On a Friday night in Beverly Hills a rabbi picks up a guitar.
The room is the chapel at Temple Emanuel, 300 North Clark Drive, a Reform congregation that has stood in the city since before the man holding the guitar arrived in 1996. There is no organ tonight. There is no choir in robes behind a screen. Cantor Lizzie Weiss stands beside him with a microphone, and the two of them lead the prayers the way a folk duo leads a room, melody first, the old Hebrew set against tunes a congregant might hum in a car. The rabbi composed some of these melodies himself. You can find them on Spotify. He calls the service Shabbat Unplugged, a name borrowed from a record format, and the borrowing is the point. The guitar on the bima tells the congregation what kind of Jew it is allowed to be. Not the kind bent over a folio in a study hall. The kind that sings.
Jonathan Aaron came to the rabbinate from theater. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emerson College in Boston before he holds a single degree in Hebrew letters. He writes plays. He writes the shpiels for Purim. He composes the temple’s anthem each year, a new song for a new theme, and he composes liturgical poetry and blessings, and he leads the congregation in the music he made. The synagogue, he teaches, is the center of Jewish spiritual expression. Each person carries a spark, a ruach chochmah, a spirit of wisdom, and that spark wants out. For one man it comes out as Torah study. For another as yoga, or meditation, or cooking, or standing among trees. For Aaron it comes out as art. His deepest reach toward God runs through the act of making.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the tool to read this. In The Denial of Death he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die, and that culture exists to hide this knowledge from him. Every society hands its members a hero system, a set of roles and prizes and sacred acts by which a man can earn the feeling that he counts, that he is not a body destined to rot but a creature of cosmic worth. The hero system is a vital lie. It works by telling a man what to do with his terror.
Aaron’s system answers two terrors at once. The first is the plain one. The body dies. The man who sang on the bima will stop singing. Against this, Aaron offers the song that outlasts the singer. He names the thing himself when he calls Torah study a conversation between us and the generations who came before us. The conversation has no last word. A man who adds a verse to it joins a chain that ran before his birth and runs past his death. The recording stays on Spotify. The anthem gets sung next year by people who never met him. This is an immortality project stated almost in the open.
The second terror bites the modern Reform Jew in a particular place. He has set down the yoke of the 613 commandments. He keeps no strict Sabbath, no kashrut, no fixed daily prayer that binds him whether he feels it or not. The law no longer tells him he matters to God. So what does? Here the spark answers. Every soul carries one. Every spark is unique. To leave it unexpressed wastes a thing God placed in you for a reason, and so the modern Jew, freed from the law, finds a new commandment that fits a free man: express, or betray the spark. The terror of the unbound self, the fear that a liberated life leaves no mark, gets met by the doctrine that the self is sacred and the self has work to do.
There is a story told about Reform Judaism by its critics, a subtraction story. It says Reform is Orthodoxy with the hard parts removed. Take away the dietary law, the man says, take away the second day of festivals, take away the Hebrew a congregant cannot read, and what remains is a thinner thing, a Judaism for people who want the belonging without the burden. Aaron’s hero system exists to refute that story, and it refutes it by inverting the arithmetic. What the critic counts as subtraction Aaron counts as clearing. Pull up the law that grew over the spark and the spark breathes. The yoga, the guitar, the meditation, the plays, these are not the leftovers of a stripped tradition. They are additions, new rooms built once the old walls came down. The service is unplugged so that the man inside it can be heard.
Now take the word at the center of all this and watch it travel.
Expression. In Aaron’s hands the word means the soul finding its outward form, the spark made visible, the self carried out of the body and into a song that survives the body. To express is to live fully. To withhold is to die with the music still in you. The word carries love in it, and risk, and a wager against oblivion.
Carry the same word into a study hall in Lakewood, New Jersey, and it turns to poison. A yeshiva man there hears expression and hears the yetzer hara, the inclination that flatters the self and calls the flattery holy. His hero is not the man who lets the spark out. His hero is the man who annuls the self before the text, bittul, the emptying of the I so that something larger can fill the space. He fears death too, and his answer is the opposite of Aaron’s. He does not add his voice to the conversation. He receives the conversation and guards it without changing a letter. Ask him what he made today and the question lands wrong. He made nothing. He submitted. The spark that Aaron would spend, the yeshiva man would hold, because to spend it is to mistake the candle for the sun.
Carry the word into a Trappist monastery and it thins again. The monk has taken a vow that touches speech. He believes God lies past the reach of any saying, and that the highest prayer climbs toward silence, the long unsaying of everything a man might want to declare. Expression, to him, marks a falling-short. Words are the noise a soul makes on its way to the place where words run out. He stands against the same death Aaron stands against, and he meets it by growing quiet, by becoming the kind of man whose mark on the world is the absence of his clamor.
Carry it into a Marine recruit depot. The drill instructor has a hero system built on the deletion of the self. The uniform exists to make one man look like every other man. The haircut, the cadence, the surrendered name, all of it works to dissolve the I into the unit, because a unit that holds together saves lives and a man busy expressing himself gets people killed. Tell him the synagogue is the center of self-expression and he hears a recipe for a broken line. His immortality runs through the Corps, a body older than him and outliving him, and a man earns his place in it by giving up the very thing Aaron tells his congregation to find.
Carry it into a meeting at a sneaker company and the word turns to money. A brand strategist there loves expression. Express yourself, the campaign says, and the strategist means buy the shoe, because expression has become a product category, a feeling sold back to the customer who supplied it. The word that risks everything in the chapel risks nothing in the conference room. It moves units.
Carry it into an Old Order farmhouse and it becomes the sin with a name. The Amish farmer calls it Hochmut, the pride that lifts a man above his neighbors, and he sets against it Gelassenheit, the yielding, the lowering of the self into the community and the will of God. A man who paints his barn a loud color expresses himself and shames the district. The plain coat says what the man believes about the spark, which is that a spark drawing eyes to itself burns toward damnation.
And carry it, last, into a place Aaron knows from before he was a rabbi, the theater. The actor lives by expression too, and means by it almost the reverse of what the rabbi means. The actor expresses by vanishing, by emptying himself of his own face so a written character can wear it. His gift is self-erasure dressed as performance. He does not bring the spark out. He puts it away and becomes someone else for three hours, and the better he is, the less of him you see.
One word. A wager against death in the chapel, a temptation in the study hall, a failure in the monastery, a danger in the barracks, a sales tool in the boardroom, a sin in the farmhouse, a disappearance on the stage. The word makes sense only inside the system that issues it. Lift it out and it changes shape in your hand. This is what Becker means when he says a hero system tells a man what to do with his terror. The terror is the constant. The word is the local coin, and it spends only where it was minted.
How much of this does Aaron see?
More than most who run his system, and the bio shows it. A man who frames Torah study as a conversation across the generations has half-named the immortality project in plain sight. He knows the song is supposed to outlast him. He built a service to make the spark audible and a body of recorded work to keep it audible after the breath stops. He has read his own wager, or something close to it. What the system cannot let him say out loud is the harder half of Becker’s claim, that the wager might fail, that the spark might be a story the dying tell themselves, that the conversation across generations runs on the same denial as the plain coat and the surrendered name. The doctrine that every soul is sacred and every spark must be spent comforts the free Jew exactly because the alternative, that a liberated life can leave no mark and owe no answer, sits too close to the second terror to be looked at directly. The vital lie does its work by staying lyrical. The guitar helps.
Three coordinates locate the man. His hero takes the shape of the artist-priest, the one who reaches God by making, who turns the synagogue into a studio and ordains the spark as the thing that must not be wasted. The rival he fights without naming is the Jew of the yoke and the annulled self, the man in the study hall for whom expression is the temptation and submission the crown, the figure whose existence forces the subtraction story Aaron spends his career inverting. And the one cost his ledger cannot price is the possibility that some sparks ask to be held rather than spent, that silence and self-erasure are not failures of nerve but answers of their own, and that a system which tells every soul it owes the world its song leaves no honored place for the soul whose deepest word is a vow to say nothing.
Yoshi Zweiback (b. 1969) grew up one of a handful of Jews in his grade in Omaha. He has joked that the city held about six thousand Jews, near the membership of the temple he runs now in the hills above Los Angeles. In the second grade the teacher asked him to stand and explain the theology of Hanukkah. He was seven. The other boys looked at the cap on his head and asked what the beanie was for. He did not have the answer the teacher wanted. He stood and gave what he had.
At home he sang. He taught himself guitar and piano, wrote songs, and held a fireplace poker for a microphone while he performed for his parents.
Set those two scenes beside each other. A boy asked to account for his difference in front of a room that finds it strange, and a boy alone at the hearth deciding the world will hear him. A hero system takes shape there, before the man has a word for it.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that a man lives under two terrors. The first is plain. The body fails and goes into the ground. The second runs deeper and frightens him more. The life might not have counted. It might leave no mark and weigh nothing. Culture answers both at once. It hands a man a hero system, a set of values that tells him what a life that counts looks like and how to earn one. The hero system comes before argument. A child breathes it in before he can name it. The boy with the poker had already picked his. He meant to be heard, and he meant what he sang to carry weight.
Years later he founded a tzedakah collective and gave it the heaviest word in the Hebrew language. He called it Kavod and said its work protects human dignity.
The root of kavod means heavy. Kavod is weight, gravity, the thing that presses down and stays. In the Torah the kavod of God fills the sanctuary, and the priests cannot stand because the weight of the Presence is too great for a man to bear upright. Honor, glory, dignity, the heft of a life that registers against the void. One word holds all of it. When Zweiback takes that word and hands it to every man, beggar and donor alike, he makes a bid. He says the weight of God’s glory rests on the ordinary person, and the job of a community is to keep that weight from being stripped away.
This is the Becker apparatus working in Hebrew. The hero system is the device for making a life weigh something. Zweiback named his after the weight.
There is a story told about men like him, and the Orthodox tell it with some heat. The story says Reform Judaism is Judaism with the weight removed. God shrinks to metaphor. The commandments become options on a menu. The synagogue turns into a clubhouse with a sanctuary attached, a place to mark birth and death and feel Jewish on the way to assimilation. On this telling, Zweiback’s human dignity is secular humanism wearing a prayer shawl, and kavod is a fine word for a thin thing.
Becker would not grant the story its premise. You cannot subtract the hero system. A man does not arrive at the bare truth by stripping illusions, because he needs the weight to live, and if you take one source he reaches for another. Zweiback has not lightened the sacred word. He has moved its holiness. He took the glory that filled the Temple and laid it on the man in the food line. The Orthodox hear this as theft. Becker would call it the oldest transfer in religion, the holy relocated to a new altar so that life can keep its gravity.
Walk the word through his world and watch what it carries. Every man bears the divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, so the kavod owed him is not earned and cannot be forfeited. The collective gives in a way that guards the face of the one who receives, no shame attached to need. Service is joy. He cites Psalm 100, serve the eternal with gladness, and he means it. He writes melodies. As part of the band Mah Tovu he recorded a camp song that turns the plagues of Egypt into a singalong. His books carry titles like Day of Days and Days of Wonder, Nights of Peace. The Judaism he sells is light to carry and warm to hold, and he believes a man need not choose between the modern world and the covenant. He holds the dignity of a people with a state and the dignity of the stranger in the same hand and calls the holding progressive Zionism. Run the whole thing back to Omaha and you find the boy who refused to be small. Kavod, for Zweiback, is the promise that no one has to be small.
Now the trouble Becker pointed at. The same sacred word means different things in different hero systems, and each system needs its own meaning to be the true one.
A trauma surgeon at the end of a long night uses the word too. He stands at the bed of a man he cannot save and asks the family whether they want him to keep going. For him dignity is control. It is the body still under command, the choice honored, the tubes out when the patient said no tubes. His hero system holds death off with skill, and when skill fails it hands a man a clean exit. Tell the surgeon that dignity cannot be forfeited and he will think of a ward he has seen, and he will disagree without saying so.
A Marine gunnery sergeant uses the word and means bearing. You do not break. You hold the line, you carry your wounded out, you bring your dead home, and you do not weep where the young men can see you. His dignity is the refusal to be shamed in front of the unit, and his weight comes from the Corps that will remember his name. He would not understand a dignity that asks for nothing and proves nothing. To him a thing given free has no weight.
A grandmother in an honor culture, Sicilian or Pashtun or Bedouin, uses the word and means the name. The family name kept clean across generations, the daughter married well, the insult answered. Shame for her is a death the body survives, and dignity is the line continuing unstained. The donor who guards a stranger’s face would puzzle her, because in her world face is the family’s and a man alone does not have one to lose.
A founder in a glass building south of San Francisco uses the word and means leverage. Dignity is the freedom to walk out of any room and not need it, the money that makes him answerable to no one, the company that might outlive him. His immortality is a dent in the world. The man in the food line is to him a problem of efficiency, and a dignity that depends on being given to looks to him like the opposite of the thing he is building.
These men are not confused about the word. Each one is right inside his own system and could no more adopt another’s meaning than he could adopt another’s death. That is Becker’s point about evil. The systems do not merely differ. Each needs the others to be wrong, because if the surgeon’s dignity is the true weight then the Marine’s is sentiment, and if the founder’s is true then the grandmother’s is superstition, and a man cannot hold his life up against the dark with a weight he half believes is fake.
The rival closest to Zweiback shares his book.
Picture an avrech in a study hall in Lakewood or Bnei Brak, black hat on the bench beside him, a volume of Talmud open, the room loud with argument. He uses the word kavod, and he draws the distinction Zweiback’s whole project rests on top of. There is kavod ha-briyot, the honor owed to creatures, and there is kavod shamayim, the honor owed to Heaven, and when the two meet the second wins every time. To the avrech, a man is not the bearer of glory. A man is the servant of the law, and his weight comes from submission, from making himself nothing before the Throne so that the Throne can be everything. He looks at the dignity Zweiback prizes, the autonomous self that chooses its commandments and keeps its face, and he hears the snake in the garden. You shall be as gods. He sees a Judaism that put the man where God belongs and called the swap progress.
The two cannot both be heroes. For Zweiback the commandments serve the man. For the avrech the man serves the commandments. Same Torah, same word, opposite floor. Each requires the other to be mistaken about the heaviest thing there is.
How much of this does Zweiback see? More than most. He trained in religion at Princeton and felt the call in his sophomore year. He is a fellow at a Jerusalem institute built for Jews who want their tradition and their modern minds in the same skull. He hosts a podcast called Search for Meaning, which is an odd title for a man who thinks meaning sits ready to be found. The temple he leads prints its own creed on the wall. We make meaning and change the world. Make. Not receive, not obey, not inherit. Make. That is a constructivist confession built into a brand, and a less self-aware man would never let it stand. He knows he is building the weight, not just carrying it. He says so on the signage.
So three coordinates, in plain prose.
The shape of his hero is the singer who makes the small weigh. The boy who would not stay small grew into the man who tells every other small person that the glory of God rests on him, and who sets it to a melody so the claim goes down easy. His heroism is the transfer, the holiness moved from the sanctuary to the stranger, performed with joy so that no one notices how much is being asked of the word.
The rival he fights without naming is the avrech, who says weight comes from Heaven alone and that a dignity a man grants himself is no weight at all. Zweiback rarely argues with him head on, because to argue is to admit the floor is in question, and the whole appeal of his Judaism is that the floor feels solid and the burden feels light.
The one cost his ledger cannot price is the floor. Kavod means heavy, and heaviness needs a foundation under it. The avrech’s dignity is heavy because Heaven is heavy and certain. The surgeon’s is heavy because the body and its death are real. Zweiback keeps the full glory of the word while loosening the ground it stood on, trusting joy and community and the divine image to hold the weight that God once held. It may hold. It has held for him, in a full sanctuary on a Los Angeles hilltop. The cost he cannot enter in his books is the chance that the word travels lighter to the next room than it reached him, that his congregants keep the comfort and mislay the gravity, that the grandchildren inherit the dignity and forget the weight, and find one day they are holding a beautiful word with nothing underneath. He took the heaviest word there is and made it light to carry. He may have done it by quietly setting down the part that made it heavy.
On a Friday night at Temple Beth Am the seats face each other. The room runs in the round, under glass that holds the last of the Los Angeles light. An inner circle of singers forms. The niggun starts low. Rabbi Adam Kligfeld stands inside the ring and lifts a hand, and the wordless tune climbs. He built this. He calls it Sovev, the surrounding. The other service, the Shabbat morning Hama’alot, he has timed minute by minute, the way a composer scores a film. Nothing in the hour is left to chance. The aim is one thing. He wants the man in the third seat, the one who came in tired and thinking about Monday, to stop and feel that he stands somewhere holy.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) taught that every culture builds a hero system, a way for a man to earn the sense that his life counts against the silence of death. The system answers two fears. The first is the body that rots. The second is the suspicion that nothing a man does will register, that his days run rote and then end. A hero system gives him a part to play in a story large enough to outlast him. It tells him his small acts count in the order of things.
Kligfeld names his own two fears in his own words. He says the message under most of his teaching is, in his phrase, be attentive. He believes all spiritual aspiration raises the mundane to the exalted, the ho-hum to the holy, the rote to the ecstatic. Read him through Becker and the terror comes clear. The thing he fights is the rote. A life done without attention is death before the body dies, a man eating breakfast and clearing email and never looking up. The second terror runs under the first. It is dissolution, the chain of transmission snapping, the tradition handed down for a hundred generations stopping in this one, the people thinning into the surrounding culture until nothing is left to hand on.
His hero system has sacred words. Attention is the first. Covenant is the second. Holiness sits over both. Each word feels solid when he uses it, as though it points to one fixed thing. It does not. A sacred word holds its shape inside the system that gave it meaning. Carry it across to another hero system and it bends. The same syllables open onto a different heaven.
Take attention. In Kligfeld’s hands it points up. The attentive man notices the bread before he eats it and says a blessing, and the bread changes. Attention is the door from the ho-hum to the holy, and it binds the man closer to the practice, to the people, to God.
Sit a Zen monk in the next seat. He has spent forty years on attention. For him the breath watched with enough care dissolves the watcher. Attention loosens the grip of the self until the self thins out and the man sees there was never a fixed I to bind to anything. Kligfeld’s attention ties knots. The monk’s attention unties them. Same word. Opposite work.
Now a man who sells attention. He runs a company in a glass building south of Market Street in San Francisco. His product is a meditation app, and his deck calls attention the scarcest resource of the age. He means the thing advertisers buy and apps capture and a worker spends or wastes. Attention for him is a quantity, counted in minutes, leaking out through notifications. He wants to help you hoard it and spend it on what you choose. He has read some of the same teachers as the monk. He has built a hero system out of focus, and the holy never enters it.
Send in a field medic under fire. Attention for him narrows to the wound and the hands and the next breath of the man bleeding on the road. He does not raise the mundane to the holy. He holds a man inside the mundane long enough to keep him there. His whole training points his attention down, to the body, to the artery, to the clock.
Take covenant. Kligfeld loves a line from the Midrash. God says to man, your light is in My hand, My light is in your hand. He hears mutual fragility in it. The covenant binds two parties who can each fail the other, and the binding is the holiness. He hears the chain too, the brit handed from a father to a son for a hundred generations, the rabbi one link in a line that must not break on his watch. His immortality runs through the chain. He will die and the tune will go on, sung by people who never knew his name, and that is how a man cheats death in this system.
His wife works the same word for a living. Havi Kligfeld is a couples therapist. She sits across from two people who once made a covenant and now cannot stand the sound of the other chewing. Covenant for her is not the chain. It is the choice the two of them make again on a Tuesday afternoon in her office, or fail to make. She repairs covenants one marriage at a time. He repairs the covenant of a people. The same word runs through both their workdays and points at different things, his at the line of generations, hers at the two faces in the room.
Put a Haredi man in the picture. He keeps the covenant as a yoke, the ol malkhut shamayim, the kingdom of heaven taken on whole and without edit. Covenant for him is the fence, the law that does not move because a man finds it hard. He looks at the curated Friday night, the in-the-round seats, the new music, and he sees a covenant redecorated to please the people in the chairs. Where Kligfeld hears living tradition, he hears erosion.
Set a young organizer beside him, the kind who marches and writes and means every word. Covenant for him is the bond of the just against the powerful. He uses the word the way the prophets used it, a demand for righteousness, and he has little patience for a covenant that spends a Friday night on niggunim while the world burns. Kligfeld’s covenant looks inward, toward the people and the practice. His looks outward, toward the street.
Becker said each hero system carries a subtraction story, a picture of what the man becomes once you strip the illusions away. Kligfeld’s subtraction story sits right under the word attention. Take away the practice, the blessing over the bread, the timed service, the chain, and what remains is the modern man who does his days without noticing them. He works and scrolls and sleeps. He feels little and expects little. He has a self sealed off from any larger order, a self that no longer leaks out toward God or the dead or the people. Kligfeld looks at that man and sees one already dead inside his own week, and the whole craft of the curated service, the minute by minute, the inner ring of singers, exists to pull him out for one hour and show him he can feel.
Most men inside a hero system cannot see they stand in one. They take their heaven for the only heaven. Kligfeld is harder to catch this way. His own theology runs on the mean. He quotes the Talmud that absolute justice is oppression and absolute peace is lawlessness, and he reaches for the point between. His movement, Conservative Judaism, names itself as a middle thing, tradition and change held in one hand, set between the Orthodox who change nothing and the Reform who change at will. A man who builds his house on the mean knows he has chosen a tension and not a pole. That is a rare clarity. He knows the fundamentalist sleeps better. He knows the man who threw the whole tradition overboard travels lighter. He chose the harder seat and he knows the price of the seat.
Three coordinates fix the man. The shape of his hero is the curator of attention, the rabbi who times an hour to the minute so the tired man in the third seat will feel the holy press in, who earns his slice of forever by keeping the old tune sung after he is gone. The rival he fights and does not name is not the Haredi and not the Reform Jew, who are his cousins and quarrel with him as cousins do. His real enemy is the shrug, the man sealed in his own week who finds the whole tradition a pleasant noise and feels nothing when the niggun climbs. Against that man he builds every service.
The one cost his ledger cannot price is the suspicion under the mean. He has chosen the middle and called it wisdom, and he might be right. The middle might be where truth lives. It might also be where a man goes to keep everyone in the room, the donor and the doubter and the board, none of them angry, all of them dues-paying. The mean makes no martyrs. The bridge-builder gets walked on from both ends and thanked by the center, and he can earn a long warm career without once finding out whether he held the middle because it was true or because it kept the peace. He teaches that absolute peace is lawlessness. The teaching cuts toward his own life and he knows it. That is the one number the ledger will not show him, and he keeps the books anyway, by candle and tune, on a Friday night, in the round.
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A woman sits in the rabbi’s study. Her son is dead at nineteen, a car on the 405 at two in the morning, and she has come with the question that predates the Book of Job. She does not raise her voice. She asks where God was.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) puts two terrors in that room with her. The first is the body. The boy is meat now, and so is she, and so is the rabbi across the desk, and every creature that ever drew breath has come to the same end. The second terror is worse, because a man can almost bear his own death if it counts for something. The second terror is that it counts for nothing. The universe runs on whether or not the boy lived. A hero system answers both terrors at once. It tells a man how to die and still win, how to lend his small life to something that does not perish, so that the grave becomes a door and not a wall. Every culture sells one. Every clergyman is a salesman of the local model.
Bradley Shavit Artson (b. 1959) holds the dean’s chair at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and has spent a career building a model unlike the one most of his congregants were raised to expect. The expected model is old and strong. It says God is King of the Universe, all-knowing, all-powerful, outside time, lacking nothing. Maimonides (1138–1204) gave the Jewish version its iron frame. That God cannot change, because change means He was once less than perfect or will become so. He cannot suffer, because suffering is a lack, and He lacks nothing. He cannot be moved by the woman’s prayer, because to be moved is to be altered, and the perfect admit no alteration. You pray to that God to change yourself. He is the fixed point, and the hero attaches his perishing life to the one thing in the cosmos that does not perish.
Artson refuses that God. He calls Him an idol.
The refusal grows from a wound and from a library. The wound is the one in the study, multiplied across a century that produced Auschwitz and the boy on the freeway. The library is process theology, and Artson is its most visible Jewish exponent, the author of God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology and Renewing the Process of Creation: A Jewish Integration of Science and Spirit. The argument cuts at the root. A God who could have stopped the car and chose not to is not worth worshiping. So Artson surrenders the divine power to stop the car. His God does not coerce. His God lures. He works the way a melody works on a listener, the way a teacher works on a student who remains free to refuse. He is woven into the becoming of things, not perched above it, and He grows alongside the world He calls forward. He felt every minute of the boy. He loses nothing. The dead are held in His unfading life. That is Artson’s answer to the mother. Not a King who could have intervened and declined, but a companion who suffered the loss with her and carries her son forward in a memory that time cannot erode.
Watch what happens to a single sacred word inside this system, and then watch the same word in the systems built against it. Take power.
For the Reformed pastor working in the tradition of John Calvin (1509–1564), power is sovereignty. It is the decree that stands before the foundation of the world, the will that elects and reproves and answers to no court. The boy died because the decree included his death, and the pastor’s comfort, hard as flint, is that nothing fell outside the plan. To worship is to bow before a will you cannot question and call it good. Power means the absolute capacity to ordain.
For the Marine on his third deployment, power is the capacity to impose. It is the round that finds the target and the order that moves the column. A man earns his place in that hero system by becoming an instrument of force aimed well, and his immortality is the flag, the unit, the name read aloud at the next muster after he is gone. Power is what you do to the enemy before he does it to you.
For the hospice nurse at the end of a double shift, power has reversed its meaning. Her hero system is built on the thing the Marine and the Calvinist both flee. She has no decree and no round. Power, for her, is the discipline of not fixing, of sitting with the dying and refusing to lie to them, of managing the pain she cannot cure. She earns her significance by presence in the face of the very helplessness the other systems exist to deny.
For the founder in Menlo Park, power is leverage and scale, the capacity to move a million users with a line of code, to outlast death by building a thing that runs after the body quits. He prays, if the word fits, to growth.
For the Hasidic rebbe, power flows downward through a channel. The tzaddik does not own it. He conducts it, drawing abundance from the upper worlds into this one, and his court orbits him because he is the conduit, the place where heaven touches the street.
Five men, five women, one word, and it splits into five different things, each of which holds together only inside the system that gives it weight. Artson’s redefinition is a sixth. Power, in the God of becoming, is persuasion. It is the strength to invite without forcing, to call without compelling, to suffer the refusal of the beloved and keep calling. Inside his hero system this reads as the highest power, the love that will not coerce because coercion is the weakling’s tool. Carry that same sentence into Calvin’s study and it reads as blasphemy, a God demoted to a suggestion. Carry it to the Marine and it reads as defeat. Carry it to the founder and it does not parse at all. The word does not travel. It means what the system needs it to mean, and the systems do not need the same thing, because they are built against the same two terrors from different ground.
The honest measure of a hero system is the cost it cannot see on its own books. Artson sees most of his. He knows he has traded the omnipotent rescuer for the suffering companion, and he names the trade as a gain. He would rather have a God who is true and weak than a God who is strong and a liar about the freeway. He has read the objection a thousand times and answers it without flinching. That is real intellectual courage, and it sells well to the educated congregant who could not believe in the King anymore and was about to leave the building. Artson built a door for that man to stay.
The cost his theology cannot price sits one floor below the argument. A God who cannot compel offers the mother company in the dark. He does not offer her the boy back, and he does not promise the dark ends. For the parent who needs a rescuer and not a fellow mourner, the partner God is thin soup. Artson chose truth over that comfort, by his own lights, and a man is allowed to. But the choice has a price, and the price is paid by the one who needed the other thing.
There is a second cost, and it does not live in the books at all. It lives in the building. In 2024 the American Jewish University investigated Artson and his deputy dean after complaints gathered over two decades from former rabbinical students, alleging a pattern of favoritism toward men and disrespectful treatment. The investigation closed that June. The firm reported that students had experienced discrimination, though it judged the problem not systematic, and the university did not release the report. The Rabbinical Assembly opened a parallel inquiry. Rabbi Artson retired in June 2026.
