Two weeks ago, in Seattle, I was waiting at a makeshift bus stop. The original bus stop had been moved due to construction, and I found myself surrounded by ~40 protesters who were chanting and holding signs. After a few minutes, I struck up a conversation with a protester standing next to me. He was white, in his late 40s, angry, and he held a large sign demanding, “End War NOW.”

I asked him what he was protesting and he said, “War, oppression, fascism.” He asked me what I’m doing, and I told him the truth: “I’m waiting for the bus. The bus stop was moved due to construction.” He nodded and got back to yelling at cars and signaling them to honk in support, which many did.

I asked him how long he’d been protesting and he responded, “Two hours, today.” Then I asked him where he got his news, and he said, “YouTube and podcasts.” I said, “Cool, what podcasts do you listen to?” He stopped yelling, looked at me, and said, “A lot of different ones.” “Cool,” I said, “I listen to a lot of podcasts, too. What are your favorites?” He froze, stared at me, and said, “I don’t have to tell you shit.” Then he got back to yelling at cars.

I asked, “Why are you upset? Was my question unreasonable?” He responded, “I think you don’t believe what I do.” I said, “Even if that’s true, isn’t that more and not less reason to talk to me? You’re out here with signs yelling at people in cars and I assume it’s because you want support for your message. I’m just a guy waiting for the bus. Isn’t this a great opportunity for you and for me to learn?”

He ignored me and began screaming at cars again.

Other protesters then surrounded me, not in a threatening way, but they physically encircled me. They asked me what was going on and I told them. They agreed with the protester, “He doesn’t have to tell you anything,” a young man told me, to which I responded, “That’s true. He certainly does not. And yet, I truly don’t understand the hostility. Is my question unreasonable? Why is that question so disturbing?”

Then the bus arrived.

That refusal to engage, even when the cost was zero, struck me as a small but telling example of the same pattern I had seen for decades in academia.

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Questions Without Answers

For over three decades, I’ve been respectfully asking people questions. When I taught at a university I will not name, I saw bizarre claims (“citation justice,” the claim that in peer-reviewed papers, academics should cite minorities more than non-minorities; racial disparities in outcomes are entirely caused by systems; it is possible to change biological sex) increasingly creeping into policy decisions. I politely and respectfully asked supporters and administrators what the rationale and evidence for the new policies were, and instead of providing clear answers, I was consistently met with hostility, formal complaints, anger, and accusations of microaggressions.

Nobody would respond this way to claims about electricity or gravity. They’d just provide evidence. And yet otherwise intelligent and highly educated people were making really strange claims about reality that up until very recently almost everyone would think were completely absurd if not morally suspect. One of the reasons why questioning these claims was important is that once they became institutionalized, the policies would govern how people behaved, including the threat of sanction, punishment, and even loss of employment.

One of the things that was so striking to me about this hostility was that years prior I was involved in the New Atheist movement. When I would ask Christians or those of other faiths about their reasoning and evidence, they were more than happy to speak with me at length about why they believed what they believed. While spirited, these conversations were almost universally friendly and often ended in one of us taking the other to dinner or drinks. I still maintain many of these friendships.

My First Mistake

For years, I’ve attempted to get leftists on my show. I’ve largely failed. (We’ve recently begun making our invitation list public. As to why, see here.)

Only three leftists have accepted my invitation (Destiny, David Pakman, and Jonathan Rauch). These were not particularly interesting conversations, and that’s entirely my fault. I made the mistake of softballing questions in the hope that eventually I’d get more leftists on the show. This approach was grossly mistaken and ultimately failed. It made the conversations less robust than they could have been and I shortchanged my guests. For that, I am sorry.

One reason I did this was that I was particularly susceptible to the criticism that Conversations with Peter Boghossian (Apple, YouTube, Amazon) was a center-right show that did not have leftists on. I was and am someone who values the truth, and I am not egotistical enough to believe the truth lies entirely with those in the same tribes as me.

But most of the individuals who are in service to opposing tribes and ideologies have shown little willingness to add substantive arguments to the conversation when challenged. If they did have such a willingness, quite simply, they’d have already added it. We’d see them routinely appear on longform shows where they substantively engage people who hold opposing views or who question their views. Think Kamala Harris going on Joe Rogan. (Destiny is the exception to this, but while Destiny is a self-described leftist he’s not an identitarian.)

This used to be the standard among disagreeing tribes in the United States. Christians and atheists did this for decades prior. Specific examples include Richard Dawkins debating John Lennox and Alister McGrath, Sam Harris debating William Lane Craig, and Christopher Hitchens debating Frank Turek. But this was neither new nor confined to the realm of culture wars. Politically, William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal engaged in similar public dialogues and debates in the late 60s. As a bare minimum, they’d furnish their reasoning and evidence in writing and invite others to a back-and-forth.

It’s important to not “what about” the issue of an unwillingness to engage those with whom one disagrees. Unwillingness to engage opposing views in good faith has become especially pronounced on the contemporary left, particularly within academic and activist institutions. With the exception of a few isolated examples on the right, those on the center and to the right of center are more than willing to engage those they disagree with.

Think Charlie Kirk, who was willing to debate people across the political spectrum. Reactions to his assassination in 2025 revealed how many on the left celebrated political violence rather than condemning it. Although this is ahistorical, unwillingness to engage opposing views in good faith remains a notable feature of the modern left. Saying otherwise is profoundly dishonest.

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I Was Wrong, Again

Realizing my mistake, that I could get leftists on the show if I softballed people with similar worldviews, I decided to change course. On June 24, 2026, I tweeted:

“I miscalculated. Softballing leftists did not draw more leftists to the show. That approach ends now.

All future in-person interviews on Conversations with Peter Boghossian will be hardball. Guests will face direct pressure and rigorous examination of their claims.

Edited interviews already in progress remain unchanged.”

Consequently, I was confident that it would be more difficult for me to get noteworthy people of any political orientation to come on the show. After all, who would want to endure a sustained Socratic grilling? It turns out, quite a few people.

After I posted the above tweet, we were deluged with requests to come on the show. While we rarely accept self-invitations, the fact still stands: More, and not fewer, people wanted to come on the show. And, as far as I can tell, not a single person on the left was among them.

Potential guests’ enthusiasm did not wane when we informed people we’d already invited on the show about the new format change. One person even responded, “Great! I was looking forward to it before but now I can’t wait!!”

This reaction confirmed something I had already begun to suspect: Avoiding rigorous disagreement doesn’t just limit conversation, it actively damages people’s ability to think clearly.

Cognitive Pits

Failure to engage people with whom you have significant disagreements will, eventually, deepen and entrench your delusions about the nature of reality. This does not mean that engaging others will necessarily lead you to truth, but by not engaging others you’ll have no way to figure out if what you believe corresponds to reality. You’ll have no corrective mechanism or way to falsify what you believe.

But it’s even worse than this. Over time, you’ll come to believe you’re a better person because you’ve not engaged others. You believe the true things, which makes you a good person, and so those who disagree must be bad people. (You’ll do this because the confidence you have that your beliefs are true will increase because your beliefs have not been stress tested. A similar phenomenon can be found in fantasy-based martial arts, where practitioners do not engage resisting opponents.)

The solutions sound simple: “Engage people you disagree with. Listen with the goal of understanding. Really understand why someone believes what they believe. Be willing to revise your beliefs,” but they’re not easy to achieve. Complicating your ability to do this are institutional structures, tribalism, and our evolved moral systems. Briefly, here are a few obstacles that put conversations across divides into hard mode:

• Thinking that because one has a different political orientation, engaging them morally sullies you

• Failing to understand that not being exposed to people who hold different views causes you to “other” them and thus view them as bad or immoral

• Avoiding engage long enough, and you’ll not know how to engage and cease to understand why you should

• Thinking you can immediately write off a person or an idea because of a particular label (“far right,” “racist,” “bigot,” “[something]phobic,” etc.)

• Thinking that not revising your beliefs makes you a better person

• Using the fact that you don’t engage others as an excuse to not do the intellectual work to understand the reasoning behind their positions

• Fearing ostracism or outcast from your moral community if you engage different beliefs, and fear of losing moral status if you’re verbally bested

• Believing that being offended is a justified response to your beliefs being challenged

These can be mitigated to a certain extent, but not entirely. My number one recommendation for how to start is to just listen. That’s it, listen. Listen to someone whose beliefs don’t align with yours, and focus on why they believe what they believe. I’d also suggest keeping these interactions brief, to start. Eventually you can work yourself up to listening for longer periods of time and asking targeted epistemological questions.

To entirely mitigate these obstacles, you need a certain disposition. Basically, the willingness to lose friends, to lose the respect of those in your community, and to be lonely. Indeed, a heavy price to pay when truth is not guaranteed and when you prioritize other, more primal instincts.

There Are No Guarantees

If someone does not want to talk to you, there’s not a lot you can do about it. The protester at the bus stop was hellbent on not talking to me, despite my best efforts to build rapport and be mindful of my tone. But this doesn’t prevent you from engaging others. It just means that it’s not always possible.

I’ll be 60 this month, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. One of those mistakes was believing that softening my approach would encourage more and better engagement. I will not make that mistake again.

Peter

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And then there’s this:

Thirty-year-old Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese asylum seeker, mounted and stabbed Stephen Ogilvie repeatedly in the face, head, neck, and back with a kitchen knife in north Belfast. Ogilvie lost his left eye and sustained serious injuries but survived.

