Two days ago, our country was subjected to an ugly spectacle that forced us all, regardless of political persuasion, to confront the truth: that the alleged leader of the free world—the man in control of our nation’s nuclear codes, at a time when we are closer to nuclear war than any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis—is unfit to lead the local HOA, let alone the most powerful nation on Earth. So what happens now?
We do not know who is actually leading our country, but we do know the people who are the next level down: the deep state and the cathedral. The deep state consists of the unelected bureaucrats who make up the administrative agencies, including what is commonly referred to as the intelligence community. The cathedral consists of the mainstream news media, commonly referred to as the fourth estate, the major studios in the entertainment industry, and the leading academics in our nation’s research and education systems.
What do we know about the deep state and the cathedral?
They have a complete disregard for the truth. We know this is true because these people have had unfettered access to Joe Biden since he took office, and they have done everything in their power to obfuscate, gaslight, and deceive us about his mental deterioration.
They hold the American people in contempt. Once again, we know this is true because of how they have done everything to obfuscate, gaslight, and deceive us.
They have no love for this country. We know this because of their efforts to rewrite our history along the lines of radical ideologues like Howard Zinn and Nikole Hannah-Jones.
They have seared their consciences with a hot iron. We know this because there has been absolutely no accountability or admission of fault for their numerous failures, including the pandemic response, the crippling lockdown policies, the so-called vaccine that is neither safe nor effective, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mishandling of Ukraine, the crisis on our southern border, etc etc ad nauseum.
The only thing they respect is raw power. We know this is true by their own admission.
Finally, we know that they believe that Trump represents an existential threat to their power.
In the immediate aftermath of the debate, it appears that these people are now turning on Biden, judging from the way they are calling for him to step down. But it is important to point out that the deep state and cathedral are not monolithic, and that the people who control these institutions are divided into multiple competing factions. The faction that revolves around Biden himself is likely to continue to resist these calls, as they have from the very beginning. In fact, they have shrewdly and cynically painted the other factions into a corner, leaving them with no good options.
To illustrate this, let’s list all of the possible scenarios in which Biden no longer faces Trump in the general election:
Scenario 1: Biden resigns.
Under this scenario, the VP, Kamala Harris, becomes the acting president, which also makes her the presumptive nominee. This would almost certainly lead to a Trump victory in the general election, since Kamala is even less popular than Biden—and perhaps even less competent, if that is possible. Seriously, the only reason she has a political career at all is because 1) she (literally) sucked her boss’s cock, and 2) she knows how to bully her subordinates. To see just how bad Kamala is, check out this satire piece from the Babylon Bee:
In any scenario where Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, Trump is likely to wipe the floor with her in the general election (assuming, of course, that we even have an election). Biden’s team knows this, which is probably why they made her VP in the first place: to deter their enemies from removing him from power.
Scenario 2: Biden serves out his term but announces that he is no longer running for re-election.
Because the primaries have already been held, this would turn the Democratic National Convention into a free for all, with no clear way to choose Biden’s successor. It would also be profoundly undemocratic, and likely demoralize the rank-and-file Democrat voters who buy into the cathedral’s narrative about “our sacred Democracy.” The hypocrisy at that point will simply be too much for them to ignore.
The only figure who likely has the power to unify the base is Michelle Obama, but the Obamas represent only one faction within the DNC, and it’s not at all clear that they’re in a position to win the game of thrones that will ensue under this scenario. Also, since the Biden faction has clung to power for so long, they are unlikely to give it up now.
Scenario 3: Congress invokes the 25th ammendment and removes Biden from power.
Under this scenario, Kamala Harris becomes the president elect and presumptive nominee, paving the way for a Trump victory in November.
Scenario 4: Biden dies.
This also leads to a disastrous Kamala Harris implosion.
Scenario 5: The deep state overthrows Biden in a coup, suspending the Constitution and cancelling the election.
Unfortunately, this is the scenario that seems most likely to me at this point in time. They already did everything they could to hamstring Trump’s presidency with the Russia collusion hoax and the special investigation, as well as the impeachment (in which Trump was literally impeached for Biden’s crimes). When we consider all the points we listed above, there is no reason to believe that these people won’t literally burn down the country to hold onto their positions of power.
The debate projected Biden’s weakness not only to a domestic audience, but to an international audience as well. Therefore, if our enemies (Russia, China, Iran, etc) calculate that a Trump re-election is likely, they are also likely to calculate that they have a limited window in which to take advantage of Biden’s weakness. This means that the odds of a major geopolitical crisis have increased dramatically, be it a terrorist attack against the US or our allies, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, an escalation/expansion of the Russia-Ukraine War, or some sort of black swan event.
But every crisis is also an opportunity. And if our enemies move against us in a major way, this presents an opportunity for the deep state to sieze unprecedented power. In such a scenario, are they likely to exercise constraint and respect the lines set out by our Constitution? Remember, these are the same people who took advantage of the pandemic to sieze unprecedented (and also unconstitutional) powers. Why wouldn’t they do it again?
I really hope I’m wrong about this, and that the general election proceeds without any sort of deep state interference. But at this point, I think the most unlikely scenario is that the deep state / cathedral respect the election results and step down if Trump wins.
On the issue of abortion, I would consider myself to be very pro-life. I have written several explicitly pro-life stories, including “The Paradox of Choice,”“The Body Tax,” and “The Freedom of Second Chances.” My wife and I also donate monthly to Preborn, a charity / Christian ministry that provides free ultrasounds and support to pregnant women seeking abortions.
I was not always pro-life, however. In fact, if you’d asked me fifteen years ago where I stood on the abortion issue, I would have described myself as either pro-choice or leaning pro-choice. So what was it that changed my mind?
First, a little background about myself. I grew up in a comfortable middle-class home, with three younger sisters and a mother and father who were married and faithful to each other. Abortion was not a thing that I had any direct experience with; it was little more than a vague concept that I heard other people arguing with. And although I grew up in a religious household, we lived in a Democrat stronghold (western Massachusetts) and both of my parents were Democrats, so of course the default position that I grew up with was pro-choice.
I didn’t really hear the abortion issue debated until high school. I went to an elite preparatory academy in Pioneer Valley, so I was surrounded by people who were far left even by Massachusetts’ standards. My position, which I more or less absorbed from those around me, was that abortion was a tragic but sometimes necessary procedure, and that it wasn’t the place of men or the government to tell women what they couldn’t do with their own bodies. Basically, the “safe, legal, and rare” position.