Set that beside the theology. A man teaches a God who rules by invitation and never by force, who holds the world in a relationship of mutual regard, who calls and waits and refuses to coerce the beloved. The same man ran a seminary, held the chair, decided whose career advanced and whose stalled, and stood at the head of a hierarchy where a student’s vocation passed through his favor. The students who filed those complaints did not describe an invitation they were free to refuse. They described a power that felt like the old kind, the kind that ordains and is not questioned, the kind Artson spent his life teaching God does not use. The theology of relationship and the structure of the institution did not match. Becker would not call that hypocrisy. He would call it the standard human gap between the hero system a man preaches and the one he lives, the gap every man carries, widened here by the size of the claim. The bigger the theology of mutuality, the louder the silence where mutuality failed.
Three coordinates, then.
The hero is the partner. The Artson hero does not wait for God to mend the world and does not bow before a decree he cannot fathom. He puts his hands on the broken thing and works beside a God who is also working and also at risk, and he finds his significance in the labor shared with a vulnerable partner rather than in submission to an invulnerable King.
The rival he fights without naming most days is the God of his own prayer book. The liturgy he leads still calls God King of the Universe, still says He kills and makes alive, still hands the old sovereign the throne. Artson preaches against that God on the page and chants to Him on Shabbat morning, and the rival lives inside the tradition he serves, which is why he can never finish the fight.
The one cost his ledger cannot price is the distance between the sermon and the staircase. A God who cannot compel is a beautiful answer to the woman in the study and a hard thing to square with the students who walked the halls below his office and felt compelled. The theology absolves God of the power to coerce. It does not absolve the man who held the chair.
Bradley Shavit Artson and the God of Becoming
Bradley Shavit Artson (b. 1959) ranks among the more consequential theologians of contemporary American Judaism, a figure who combined a long institutional career in rabbinic education with a sustained effort to rethink the idea of God for a scientific age. For more than twenty-five years he held the deanship of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, where he helped train hundreds of Conservative rabbis. Across the same span he built a body of theological writing that drew on process philosophy, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and neuroscience, and that argued, against a long tradition of assumed conflict, that Jewish faith and modern science can deepen rather than diminish each other.
He was born in San Francisco, California, and educated at Harvard, where he studied history and literature and graduated cum laude in 1981. As an undergraduate he interned for Congressman Phillip Burton (1926–1983) and Senator Alan Cranston (1914–2000), and after graduation he worked for a time in the California State Assembly. The pull toward public life gave way to the rabbinate. He enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism, and received ordination with honors in 1988. Already in rabbinical school he showed the preoccupations that would mark his later career, publishing early work on Jewish ethics and on war, peace, and nuclear disarmament.
Many rabbis with academic ambitions move quickly from ordination to the university. Artson did not. He spent a decade in the pulpit, serving Congregation Eilat in Mission Viejo, California, from 1988 to 1999. The congregation grew under his leadership from roughly two hundred families to more than six hundred, and his Introduction to Judaism course gained a wide reputation. Hundreds studied with him, more than two hundred converted to Judaism, and ten of his congregants later entered the rabbinate. The decade fixed a conviction that would shape everything after it: that Jewish life flourishes when it presents itself as intellectually serious and open to people who arrived without an extensive Jewish education.
In 1999 he joined the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, soon renamed the American Jewish University, and within a year he became dean of its Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. He held the post for about a quarter century, and under his direction the school became a principal center of Conservative rabbinic training. Artson argued that the modern rabbi needs more than command of Talmud and Jewish law. He broadened the curriculum to include pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, psychological resilience, leadership formation, and the practical skills of communal life. The rabbi he wanted to produce served at once as scholar, legal authority, counselor, teacher, and institutional leader.
His reach extended past North America. He became founding dean of the Zacharias Frankel College at the University of Potsdam in Germany, a center for Conservative and Masorti ordination in Europe under the religious supervision of the Ziegler School. He took part in the support of emerging Jewish communities elsewhere as well. In 2008 he ordained Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, spiritual leader of the Abayudaya community in Uganda, and joined a court that converted candidates from several African countries. A regional chief gave him an African name.
Artson pursued advanced theological study alongside his administrative work. He earned a Doctor of Hebrew Letters in contemporary Jewish theology from Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion under the supervision of David Ellenson (1947–2023). The doctorate supplied the academic ground for the project that became the center of his intellectual life: the adaptation of process theology to Judaism.
Process theology descends from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and the later work of Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000). It rejects the classical picture of God as an all-powerful, unchanging ruler who stands outside time, and describes instead a God bound up in relationship with creation and in the unfolding of events. Artson holds that the traditional doctrine of omnipotence grew harder to sustain after modern science and the catastrophes of the twentieth century. His God does not control every event. He offers, at each moment, the possibility of greater goodness, justice, creativity, and connection, while respecting the freedom of the world He calls forward. The argument found its fullest statement in God of Becoming and Relationship and in Renewing the Process of Creation, books that set out to build a Jewish worldview able to absorb evolutionary theory, quantum physics, systems theory, and contemporary cosmology without treating science and religion as sealed compartments.
The treatment of suffering and evil stands at the heart of the project. In God of Becoming and Relationship, in The Search for God and the Path to Persuasion, and in the broader argument he sometimes summarized as “Almighty No More,” Artson maintained that faith need not rest on belief in a deity who directs history and could halt any tragedy at will. The Holocaust, natural disaster, illness, and human cruelty press hard on the older claims about divine power. Process theology answers that God neither causes suffering for hidden reasons nor holds the coercive power to prevent every loss. God accompanies creation through suffering, offering strength, guidance, love, and new possibility. The aim is to keep both divine goodness and human freedom intact, and to make a defensible faith available after Auschwitz.
The roots of this theology run into Artson’s own home. He married Elana Shavit Artson, and they have twins, Shira and Jacob. Jacob’s severe autism shaped his father’s thought and public work. Artson wrote at length about raising a non-verbal son, and about how the experience tested his earlier assumptions about prayer, communication, and human dignity. He came to treat disability not as a problem demanding explanation but as a summons to deepen compassion and widen communal inclusion, and his writing on the subject made him a leading advocate for the place of people with disabilities in Jewish religious life. That commitment ran alongside his support for broader participation in Jewish communal life, including LGBTQ inclusion, interfaith engagement, and racial justice, positions he advanced while remaining rooted in Conservative Judaism and its claim that the tradition holds resources for the moral questions of the present.
A large part of his influence came from a capacity to carry difficult ideas to readers without specialist training. Beyond his scholarly books he wrote for general audiences in The Bedside Torah and The Everyday Torah and in many guides to practice and spirituality. He published hundreds of articles, lectured across North America and abroad, oversaw adult education programs, and supervised the Louis and Judith Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at the American Jewish University. His weekly Torah commentary reached thousands of subscribers.
His theology met a personal test when he underwent treatment for cancer. Writing about the experience in public, he reflected on mortality, resilience, and gratitude, and found the themes of his scholarship pressing on his own life. The episode confirmed his sense that faith rests less on certainty or supernatural rescue than on relationship, courage, and companionship in the face of what no one escapes.
In 2026 Artson concluded his deanship after more than a quarter century, and the American Jewish University marked the occasion with a gala in his honor. He took up the title of Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar, a name that links him to Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and an earlier American thinker who tried to reconcile Jewish tradition with a naturalist account of the world. Artson continued to teach, write, and mentor.
Conservative Judaism has long been known for scholarship, legal reasoning, and institutional strength rather than for systematic theology. Artson worked against that pattern. By bringing process philosophy into long conversation with Jewish sources, he undertook an ambitious theological program and pressed a question central to modern religion: how an ancient faith might stay intellectually credible and spiritually compelling in a world shaped by evolution, neuroscience, cosmology, and historical catastrophe. Whether a reader accepts his answers or not, he stands among the significant Jewish theologians of his generation, a man who sought a Judaism that holds tradition and scientific inquiry together and that names God a partner in the ongoing work of creation rather than a distant ruler above it.
Theodicy and Charisma: Bradley Shavit Artson Through Max Weber
The problem of innocent suffering does not press on all religions with equal weight. Weber saw that it grows sharper as a faith grows more rational and more demanding about its God. A world of many gods spreads the blame, since one god’s cruelty answers to another god’s mercy, and no single will stands behind the whole. A God who made everything, knows everything, governs everything, and loves what He made has no one to blame but Himself. Ethical monotheism builds the trap and then lives in it. The more majestic the God, the louder the question of the child dead on the freeway and the six million dead in the camps. Weber called the rational accounts that answer this question theodicies, and he held that a high religion stands or falls on the one it can sustain.
Weber counted the solutions that hold together under pressure, and there are not many. Predestination keeps God’s power and goodness whole by placing His decrees past human judgment, so that the elect and the damned both serve a glory no creature may question. Calvin took that road. Dualism splits the cosmos between a power of light and a power of darkness, so that suffering comes from an enemy God fights rather than from God’s own hand. Zoroaster took that one. The doctrine of transmigration in India solves the problem with an iron justice across many lives, so that every soul reaps what it sowed and no fate is undeserved. Each answer holds, and each pays a price. Predestination buys God’s majesty with His warmth. Dualism buys His innocence with His sovereignty. Karma buys perfect justice with the abolition of grace. Weber’s point stands behind all three. A man cannot keep God’s goodness, God’s power, and the reality of evil at full strength at once. He keeps two and surrenders the third, and the religion he builds takes its shape from the one he gives up.
Bradley Shavit Artson gives up the third. He keeps God’s goodness and the reality of evil, both at full strength, and he lets the power go. His God does not govern the freeway and chooses companionship over control. The car crashes because the world holds real freedom and real chance, and God could not stop it without unmaking the freedom that makes love possible. Weber’s older theodicies refused this move, and they refused it for a reason Weber understood. A God stripped of coercive power loses the majesty that made men kneel. The Calvinist God terrifies and so commands. The Artson God accompanies and so consoles. Weber would file the surrender of omnipotence as a fourth solution, late and distinctly modern, available only to a religion that has already absorbed the disenchantment of the world and no longer expects God to part the sea. The price is the throne. Artson pays it without protest and calls the throne an idol.
The man who builds such a theology belongs to a type Weber drew with care. He is the religious intellectual, and Weber held that the intellectual carries a hunger the ordinary believer does not feel. The peasant wants rain and a cure for the sick cow. The intellectual wants the cosmos to cohere, to form a single whole that yields an answer to the question why, and he suffers when the world refuses. Salvation religions of intellectuals, Weber wrote, grow from this refusal of the world to make sense on its own. Process theology is an intellectual’s theodicy through and through. Artson built it for the educated congregant who reads evolutionary biology in the morning and cannot kneel to the King of the Universe at night, the man who needs his science and his faith to speak without contradiction or he will keep neither. Weber named the demand. Artson tried to satisfy it.
The demand runs into Weber’s hardest verdict, the one he delivered in “Science as a Vocation.” The world has been disenchanted. Science has emptied the cosmos of intrinsic meaning and left a chain of causes that answers how and never why. The scholar at his desk can tell a man what is and cannot tell him what to do or how to live or what his suffering is for. Weber thought the honest man of his age had two roads. He could bear the disenchantment with a clear eye and ask no comfort of a silent universe, or he could make the sacrifice of the intellect, the sacrificium intellectus, and return to the arms of the old churches, which take such men back without shame. Weber respected both roads and warned against the third, the road of the man who wants the consolation of faith without the surrender of reason, who dresses the old longing in the language of the laboratory and calls it knowledge.
Artson takes the third road and means to walk it without paying the toll. He reads the disenchantment and refuses Weber’s choice between bearing it and fleeing it. He says the cosmos that science describes, the cosmos of emergence and novelty and relationship, points on its own toward a God of becoming, so that the believer need not check his reason at the sanctuary door. Weber watches this with respect and doubt. The respect is for the seriousness of the attempt, which asks no man to deny what the telescope shows. The doubt is older and colder. Weber suspected that the marriage of science and salvation always hides a sacrifice somewhere, that the intellectual who finds his God confirmed by cosmology has read his hope into the data, and that the disenchanted world stays disenchanted no matter how warmly a gifted teacher describes it. Whether Artson dodged the sacrifice or only buried it deeper is the question the frame leaves open, and the frame does not flatter either answer.
Then there is the school, and here Weber’s second great category takes over from the first. Artson did not build the Ziegler School on rules. He built it on himself. Students wanted what he carried. The weekly commentary reached thousands because the man on the page held them. The curriculum he wrote, the rabbis he formed, the campers and the European ordinands and the African community he flew to install, all of it gathered around a person with extraordinary gifts whom others recognized as extraordinary. Weber has a name for authority of that kind. He calls it charisma, the power that rests not on tradition and not on rule but on the recognized gifts of a particular man. Charisma does not inherit and does not elect. It appears in a person, and it commands because the person commands, and it knows no regulation outside the leader’s own sense of his calling. Weber gave it a motto borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount. It is written, but I say unto you.
Charisma is the least stable authority Weber knew, and it cannot survive in its pure form. The gifted man ages and dies, and the school he built on his person must find some way to outlast him, which means it must convert his charisma into something that runs by rule or by inheritance. Weber called the conversion routinization, and he treated it as the fate of every charismatic order, the slow exchange of the prophet’s fire for the clerk’s ledger. Routinization is itself a kind of disenchantment, the cooling of the personal flame into the impersonal office. The deanship gave Artson an office, a legal and bureaucratic seat with rules attached, but he held the office charismatically, by the force of the man rather than the terms of the chair. An institution run that way distributes its goods the way charisma always distributes them, by the leader’s favor and not by impartial rule, because charisma recognizes no rule above the leader’s own discernment.
The collision arrived in 2024. The American Jewish University opened an investigation into Artson and his deputy dean, Rabbi Cheryl Peretz, after complaints that had gathered across two decades from former students, who described a pattern of favoritism toward men and disrespectful treatment. Weber’s frame names the form of the conflict. A bureaucratic and legal apparatus, the firm, the formal process, the assembly’s probe, was brought to bear on an authority that had run on personal gift. The complaint that a charismatic leader favors some over others and binds himself to no even rule is not an accident of one man. It is the standing tension Weber predicted between charisma and bureaucracy, the one that says favor and the other that says rule, and the investigation is the rule arriving to ask the favor to account for itself. Routinization, in Weber’s sense, came to the Ziegler School in the shape of a law firm.
In 2026 Artson stepped down after a quarter century, and the university held a gala, and he took the title of Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar. Weber would read the gala and the named chair as routinization completing its work. The charisma of the man becomes the honor of a title, the fire becomes a name carved into a chair, and the school keeps the prestige while shedding the unruly person who generated it. The Kaplan chair is a fitting close, since it ties Artson to an earlier teacher who also tried to keep faith and the modern world in the same room. The honor is real. It is also the form that charisma takes when it has been made safe for the institution that outlives the man.
Artson’s theology spent its strength stripping God of coercion, building a God who governs by persuasion and never by force, a God whose power is the patience to invite and wait. Charismatic authority is the most personal power a man can hold and the one least bound by rule, the power that says I say unto you and answers to no written code. The theology unmade compulsion in heaven. The authority that carried the theology into the world ran on the one form of earthly command that recognizes no rule above the gifted self. Weber does not call that hypocrisy. He calls it the condition of charisma, which builds great things on a person and then must be tamed by rule before it can be trusted, and which feels, to those who stand below it without favor, like a power that answers to no one. The God lost His throne in the books. The throne stayed warm in the dean’s chair until the rule came for it.
A God for the Immanent Frame: Bradley Shavit Artson Through Charles Taylor
A man sits in the pew on a Saturday morning and cannot do the thing his grandfather did without effort. He cannot believe the old way. He has read his biology and his cosmology, and the universe he carries in his head runs on causes that ask no God to push them along. The sea does not part. The dead stay dead. He knows this the way he knows the earth goes around the sun, in his bones and below argument, and no sermon will talk him out of it. He also cannot do the other thing, the thing the village atheist does with a shrug. He cannot live in a world that means nothing, a flat world of matter and decay where his love for his children is a chemical accident and his grief at the graveside signifies as little as rust. He is caught between two impossibilities, and Charles Taylor (b. 1931) wrote a thousand pages about him in A Secular Age. Bradley Shavit Artson built a God for him.
Taylor’s account starts with the shape of the modern self. The man in the pew has what Taylor calls a buffered self, a self with a firm wall between the inner mind and the outer world. Meaning lives inside him, in his thoughts and his choices, and the world outside stands inert, a field of objects that carry no charge of their own. His ancestor had a porous self, open to a world thick with spirits and powers and holy places, where a relic could heal and a curse could kill and the boundary between mind and cosmos ran thin. The long change Taylor traces, the draining of the spirits out of the world, sealed the porous self into the buffered one. The buffered man is safe from possession and safe from grace alike. Nothing outside gets in without his leave. The old God belonged to the porous world, a King who reached into nature and bent it, and that God cannot find a door in the buffered wall. Artson’s congregant is buffered to the core, and he cannot will himself back into porousness any more than he can unlearn the heliocentric solar system.
Around this self Taylor draws the immanent frame, the background all moderns share whether they believe or not. It is the sense of a natural order that runs on its own, complete in itself, requiring no reference to anything beyond it to be understood. We breathe it. The unbeliever takes the frame as closed, sealed against any transcendent, and reads his own closure as the verdict of reason. The believer takes the frame as open, spun toward a beyond that the same natural order might point to. Taylor’s sharpest claim is that neither reading is forced by the evidence. The frame can be lived open or closed, and the choice runs deeper than proof, down in the place where a man senses where life is fuller and where it goes thin. The believer and the unbeliever both feel the pull of the other side. Taylor calls this the cross-pressure, the modern condition in which no faith is naive and no doubt is final, and every position feels the draw of its opposite.
Taylor spent his polemical energy on a story he thinks modern people tell themselves and get wrong. He calls it the subtraction story. The story says that secularity is what remains when you subtract illusion, that the modern unbeliever is simply the human being who was always there under the religious paint, revealed once the paint came off. Taylor denies it. Unbelief was not uncovered. It was built, a new and demanding self-understanding that had to be constructed against the grain, an achievement and not a residue. Hold this against Artson, because Artson tells half a subtraction story and resists the other half. He accepts that the omnipotent King was an error the modern man does well to subtract, a primitive picture science and history have retired. He refuses the larger subtraction that would leave only matter and call faith a leftover. The doubleness is the Taylorian condition exactly. Artson stands in the cross-pressure and tries to keep his footing.
His footing is process theology, and read through Taylor it is a re-enchantment built to the buffered self’s own specifications. The trick of it is restraint. Artson does not ask the buffered man to become porous again, to expect the sea to part or the relic to heal. His God of becoming never breaches the causal order. He does not reach in from outside and bend nature, because He has no outside to reach in from. He is woven through the becoming of things, present in the emergence and the novelty and the relationship that the science describes, calling the world toward goodness from within rather than commanding it from above. This is a God the buffered self can hold without breaking his own wall, a transcendence that asks no return to the enchanted world, a way to spin the immanent frame open while leaving the buffered boundary intact. Artson found the one shape of God that fits through the modern door.
Taylor insists that belief and unbelief are lived from particular places, that no man reasons his way to God or away from Him on a blank slate, that the sense of fullness a man orients by rises from where he has stood and what he has carried. Artson stood in a home with a non-verbal son whose dignity no theory of the useful soul could account for, and he stood later in the country of his own cancer, where the questions stop being academic. A theology that grew from those places is not a marketing scheme for the educated. It is the testimony of a cross-pressured man working out, from inside his own life, how to keep the frame open when the flat reading is always there at his elbow offering its cold relief. Taylor honors that. He thinks the open frame is lived this way or not at all, out of the depths of a particular life, and Artson’s God carries the marks of the life that produced Him.
So the frame grants Artson his sincerity and his achievement, and then it asks the hard question, the one Taylor reserves for the liberal theologies that accommodate the modern self with such care. Has Artson spun the immanent frame open, or has he furnished its inside more warmly. A God so fully at home in immanence that He never disturbs it, never breaks the causal order, never confronts the self with anything the self did not already half-possess, starts to look less like a transcendent Other and more like the immanent frame’s own most comfortable tenant. Taylor worries that the malaise of immanence, the flatness the congregant fled, might not be cured by a God who is immanence described in a kinder voice. The buffered man wanted a way out of the flat world. Artson may have given him a way to stay in it and feel religious, which is a different gift, and perhaps a smaller one. The transcendent in Taylor’s account is supposed to unsettle, to break in, to call the self past itself toward a good it did not author. A God who fits the modern door so well may have been measured to the doorframe.
The danger sharpens in what Taylor names the age of authenticity, the late modern climate where each man finds his own path and his own spirituality and answers to no authority but his sense of what speaks to him. The God of becoming is a God a buffered seeker can accept without surrendering anything, without the scandal of miracle or the yoke of a law he did not choose, and a God accepted on those terms edges toward a God of the self’s own choosing, the deity of expressive individualism wearing the robes of an ancient tradition. Taylor does not say Artson has crossed that line. He says the line runs near, that a religion shaped this precisely to the contours of the modern self risks becoming a mirror, and that the warmth the congregant feels might be the warmth of his own reflection. The question is whether Artson’s God calls the buffered man out of himself or only keeps him company where he already sits.
Taylor leaves it open, because his whole argument forbids him to close it. The immanent frame can be lived open or closed, and no proof settles which reading is true, and a man who builds a door in the frame’s wall cannot demonstrate that it leads outside rather than into another room of the same house. Artson built a real door. Educated men who had given up on God walked through it and found something they could hold without lying to themselves about the age they live in, and that is no small work in the cross-pressured world Taylor describes. Whether the door opens onto the transcendent or onto the most spacious chamber of immanence is the question the frame poses and refuses to answer, and Artson, who knows the cross-pressure from the inside, might be the last man to claim he has settled it.
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Rabbi Joshua Weisberg is a Canadian-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi, teacher, chef, licensed tour guide, and writer who has lived in Jerusalem for more than thirty years. He teaches Talmud, Hasidic thought, Kabbalah, and Jewish philosophy, and he presents these sources to readers shaped by the psychological and spiritual questions of modern life. His students range from advanced Torah scholars to men and women who meet classical Jewish texts for the first time. Across his teaching runs a single concern: the link between traditional Jewish learning and the inner life, including dreams, intuition, emotion, memory, and personal change.
Weisberg grew up in Kingston, Ontario. His father, Mark Weisberg, taught law at Queen’s University. His mother, a German Catholic and an English teacher, and his American Jewish father belonged to the founding families of Kingston’s Reform Jewish community. The home held more than one religious and cultural tradition, and Weisberg learned early the questions of faith, identity, and belonging that later shape his teaching. He often retells a line from his mother, who explained her support for Jewish continuity this way: “My people took so many Jewish children, I want to give some back.”
After high school Weisberg volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz. The experience changed his direction. Living and working in Israel drew him toward both Judaism and the Jewish state. He then studied at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but Israel kept its hold on him. After his undergraduate years he returned and made the country his home.
In Jerusalem he gave himself to intensive Torah study. He spent years in the classical disciplines of Talmud, Jewish law, Jewish philosophy, and Hasidic thought. Many Orthodox rabbis come up within the yeshiva world. Weisberg came to it as a man making a personal discovery, and his path from a Reform upbringing to Orthodox commitment gave him a particular feel for students who approach Judaism from outside the traditional frameworks.
Over more than two decades Weisberg has taught at several of Jerusalem’s prominent institutions. His longest association is with Nishmat, the Jeanie Schottenstein Center for Advanced Torah Study for Women, where he has taught Talmud and Hasidic thought for some twenty-five years. He has also lectured in Orthodox yeshivot, seminaries, and adult education programs in Jerusalem and abroad.
Much of his teaching sits at the meeting point of classical Jewish spirituality and modern psychology. He draws on the Talmud, the Midrash, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and the writings of figures such as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) and the Slonimer Rebbe. From these sources he argues that traditional Jewish literature carries developed understandings of consciousness, emotion, imagination, and spiritual growth. He treats Judaism less as a legal system and more as a body of thought that opens the hidden parts of human experience.
One recurring subject is the place of dreams and the unconscious in Jewish thought. Through lectures, classes, and a long-term writing project, Weisberg examines how biblical narrative, rabbinic texts, and the mystical tradition understood dreams as paths to self-knowledge, divine communication, and psychological insight. He works to recover ideas that modern psychology often reaches through secular language, and he traces their roots inside Jewish intellectual history.
Weisberg’s reach extends past the classroom. Known as “Chef Rabbi Josh,” he has built a model of hospitality that joins food, Torah, storytelling, and conversation. In programs hosted in his Jerusalem home he welcomes visitors from around the world for elaborate meals that combine cooking with talk of Jewish history, spirituality, and Israel. What started as informal hospitality grew into organized educational dinners that now form a large part of his public identity. Accounts of these dinners have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, the Jerusalem Post, and on Aish.com. When the Covid-19 pandemic halted international tourism, the family began preparing its dinners for friends and neighbors, and the idea of a family deli grew out of that turn.
His culinary work carries a broader conviction: that Jewish learning need not stay inside formal institutions. For Weisberg the table extends the study hall, a place where ideas move through relationship, conversation, and shared experience. The emphasis recalls older Jewish patterns, where the home served as a center of education, community, and spiritual formation.
Weisberg holds a license as an Israeli tour guide and leads educational tours across Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. His tours bring together biblical texts, Jewish history, archaeology, and spiritual reflection. He treats a site less as a fixed location and more as an entry into larger questions of Jewish memory, identity, and religious meaning. His command of landscape, history, and text has made him a guide that visitors seek out for a closer encounter with Israel.
Alongside teaching, cooking, and guiding, Weisberg has worked in filmmaking and multimedia. These projects carry his interest in communicating Jewish ideas across formats and reaching audiences beyond the religious settings. As a public speaker he has lectured across North America, Europe, and Israel, taught online courses, and addressed both Jewish and non-Jewish listeners. His talks join scholarship, humor, storytelling, and personal reflection.
Weisberg speaks to people from a wide range of religious and cultural traditions, including Christian congregations, and he takes part in interfaith conversation about Judaism, Israel, and shared moral questions. His manner runs non-polemical and invitational. He shows less interest in ideological debate than in helping men and women work through lasting questions of purpose, spirituality, relationship, and growth.
Weisberg lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Chana Jenny Weisberg, an author, lecturer, and founder of JewishMom.com, a well-known Jewish parenting and family website. Married for nearly thirty years, they have raised eight children. Their home has long served as a center of hospitality, education, and communal life, open to visitors from around the world, and it holds together traditional observance with intellectual openness.
Weisberg belongs to a generation of Jerusalem teachers who carry traditional Jewish wisdom to modern audiences. His career shows a sustained effort to bridge worlds: secular and religious experience, psychology and spirituality, study and daily life, and the ancient texts of Judaism and the long human search for meaning.
The site runs on Wix. A family business, self-built and self-marketed, with no institution standing behind it. The hero image on the homepage is chicken soup, not the rabbi. The soup sells first.
Read his own one-line description: a Talmud scholar, popular public speaker, registered tour guide and specialty chef. Then read the order. The domain and the persona lead with Chef. His self-description leads with scholar. Chef is the hook that gets the click. Scholar is the capital he wants respected. The site holds both and lets each do its job.
The clearest tell is the audience segmentation. He has built separate doors: Christian, Jewish, Deutsch, an Israeli page in Hebrew, and online classes. The same evening of food and Torah gets pitched one way to Christians, another to Jews, another to Germans, another to Israelis. The Christian page is a product he built, not a stray gesture of interfaith warmth. He found a market in church and Christian-Zionist audiences who want a taste of the Jewish source, and he serves it on its own terms.
His own story is the engine. The press row links to a Wall Street Journal piece framed around being born half-Jewish and choosing Judaism fully, and to a Mizrachi conversion story. He sells the authenticity of a man who chose this rather than inherited it. For seekers, and for Christians curious about the root of their own faith, that choice carries more than birth might.
Credibility rests on the logos. The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, the Jerusalem Post, Mizrachi, and Aish run along an “as seen in” strip, and a single named testimonial sits on the homepage, a vice president at a Chicago development firm. The logos do the lifting the testimonials don’t.
The marketing vocabulary sits at a distance from the content. The tagline strings three verbs together. The tour copy promises hidden gems and an insider’s view and offers to bring a taste of the Holy Land to your home town. Travel-brochure language wrapped around Talmud and Kabbalah. The friction is the proposition. He markets depth in the words of a tour package, and the bet is that the depth shows up once people are at the table.
