked, FIRE declined to produce any evidence that the protesters were “specifically targeting Jewish students” or even that Crispe’s mobility was impeded to any non-trivial extent. Instead, they referred me to their official statement on the matter.

Yale University ended up going even further than what Lukianoff recommended: it revoked the registration of Yalies4Palestine as a student group, denying it use of campus resources. FIRE has not yet objected to this action. In their email response to me, FIRE pledged to defend Yalies4Palestine if it is persuaded that the group’s registration was revoked “solely on the basis of viewpoint discrimination.”

Yalies4Palestine did not respond to requests for comment.

FIRE’s public response to the Yale protest fits an emerging pattern. In the past, the group has scolded pro-Palestinian student activists for engaging in “disruptive protest” on private property and for using drums and bullhorns, proclaiming in the latter case that the students “should be punished.” FIRE’s CEO has called the pro-Palestinian protests of the last two years “mob censorship” and “an absolute disaster for campus freedom of speech” and accused protesters, without evidence, of targeting Jews.

Last week, FIRE stayed silent as the National Institutes of Health issued an unprecedented new rule that bans hundreds of thousands of research grantees from participating in any boycott of Israel. No other country is protected by such a rule. Researchers are free even to boycott American states without fear — just not Israel. FIRE has said nothing about this brazen censorship, likely because the group condemns the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel as antithetical to academic freedom. Indeed, a few days after issuance of the rule, FIRE praised NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya for his commitment to freedom of inquiry.

When it comes to gray areas like non-violently disrupting events on campus or engaging in civil disobedience, FIRE has consistently policed the boundaries of speech in a far more restrictive manner than other civil liberties organizations have. Even the ACLU defended a pro-Palestinian protester who was punished for using a bullhorn, while FIRE has gone out of its way to criticize such protest activity as unprotected and deserving of discipline.

Groups like the ACLU have traditionally understood their mission to be to expand the parameters of First Amendment protections. FIRE seems to believe that its role is to fight for constitutionally-protected speech when there are clear violations and to call for investigations and punishments of protesters when they deem their activities out of bounds — or at least when that protest activity is critical of Israel.

With the overt politicization of the ACLU, FIRE is meant to be the standard bearer for the principled defense of free expression in America. But on this one issue it appears to have competing priorities — and that issue happens to be the one in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. Whether you believe that FIRE is hindering the White House in its sweeping attacks on political dissent or providing it with political cover may depend on one’s personal feelings about Israel and the war it is waging.

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Last week I got into a brief Twitter debate with JD Vance. I jumped into the fight after Zaid Jilani picked it. Later, Jesse Singal joined in, too. Then Vance quote-tweeted Jesse with this attack:

I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit. “I know I'm right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me.” It's an easy way to go through life, because then you never have to think seriously about why your worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.

It’s a remarkably un-self-aware dig, given that the second half of Vance’s last sentence is like the Platonic form of “smug, self-assured bullshit” by someone who thinks it’s immoral to disagree with him. But setting that aside, the line about Vance’s ancestors having built America with their bare hands is, in my opinion, revealing.

I’ve written before about the ascendance on the right of what I’ll call “ancestral nationalism,” by which I mean the kind of nationalism that’s rooted in a sense, real or imagined, of a common history, culture and heritage that binds a population together. This is the nationalism that’s probably most familiar to us, because it’s the most primitive form of it and it has also historically been the most explosive. When it mixed a century-and-a-half ago with the pseudoscience of eugenics, it gave shape to the ideologies that upheld the racial order of the Jim Crow South and then spawned Nazism and Japanese imperialism. It was also a central part of the ideology of the “Alt-Right,” if you remember such “philosophers” and influencers as Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern from about a decade ago.

Ancestral nationalism is the ideological waste product of the transition from feudalism to modern nationalism. A relic of nineteenth century Europe, it combines the former’s fixation on bloodlines with the latter’s invention and mobilization of a geographically-rooted collective identity.

The feudal system of hereditary honor and privilege was the function not of a governing system, but the lack of one. European feudalism was the political order that arose, essentially, out of anarchy. The collapse of the western Roman Empire left the lands of Europe in the hands of thousands of dueling petty warlords. To amass armies unto themselves, these warlords secured the loyalties of yet smaller warlords and the soldiers pledged to them by offering physical protection in exchange for fealty. Over time, fealty became, by custom if not by law, hereditary. If your father was sworn to a king, then you were expected to swear yourself to him as well, and to his heir upon the king’s death. In this way, noble and aristocratic dynasties coalesced, with their power and legitimacy a function of their longevity. A family’s honor and prestige was derived from its claims to an ancient and exalted lineage. Ancestry was the chief determinant of social rank.