However, there was one pro-life argument I heard at that time that planted a seed in my heart. The school paper printed a debate on the abortion issue, and the student who wrote the pro-life side argued not from the legal position, but from the moral position—specifically, asking the question “when does life begin?” Since we cannot know when life begins, the student argued, we should err on the side of preserving life and treat the unborn child like a full human being from the moment of conception. If we believe that murder is wrong, erring on the other side—that of preserving the mother’s autonomy—would risk committing an immoral act, since we cannot positively say that abortion does not take a human life.
It was an interesting argument, and I didn’t really have a counter to it. However, the abortion issue didn’t rank very high on my list of priorities, so I filed it away and forgot about it, reverting back to the default position which I’d more or less absorbed. If pressed, I would say that I didn’t like abortions, but that it was something best left between a woman and her doctor. I didn’t really give the “when does life really begin?” question any serious thought.
However, one thing I did give serious thought to was the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II. The liberal, post-modern position that I more or less absorbed from the air around me was that history (or at least the part that really mattered) began in the 1930s, that the Nazis represented the ultimate evil, and that “never again” was civilization’s most sacred value—not just for the holocaust, but for all forms of genocide, nuclear proliferation, and global war. As a kid, I read every (non-boring) World War II book that I could get my hands on, and was profoundly moved by several of the photographs that I saw, especially of the Nazi death camps. Later, in middle school, I read Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, which further cemented my revulsion of the holocaust, and my determination that I was not and would never be the kind of person who would assent to that sort of atrocity.
Fast forward to the 2000s. After serving a two-year mission, I attended Brigham Young University from 2006 to 2010. The contrast was stark. In Massachusetts, I had been the odd “conservative” kid surrounded by liberals. In Utah, I was the odd “liberal” kid surrounded by conservatives. And though BYU is not the most conservative school in the United States (that would probably be Hillsdale), the air that I found myself in was much more conservative than anything I’d experienced growing up.
Overall, the experience was good for me. I found myself questioning a lot of my unspoken political assumptions and coming to conclusions that would have surprised my earlier teachers and mentors. For example, I independently came to appreciate the second ammendment and the right to self-defense, mostly from participating in BYU’s jujitsu club and learning how to physically defend myself. I also gained a deep appreciation for the principle of free speech, since studying contrasting viewpoints was so key in shaping my own worldview at that time.
However, I still didn’t give much thought to the abortion issue, since 1) it wasn’t directly relevant to my life at that time, and 2) it was just a really icky thing to think about. If pressed, I probably would have said that I was against using abortion as a form of birth control, and that some restrictions should be put in place to prevent that from happening, but that I didn’t think Roe v. Wade should be overturned. I had never known a world before Roe v. Wade, and thus was more comfortable sticking with the default that I’d grown up with. As a faithful Latter-day Saint, I knew that I would never put a woman in a position where she would consider getting an abortion, so the status quo was enough for me.
As a side note, I should point out that the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that abortion is wrong in all cases except where rape, incest, or the health of the mother create extenuating circumstances. As missionaries, if we wanted to baptize someone who had either had an abortion themselves or had participated in one, we had to move it up the chain to a higher ecclesiastical authority to interview them and determine whether the prospective convert needed to demonstrate more repentance. Later, as a member of a bishopric, abortion was something we had to seriously consider when convening disciplinary councils. It is possible to get an abortion as a Latter-day Saint without getting excommunicated, or to come back into full fellowship after being excommunicated for abortion, but you have to go through your local (and sometimes area/general) authorities to work it out—and even then, they will strongly encourage you not to go through with it. But there is quite a bit of room for nuance in the church’s position on abortion.
Not that I ever really gave the deeper nuances of the issue any serious thought during this period. In fact, the one question that I never really asked myself was “when does life actually begin?” If pressed, I probably would have taken the position from that high school debate article, that since we don’t know we should probably err on the side of assuming life begins at conception, but I never really thought through the full implications of that position, again because 1) it didn’t directly impact my own life, and 2) the whole abortion issue was just icky.
Fast forward to 2015. I had graduated from college, traveled the world a bit, spent a few years bouncing around odd jobs and more or less living on my own, and made the best decision of my entire life: to not pursue a graduate degree. If I had gone on to grad school, I would have racked up a whole lot of debt, delayed my exposure to the “real world,” and failed to learn a number of important and life-changing lessons from the school of hard-knocks. And now that I finally felt like I was getting my feet back under me, I began to question all of my prior political assumptions, especially since the Obama years were coming to a close. I had voted for Obama in 2008, but vowed that I would never vote for a Democrat again, and was frankly disgusted with the intersectional coalition and its crusade for anti-racism and social justice.
It was around this time that I discovered Jordan Peterson. I was deeply impressed with Peterson’s earnest sincerity, intellectual honesty, and courage of his convictions. I was also intrigued by many of his arguments, which ran contrary to so many of the things I’d grown up with. One of these was his argument that most of us would have gone along with the Nazi atrocities, if we had lived in 1930s Germany. His argument was basically: “we’d all like to think that there was something unique about the Nazis that made them so evil, but that isn’t true. They weren’t so different from all of us. You may think that you wouldn’t have gone along with all of the atrocities that the Nazis committed, but the truth is that you probably would have gone along. After all, you’re not so special. You’re just as much a product of your times as the Germans in 1930s, and they really aren’t as different from us as you think they are. Don’t kid yourself. You’re just as capable of evil as they were.”
This argument struck something deep within me, partly because “never again” was such a core part of my own personal identity. Was I the kind of person who would have resisted the evils of the Nazis? Or in fact, was I not that special, and also not that different from those who had gone along with the Nazis’ terrible crimes? The only way to know for certain was to compare our times with the times of the Nazi regime, to see if there was anything comparable to the holocaust in our own time.
As soon as I asked that question, it was like my eyes were suddenly opened. There is indeed an atrocity comparable to the holocaust in our times, and it has become so ingrained into our culture that in many places—such as the blue state where I grew up—it is almost like part of the air that everyone breathes. That atrocity is the genocide of the unborn. If life truly begins at or near conception, then we have committed 10x holocausts since Roe v. Wade, a full order of magnitude more blood than the Nazis spilled. Moreover, we have slaughtered the most innocent, voiceless, and powerless people among us: our own children.