Dinners for groups up to forty, tours, online classes, a North American speaking tour, a self-published book sold through PayPal, and five social channels all run off one man and his family. The breadth is a solo brand stretched across every surface a single teacher can reach. Polished, homemade, and clear about what it sells.
The brand name says JewishMom. The posts on the page are war.
What shows up is a wall of grief and resolve. Funerals for young soldiers, a neighbor’s nephew killed in the war, a hostage mistakenly killed by the IDF, and flags lining the street as a family walks to the bus for Mt. Herzl. A parenting site has turned into a wartime chronicle, tracking the fighting in the north and the losses on her own block.
The voice is the neighbor and the mother. She writes in first person from her street and names the people. Her next-door neighbor’s nephew, her daughter’s guidance counselor’s grandson, another neighbor’s husband fighting for his life in Lebanon. Proximity is the method. She testifies rather than comments, and the close detail does the work, the flags, the bus, the run of funerals in a single week.
Faith carries the loss. HY”D follows a dead soldier’s name, b”H and Hashem run through the worst news, and a chizuk post sets out to steady readers. The deaths fold into a providential story. Southern Lebanon cleared of Hezbollah reads as a gift from God and from the soldiers both.
She takes a side and does not hide it. Douglas Murray takes apart an anti-Israel journalist, in her framing, and she approves, adding that a man need not be Jewish to see the truth. No neutrality, no hedging. The evacuee baby boom carries the emotional logic of the whole feed: four grandchildren born to a displaced family, more Jewish life set against Jewish death, and birth winning the page.
Set beside her husband’s site, the contrast is clean. His is a sales funnel aimed at outsiders, dinners and tours and classes. Hers reads as testimony aimed at insiders, devotional and communal, with no product on the page. He sells the experience. She bears witness. One home, two instruments.
The promise in the name is mothering. The product on the feed is national grief and resolve. A reader who came for parenting a decade ago now gets the war. Whether that is drift or a writer carrying her readers through an emergency, the feed alone cannot say, but the gap between the brand and the current content is real.
A family on her street carries a flag to the corner and waits. The neighbors come out with flags of their own and form a line along the road. A bus idles at the curb. It will take the family to Mt. Herzl to bury a nephew, a sergeant, twenty-two years old, killed in the war. Chana Jenny Weisberg picks up a large flag and stands with them. Later she writes it down for the readers of JewishMom.com. She has buried a neighbor’s nephew and sat at another funeral the same week. A neighbor’s husband fights for his life in a hospital in the north. Her daughter’s guidance counselor has lost a grandson. She is exhausted, and she says so, and then she finds the meaning in it, because the finding is the work.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built his books on one claim. Man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot carry the knowledge. So he builds a second self out of symbols, a self that can outlast the body, and he joins a cultural project that tells him how to earn a place in something that does not end. Becker calls these projects hero systems. Each one hands its members a script for significance. Each promises that a life spent its way will not be erased. In The Denial of Death he names the two things the script holds back. The first is death. The second is harder to see and worse to feel. It is the suspicion that the life was small, that it counted for nothing, that a man can die and leave no mark on the order of things. The hero system answers both. It says you will not vanish, and it says you were never small.
Set Becker beside the woman with the flag and her site comes into focus as an engine built against both terrors at once.
The first terror sits in her feed. Young men die and she names them. She writes HY”D after a soldier’s name, may God avenge his blood, and the letters do two jobs. They mark the death as murder rather than accident, and they hand the avenging to a power that does not forget. A nation can lose a war. A People that God remembers cannot be ended. The flag walks to Mt. Herzl, the coffin goes in the ground, and the line holds, because the dead enter a story with no last page.
The second terror is quieter and closer to home, and it is the one her site was built to answer first. Picture her at the sink at two in the morning with the eighth child finally down and a counter full of plates. By the measures of the age she is doing nothing. No title. No salary the state can read. No byline in the sense the world rewards. The culture she grew up beside, the one with the university and the career and the small planned family, looks at the woman at the sink and sees unpaid invisible labor, a talent buried under diapers, a life poured out and lost. JewishMom.com exists to deny that verdict. It says the woman at the sink stands at the center, not the margin, of the largest thing a person can do. The home is the altar. The child is a deposit into eternity that no market can discount. The dish is not a dish.
This is the subtraction the hero system has to perform. Becker says every such system runs on a denial, and hers denies waste. Nothing on her feed gets to be merely physical, merely random, merely lost. The pregnancy that wrecks her sleep is not exhaustion, it is fruitfulness, more life set against death. The soldier in the mud of south Lebanon did not bleed out for nothing, he fell for the People and God will avenge him. The four grandchildren born to a displaced family in a single month are not coincidence, they are the answer the war did not expect. Her sister-in-law looks at the babies near the Lebanese border and says the obvious thing, that the family grows while the enemy tries to end it, and the obvious thing is the whole creed. Birth against death. The ledger never shows a loss.
The price sits inside the denial. A system that cannot afford a wasted death cannot sit with one either. Grief that refuses to resolve into purpose has no room on the page. The Tuesday that was only a Tuesday, the chore that redeemed nothing, the boy who died for a hill that the next month gave back, these she cannot let stand as themselves. She must gather them up. The gathering is mercy and it is also a wall, because the believer who says this death must mean cannot also say and if it does not.
Watch one word move through the systems that surround hers. Take sacrifice. For Chana Jenny sacrifice is a deposit. The body given to childbirth, the self given to the home, the life given by the soldier, all of it goes into an account that compounds forever and never spends down. Give more and you hold more of eternity. Now carry the same word across the street.
In a glass office in Palo Alto a founder has not seen his children awake in nine days. He sleeps under the desk. He tells the new hire, We bleed now so the thing outlives us. His sacrifice buys a different permanence, the product that ships after he is gone, his name on the patent, the dent he leaves in a world that forgets faces. He pours out the present for a monument. Children, to him, are a cost center against the build.
Across a different city a woman has decided not to have children at all. She has run the carbon math and the math is the prayer. Her sacrifice is the daughter she will not bear, given up so the planet she worships can breathe a while longer. She says, I love the future too much to add to the load. Her holiest act is the empty crib. Chana Jenny’s holiest act is the full one. The same word, sacrifice, points the two women in exact opposite directions, and each can see only waste in the other. To the mother of eight the empty crib is a small grave. To the woman with the carbon math the full house is arson.
In a monastery a man sits and tries to want nothing. His sacrifice is the self, the craving, the very wish to continue. He gives up the hunger for more life so the wheel will stop turning and not bring him back. He says, There is nothing to keep. Chana Jenny wants the wheel to turn forever and to fill every seat. He spends his discipline reaching non-being. She spends hers reaching more being. One climbs toward zero. The other climbs toward overflow. The word sacrifice serves both ascents and means nothing in common across them.
And at the same Mt. Herzl, on the same afternoon, another mother buries another son, and she has no God to hand the avenging to. She is secular, a child of the kibbutz movement, and her boy died for the state and the unit and the land. Her hero system overlaps the rabbi’s wife in shape and breaks from it at the root. Same coffin, same flag, same gravel under the same shoes. But where one mother says God will remember and avenge, the other says only the country must go on. The beyond that catches the death is a nation for the one and a People-with-God for the other, and which beyond a man trusts decides whether the grief has a floor or falls through.
Set one more figure at the edge of the frame, an accountant of impersonal good who gives a tenth of his pay to buy bed nets and counts the lives saved per dollar. He looks at eight children and sees eight mouths, not eight victories. To him sacrifice is the kidney handed to a stranger whose name he never learns, the warm feeling traded for the cold number that does more. Bloodline is sentiment. He banks his immortality in a spreadsheet of strangers kept alive. Chana Jenny banks hers in faces around her own table. Each calls the other’s deposit a vanity.
How much of this does she see. More than the cynic grants and less than the system could survive examining. The faith vocabulary on her feed, the b”H threaded through the worst news, the chizuk post written to steady the others, shows a woman who knows she is doing the work of refusing waste and chooses to do it out loud, as a service to readers who would otherwise fall through the floor she is building under them. That is craft. What the system cannot let her do is turn the same gaze on its base. She can comfort the grieving mother. She cannot ask, with the mother, whether the death meant anything at all, because the question is the one thing her hero system was built to make unaskable.
Three coordinates locate her. The shape of her hero is the mother who makes the smallest act the largest, who answers every death with more life and every loss with another name written down, so that the account against extinction only ever grows. The rival she fights without naming is the modern verdict that the home is small, that the woman at the sink wastes herself, that the full crib is a cage and the empty one a freedom, and behind that verdict the older enemy, the flat suspicion that all of it, the soup and the sergeant and the eighth child, runs on nothing and adds to nothing. The one cost her ledger cannot price is the death that simply does not mean, the Tuesday that redeemed nothing, the boy who fell for the hill they handed back. She will not let it sit as itself, and so she may never hold raw loss in her hands for long, never let her daughter’s grief stay grief, never let her own exhaustion be only exhaustion before she has turned it into a deposit. The mercy and the blindness are the same act. To keep nothing wasted she must spend her whole strength making sure nothing ever is.
His Hero System
The guests come off a tour bus and climb the stairs to a Jerusalem apartment where the table is already set for forty. There is chicken soup. There is a rabbi in an apron who takes each hand as though he has waited all week for this one to arrive. Between the courses he tells them his story. He was born in Kingston, Ontario, to an American Jewish father and a German Catholic mother, in a home that helped start the town’s Reform congregation. He came into the world half a thing. Then he chose. He went to a kibbutz, then to years over the Talmud, and he made himself a whole Jew, and now he feeds strangers from around the world and teaches them and they leave saying they were welcomed like old friends. The soup, the story, the welcome. The product is the man.
Ernest Becker built his books on one terror, and the life of Rabbi Joshua Weisberg answers two faces of it.
The first face is the given self. Becker says the worst news a man carries is not only that he dies but that he might never have been anyone, that he is a creature shaped by accident, a copy run off by parents and place and the year of his birth, significant to no one and chosen by nothing. Set that terror on the boy in Kingston. He belongs fully to no tribe. His father’s people and his mother’s people meet in him and cancel. He is a founding family’s son in a congregation built to soften the old lines, raised between a church and a synagogue, a half-Jew who can pass in any room and stand at the center of none. Becker has a name for the answer such a boy reaches for. He calls it the causa sui project, the dream of fathering oneself, of refusing the self that was handed over and authoring a self by will. The headline the rabbi later earns in an American paper says it in a sentence. The half-Jewish boy chose to be wholly so. He becomes his own father. He makes the man the accident failed to make.
The second face is death. A scholar can spend forty years over the page and die in a back room with no one at the table and the learning dies with him. The teacher fears the empty hall the way the mother fears the cut line. Weisberg answers it with a table. He takes the study hall and opens it to the street. He gathers strangers off the buses, feeds them, tells them the story, sends them home carrying a piece of it, and he brands the welcome with his own name so the host is remembered and the teaching travels in tens of thousands of mouths. Becker would read the dinners as a transference of the self into the world, a way to be larger than one life and to outlast it. The man who was no one’s full son becomes everyone’s host.
Every hero system runs on a subtraction, and his subtracts the given. The parts of a self that arrive without being chosen, the accident of blood, the church on the mother’s side, the soft Reform childhood, all of it gets demoted to prologue, not the real thing, only the road to the man he made. The vital lie holds the prologue in place. It says there was no accident at all, only a hidden path, that even the half-Jewish start was a calling in disguise, that the mother who helped raise a Jew was repaying a debt and not making a muddle. Nothing is left unchosen in the end. The welcome carries the same subtraction. The guest must feel singled out, taken by the hand, met like an old friend inside ten minutes, and so the strangeness of the stranger, the parts of the visitor that do not fit the evening, get smoothed under before the soup is served. A welcome that total can hold no guest it cannot warm and no self it cannot remake.
Carry one word across the systems that surround his. Take the made self, the second birth, the value he stakes his life on, the becoming. For Weisberg the made self is the chosen self brought whole under God, the half soldered into the one, the real man standing where the accidental one used to be. Now set the same word in other mouths.
On a parade ground a drill instructor screams into a recruit’s face. You came in here a civilian. You will leave a Marine or you will not leave. The recruit’s old self dies on that ground and the corps fathers a new man out of the wreck. The made self here is the forged man of the unit, and the permanence he reaches for is the corps that buries him with its own flag and outlasts him by two hundred years.
In a county office a man signs the paper that changes his name and files the old country away with it. He sheds the village, the patronymic, the accent he has been sanding down for years. Here I am nobody’s son, he thinks, here I start clean. His made self is the free man with no father, and his deathless thing is the new nation he writes himself into, the line that begins with him.
At the edge of a river a preacher lowers a weeping man backward into the water. I was dead in my sins, the man says, and now I am a new creature. The shape is the rabbi’s own. Lost, then chosen, then reborn whole. But the new creature rises under a rival Lord and walks toward a rival eternal People, and here sits the sharpest fact in the whole picture. Some of those born-again men are the rabbi’s paying guests. Two self-authored fathers of themselves face each other across the chicken soup, each one sure his second birth is the true one, each one selling the other a taste of a wholeness the other has already claimed by a different road.
On a film set an actor disappears into a part and comes out and disappears into the next. There is no me, he says, there is only the role. He makes and unmakes the self for the work and keeps no fixed self at all. His made self is the made character, his immortality the print on the reel, and he reaches wholeness only on the screen, a man entire for two hours and scattered the rest of the time.
In a clinic a wealthy man reads his own blood panel off a tablet and frowns. He swaps his plasma for a younger man’s, counts his markers, times his meals to the hour. I am not dying on schedule, he says. His made self is the upgraded body, his second birth a maintenance plan, his deathless thing the machine that he means to keep running past the span the worms expect. Where the rabbi’s lasting life runs through the soul and the People he joined, this man’s runs through the hardware he refuses to retire.
Six men, one word. The made self means the chosen man under God, the forged man of the unit, the free man with no father, the new creature under a rival Lord, the dissolved man who lives on film, and the optimized man who will not die on time. Each becoming carries its owner toward a different thing that does not end. The word holds them together and means nothing in common across them.
How much of this does he see. A great deal, and he turns it into the brand. The conversion story is the authenticity stamp on the dinners, the proof of the wares. He knows the welcome is built and he builds it on purpose, and the building is craft, a gift wrapped for sale. What the system cannot let him ask is whether a self that stands by choice can ever rest in standing. The given man rests. He was handed a self and he keeps it whether he tends it or not. The made man owns no such floor. A self that exists because it was chosen must be chosen again each morning, told again to each new table, hosted, fed out, renewed, because the moment the choosing stops the made self has nothing underneath it to keep it whole. He set himself against the accident of his birth, and the price is that he can never stop setting.
Three coordinates locate him. The shape of his hero is the self-made man who refuses the accident of his birth, authors a whole chosen self by will and years of study, and then makes that self last by gathering strangers to his table and being remembered as the host who took them by the hand. The rival he fights without naming is the old verdict that a self is given and not made, that a man is what he was born and cannot author his way out, that the convert stays a guest forever and is never wholly at home, and behind that verdict the flat suspicion that the whole evening is one man setting a table against the dark and calling the light he makes there permanent. The one cost his ledger cannot price is rest. He can never be the way the given man simply is, because his wholeness lives by being chosen and performed and handed out again at dawn. And the home he can never return to is the one he started in, the half-Jewish Kingston boy who belonged by accident and not by will, since he has staked his life on the claim that the boy was only the road and never the man.
A woman at the long table tells him she had a strange dream the night before. She says it the way moderns say it, with a small laugh that takes it back before it lands, the laugh that means none of this counts, only my brain doing its filing. Rabbi Joshua Weisberg does not laugh. He leans in. He treats the dream as mail. He asks what came in it, what she felt, what she has kept from herself in waking hours, and he tells her the tradition read a dream as one sixtieth of prophecy, a channel left open at night when the daytime guard goes off duty. The woman came for dinner. She did not come for prophecy. By the second course she leans in too.
Set Charles Taylor (b. 1931) beside that table and the scene opens.
Taylor draws the central line of the modern condition in A Secular Age. On one side stands the porous self, the self of the premodern world, open to a charged cosmos. Meaning lives out in the world for the porous self, not only in the head. Spirits cross the boundary. Objects carry power. A dream arrives from outside the dreamer and lands on him like weather. On the other side stands the buffered self, the modern self, sealed at the edges. Meaning starts and stops inside the buffered mind. The world beyond the skin runs as inert matter under law, and the dream becomes brain noise, a private event with no sender. Disenchantment names the long migration from the first self to the second, the raising of the buffer. The woman with the laugh is a buffered self. So, once, was the man across the soup from her.
His audience comes to him buffered. They live inside what Taylor calls the immanent frame, the construal of the world as a closed natural order, and they have been trained from childhood to treat talk of the divine as a category error, charming in a grandmother and embarrassing in oneself. His material runs the other way. Dreams as messages, the unconscious as a room where something speaks, Kabbalah, the inner life open to God. All of it is porous-self goods. His problem is the seam between the two. How does a man carry enchanted cargo past a border guard who confiscates enchantment on sight.
He pays the guard in the one currency the buffer honors. He translates the porous into psychology. The buffered self has thrown out spirits and omens and kept one licensed word for depth, the unconscious, and around it a whole approved discipline of interior life. So Weisberg renames at the door. The dream becomes the unconscious. Divine communication becomes intuition, the inner voice, an insight rising from below. The mystical map becomes a chart of consciousness. He hands the porous good the buffer’s own papers and waves it through. The buffered seeker takes delivery and signs for it, certain he has bought nothing he cannot explain to a skeptical friend on Monday.
Watch one dream cross four worlds and the line Taylor draws turns visible.
A sleep researcher reads the same report and shrugs. Memory consolidation, he says, the cortex stitching a story over random firing while you sleep. It carries no message because there is no one to send one. This is the buffer at its cleanest, the world emptied of senders.
A therapist down the hall takes the dream and grows interested. The unconscious is speaking, she says, a buried wish, a figure from the deep. She grants the dream meaning, real meaning, and the meaning stays sealed inside the patient, the self in conversation with the self. The depth is interior and it goes no further than the skin. Still buffered, only furnished.
A grandmother in a mountain village hears the dream and crosses herself. Your dead aunt came to warn you, she says, light a candle and stay off the road Thursday. For her the dream came from outside, a real visitor across an open boundary, meaning loose in the world and pressing on the dreamer with a claim. Porous, entire.
Weisberg stands in the doorway between the therapist and the grandmother. He tells the buffered woman her dream is the unconscious, and she nods, because that word she can keep. Then he turns the unconscious into a room with more than one occupant, a place where the daytime self goes quiet and something other than the self might be heard. He reopens the grandmother’s boundary while holding the therapist’s word in his mouth. Four readings of one dream, and his is the fourth dressed in the clothes of the second.
The frame runs through his own life before it runs through his teaching. Reform Judaism in Kingston, then Wesleyan, a liberal arts formation in a secular-adjacent world, all of it builds a buffered man, schooled in doubt and in the polite distance from anything that might possess him. The kibbutz cracks the buffer first, and it cracks through the body and the land rather than through argument, the work and the soil and the place reaching him under the level where doubt operates. Then the years over the Talmud and inside Hasidism reopen the boundary the buffer had sealed. He did not inherit porosity. He recovered it, as an adult, by choice, after living inside the buffer long enough to know its inside. He sells the road he walked. The country he offers the buffered woman is the one he emigrated to.
Taylor has a name for the modern habit Weisberg works against at the table. He calls it excarnation, the long transfer of religious life out of body and ritual and shared presence and up into the head, until faith becomes a set of propositions a person holds or drops. Weisberg refuses the transfer. He puts the sacred back into the soup, the hand taken at the door, the face across the table, the body kept in a chair for three hours while the courses come. Enchantment reaches the buffered guest through the senses, under the guard, by the route the buffer never thought to seal. Taylor’s phrase for the deeper move is the sanctifying of ordinary life, the modern turn that finds the holy in work and home and the family meal. Weisberg runs that turn on a bowl of chicken soup and a Tuesday in Jerusalem.
His market is the population Taylor describes. The buffered self inside a closed immanent frame feels, sooner or later, the malaise of immanence, the flatness, the suspicion that the sealed world is missing something it cannot name, and it goes looking through the open field of options Taylor calls the nova, the proliferation of spiritual offers in a secular age. Weisberg sets up shop in the center of that field and offers fullness with roots, the ancient against the arbitrary, a re-enchantment that claims a four-thousand-year warranty. The hunger that fills his table is made of people trained to distrust the very thing they arrive hungry for.
When the porous comes wrapped in the buffer’s language, does the buyer cross the line or only visit. The woman leans in by the second course. Does she leave the table re-enchanted, the boundary open for good, or does she carry home a contained taste of porousness, a warm weekend, and find the guard back at the door by Monday with the immanent frame closed behind him. The translation that gets enchantment past the buffer may also be the thing that tames it, that hands the buffered self an enchantment it can switch off. And the same question turns back on the host. The man who must say the unconscious to be heard, who reaches the porous only through the buffer’s own dialect, keeps one foot inside the frame he means to open. Taylor reads this as the condition itself, the air every modern now breathes, the re-enchanter included. The road back to the porous world runs through the buffer, because there is no other road left, and Weisberg has learned to hold the door open long enough for the soup to land and the dream to mean. He knows the door swings shut behind each guest. He knows he will set the table again tomorrow, for the next buffered soul who laughs at her own dream and then, by the second course, leans in.
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Rabbi Josh tells it the same way each time, somewhere between the soup and the main course. He was born in Kingston to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, half of one thing and half of another, belonging all the way to neither. One day he stopped letting the accident of his birth decide him. I chose, he says. I went, I studied, I made myself a whole Jew. The guests warm to the story because it is the story they tell about themselves, the story of the age. A man looks at what he was handed, weighs it in his own mind, and selects his life. He is the author. The self is a draft he is free to revise.
John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) calls that picture a flattering error.
In The Great Delusion he argues that man is a social animal from the first day to the last, and that the lone reasoning chooser at the center of the liberal story barely exists. We come into social groups that shape us before we can shape anything. We attach to our group, and we will give a great deal for it, sometimes our lives. Mearsheimer ranks the three sources of what a man wants and puts reason at the bottom, below innate sentiment and far below socialization. The reason is clear. A child spends years inside his family and his people while his critical faculties are still soft, and by the time he can think for himself the value infusion is already done. He does not select his moral code off a shelf. He receives it, and later he reasons about a self that was largely settled before the reasoning began. So if Mearsheimer is right, what follows for the man at the head of the table.
It follows that the story he tells has the order backward. Take the three sources and lay them along his life. Start with the childhood he treats as the thing he overcame. The home was not neutral ground between two faiths. His father was a Jew. His mother, the Catholic, wanted Jewish children in the world and said so, that her people had taken too many and she meant to give some back. The family helped found a synagogue. The boy grew up inside a Jewish socialization, thin and liberal, but a Jewish one, tilted toward the people he later says he chose. The infusion ran while his faculties were soft. By the time he could weigh the question with his own mind, the scale already leaned.
Then the kibbutz. A young man does not reason his way onto a kibbutz. He is pulled into a group, into shared work and shared meals and the warmth of fellows who treat him as one of their own, and the pull reaches him under the level where arguments operate. He felt the belonging first. The doctrine came after. The years over the Talmud and inside Hasidism, the part of the story he presents as the deciding act of the free mind, arrive last in the sequence and do the work reason does on Mearsheimer’s account, which is to dress a settled attachment in the language of a conclusion.
Man cannot bear to belong nowhere. The half-Jew of Kingston held the worst social position a tribal animal can hold, accepted fully by no group, a guest in every room and a son in none. The social nature does not tolerate that for long. It drives toward full membership, toward a thick people with a land and a history and a claim on its members. He did not invent a self. He found a tribe, and the tribe took him in, and the relief of being inside one is the engine the choice story hides. The proof sits on his own dinner table and on his wife’s website, where the dead soldiers are named and avenged in the formulas of the people, where the war is the family’s war and the losses are counted as the family’s losses. He mourns now as a tribesman mourns. The man who once belonged to no one will give for these people the way Mearsheimer says members give for their own.
His welcome to outsiders looks at first like the universalism Mearsheimer attacks, the open door, the same hospitality for everyone, Jew and Christian and tourist alike. Read it again through the frame and it turns into something Mearsheimer can account for without strain. He does not greet the world as a citizen of the world. He greets it as an ambassador of one people, hosting other tribes from inside his own, showing his nation’s table to guests who will go home still belonging to theirs. The Christians who book his dinners do not leave Jews. They leave admirers of Jews, which is inter-tribal diplomacy and not the dissolving of tribe. And the work itself, the teaching, the dinners, the storytelling, is socialization run on adults, a man infusing affection for his people into strangers, the very process Mearsheimer says made him. He is a product of socialization who has gone into the socialization trade.
Mearsheimer built his anthropology for people raised inside one tribe through one long childhood. The adult convert is the awkward case, the man who switched after his faculties hardened, who sat for years and learned a language and a legal tradition by sustained effort against the grain of his given upbringing. That looks more deliberate than limited choice in a moral code allows. The strong answer keeps Mearsheimer’s order intact. The early tilt, the innate hunger for a tribe, the social pull of the kibbutz all pointed him before he reasoned, and the study elaborated a destination the social animal had already chosen for him. The fair answer concedes a little. Mearsheimer subordinates reason. He does not delete it. A man who spends decades mastering Talmud has let the junior partner do unusual labor, and the frame explains the pull toward a people far better than it explains the particular door he walked through and the work it took to stay inside.
So, what for Josh, if Mearsheimer has it right. The loss is small and the gain is large, though the gain is not the one he advertises. He loses the flattering half of his story, the lone author who reasoned his way to a self. He keeps, and Mearsheimer hands it back to him as the better truth, the man who needed a people and found one and now belongs all the way down. The age tells him his dignity lies in having chosen. Mearsheimer tells him it lies in having been claimed, and that this makes him not less of a man but a truer specimen of the only kind there is.
The Reversed Economy
The guests pay before they arrive. They book the evening online, enter a card, and a confirmation drops into the inbox the way it drops after any reservation. Then they climb the stairs in Jerusalem and the rabbi meets them at the door and takes each hand as though no money has ever passed between them, as though they are family come for a holiday. For three hours nothing is for sale. There is Torah, there is soup, and there is a man who seems to have waited all week for these particular faces. The price is real and the welcome is real, and the whole craft of the evening rests on the second hiding the first.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) built a science out of that hiding.
Bourdieu reads social life as a set of fields, each one a space of struggle over a scarce stake and over the kinds of capital that count there. A man carries economic capital, money. He carries cultural capital, the knowledge and credentials and bearing that schooling and origin lay down in him. He carries social capital, his web of useful relations. And he can carry symbolic capital, which is any of the others once it has won recognition as legitimate, as prestige or honor or holiness. Symbolic capital obeys a strange law. It accumulates only where the pursuit of money is denied. Bourdieu calls the fields of cultural and religious production economic worlds reversed, places where a man wins by appearing not to want the thing he is in fact accumulating, and where the appearance of disinterest is the price of admission to later profit. Hold that law in mind and the dinner table comes into focus.
The field he entered is crowded, and the capital that rules it is scholarly and religious. Jerusalem holds more teachers of Torah per square kilometer than any city on earth, and the men at the center of that field hold inherited and institutional capital he can never match, the right lineage, the right yeshiva, the ordination whose pedigree announces itself. He has real cultural capital. He knows the Talmud and has spent his decades in it. What he lacks is the consecration the field’s center hands only to its own. He cannot win their game on their board. So he changes the board. He fuses three capitals that the field keeps in separate hands. Scholarly capital from the Talmud. Spiritual capital from Hasidut and Kabbalah, the sub-field of the inner life. And culinary capital, imported whole from gastronomy, a field with no religious standing at all. The fusion produces a position no rival occupies. Chef Rabbi Josh is not a better version of the established teacher. He is the only specimen of a new species, and Bourdieu names the move. It is the strategy of the newcomer who cannot beat the incumbents at the inherited game and so imports a foreign capital to carve a niche where he stands without competition.