There’s been a characteristic silence around the attack from left-wing media. The New York Times did cover it, but only in the context of the anti-immigration sentiment that ensued. Same with the other mainstream outlets I checked (BBC, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, etc.). This is a shame, not merely because it is gross journalistic malpractice to frame the event only in terms of its backlash, but because it deprives everyone (left, right, and center) of hearing what the intelligent left-wing critic has to say about the issue.

After the attack I called a few leftist friends to get their perspectives on the attempted beheading. Not a single person had even heard of the attack. Not one.

Maybe there is a reasonable way of interpreting this asylum seeker’s savagery that doesn’t lead one to think, as I did: “Jesus Christ, we’re long overdue to shut the borders and deport these people.” But because of the mainstream’s silence on the issue, we will never know what intelligent leftists have to say.

Whether or not I agree with the left or the right on any given issue, I think the presence of differing opinions and the resulting debate is an inherently good thing for a democracy. If people with whom you disagree are unwilling or incapable of forming arguments for their positions, and if you value truth and intellectual integrity then you should make their arguments better than they could. This is part of being an intellectually responsible adult: Understanding that you cannot be correct about everything and those who have substantive disagreements with you are almost certainly correct some of the time.

So, in the absence of intelligent left-wing discussion on this issue, I’m going to steelman the opposition and tell you what I think the intelligent left-wing response to this issue should be:

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I am not asking you to agree with this perspective. I do not agree with it. My disagreement stems from the idea that we have an obligation to take in asylum seekers because we are relatively well off. This is an assertion. It’s not derived. Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that large, rapid inflows from high-violence, low-trust source regions produce measurable downstream costs in crime, welfare, and trust.**

With that said, I am asking you to consider this argument, and indeed, to rebut it to the extent to which you disagree. We are made stronger as a society when there is public debate on matters of abiding significance. This is my contribution.

Peter

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**Citations

• Statistics Denmark, Indvandrere i Danmark 2025 (Copenhagen: Statistics Denmark, 2025). Male descendants crime indices relative to Danish-origin baseline: Lebanon 386, Somali 316, Syrian 312, Iraqi 268.

• Statistics Denmark, conviction tables (STRAFNA4 series), penal code convictions per 100,000 residents aged 15–79 by country of origin, 2021–2025. Somali-origin rate 7.8 times Danish-origin baseline (428 per 100,000); 40 of 65 tracked origin groups exceeded the native rate.

• Ministry of Justice (UK), prison population statistics, June 2021–June 2025, analyzed in Migration Observatory, “How do conviction rates and prison populations differ between migrants and the UK-born population?” (30 September 2025). Prisoner numbers from Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan increased over the period concurrent with higher asylum inflows from those countries.

• Migration Advisory Committee, Migration Advisory Committee Annual Report 2025 (London: Migration Advisory Committee, 17 December 2025), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-annual-report-2025/migration-advisory-committee-mac-annual-report-2025-accessible. “We expect the lifetime net fiscal impact of those entering through asylum and refugee routes to be unambiguously negative.”

• Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Police Crime Statistics 2025 (Wiesbaden: BKA, 2025). Non-German suspects accounted for roughly 34% of total suspects while comprising approximately 16% of the population, with elevated representation in violent crime categories among asylum-linked migrant cohorts.

• Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA), Registered offendings among persons of native and non-native backgrounds (Stockholm: BRA, September 2021). Foreign-born show relative risk of 3.2 for rape offences and up to 4.0 for homicide. Those born in Sweden to two non-native parents show relative risks of 11.2 for homicide and 11.5 for robbery.

#1:

#2:

#3:

There are many good answers to this question, and the one you offer is a litmus test. Some right-wing readers are likely disgusted by all three, and identify them as the results of left-wing policy failures. Left-wing readers may instead see three groups resisting various tendrils of America’s power, be they patriarchy, white supremacy, or cultural erasure.

I offer a different answer: All three are a result of the demise of shame as a cultural force in America.

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In order to shame someone, you have to share a basic moral and cultural framework with them. Put more simply, you have to think the same things are bad. This is why shame was such an efficient cudgel during the Woke era: There was a shared understanding of what constituted wrongthink (even among the minority who disagreed that it was wrongthink) and this shared understanding enabled the Woke to efficiently identify, shame, and punish transgressors.

My suspicion is that Wokeness was likely the last mono-morality that will ever exist in America; peak-Woke is over and we are too diverse a nation for any one moral system to hold purchase over everyone. Now, different moral tribes compete and coexist: Urban Black, conservative Muslim, Woke, WASP, conservative Christian, and those of various immigrant groups, to name a few.

It’s easy to see the good that freeing people from shame does. I am now more able to speak my mind without fear of social, professional, and legal reprisal than I was during peak-woke. Two men in love can hold hands while walking down the street, something much harder during the 1950s era of conservative Christian cultural domination. These are positive, liberal developments. They bring our society closer to Enlightenment ideals that form the beating heart of Western civilization.

But shame is also an important tool of social control. Without shame, we will become forced to default to carceral solutions, which leaves everyone, from taxpaying shamers to those whose behavior is immune to their shaming, worse off.

Decades ago, when I was still teaching at a university I will not name, I taught an ethics class. I asked students to raise their hands if they believed we should shame other people for things they do. Nobody raised their hands. I then offered a specific example: What if, in the park just outside our classroom, we saw a man call his girlfriend a “stupid bitch,” and then spit on her? Should we shame that behavior? Most hands went up.

Shame is an integral part of a well-functioning society. We should shame smoking in front of children. We should shame littering. But shame stops functioning as a mechanism to control behavior in morally diverse societies. For instance, urban Black youth culture does not consider public disorder to be shameful (as evidenced by video #2, filmed gleefully by participants). WASPs, meanwhile, do find public disorder shameful. That sets up an incommensurable cultural conflict that no amount of shaming will solve, because the former group doesn’t give a shit about what the latter thinks is proper. (And to be fair, neither do the latter about the former.)

The post-Woke era is also the post-shame era. Some groups—Christian LARPers, Marxists, those who aspire to institute Sharia Law—believe that they will be the ones to enforce the next dominant moral orthodoxy. They are all wrong. It is too late for that. Diversity (our strength!) has triumphed over a shared sense of right and wrong.

But I’m not writing this essay to mourn the past. I’m writing it to build the future. We need to create the moral, legal, and physical infrastructure that will allow the United States to continue to function efficiently even as it becomes an increasingly diverse society. This is a simple idea in the opening salvo of what will hopefully be a longer conversation:

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We inoculate our society against those who would take advantage of it by pre-emptively making ourselves lower-trust.

A common thread among low-trust cultural and moral groups is a disrespect toward the commons. Examples include littering, welfare fraud, playing music loudly on public transportation, and riding motorized bikes on pedestrian sidewalks. Some of these can be easily remedied by intelligent public policy: Increase the number of trash cans in public spaces, or make it physically impossible to enter public transit without paying. (For more on the latter, see Lessig’s Code 2.0.)

Both of these have already been implemented in large blue cities to tremendous effect. Let’s look at one example: In August of 2025, San Francisco installed 6ft tall plexiglass fare gates in BART (their public transit system) that made it almost impossible to enter without paying. In tandem, they also increased the number of police. The result? A 41% decrease in crime relative to the year before, 961 fewer hours spent cleaning up graffiti and vandalism in just the first 6 months after installing the gates, and $10,000,000 in annual revenue recovered. This is an excellent example of how even minimal selection against low-trust behavior (fare evasion) in public spaces pays dividends. As the United States becomes more culturally and morally diverse, and low-trust behavior becomes more common, the returns from enforcing socially productive behavior increase.

It’s easy to blame low-trust behavior on people in low-trust societies, but in fact, in most places, our public policy actually incentivizes low-trust behavior. Why would you pay for the subway when you know that (a) fares are not enforced, and (b) you’re going to be harassed during your ride by (c) other people didn’t pay the fare! It’s effortless to imagine how one would think it’s illogical and unfair to pay.

This too is a downstream effect of, among other things, decreased shame. Harassing innocent people used to be shameful behavior—it was done in dark alleys and at night—now, it’s done in subway cars in New York City by the criminally mentally ill. And if you stop them from harassing others (Daniel Penny) the justice system—the very people who are entrusted to ensure your safety—shame and attempt to punish you.

A dream scenario would be for cultural and moral homogeneity simply to the extent of a respect of public spaces. I won’t hold my breath. Absent this, I’ll take enforcing laws (whether through rebuilding physical infrastructure, increased police presence, or harsher legislation) designed to compel behavior that was once largely self-enforced. This will necessarily mean increased state presence in the lives of citizens, something which I am (generally) against. There may, however, be no other realistic options.

If you have further ideas for preparing the United States for increasing low-trust behavior I would love to hear them. I think this will be one of the defining questions of the next few decades of American life.

Peter

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I traveled to Hawke’s Bay to have conversations with Black Power’s leadership. They’re New Zealand’s second-largest gang, after their rivals, the Mongrel Mob.

As we (Reid and Guy) pulled up to our humble Airbnb in a shiny SUV rental, an older white V8 Mercedes was in our driveway. I got out, approached the men standing outside their car with my hand outstretched. Rather than shake my hand, one by one they pressed their foreheads against ours and looked into our eyes. I liked them immediately.