It all comes down to the question “when does a human life begin?” As far as I can tell, there are only two answers to that question that are logically consistent and scientifically sound: “at conception” and “I don’t know.” Viability is a moving target that changes with innovation and technology: in another decade, we may have found a way to grow children outside of the female womb, making them viable from literally the point of conception. Capacity for pain is also a moving target, since we’re still learning all sorts of new things as our technology improves. Sentience doesn’t work because people in comas are both alive and non-sentient. Heartbeat doesn’t work because it is possible to put an animal into suspended animation, where their heart has stopped beating, and successfully revive them. We can’t exactly do that to humans yet, but it’s only a matter of time and innovation before we can.
Now, I cannot say for certain that abortion is always wrong. Just like there are circumstances when it is just to shoot someone to death (such as during a violent home invasion), I understand that there may be circumstances where an abortion is similarly warranted. These are the edge cases like rape, incest, and health of the mother that the pro-choice pro-abortion activists always fall back on. The clearest of these is probably ectopic pregnancy, which is almost always fatal for both the mother and the child. But of course, what the activists never tell you is that almost all of the abortion bans that have been put into place since the end of Roe v. Wade have exemptions for ectopic pregnancies, which are not considered legally to be abortions. But I grant that there are other cases, such as depression and suicidal tendencies, that fall into a gray area morally. I also grant that a strict pro-life position has far-reaching implications for things like IVF and surrogacy that may or may not go too far. Frankly, I’m not at all sure where I stand on surrogacy and IVF.
But when you take a clear-headed and logical view at the way our culture practices abortion, focusing not on the legal intricacies but the simple question “when does a human life begin?” it becomes very clear that our current regime is not only comparable to the Nazi regime, but may actually exceed the Nazis in objective measures of evil. After all, what made the Nazi holocaust so evil? The sheer size of the death count? Ours is an order of magnitude larger. The innocence of the victims? No one is more innocent than the unborn. The motivations behind the killing? Hatred is one thing, but the worst evils have a quality of banality to them that our narcissistic and apathetic obsession with personal convenience captures better than almost anything else.
If it seems so unthinkable to claim that the evils of our own time exceeds the evils of the Nazis, that’s only because we are living so close to our own historical moment that we cannot see it clearly for what it is. Our modern liberal culture operates on the unspoken assumptions that 1) history only meaningfully began in the 1930s, 2) the Nazis represent the ultimate evil, and 3) “never again” is our civilization’s most sacred value (though with the October 7th massacre, that last one is beginning to fray). But if you can step back from that worldview and take a more objective look at our own historical moment, it quickly becomes obvious that we’re not as different from the Nazis as we think we are. After all, there is nothing new under the sun.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was not the end of our culture’s abortion regime, but merely a shift in the argument and an opening of a new phase. And frankly, I am disgusted by the way that the Republicans have infiltrated and exploited the pro-life movement, cynically transforming it into a get-out-the-vote operation rather than treating this issue for what it is: the fundamental moral question of our times. In the 19th century, that question was slavery. Today, that question is the value of human life—and future generations will judge us just as harshly for our own position on that question as we judge the plantation slaveholders of the antebellum south. And well should they!
In sum, I wasn’t converted from pro-choice to pro-life until after I was confonted by an argument that forced me to take a good, hard look at my own worldview. At the heart of that argument was a very simple question: “when does a human life begin?” After considering that question deeply, I not only changed my position on the issue, but changed it so deeply that my wife and I now donate monthly to a Christian pro-life charity, even though we are not evangelical Christians. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I have deep theological differences with the people in the Preborn ministry, and that most of them have been taught to view my own Latter-day Saint faith as an abominable heresy. But I’m willing to lay all that aside, because in this day and age, I think that the value of life is a much bigger issue than any of that. And when my great great granchildren look back on my life, I hope that they can say that I rose above the evil of my times.
I just finished reading The Last Election by Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche. It’s a fascinating book, but not in the way that the authors probably intended.
The book basically presents a detailed account of the 2024 election, starting in November 2023 and ending with the results of a contingent election, after the (fictional) third party campaign disrupts things so thoroughly that no presidential candidate can get to 270 electoral votes. There’s violence in the streets, a supreme court justice who gets assassinated, a presidential debate that gets disrupted by a riot before it can really begin, a stealth military coup, and all sorts of insanity. And it ends (of course) with a Trump victory in the contingent election, where every state gets one vote and the representatives from each state vote behind closed doors. Cue the end of “our democracy.”
Partisan politics aside (and I am still genuinely undecided as to how, or even if, I will vote in 2024), there is sooo much to unpack in this book. The authors are totally ignorant about half of the country, and utterly clueless about the other half… and I can’t tell which half is which. That’s what I find so fascinating. Do the authors really believe that the average Trump voter hates and fears black people simply because they are black? Do they genuinely believe that sexual harrassment makes a better kick-the-dog moment than a coerced secret abortion ending in suicide? That such an abortion doesn’t even count as a kick-the-dog moment at all?
However, my purpose in this blog post is not to unpack all the myriad layers of willful and oblivious ignorance in The Last Election, but to point out what should be obvious by now: that most of the authors’ predictions are already failing to pan out.
By now, on the timeline, we should have had 1) an assassination of a justice of the supreme court, 2) RFK projected to win several states, and 3) street violence on the level of the George Floyd riots, with about as many casualties. Of course, none of those things have actually happened. And that, more than anything, makes me think that a hot civil war is unlikely to break out in this country.
Instead, people just seem to be exhausted. There are a few keyboard warriors, of course, but from what I can tell, most people on both sides are doing their best to tune them out. The memes aren’t anywhere near as good as they were in 2016. Of course, there’s still enough outrage for the political grifters to work with, but that outrage isn’t translating into lone wolves and false flags.
The 2024 election is shaping up to be the least important election in my lifetime. If our democracy were healthy, we would be debating the government’s disastrous response to the pandemic and whom we should hold responsible for it (of course, in a healthy democracy, the citizens would not have complied with those policies in the first place). Instead, the thing that’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room is the neverending lawfare against Trump—which is still important, don’t get me wrong, but is it really the most important thing happening right now? Inflation is crushing the economy, Europe is in the midst of its worst armed conflict since the Nazis, we are closer to a nuclear armed conflict with Russia than we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Anthony Fauci is still both alive and free.
When I step away from the perpetual outrage cycle that passes these days for the news and look at the current state of the world, what I see is not a superpower that is careening toward a hot civil war, but a former superpower that is steadily disintegrating. Some parts of the country are in a greater state of collapse than other parts, but we are all in the midst of a collapse, and probably have been for years, perhaps even decades. Our dysfunctional politics is not the cause of any of this. It’s just a symptom.