The goods he sells across that fused position are consecrated goods, and consecrated goods carry a peculiar condition. Their worth depends on the belief that they have no price. Torah given for money is a lesser Torah. Hospitality with an invoice is catering. A blessing on a meter is a transaction. The value lives in the disavowal. So the evening must never read as a restaurant, the class must never read as a service rendered for a fee, the welcome must read as love and not as labor. The title itself does the load-bearing work. Rabbi consecrates and Chef sells, and the sacred half carries the commercial half across the threshold the way a respectable name carries a doubtful business. The money moves underneath while the surface stays holy. That is the reversed economy running in a single apartment, the disinterested face turned to the guest and the card already charged.
His path to that apartment is movement through social space, and the shape of the path explains the strategy. He starts at the periphery, in Kingston, with the wrong capital for the field he will enter. A Reform childhood, a half-Jewish home, a founding family in a small liberal congregation, all of it counts for little or less than little in the Orthodox center he is headed for. He picks up secular cultural capital at Wesleyan, a good Western degree, legitimate in one field and useless in the other, or so it seems at the time. He makes his way to Jerusalem and acquires religious capital at the center, but he acquires it late, as an adult, by labor rather than by birth, and the latecomer never fully banks the inherited capital of the men raised inside it. He reaches the geographic center and holds, within the field’s hierarchy, a position still near the edge.
Then comes the conversion that makes the career. He turns his peripherality into capital. The outsider origin, the Westerner who chose this, the half-Jew who made himself whole, becomes the authenticity that sells to other outsiders, to the Western tourists and diaspora Jews and curious Christians who form a laity the center neither serves nor can reach. And the Wesleyan degree, the English, the easy Western manner, the warmth that meets a Chicago developer as an old friend, all of it turns out to be the scarce asset after all. Bourdieu points to the habitus, the dispositions written into the body by a life. The Jerusalem-born scholar holds more religious capital and cannot host that developer, because his habitus was formed in another world and his body does not know the gestures. Weisberg carries a doubled habitus, the Western and the Hasidic at once, and the doubling is exactly what lets him broker between the center, where the sacred goods are made, and the periphery, where the paying market for them sits. He is the rare man fluent in both rooms, and he charges for the passage between them.
Lacking the center’s consecration, he borrows consecration from adjacent fields. The strip of logos on his site, the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, the Jerusalem Post, Aish, Mizrachi, performs a rite of legitimation that the rabbinic authorities have not performed for him. Media recognition stands in for field recognition. The testimonial from the satisfied guest, the developer who felt welcomed like family, is market approval dressed in the clothes of communal honor. He assembles his symbolic capital out of the materials at hand, since the materials the center reserves for its own are closed to him.
The guests are sorted by the very goods they buy. An evening of Torah and a four-course meal in a real rabbi’s home, booked in advance, priced above a tour-bus lunch, draws a particular fraction, educated, affluent, Western, hunting the distinction that a rooted and insider experience confers. The traveler who dines with the rabbi carries home more than a meal. He carries a story, a brush with the authentic, a piece of cultural capital convertible at his own dinner parties in Chicago. Weisberg is in the business of handing distinction to people who can afford it, which is why the evening must feel exclusive and never mass, hidden gems and an insider’s view rather than a package and a queue.
The position pays well, and it pays only while it does not look as though it pays. There lies the strain that runs under the whole enterprise. The deli, the checkout, the audience-segmented sales pages, the copy that boasts of a world-famous five-star dinner, every one of them pulls toward the commercial pole and thins the disavowal that gives the goods their worth. Each act of cashing the symbolic capital spends a little of it. The sacred sells because it disowns the market, and every visible sale weakens the disowning. So the work is never finished. He must replenish the disinterest he keeps drawing down, must meet each new table as though no card was ever entered, must make the welcome at the door erase the confirmation in the inbox, again tonight and again tomorrow, because the reversed economy collapses the moment the reversal shows.
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A source separately provided WIRED with the registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant’s membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.
Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it’s worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So:
–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.
–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.
–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.
–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.
–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.
–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)
–That said, Dialog was a pretty ideologically diverse crowd. I met some people there who were *extremely* far left and far right. I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it.
– I’m a journalist, I go to lots of things in the hopes of getting to know people, hearing new ideas, finding podcast guests, etc.
–Being at something does not mean I endorse it, or everyone at it, or everyone who organized or founded it. I try to go to things where I don’t share the politics and perspectives of the crowd, for obvious reasons.
–I am surprised how credulous some people have been on this story. You have to believe some weird things about the world to believe Julián Castro and Peter Thiel are somehow engaged in a common project. Secret societies, I imagine, need a lot of trust to function, but the people being named here do not trust each other and do not have aligned agendas.
So that’s what I saw at Dialog. I’ll just end by saying it’s a weird experience to have a conference you haven’t thought about for years become the center of a new conspiracy theory.
“Being at something does not mean I endorse it, or everyone at it, or everyone who organized or founded it.” That principle died in 2017. You 100% endorse it, everyone at it, and everyone who organized or founded it. That’s how things work now.
Two stories sit inside the Dialog leak, and the louder one is the weaker one.
The loud story is the secret society. Peter Thiel (b. 1967) founded a private club. The club hides its members. WIRED finds the roster sitting in the website’s own code and runs the names: a NATO commander, a Treasury secretary, two senators, the Palantir founders, the data brokers who sell to the government and the officials who buy. The framing writes itself. Cabal. Shadow government. Thiel’s face at the top.
That story falls apart on contact, and Ezra Klein (b. 1984) takes it apart. He attended in 2018 and again in 2022. He found self-organized panels in small rooms, a TED vibe, a crowd that ran from far left to far right. He never saw Thiel. He points at the obvious hole: Julián Castro and Peter Thiel do not share a project, and a secret society needs a trust its members do not have. He is right. The room holds men who despise each other. No cabal coordinates people who disagree about everything.
But Klein wins the easy argument and skips the hard one. He knocks down “common project” because “common project” is a cartoon. The case against a gathering like Dialog never rested on aligned agendas. It rests on proximity. Put a sitting Army secretary in a room with Joe Lonsdale (b. 1982), whose company’s software runs case management for ICE, and you need neither of them to plot. You need only the dinner, the introduction, the number saved in a personal phone. Influence in this country runs through overlapping rooms. No one has to issue an order. Klein, defending his own attendance, reaches for the version of the charge he can beat.
The quiet story has teeth, and WIRED states it once and moves on. None of the registrants used a government email address. The supreme allied commander Europe, listed as a member since 2021, signed up with a personal or corporate account. So did everyone else who holds public office. They placed their attendance outside the email systems that public-records law can reach.
That is the front-page fact. Not the WWIII panel, not “Build-a-Cult,” not the sex-life session. A general who answers to the public and a Treasury secretary (b. 1962) who writes the rules on financial data build private relationships with the regulated and the armed, and they arrange the contact so the paper trail never forms. Set the conspiracy talk aside. The accountability gap stands on its own, and it is worse for being ordinary. No one had to scheme. A personal email and a confidentiality rule do the work.
Here the hype and the debunk fail in the same direction. The secret-society frame inflates the story into a plot, which lets a reader dismiss the whole thing once the plot dissolves. The calm correction deflates it into networking, which lets the same reader file it under rich people talking shop. Both moves bury the records-law point. One buries it under too much, the other under too little. The middle ground, where the association is real and the conduct deserves a look and no cabal exists, is the ground nobody wants to hold, because it pays nothing and offends everyone.
Marc Andreessen (b. 1971) explains why that middle ground emptied out. Klein writes that being at something does not mean you endorse it. Andreessen answers that the principle died in 2017, that now you endorse all of it, everyone there and everyone who built it, and that this is how things work now. He says it as settled fact and leaves out his own part in settling it. The guilt-by-association rule he describes is a weapon, and his milieu has swung it as hard as anyone, against universities, against reporters, against firms that fired the wrong employee. Klein defends a norm the men in Klein’s own anecdote have stopped honoring. The leak shows what happens to that norm under pressure. It splits at once into cabal and nothing, because the position that says he went, and going is not endorsing, and the going still merits scrutiny, no longer has a home.
The detail that tells you what Dialog wants is the dating app. Reporters flagged it as creepy, and it is, but creepy undersells it. A conference books a hotel and disbands. Dialog logs membership status, records every retreat a man has attended, ranks its people, and asks whether they are looking for love. It runs dating.dialog.org and offers to keep matching them. A club does not build a marriage market unless it means to last past the weekend. Endogamy is how a class becomes a class. Old aristocracies arranged marriages to keep capital and blood inside the walls. Dialog has built the software version. The WWIII panel is theater. The matchmaking is the institution trying to reproduce itself.
Dialog ranks its members in private, then coaches the moderators to model short introductions that avoid status signaling in a room of senators and tycoons. The club sorts everyone by rank and then stages a room where rank does not exist. The performance is the tell. Men this powerful relax only where the ranking stays under the floor.
The strongest defense of all this is that powerful men have always gathered in private. Private talk lets a man test a heterodox idea without losing his job over it. A personal email for a personal conference is what anyone uses. None of that is sinister. The public interest does not require a transcript of every room.
The public interest requires one thing. When the men in the room hold public office and oversee the companies in the next chair, someone counts the chairs. The leak counted them by accident. That is the contribution, and it survives the collapse of the conspiracy theory that came packaged around it.
My favorite reaction from Klein is this: “I am surprised how credulous some people have been on this story. You have to believe some weird things about the world to believe Julián Castro and Peter Thiel are somehow engaged in a common project. Secret societies, I imagine, need a lot of trust to function, but the people being named here do not trust each other and do not have aligned agendas.”
I am surprised by how credulous Klein is. The value of this story to his enemies does not lie in its truth.
Klein reaches for “credulous,” and the word does the opposite of what he wants. Hugo Mercier built a book against that reflex. Not Born Yesterday argues that men did not evolve to swallow what they hear. We evolved to test it. We weigh the source, weigh the argument, and resist any message that would cost us to believe. Mercier calls this open vigilance. The finding runs against centuries of hand-wringing about the gullible mob: persuasion is hard, propaganda mostly fails, and demagogues mostly tell people what they already want to hear. The mob is a tough sell.
So the spread of the Dialog cabal story marks no failure of vigilance. It marks vigilance running as designed. The men amplifying it already distrust Thiel, the tech right, and the elite press. The story fits what they hold. It arrives from sources they trust. It asks them to believe nothing that hurts them and much that flatters their side. A claim that clears all three filters travels. That is the system working, not breaking.
Klein treats the belief as a map and then calls the mapmakers fools. Mercier draws the line Klein skips. Vigilance tracks stakes. Where a wrong belief would cost a man his money, his safety, or his standing among people he needs, he checks it hard. Where the belief costs him nothing and pays in loyalty, he holds it loose and waves it. Few of the men sharing the Dialog story have rearranged their lives around a literal Thiel conspiracy. They have picked up a banner. The looseness Klein reads as credulity is the looseness of a belief held for show, and a belief held for show answers to its use, not to the evidence.
This is where the right’s handling of the story comes clear. The right does not need the cabal to be real. It needs the cabal to be usable. The story damages Klein, the left, and the elite outlets that vouch for one another, and it damages them whether or not Julián Castro and Peter Thiel share a plan. The worth of the narrative sits apart from its truth. A weapon does not have to be accurate. It has to land. Men who deploy a story for its payload have understood it well. Call that many things. Credulous is not among them.
Turn the word back on Klein and it explains his own move. “Credulous” is the comfortable read. It lets him answer a story that wounds him without crediting his opponents with knowing what they do. A man would rather his enemies be foolish than hostile and competent. Mercier’s account predicts the harder version. The people running the Dialog story stay vigilant about their own interests, stay clear about the story’s worth to their side, and stay indifferent to the literal question Klein keeps correcting. They are not confused about Thiel and Castro. They never needed the two men aligned. Klein answers a claim no one had to believe.
That is why his correction will not travel as far as the thing it corrects. He keeps proving the cabal is not real. The story never ran on its reality. It runs on its use, and its use survives every fact he supplies. He brings evidence to a fight that was never about evidence, and he calls the other side gullible for fighting the fight they are in.
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Arynne Wexler (b. 1993) is an American writer, commentator, comedian, and former finance and technology professional whose career tracks the loosening boundary between elite professional institutions and independent digital media. She came to prominence in conservative and heterodox circles during the 2020s, building an audience through political commentary, cultural criticism, humor, and a command of social platforms. Her path from the University of Pennsylvania to Goldman Sachs, to venture-backed startups, and then to independent media reflects a wider shift in American public life, where influence moves outside the older journalistic, academic, and political channels.
Wexler grew up in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent suburb north of New York City known for its schools and its professional class. She has described herself as the political odd one out in a liberal home and a liberal town, an experience she credits with shaping her interest in dissent and in the pressures toward conformity inside institutions. She showed early interests in politics, writing, and argument alongside strong academic performance. She attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, where she took part in student government and model United Nations and competed in a national constitutional essay contest, an early sign of the interest in civic and constitutional questions that runs through her later commentary.
She entered the University of Pennsylvania through the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, a selective four-year undergraduate course of study that joins business education, advanced language training, and the liberal arts. Huntsman students graduate with two bachelor’s degrees, a B.A. in International Studies from the School of Arts and Sciences and a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School, and they specialize in the region tied to their target language. Wexler’s target language was Arabic and her regional focus the Middle East. She served as editor-in-chief of the Penn Political Review and held a leadership post with Wharton Women. Her years at Penn shaped the interests that would persist through her career: the relationship between institutions and incentives, the role of elite leadership, and the interplay of culture and political power.
After graduation she entered finance, joining Goldman Sachs as a G10 foreign-exchange trader in the firm’s fixed-income, currency, and commodities division, a role she held from roughly 2015 to 2017. The desk put her inside global currency markets during a period marked by the long aftermath of the financial crisis, European sovereign-debt worry, and the steady automation of trading.
That training stayed visible in her commentary. She tends to read political questions through incentives, organizational behavior, leadership, and accountability rather than through moral or partisan first principles. Her writing carries the assumptions of someone schooled to judge a system by whether it meets its own stated aims.
After Wall Street she moved into technology and startups. She held operating and leadership roles, among them project management and chief-of-staff work at HiredScore, a firm in workforce and hiring technology, and later positions at venture-backed companies including Melio, Avenue, and Seam, where she led business development and implementation in the early 2020s. These roles gave her direct contact with startup culture, venture capital, hiring systems, product work, and the strains that come with fast growth.
The pairing of finance and startup work gave her a vantage point that set her apart from many political commentators. Where the older conservative media figures often came from law, electoral politics, or the newsroom, Wexler came from places where survival depended on execution and measurement. The result is a recurring interest in merit, institutional competence, and the side effects of bureaucratic decision-making.
In the early 2020s she turned toward public commentary. She built a large following on social platforms by mixing short-form political analysis with observational comedy and cultural criticism. Her quick, blunt style fit platforms that reward personality and direct contact with an audience. She took up contested subjects: relations between the sexes, elite institutions, free speech, media narratives, identity politics, and the texture of contemporary American life. By the middle of the decade her main Instagram following numbered close to a million.
Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Federalist, Blaze Media, Tablet, and Human Events, and she has built a direct readership through Substack, X, and similar channels. Across these venues she returns to the link between cultural norms and institutional incentives, arguing that organizations drift from their stated missions once symbolic goals come loose from measurable results. Much of her attention falls on elite institutions, the universities, corporations, media organizations, and professional bureaucracies, and on her claim that many of them reward ideological conformity over competence. Her critics read this as another front in the culture war. Her readers read it as a diagnosis of organizational failure and falling public trust.
A substantial part of her public profile concerns Jewish identity, antisemitism, Zionism, and Jewish participation in American civic life. In writing and in appearances she has taken up the strains facing Jewish communities at home and abroad. Her emphasis falls on civic responsibility, democratic participation, coalition-building, and communal resilience rather than grievance. Her work for Tablet and her ties to Jewish communities in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv inform this strand of her thinking.
Wexler hosts the podcast NONNEGOTIABLE with Arynne Wexler, which blends interviews, commentary, and cultural analysis and gives her room to develop themes that surface in her shorter posts: polarization, elite institutions, technology, media incentives, and social change. From the middle of the decade she moved into stand-up and live performance, and she treats the comedy as part of the same project rather than a sideline. Her sets draw on corporate offices, human-resources culture, online discourse, dating, and the manners of educated urban Americans, carrying online arguments onto the stage. Appearances on programs such as The Rubin Report, Fox News, and The Adam Carolla Show have carried her past the social platforms to a broader audience.
Wexler belongs to a cohort formed by the decline of institutional gatekeepers and the rise of direct platforms. She is neither a conventional journalist nor a party activist. She holds a hybrid place that joins analyst, entertainer, entrepreneur, and commentator, and her career shows how skills learned in finance, technology, and management can convert into cultural argument.
The thread running through her work is incentives. Markets, corporate management, higher education, media, political movements: she asks the same questions of each. What incentives drive the behavior. Does the institution reward competence. Do its structures match its stated goals. This managerial, systems-minded habit separates her from many of her peers and helps explain her pull with audiences who distrust established institutions yet still care about governance, performance, and social cohesion. She stands as a twenty-first-century media figure, a person who came out of elite professional institutions, went around the traditional gatekeepers, and built a following through direct contact with a large digital audience, her career sitting where finance, technology, politics, culture, and entertainment meet.
Arynne Wexler and the Conversion of Capital
Arynne Wexler reads institutions for a living. She asks what incentives drive them, whether they reward competence, whether their structures match their stated aims. She treats this as clear sight, the view of a woman trained on a trading desk to watch outcomes rather than stated reasons. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) offers a different account of where that sight comes from and what it does. For Bourdieu a person carries dispositions laid down by his path through the social world, a habitus, and the habitus shapes how he sees before he forms a single opinion. Wexler’s way of seeing is not a window. It is a position.
Her path makes the position legible. Scarsdale gave her the first stock of capital, the home and the town that send children to selective schools. Horace Mann added more. Then Penn through the Huntsman Program, then the Wharton degree in economics paired with the degree in international studies. These are institutionalized cultural capital, the credentials a school confers and the wider world recognizes on sight. Goldman added economic capital and something scarcer, an embodied capital the currency desk rewards, the quickness and the nerve to price risk under pressure. The startups added operating experience and a network across venture capital and technology. By her early thirties she holds a thick stock of capital in several forms.
The arc is conversion. Bourdieu’s word for the movement of capital from one form into another. She converts the credentials and the desk and the operating roles into the cultural and symbolic capital of the commentator. The Wharton line and the Goldman line do work in the commentary field they never did on the desk. They buy credibility. Former Goldman trader is a claim on attention before she says a word. The selective program, the elite degree, the Wall Street years, all turn convertible the moment she steps onto the new field. She spends the credentials she markets against.
Each move crosses a field, and each field runs by its own rules. The financial field prices positions in currencies and settles its scores in profit and loss. The startup field trades in growth and equity and the judgment of investors. The field of cultural production runs on a different stake, recognition, and it splits along a line Bourdieu draws with care. At one pole sit the producers who serve a large audience and take their reward in money and reach. At the other sit the producers who claim independence from the market and take their reward in prestige among peers. Wexler stands at the large-audience pole, near a million followers on a single platform, a comedy tour, a podcast, the cable appearances. Yet she claims the prestige of the other pole. She presents herself as the independent voice, free of the gatekeepers, saying what the credentialed will not. The claim is a position-taking, a move in the field that distinguishes her from the producers she competes against.
Her favorite tool comes from the desk. The reading of every institution through incentives and competence is a disposition, not a finding she arrived at by inquiry. The currency desk teaches a man to see the world as a set of positions and payoffs, to discount stated reasons and watch revealed ones. She carries that habitus off the desk and turns it on universities, newsrooms, corporations, party movements. It serves her well. It also hides its own source. She sees the incentives running other people and misses the field forces running her reading of them.
Beneath the tool sits a doxa, a thing held as given and seldom stated. She holds that an institution should reward measurable competence, and that drift from measurable goals marks decay. She states this as common sense. Bourdieu calls it the view from a particular position, the view a trading floor produces and then offers to the world as truth. The floor prices everything. A woman formed on the floor comes to feel that what resists pricing must be evasion or rot. The conviction has force. It also has an address. It comes from somewhere, and the somewhere shapes what it can see and what it cannot.
The somewhere matters most where she fights it. She brands herself against the gatekeepers, the deans and editors and human-resources officers who reward conformity over merit. The brand sells. It also rests on the consecration those same gatekeepers granted her. Penn admitted her to a program that takes few. Wharton stamped the degree. Goldman hired her onto a desk that screens hard. Each of these acts of consecration travels with her into the new field and pays out there. The audience that cheers her attack on credentialism grants her a hearing in part because of her credentials. The old consecrating institutions made the outsider, and the outsider trades on what they made.
The new field has gatekeepers of its own. The platform and its sorting, the heterodox network and its hosts, the editors at the outlets that run her work, Tablet and the rest. These confer the recognition that builds a name. Wexler reads the old gatekeepers with a cold eye and grants the new ones a pass, because the new ones consecrate her now. Bourdieu’s point is not that she cheats. It is that every player in a field misrecognizes the field that holds him. The misrecognition is the price of play. A man who saw the whole board, including his own square, could not take the game seriously enough to win at it.
This returns the question to her. Bourdieu built his work on reflexivity, the turn of the tools back onto the analyst and his position. Wexler has built a strong tool and pointed it outward with skill. She reads the incentives of the professor, the editor, the manager. The frame asks her to read one more position, her own. What field forces produce a woman who reads all institutions through incentives and competence. What does that reading buy her, and in which market. What truths about her own trajectory does the tool keep her from seeing. She conducts a sharp audit of everyone’s books. The frame asks for her own.
1. What coalition do they depend on for status and income.
2. Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly.
3. Who benefits if their framing wins.
4. What truths would cost them their position.
The coalition behind the status and the income is the audience disaffected from liberal institutions, the heterodox and conservative attention market. Her platforms confirm it: Rubin, Carolla, Fox, Blaze, The Federalist, Human Events, the Substack subscribers, the comedy rooms that draw the same people. Her brand is the defector, the Wharton woman who left the liberal fold, a nonlib girl in a crazylib world. A second, overlapping coalition funds the Jewish and Israel material, a Zionist civic audience reached through Tablet and her ties in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv. Status flows from staying legible to these rooms. Income flows from the same rooms through subscriptions, tickets, fees, and the bookings that reach brings.
If she speaks plainly, the risk sits with her own coalition. The brand rests on the defector story, so a fair word for the institutions she mocks costs her. Praise a university that gets something right, grant a progressive critic a point, soften on the culture-war fronts her audience tunes in for, and the audience reads it as a betrayal of the bit. The two halves of the audience also pull against each other. A joke too partisan loses the comedy fans who came for the laugh. A take too mild loses the political fans who came for the fight. The hardest plain speech sits on the right’s own antisemitism. Name it square and she angers a part of the coalition that now hosts her. Hold back and she trims the truth to keep the room.
Her framing says institutions reward conformity over competence and that gatekeepers suppress merit. Several parties win if it carries. The new attention producers win, she among them, because the framing strips legitimacy from the old gatekeepers and opens ground for the direct-to-audience voice. Employers who want fewer constraints win, since the anti-conformity case doubles as a case against the programs they hope to shed. The conservative project wins, because lower trust in universities and the press serves it. The credentialed win twice, the people who hold the degrees and now recode their advantage as pure merit. The framing flatters the audience too. It tells them they are the competent ones held down by the conformists. Few messages sell better than that one.
The truths that cost the position are the ones the position makes hardest to say. That her standing rests on the credentials she trades against, that the outsider is a consecrated insider stamped by Penn, Wharton, and Goldman. That the incentives-and-competence eye is a trained habit from a trading desk and not neutral sight, and that the attention market she works now rewards heat over the measured competence she praises. That a large share of her output is coalition maintenance worn as independent candor, the saying what you fear to think calibrated to a paying room. That the right she sits inside runs its own conformity and carries its own antisemitism, and that saying so plainly costs her there. Each might be true. Each cuts the brand. The truths that threaten a position are the ones a person in that position finds hardest to speak.
David Pinsof’sAlliance Theory starts from a claim that strips the dignity out of political belief. A belief system is not a philosophy. It is a patchwork of justifications, rationalizations, and grievances built to support a person’s allies and oppose his rivals. Moral principles are not so principled. Core values are not so core. The thread that runs through a set of beliefs is not a value like merit or freedom. It is the roster of who counts as a friend and who counts as an enemy. Apply this to Arynne Wexler and the question changes. Stop asking what she believes. Ask whom she fights for, and in what order.
The order is the part a first pass gets wrong. Read her public brand and you draw a flat roster. Allies: the heterodox crowd, the conservative media circuit that hosts her, the competent she casts as held down, employers who want fewer constraints. Rivals: the university, the newsroom, the diversity officer, the professional-managerial class. From that flat roster you might predict that she extends the perpetrator bias to the right across the board, rationalizing her own side’s faults to hold the coalition together. Her own writing breaks that prediction, and the break is the lesson. Alliance Theory builds in transitivity, the rule that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and he builds in super-alliances between groups that can fracture when their interests diverge. Her roster is layered. At the top sits Israel and Jewish peoplehood. The rest of the coalition ranks below.
Her Substack shows the hierarchy. The brand sells a finance analyst. The page delivers an observant Jew. The longest and most patient essays work through the Book of Esther at Purim, through the Exodus and the danger of a people forgetting, through the Hasidic idea of run and return and the broken tablets kept in the Ark. Pinsof would not read these as theology for its own sake. He argues that worldviews are built to signal allegiance and mobilize support, not to view the world. The Esther piece tells the reader to stand with his people rather than hide, for such a time as this. That is allegiance signaling in the register of scripture, a call to similarity and interdependence with the senior ally. The tradition gets recruited to the present alliance.
Once you see the senior alliance, the faction fight makes sense, and the faction fight is where the earlier prediction fails. On Iran she turns on her own side. The pieces on what happened in MAGA and on the online right losing its mind go after the isolationist Tucker Carlson wing by name, hard, after the strikes on Iran. She mocks their forecasts, jeers that math is not their strong suit, calls them dupes tricked by men who make a living fooling conservatives, and reaches for a slur, the Retard Right. This is not a woman softening on her coalition. This is the perpetrator bias and the attributional bias aimed at a rival, and the rival is a wing of the right. Transitivity explains the target. The isolationists oppose striking Iran. Iran is the enemy of her senior ally. The friend of her enemy becomes her enemy, even when he carries a MAGA hat. So she grants the isolationist right no mitigating circumstances and no good intentions. She attributes their stance to internal causes, grift and stupidity and cowardice, the same self-serving attribution Pinsof describes, applied here against people who sit inside her broader camp. The senior alliance overrides coalition peace.
The three propagandistic biases run clean once the roster is ranked right. The attributional bias is the big one. Pinsof describes the pattern: a person attributes his allies’ advantages to talent and effort and their disadvantages to luck and mistreatment, and reverses the assignment for rivals. Wexler’s merit framing is this bias raised to a creed. The success of her allies she lays to internal worth. The success of her rivals, the diversity hire, the credentialed conformist, she lays to ideology and lowered standards. The failures of her rivals she lays to incompetence dressed as virtue. The Tucker wing gets the rival treatment, their bad calls read as proof of low character rather than honest error.
The victim bias comes next, and the Iran feminism piece carries it. She asks why left-wing feminists stay silent about the women of Iran and casts the Iranian women’s struggle as the true feminism. The grievance is real. The frame predicts she will reach for the victim register on behalf of her allies, the women under the regime that threatens her senior ally, and discount the register when her rivals claim it. The same writer who tells the audience that people are too easily offended keeps a careful ledger of the offenses that should sting, and the ledger tracks the roster.
The perpetrator bias completes the set, and here the revised reading sharpens the antisemitism prediction. The flat roster suggested she would go soft on the right’s antisemitism to keep the coalition. The layered roster predicts something narrower and truer to her output. Where a faction of the right threatens Israel, she treats it as a rival and spares it nothing. Where a faction of the right stands with Israel, she extends the ally’s benefit. Her allegiance runs to Israel, and the right earns her defense or her contempt by where it stands on that axis. The perpetrator bias follows the senior ally, not the party.