Denis, an older white guy, is a Black Power life member. Munz, an older Māori man, is the president. And Grub, who sported moko kanohi (a full-face tattoo), is the vice president. After those brief and intimate introductions, we went into our living room, sipped water together for 90 minutes, and talked about how we wanted to proceed.

I felt a connection to these three men. These are people who do not bullshit, who’ll have your back in times of crisis, and whose word means something. They are men of a bygone era, when your word was your bond, and your honor was sacred. These are men you can have an honest conversation with, who’ll look you in the eyes and tell you how they see it, and they won’t hesitate to call you out. Spending time with them felt familiar.

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I’ve made a lot of predictions, on record, about New York City under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. How it’s going to be insolvent. Crime-ridden. Dysfunctional. You can find them, timestamped, here, here, here, and here. But a few days ago, Mamdani’s office announced that he had reduced New York’s deficit from $12 billion to $0. Amazing!

Here’s Mamdani’s video where he explicitly makes this claim:

Only one of us can be correct, and we now have the evidence to determine who that is. So, I thought I’d take this moment to pit my predictions—and Mamdani’s claims—against reality.

Who got it right? Who got it wrong? And do I Mamdani an apology?

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First, I want to acknowledge the distinct disadvantage Mamdani faced: Eric Adams was, unfortunately, as incompetent as he was corrupt. (He’ll feel right at home in Albania.) His budget failed to accurately reflect how much money the city needed by about $12 billion dollars. That is: He claimed that New York City only needed X dollars to fund the city’s expenses, and he received X dollars, but in fact the city actually needed X + $12 BILLION dollars. Now the bill is coming due, and Mamdani’s stuck with it.

Second, feel not the slightest sympathy for Mamdani: When he was an assemblyman, he voted for the precise spending increases that inflated the budget past what New York City could afford; when Eric Adams vetoed them, arguing (correctly) that the city didn’t have the money, Mamdani and other members overrode the veto. Now Mamdani is claiming to have “uncovered” the $12 billion “Adams gap.” Hmmm. How did that gap get there, Assemblyman Mamdani?

Nonetheless, I’d be willing to look the other way if Mamdani did actually balance the budget. There’s nothing wrong with funding things you can pay for.

So, can he? Or rather, can you, taxpayer?

Essentially, Mamdani’s task was to find $12 billion dollars. There are really only two ways to do this: You cut services, or raise taxes. (The federal govt. prints money.) Both make people hate you, and every politician knows that. Mamdani found a neat way around this: Make your children pay for it! (This works because his devoted base of downwardly mobile and over-educated yuppies have none.) Let’s look at how he accomplished this.

NYC has pension funds from which it draws to pay the pensions of current retirees and future retirees. At current spending levels, however, the fund is on an unsustainable decline. If NYC doesn’t put more money into it, the city won’t be able to afford future retirees’ pensions, and the system collapses. In short: They’re fucked. To prevent system-collapse, every year NYC is required to pay money in so that, hopefully, by 2032, the fund will have enough money that it can self-sustain.

Mr. Mamdani, however, decided that he’d rather not put all that money in this year. It’s expensive to prevent system-collapse! Instead, he increased the amount of time the city has to repay the debt from 2032 to 2037, which reduces the amount the city needs to pay each year. This year, specifically, it allows New York to pay $1.64 billion fewer dollars into the fund. Mamdani, who I’m coming to realize really is an excellent politician (pejorative), has claimed that $1.64 billion as a credit against the $12 billion he has to come up with.

So what? He plays with numbers. What’s the big deal?

The problem with this is that delaying pension contributions doesn’t make costs go away, in fact, it dramatically increases them in the long term. This is because the pension fund expects to earn investment returns on the money that NYC puts in this year, so when contributions are reduced, the city eventually has to pay back the difference plus the investment growth the fund would have generated. That missing money then compounds at 7% per year, which, annualized across 5 extra years, is about $4 billion dollars missing. So, Mamdani really did “save” NYC from having to pay $1.64 billion dollars this year, and all it cost was $4 billion dollars from your children, taken when Mamdani is no longer mayor.

That’s $1.64 billion. What about the rest? The lion’s share of $12 billion comes from a $4 billion New York State aid package ($8 billion over two years). A one-off hand out that is, in effect, a wealth transfer from upstate New York to New York City. Very equitable!

But in truth, there’s nothing wrong with an aid package. Sometimes you’re in deep shit and you need some help to dig yourself out. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with providing temporary budget relief, provided that money is used to fix structural problems. But fear not! Mamdani has actually found a way to use this money to create even more structural problems.

The perfect example: Mamdani is using $1.6 billion in New York State funding to expand free pre-k for 3-year-olds and begin free pre-k for 4-year-olds. But he only secured funding for 2.5 years. So when the time is up there will be a political crisis: NYC will either have to come up with an extra $1.6 billion a year (at least, that number assumes no costs grow), or cut the program and kick children out of pre-k, disrupting tens of thousands of families that have structured jobs, commutes, and childcare around the service. So, it is true that Mamdani secured $8 billion in funding across two years (no small feat!), he just decided to use that money to lock in an extra $1.6 billion dollars of spending, every year, in perpetuity.

There is an argument to be made that free pre-k for 3- and 4-year-olds will actually save the city money: If parents decide to work instead of staying home to take care of children, that increase in earnings will translate into increased tax revenue. This argument, of course, is not the one Mamdani is making however, because he does not care if New York City is fiscally sound.

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Another element of his budget is the infamous pied-à-terre tax, or the tax on second homes. Though there’s been a lot of faff about it, and of course Mamdani has already claimed the predicted $500 million in annual revenue as a further credit against his $12 billion deficit, the law hasn’t actually passed.

That $500 million also seems suspiciously high to me because it assumes that no rich people move out as a result of the tax. Famously, Mamdani announced his tax in front of Citadel-CEO Ken Griffin’s home; the CEO, incensed, announced that Citadel would be expanding and adding 400 new jobs in Miami instead of New York. Not a smart move, Mamdani. Although to be fair to the mayor, the most-cited work on this subject (by Stanford researcher Cristobal Young) suggests that millionaire flight is real but small: Per 1% increase in taxes, about 0.3% of millionaires will move away.

Listen to the mayor, in his own words:

youtube.com/watch?v=FLKZnVB4F9k&themeRefresh=1

The lesson I don’t want readers to take away from this is that socialists aren’t fiscally responsible. Because—while true—it’s irrelevant. American politicians, red, blue, and purple, are not fiscally responsible. Since Trump came into office just over a year ago the deficit has grown 2.8 TRILLION dollars. (That was a serious point of contention between Musk and Trump.) Biden, in his four years, oversaw a 7.9 trillion dollar increase (to be fair, much of this was as a result of Trump-era COVID stimulus). Obama and Bush were hardly better.

We are not serious about the future of our nation. At every step we have prioritized gluttony over discipline, and our kids will pay the price. Mamdani is a symptom of this, not the cause.

So no, I do not owe Mamdani an apology. But I do owe my kids one.

Peter

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I have a problem.

For years now, I’ve been unable to get people on our show who disagree with me. Not all people, just those committed to identity-first frameworks on the left.

I’m currently in New Zealand. As this is a remarkably chill place, I invited, both by email and on X, a few of New Zealand’s prominent progressives to come on the show.

Crickets.

But getting them to have conversations with me is only half the problem. The more corrosive half is the pattern of denying invitations ever occurred, which undermines any claim to good-faith disagreement. After years of thinking about how to solve these problems, I finally have the best solution I could think of: Make a public registry of who we invited for a conversation, when they were invited, how they were invited, and what their response has been.

You can find our invitation list here:

https://www.nationalprogressalliance.org/who-weve-invited/

We just began this on April 28, and we will be adding to this list accordingly.

To understand why I think this is important, I want to offer a brief background and a few words about the show.

Background

From the right, I’ve had a lot of people on who disagree with me about issues—for example, abortion (I’m pro-choice in the first trimester), the death penalty (I’m against it), religion (both Muslim and Christian apologists have come on the show), immigration (guests have been both pro and con), marijuana legalization (I’m pro legalization), metaphysics, morality more broadly, etc. These conversations have been extremely civil, and they’ve nudged some of my views. I’ve even had non-identitarian leftists on the show, like David Pakman, Destiny (five times), Jonathan Rauch, and others.

But I simply cannot get identitarian leftists to come on the show and speak with me. This is one of the Achilles’ heels of my book that Lindsay and I acknowledge early on: You cannot force a person to have a conversation with you. If they agree to converse, the book is, in my opinion, the ultimate tool. If they do not agree, there is literally nothing you can do. But not having a conversation and (in at least one case) lying about the fact that you were ever invited is different.

I want to be crystal clear: Nobody is under any obligation to speak with me, just as I’m under none to speak with anyone. The invitations to conversation are not about beating anyone down, tricking people, or humiliating them, and I offer ~240 episodes of the show as evidence of this.

Conversations with Peter Boghossian: “No dogma. Just dialogue.”

My 45–90 minutes conversations are long-form, unscripted, and candid.

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I explicitly aim to model productive conversation. My goal is to foster candid, intellectually rigorous dialogues grounded in reason, civility, and curiosity. Yes, I want to challenge ideological conformity and reclaim open inquiry amid polarization. And yes, I do test assumptions, push guests for clarity, and Socratically explore ideas while doing my best to minimize my own orthodoxies. And yes, I do have first principles like free expression, civil discourse, and Enlightenment rationalism.