As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as exceptional. We also like to obsess over the imminent fall of our cuntry. That’s probably why there’s been so much talk in the last few years about the possibility of a civil war. God forbid that America goes out with a whimper instead of a bang.
But the more I see, the more I think that that’s exactly how this country will fall apart: with a steady and unrelenting disintegration, until our politics are totally irrelevant, our military is unable to project power overseas, our national government is little better than that of a failed state, and our economy is so weak that no one bats an eye at rolling blackouts and empty grocery shelves.
Then we will pass through a period when things that cannot continue will not continue, and things that must happen will happen. Several states will become de facto autonomous, simply to survive. Many won’t. The dollar will collapse and the efforts of the global elite to replace it with a global digital currency will fail, but their depopulation efforts will succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and ultimately prove their downfall. The perpetual growth paradigm that the left calls “capitalism” and the right calls “progressivism” will unravel to devastating effect, and by 2100, there will be fewer than one billion humans on this planet (which will probably be significantly colder than it is now).
But there will not be a second American civil war, because that would require a level of dynamism that we simply do not possess. There is still a lot of ruin in this country, though, so we will probably endure longer than most other countries… kind of like how Japan is going on its fourth “lost decade” by now. But Japan had us to lean on. We’re not going to have anybody except ourselves.
…when you realize that the internet is a factory for creating cults, and that social media and smart devices are force multipliers for this effect.
Before the internet, your “community” was a geographically bound group of people, who were diverse enough (that’s “diverse” with a lower-case d) to give you an interesting variety of perspectives and worldviews. Also, you typically interacted with each other while physically in person. If you said or did something extremely embarrassing, it typically didn’t get beyond your immediate circle of associates, or the people you decided to tell about it.
The internet changed everything by turning “community” into something that was bound by interests, hobbies, perspectives, or worldviews. Now, every person with a weird and perverse fetish, who before kept it hidden because they were the only person in their community who held it, now could find all the other people in the world who held the same weird and perverse fetish, and create a “community” around that thing. Same with crazy political views. Same with radical ideology.
At the same time, if you said or did something embarrassing, and it went viral, your embarrassing moment would be broadcast far beyond your immediate circle of associates, to people you had never before met—as well as to people whom you would never want to hear about it. This effect was multiplied by the development of social media, and it led people to self-censor and conform to whatever “community” they were a part of, in the fear of standing out and going viral.
At the same time, all these “communities” turned into echo chambers that warped the various members’ view of reality. And because anger and outrage are the things that are most likely to get spread on the internet (see the video above), these echo chambers starting to become paranoid and break off from the rest of the world, taking the dimmest and least charitable view of everyone who wasn’t a member of their “community.”
As these online communities came to take a more prominent place in the average person’s life than their own families and communities, then the average person’s sense of identity increasingly became caught up in whatever hobby, fetish, or ideology united the “community.” And because of how paranoid these communities became, they increasingly came to demand absolute and preeminent allegiance. Is this starting to sound like a cult yet?
But it goes deeper than that, because the devices through which we connect with these “communities” actually make us more physically isolated from each other, while giving us the illusion of a genuine connection. When you’re holding up your smart device to capture a fireworks show, you’re not actually enjoying the fireworks. And when you’re lying in your bed, posting updates on your social media or chatting with your friends, you are still, in reality, lying alone in your bed. Combine with the internet’s penchant to drive outrage, and you have the two key ingredients for a mass formation psychosis: a large group of atomized and isolated individuals suffering from free-floating anxiety.
Before the pandemic, (that’s the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, for future readers who may be wondering “which one?”) I think that we lived in a world where the majority of our countrymen—the members of our “community” in the traditional sense—were not caught up in one of these cults. Either the majority of people weren’t caught up in one of these echo chambers, or the majority of echo chambers hadn’t yet reached cult-status, but people were still generally reasonable, on the whole. But with the pandemic, I think we passed through some sort of a threshold, to the point where now the best way to make sense of our world is to assume that the majority of people around you are trapped in some sort of a cult—which may literally be the case, considering the theory of mass formation psychosis.
So what does this mean for where the world is headed? Nothing good. I suppose that in an optimistic scenario, a critical mass of people manages to break themselves and their friends out of this mess, and go on to build a new society with proper safeguards in place to prevent this sort of mess from happening again. But I think it’s much more likely that this thing runs its course, and large swaths of our civilization drink the proverbial Kool-Aid.
Fortunately, there is a script that we can run, as individuals and (more importantly) as families, to get through this mess. It’s the same script that we use to get ourselves or our loved ones out of a dangerous cult. I’m not yet an expert on that script, but I know that it’s out there, because cults have been a thing for a very long time. But I’m pretty sure it involves putting your family first, getting off of social media, limiting the amount of time that you spend on your smart devices, and becoming more involved in your real “community”—the real-life one where you actually live.
This is, by far, the best take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I’ve heard. It’s between a Jew and a Palestinian, but both of them are converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which means that they’re less interested in winning a debate and more interested in coming to a common understanding, even though they are approaching it from completely opposite sides. It also means that they’re willing to say things that the hardliners on both sides of the conflict would consider heretical, and own up to their own side’s mistakes and shortcomings. Really fascinating stuff, with none of the bloviating lies, manipulative gaslighting, or emotional hyperbole that characterizes so much coverage of the conflict these days. You’ll probably get more out of it if you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but even if you’re not, I highly recommend giving it a listen.
7 And now I write somewhat concerning the sufferings of this people. For according to the knowledge which I have received from Amoron, behold, the Lamanites have many prisoners, which they took from the tower of Sherrizah; and there were men, women, and children.
8 And the husbands and fathers of those women and children they have slain; and they feed the women upon the flesh of their husbands, and the children upon the flesh of their fathers; and no water, save a little, do they give unto them.
9 And notwithstanding this great abomination of the Lamanites, it doth not exceed that of our people in Moriantum. For behold, many of the daughters of the Lamanites have they taken prisoners; and after depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue—
10 And after they had done this thing, they did murder them in a most cruel manner, torturing their bodies even unto death; and after they have done this, they devour their flesh like unto wild beasts, because of the hardness of their hearts; and they do it for a token of bravery.