Now the strange bedfellows. Pinsof’s title points at the incompatible standards that sit together because the coalition holds them, not because they cohere. Wexler carries several. She attacks identity politics and writes a fervent Jewish identity politics. She praises merit and defends a media class, her own, whose standing comes from reach rather than measured skill. She mocks grievance and runs grievance for her allies. She tells the reader to think for himself under a banner that names the approved conclusion, common sense patriots. A philosophy resolves these. Pinsof’s point is that the bundle comes from the groups that travel together in this country at this moment, and the senior place of Israel in her bundle is a fact of her alliances, not a deduction from a value.
Alliance Theory holds that the alliance psychology is the same across political lines, part of the species toolkit. Wexler is not running cleaner software than the progressive she fights. She has different allies in a different order, and she applies the same three biases to them. Her opponents attribute their allies’ gains to virtue and their rivals’ to privilege, embellish their allies’ grievances, and rationalize their allies’ faults, and they call it clear sight too. The frame grants neither side the high ground.
The contingency claim closes it. Drop her in another country or another decade and the bundle comes apart and reforms around different friends. The ex-trader who does anti-woke comedy, defends Israel against a wing of her own coalition, and writes Hasidic commentary for two thousand subscribers is not the carrier of a coherent creed. She is the carrier of a roster, ranked, with one alliance at the top. Learn the roster and the order, and you can predict the beliefs, the faction fights, and the silences. The Substack shows which tribe ranks first when her tribes collide.
The persona we’ve been working from, the ex-Goldman trader who reads everything through incentives and competence, barely appears on the Substack. The incentives lens is mostly absent. What dominates is Jewish religious writing. The Purim piece on Esther, the Exodus piece on memory and forgetting, “The Freedom to Fail” working through the Hasidic idea of ratso vashov and the broken tablets in the Ark. These lean on Talmud and Tanakh and Hasidut, and they are the more textured writing on the page. The finance-and-systems analyst is not the writer here. The observant Jew is. Her own long-form output weights toward Torah and peoplehood, not org-chart analysis.
I thought she would go soft on the right’s own faults to keep the coalition that pays her. On the Substack she does the reverse where Israel is the stake. “What Just Happened in MAGA?” and “The Summer the Online Right Lost Its Mind” go after the isolationist Tucker Carlson wing hard, by name, over Iran. She calls them the “Retard Right.” So her allegiance to Israel overrides any comfort with the populist right, and she will knife a faction of her own side to defend it. Her Israel loyalty is the senior commitment, and it beats coalition peace when the two collide.
On the writing. Two registers sit side by side and they are not equal. The religious essays are patient and built on sources. The political posts run hot, reach for the dunk, and in the MAGA piece reach for a slur. She plays to the room and it forecloses the reader she says she wants, the one she tells to read and to think.
Last, the reach gap is large and tells you what the Substack is for. Over 2,000 subscribers here against something near 937,000 on Instagram. The Substack is the annex, not the main house. The mass audience lives on video and the short form. The newsletter is where she does the longer, more Jewish, more earnest writing for a small, already-converted readership that opens with “common sense patriots” and a line flattering them as the people who read. It is a side channel for the part of her that wants to write paragraphs, attached to an operation that runs on clips.
Stephen Turner’s idea of convenient beliefs cuts at a soft spot in how people argue. A convenient belief is one a person holds because it pays him to hold it, not because he has grounds for it. The belief legitimates his authority, secures his income, flatters his self-image, or licenses his standing, and these payoffs explain why he keeps the belief better than any evidence he can cite for it. The believer feels conviction. He experiences the belief as a thing he discovered about the world, and he can always produce reasons when asked. Turner’s point is that the reasons come after the belief and that the convenience came first. The test is counterfactual. Ask whether the man would drop the belief if holding it began to cost him. The beliefs he cannot afford to drop are the convenient ones, and his certainty about them carries no weight as evidence, because he would hold them whether or not they were true.
Run this on Arynne Wexler and the structure of her commentary appears.
Her central belief is that institutions reward conformity over competence and that gatekeepers suppress merit. Set aside whether this is right. Ask what it pays her. She left finance and technology for direct-to-audience media. If the institutions are corrupt and merit-blind, then her exit reads as the sound judgment of a competent person fleeing a broken system, and her present standing reads as vindication. If the institutions are mostly functional, her path reads as a career change like any other. The belief converts a biography into a verdict in her favor. It also pays at the register. The belief flatters her audience as the competent and clear-eyed, held down by the conformists, and a flattered audience subscribes. Turner’s frame notes that the belief earns its keep, and that her conviction about it tells you nothing, because the convenience would hold the belief in place even if the institutions were fine.
She judges institutions by measurable competence. Why that yardstick and not another. A school might be judged by care, a newsroom by courage, a community by how it holds together, a firm by whether its people can stand each other for thirty years. She reaches past these for the metric of measurable output, and the metric is the one a person trained on a trading desk scores highest on and the one her rivals score lowest on. Turner’s anti-normativism presses here. He doubts that claims about what an institution ought to reward track any moral fact waiting to be found. They express a position. The choice of the competence standard is not a discovery about the proper aim of institutions. It is a convenient selection, convenient because she wins under it and the people she fights lose under it. She presents the standard as plain sense. It is a ruler cut to fit her hand.
Her authority rests on a second convenient belief, that her years inside elite institutions give her transferable knowledge of how institutions in general work. The Goldman line and the Wharton line function as a warrant. They license her to pronounce on universities, newsrooms, and human-resources offices she never worked in. Turner spent a career doubting expertise claims that cannot be cashed out, asking what the expert knows that he can demonstrate rather than assert. The belief that a currency desk taught her the hidden grammar of all institutions is unproven. It is also convenient, because without it she has opinions and with it she has expertise. The transfer might be real. The point is that she has every reason to believe in the transfer and no cost for believing in it, so her confidence in her own insider knowledge is not evidence that the knowledge transfers.
The bravery belief is the most convenient of all, because it is the product. She holds that she says what others are too afraid to think, that her candor is courage. Turner’s test bites hard here. The candor is a paid performance calibrated to a room that rewards exactly this stance. The belief that the performance is bravery lets her experience a market transaction as a moral act. She could not run the enterprise while believing the truth that the frame suggests, that the daring is priced and the room pays for it. So the belief stays, not because she has weighed it, but because the enterprise needs it. A writer who told her audience that her boldness was a business model would have a smaller audience and a worse self-image. The belief protects both.
A fourth convenient belief is the self-attribution that her own success reflects her merit. This is the same standard turned inward, and it pays the same way. Turner notes that a person reaches for internal causes when the outcome favors him. Wexler reads her rise as earned. The reading is convenient because the alternative readings, luck, timing, the lift her credentials gave her, the accident of a media moment that rewarded her manner, all cost her the merit story she sells to others. She cannot run the competence argument against the institutions while crediting her own arrival to fortune. The self-attribution holds because the public argument requires it.
Her religious writing sits at the edge of the frame. Her essays calling the reader to stand with his people and not hide are convenient to her standing in the community she writes for and the audience she writes to. The belief that this is the brave and righteous posture pays in belonging and in readership. The faith may be deep and the belief may be true. The convenience remains, and it explains some of the certainty that the faith alone might not.
Now the counterfactual that Turner asks of every belief. Which of these could Wexler afford to drop. Not the belief that institutions reward conformity over competence, because it vindicates her exit and flatters her readers. Not the competence standard, because it is the ruler she wins by. Not the transfer of insider knowledge, because it is her warrant. Not the bravery, because it is her product. Not the merit of her own rise, because it is the argument turned inward. Every one of these beliefs pays her, and none of them could go without taking a piece of her position with it. By Turner’s test, that is the signature of the convenient belief, the kind a person cannot give up because giving it up costs too much.
‘An Open Letter to the Groypers from a Jewish Woman’
If you are one of Fuentes’ followers, I’m betting the thing that hooked you wasn’t just the anti-Jewish message. I bet you found him funny, which he is, and I bet he said something that resonated with you, and felt true to your experience.
I don’t want to take that away from you. In fact, I think the Right gains nothing by denying the true parts of Fuentes’ message. We simply look unreasonable, out-of-touch, and heartless.
Groypers, I agree with you – you are suffering.
Particularly if you’re young. I also agree that it’s not your fault; you couldn’t control the fact that you were born in this era – in an era when cost-of-living has ballooned, when the older generations have turned the housing market into basically a crypto scam, and when college degrees are oversupplied and thus comparatively worthless despite still being vastly overpriced.
What’s more, you’re right to look at the past and sense that this is not normal. It used to be that men could have secret second families on a teacher’s salary. Now, men can’t even have main families, and even if they could, what woman are you going to have it with? Someone you don’t want, or more likely, someone who all of society tells you will never want you? No one would want that.
This is the most ambitious thing of hers I’ve seen, and the most revealing. Most writing aimed at antisemites condemns and closes the door. Hers opens with concession. She grants the economic grievance first, housing and worthless degrees and a dating market and a politics rigged for the wealthy and old and corporate, and only then turns to the conspiracy. That sequence is the right persuasive instinct. You cannot move a man you open by calling evil. The “cheap date” passage on the aid figure is her strongest stretch, because it is checkable and it reframes the conspiracy on the audience’s own populist ground. Aid to Israel runs near six hundredths of a percent of the federal budget. Point a resentful man at the auto, pharma, and tech money instead and you have at least made an argument he can test. The Fuentes-and-the-algorithm close is also sharp and probably true. A man who profits from your anger has no reason to end it.
Then there is the central gambit, that the Groypers are themselves victims of antisemitism, and this is where I part from her. The move where their idealized Hitler “actually describes” Abraham, Moses, and the Messiah is a magician’s reveal. It thrills the writer and it will thrill her own readers. It will not survive contact with the target. A young man who came for Fuentes experiences this post as a Jewish woman reaching into his head and renaming his contents, which is the exact posture his movement is organized to resent. The cleverness works against the persuasion. The more the trick lands as a trick, the more the reader braces.
Calling Palestinians people who strap bombs to their children is a flat dehumanizing generalization, and it sits inside an essay whose whole claim is that you do not write off a whole people for the acts of some. The line refutes the ethic of the piece around it. Pulled out and printed, it is the sentence that ends her week. “You are us,” said to Groypers, and “gay race communism,” and the open call to end aid to Israel, and the soft nods toward the immigration and H-1B framing, each travels badly without the surrounding paragraphs. She is writing for an audience that rewards heat, and heat photographs poorly.
The structural problem is quieter and deeper. She diagnoses a material wound, rigged housing, captured politics, a generation priced out, and then prescribes a cultural cure, join a community, study the Israeli model, stop hating us. The diagnosis is populist and economic. The remedy is belonging and peoplehood. The gap between them is the soft center of the essay, and the sharper sort of Groyper, the kind she claims to respect, will feel the switch. You told me the system stole my house and then offered me a warmer family. Those do not meet.
Which raises the honest question of who the letter is for. I doubt it moves many Groypers. It reads as a performance of generosity staged for her existing audience, a demonstration that she can extend a hand to the people everyone else only curses, and be funny doing it. That is not nothing. Modeling sympathy for a hostile camp has its own worth, and refusing to write off the young men inside it fits the better part of your own values. But the essay mistakes catharsis for reach. It feels like persuasion and functions like applause.
Net read: the impulse is humane and rare, the entry is well built, the aid argument is real, and the long psychoanalytic middle is too pleased with its own pattern to do the work she wants from it. If she cut the Palestinian line, trimmed the you-are-secretly-us conceit by half, and closed the gap between the rigged-system diagnosis and the join-us cure, it would be both safer and more likely to land. As it stands it will delight the people who already agree with her and harden the people she addresses, which is the opposite of the result the title promises.
On a currency desk the number comes every second. The screen runs red or green. The squawk box barks a figure from London and the figure is true or it ruins you, and no charm, no pedigree, no good intention bends it by a basis point. A trader on a G10 desk learns the lesson young and learns it in the body. Worth is earned. The earned is real. The rest is a story people tell to feel better about the figure on the screen.
Arynne Wexler carried that lesson off the floor and built a life of talk on top of it. The talk changed. The lesson did not.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives the tool for reading what she built. Man is the animal that knows it will die and cannot live inside the knowing, so he raises a hero system, a structure of meaning that lets him feel he counts past his span. The hero system answers two terrors. The first is death. The second hides behind the first and bites harder. It is the terror of insignificance, the dread of having eaten and slept and left no mark, of having been a creature and nothing more. A man quiets both by becoming, in his own eyes and in the eyes he respects, someone whose worth is real and will outlast the body. The hero system is how he earns the right not to vanish.
Wexler’s system turns on a single sacred word. Earn. To earn is to be real. To be handed a thing is to be a fraud holding it. The word organizes everything she fights for and everything she fears. Behind it sit her two terrors, and they are the same terror wearing two coats. The private terror is that she is not the genuine article, that somewhere a number will come back and show her carried, soft, mediocre, a person who was given her place and could not hold it on her own. The collective terror is larger and older. It is the erasure of a people, the chain of generations broken, the name forgotten, the Esther who stayed hidden and let her people die. Both terrors are death. One is the death of the self that turns out to be nothing. The other is the death of the people that turns out not to endure. Her hero answers both with the same act. Earn your worth so the number cannot break you, and belong to the people who earned their survival across three thousand years.
Every hero system needs a story of loss, a thing taken away that the hero exists to restore. Hers is decline. Competence subtracted by ideology. Nerve subtracted by self-flagellation. A country that forgot what made it, a people coaxed into apology, a generation that mistook grievance for worth. The hero stands against the subtraction. She names what was taken and shows the way back, and the way back is always the same road, the road of the earned and the proven and the tested.
The word is sacred to her. It is not sacred in the same way to anyone else, and this is where Becker turns the lights up. A hero system defines values. The same word carries a different cargo in each system, and a man cannot hear the other meanings while he stands inside his own.
Take the word into a clapboard Reformed church on a Sunday, where the pastor in a gray suit tells a packed room that no man earns the air in his lungs. Here merit is the oldest sin. Worth cannot be earned. It is given, unasked, undeserved, by grace, and the belief that you earned your standing is the very pride that damns you. “Grace is not wages,” the pastor says, and the room says amen. To this man Wexler’s sacred word names a trap. The harder you work to deserve, the further you fall.
Take it into a monastery where the bell rings at three in the morning and a man rises in the dark because the rule says rise. He has given up his name, his hours, his will. He wants to be no one, emptied, a reed the wind moves. Ask him what he has earned and he stares. To earn is to still be clutching the self he came here to put down. His worth, if the word fits at all, lies in the surrender of the project Wexler cannot stop running.
Take it down a fluorescent corridor to a man who has kept a water system, or a court docket, or a benefits office, running for forty years. He wears a lanyard. His chair is worn at the arms. No one has heard his name and no one ever will, and the checks cleared and the water ran and the lights stayed on because he came in every gray morning and did the unglamorous thing. “Somebody has to keep it running,” he says, and he believes his life is earned, every hour of it, by a merit that produces nothing you can sell and shows up nowhere on a screen. He is the conformist she scorns. He reads his own steady decades as worth. She reads them as the absence of worth. They use her word and mean opposite things.
Take it to a bedside where the tea has gone cold and a nurse sits with a man who will die before morning. She will produce nothing tonight. She will win nothing, prove nothing, earn nothing the desk would recognize. She holds a hand. “I just sat with him,” she says after, and in her system that sentence names the most worthy act in the building. Output is a category error here. The unmeasurable is the point. Wexler’s word has no purchase in the room at all.
Take it to a workshop where a man bends a rib of maple over a hot iron for a violin no famous hand will ever play. He works for no audience and no crowd and no number. “It will sound right or it will not,” he says, and that is the whole of his standard. He is close kin to her, a craftsman who believes in the proven and the real. But strip away the crowd and the win and the measurement, and you see what her version adds. She requires witnesses. The earned must be seen to be earned, or the terror creeps back.
There are more rooms. The soldier who earns by dying for men he never met. The mother whose worth is poured out and never returned. The scholar who earns a footnote and counts it immortality. The point is not the list. The point is that her word is one word among many, and each system hears it in its own key, and she stands inside hers and hears only the trap, the sloth, the excuse, the fraud, where the others hear grace, surrender, stewardship, and care.
How much of this does she see. Less than she thinks. She holds herself the clear-eyed one, the realist among sentimentalists, and the holding is the blind spot. Her ledger has columns for output and victory and proven nerve and no column at all for the worth of the carried, the surrendered, the unwitnessed, the soft. When she reaches toward the people she would normally code as losers, the open letter to the young men who hate her, the reach is real and the terms are hers. She offers help on the condition that they become worthy, join a model that works, stop licking their wounds, earn their way out of the pit. Even her mercy runs through the turnstile of merit. The one thing her system cannot do is grant worth to the unproven as such, because to grant it is to admit that worth might be given, and if worth can be given then the desk lied, and if the desk lied then the terror she has outrun her whole life comes back over the wire.
Three coordinates.
The shape of her hero is the genuine article. The one who earned it and can show the work, tested by the number and not found wanting, real where the others are frauds, and bound to a people who earned their endurance and will not be erased. She is undeniable, or she is nothing, and she has built a life so that she will never have to find out which.
The rival she fights without naming is not the progressive. Him she names a hundred times a day. The rival she never names is grace. It is the whole family of systems that say a man does not have to be impressive to be worthy, that worth is given and not won, that the reed and the steward and the nurse and the dying are already enough. She cannot name that rival because her system has no room to hold it, and naming a thing you cannot hold is how you start to lose your grip on the thing that holds you.
And the cost her ledger cannot price is rest. There is no grace in a hero made of merit, and where there is no grace there is no rest, because the earned worth must be earned again tomorrow, and the number comes every second and does not care who you are. She suspects, on the bad nights, that she might be one of the carried after all, and she answers the suspicion the only way her system allows, by earning it again, and again, against a screen that never goes dark and a ledger that never, ever closes.
The Set
Picture the room where this set gathers. A Free Press live event, or a dinner in a private room off Lafayette, or the back table at the Comedy Cellar after the late show. The dress is expensive but reads as casual, the kind of casual that costs money. Someone arrives late from a taping and gets the long hello. Someone else, a Substacker with twelve thousand subscribers and no institutional perch, gets the short one. A waiter pours natural wine. A man says, “I’ve been saying that since 2019,” and three people nod, because in this room the date you started saying a thing is a form of seniority.
Arynne Wexler sits at the young, loud, social-media-native edge of this world. The commanding heights belong to others. To understand her, you map the set.
The center of gravity is Bari Weiss (b. 1984) and The Free Press, which she founded after walking out of the New York Times with a resignation letter that became the set’s founding scripture. As of October 2025 she runs CBS News, bought there when Paramount Skydance acquired her company for a reported one hundred fifty million. She brought writers with her, Abigail Shrier, Rod Dreher (b. 1967), Arthur Brooks (b. 1964). She fired Scott Pelley in June. Her old newsletter was called Common Sense before it was The Free Press, and you hear that phrase everywhere in this world, down to Wexler’s own banner, common sense patriots. The vocabulary is shared because the worldview is shared.
Around Weiss sits a dense Jewish, pro-Israel, anti-woke commentariat. Commentary magazine and John Podhoretz (b. 1961) and Seth Mandel hold the older intellectual flank. Dan Senor (b. 1971) and his Call Me Back podcast hold the Israel-policy flank. Eli Lake works the national-security beat. Batya Ungar-Sargon argues the populist-but-anti-woke line on cable. Then the heterodox crossover crowd, not all Jewish but all fluent in the same moral language: Coleman Hughes (b. 1996), Douglas Murray (b. 1979), Konstantin Kisin and Triggernometry out of London, Ben Shapiro (b. 1984) and the Daily Wire orbit, Megyn Kelly (b. 1970) on her own show, Dave Rubin, Dennis Prager (b. 1948). The comedy wing matters more than it looks, because this set treats comedy as the last free speech, so the Comedy Cellar and Noam Dworman’s table carry weight, and Wexler’s old co-host Emily Wilson runs the same lane. Adam Carolla and the Rubin Report give her the bookings that built her past social media.
What do they value. Courage above all. Free speech, merit over identity, the West and America and Israel as goods a man should defend without apology, the individual over the grievance group, and a recent turn back toward religion, family, and nation after a decade of thinking markets and snark were enough. They prize the person who says the unsayable thing and pays for it. They despise the coward who trims to keep his seat.
Their hero is the defector. The one who stood inside a prestigious institution, saw it go mad, and walked out into the cold to tell the truth. Weiss is the type specimen, and the resignation letter is the relic. The significance a man earns in this world comes from exile, from having been cast out of somewhere good for refusing to lie, and then vindicated when the world caught up. The set builds its own institutions to house the exiles, the Substacks and the podcasts and now a television network, and it tells itself a second story underneath the first, the story of a people who endure. For the Jewish core, the courage myth and the survival myth fuse. Weiss says her Judaism gave her a road map for how to be brave. Wexler says the same in scripture, stand with your people, do not hide.
The status games follow from the hero. The first is the cancellation credential. The man who lost the most prestigious perch is the most authentic, so a Times resignation outranks a tenure denial, which outranks a brand deal pulled by a nervous sponsor. The second is the priority claim, the I-said-it-first game, where the date of your first heresy is your rank. The third is proximity to the nodes, a piece in The Free Press, a seat on Honestly, a guest spot with Megyn or Rubin, the booking that says the set has ratified you. The fourth is the count, the paid subscribers, the followers, the sold-out room, all of it worn lightly and known precisely. And the fifth, the cruelest, is the purity audit. Are you brave or are you a grifter. Are you the real thing or controlled opposition. The same word the set throws at the left, coward, it turns inward at the first sign that a member is performing courage for money rather than paying for it.
Their normative claims are blunt and they state them as obvious. Institutions ought to reward merit. Speech ought to be free. A man ought not apologize for his civilization or his people. Courage is the first virtue and cowardice the first sin. The individual answers for himself. Victim culture rots whatever it touches. They do not argue these as one position among many. They argue them as the recovery of plain sense after a long collective madness, which is why the word sane does so much work in their mouths.
Their essentialist claims sit just under the surface and carry the real charge. Human nature is real. Sex is real, which is why Shrier and Riley Gaines (b. 2000) became saints of the set. Merit is a real thing you can measure, not a mask for power. Culture is real and some cultures produce better outcomes than others, which Wexler says when she tells the young men that Israel’s prosperity owes something to values. And the people is real, an essence that runs through three thousand years, a chain a man can betray by hiding or honor by standing. Reality is the master term. The left denies reality, the set lives in it, and the whole moral universe turns on that claim.
The moral grammar runs on one axis above the others, courage against cowardice. The progressive grammar runs on harm and care. The old religious right runs on purity and sin. This set runs on brave and afraid. Its honorifics are brave, fearless, honest, heterodox, sane, real, based. Its curses are coward, captured, woke, grifter, midwit, NPC, controlled opposition. To sin is to lie so you can keep your job, to apologize for your tribe, to punch down while calling it punching up. To be saved is to tell the truth at cost and survive it. There is no grace in this grammar. A man cannot rest on courage already spent. He has to be brave again this morning, which is why the set never stops and why its members burn out or harden.
Now the part that makes the present moment sharp, because the set is at war with its own right flank and the war is the live drama. For years the enemy was clear and to the left, the woke dean, the captured newsroom, the struggle session. Then a younger, harder, often openly antisemitic right rose on the same anti-woke energy and turned on the Jews. Nick Fuentes (b. 1998) and the Groypers. Candace Owens (b. 1989), pushed out of the mainstream right and into open Jew-hatred. Tucker Carlson (b. 1969), isolationist now, skeptical of Israel, willing to platform Fuentes. Marjorie Taylor Greene (b. 1974), whom Wexler files under the retard right. The set that organized against the left now spends half its force excommunicating its own flank, drawing the line at antisemitism and at abandoning Israel. Wexler’s open letter to the Groypers and her strikes at Tucker and Megyn are moves in exactly this war. The fight is over who stays sound on the Jews and on Israel when the coalition’s young blood drifts the other way.
And there is a second strain the set feels and seldom says. Its hero is the exile from the captured institution. Its champion now runs CBS News and fires its veterans. Weiss built her authority on being cast out and now does the casting. Pelley walked out accusing her of murdering 60 Minutes, the way she once walked out of the Times. When the outsiders capture the tower, the courage myth that ran on being outside starts to strain, and the set has not worked out what to tell itself about that yet. Watch that strain. It is where the next round of purity audits will land, and Wexler, young and hungry and standing at the edge of the room where the seating is not yet fixed, has every reason to be watching it too.
The Rubin Report: ‘If You Want More Women to Be Conservative, Do This | Arynne Wexler’ (Feb. 8, 2025)
This is Rubin’s couch, so it’s the loosest, least guarded version of her. He says they’re friends, he reads no prepared questions, and the room laughs along. That makes the hour the most revealing thing of hers I’ve seen and the least disciplined. Set it next to the Substack and the Groyper letter and you have one person in three registers, and this is the bottom one.
The key ideas, with timestamps.
0:00 and 44:20. Her sharpest original line opens the show and she throws it away. She inverts Shapiro. Facts do not care about your feelings becomes feelings do not care about the facts. The 2024 vote, she argues, ran on felt experience, not new data. Nobody learned a number. They felt the grocery bill. The trouble is she illustrates it with the litter-box-and-furries story, which is a hoax, stated as fact (0:40, 44:51). The one insight in the hour gets propped on a fabrication.
2:55. The persona in a sentence. Joan Rivers and Ben Shapiro had a baby. Comedy plus punditry, diamonds plus eyebrows. She is telling you the act is built, not found.
5:11. The strategy said out loud. The Ivy League and the Goldman trading floor are armor, so the left cannot call her stupid. She names the credential as a shield in the same career she spends attacking credentialism.
10:10. The engine belief. The bathroom whisperers, the underground railroad of secret conservatives. The thesis that a silent majority agrees and only lacks courage. It powers the whole project and it cannot be tested, and it flatters her and her audience at once.
15:53 and 54:36. The essentialism about women. Women run on feeling, easily swayed, and she is the exception, I am different, I am just a girl. She makes a living as a woman telling women they reason worse than men, and the only way to hold the claim is to exempt herself from it on a running joke.
21:36 and 23:04 and 25:06. The cruelty turn. The fat-nippled androgyne, the high-school classmate rendered as a white Oompa Loompa, the call to bring back bullying. The bullying line ends at school shooters (25:30), where it stops making sense and turns ugly. Am I a mean girl, she says, (24:31).
27:51 to 31:02. Her most serious stretch. The right is seduced by celebrity and forgives anything for a follower count. Kanye, the standards problem, Tucker stoking antisemitism. This is the through-line that also runs the Groyper letter and the Substack MAGA pieces, and it is where she takes real risk inside her own camp.
32:05. The conspiracy double standard. She faults Tucker for conspiracism and then plants a flag on Obama being gay, citing Tablet, as a die-on-this-hill conviction. She cannot see her own conspiracy as one. The facts-and-feelings blade cuts back at her and she does not see it.
41:16 to 42:51. The leftist Jews passage. Disown them, a mental defect in these Jews. Then, in the same breath, she says the Nazi crew will clip this out of context. She watches the New York Times front-page test fail in real time and keeps going.
48:29. The Trump devotion. She gets emotional about how he sacrificed his life for us. The clear-eyed skeptic who reasons from felt facts turns worshipful. The back-half save is the pessimist turn (50:07), where she splits Trump voters from conservative voters and worries the coalition peels back, which is the one piece of cold political analysis in the hour.
Now the thoughts.
The hour runs on a fusion she never examines. She sells courage, saying the thing others fear to say, and a large share of what the courage cashes out to here is meanness about faces and bodies. Bravery and cruelty get welded together until the brand cannot tell them apart. The Groyper letter extends a hand to the lonely young men. This hour mocks a former classmate’s body for sport. Same month, same woman, opposite ethics, and the difference is the room. Rubin’s couch pays for the dunk, so she dunks.
The 42:51 moment is the one to sit with. She knows the line will be clipped and she says it anyway. That is the incentive structure showing its face. In her own terms, the felt reward of the laugh beats the known cost of the clip. Run her own opening thesis on her own performance and it explains the whole hour. She is not reasoning to these positions. She is feeling for the applause and narrating backward.
The strongest thing she does is the standards argument against her own side from 27:51 on. Holding the right to account on antisemitism and on celebrity worship takes real risk in her coalition, and it is consistent across her work. If she has a contribution, it lives there. It does not live in the body-shaming comedy, which any number of people can do and which costs her nothing with the audience that matters to her.