I attempt to demonstrate, in practice, how to have difficult conversations across divides, reduce tribalism, and defend habits of open, evidence-based inquiry that are essential to democracy and human progress. I don’t just talk about the problem of polarization. I try to model a solution.

In short, I’m trying to show that serious conversation about difficult topics is still possible, and doing so is essential for a healthy liberal democracy. My conversations are not about “winning” but about clarifying ideas, exposing weak reasoning, and fostering intellectual courage in the audience.

Finally

It is difficult to discharge this mission when the people who have radical disagreements with most (all?) of my positions refuse to converse. It is more difficult still when they lie about not being invited to converse. Hence, in the spirit of transparency, we are making our outreach list public. If you know anyone who disagrees with any of my views and you think we should invite them, please write their name(s) in the comments below along with their X handles if they have one. Or if you believe someone was improperly listed as non-responsive, please provide counter-evidence.

Thanks, and I’m hoping that making our invitation list public will make it easier to hold both sides accountable whether impossible conversations actually happen.

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I prefer the dictionary definition of “conspiracy theory” because it does neither of those: “A belief that an event or situation is the result of a secret plan made by powerful people” (Cambridge Dictionary). Unfortunately, sometimes events are the results of a secret plan made by powerful people, and as such conspiracy theories deserve to be evaluated with the same rigor that any other idea is due.

The SPLC

Famously, in 2017, Alex Jones accused the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of funding neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Even though I’ve long known the SPLC to be ideologically captured and wholly corrupt, at the time I considered this a “conspiracy theory.” It was so outside the bounds of likelihood I simply ignored it. This month, however, the SPLC was indicted for wiring over 3 million dollars to members of those groups.

I was wrong. I believed it was a false claim, and I did not give this “conspiracy theory” the scrutiny it deserved.

The SPLC revelation came on the heels of another assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Reading commentary about the attempt, it struck me that conspiracy theories have become increasingly mainstream. There are two reasons why this may be true: 1) situations are increasingly the result of secret plans made by powerful people, and Americans are recalibrating their beliefs accordingly, or 2) we are becoming increasingly ill equipped to evaluate the merits of theories, and in absence of critical evaluation are deciding what to believe by defaulting to signals of whether theories align with our ideologies. I prioritize the latter as the best explanation.

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I’m excited to announce the next Zoom hangout for our amazing Paid Substack Subscribers!

Join me TODAY, April 24 at 6pm US Eastern Time to chat, question, and tackle the chaos around us.

Not subscribed yet? You can sign up below. Your contribution of $5/month or $50/year directly supports the production of my content through National Progress Alliance. Thank you for your support!

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The discussion ends where it should, not with longevity hacks, but with the question of what makes a life worth living.

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I enjoy exploring absurd, morally repulsive, and unhinged ideas. That’s why I had to speak with esteemed philosopher Dr. Nick Zangwill. Nick believes it is a moral duty to eat animals. His argument runs something like this: We have to eat the animals we’ve “constructed,” that is bred, and made to eat (unlike dogs and cats, which were not made for human consumption). We “owe it to them” to be eaten. If we don’t eat the animals, then we don’t respect them as the kind of thing they are. We respect animals only by eating them.

I eat animals, and I’m not happy about it. I struggle with the suffering they experience, yet it’s a conscious choice I’ve made. I’m also under no illusions: Animals feel pain. Animals suffer. I contribute to that suffering. When I’ve stopped eating animals, my health has suffered tremendously. So, I’ve made a choice for there to be more animal suffering so that I may be healthy and feel better than if I were a vegetarian or vegan. This is all the more reason to discuss animal suffering with Nick, as I’m quite confident my belief is morally correct.

Animal Snuff Movies

Years ago, at a university I will not name, I taught an environmental ethics class. In that class, I showed a truly horrific movie of how cows, pigs, and chickens are treated in factory farms. It was ghastly, and I’ll spare the details. My claim was that if one chose to eat meat, one should know what that entails – namely, suffering. Horrific suffering.

One day, I was summoned to my superior’s office. They told me that the film I showed made “more than one student” uncomfortable, and multiple students had complained. I responded that one of the objectives of showing the film in an environmental ethics class was to examine the morality surrounding factory farming and the ethics of eating animals. I was not advocating veganism or vegetarianism, but I was asking students to be morally aware of the consequences of their choices. That, I believe, is one of the points of an ethics class.

My superior told me that the university is “not in the business of making students feel uncomfortable” and that I was likely in violation of some unspecified rule if I showed the film again. Rather than engage in a conversation about the purpose of an ethics class or argue that some discomfort is usually experienced when honestly examining one’s moral beliefs and actions, I responded by stating that I understood and that I would not show the film again. I did not, however, apologize. (If it was a university rule, after all, then I should either follow the rule or resign.)

It’s worth noting that the two students who thanked me after showing the film were vegan and one vegetarian. If I were to guess, I’d guess that the meat-eaters filed formal complaints because they were uncomfortable with the consequences of their actions.

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Where Were Animal Rights Activists?

After countless hours of trying, my team and I could not find even one vegan or vegetarian activism to join Nick and me for a discussion about animal rights. (As I’ve mentioned 10,000 times before, this is a perennial problem encountered by everyone in the conversation space.) If an animal rights activist were to join us, I’d recommend a line of questioning akin to this: Imagine two universes, one with cruelty and one without. Wouldn’t it be better to live in a universe without cruelty?

And that’s exactly what I asked Nick. He responded by echoing Nietzsche and stating that a world without cruelty would also be a world without grief. “Would the world without grief be a better world? No, it wouldn’t. It would be a much worse world, because only in a world with love would there be grief.” Indeed, Nietzsche consistently portrays a world without grief or suffering as undesirable: meaningless, contemptible, and antithetical to human potential. Nietzsche encouraged embracing pain as a catalyst for meaning, rather than seeking its eradication.

This threw me for somewhat of a loop, as it’s unclear why one would want to do a bad thing to have a morally and socially appropriate response to the wrongdoing. (Aristotle writes this about shame. We shouldn’t commit a bad act to feel shame. We should just not commit bad acts.)

I want to add that Nick was firm in his argument that the animals we eat should have decent lives. The problem with animal activists, he argues, is that you can’t just focus on the last five minutes of an animal’s life. What’s occurred in their lives before that matters.

Cruelty or Callousness?

Nick didn’t accept my characterization of the treatment of animals as cruel. Cruelty, he countered, implies something about the motivation of the people doing the action. Their treatment was best characterized as callous.

Is industrial farming callous or cruel? Or is this a distinction without a difference? It’s not mere semantics. In cruelty, you’re aiming at causing pain and suffering. Callousness implies you don’t care about suffering; cruelty means you do and that you’re attempting to cause it. I think Nick is largely correct in that the abhorrent treatment of animals is better characterized as callousness, albeit grotesque callousness and even deranged moral indifference.

There’s an important meta-point to be made here, and that’s that the words you use matter. We are so accustomed to capriciously throwing around words that we are trapped in sloppy ways of thinking.

I’ll no longer dwell on words or the treatment of animals. I’ll leave it to you to decide if his argument holds up.

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I asked Nick to contribute to the Substack, and here's what he had to say:

By Nick Zangwill

Our conversation began with my robust defence of carnivorism and then branched out to other topics. One recurring theme is the notion of rights. I advocate a minimal negative notion of rights, essentially the right to non-interference. This stems from something unique to humans: our rational self-consciousness, as seen in our ability to make reasoned decisions.

However, the concept of rights has been horribly abused, particularly with regard to positive rights. Positive rights require others to act on behalf of the rights-holder. These are often invoked to support dubious causes, such as undemocratic regimes, or by individuals who believe they have the right to make demands or exert control over others. This tendency is also evident in everyday public interactions. For example, a parent at your children’s school or a neighbor on your block who insists on their rights is often just a bully seeking to dominate others. Talk of positive rights is frequently a tool for coercion.

Another key concept is goodness, which, though central, differs from rights. Having rights includes the freedom to make mistakes and pursue what may not be good. Moral life is complex, and we must distinguish between rights and the good to avoid oversimplifying it.

Non-human animals, particularly those we breed for food (which we can generalize about to some extent), lack the negative rights that humans possess.Nonetheless, some things are good for animals and some are bad; some align with their interests, others do not. This straightforward view supports a defense of carnivorism, where a practice benefits animals by providing them with existence and a sufficient quality of life.

Now, what about aspiring immigrants (often called ‘asylum seekers’)? We cannot eat them! Why? Because they have negative rights. They belong to a different category from animals.Human beings also have positive rights, but only as members of specific communities, such as nations or families. Having these rights entitles us to assistance from others in the group. However, without belonging to such a community or family, these rights do not apply. In particular, there is no abstract universal positive right to be helped that burdens everyone else. There is, however, a universal negative right: others should not interfere with you, and you should not interfere with them. In short, we should leave each other alone.

Many people appeal to what they see as universally shared positive rights. This is once again the tactic of the bully. Intellectuals who promote borderless internationalism are both misguided and culpable. Those outside a community lack a positive claim on those inside. Therefore, when it comes to aspiring immigrants, our attitudes and decisions may be guided primarily by what is good for those within the nation’s circle.

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When I was 6, my teachers told me that all children are equally intelligent. I remember looking around the classroom and seeing this was obviously false. But beyond that, I knew my teachers looked around the same room and also knew it was false.

There is a lesson in this: Sometimes people lie to you. As the old Soviet joke goes: “They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway – and we keep pretending to believe them.”