11 O my beloved son, how can a people like this, that are without civilization—
12 (And only a few years have passed away, and they were a civil and a delightsome people)
13 But O my son, how can a people like this, whose delight is in so much abomination—
14 How can we expect that God will stay his hand in judgment against us?
Moroni 9:7-14
The atrocities that we saw by Hamas on October 7th were on exactly the same level as the atrocities in the closing chapters of the Book of Mormon. The only thing we haven’t heard about is cannibalism, both of Hamas fighters against the victims, and of the hostages fed with the flesh of their own children—but frankly, it wouldn’t be surprising, given the scope and nature of the atrocities we already know about.
And yet, there are significant numbers of people in the West who approve of the jihad against the Jewish people? Truly, we are swiftly passing from a “civil and delightsome people” to a “people… without civilization.”
In just ten days, this comedy skit has gotten about 1.2M views on YouTube, and probably a lot more on X. It’s gone viral for a couple of reasons: first, because it makes fun of celebrities, who most of us Americans now love to hate; and second, because most of us who have watched it feel like we’re in a similar position, thanks to the way social media makes celebrities and narcissists of us all.
I can sympathize with the confusion of most Americans, who feel like the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came out of nowhere, and don’t really know who’s right. The last big “current thing” was probably the Russo-Ukraine war, and most of us have since come to the conclusion that there are no good guys in that conflict, only innocent civilians and impoverished taxpayers who’ve been bilked out of billions and billions of dollars while our insanely corrupt politicians vow to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Here’s the thing, though: you shouldn’t have to pick a side to be able to declare, without any misgivings or doubts, that this is evil:
Unlike most Americans, I am not unfamiliar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I studied it for four years in college, interned briefly with a major K-street foreign policy think tank, and traveled both to Israel and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. At the time, I was very pro-Palestinian.
My school (Brigham Young University) was actually more conservative and a lot more fair to the Israeli side of the conflict than most universities, but even back in the 2000s the entire American academic establishment had a very anti-semitic bent, and the things I didn’t learn—the lies of omission, especially about the history of anti-semitism in the Arab world—could fill volumes.
The other thing that red-pilled me away from my pro-Palestinian stance was the realization that Islam teaches that it is virtuous to lie to the unbeliever in order to further the cause of Islam. This principle is called “taqiyya,” and when you realize that everything we as kaffirs think we know about Islam has been transmitted to us by someone who was taught to lie to us about Islam, it makes a lot more sense. Not all Arabs are Muslim, and within Islam there are a lot of sects and divisions, but all of them share this principle of taqiyya, and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim.
Back in my pro-Palestinian days, there were a number of things that I had to either ignore or chalk off as anomalies in order to maintain my pro-Palestinian views. Things like the insane popularity of Hitler’s Mein Kampf all across the Arab world, perhaps only rivaled by the Qur’an. Things like the fact that generations of Palestinians who have never even set foot in the disputed territories demand the “right to return,” while Arabs displaced from other conflicts, such as the Syrian civil war, have no qualms about picking up and leaving their ancestral homelands. Things like the fact that Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terror groups deliberately target civilians, whereas Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Can you imagine what would happen if the Israelis used their own people as human shields the way that Hamas does? Hans… are we the baddies?
As someone who spent a significant portion of his life studying this conflict, and has since had a 180 degree change of view, the October 7th massacre was extremely clarifying. All those things that I used to chalk up as anomalies now fit into place in a way that makes me wonder how I didn’t see it before. The biggest of these has to do with the anti-semitic origins of Palestinian nationalism in the first place. Before the Balfour Declaration, which started the ball rolling for the formation of a Jewish state on historically Jewish lands, there was no concept of a Palestinian nation. Indeed, until the 20th century, the concept of the Westphalian nation-state was foreign to the Arabs, who instead tended to identify with their local community or tribal affiliation. From the beginning, Palestinian nationalism was created and deliberately cultivated as a means of accomplishing exactly what Hamas did on October 7th: the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of the Jews.
Which is not to say that the people we call “Palestinians” were not themselves violently displaced by the wars in 1948 and 1967. Unlike what some conservative commentators have said in recent weeks, these people were not “squatters,” but legitimate inhabitants of these lands. Indeed, many of them are descendants of the ancient Jewish people who converted to Christianity, and thus remained on the land after the Romans pacified Judea in the first century AD and drove their fellow Jews from their homeland. It’s a very ancient and complex conflict, which is why I can sympathize with Ryan Long’s comedy sketch.
But what’s happened with the Palestinians is the same thing that’s happened with the blacks and BLM, the American Indians and the decolonization movement, gender dysphoria victims and the transgender movement, same-gender attracted peoples and the LGBTQ+ movement, and women generally and radical feminism. It all follows the same pattern. First, the radical left identifies a minority which they can pretend to champion as an “oppressed class.” Then, once they have established themselves as representing that particular group, they redifine that group’s cause to fit into their grand goal, which is to overthrow Western civilization and establish a Marxist utopia.
Let’s be honest. There are only two ways that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can end. The first is for every Israeli Jew to meet the same end as the victims of the October 7th massacre, or to be violently and permanently driven from their land. The second is for the vast majority of the Palestinians to be resettled somewhere other than the so-called Palestinian Territories, and for Israel to annex those lands. The October 7th massacre didn’t kill the two state solution, so much as it revealed that it was never a viable solution to begin with. How could it, when Hamas—and by extension, those who support Hamas—view the state of Israel itself as an “occupation” of their lands?
Of course, history never truly has an end, so the default is for the current state of affairs to continue in a metastable state until it is either displaced by an outside force, or ceases to be metastable. From 1973 to the present, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was metastable, which allowed the myth of the two state solution to take hold. The so-called “peace process” itself became an industry, and a lot of people built profitable careers by propagating this myth. At the same time, the ant-semitic forces that want to cleanse the Holy Land (and ultimately the world itself) of all Jewish blood also propagated this myth, because so long as the Palestinian people remained in refugee camps instead of being resettled elsewhere, the conflict could continue.
But now, the situation has changed. We are living through the midst of a fourth turning, where conflicts such as this one are no longer metastable, and the old order itself comes crashing down. According to Strauss and Howe, who developed the theory of generational turnings and secular cycles, fourth turnings always start with a lot of chaos and confusion, but somewhere in the middle an event or development happens that brings moral clarity to the conflict, which in turn brings everything into focus.