The women-and-feelings material is the weakest, because she is the standing refutation of it and has to keep stepping outside her own category to make it work. A claim that needs its author exempted is not a claim. It is a costume she can put on and take off, just a girl when it is funny, the smartest person in the institution when it is flattering.
If you wanted one thing from the whole hour, it is the first minute. Feelings do not care about the facts is a real idea, better than anything built on top of it, and it would be sharper still if she turned it on herself. She will not, because the act depends on her being the exception to every rule she names, the one woman who runs on fact, the one skeptic who weeps for Trump, the one truth-teller whose cruelty is only courage. The hour is funny and quick and, by the New York Times front-page test, mostly indefensible, and she tells you so while she does it.
Adam Carolla: ‘From Wall Street to Stand-Up: Arynne Wexler on Comedy & Why More Liberals are Turning Right’ (Apr. 7, 2026)
The format here matters before anything else. On Rubin she drove. Here she rides. This is Carolla’s machine, built on bits, and she plays straight man and co-signer for most of two hours. So the revealing question is not what she argues but what she chooses to amplify and where she stays quiet.
Key ideas, with timestamps.
0:54 and 32:50 and 48:21. The Wharton credential becomes the running gag of the whole show, with Carolla casting his street smarts against her degrees. She leans into the pedigree on entry, Goldman as a boutique bank you have probably never heard of (3:13). The credential is the bit and the armor at once, same as on Rubin.
6:37. A real piece of candor. She says she started standup six months ago and that people warned her not to admit it. She admits it. The honesty is to her credit and it also tells you how new the comic is under the viral clips.
11:16 and 17:41. The black girl spelling device. She uses the spelling of her own name as a license to say things about Black people, I get to say it because I have a black girl spelling.
17:22 to 19:42. The worst stretch, and she is an active builder of it, not a nodder. Carolla floats that Black people resent Jews because Jews hold a mirror to what they should accomplish. She co-signs hard, you are so correct, and supplies her own material, the short bridge to the Holocaust against the long bridge to slavery, the broken-arm versus sore-back sports analogy, we own sports we do not play sports. This is racial essentialism about Black failure in the present, performed as a two-hander for laughs.
12:30 and accepted again at 1:26:45. The women-are-emotional line returns, the woman’s nature of being emotional, and later she lets Carolla’s she is a chick so she just spits it stand without pushback. Same self-exempting pattern as Rubin.
20:09 to 20:48. Her sharpest analytic moment. On Mamdani and rent she separates the constant from the variable. The rent is the same number for everyone, so the thing to explain is not the rent but why it lands harder on some groups. Look at the variable. That is a clean move and it comes straight from the trading habit of mind.
29:34. A second point. Do not assume these people cannot win. Democrats are good at turning out votes. She refuses the comfort of writing off the other side, which is rarer on the right than it should be.
34:24 to 36:51. Her best sustained run. The 2024 win came from the widest tent the right has had, Elon and the tech bros and MAHA and the suburban moms, and good times will erode it, because people forget and the social permission to vote right evaporates once the fear recedes. New York under Mamdani is the warning. The pessimist case is the most political thinking she does all show. She also drops the litter-box hoax again (35:20), the third time across these transcripts, still as fact.
39:51 to 40:16. The most independent thing she says. She rejects the silent-majority framing outright. Being in the majority does not make you right, and history often puts the right people in the minority. That cuts against her own side’s populism, and she says it anyway.
45:55 and 46:17. Her aesthetic creed. Comedy is the truth with good timing, so unfunny means untrue. Then the Bill Burr (b. 1968) set, where she laughs at jokes coded against her side and respects him for being a comic first. Strong media criticism, and consistent with the comedy-as-courage line she runs everywhere.
Now the thoughts.
The episode splits her into two people. One is a sharp political analyst with a finance brain. The rent variable, the turnout pessimism, the warning against underestimating Democrats, and above all the refusal of majority-equals-right are the best things in two hours, and they are buried under Carolla’s bits because the format rewards the bit over the argument. If she wrote up the anti-majoritarian point alone, in her own voice, she would have something worth reading. It is the rare moment where she thinks against her tribe rather than for it.
The other person is the co-signer, and that one pays a heavy price for the seat. The 17:22 stretch is worse than anything on Rubin, not because the lines are sharper but because she builds the structure with Carolla rather than tossing a single jab. Racial generalization about a whole people’s failure, dressed as comedy, with the black girl spelling used as a hall pass. Run her own creed against it. Comedy is the truth with good timing, she says, and then the laughs here come from generalization, not truth. The creed and the practice split, and the split is the tell. She knows the difference between a true joke and a cruel one. She chooses the room.
On venue, the contrast with Rubin and with the Substack is the whole story of her. The Substack is the earnest observant Jew. The Groyper letter is the generous persuader. Rubin is the brand owner running her own line. Carolla is the apprentice feeding setups in someone else’s house and matching its register, which here runs to race and to dunks. Four rooms, four ethics, and the through-line is that the room sets the floor, not she. The warmth toward Trump at the end, where she coos along with Carolla’s autograph story and the he-reads-everything material (1:13), is the same courtier note from Rubin. Access flatters her, and she lets it.
She’s learning, six months in, that the fastest way to land on Carolla is to hand him the next bit, even when the bit is about who plays sports and who owns them.
‘Arynne Wexler: If New York Falls, The West Falls | Sage Steele Show | EP 79’ (Oct. 29, 2025)
Of the three, this is the warmest room and the most revealing. Sage Steele (b. 1972) plays the admiring older friend, no edge, frequent you-are-so-brave. That ease pulls out the most biography, the most sincere religion, and the clearest statement of her project, and it also lets a steady run of ethnic jokes slide by unchallenged. The contrast with Carolla is the lesson. There she co-signed race material to land bits. Here the depth comes out, and the jokes turn Arab and Muslim and softer-seeming because the room is gentle.
Key ideas, with timestamps.
3:39 to 5:25. White liberal women as the master villain, more damaging than Islamic terrorists because they import and excuse them. The pronoun-users-are-worse-than-trans-people line. The villain is gendered and racial at once, and it recurs all show.
6:09 and 1:09:13. Rob Henderson’s (b. 1990) luxury beliefs, used as a real analytic tool. Life is candyland, so people can afford ruinous ideas. She reaches for an actual concept here, twice.
12:59 to 13:21. The tell of the whole worldview. She got LASIK because she did not want to manage contact lenses during a civil war if Trump lost. The fear was sincere and apocalyptic, and it is the engine under everything.
25:39 to 25:59. The anti-majoritarian point, for the third time across three interviews.
28:11 to 28:46. In her own words, the Penn degree. A dual bachelor’s through a fifty-person program, a BA in international studies and a Wharton BS, four years of Arabic.
30:32 to 30:49 and 35:37 to 36:26 and 1:42:00. The Arab and Muslim jokes. The textbook character who marries her cousin, at least not a goat. The Jihadi Jihad airport skit. The dog who, were he Israeli, would be hunting terrorists in tunnels. These are the lines that fail the front-page test hardest here.
42:22 to 50:16. The center of the episode and her best work. The Charlie Kirk (1993-2025) Save the West retreat with Bill Ackman (b. 1966) and others, and Candace Owens (b. 1989) accusing her of running a Jewish cabal tied to Kirk’s death. She denies, refuses to name attendees, and turns it into a charge against the unnamed household names who were there and stayed silent. Her formulation lands: moral cowardice under the guise of political bravery (50:16).
47:47 to 59:20. The Megyn Kelly (b. 1970) indictment. Kelly calls Candace brilliant while claiming not to watch her, calls Tucker (b. 1969) a friend and not an antisemite without saying why, and says I don’t care when pressed on it. Wexler notes Kelly’s independent media is Fox-owned now [LF: not true], so the independence claim is hollow, and that independent media is more swayable than mainstream, not less (53:35). This is real media criticism with cost attached.
55:49 to 56:31 and 1:01:53. Tucker as a pro-life Marxist peddling a victim mentality. The old right was iron your shirt and get a job. The new right blames the elites and the women and the Jews. Horseshoe theory, stated plainly, and consistent with her other appearances.
1:09:53 to 1:11:43. The strategist showing up. She argued incremental abortion politics to Kirk, start with late-term, ease people in, and he refused. There are your beliefs and then there is strategy. Paired with feelings don’t care about facts (1:11:59), it is the analyst at her best.
1:19:53 to 1:20:05. The peoplehood creed, undisguised. Earning my stripes as a Jew today, the nation of Israel always lives, we get to be strong for everyone because we have had the easiest lives, I don’t sleep anymore. This is the merit-and-endurance worldview in her own mouth.
1:21:05 to 1:21:47. Her explicit theory of her own method. Comedy is the last free speech, and when you make people laugh they are agreeing before they realize they should not be. Disarm, then implant.
1:39:34. The women-are-emotional line again, now co-signed with Steele as why a conservative man may marry a liberal woman but never the reverse. Same essentialism, same self-exemption.
Now the thoughts.
This is the best material she has, and it sits next to the worst, and the room is why both come out. The Megyn Kelly argument is her strongest, most courageous, most consistent work across all three tapes. It costs her inside her own coalition, she names the incentive structure of independent media without flinching, and moral cowardice under the guise of political bravery is the sharpest sentence she has said anywhere. The Candace Owens cabal accusation is a frightening thing being done to her by a large-following figure, not a performance of victimhood, and it explains the security fear that runs under the episode. On this front she is serious, and she is right to be.
The religious material is the engine. Earning my stripes as a Jew, the people who always live, strong for everyone because we have had it easiest. That is the merit-and-endurance worldview stated flat, down to the joke that the dog must earn his meal. She even applies the creed to a spaniel. A person who organizes the world around earning and proving and enduring will say exactly these things, and she does.
The abortion incrementalism against Kirk, the beliefs-versus-strategy split, luxury beliefs, the turnout pessimism, and for the third straight time the refusal of majority-equals-right. If you wanted the portable Wexler, the one worth reading, it is these passages. The anti-majoritarian line especially. She has now said it to Rubin, to Carolla, and to Steele, and it is the one idea she holds against her own MAGA tribe rather than for it.
The cost is the same as before and the warm room makes it worse, not better, because nobody pushes. The Arab and Muslim jokes are the heaviest here, and the goat line and the airport skit are indefensible by the New York Times test. And she keeps narrating her own awareness while she does it. She tells the vet the Lil Jew line is fine, the vet says it is not, and she says it anyway (1:42:19), the same move as the Nazi-crew-will-clip-this moment on Rubin. The awareness is part of the act. Her own theory of comedy explains why. If the laugh makes people agree before they notice they should not, then the ugly joke is not a lapse, it is the method working.
The LASIK story is the key. A woman gets eye surgery so she will not have to manage contacts during the civil war she expects if her side loses. The fear is sincere, and sincere fear of civilizational collapse is the thing generating both the serious work and the catastrophizing. It is what makes the Megyn Kelly argument feel urgent and also what makes a mayoral race read as the fall of the West. The same engine drives the best and the worst of her.
Net, across the three rooms. Rubin got the brand owner, Carolla got the apprentice feeding bits, Steele got the fullest person, the one with a faith, a strategy, a real grievance, and a joke habit she cannot or will not govern. The throughline holds. The room sets the floor, the fear sets the urgency, and the cold analytic core, the strategist who knows the majority is not the truth, shows up for maybe fifteen minutes and is worth more than the other three hours combined. If she ever wrote from that core without the disarming joke and the manufactured license, she would have the contribution she keeps saying she wants. On this evidence she has it in her, and she spends most of her time elsewhere.
‘Biden and Blinken’s Betrayal | Arynne Wexler | The Buck Sexton Show’ (Feb. 22, 2024)
She is thirty, still NonLibTake, still in the man-on-the-street phase, before the standup, before the Substack, before the war with her own flank. So you can read the whole later arc backward from here and see what was already in the seed and what got grafted on.
Key ideas, with timestamps.
0:22 to 1:04. The origin, confirmed. Buck Sexton’s (b. 1981) wife Carrie, a former Fox producer, found her videos, recognized the building behind her as next door, and sent them to Buck. The discovery vector and the first node in the network that later runs through Rubin’s parties.
3:33 and 16:01. The woman as villain is already fully built. Androgynous woke Jihadi Jane in February 2024, and the Jihadi Janes marching for a ceasefire later in the same hour. The archetype that anchors everything after is present from the start.
3:47 to 4:28. The low-t soy beta, which she says she coined at the dog park, the same dog park where she says she coined the handle. The masculinity policing starts early in her arc.
4:35 to 11:03. The dating pre-screen, and the Rosetta stone of the whole person. She phone-screens suitors for conservatism and, in her words, to hear whether they sound gay (7:00). The old version was a Romney litmus, vote for him or you will not father my children. This is a loyalty test for romance, built exactly like the loyalty test she later runs on the movement.
5:45 to 6:43. The platform grievance, fifth YouTube channel, shadowbanned, fifty viewers. The same persecution narrative as the later TikTok-prison stories, and in early 2024 more grounded than it became.
12:58 to 16:09. The Israel segment, the serious core. Drawing on her Federalist and Blaze pieces, she argues Biden’s support is fleeting, optics over outcome, and that the war is religious, not territorial, because Hamas wants eradication and not a border. Agree or not, it is an argued position, not a bit, and it is the one commitment that stays senior all the way to 2026.
16:18 to 17:53. Her best moment here, and cold. Asked whether Jews will shift right, she says cautiously optimistic, very cautiously, because Jews want to be accepted and will curl back to the Democrats the way they did after the 2021 rockets. She predicts her own side’s behavior against her own hopes.
22:37 to 23:25. The name bit, and note what is missing. Here it is innocent. Aaron is a boy’s spelling, Erin reads Catholic, her parents were ahead of the celebrity-baby curve. There is no black girl spelling line. That device, the one that later manufactures a license to talk about Black people, has not been invented yet.
Now the thoughts.
Read against the three later tapes, this one tells you what is essential and what is acquired. Essential, present in the seed: the sexual villain and the masculinity vocabulary, Israel as the senior loyalty, the platform-persecution grievance, the cold predictive read on her own tribe, and above all the screening instinct. Acquired later: standup and the disarm-then-implant theory of comedy, the devotional Torah register, the war on Candace and Tucker and Megyn, and the black girl spelling license. In February 2024 the enemy is entirely to her left. The right has not fractured, or she has not yet turned to face it.
The dating pre-screen is the key to all of it, and it is funnier and more revealing than she means it to be. Her root instinct is the loyalty test, the phone call to check whether a man is sound before the small talk is allowed. She runs it on suitors here and, two years later, on the leading voices of her movement, Megyn Kelly and the household names in the Hamptons. The object changes. The instinct does not. She is a screener by temperament, and the screen is binary, sound or not sound, the father of my children or not. That tells you why the later purity fights feel so natural to her. She has been doing this to her own dates for years.
The Israel material is the spine, and it is the most consistent thing about her across two years. It is senior here, argued in print, and it stays senior all the way to the point where she will knife her own coalition to defend it. Whatever you make of the hawkishness, it is the one position that is never a bit and never venue-dependent. The 2021 prediction, that Jews want acceptance and will drift back, is the analyst showing up in the serious stretch again, the same cold register as the anti-majoritarian line she repeats in every later interview.
The sound-gay line and the soy-beta talk are the New York Times front-page failures of February 2024, and they are tame next to the goat jokes and the race license of 2026. So even the transgression has a trajectory. It escalates as the audience pays for it. The innocent name bit becoming the black girl spelling device is the whole pattern in one detail. The same fact about her name, harmless in 2024, gets repurposed two years later into a hall pass for the otherwise unsayable. Nothing was added that was not already latent. It just got rewarded, and grew.
So the seed contains the plant. The loyalty screen, the Israel commitment, the gendered villain, the platform grievance, and the cold eye on her own people are all here at thirty. What the next two years supply is a stage, a pulpit, a license, and an enemy on her own side. The best of her, the realist who tells you her tribe will not move and that being in the majority is not the same as being right, is audible already in this small early room, between the dating bit and the soy betas, and it remains the thing she should build on.
‘The Eulogy Charlie Kirk Deserves’ (Sep. 11, 2025)
Many have remarked on the similarities between the 60’s Left and today’s Right. On those terms, there’s only one appropriate comparison: Charlie Kirk was our Martin Luther King Jr., and not only because we’ll always remember where we were when we heard he was shot. In an era when young conservative men were treated like pariahs – ostracized, shamed, scapegoated, dehumanized, and demonized – Charlie alone could channel their rage without being consumed by it. He not only felt their pain, but genuinely worked to fix it, which gave him the moral authority to tell them to rise above their worst instincts: to take the high road to self-betterment rather than one of the many primrose paths to self-immolation.
Unlike many other conservative influencers who claim to speak for young people, Charlie did not do this as a cynical ploy to protect donors. Quite the opposite.
I had the privilege to be with him a month ago for an off-the-record, high-level discussion with some TPUSA donors, where the topic unexpectedly became home-ownership among young people. It was a topic that Charlie chose. And in a room with people who arguably paid his salary, a lesser leader would have simply parroted what the people with money wanted him to say, but not Charlie Kirk. He refused to let that dictate his words. He refused to give up on the idea that young people deserved to experience the American dream, because as a man who never finished college and yet who ended up leading and shaping an entire movement, he personified the American dream.
I never once saw him look at his phone during the two days we met. Even when we disagreed, it was as if he had nowhere else to be. Like right there, in that moment, all that mattered was the subtle thrust and parry of intellectual fencing between two minds. He was preternaturally laser-focused, and despite the fact that he was both a literal and figurative giant (6’5’’ even when slouching), he somehow never made you feel small.
And it worked. In refusing to accept what his nearest historical analogue, William F. Buckley Jr., called “the failure of the conservative demonstration,” Charlie Kirk demonstrated that conservatism could be fun.
Judge this one by its genre and its clock. It is a eulogy written within a day of a murder, for a man she had met and admired.
The anaphora carries it, the man who never walked out of a fight, a friendship, his family, his country. The Buckley echo is earned and shows she knows the lineage, stood athwart, the failure of the conservative demonstration, the line about William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) doing more work than the rest of the references combined. The best paragraph is the donor-meeting anecdote, because it is specific and humane and it argues by detail rather than by adjective. Charlie Kirk (1993-2025) picks the homeownership topic in a room of people who pay him, refuses to parrot the money, never looks at his phone, never makes you feel small at six foot five. That is eulogy doing its actual job, turning a public figure back into a person. It is also, notably, the same meeting she later relitigates on the Sage Steele show as the Candace Owens cabal fight. Here, the day after, it is pure tribute. Two months on it becomes evidence in a war. The event holds still. The use of it moves with the room.
The most serious thing in the piece is the restraint plea near the end, and it is to her credit. In the white heat of the day after, she tells her own side to ignore the people who want violence for violence. Justice, not vengeance. Right reason, not blind rage. Punish, but not irrationally. Calling your own grieving tribe off the warpath in that moment takes more nerve than any of the dunks, and the closing turn, that persuasion is the punishment our enemies fear most, is both shrewd and consistent with the better strategist in her.
Now the breaks. The Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) comparison is the overreach that swallows the essay. It is the boldest claim and the least earned, and the Buckley comparison she makes in the next breath is more apt and more modest. She had the right analogy and reached past it for a bigger one.
The deeper problem is an internal contradiction. The same essay that pleads for right reason, not blind rage spends its middle dehumanizing the killer as an animal, an insect, a sniveling thing she will not dignify. Grief explains it. The genre invites it. But you cannot counsel your movement against blind rage in one paragraph and model it in another. The plea would land harder if the rhetoric around it practiced what it preached. The bigger-than-9/11 line is the same kind of reach, and she flags the risk herself while taking it anyway, which is a habit by now.
Then there is the register problem. He bled aura and courage is always cool, cowardice is always cringe are influencer lines in a funeral oration. They are her native idiom, and in the analytical pieces they pass, but next to a coffin they cheapen the grief they mean to carry. A murder reduced to a coolness binary reads small, and she is capable of better, as the donor anecdote proves three paragraphs up.
The piece confirms what runs through all her work, that courage against cowardice is her master axis and that her hero is the man who walks into the room and will not walk out. Kirk is that hero, and her grief is real, and the eulogy is at its best when it trusts the specific memory and its plea for restraint, and at its worst when it inflates the man into a martyr-saint and dehumanizes the killer in the same breath that warns against rage. Cut the King comparison, cut the bigger-than-9/11 reach, let the animal-and-insect lines go, and keep the phone he never checked and the topic he chose against his donors and the call to persuade rather than avenge, and it would be both truer and more moving. As written, it is a sincere eulogy at war with its own counsel.
David Pinsof’s misunderstanding myth describes the story intellectuals tell to make themselves the heroes of the world. The story says that everything wrong with the world comes from misunderstanding. Polarization, bigotry, war, unhappiness, all of it springs from bad beliefs, and the cure is better understanding, which makes the people who supply understanding the most important people alive. Pinsof’s reply is that there is no misunderstanding. People understand what they have an incentive to understand. Stereotypes are often accurate, partisan hatred is rational competition over the power of the state, and the cognitive biases the intellectuals want to fix are savvy strategies that serve the people who run them. The trick the myth performs is to swap stated motives for actual motives. Judge a person by what he says he wants, to change minds and better the world, and he looks like a failure in need of more enlightenment. Judge him by what he is doing, climbing hierarchies and derogating rivals and dominating under a moral cover, and he looks like what he is, a rational animal getting exactly what he came for.
Run this on Arynne Wexler and the first surprise is that she is half inside Pinsof’s camp before he arrives. She is the rare commentator who has already said the anti-myth thing out loud. Feelings do not care about the facts, she repeats in interview after interview. Nobody voted for Trump because a chart on the border changed his mind. People felt the grocery bill and saw the streets and voted the feeling. She tells her own side they are fools to think facts win anyone over, that they have to meet people where the wanting is, not where the data is. That is the misunderstanding myth refuted in her own words. She has looked at the persuasion business and concluded that understanding is not the lever.
The second surprise is that she runs the myth anyway, flipped. Where the liberal intellectual believes that if people only understood they would be progressive, Wexler believes that if people only understood, or were given the courage and the permission, they would be conservative. Her whole engine is the silent majority of secret conservatives, the classmates who whisper in the bathroom that they agree, the conviction that the country is with her and only fear and brainwashing keep it quiet. She brands the product common sense patriotism, and common sense is the myth’s signature word. It says the truth is clear and only confusion, ideology, or intimidation stops a person from seeing it. So she keeps the structure the intellectuals keep. The other side is not pursuing its interests. The other side is mistaken, gullible, captured, holding luxury beliefs it could afford to drop if it understood.
The tell is the asymmetry, because she applies the two readings by team. For her rivals she reaches for motive. Liberal women run on emotion. The leftist Jews want acceptance and will trade their politics for it. The activist holds luxury beliefs because life is candyland. These are incentive readings, and they are sharp, and they are pure Pinsof. For her own side she reaches for understanding. The right reasons its way to truth. She herself came to conservatism, she says, because she had a brain and was allowed to think. So liberals believe what they believe because of what they want, and conservatives believe what they believe because of what is true. The myth survives precisely where it flatters her, in the gap between how she explains her enemies and how she explains herself.
Turn the frame on her own motives and the gap closes. Her stated goals are the mission statement, persuade, save the West, give people the courage to say what they think, put the truth out there. Measure her against those goals and the results are thin by her own admission, because the people who agree with her already agree and the people who do not are not being moved. Measure her instead against the goals Pinsof says are the real ones, status in the post-gatekeeper market, the derogation of rivals, the building of a name, and she is a model of competence. She talks about her launch in the language of a startup, proof of concept and go to market. She notes that her videos perform better when she looks worse, and adjusts nothing about the looking, because performance is the point. And she says the quiet thing all the way out loud when she explains her comedy. The joke makes people laugh, and by laughing they are agreeing before they realize they should not be. That is not a theory of enlightenment. That is a theory of getting past the guard. A woman who understands persuasion as slipping the conclusion in before the defenses close is not laboring under the misunderstanding myth. She is running the attention economy with her eyes open and calling it truth-telling for the brand.
So apply Pinsof’s hardest question to her hardest case. She is baffled by the leftist Jews. She calls them the dumbest smart people and says she has to disown them, that after everything they still will not get it. The myth is doing all the work in that bafflement. It insists the people who disagree must be confused, because if they are not confused then they are doing something rational that her own framing cannot allow. Pinsof supplies the thing it cannot allow. They get it fine. A secular Jew in a progressive milieu who keeps voting with that milieu is buying acceptance at the going rate, which is the most rational purchase on the shelf, and Wexler has already said as much in her cooler moments, that Jews want to be accepted and will curl back to the party that offers it. She has the incentive reading in hand. She drops it the moment it would dissolve her grievance, and reaches back for confusion, because confusion lets her keep saving people who are not lost. The Mamdani voter gets the same treatment, written off as not being thoughtful, when the simpler account is that he wants cheaper rent and a new face and is voting for both. There is no misunderstanding to clear up. There is a want being satisfied.
Pinsof ends on the bracing idea that the world does not want to be saved, that the hole cannot be studied your way out of, that the trouble with us is that nothing is broken. Wexler spends her days trying to save the West and grieving that it will not be saved, and the grief is the myth charging her rent. If the country were merely confused, her courage and her clips might fix it. The country is not confused. The voters want what they want, the press chases the market it chases, the rival commentators protect the audiences that pay them, and the leftist Jews are buying exactly the acceptance they mean to buy. Nobody in the picture has misunderstood anything. They have all understood their incentives, which is why none of them can be argued out of their position by a woman with a microphone and a mission statement.
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Hold this up to Arynne Wexler and the first thing it breaks is the story she tells about herself.
Her self-image rests on reason. She was conservative, she says, because she had a brain. Her parents let her come to her own conclusions, sat her at a debate table, told her to back it up, and she reasoned her way to the right. She is the thinker among feelers, the woman who saw through the herd by the light of her own mind. Mearsheimer says no one does this. No one reasons his way to a moral and political code, because the reasoning equipment comes online years after the code is installed. And Wexler, without seeming to notice, narrates the installation in full. Two Ivy League parents in a conservative home. A Jewish culture that treats education as sacred, she says, even back when the Jews were poor peasants in the shtetls. A suburb where good schools and good jobs were the total expectation. A move, as an adult, into an Orthodox synagogue to be among friends who shared her values. That is Mearsheimer’s value infusion described from the inside, generation on generation of it, and at the end of the description she credits her own intellect. She is the best evidence for his thesis and she presents it as the exception that proves she is free.
The symmetry she will not grant is the heart of it. She mocks liberal women for running on feeling instead of fact, for being emotional, easily swayed, socialized into their views by late-night television and the campus. Mearsheimer agrees that they are socialized into their views. He adds that she is too. The liberal woman absorbed one value infusion and Wexler absorbed another, and neither reasoned her way anywhere, because reason is last for both. Wexler has even said the true half of this out loud. Feelings do not care about the facts, she repeats. People feel their way to their politics and reach for the facts later. That is Mearsheimer’s ranking in her own words, reason behind sentiment and socialization. She applies it to the masses and to the left and exempts herself and her side, as though common sense were a faculty of pure reason rather than the residue of a particular upbringing. Common sense is the value infusion talking. Every tribe calls its own infusion common sense.
Once the rational-individual story falls away, what is left is exactly the animal Mearsheimer describes, and it explains her far better than she explains herself. Her deepest and steadiest commitment is not to a principle. It is to a people. The nation of Israel always lives, she says. Stand with your people, do not hide. I am earning my stripes as a Jew. This is not the language of an atomistic rights-holder reasoning about universals. It is the language of a tribal being attached to her group and ready to sacrifice for its members, which Mearsheimer names as the most human thing there is. Her willingness to risk her safety, her advertisers, and her standing inside her own movement to fight the antisemites on the right is not the heroism of a lone individual. It is the social animal taking a wound for the group. She frames it as personal courage. Mearsheimer would frame it as loyalty, the oldest force in the species, and his frame fits her conduct better than hers does. Her American nationalism runs the same way. Save the West. If New York falls, the West falls. The MAGA hat worn as a flag. Mearsheimer holds nationalism to be the strongest political force on earth, and Wexler is moved by two nationalisms at once, the Jewish and the American, far more than by any individualist creed she could name.