The most charitable interpretation of this phenomenon is that these are pro-social lies. Our teachers, and society broadly, don’t tell these lies to deceive (after all, they’re conspicuously false). We lie because we think it’s the kind thing to do. My teacher at 6 years old did not wake up with the goal of lying to 6-year-olds. Rather, she probably looked around the room, saw a child who suffered from what we then termed “retardation,” and thought, “It’s hard enough to be a retard; the least we can do is pretend they’re just like everyone else.”

What people like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, and increasingly Tucker Carlson do is name these lies. Jews do dominate elite society. Blacks do have, on average, lower IQs. Men aren’t women. Women are at a distinct disadvantage in competitive sports.

It’s powerful to hear the truth. It feels refreshing. But whether through ignorance or malice, you don’t hear the deeper, more banal truth: These are well-meaning lies, told mostly by midwits. These lies are not, as the influencers claim, evidence that there’s a great conspiracy afoot: The Jews are using the Blacks as pawns against the Whites, with only MAGA standing against the rising horde. The purveyors of these pro-social lies are right about what’s wrong and wrong about what’s right.

One of the great failures of the Left is its inability to address these lies head-on. They don’t want to admit that they’re lying, whether it’s about all children being equally intelligent or about it being possible to change one’s sex.

A lie is just a transfer of credibility from the people who speak it to the people who debunk it – a constant outflow of power from the left to the right.

I don’t want to make the same mistake. So I’m committing professional self-immolation: I am going to name a few of the most radioactive pro-social lies, tell you why they’re not evidence of a conspiracy, and hopefully offer you the gift of doubt.

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“The one unforgivable sin is to be boring” Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Season 5 of For All Mankind has committed the unforgivable sin. It is boring. I have to force myself to stay tuned in, or to care about the characters, or to be interested in the plot. I even have to strain to remember the characters’ names. I just don’t care. It’s become an insipid, lowbrow soap opera set on Mars. It is replete with wooden, purposeless characters orbiting one another in a purposeless universe.

The show has a fantastic alternative history premise: The Soviets beat us to the moon. What happens now changes the trajectory of the world’s future history! And in Seasons 1 and 2, that was the premise that guided the show. It was buttressed by fairly animated characters who were trying to do the right thing, sometimes failing (Margo giving information to the Soviets) and sometimes succeeding (Ed didn’t kill the Soviet cosmonaut trespassing in his mine). Their struggle, however, was always clear and their choices interesting if ill-considered.

Fast-forward to Season 5. For whatever reason, in this most recent season the writers decided to jump nine years in the future. The protagonist, Ed Baldwin, is old, wears heavy prosthetics, and comes off as dyspeptic and aggrieved. Margo is curdled, imprisoned in what I imagine to be a federal penitentiary. (The prison allows touching and gifts?!). Dev is acting as if what he’s building matters, but we are clueless as to why to whom. Ed’s daughter, Kelly, is still searching for life on Mars. And there seems to be some kind of race to find life in the solar system with Titan rover signals somehow factored in, and life’s discovery seems to have some kind of commercial use, but we’re not told what that is. Some old stoic North Korean refugee is in the mix too, and he’s remarkably nonchalant about being arrested for murder.

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Adding to the pointless malaise, the sets are uninspired. There’s a lot of space in their domiciles, the gravity is treated the same (Mars is about 38 percent of ours) as Earth’s with no explanation given or shown in the CGI, and the promenade looks eerily similar to shows like Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9, but more sterile and less frequented (despite police officer’s warnings of overcrowding).

For all the rhetoric coming from Earth, there’s really no fundamental difference, as far as I can tell, between Earth’s inhabitants and Mars’. People come and go between the two planets, with seemingly little diplomatic hassle and medical quarantine required. Contrast this to the Expanse, where Mars and the Belters had their own dialect, traditions, and culture. In For All Mankind, the inhabitants of Mars and Earth are homogeneous, even fungible, and the tension between them comes off as forced, artificial, and manufactured for some unknown plot tension.

Like Man in the High Castle’s alternative history premise in which the Nazis won WW2, For All Mankind has a lot to work with but for whatever reason the writers have chosen to not lean into why viewers who enjoy this genre would tune in. We have incredibly cool space technology and a colony on Mars, but what are the tradeoffs? What was sacrificed to achieve this? I was stunned that the inhabitants of this parallel world have phones remarkably similar to ours and 3D goggles that look like Apple’s. The writers could have played with that so much more, showing what this parallel universe did not develop at the expense of what they did. But that is not explored.

Nor is the geopolitical intrigue that we saw in early seasons plumbed. The US-Soviet tension has simply vanished: It is unclear whether it was resolved, how, or when, but the overarching ideological conflict that once defined this universe—one of its most compelling features—is entirely ignored.

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This limited exploration of divergence is both a lost opportunity and baffling. If you want to see a fantastic exploration of divergence in parallel worlds, see the grossly underrated show Counterpart. It aired on Starz almost 10 years ago, and it’s a model for parallel worlds, as is Apple TV’s more recent Dark Matter (2024).

For All Mankind’s early seasons leaned harder into stakes, moral gray areas, and “what if” consequences. Season 5’s premiere and episode 2 shift toward personal grudges, family tensions, and table-setting for a space-elevator/murder subplot. It’s very soapy.

With all the fantastic sci-fi shows on Apple TV alone, like Silo, Pluribus (Review part 1 and part 2), Dark Matter, Severance, Season 1 of Invasion, Season 3 of Foundation, etc., Season 5 of For All Mankind is a missed opportunity that cannot be waved away as “maybe it’s the time between seasons.” The Soviet moon victory was always a vehicle for exploring sustained geopolitical trade-offs, not a launchpad for generic colony soap. With Season 6 already confirmed as the finale, the series has one season left to recover the premise that made it distinctive. As it stands after two episodes, Season 5 has traded that distinctiveness for familiarity, and the disappointment is not premature. It is earned by what is already on screen.

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The Bird Whisperer

Two people I respect intellectually told me I must have a conversation with the man who talks to birds. When I told my son about this forthcoming conversation, he said, and I quote, “What will you talk about? You have completely different worldviews and epistemologies. What’s the overlap?”

I enjoy speaking to people with whom I have fundamental, even incommensurable views. That’s why I was particularly excited about this conversation with Enrique Enriquez, the bird whisperer. Enrique considers birds to be a source of transcendence and to possess a kind of universal knowledge. People have even commented that Enrique “speaks like a bird.”

Instead of texts or voicemails, Enrique records himself using bird calls and sends these recordings to family and friends. If one of my friends sends me a VM of himself talking to birds, I’d think he was on a potent hallucinogen. This is not the case with Enrique! He’s completely sober! Enrique finds that this form of communication, bird calls, avoids misunderstanding as it is universally understood. He believes birds offer a type of contemplative language which delivers immediate, raw, and unmediated “apprehension to experience.” Unlike written language, however, meaning in “bird language” ends once the sounds end.

For Enrique, listening to birds requires being present and open without fixation or holding on tightly to bird sounds. Birds are a kind of messenger, albeit a messenger that “poetizes” reality as opposed to providing definitive answers. Suffice it to say, this is not how I view reality, so what a pleasure to have this conversation.

Donald Davidson: “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”

In “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” the American philosopher Donald Davidson argues against the notion of untranslatable languages. He claimed, and I completely agree, that the idea of a conceptual framework or language that cannot be translated into our own (say, English) is not coherent. If something appears untranslatable, it does not qualify as a genuine language or scheme. That’s because translatability is a prerequisite for recognizing the thing in question as a language. For a language, communication is always possible because the language must be translatable into ours.

Think about it like this: We all share the same objective reality. (All but the most extreme postmodernists hold this view. A common misunderstanding is that postmodernists deny an objective, shared reality. They don’t. They believe the understanding of reality is mediated through power relations, like race and class. That, in turn, shapes our understanding of the world. But the world still exists, and we occupy that shared space.) Different perspectives pertain to the identical objective reality and are thus commensurable, that is, in some way measurable by a common standard. Davidson’s view, which again I fully share, undermines the idea that people have different conceptual schemas to apprehend the world, and thus it undermines conceptual relativism. Acknowledging other viewpoints requires them to be translatable, thus making radical incommunicability impossible in principle.

So then where are we with bird language? How does Enrique know that when he talks to birds what they’re giving back to him is objectively true as opposed to him thinking it’s objectively true? How do we know birdsong is a language as opposed to evolutionarily driven sounds?

Scientific studies on bird communication offer some insights here. For instance, research on Japanese great tits (yup, that’s a thing) shows they use compositional syntax in calls, combining notes to convey specific meanings (Suzuki et al., 2016). Similarly, studies on parrots reveal segment-like units in their songs akin to human speech (Tu et al., 2020). A review by Griesser et al. (2018) suggests that such syntax evolves in complex social contexts, providing evolutionary drivers for these vocalizations. This empirical perspective blends with Enrique’s more transcendent interpretation.

That was the thrust of many of my questions.

Is there some way of figuring out if Enrique’s in actual communication with birds? Have the birds given him new knowledge, like how to solve an ancient mathematical conundrum or how to build a better microprocessor? Or is bird knowledge operating in an entirely different epistemological and ontological domain? Or do birds have no knowledge but convey something else, like states of being, feelings, or glimpses of a wholly different interpretive framework?