In the Civil War cycle, this event was the Emancipation Declaration. Slavery was always a major underlying issue to the conflict, but until Abraham Lincoln clearly and unambiguously identified it as the war’s main cause, the war spiraled from a gentleman’s contest on the shores of the Manassas to a bloody chaotic conflageration engulfing the whole nation, and the Union lost almost every battle. After the Emancipation Declaration, the Union won almost every battle until the South was firmly defeated and the 13th amendment made every state a free state.
In the last fourth turning, this event was the holocaust. World War II started as a series of border disputes between the expansionist Axis powers and their neighbors, but after the conflict when global and it became clear that the Nazis wanted nothing less than the extermination of the Jews (and Roma and Slavs and…), moral clarity was achieved. That’s why the Great Power cycle ended with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past two weeks, and now I firmly believe that the October 7th massacre was the event that brought moral clarification to our own fourth turning. Therefore, the moral conflict of our times comes down to this: should the Jews (and by extension all “oppressor” classes, including straight white males) be liquidated in the name of “justice,” “equity,” and “decolonization,” or should we reject the Marxist utopia, return to God, and preserve God’s ancient covenant people—the Jews?
The third world war has probably already begun. This is the defining moral conflict of our times. There will be no return to the status quo ante: the Israeli-Hamas war will continue to expand until there is a decisive victory on the one hand or the other. We are still in the early stages where this particular armed conflict can be contained, but make no mistake: the forces arrayed against Israel, both foreign and domestic, are also arrayed against the West. I hope that the Israel-Hamas war ends before it spirals into a global conflageration, but even if this particular conflict isn’t the volcano, it lies on the same moral fault line.
What should that mean for us, who aren’t directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Should we send over billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, and ultimately put boots on the ground in that conflict? I don’t know about that, but I do know that we need to repent and return to God, both as individuals and as a nation, and that we need to call out evil for what it is, especially what we saw on the October 7th massacre. But we shouldn’t stop there. We should call out the evil behind every element of the anti-semitic Leftist agenda, and not just those parts that have to do with the Jews. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the castration and mutilation of gender-confused children, the ongoing slaughter of the unborn, the naked racism of the so-called “anti-racists,” the LGBTQ+ grooming happening in our schools—basically, every social justice cause that has ever been championed by the people now championing the cause of Palestine and Hamas.
This is our moment of moral clarity. Will we stand against evil, or will we fail to call it out for what it is? The October 7th massacre of Israeli Jews by Hamas terrorists was evil—arguably, more evil than the holocaust itself. Whatever else you believe, if you can’t come out and say that, you are, indeed, one of the baddies.
It occurs to me that most of my posts in the past month have either been extremely doom-and-gloom, or they’ve been excerpts from some of my most recent work. This probably gives the impression that I’m huddled in a corner somewhere, black-pilled and traumatized, and seeking some sort of an escape through my writing, when really, that is not the case.
In fact, the main reason I haven’t posted more is because I’ve been so busy with life and family. It’s been a really great year for us, with a new baby and a bunch of cross-country road trips that have been a lot of fun. I’ve also been testing out a lot of AI writing techniques, and while that has really invigorated my creativity in a major way, it’s also taken me away from things like this blog, which is why you haven’t heard as much from me.
If I were still on social media, I have no doubt that I would be doom-spiraling right now, what with everything that’s happening in the world. Even without social media, I’ve been glued to the news sites I follow, checking for hourly updates on the war with Israel (which I really do believe is the opening stages of World War III). But that’s actually not very new for me: back in high school, I was the same way, following the news every day from the public computers at my school library. The 9/11 attacks happened on the first day of school for me, but in the last couple of months of the previous school year, I remember being frustrated that no one seemed to be taking this Osama Bin Laden guy more seriously, especially after the USS Cole and Kenya embassy bombings. Then the summer came, and I mostly goofed off, but as soon as school got started I was back to following the news on a daily/hourly basis.
So I’ve got a lot of experience with taking scary news in stride and not letting it totally consume my life. In fact, that’s the main reason I follow things like this so closely: so that when the unthinkable happens, I can face it without getting shocked or overwhelmed. And recent posts to the contrary, I’m not black-pilled at all. In fact, I tend to believe that I was put on the Earth at this specific period of time for a reason, and not just one that was imposed on me: that at some point, before I was born, I was given a choice between this and some other era, and I specifically chose this time to be born. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it would not at all surprise me if that turned out to be the case.
In any case, we just got back from our last family road trip of the year, this time up to Coeur d’Alene to spend some time with Piper’s brother and his family, as well as my in-laws, who joined us on the trip. We had a really good time! Our daughter had a blast playing with all her cousins, especially the ones about her age right now. We also got to see her cousin’s baptism, so that was really good. Provo to Couer d’Alene is about an 11 hour drive, which is not quite far enough to justify getting a hotel, but for a 7 month-old and a 3 year-old, it was pretty hard. We’re all glad to be home now.
My wife is super busy working on her PhD. Specifically, she’s getting a paper ready for a major conference she hopes to attend with the rest of her lab. Her paper is on using AI to generate useful cross references across a body of work (eg Shakespeare, Jane Austen, The Bible, etc), and she’s developed a method that cuts down the cost of creating a cross reference set by upwards of 50%. But for the next couple of days, she’s going to be really busy with all of that.
Meanwhile, I’ve been taking care of the kids while the grandparents are on another road trip out to Omaha. It hasn’t been that bad, but I’ve also been pretty swamped with work, which one of the reasons I’ve been neglecting this blog. I have a bunch of ideas for posts I’d like to share, but no time to get to them, though hopefully that will change soon. Here are some of the posts I’d like to write:
A part 4 to my Navigating Woke-SF series. I recently had some experiences with the woke SF publishing world that have made me rethink things in a way that y’all would probably find very interesting.
An update to my generational cycles of grimdark and noblebright theory. This is one of the things I’ve been thinking about, and I’m starting to think that some of my basic premises in that post were wrong, or at least not entirely accurate, requiring an overhaul.
A lot of thoughts on AI and writing. This has been my main focus for the past couple of months, and I have thoughts. Many, many thoughts.
More thoughts on geopolitics and current events, especially on the trajectory of the unfolding global conflict and what it all means on a moral and spiritual level. But I think I should hold off on posting too much about that, since I’ve already spent so much time on it already.
Which of those things would you like to see next? I can’t promise anything, but I do want to spend more time on the stuff that followers of this blog actually want to read. In the meantime, I’ll try to intersperse a few quick update posts like this one, and get back into the habit of regular blogging.