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American nationalism was the precise inverse of this value system. It emerged as an explicit rejection of the feudal status order. It wasn’t the democratic institutions of self-governance that distinguished the American colonies from the rest of the world; these were directly inherited from rights, customs and practices that had evolved over centuries in medieval England — rights, customs and practices that had, in their own turn, been transplanted from Scandinavia. In America, however, the colonists did more than insist on their individual rights; they rejected the very basis of political authority in one’s family ancestry. The colonists had left Europe to get away from all that. They abandoned their ancient farms and crossed the ocean to acquire cheap land on the new continent that they could own outright, without owing any duties or obligations to some parasitical lord or other. They came here to work with their hands and enjoy the fruits of their labor in their entirety, to do what they wished with their property and pass it along to their children. They came to toil and be left alone.

That was what made American democracy revolutionary — not our system of checks and balances or our particular articulation of individual rights, both of which had their equivalents in the Old World, but our abandonment of the notion that you were born into a social rank derived from your family lineage.

Indeed, little else was shared by colonists from opposite corners of Europe but this rejection of the old ways. With the exception of the Puritan colony in New England, it was private interests, not a common purpose, that had brought the settlers to these shores. Immigrants did not land in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia to build a new nation together. They arrived to carve out a living for themselves and their families that their children could build upon. When English Quakers, Ulster Presbyterians and German Mennonites collided with one another in the New World, their only common ground was this simple, material aspiration. There was little more to bind them — not culture or religion or even language. As they pushed out onto the frontier, as they had children and their children had children and their families were diluted and dissipated into the vagueness of the American experience, these common traits — the private nature of their enterprises and the social equality of their stations of birth — came to define what it meant to be “American,” even as, in other countries around the world, a bizarre hybrid of the feudal idolatry of heritage and the mass identity of nation-statehood came to define their forms of nationalism.

J.D. Vance’s nationalism belongs to that foreign category. His American identity is as fused to the ghosts of his ancestral lineage as the aristocratic identities of European dukes were fused to theirs. He wants this vain, backward-looking mentality to be the basis of a “new” American self-conception because it would establish a spectrum of degrees of citizenhood in place of the singular category of “citizen,” with his own family and those like his at the very top of it. It would make him and a broad section of his political base more American than, say, the native-born children of immigrants from Pakistan or Honduras. It would establish a neo-feudal order of social rank rooted in one’s American bloodlines.

Vance is wrong about his ancestors. They did not come here to “build” America. They came here to build a life for themselves and their children. That doesn’t cheapen their contribution; it honors it. Those humble, private aspirations are what it has always meant to be an American, as opposed to some mythical fetishization of one’s long-dead grandparents and great-grandparents. And those same aspirations have motivated generations of immigrants from poorer parts of the world, from Mexico to Yemen, who the MAGA movement would just as soon exclude from their definition of the American community. And therein lies the political utility of their embrace of this most un-American form of nationalism.

Our guest today is Jake Klein, a libertarian activist and author who has written about the dangers of identity politics and tribalism.

Klein, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and is now atheist, talks about his path in life. We talk about the unproductive nature of many pro-Palestinian activists on the far left, the hypocrisy of many supposed “heterodox thinkers” and why we have come to reject any kind of racial or ethnic category. We also chat about the downfall of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, Inc., a group we hoped would help serve as the answer to weaponized identity politics.

Klein’s Substack is called The Black Sheep and he’s on X. Please give him a follow. And if you enjoyed this live podcast, please consider paid subscription to support our work.

Yesterday, Lee and I tried out Substack’s new livestreaming feature to record Le Pod. We like it; it was fun. About 300 of you joined, which was great for a first attempt with almost no promotion behind it. We’re going to start doing this every Wednesday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. If you can’t join us live, we’ll put out the non-live version each Thursday.

We spent pretty much the whole episode discussing the biggest question for our country right now: Are we in a pre-authoritarian moment right now — or have we even crossed the threshold into authoritarianism?

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.