Does it even matter? If bird song is offering one gentle, thoughtful man peace, joy, and meaning, and that peace, joy, and meaning are making him and those around him happy, great! Trying to figure out if the birds have a language and imposing Davidson’s idea would thus be unnecessary, clunky, and one in which birds could not possibly care less about.

Do you have a question for the birds?

I have good news! If you have a question for the birds, you can email Enrique. Please be nice.

Here’s how:

SEND A QUESTION TO THE BIRDS

Birds are words that fly, returning messages and visions. Your question will be posed to the birds in their language and the answer will be returned in our words, not to prescribe a certainty but to poetize life. Please send your question to enrique.eenriquez@gmail.com.

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Enrique. I genuinely did. I found our discussion “frictionless,” and I found him to be sincere, someone who does not mediate or bend his thoughts to what is socially or politically expedient. I really like Enrique and plan on joining him for coffee and conversation while I’m in NYC. If you’d like me to have more of these kinds of conversations, let me know.

Thanks.

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I invited Enrique to contribute to the Substack. Without further ado…

By Enrique Enriquez

A conversation is a perfect accident, the culmination of all the swerves that unite two people. It creates a space where our presence is shaped by another’s voice, a call and response in the lost and found of our humanity. What are the odds of a spark? What chance of finding the other person where we expect them to be?

Peter and I walked through Central Park, dodging curious people and accordion players. We talked about finding ways to understand how to live in the thoughts of a tree and the possibility of communicating with birds. Most importantly, we pondered whether each of us could be a garden.

We wondered if we could trust the world’s voice and discern exactly what we needed from what was left unsaid. Can the smallest incident or even a misunderstanding lead us to the truth? Can we transcend the moment while still being in it, discovering an antidote to trivial things through quiet contemplation?

As we walked and talked, we turned the pages of the world-as-book. I remember little of my words; ultimately, they don’t matter. What remains are the trees, the footsteps, the call of the water vendor, and, above all, the sight of Peter’s forehead pushing forward, as if he were trying to navigate not only the path in front of us but also the one within.

All roads lead to the same goodbye. Our words must fade away once we realize, in the promise of the other person, our place under the sun. If you mute the volume of our dialogue and observe our faces, you will see that, against all odds, Peter and I truly met that afternoon in Central Park.

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We had a refreshing conversation about hard work, physical and mental discipline, sacrifice, and dedication, and how those habits will help you perform at a higher level. We also discussed tribalism, epistemology, the absence of logical thinking in the classroom, and the influence of social media platforms that prioritize likes over truth.

I asked Bill to contribute to this Substack. Without further ado…

Bill Ramsey

“OK, but why me?” This was the question I put to Peter’s people when they asked if I was open to doing an interview. I had checked out some of his podcasts and they mostly seemed to be with prominent public intellectuals who had some level of cultural notoriety. By contrast, I’m a fairly obscure academic, the chair of a philosophy department at standard, large public university (UNLV). I might have some name recognition among people in the highly specialized areas I work in (mostly involving how the brain represents information) and some degree of standing in the world of rock climbing, which I have been doing for 50 years. But I’m certainly not the sort of “thought leader” popular podcasters and YouTubers seek for interviews. So I was puzzled by the invitation. In response, I was told that Peter wants to talk to thinkers and educators at all levels of prestige, and that he hoped to hear the perspectives of an everyday professor. That sounded good to me, so I agreed and I’m glad I did. I enjoyed our conversation and appreciate that Peter wanted to hear from ordinary humanities professors who aren’t selling a book or promoting a specific agenda. Since much of the conversation about academia today involves people who aren’t actual professors, I was glad someone wanted to hear from those of us working in the trenches.

Indeed, when I hear about university life on various mediums I often have to wonder what world they are describing, since what they are describing does not correspond with my experience. For the record, I do not live in fear of cancellation from those trying to put me in an ideological straight-jacket, comprised of some combination of Marxism, critical race theory and woke social justice. In the nearly 40 years I’ve been teaching at the university level, I have never been pressured to alter my teaching style or course curriculum to fit some agenda. When I first heard terms like “trigger warnings”, “cultural appropriation”, “micro-aggression” and “safe spaces”, I had to look them up just like everyone else because my academic peers don’t use such words. The world of academia as it’s described in many popular outlets is alien to me, having little to do with my actual experiences.

That’s not to say that I don’t recognize that there are places where various forms of hyper-woke illiberalism have taken root. I see this happening mostly at elite private universities, where it seems in specific cases something has gone terribly wrong (the situation with Carole Hooven at Harvard comes to mind). But it is wrong to generalize from these cases to all universities, especially the overwhelming majority of state-run public universities where both the students and faculty are kept awake at night worrying about far more pressing issues. The faculty I know couldn’t care less about whether a colleague or student voted for Trump, Harris, or Daffy Duck. They’re too busy worrying about matters like the value of assigning papers as a pedagogical exercise, given how many students now use AI to write papers for them. They’re worried about their scholarly projects as political actors consider cutting funding for things like basic research or important medical and mental health studies. They’re concerned about various inane prohibitions on language or viewpoints that come from different levels of government, or if their tenure might be denied because they once criticized something on Facebook that a trustee likes. And they’re especially worried about teaching kids how to think critically and responsibly when their students’ attention is focused on TicTok or other social media posts, constantly bombarding them with misinformation and algorithms designed to manipulate. Indeed, they’re worried about teaching people whose lives are increasingly consumed by staring at 6” screens.

I get it. Academics can be annoying and obnoxious. Philosophers in particular often piss people off because it is partly our job to challenge the status quo and serve as social critics – to push for the truth even when the truth is harsh and people prefer pleasing fairy tales. As I told Peter, I agree with Plato’s observation that an unexamined, unreflective life is not worth living. Philosophy is the oldest and most fundamental intellectual discipline, providing the foundation for everything else. Still, philosophers have been a favorite target of scorn ever since Socrates was executed for the crime of corrupting the youth – a charge that, at least in some circles, is regaining popularity. In reality, doing philosophy means being agreeably disagreeable. Anyone who has read a Platonic dialogue knows what this means. It involves respectful engagement and critical assessment where the goal is not to win the debate or “own” the other person, but to try to figure what’s actually right. It is to defend and interrogate reasons for thinking a particular claim may or may not be correct. We test our ideas and perspectives by bringing them into the arena of open analysis and critical assessment, and we should not only accept but actually welcome good faith scrutiny and criticism. That is a bedrock value in education, academia, and scholarship, and insofar as there are those on either the left or the right who oppose aggressive but civil and good faith debate, then they are simply engaging in a form of anti-intellectualism.

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You might be thinking that the problem in our cultural is not too little disagreement but too much of it. This is true if you focus on the cesspool of bad faith, online trolling or many of the mindless exchanges on cable news programs. In the attention culture, where viewership and listenership has been monetized, the goal is almost never to gain understanding through the exchange of ideas. It is almost always designed to attract ‘clicks’ and attention regardless of how corrosive it is to our discourse. Many people celebrated the advent of an information economy in which there were no gate-keepers. But as online discourse has become increasingly toxic and ignorant and silly, it turns out some gatekeeping was actually a good thing. Of course, many forms of conventional media have also failed in this regard. Yet at most universities, especially among us philosophers, the goal actually is to teach the value of good faith civic analysis and debate. I appreciate than Peter is trying to do what we are trying to do, which is promote discussions that have intellectual integrity and where truth is an actual goal and not a word to be used as a promotional gimmick. Sure, it is not as entertaining as various flame wars, but it is the bedrock of any civil society.

An illustration of the wrongheadedness fueled by social media is tribalism, which I brought up with Peter because we are both interested in promoting critical thinking and responsible dialogue. We both recognize that group-think and so called my-side bias increasingly undermines intellectual integrity. I mentioned the conflation of primary and secondary moral values because I’m trying to expose factors that promote tribal group-think and polarization. If people think that loyalty is as fundamental a value as, say, basic decency and fairness, then they are more likely to endorse bad ideas just to stay loyal to their in-group orthodoxy. But if the value of loyalty is recognized as being conditional, dependent upon the morality or reasonableness of the specific claim in question, then a commitment to tribal affiliation can be properly seen as conditional, contingent upon what should be a much deeper commitment to more basic values and principles. I believe that for most of us, the most important tribe we should care about has a membership of one. What truly defines us isn’t our alignment with others (although that is certainly important), but it is the idiosyncratic combination of experiences, priorities, values, traditions, and backgrounds that makes each of us unique. If there is anything we should be staunchly committed to, it shouldn’t be identity groups but instead the core principles of ethics and reason that undergird moral and intellectual competence.

I’m glad Peter and I got the chance to discuss my climbing. I believe it contributes to my being a better educator and a better scholar. As a professor, it is easy to become your job, allowing teaching, administrative duties and scholarship completely dominate your life. However this can lead to one-dimensional and cloistered teachers whose focus is too narrow. With climbing, besides providing an important opportunity to step away from the academic world, it also allows me to spend time with individuals from radically different backgrounds with varying careers and perspectives. This is especially true of the young people with whom I climb. Spending a day sharing a rope with a 21 year-old can be exasperating at times, but it also provides me with insights into the mind-set of my students – what they are talking about and where their interests lie. I believe I’m a much better teacher of college students because I have dealings with similar kids outside of the classroom, in a setting where mutual trust and communication is absolutely essential. In fact, I learn from them as much as I hope they can learn from me.