The purpose of this post is not to pick any particular side or advocate for any particular action, but to give a back-of-the-napkin analysis of the current situation on the ground in the Middle East and project where it will likely go in the coming days and weeks. My goal is to approach the geopolitics of this conflict from a realist perspective and not let my own biases led to “wishcasting” or “doomcasting,” but these are just my own opinions, and I don’t have any special knowledge of the situation: just what I’ve been following from open source newscasts and political pundits.
What authority do I have to speak on this subject, besides just being a guy on the internet? In 2010, I double-majored in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from BYU, but please don’t hold that against me: I’ve since come to realize that most of what I learned in university is a lie, either of commission through the Islamic principle of taqiyya which states that it is morally virtuous for a muslim to lie to a kafir in the service of Islam (and guess where we kafirs have learned everything we think to know about Islam), or a lie of ommission, perpetuated by things like the history of anti-semitism that the American academic establishment studiously chooses to ignore. I also speak and read Arabic, spent a summer living, traveling, and hitchhiking in the Middle East, had two Palestinian roommates in college, and briefly interned as a research assistant in a major K-street foreign policy think tank, though I was fired early for having moral principles.
I’m going to assume that the reader is familiar with the basic history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the events of the past week. The situation on the ground is changing quickly, and the fog of war is certainly beginning to thicken, but my understanding of it is as follows:
Israel is mobilizing an army of several hundred thousand soldiers for a ground invasion of Gaza, while the Israeli air force is striking suspected Hamas targets throughout the Gaza strip. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to launch several hundred missiles per day at Israeli targets, though it appears to be rationing munitions as it prepares for a protracted conflict.
With that said, Hamas is clearly targeting civilians while using their own people as human shields, whereas Israel is targeting Hamas while evacuating civilians from staging areas such as Sderot. That’s an important distinction, not only for moral clarity, but for the war for global public opinion, which is currently the most important aspect of this conflict.
Israel’s five war goals, as stated by PM Netenyaho, are: 1) defeat any terrorists remaining in Israel, 2) launch a massive offensive operation, 3) contain the conflict to Gaza, 4) expand support in the international community, and 5) solidify national unity.
Goal 1 has mostly been achieved, though there are still sporadic reports of gunfights with isloated Hamas terrorists still on Israeli soil. However, the border fence has been secured, and so far as I can tell, no new terrorists are crossing over.
Goal 2 is currently pending. The airstrikes are brutal and ongoing, but the real offensive is going to begin with the ground offensive, which is clearly with days or even hours of beginning. In fact, it may have already begun.
Goal 3 is much more tricky. Hezbollah in the north is reported to have 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel, and has issued statements of solidarity with Hamas. Some skirmishes and artillery exchanges on the northern border have already occured. In addition, Israeli forces have exchanged fire with Syrian forces across the Golan Heights, and just this morning, Israel struck the Damascus airport, preventing a shipment of Iranian arms from entering the conflict zone.
So it seems very unlikely that Israel will achieve goal 3, especially since Hamas’s primary objective right now is likely to draw in other elements from the Arab world. They’re already calling for a general jihad, so it would not surprise me if we see a major escalation across Israel’s other borders. It’s not a question of if, but when.
As for goals 4 and 5, Israel currently appears to be experiencing a level of success that I have not seen since I started studying this conflict. The sheer savagery with which Hamas has raped and murdered women and children has, I believe, strongly shifted sympathies in the West toward Israel. Also, unity among Israelis has also never been higher, by all appearances exceeding the unity I saw here in the US in the days after the 9/11 attacks. However, the situation is very dynamic, and changing by the hour. As the shock and horror of Hamas’s atrocities passes out of the news cycle, I expect that most people in the West will either revert to their prior opinions, or put the conflict out of mind.
In the Arab world, however, I suspect that it’s just the opposite. What Hamas lost in terms of public relations with the west, they have probably gained with most Arabs. Anti-semitism runs deep throughout the entire Arab world, and the proportion of Arabs who view Jews as non-people is probably as high or higher than the proportion of Germans who did so in the years leading up to WWII. But the blow to Israel’s reputation for invincibility has now been shattered by Hamas, which now makes this conflict an existential one for both parties. If Hamas survives the conflict with any capability to prosecute terrorist attacks, that reputation will be permanently shattered, inspiring thousands of other Arabs to take up arms until Israel dies by a thousand cuts. Therefore, Israel must eradicate Hamas completely before the war expands to other fronts, and the tide of global opinion turns against Israel as images of dead and wounded Palestinians drowns out the images we’ve already seen of raped and murdered Israelis.
I suspect that Hezbollah is waiting until Israel commits itself to a ground offensive in Gaza before they open a second front in the north. That will be the time when Israel is weakest, especially if they’ve already spent most of their munitions on Gaza. That’s probably why Israel hasn’t launched the ground offensive already. Will Israel launch a pre-emptive strike against southern Lebanon, the way they did against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the ’67 war? The biggest risks with that are 1) a failure or partial success that commits too many forces to the north, before Hamas has been sufficiently defeated, and 2) losing the public relations battle, which is already guaranteed to happen eventually, given the steps they must take with the ground invasion of Gaza.
When—not if, but when—the northern front to this war opens up, Syria and Lebanon will almost certainly be drawn into the conflict. Jordan and Egypt will likely try to stay out of it for as long as they can, since among the Arab states, they are more closely aligned with the West than they are with Iran. Until this summer, Saudi Arabia was also aligned against Iran, but that began to shift when both countries joined the BRICS alliance. Saudi Arabia has also been making overtures with China, who appears to be siding tacitly with the Palestinians against NATO and the West.
Will Iran be drawn into this conflict? If it becomes protracted, almost certainly yes. I suspect they will enter it by launching a surprise attack on a US aircraft carrier, either with a drone, or with a Russian hypersonic missile. If they can sink a US aircraft carrier, that would be a major blow to our own military reputation, which would represent a tremendous victory in itself. Based on what we’ve seen in Ukraine about the effectiveness of drones in modern warfare, our Cold War-era aircraft carriers could prove to be as big of a liability as the Maginot Line, when the history of WWIII is written. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The way to prevent Iran from being drawn into this conflict is to eradicate Hamas swiftly and completely, bringing the war to a decisive close before the Iranians have fully mobilized. But Hamas is deeply entrenched, having used the billions of dollars of foreign aid they’ve received over the years to prepare for exactly this eventuality. So the Gaza offensive is like to strike fast and hard, without much regard for civilians such as we’ve seen from Israel in the past. Because of how this will shock global opinion, Israel has only a narrow window in which to carry it out.