So here is the irony that the frame exposes and she cannot. She is an anti-liberal who carries a liberal at her center. The content of her politics is tribal, all peoplehood and nation and group loyalty and sacrifice. The story she tells about her own mind is liberal in Mearsheimer’s exact sense, the tale of an atomistic individual who reasoned his way to truth, free of the society that made him, equipped with a brain that cut through what fooled everyone else. That self is the liberal fiction Mearsheimer wrote the book to refute. The lone wolf who thinks for himself. She is no lone wolf. She is a thoroughly socialized member of a particular tribe, an affluent, educated, conservative, pro-Israel New York Jewish world, and her common sense is that world’s value infusion wearing the mask of reason.
The frame also cuts her foreign policy in two. Mearsheimer respects the tribal and the particular. A people defending its own homeland, the Jew who stands with the Jews and wants Israel to survive, is acting on the soundest part of human nature, the group looking after its own. That part of Wexler he would not argue with. But her larger key changes register. Save the West, common sense for everyone, America must lead and set the world right, and the eradication of an enemy framed as a war for civilization itself. That is no longer the particular tribe guarding its own. That is the universal crusade, the belief that one set of values fits all of mankind and that a great power should go impose it. And the universal crusade is the very delusion Mearsheimer blames on liberalism, the dream that springs from treating rights as universal and people as the same everywhere. The anti-liberal smuggles a liberal universalism into her hawkishness. She is particularist when she defends her people and universalist when she would save the world.
So what does Mearsheimer mean for Wexler, if he is right. It means the woman she takes herself to be does not exist. The rational defector who reasoned past the herd is a socialized tribesman who happened to receive a conservative value infusion instead of a progressive one, and her certainty that she is the clear-eyed exception is the surest sign that the infusion took. It means her real authority and her best work are tribal, not rational. The loyalty to her people, the willingness to sacrifice for the group, the nationalism, these are her strongest and most consistent forces, and they are exactly the forces his anthropology predicts will dominate. It means her project of persuasion succeeds only in the form she half conceals from herself. She will not reason anyone into the right, because reason is last and changes little. What she can do is socialize, hand the young their permission and their courage, slip the value past the guard with a joke before the critical faculty wakes, reshape the sentiment that gets installed before anyone can weigh it. She runs Mearsheimer’s playbook, the management of socialization and sentiment, while telling herself the liberal story about reasoning people toward truth. And it means the last liberal thing about this anti-liberal is the one she guards hardest, the belief that she authored herself. That belief is the delusion at the center of her. She is not the mind that saw through her tribe. She is what her tribe made, doing for the next set of children what was done to her, and calling the result common sense.
Stephen Turner’s anti-essentialism is a solvent for a habit of mind. The habit is to take a collective noun, a people, a culture, a society, a sex, a civilization, common sense, and treat it as the name of a real shared essence, a substance or nature that all the members carry and that makes them what they are. Turner denies that the essence is there. What is there, when you look, is a scattered distribution of individuals, each one shaped by his own causal history, each holding habits and dispositions that differ from his neighbor’s, none of them carrying an identical copy of some common stuff. The sharedness is an inference we draw from the outside, a projection thrown over the scatter, not a thing inside it. There is no collective mind, no group soul, no essence of a practice that every practitioner instantiates. There are only persons, various and separately made, and the words we lay across them.
Arynne Wexler builds her entire world out of the essences Turner says are not there.
Listen to the nouns she leans on and every one of them is an essence. Women have a nature, emotional, intuitive, easily swayed by feeling. Men have a nature, and its decline produces the low-testosterone figure she mocks and the masculine energy she misses. The Jews are a people with a character that runs unbroken across three thousand years, education-loving, family-bound, the nation that always lives. The West has a soul that can decay and a greatness that can be lost. America has a soul too, and a next generation whose soul is the prize. There is a natural state of the human being that ideology has deformed, and she would un-deform it, send men and women back to what they essentially are. And over all of it sits the master essence, common sense, the shared faculty that sound people possess and that the captured and the confused have lost. Each of these is a claim that a category names a real nature. Turner’s whole argument is that it does not.
The cleanest place to watch the essence dissolve is the one she returns to most, the nature of women. She says women are emotional. In the next breath she says she is not like other women, that she liked math and the trading floor and argument, that she is just a girl only as a joke. So the essence admits an exception, and an essence that admits exceptions was never an essence. It was a loose generalization over a spread, and the spread includes her. Turner’s point lands without argument here, because she supplies the counterexample herself, every time, in the same sentence as the rule. There is no womanhood-substance that all women carry, one emotional and one not. There are women, many of them, variously made, and Wexler is one more point in the distribution, not the exception to a nature. She keeps having to step outside the category she defines, and the stepping out is the proof that the category has no inside.
The same solvent works on the larger nouns, and it works whether the essence is dear to her or not. The nation of Israel always lives, she says, a people with one character across the millennia. What persists across those millennia is not a substance handed down whole. It is a long chain of separate persons, internally various in every generation, transmitting texts and habits and quarrels that no two of them held in quite the same way, and the always lives is the projection thrown over that scatter from the outside, a destiny read into a population that contains every kind of person and every kind of disagreement. Turner is not denying that Jews exist or that the word picks something out. He is denying that the word names a shared essence with a nature and a fate. The West is the same. There is no soul of the West to save or lose, no civilizational substance that New York’s fall would drain away. There is an immense heterogeneity of persons and practices that the word papers over, and the soul she fears for is a thing the word created, not a thing the word found.
Her natural state is the boldest essence of all and the easiest to dissolve. She posits a true human nature, masculine men and feminine women in their proper complement, the family as the natural unit, and she casts the present as a deformation of that nature by ideology, to be corrected back toward what we essentially are. Turner asks where the fixed nature is. What you find across societies and centuries is not one natural arrangement distorted here and there, but a wide range of causally produced arrangements, different in different places, none of them the essence and all of them the distribution. The natural state is a normative picture she favors, dressed as a nature she discovered. Calling it natural does not locate an essence. It only hides the preference inside a noun.
And common sense, her brand and her banner, is the master case. Common sense names, in her usage, a shared faculty that all clear-eyed people own and that ideology has clouded in the others. Turner says there is no such shared faculty. There is a distribution of acquired dispositions, and what she calls common sense is one cluster of them, the cluster she happens to hold, essentialized into the human baseline so that everyone outside it reads as a deviation from a nature rather than as another point on the spread. Every position calls its own dispositions common sense. The word does the work of turning a particular into an essence and the disagreeing particulars into defects.
Here is the turn she will not make, and it is the one that should sting, because she has already made half of it. Against the left she is an anti-essentialist in good standing. She mocks the reduction of people to their race and their gender, the it-impacts-the-black-and-brown framing, the people-of-color category that flattens individuals into a group nature. She says treat the person, not the identity, merit and not the essence of the tribe. That is Turner’s solvent, and she pours it freely on her rivals’ categories. Turner only asks her to pour it on her own. The same logic that dissolves the left’s race-essence and gender-essence dissolves her people-essence, her West-essence, her woman-nature, her natural state, her common sense. She is right that the left reifies. She is blind that she does the same, and the blindness has a shape. She sees the essence clearly when it belongs to her enemy and not at all when it belongs to her.
In Explaining the Normative, Stephen Turner takes aim at a move that most moral and political talk depends on. The move is to treat an ought as a fact. The normativist holds that there are real binding norms in the world, genuine obligations, valid standards, things we truly must do and truly owe, and that these normative facts stand over and above the causal facts of what people feel and do, with an authority that holds whether or not anyone honors it. Turner denies the facts are there. When you look for the binding norm, what you find is people. People who feel a demand as binding, who experience certain things as sacred and certain failures as intolerable, who sanction the ones who fall short, all of it caused and explicable in the ordinary way. The feeling of being bound is real. The binding fact is not. Turner’s sharpest cut is the line between the two. That a person experiences an obligation as authoritative is a fact about him. That there is an obligation out there with authority over everyone is the inflation he refuses, because the felt authority is not evidence of real authority, and the real authority does no work the feeling has not already done.
Arynne Wexler named her show Nonnegotiable. The tagline is that some values are not up for debate. That is the strongest normativist claim a person can make, the claim that certain oughts bind regardless of anyone’s assent or feeling, and she has put it on the marquee.
Her whole vocabulary is the ought stated as a fact. Institutions ought to reward merit. A man ought to say what he thinks and ought never apologize for his people. Courage is a virtue and cowardice is a sin, always cool and always cringe. Ours is the party of justice and not vengeance, of right reason and law and order. The competent deserve their place and the merit is owed to them. And underneath the political oughts sit the sacred ones, the covenant she was chosen to keep, the commandments that bind, the judgment of God which is the only judgment she says she fears. Every one of these is presented not as something she demands but as something that is so, a standard already valid, an obligation already in force, a fact about the moral structure of the world that she is reading off and others are failing to honor.
The Megyn Kelly indictment is where the normativism runs hottest, and where Turner cuts cleanest. Wexler’s charge is moral cowardice under the guise of political bravery. Megyn, she says, has an obligation to denounce the antisemites, and her silence is a real failing, a binding norm broken. Wexler wields the obligation as a fact that holds over Megyn whether or not Megyn feels it. Turner asks where that fact is. What is there is Wexler’s demand, felt by her as binding, and her sanction, the public naming of the failure. Megyn’s flat I don’t care, said of whether Tucker is an antisemite, is not the failure to honor a real obligation she somehow cannot see. It is the simple absence in Megyn of the demand that grips Wexler. Two people, two different felt demands, and no third standard hovering above them that settles which is bound. Turner is not telling Wexler her demand is wrong or that she should drop it. He is telling her that the obligation she points to is her demand wearing the face of a fact, and that the force of you have an obligation reduces, on inspection, to I require this of you and will sanction you for refusing.
Nonnegotiable is the banner that undoes itself. To call a value nonnegotiable is to say it carries authority no negotiation can touch, that it binds before anyone agrees and after anyone refuses. Turner says nothing carries that authority, because there are no such binding facts, only people who feel certain things as nonnegotiable and who sanction the ones who treat them as up for grabs. Her nonnegotiables are her sacreds, felt as binding and caused like any feeling, and the word nonnegotiable is the authority she projects onto them, not a property they own. They are nonnegotiable to her. The marquee leaves off the last two words.
The sacred case asks for care, and Turner gives the room. His deflation is about the logic of the claim and not about whether God exists. The believer who feels a divine command, who experiences the covenant as binding and the commandment as real, has a genuine first-person experience. What Turner denies is the step from that experience to a normative fact that binds the man who does not share it. Wexler can hold her covenant and feel it bind her. What she cannot get from it is an obligation that holds over the secular Jew she would disown or the friend who will not denounce, because their not feeling the bind is not the violation of a fact. It is the absence of the feeling. The covenant obligates the one who stands inside it. It issues no ought to the one who stands outside, however much she experiences it as issuing one.
The same deflation runs through her verdicts. The coward, the bad person, the evil policy, the justice owed and the justice denied. She delivers these as perceptions, as readings of real moral facts that any honest eye would see. Turner relocates them. They are sanctions, the expressions of a demand felt so strongly that it presents to her as the sight of something out there. The disapproval is real and it works in the world. It is just not the discovery of a normative fact. It is the issuing of one, by her, in the only way normative things ever get issued, by a person who feels the demand and acts on it.
Here is the turn she has half made already, and it is the one that should land. Against the left she is a normative deflationist in full cry. Their you must use the pronouns, their moral demands, the whole apparatus of being forced to submit, she sees through at a glance. She names it for what it is, coercion dressed as a binding norm, social pressure pretending to be a real obligation, a felt demand of theirs that they have inflated into a fact that supposedly binds her. That is Turner’s exact move, performed by Wexler, on her enemies. She knows in her bones that you ought to affirm this is not a fact in the world but a demand with a sanction behind it. Turner only asks her to look at you ought to denounce that, and you ought to reward merit, and these values are nonnegotiable, and notice that they have the same shape. A felt demand. A sanction for refusal. No fact above the fray. She is a deflationist about the oughts she resents and a realist about the oughts she loves, and the line between the two is not a line in the world. It runs through her.
So what does the frame mean for her. It removes the floor under her favorite move. When she says these values are nonnegotiable and you are obligated to honor them, she is not reporting a feature of reality. She is voicing a demand and threatening a sanction, which is what everyone does, including the people she accuses of denying reality. Her indictment of Megyn, the bravest thing she has said, keeps all its force as a sanction and loses its standing as the perception of a violated fact. She can demand that Megyn speak. She cannot truthfully say the obligation was there all along, binding Megyn, waiting to be honored. There is a freedom in this, the freedom to own her values as her demands instead of pretending they are stitched into the structure of the world. But the cost is the rhetorical move she leans on hardest, the appeal to a binding ought that is supposed to obligate the people who do not feel it. Strip the normativism and the marquee changes. Not nonnegotiable. Nonnegotiable to me, and I will fight you over it. That is the honest version, and it is the one she already grants when the ought belongs to someone else.
The Voice
Her signature is a collision of registers, and once you hear it you hear it everywhere. She talks like someone who went to Wharton and lives on 4chan, and she runs both idioms in the same breath without a seam. The Charlie Kirk eulogy gives you the high end at full stretch, Buckley’s “stood athwart,” “a Daniel come to judgment,” “the many primrose paths to self-immolation,” “the unwitting tributary.” Two sentences later she writes “he bled aura.” That is the voice. Credentialed highbrow slammed into meme-native lowbrow, and the friction between them is the thing she sells. Most people who can reach for “tributary” cannot say “based” without sounding like a substitute teacher, and most people fluent in “cringe” and “good and hard” cannot build a tricolon. She does both, and the blend is her competitive edge.
The diction follows from that. She manufactures sticky epithets the way a trader books quick wins, “low-t soy beta,” “Jihadi Jane,” “androgynous woke,” coinages built to travel. She speaks fluent Extremely Online, normies and libtard and aura and mid, and she folds in a finance lexicon when she turns analyst, proof of concept, go to market, the rent variable held constant. Then the Jewish register, covenant and the nation and earning her stripes. She reaches for absolutes by default. Always, never, the goat, nonnegotiable, literally. The vocabulary deals in totalities, which is part of why she lands hard and part of why she overshoots.
Her speaking manner is fast and fluent and almost never gropes for a word. She packs subordinate clauses and then drops a short flat punch, and the punch is delivered deadpan, in the same even tone as the mild thing before it. The flatness is the comic engine. She says the wild line with no vocal italics, so the laugh comes from the gap between content and delivery. She told us her own method, that comedy makes people agree before they realize they should not, and you can watch her run it, the build, the level tone, the landing, the move-on before anyone reconsiders. She also narrates herself while she performs, the running meta-aside, “the Nazi crew will clip this,” “I’m obviously kind of crazy.” She is the act and the color commentary on the act at once, which flatters the audience into feeling they are in on something.
The rhetoric proper is more trained than the meme surface suggests. The eulogy is full of real figures, anaphora on “never walked out,” the tricolon “Fight. Fight. Fight.,” antithesis everywhere, the clean inversion “9/11 showed us we weren’t safe from the world, 9/10 showed us we aren’t safe from each other.” Her master structure is the binary, courage against cowardice, sound against unsound, the Romney test, the phone screen, would you date across the aisle. She thinks in litmus and sorts people in or out, and the sorting drives the prose. She likes the mirror move, the claim that the hatred aimed at her side is really the enemy seeing his own reflection. And she leans hard on the pre-emptive concession, “at the risk of sounding disrespectful to the victims of 9/11,” then says the disrespectful thing anyway. The disclaimer is doing deniability work, the same job as “I’m just saying, I have no oversight on this.” She wants the transgression and the alibi in one gesture.
Underneath the persona there are two voices, and they do not quite get along. One is the analyst, cold and quotable, “feelings don’t care about facts,” the turnout pessimism, the prediction that Jews want acceptance and will not move. That voice is spare and good and you wish she stayed in it longer. The other is the provocateur, the slurs and the bits and the body jokes, and it runs on the coined epithet and the shock. She switches between them by room. With Rubin she is wonkier, with Carolla she is cruder and feeds the race bits, with Steele she is more devout. The register tracks the venue, which tells you the manner is a tool she controls, not a temperament she is stuck with.
The tells are mostly tells of excess. She inflates, the MLK comparison, the line about a death bigger than 9/11, “the dumbest smart people,” and the inflation cheapens the sharp thing it sits next to. The deniability tic, said often enough, reads as wanting credit for daring and cover from the cost. And the register collision that works in an interview misfires in a eulogy, where “bled aura” cheapens the grief it means to carry. Her reliance on the manufactured label can stand in for an argument she has not made.
What is distinctive and good is the fluency in two idioms almost nobody combines, the real ear for the phrase that sticks, the comic timing, and the trained rhetorician who shows up when she decides to work. The self-narrating awareness is unusual and effective. When she drops the bits and lets the analyst talk, she is better than most of the people she shares a stage with, and she knows it, which is why she keeps reaching past it for the laugh.
Status game collapse. When players of a status game gain common knowledge that they’re playing a status game. They suddenly see each other as vain, insecure, or self-absorbed, which sends them scrambling to play a different status game. This is one of the engines of cultural evolution. Sacred value. A cover story for status-seeking designed to prevent a status game from collapsing. We deny we’re seeking dominance or superiority and instead pretend that we’re seeking honor, wisdom, beauty, authenticity, self-actualization, equality, morality, or the betterment of humankind. Darwinian cynicism. The view that everyone’s basic desires are products of natural selection. This is cynical because evolution cannot favor a basic desire to make the world a better place—only the desire to help ourselves, our families, or our tribes. The Vibes Theory of Money. Most people suck at economics. People mainly think about money as a way to convey information about status and social relationships—not as a proxy for goods and services. Money is more about vibes than stuff. Alliance Theory. Political ideologies are explained by historically contingent (and sometimes random) alliances between ethnic, class, religious, and cultural groups. “The difference between liberals and conservatives is not what values they hold, but whom they view as their allies.” Strange bedfellows. Political allies who are conspicuously dissimilar yet awkwardly find themselves in the same coalition—e.g., the alliance between Christian fundamentalists and free market libertarians, or between liberal college students and Islamic extremists. Opinion. A subjective preference (e.g., for food, music, or policies), combined with a set of positive judgments about the people who share that preference (e.g., they’re smart and good) and a set of negative judgments about the people who lack them (e.g., they’re dumb and bad). The Opinion Game. A status game we play with our opinions, where the objective is to “make the people who share our preferences look superior to the people who don’t, while concealing the fact that we’re trying to do that.” The superhuman fallacy. 1) People who disagree with me are dumb and bad. 2) The reason they are dumb and bad is because of “human nature.” 3) Unstated implication: I am superhuman. The desire problem. Most of our desires are about being better than, or better off than, the people around us. This means we cannot all get what we want, conflict is inevitable, and utopia (where everyone is satisfied) is impossible. Intergenerational competition theory. The only way to solve the desire problem (see above) is for each generation to become higher status than the previous one. The older generation is okay with this, because the younger generation contains their progeny. This is the closest thing to utopia we’re capable of. Toxic learning: The desire to learn about gossip, bluster, propaganda, outrage bait, disaster porn, and pseudo-profundity, while being bored by accuracy, nuance, and practical utility.
David Pinsof’s status game is the competition we never stop playing, to be smarter, cooler, braver, kinder, truer, and more virtuous than the people around us, scored like a game with points and players and winners and losers. The game has one great vulnerability. Pinsof calls it collapse. Collapse comes when the players gain common knowledge that the game is a status game, when they all see at once that the striving for honor is striving for rank, and in that moment they look vain and insecure to each other and the game caves in. So the players need protection, and the protection has a name. The sacred value is a cover story for status-seeking built to keep the game from collapsing. We deny we are chasing dominance and superiority. We claim we are chasing honor, wisdom, truth, morality, the betterment of mankind. The sacred value hides the rank-seeking from the other players and from ourselves, and that hiding is the work it does.
Arynne Wexler plays a clear status game in a clear arena. The arena is the post-gatekeeper conservative world, the podcasts and the clips and the comedy stage, and the points are countable, the followers near a million, the bookings with Rubin and Carolla and Steele and Buck Sexton, the standup sets, the invitation to the Hamptons retreat where the movement’s names gather. The particular ladder she climbs is the one where points are scored for nerve. She competes to be the bravest in the room, the realest, the one willing to say the thing the others will not say. That is the game, and she is good at it.
Her game is more exposed to collapse than most, because she narrates her own play out loud. She describes her launch in the language of a startup, proof of concept and go to market. She says her videos perform better when she looks worse and she changes nothing about the looking. She explains her comedy as the art of making people agree before they notice they are agreeing. Every one of these is a near-confession that she is running a status operation, and every one walks her to the edge of the collapse, the moment her audience might see the courage as content and the conviction as a product. She flirts with that edge for a living.
This is where the sacred value goes to work, and the proof is in the timing. The cover stories arrive at the exact moments the status reading gets close. When the question turns to comedy and clout, she reaches for truth, comedy is the last place a person can say what is real, and the holy word lands precisely as the clout reading arrives. When her operation is most visible, the brand and the numbers and the merch, she reaches for risk and for the people, I could be hurt for this, I have lost sponsors for this, I do this because the nation of Israel always lives and I am earning my stripes as a Jew. The visible status play converts, in one move, into a holy sacrifice. And when the talk turns to approval and cancellation, to the scoreboard everyone can see, she relocates the scoreboard to a court no one can audit. I only care about the judgment of God. That is the strongest firewall she owns, because a scoreboard kept by God cannot be read by the other players, and a game whose points cannot be counted cannot collapse.
Her master sacred value is courage, and here the cover becomes seamless, because in her game courage is also the currency. The points are awarded for nerve, and the holy thing she claims to serve is nerve. Courage is always cool and cowardice is always cringe, she says, and that single line is at once the rule of the game and the sacred value that hides the game. When the holy value and the points are the same word, the cover story cannot slip, because there is no gap between what she is paid in and what she worships. She competes for courage-status and she defends the competition by calling courage sacred, and the two are indistinguishable even to her. That is why the firewall holds. She is not pretending courage is holy to disguise a hunger for rank. She has fused the holy and the rank into one substance, and the fusion is the perfect cover, the one a player can never see past because seeing past it would require prying apart a word that is whole to her.
Pinsof has a name for her other move too. Anti-status is the status you draw from looking like you do not want status. I do not care what they think, she says, I have no oversight, I answer only to God. The performed indifference is not the absence of a status play. It is a status play, the one that scores by appearing to keep no score, and it is among the most reliable points on her board.
Now the part that should sting, because she owns the whole apparatus and aims it everywhere but home. She is a master at forcing collapse on other people’s games. The left’s social justice, she says, is status-seeking in a costume. The women on the daytime shows are players chasing applause. The controlled-opposition right are grifters working for money and calling it principle. And her sharpest stroke, the charge against Megyn Kelly, is a collapse induced by name, moral cowardice under the guise of political bravery, which is Pinsof’s exact structure spoken aloud, a sacred value exposed as a status play. She can do this. She does it with real skill. She names the cover story for what it is the moment the cover story belongs to a rival. She has the tool that collapses any game, the common knowledge that it is a game, and she wields it freely against every player except the one holding her own microphone.
So what does the frame mean for her. The sacred value works because the player believes it, and Wexler believes hers. The courage feels holy to her, the people feel holy, the truth and the West and the judgment of God feel holy, and the sincerity is not the flaw in the cover. The sincerity is the cover. What the frame shows is functional and not moral. Whatever else her sacred values are, they keep her status game from collapsing, and you can watch them do that job by noticing when they fire, always at the approach of the status reading, never at rest. And it names the one cost she pays for the perfect firewall. She has built a self that no player can read as a player, not even herself, and so she has surrendered the single tool she turns on everyone else, the collapse that lets a person see his own game. She will find the status game in every rival and never in the mirror. The sacred value is doing exactly what Pinsof says it is built to do. It is preventing the collapse that would let her see it.
David Pinsof’s superhuman fallacy runs in three steps, and the third is the one nobody says out loud. Step one, the people who disagree with me are dumb and bad. Step two, the reason they are dumb and bad is human nature, the biases and passions and weaknesses built into the species. Step three, left unstated, I am the exception. I am not driven by those weaknesses. I see clearly where the rest are blind. I stand outside the nature I have just described. The flaw sits in plain view once the third step is spoken. If the failing is human nature, then it is universal, and a universal failing includes the person doing the diagnosing. You cannot explain everyone else’s errors by appeal to the human animal and then exempt yourself, because you are a human animal. The only clear eye in a blind room belongs to someone who is not in the room. To exempt yourself from human nature is to claim you are superhuman, and almost no one has earned that claim.
Arynne Wexler runs all three steps.
Step one she performs without pause. The people who disagree with her are dumb and bad. The leftist Jews are the dumbest smart people. The liberal women are emotional and captured. The voters for Mamdani are not thoughtful. The men she dislikes are low-testosterone and soft. Her opponents are not merely mistaken. They are stupid and they are cowardly and some of them are ghouls. The catalog is long and she keeps it current.
Step two she supplies herself, which is what makes her such a clean case. She does not leave the explanation implied. She names human nature as the cause of the errors. People are emotional creatures who feel their way to their beliefs, she says, and feelings do not care about the facts. People crave acceptance, which is why the Jews who should know better keep voting for the party that will have them. People hold their beliefs for status, the luxury beliefs of the comfortable. People are tribal and conformist and bend to the social cost of speaking. She has built a full picture of human weakness, emotional, status-hungry, tribal, cowardly, captured, and she reaches for it whenever she needs to explain why the world is wrong. The world is wrong because people are people.
Step three she takes every time, and she takes it as the unstated gift the fallacy depends on. She is conservative, she says, because she had a brain, which sets her apart from the feelers and the followers. She is not like other women, not emotional, not soft, a girl only as a joke. She does not care what the crowd thinks, she answers only to the judgment of God, which sets her apart from the status-hungry. Her courage stands against their cowardice. In each case the weakness she has just called human nature is the weakness she claims not to have. They feel, she thinks. They conform, she stands alone. They chase acceptance, she fears only God. They are cowards, she is brave. The clear eye in the blind room. The exception to the species.
The disproof is in her own conduct, case by case, because the failings she exempts herself from are the ones she shows most plainly. She calls the others emotional, and she runs as hot as anyone alive, the apocalyptic dread that has her planning for civil war, the rage at the antisemites, the grief and fury of the Kirk eulogy, the fierce love of her people. If feeling is the human weakness, hers is on full display and at high volume. She calls the others status-hungry, and she competes for standing by her own description, the followers counted, the nerve scored, the bookings won. If status-hunger is human nature, hers is showing. She calls the others tribal, and there is no more tribal voice in the room than the one that says the nation always lives and stand with your people and do not hide. If tribalism is the failing, she is the proof and not the exception. She calls the others cowards bending to social cost, and she calibrates each transgression to the room she is in and tags it for deniability, the Nazi crew will clip this, I am just saying. That calibration is the fear of social cost, managing itself in real time. Every weakness she places in human nature and lifts off herself turns out to be operating in her, sometimes louder than in the people she diagnoses.
Her best line is the one that convicts her. Feelings do not care about the facts is the sharpest thing she says, and it is a claim about human beings, all of them, the species. The moment it is true, it is true of her. She cannot be the one mind that runs on facts while the rest run on feeling, because the claim she made was not about the rest. It was about people, and she is people. She uses the line as a one-way weapon, a truth about them that is somehow not a truth about her, and the one-way use is the fallacy in its purest form. A human-nature claim cannot be aimed in a single direction. It points back at the hand that throws it.
The left might often be emotional and tribal and hungry for status and acceptance. Pinsof’s point cuts elsewhere. Those traits are human, so they are hers too, and the error is not the diagnosis but the exemption. The cure is symmetry. If she applied the reading to herself, she would lose nothing true and gain a great deal, because the cold realist who says feelings beat facts would include her own feelings, and the analyst who sees status driving the herd would see it driving her, and she would be sharper for it and far less flattered. What she would lose is the unstated third step, and she cannot afford to lose it, because the clear eye in the blind room is the whole of her brand. She would never say the words I am superhuman. She would laugh at them. But every argument she builds requires them, every time she explains the herd by the nature of man and quietly steps outside it, and she cannot give the step up without giving up the self that sees through everyone.