Regarding the latter, when climbing I often still slip into professorial mode. People have recently focused upon the very real crisis of despondency among young men. However, the young men I climb with seem to be doing just fine. Big surprise: being outdoors, surrounded by breath-taking panoramas while overcoming real challenges and dangers is actually better for your psyche than playing video games and shitposting all day. In my chat with Peter I brought up my little “pain-box” meme because it illustrates, first, how the pursuit of excellence through devotion and hard work is still a lesson educators try to convey to young people. Contrary to what you might hear, professors are still very much committed to meritocracy and rewarding those who put in the work.

Second, it illustrates how my philosophical life intersects with my climbing life. By constructing a philosophical and geometric reconceptualization of the inverse relation between the two main sorts of suffering in our lives (the pain of hard work and the pain of failure), I use this scheme to push myself a little harder to excel. The core principles involved, rooted to some degree in Stoic philosophy, help myself and some younger and more accomplished athletes (like extreme skier Cody Townsend) work harder to accomplish our goals. It’s helped me succeed as both a scholar and an athlete which, as I told Peter, is a pretty fulfilling and gratifying way to live and achieve what the Greek philosophers called “Eudaimonia” – a sort of flourishing through striving. The value of that kind of well-being is just one of the many lessons I hope to pass along to young people both in and out of the classroom.

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The thesis of Sacrificial Lambs is straightforward: The explosion in teens identifying as transgender or gender-questioning (now over 1 in 20, a tenfold jump in a decade) isn’t about innate confusion in kids but about adults and institutions pushing a gender ideology that causes emotional, psychological, and physical harm. All, of course, under the banner of progressive compassion.

She’s a lifelong liberal journalist who started out left of Bernie Sanders, and she approached the gender topic unsure of what she’d discover. She uncovered that medical professionals rush children into hormones and surgeries before they grasp basic sexual concepts, and schools indoctrinate children into the idea that doctors “guessed” their sex at birth (“assigned at birth”). Anita dismantles the media’s narrative that these interventions are “life-saving,” exposes them as built on unequivocal lies, and calls on progressives to wake up to the evidence of damage like sterility, failure to orgasm, and heightened disease risks. Good luck.

This isn’t entirely new ground. Think Abigail Shrier’s focus on social contagion in girls, or Helen Joyce’s take on ideological capture, or Mia Hughes exposing institutional corruption. Bartholomew’s edge, however, comes from insider liberal cred, and it lets her spotlight the cognitive dissonance the left (broadly construed) must swallow to back this anti-scientific, deranged cult of lunatics. She indicts mainstream media for peddling lies, shares heartbreaking stories like a mother’s loss of her daughter to therapist- and school-fueled trans identity, and urges “allies” to debate the harms openly. Again, good luck, aint gonna happen.

I’ve said it a million times before: Not only will that never occur, but people who advocated and performed these ghoulish procedures of children will deny they ever believed or had anything do to with any of it. That said, Sacrificial Lambs is still a great read, particularly if you’re new to the subject or you’re on the left and want to see how an honest person with an impeccable leftist pedigree has discovered about these issues.

I hope you enjoy our conversation and Anita’s guest post, below.

Genital Bigotry, the Cotton Ceiling, and Mass Indoctrination

Peter and I had such a wide-ranging discussion, it would be impossible to cover everything in one post, so I’ll focus on what I thought was particularly salient. And that’s about how queer theory, and especially its offshoot, transgenderism, have managed to gain the support of close to half of Western civilization. That’s despite the fact that most people have little to no understanding of what they’re supporting.

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Shared Roots, Shared Risk

Rubio called America Europe’s “child,” born from the same Christian heritage, art, history. That’s not bullshit. It’s why I’m talking to French policymakers, philosophers, and public intellectuals about France’s conspicuous decline. If the West continues to erode here, it crumbles everywhere. And we are not separate from Europe; we’re one body with bad circulation.

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The delusions Rubio named—such as the post-Cold War fairy tales of endless globalization, open borders, serious economic woes, and welfare over defense—are what I’ve been hearing from Parisians. They have a deep pessimism about migration, identity, and the economy, and they share a widespread belief that the future is utterly hopeless.

Self-reliance ≠ Abandonment

The US didn’t ditch Europe. Europe needs to get its shit together. It needs to be strong, offer upward mobility to youth, secure supply chains, and control borders. This is tough love. And that’s why the conversations I’ve had matter: France and the rest of Western Europe cannot wait for America to fix their problems. We need real talk—about Islamic immigration, culture, sovereignty, economics—before it is too late. And it’s teetering on being too late.

Why am I here now? Rubio received a standing ovation in Munich because people want real, grounded hope, not lectures. They want honesty, even if it hurts. That’s why I’m here: Dialogue beats despair. If we’re fighting for Mozart, Shakespeare, cathedrals—these abstractions—then Paris is ground zero.

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Sometimes our European friends need to hear an American tell it like he sees it, and that’s what I did in my interviews, like the one with Le Figaro. I asked French thinkers and policymakers how they could have allowed multiple catastrophes to happen. Then I bluntly told them that they alone need to change their public policies. They can begin by securing their borders, stopping overregulation, and changing laws restricting data collection based on identity group. The US cannot do that for them.

Why France?

Finally, I’m in France for the US. Not only because we need strong allies, but I want to share with you lessons the French have learned from their failures. I don’t want their fate to befall us. What lessons can we learn? As one of my guests told me, “If you want to avoid our fate, study France’s public policies and do the opposite.”

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Franklin is a political commentator who fled Venezuela after the Maduro regime accused him of terrorism for the crime of debating a professor in class. As he tells it, the director of his university said to him, “This is a communist and revolutionary university. If you don’t like it, go to Harvard.” If only he knew!

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The thing I keep coming back to in the days after this conversation is a deceptively simple claim Camargo made about the Declaration of Independence. The Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and Camargo pushed back: If they were self-evident, everyone would accept them. They don’t. So they’re not. Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not things you simply recognize. They have to be derived, reasoned toward, argued for, and defended with evidence and logic.

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This has enormous implications for the university system. If rights require derivation, then you need intellectual infrastructure for that work. You need institutions that teach people how to reason from first principles to conclusions about human dignity and flourishing. You need functioning universities. We currently have the opposite of those, where we take relatively well-intentioned and sincere students and turn them into ideological automatons. The fact that 62% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism isn’t evidence that socialism is gaining on its merits. It’s evidence that the institutions charged with teaching people how to think have abandoned that mission entirely. The downstream consequences of that failure aren’t abstract. They’re Zohran Mamdani. They’re Somali daycares.

I challenged Franklin on the merits of socialism and democracy. If a majority of people decide that fighting inequality matters more than fighting poverty, what makes them wrong? His answer was simple: “We need to observe reality.” That isn’t exactly a devastating philosophical argument, but it is funny, and as a practical matter, reality has been devastating for socialism:

Chavez nationalized the means of production, attacked private enterprise, and promised the rich would pay for everything. The rich left or stopped being rich. Now, 25 years later, 90% of the population lives in poverty. Camargo put it this way: “You cannot help the poor by destroying those who create the most value in society.” Decades ago, Thatcher said nearly the same thing in Parliament: That her opponents would “rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”

But the harder, more central question I kept circling back to throughout the conversation was this: Don’t people have a right to vote against their own self-interest? Even if it means they’re voting themselves and their children into poverty?

I think they do. I think the heart of the American promise is the right to self-sabotage.

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There’s no better example of this than New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani (Peace Be Upon Him). Camargo sees the parallels between Mamdani’s economic agenda and Maduro’s: Tax the rich out of existence, price controls, the government running grocery stores. I asked him whether Mamdani was elected in a free and fair election. He said yes. I asked him whether the mayor should be allowed to govern. He said yes, but drew the line at property rights. He doesn’t think a democratically elected official should be able to dictate what you charge for rent.

I completely disagree. If the people of New York City want to elect a socialist who tanks their supermarket infrastructure and imposes price controls, that is their prerogative. That’s what democracy means. My only condition: No federal bailout afterward. You voted for it. You own the consequences.

The reason this matters goes beyond New York. There’s a throughline from here to Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that struck down sodomy laws. When you enshrine the right to self-sabotage, you protect individual liberty and you pre-empt every attempt (from both the left and the right) to curtail your freedom on the grounds that it’s “for your own good.” That impulse, the impulse to protect people from their own choices, is the engine of authoritarianism. It’s what Chavez told Venezuelans when he said it didn’t matter if they were hungry, what mattered was saving the revolution. It’s what campus administrators tell students when they restrict speech to protect them from ideas they might find offensive. It’s the ultimate infantilization of the citizen—and an infantilized citizenry cannot sustain a democracy, which depends on people who can reason for themselves.

Camargo and I also went deep on immigration and the drug war. He made a distinction about Venezuela that I think deserves more attention than it gets: A conflict between the U.S. and Venezuela wouldn’t be a war between nations. It would be a war against a criminal organization. The Cartel de los Soles has been designated a foreign terrorist organization in the same category as al-Qaeda and ISIS. That reframing changes things, but I pushed back hard on the drug war logic itself. The Trump administration has been targeting traffickers in the Caribbean, and maybe they’re hitting the right boats. But the fixation on supply-side enforcement while ignoring demand is intellectually dishonest and creates a social quagmire. Why are Americans consuming so much fentanyl that it’s one of the leading causes of death for adults under 45? It is a hell of a lot easier to go blow up boats in the Caribbean than it is to admit that something is deeply broken at home.