In other words, this Hamas-Israel war is not likely to turn into a long, drawn out war of attrition, such as we’ve seen the Russo-Ukrainian war become. It’s also not likely to become a frozen conflict anytime soon. As for a ceasefire, that’s just not in the cards; the stakes for both sides are too existential, and the window in which Israel has to act is just too narrow. It’s going to be brutal.
But here’s the problem from the American perspective: our economy is so strained, and our fuel and weapons stockpiles are already so depleted that if we send too much military aid to Israel, we risk giving China an opening to attempt an invasion of Taiwan. If we don’t aid Israel, however, and that northern front opens up before Israel has eliminated Hamas, then the odds of this spiraling into a regional war begin to approach 100%. We can try to deter Iran by sending in more aircraft carriers, but to what degree have those military platforms become liabilities instead of assets, given how technology has changed the nature of war? It only took about a dozen well-placed bombs to sink four of Japan’s aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. How many cheap Iranian drones will it take to sink one of ours? But if we take the neocon path, that opens up China to take Taiwan, or Russia to bleed us out in Ukraine and precipitate the collapse of NATO, which appears to be their ultimate goal.
And then there’s the situation on our southern border, which has been completely overrun. How many terrorist cells have already come over, and become embedded in our territory? How many of them will be activated if the Israeli-Hamas war expands, as it almost certainly will? Will a Hamas-style terrorist attack on American soil strengthen our resolve, or shatter it?
Given these realities, I’m having a hard time seeing how we avoid WWIII—if indeed, it hasn’t broken out already. The battle lines will probably be drawn between US/NATO and the BRICS alliance, since the financial/economic divisions appear to be aligned with the geopolitical ones. And with all the financial and geopolitical blunders we’ve made since the pandemic, it appears that we’ve set ourselves up for exactly this scenario. Seriously—if I’d written all this as a novel, with our southern border overrun, our strategic petroleum reserves depleted, our shamefully disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, a hot proxy war with Russia depleting our military reserves, and the botched pandemic response and lockdowns driving massive inflation and a supply chain collapse, it would have rightfully been panned as a trash. And yet, this is the clown world we currently find ourselves in.
Before WWIII goes nuclear, I expect it will go cyber. I have no idea what that will look like, but it’s probably best to prepare for extended power blackouts and loss of basic infrastructure. Also, if I were China or Russia, when this conflict does go nuclear I would strike the US with a barrage of high altitude EMPs and watch the Americans eat each other. That would certainly force the troops to go home.
How do we prevent any of these scenarios from unfolding? The only way that I can see is for Israel to destroy Hamas before Christmas—but even that isn’t a guarantee, if we become so overextended that China decides to take Taiwan as a result. So if WWIII hasn’t indeed already started, I think we will almost certainly be in WWIII before Christmas.
If you’re smarter than me, please tell me how I’m wrong.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been going back and forth on whether to write this post. It’s not something that’s directly in my wheelhouse, and few things turn me off to other writers and artists more than when they feel a need to publicly post their every knee-jerk reaction to the political issues of the day.
But there are a few reasons why I think it would be a mistake not to post my thoughts about the recent Hamas attacks on Israel, and the new war that has broken out in the region. First, it’s a major watershed event, certainly for Israel, and probably for the rest of the world as well, especially if it spirals into a regional and ultimately a global war (which seems increasingly likely).
Second, I’ve actually had a lot of personal experience in the region, having traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories, studied in Jordan, learned Arabic, and majored in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic from BYU in 2010. Longtime readers will recognize the influence of all of these studies and travels on my work, especially on my earlier novels such as Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home.
What the Hamas attacks have confirmed to me is that everything I learned in university about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a lie, sometimes of commission, but mostly of ommission. Compared to most schools, Brigham Young University’s MESA program is actually very ideologically balanced. But it wasn’t until after I graduated that I learned about things like taqiyya, which is a principal of the Islamic religion that it is virtuous to lie to the unbeliever in the service of Islam (and guess where all of us Kafirs get our information about Islam). Also, we never delved very deeply into the history and development of anti-semitism. As a result, when I traveled to the Middle East, I was shocked to discover that Mein Kampf is still one of the bestselling books in the Arab world. At the time, I thought it was kind of funny, but not anymore.
So the heinous attacks by Hamas on the music festival and the various towns kibbutzim in southern Israel haven’t shattered my illusions, so much as they have given me a great deal of moral clarity. And I have to say that after seeing what the Palestinians have done to these women and children, targeting, raping, slaughtering, and decapitating them, I cannot help but feel that Israel is justified in making sure that something like this can never happen again—even if it means violently displacing millions of Palestinians to bring this generations-long conflict to an end.
The two-state solution is dead. Land for peace is dead. So is any solution that would involve integrating these pre-civilizational savages into Israeli society. My younger, more naive self would argue “yes, but Hamas doesn’t represent all the Palestinians! In fact, Hamas is an authoritarian regime!” But my older, wiser self who lived through the pandemic knows that authoritarian regimes can only exist because the people living under them comply with their rule. The reason Hamas is has been in power in Gaza for more than a decade is because this wanton slaughter of Israelis is what most of the Palestinians want. Because of that, I don’t see how any lasting peace can be made, unless either Israel or Palestine is destroyed as a nation.
This is a huge shift in my own personal thinking on the conflict, because as recently as ten years ago, my sympathies lay mostly with the Palestinians. But the actions of Hamas and the Palestinian people this last weekend have forever shattered those sympathies, and none of the footage of the bombings in Gaza is going to win my sympathy back. Not after what Hamas did to those Israeli women and children.
And when I see the activists and protesters here in the US flying Palestinian flags and protesting “in solidarity” against the “occupation,” I cannot help but wonder: is this what they want for me and my family? Do the people who consider themselves part of the self-described “resistance” against capitalism, colonialism, and “whiteness” secretly want to force me to watch while they decapitate my children, rape and murder my wife, and finally murder me? Or perhaps it’s not so secret anymore, since these people are putting pictures of paragliders in their event fliers.
If you “stand with Palestine” after the events of this past weekend, I have to assume that you are either willfully ignorant, or a pre-civilizational savage who answers only to force. Perhaps both. Either way, I will never stand with Palestine again.