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Camargo and I don’t agree on everything. His confidence in incarceration as a solution is too tidy for me. His faith in markets is purer than mine. But he has a quality I find increasingly valuable: He reasons from a principle and doesn’t abandon it when the conclusion is inconvenient.

Peter

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But first, the guest.

Shabbos Kestenbaum is a 26-year-old Orthodox Jewish Harvard graduate who sued his university for failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment and violence on campus. He testified before Congress. He spoke at the Republican National Convention. But before that, he voted for Bernie Sanders twice, marched with BLM, booed Hillary Clinton at the 2016 DNC—and then watched the left abandon Jewish Americans after October 7th, and switched sides. He came on my show to talk about all of it: Radical Islam, the demoralization of Gen Z, Jews as the canary in the coal mine, and more.

It was a wide-ranging conversation. We talked about whether Western Europe is in hospice; Shabbos, who is half-British, thinks London has fallen, and frankly, I think he’s correct. We talked about the distinction between Muslims and Islamists, a distinction on which I’ve challenged other guests and one that Shabbos draws carefully: Not all Muslims are Islamists, but all Islamists are Muslims, and the people beheading apostates and shooting up Hanukkah celebrations and driving trucks into Christmas markets belong to a specific subset that we need to be able to name. We talked about the conspiracy culture poisoning the right, how figures like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens tell young men that the reason they can’t get a job or a girlfriend is something something the Jews, something something the billionaires, and they are making enormous amounts of money doing it. We talked about how this mirrors exactly what the far left has been doing for years, and how both versions destroy the same thing: The belief that you are responsible for your own life.

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It was a solid interview. What happened next is what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

A week earlier, we’d had Raymond Ibrahim on the show. During that taping, our cameraman, a young man, got heated enough about what he was hearing that he interrupted the recording to challenge Raymond’s claims. So when Shabbos came on the following week, I decided to give the cameraman a proper seat at the table. No ambush, no gotcha…just an open invitation to make his case.

What followed was one of the most revealing exchanges we’ve had on the show.

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The cameraman held positions that, in their raw form, were not insane. He believed in religious freedom. He believed in freedom of speech. He believed that the government shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their beliefs. He believed that immigrants shouldn’t be barred from the country based on what they think. These are not fringe positions. They come from a legitimate liberal tradition; a tradition I happen to share deep roots with as a lifelong advocate of free speech and cognitive liberty.

But he couldn’t defend any of them. Again, not because the positions are indefensible, but because nobody had ever helped him think through them seriously. He’d absorbed conclusions without ever learning the reasoning behind them. When Shabbos pushed him on edge cases: “Should someone who wants to marry a six-year-old be admitted? Because that’s an actual thing happening in Iraq right now,” he struggled. When I asked him what criteria should disqualify someone from immigrating to the United States, he could only come up with two: If they’ve committed a crime, or if there’s credible evidence they intend to commit one. That’s it. Nothing about values. Nothing about the social fabric. Nothing about what makes a society cohere.

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I want to steelman what he was trying to say, because Shabbos didn’t, and I think someone should.

The cameraman’s core belief, as best I can reconstruct it, is something like this: America is defined by its freedoms, and the moment you start excluding people based on their beliefs—even repugnant beliefs—you’ve betrayed the very thing that makes America worth defending. In his words: “It’s un-American to say we shouldn’t allow people in who don’t like America, because I believe in freedom.”

There’s something admirable in that. It’s a coherent position and one that many thoughtful people have held. It’s essentially a radical commitment to the open society: The idea that the best answer to bad speech is more speech, and that the same principle should extend to immigration. You let everyone in, you let the marketplace of ideas sort it out, and you trust the system.

The problem is that this position, taken to its logical conclusion, is self-defeating. Karl Popper identified this decades ago as the paradox of tolerance: A society that is tolerant without limit will eventually be destroyed by the intolerant. If you extend unlimited freedom to people who explicitly aim to abolish that freedom—who state openly that they wish to replace liberal democracy with theocracy, who use the mechanisms of the open society to dismantle the open society—you haven’t defended liberalism. What you’ve actually done is provided the instruments of its destruction and called it a liberal principle.

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This is not a theoretical concern. Shabbos gave concrete examples: Dearborn, Michigan, where “Death to America” was chanted at a public event. Zohran Mamdani in New York. The Bondi Beach massacre. The grooming gangs. You don’t have to agree with every claim Shabbos made to acknowledge that the question of who gets in and what values they hold is not a bigoted question. It is, in fact, the foundational question of any self-governing society. Every liberal democracy in history has had to answer it.

The cameraman couldn’t see this because, I suspect, he’d been taught a flattened version of liberalism, one where all exclusion is bigotry and all standards (social, legal, relational) are arbitrary. And I don’t blame him for this. I blame the institutions that should have sharpened his thinking and instead gave him a catechism.

Because throughout the exchange, while struggling to articulate any of this, the cameraman kept pulling up ChatGPT to fact-check Shabbos’s claims in real time. He’d type a question: “Do Muslims commit a disproportionate amount of violent crimes in the US?” read the AI’s response aloud, and present it as if it settled the matter. When I asked him to put the phone down and engage with what Shabbos was actually saying, not what Shabbos was allegedly saying according to a language model that hedges everything, he couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t.

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What I watched wasn’t someone using a tool to augment his thinking. It was someone who had replaced his thinking with a tool. He could produce a fact-shaped response in seconds but couldn’t explain why it mattered, how it connected to his broader argument, or what he’d do if the next query returned a different answer. When Shabbos pressed: “If Muslims aren’t more susceptible to radical Islam, then who is?” the cameraman had no framework. He’d never had to build one. The machine had always done it for him.

This is one of the most underappreciated dangers of our moment. We’re producing people who can access information instantaneously but process it almost not at all. The cameraman wasn’t dumb. But he’d never been trained to stress-test his convictions, and now he has a device in his pocket that ensures he’ll never have to.

This is one of the great crimes of the university system: It has taken young people who have genuine moral intuitions—people who care about fairness, who oppose bigotry, who believe in human dignity—and instead of teaching them how to reason carefully about those commitments, how to stress-test their beliefs, how to encounter strong counterarguments and emerge with something more refined, it has handed them conclusions. As the old adage goes, it has taught them what to think, not how to think. It has replaced epistemology with ideology.

The cameraman is a product of that system. He walked into a conversation armed with principles he couldn’t defend, definitions he couldn’t articulate, and a phone full of AI-generated responses he couldn’t evaluate. The tragic thing is that he’s an archetypical representation of his generation. He is the new normal. He represents millions of young people who hold unshakable convictions about justice and freedom and equality and have absolutely no intellectual infrastructure supporting any of it.

Now, the format with Shabbos didn’t help matters. Shabbos is a skilled debater. When the cameraman stumbled, Shabbos pounced. He caught him in contradictions, pressed him on terms he couldn’t define, cornered him on the distinction between Islam and Islamism that the cameraman admitted he didn’t understand and then accused Shabbos of conflating. It was rhetorically devastating and almost entirely unproductive. And I take responsibility for not being able to steer the conversation in a more productive direction.

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Part of being a considerate thinker is presenting the best version of your opponent’s argument, not the worst version of their delivery. People who are less informed than you will likely still have good points. Your job, if you’re serious about the exchange and about debate as a truth-seeking mechanism in a liberal society, is to help them make those points well and then address them. The cameraman’s position on the paradox of tolerance (whether a free society can survive if it extends unlimited openness to the intolerant) is one of the most important questions in political philosophy. It deserved real engagement. Instead, it got a cross-examination.

Shabbos was a guest on my show, and I’m grateful he came—I’m not interested in lambasting someone I’ve invited to have a conversation. His knowledge of antisemitism on campus, his personal experience at Harvard, his ability to rattle off specific names and specific incidents of Jewish students being assaulted, stalked, and having their civil rights formally violated as determined by the Department of Justice, all of that was powerful and important. The cameraman’s response to hearing about those assaults was revealing in its inadequacy: “Hate crimes are bad.” He said it multiple times, as if the sentence itself constituted an argument. When Shabbos pressed on why the Democratic Party refused to defund universities found complicit in civil rights violations against Jewish students the way Eisenhower threatened to defund schools that wouldn’t integrate, the way Obama threatened to defund universities that didn’t combat sexual assault, the cameraman immediately pivoted to Israel and Gaza. He couldn’t separate the two. And that conflation—Jewish student gets assaulted on an American campus, and the response is “well, what about Israel”—is itself a species of the bigotry the cameraman claimed to oppose.

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But one of the most important ideas in the entire conversation was one Shabbos offered almost in passing: Jews are a canary in the coal mine. When a society starts going after its Jews—not criticizing Israeli foreign policy, but targeting Jewish people, beating Jewish students, chanting for intifada in American cities—it is almost never only about the Jews. Historically, antisemitism (Jew hatred) is the early warning system for civilizational collapse. It was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the Soviet Union. The Jews get targeted first. They are never targeted last.

What Shabbos described on campus is not merely a Jewish problem. It’s an American problem. It means the institutions tasked with protecting individual rights have decided that some individuals are less worth protecting. Once that principle is in place, it will be applied to others. It always is.

Watch the episode. Not because anyone delivers a knockout blow, but because it’s a nearly perfect snapshot of where we are. Two people who both believe they’re defending freedom. One sharpened by adversity and serious education. One failed by institutions that should have done the same for him but chose to indoctrinate instead. The canary is singing. I hope someone is listening.

Peter

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