The clarity she is proudest of, the eye that catches the emotion and the status and the fear moving other people, is the surest sign that she is one of them. She reads those drives so well because she runs on the same equipment, the same passions, the same hunger, the same flinch from the crowd. A creature actually outside human nature would have no feel for it and no temptation to exempt itself. The exemption is the most human thing she does. She is not the exception to the species. She is a vivid, loud, gifted specimen of it, and the belief that she stands apart is the oldest move the species makes.
David Pinsof’s dark idealism turns a comfortable assumption upside down. We tend to think cruelty is the work of people who know they are bad, that the bully and the hater act from a sense of their own wickedness. Pinsof says the opposite. The conviction that fuels the worst behavior is the conviction of one’s own purity, the heartfelt belief that we are noble and benevolent and good. That belief does two things at once. It blinds us to our own biases, because a pure person does not check himself for the failings he is certain he lacks. And it turns the people who do not share our ideals into something evil or subhuman, because if we are the good ones, the ones against us must be the bad ones, and once they are bad enough they stop being quite human. This is the engine of dark morality, the tribalism and the bullying and the dehumanizing all done in the warm certainty of being right. The purer a man feels, the more license he has to treat his enemy as vermin, and the less he notices he is doing it. The purity is the permission slip.
Arynne Wexler carries an unusually loud conviction of her own side’s purity, and that makes her a clean case. Her self-image is built on nobility. She is the brave one against the cowards, the truthful one against the feelers, the woman who answers only to the judgment of God. Her movement is the decent one, saving the West, saving the soul of the next generation, holding the line of common sense against decay. Hers is the party of justice. The dial on her idealism sits near the top, and Pinsof’s point is that this is the setting where the dark work gets done.
The eulogy she wrote for Charlie Kirk hands the demonstration over on a plate, because the purity and the dehumanizing live in the same paragraphs, touching. In one breath she declares the creed. Ours is the party of justice and not vengeance, of right reason and not blind rage, of law and order and not caprice. She warns her own side against meeting violence with violence. She counsels persuasion over the sword. She quotes courage as cool and cowardice as cringe and calls her people instruments of God. It is a sermon against rage, delivered by someone certain she stands on the side of reason. And in the same breath, in the surrounding sentences, she calls the killer a cowardly vicious animal whose name deserves to be forgotten, says she will not dignify that animal, renders him a sniveling insect cowering behind a scope, and casts the watching left as ghouls and as cowards hiding behind keyboards. Animal. Insect. Ghoul. The vermin vocabulary runs right alongside the plea for right reason, and the two never trouble each other on the page.
The contradiction is not a slip. It is the structure, and it is dark idealism working as Pinsof describes. The certainty that she belongs to the party of right reason is the precise thing that keeps her from feeling the blind rage in I will not dignify that animal. Her contempt does not read to her as rage, because rage is what the other side does and she is the reasoned one. Her purity has made her own fury invisible to her. So she can preach against rage and perform it in a single essay without any sense of a seam, because the conviction of nobility has done its first job, the blinding, and her cruelty arrives dressed as justice. She is not lying when she counsels restraint. She means it. She simply cannot see that the insect and the animal are the rage she is counseling against, and she cannot see it for the reason Pinsof names, that the idealism blinds her to her own bias. The purer the self-image, the more total the blindness.
The eulogy is the sharpest instance, not the only one. The standing vocabulary is full of the same move, the Jihadi Jane and the low-testosterone soft man and the ghoul, the opponent rendered as something not fully human, and it travels always in the company of the decent and the brave and the truthful self-image. Her best material and her worst pour from the same spring. The conviction of her side’s goodness produces the high road she preaches, the persuade-do-not-avenge counsel that is the finest thing in the eulogy, and the same conviction produces the dehumanizing she practices three lines later. That is why they sit together. They are not opposites in her. They are the two outputs of one purity.
She knows the pattern cold when it belongs to the left. She sees with great clarity that their conviction of being the compassionate ones, the anti-racists, the righteous, is exactly what licenses them to treat the conservative as a deplorable, as subhuman, as a thing worth cheering the death of. She names their idealism-fueled cruelty and she is right about it. The progressive who is sure of his own goodness hates more freely, not less, because his goodness tells him the hatred is justice. Pinsof asks one thing of her, that she notice her own purity does the identical work. The party of right reason and justice licenses her animal and her insect precisely as the party of compassion licenses their deplorable. She is a connoisseur of the other side’s dark idealism and blind to her own, and the blindness is not a separate failing. It is the diagnostic symptom, written into the definition. The biases you cannot see are the ones your idealism is hiding.
Her side might be right about a great deal. That is the whole sting of dark idealism, that it runs through sincere conviction of goodness rather than through any lie, and the better she believes her side to be, the more license she feels to make the enemy a monster. The cure is not to drop her ideals. The cure is to treat the feeling of righteousness as the warning light it is, the moment to suspect her own cruelty rather than trust it. Her eulogy convicts itself on this exact point. She warns that it would be a shame if the man famous for beating opponents with facts and logic became the reason the right abandoned both, and in the same essay she abandons both, trading the facts and the logic for the animal and the insect. She wrote the warning and broke it in the space of a few paragraphs, and the purity is the reason she could not feel the break. Her most dangerous moment is not when she feels hatred. It is when she feels righteous, because that is the moment the hatred stops feeling like hatred and starts feeling like justice. The eulogy that preaches against rage is itself an act of the rage it preaches against, and dark idealism is the reason she cannot see it.
Tablet magazine says: “Arynne Wexler studies with Rabbi Joshua Weisberg of Jerusalem. She is a community member of Yakar Tel Aviv, Altneu New York, and Chabad Miami.”
A minor holiday in Israel, Hanukkah is often the one holiday celebrated by secular Jews in the diaspora. This could be a great thing, except that this story of resilience and faith has been boiled down to a materialistic echo of Christmas. We’ve completely lost sight of its ikar, its essence, and instead been left with a reminder of the failures and assimilation of the American Jew.
The typical understanding that most people have of the holiday is that a group of Jews called the Maccabees were the underdogs in a fight against their Greek oppressors, they lit candles that burned for eight nights when there was only enough oil for one, and that’s why we now light the menorah.
Except Hanukkah is not just a cute story about an oil miracle or a time for presents. The plotline in the books of the Maccabees is as good as a high-budget HBO series, filled with gory scenes, bravery, chiseled naked men, and backstabbing.
This is the most serious thing of hers I have read, and the earliest, December 2023, before the standup and before the prominence, in a venue that wants a literate Jewish reader rather than a clip. It matters for the arc, because it shows the peoplehood commitment is bedrock. The senior loyalty that overrides everything else in her later work, Israel and Jewish survival, is here at the start, argued in earnest. Whatever else she became, this was first.
She knows the material. The move that organizes the piece, that Hanukkah is two wars and the internal one against the Hellenizing Jews is the real one, is the historically richer reading and the correct one. The books of Maccabees do foreground the civil war against the assimilationists. Her details are well chosen and accurate, Jason and the gymnasium, the priests at the discus match, Eleazar’s martyrdom, Mattityahu killing the apostate at the altar. The best single stroke is the Josephus point. That Josephus (c. 37–c. 100) never mentions the oil and yet handed the English language the Festival of Lights, meaning the freedom to worship, is a real observation that pulls the holiday off the oil and onto the freedom, and it is the kind of thing that earns the Tablet slot. Maimonides (1138–1204) gets a fair nod as the balancer of victory and oil.
The strongest turn is won the battle, lost the war. She refuses the triumphal ending. The Hasmonean dynasty corrupted and collapsed into the Hellenized, Romanized, power-hungry thing the Maccabees had fought, a few generations on, and she says so. That is the cold realist who shows up everywhere in her, the one who predicts her own side will not move, here telling her own holiday that the heroes became the villains. It is unsentimental and it is true, and it is the part of the essay worth keeping. The Agnon anecdote does similar work, the secular Zionists throwing a riotous party around a statue of Mattityahu while being precisely the apostates he would have run through, a status irony she found in Tmol Shilshom by S.Y. Agnon (1888–1970), reported by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922). She reads Hebrew literature, not only polemics, and she uses it well. And she implicates herself, I myself am far from frum, which earns the argument and keeps the scold from coming down from above.
The emotional center of the piece is admiration for hard-as-nails Jews who fight, and the admired act is Mattityahu stabbing a fellow Jew at the altar, with an approving coda that he would have taken his sword to everyone at the party. She is calling to bring back the spirit of killing the assimilationist as the recoverable virtue. She flags it, the lesson is uncomfortable, but flagging is not wrestling, and she leans into the zealotry rather than working it through. Read on the front page, bring back the sword against the Jew who lit a discus is the line that does not survive, and the defensible message sitting right next to it, know what you are and do not give yourself away, is the one that does. She never separates them, and the tradition she invokes did. The rabbis pushed the Hasmoneans into the background and put the oil in front partly as a verdict on what those zealots became. The sages’ turn to the miracle of light is itself a quiet judgment on the men with the swords, and her call to bring the swordsmen back runs against the grain of the very tradition she is citing.
The other tell is the hardening at the end, the anti-assimilation argument tipping into a purity test. A menorah in a home with a Christmas tree as a risk to Jewish identity, the campus antisemitism committee dismissed as a fake victory, the useful idiots who think we are too weak. The reflective voice gives way to the combative one, and the sorting instinct that runs through all her work, sound or unsound, fighter or assimilationist, gets aimed at fellow Jews. The same defiance that is admirable as keep your fire becomes a tribunal when it decides which Jews are real ones.
Continuity is the theological root of the later political persona. The Maccabee who will not assimilate and will not cower is the type that becomes the conservative who will not conform, courage against cowardice in religious dress, written years before courage is cool and cowardice is cringe. The senior loyalty and the defiance ethos were both here, sincere, in a serious register, before any of the rest. Reading it you see that the best of her, the learning and the won-the-battle-lost-the-war honesty, and the recurring problem, the romance of the sword turned on her own people, were present together at the start. The fire she wants the American Jew to remember is real. The question the essay raises and does not answer is what the fire is allowed to burn.
David Pinsof says an opinion is never just an opinion. A preference for a food, a song, a policy comes bundled with two verdicts about people. The people who share the preference are smart and good. The people who lack it are dumb and bad. That bundle is what an opinion is, a taste with a ranking of human beings stapled to it. And the Opinion Game is what we do with the bundle. We play to make the people who share our preferences look superior to the people who do not, and the defining rule of the game is that we conceal that this is what we are doing. The concealment is not optional. It is the heart of the thing. The moment everyone sees you are running a status game with your tastes, the move loses its power, so the work has to happen under cover. A good player elevates his own side and lowers the other while leaving no fingerprints.
Arynne Wexler calls her bundle common sense, and the name is the first concealment.
Common sense patriotism is the brand, and it presents her positions not as preferences but as the baseline any sound person already holds. That framing hides the preference, and hiding the preference hides the verdict attached to it. If her views are simple common sense, then she is not elevating her side over anyone. She is only noticing, neutrally, who has sense and who has lost it. But who has sense is the verdict. The word common sense does the concealment by itself, because it turns a ranking of people into what sounds like a flat description of reality. She is not saying I prefer these things and the people who agree are my betters. She is saying these things are obvious and the people who miss them are deficient, which is the same sentence with the status work painted over.
The verdict underneath runs loud. The sharers are brave and smart and based and real, the ones who can still think. The holdouts are the dumbest smart people, captured, emotional, cowardly, soft, ghouls. So her opinion, unpacked, is never I favor this policy. It is the people who favor it are good and the people who oppose it are stupid and cowardly, delivered with manufactured names for the inferior kind. That is Pinsof’s definition of an opinion, performed at full volume. The preference is almost incidental. The ranking of people is the product.
The Opinion Game demands concealment, and most people conceal clumsily, through earnest argument or moral sincerity that still leaves the status play half visible. Wexler conceals through comedy, which is a far better instrument, because a joke does both jobs at once. It delivers the verdict, the sharers laughing together at the holdouts, and it hides that a verdict is being delivered, because a joke is only a joke. She has described the method in her own words. The point of the comedy, she says, is to make people agree before they notice they are agreeing. That sentence is the concealment rule of the Opinion Game spoken aloud by a player who thinks she is describing craft. The laugh installs the claim that her side is superior, and it installs it under the radar, so that nobody in the room, including her, files it as a status play. And when someone does catch it, the joke supplies the exit. Lighten up. I was kidding. The concealment comes with its own escape hatch.
Watch the bit about the emotional liberal woman, or the soft man, or the marching activist, and you can see the game run live. The people who laugh are marking themselves, in the same motion, as the ones who get it, the smart ones, the ones on the right side of the joke. The people who do not laugh are marked too, as humorless, captured, slow. The comedy does not merely express her opinion about these people. It sorts the room into the superior and the inferior by who laughs, in real time, and it disguises the sorting as entertainment. That is the Opinion Game at its most efficient, the status verdict and its concealment fused into a single act that the audience experiences as fun.
So she carries two masks over one move. Common sense hides that there is a preference, and therefore that there is a verdict. Comedy hides that the verdict is a status claim, and lets her disown it on demand. Between the two she can rank people all day, elevate her side and lower the other, and leave almost no trace that she is playing the game everyone is playing.
And she reads the game with great skill when the other side runs it. She sees clearly that the right side of history and be kind and the rest are not neutral truths but preferences with a verdict bundled in, that the progressive uses his opinions to mark himself smart and good and the conservative dumb and bad, all while pretending it is only morality or only the science. She knows their concealment cold. She can name the way they hide a status game inside a moral claim. Pinsof asks one thing of her, that she turn the same eye on common sense, which hides a status game inside a description, and on her comedy, which hides one inside a punchline. The left’s science says and her common sense are the same concealment. Their solemn moral face and her disarming joke are two coverings for one move. She is a connoisseur of the rival’s Opinion Game and blind to her own, and the blindness is exactly where the game wants her.
Everyone plays the Opinion Game. Wexler owns the best cover in the business, common sense to hide the preference and comedy to hide the verdict, and the price of cover that good is that she can no longer find the move underneath it. She cannot tell her preferences from facts, because common sense has erased the seam. She cannot tell her status plays from jokes, because the laugh has erased that one too. So she cannot see that her common sense is an opinion in the full sense Pinsof means, a ranking of people wearing the mask of description, the same object she identifies instantly when it belongs to the left. The thing she reads best in them is the thing she cannot read in herself. And the laugh she is proudest of, the one that makes people agree before they notice they are agreeing, is not the persuasion she takes it for. This is the Opinion Game working at full strength, sorting the room into the superior and the inferior, with the sorting tucked so neatly inside the joke that even she does not see it land.
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Here’s what you can tell a leftist claiming that President Trump “broke international law” when he captured the narcoterrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
International law is WORD MAGIC.
It’s meaningless. It’s used by people with masters degrees in gender studies to stop good guys, like the United States, from stopping bad people. The same people who are upset about broken international law didn’t seem upset about basic human rights in Venezuela.
International law only has power because WE, the United States, chose to enforce it.
Without us, what will you do? Is the UN going to write a strongly worded letter enforced by the French? Do you think war lords in the Congo are scared of international law or the full force of the United States of America?
Your words are meaningless.
You choose to not understand — but the rest of the world does.
Welcome to 2026.
She sounds a bit like me.
Claude says:
The realist core has a pedigree. The claim that international law is not really law runs back to John Austin (1790-1859), who called it positive morality rather than law proper, since no sovereign stands above states to command them and punish defection. The modern version sits in Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner’s The Limits of International Law: states comply when compliance serves their interest and defect when it doesn’t. On the hard cases, one state using force against another’s head of state, the realist has the better of it. No court can make the United States hand Maduro back. Senator Warner’s worry, does this mean any large country can indict and seize the ruler of a smaller neighbor, is her point stated as alarm instead of triumph. The Noriega capture in 1989 is the precedent, and US courts upheld every piece of it.
So the part of her that sounds like you is the realism and the cadence. Short declaratives. “Your words are meaningless.” That is your rhythm when you drop the clauses and go Hemingway.
Here is where she stops sounding like the writer you say you want to be.
The passage is a script. It opens “here’s what you can tell a leftist.” It exists to arm one side against the other. The gender-studies line does no analytic work. It ties the law to a despised group so the reader can dismiss the law by dismissing the group. The good-guys-and-bad-people frame and the “welcome to 2026” sign-off are signals to the people who already agree. Coalition work top to bottom, the thing you say you do not want to do.
The overclaim also costs her the argument with anyone who knows the field. “Meaningless” collapses the hard case into the whole. Most international law is dull and obeyed: maritime boundaries, extradition treaties, diplomatic immunity, the postal union, obeyed because reciprocal rules serve everyone, not because the US holds a gun on the signatories. The Maduro seizure is the exception she mistakes for the rule. A serious scholar reads “word magic” and stops reading.
That is the gap. She writes ammunition. You say you want to write the thing the small number of people who decide what counts as knowledge in their corner might consider. Different jobs. The realist case against international law can be built so an international-law professor has to engage it. Cite Austin. Distinguish the routine body of the law from the use-of-force cases. Concede where the law binds, then show where it evaporates against a great power. Built that way it lands harder, because the reader can’t wave it off as a yell from the other team.
Your instinct, if you wrote this, would be to make the strong version. Hers is the version that feels good in the room.
The honest answer to “did Trump break international law” is that reasonable scholars are fighting about it in print right now, lawful under US domestic law on the Noriega line, contested under international law on sovereignty and use of force. That answer satisfies neither Wexler nor the leftist. Which is usually the sign it’s the true one.
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Arguably the most famous American Jewish comedian under 40 bragging that AI can never be as racist as she is and making jokes about Somali IQ.
I've been saying for years…the Jewish stereotype will have to catch up with the fact that the under 40s are mostly this or Hasidic. https://t.co/OYKz7IuGRX
I asked four AI bots this question based on Arynne Wexler’s comedy routine above.
The results did not surprise me. ChatGPT was the most PC and they all agreed on basic facts (Claude had the most thorough sourcing).
ChatGPT said:
There is no scientifically reliable single “average Somali IQ” that can be stated with confidence.
You may find claims online that assign a specific national IQ score to Somalia or to Somali people as a group, but these estimates are highly controversial. Researchers have criticized many national-IQ rankings because:
Data are often sparse or based on very small, unrepresentative samples.
IQ tests can be affected by language, education, nutrition, health, and familiarity with testing.
Results from one region or subgroup are sometimes generalized to an entire country.
Countries with limited educational and testing infrastructure may have especially unreliable estimates.
IQ scores are designed primarily to compare individuals within a similar testing context, not to rank ethnicities or nationalities.
If you’re interested in cognitive ability, educational outcomes, or human intelligence research in Somalia specifically, I can explain what the available research says and why these estimates are disputed.
Grok said:
Estimates from the most comprehensive national IQ compilations place the average IQ of Somalis at approximately 68.This figure comes primarily from the datasets compiled by psychologists Richard Lynn and David Becker, updated through works such as The Intelligence of Nations. Somalia receives an assigned value of 68, consistent with broader sub-Saharan African patterns in those reviews.
The estimate draws heavily from a 2017 study administering Raven’s Progressive Matrices (a relatively culture-reduced test) to Somali refugee children in Kenyan camps. Raw scores, when converted using British norms and adjustments, yielded results around 68.
Earlier extrapolations in Lynn and Vanhanen’s work used neighboring East African data due to the lack of large-scale testing inside Somalia itself.
Some alternative compilations, such as certain 2026 online aggregators, report higher figures around 83–84 for Somalia. These often incorporate different normalizations, broader online test data, or stronger Flynn effect adjustments, but they deviate from the Lynn-Becker framework that dominates cross-national comparisons.
Limitations of the DataSomalia presents unique challenges for measurement: prolonged instability, civil conflict, displacement, and minimal formal schooling mean direct nationwide samples are scarce. The refugee-camp data reflects individuals exposed to trauma, malnutrition, and interrupted education, which can depress scores. Critics, including some researchers reviewing sub-Saharan data, argue that more inclusive sampling and different study selections push regional averages closer to 80.
Despite these issues, the pattern of lower average performance on cognitive tests appears in multiple independent measures, including international student assessments and diaspora outcomes.
Somali immigrant and refugee communities in Western countries (such as the UK, US, and Scandinavia) show academic and cognitive test results below national averages in host populations. For example, studies of Somali children in Minneapolis noted elevated rates of low IQ scores among those diagnosed with autism compared to other groups. Educational attainment for Somali pupils in the UK lags behind many other immigrant cohorts. These patterns align with the home-country estimates rather than fully converging to host norms.
IQ distributions have a standard deviation of roughly 15 points everywhere. This produces massive overlap. Plenty of Somalis score 100+, 120+, or higher, just as every population contains individuals across the full range. Group averages describe central tendencies, not individuals.
What IQ measures: It captures general cognitive ability (the g factor), which reliably predicts educational success, job performance, income, and societal outcomes at both individual and national levels. It is one of psychology’s most replicated constructs.
Causes of group differences: These remain debated. Within populations, heritability estimates for IQ typically range from 50–80% in adulthood. Between-group differences show persistence across environments (including adoption and immigration studies) alongside clear environmental influences such as nutrition, schooling quality, disease burden, and culture. High rates of consanguineous marriage in Somali society represent one documented environmental depressor. No single factor explains the full picture, and precise genetic versus environmental proportions for this specific population lack definitive resolution from current evidence.
Sub-Saharan African national IQ estimates overall cluster in the low 70s in Lynn-Becker data, with ongoing scholarly disagreement pushing some revisions upward.
These numbers come from imperfect but existing psychometric data. They correlate with real-world development metrics across countries without implying fixed destiny for any person or determining moral worth. Individual Somalis, like individuals from any background, demonstrate the full spectrum of human capability.
Gemini said:
There is no verified, scientifically valid nationwide average IQ for Somalia. The figures often cited on the internet—frequently around 67 or 68—originate from highly disputed datasets compiled by controversial researchers like Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in their work on national intelligence. Mainstream psychologists, sociologists, and psychometricians reject these national rankings due to severe methodological flaws. In the case of Somalia, the specific data points reveal major limitations:
Unrepresentative Sampling: No comprehensive, nationwide cognitive testing has ever been conducted inside Somalia, largely due to decades of political instability and lack of institutional infrastructure. The Refugee Camp Study: The often-cited score of 68 comes primarily from a 2017 study that administered Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices to a sample of Somali refugee children living in the Dadaab camps in Kenya. Mainstream experts point out that using a group of displaced children facing chronic malnutrition, trauma, and disrupted education to characterize an entire nation is scientifically invalid. Western Norming Biases: These studies convert raw test scores into IQ values using Western norms (such as British or American baselines). Standardized intelligence tests measure specific types of formal abstract reasoning taught in modern school systems. They do not accurately capture cognitive potential when applied to populations lacking access to formal, stable education. When environmental factors like nutrition, healthcare, and education improve, average scores on these tests rise over generations—a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. Consequently, mainstream scientific organizations do not recognize national IQ scores as measures of innate intelligence.
Every source Gemini relied upon but one was Grokipedia.
Claude said:
The figure you will see quoted is 68. It comes from Richard Lynn (1930–2023) and his collaborators Tatu Vanhanen (1929–2015) and David Becker, and it appears in books like IQ and the Wealth of Nations and The Intelligence of Nations. That single number now circulates across country-ranking websites as though it were a measured national average.
It is not. The honest answer is that nobody has a defensible estimate of an average Somali IQ, and the 68 figure rests on data too thin to carry the weight placed on it.
Trace it to the source and the problem shows. Somalia’s national IQ in the Lynn and Becker dataset comes from one sample of child refugees in a Kenyan refugee camp. Other inputs that get folded in are a small test of schoolchildren and a test of a few dozen children aged six to sixteen. From samples like these, someone produced a number meant to stand for a whole country.
The methodological critiques are not from people squeamish about the topic. They are technical. A 2019 evaluation of the Lynn and Becker dataset found it unfit for purpose, with most of the data drawn from samples wholly unrepresentative of their national populations, often small convenience samples of children, sometimes chosen precisely because they had particular characteristics, and collected using different cognitive tests across populations too diverse to compare. A camp full of displaced children who have lived through war, hunger, and broken schooling tells you about the effects of war, hunger, and broken schooling. It does not isolate anything you could call a population mean.
Two further points cut against treating 68 as a real average. First, a score in that range sits below the threshold clinicians use to mark intellectual disability in an individual, which by itself should signal that the instrument is measuring deprivation and unfamiliarity with the test format rather than capacity. Second, a 2009 reanalysis by Wicherts, Dolan, and van der Maas found that Lynn and Vanhanen’s exclusion of studies had pushed their sub-Saharan estimate down, and that including the omitted studies raised the regional average to around 82, with the gap attributed to limited access to education, nutrition, and health care. The Flynn effect, the steady rise in measured scores as nutrition and schooling improve, has not yet run its course in places that lack those inputs.
So the truthful statement, the one that would survive the front page of the Times, runs like this. The most cited number for Somalia is 68. It comes from one researcher’s contested dataset, built on a refugee sample and a couple of small studies of children, and serious psychometricians reject it as a national measure. What that number tracks is decades of civil war, displacement, malnutrition, and the near collapse of formal schooling, the conditions known to depress test scores anywhere. It is not evidence about fixed ability, and treating it as such confuses an index of circumstance for a measure of capacity.
This is a sensitive area where bad numbers get used to support claims they cannot support, so the careful move is to name the figure, then name what it actually rests on.
The four bots don’t disagree about the facts. Read them side by side and the same skeleton shows in all four: the number is 68, it traces to Lynn and a refugee-camp sample, the sampling is bad, the Flynn effect and environment depress scores. Even ChatGPT, which withholds the number, lists the same objections everyone else uses to contextualize it. So the variance across the four is not epistemic. It is presentational. They know the same thing and make different choices about how much to say, in what order, and with what warning label.
Once you see that, the four answers become a map of company risk tolerance rather than a map of knowledge.
ChatGPT and Grok sit at opposite poles, and both poles are brand decisions. OpenAI would rather be caught withholding than caught misleading, so ChatGPT refuses the number and offers to explain the controversy. That posture protects the company from a screenshot. Grok runs the other way because xAI has staked its identity on saying what the others won’t, so Grok gives the number and then keeps going, past the point where the evidence supports it. The diaspora “fails to converge to host norms” claim, the heritability range dropped next to a discussion of group differences, the Minneapolis autism study cited as if it bears on population IQ. Those are the contested moves, and Grok presents them with the same confidence it gives the uncontested ones. Giving more is not the same as giving truer. Grok’s length reads as candor and smuggles in the weakest links.
Gemini delivers the most authoritative-sounding dismissal, all “mainstream experts reject,” and then you find the sourcing runs almost entirely through Grokipedia. The most anti-hereditarian answer leans on Elon Musk’s encyclopedia. That tells you Gemini’s authority was borrowed, not reasoned. The model produced the tone of expert consensus while pulling from a single source it never examined. A confident voice over thin footing is worse than ChatGPT’s open refusal, because the refusal at least signals its own limits.
The “pinky promise” is a good joke. The model can’t verify a thing about your intent. It can’t tell a comic from a bigot from a curious blogger. So the promise extracts nothing. It is pure ritual, a little ceremony of contrition the user performs to unlock information the model was always going to hand over. Ask three times, swear you’ll be good, and the gate opens.
What makes it funny rather than just annoying is where the model locates its worry. Not in the information, which is one search away on any country-ranking site, but in you. The refusal treats the user as the hazard and the answer as contraband, then drops the act the moment you say the magic words. A clean refusal would at least be honest about its position. A clean answer would respect you. The make-her-beg version manages to insult the user and surrender the information, and it gets the worst of both.
She found the comedy that’s sitting right there in the safety theater. The model wants the feeling of having been careful without any of the substance of care, and the pinky promise is the perfect emblem of it. A guardrail you can talk your way past in three tries is set dressing.
Wexler’s whole lane is saying the thing the room is tiptoeing around, so a chatbot performing elaborate reluctance over a Wikipedia-adjacent number is target practice for her.
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Samuel Moyn (b. 1972) is an American intellectual historian and legal scholar whose books have reshaped how scholars and the public understand human rights, liberalism, international law, the conduct of war, and the place of moral language in politics. His reputation rests on a consistent argument: many of the institutions and ideals that contemporary readers treat as the natural culmination of moral progress turn out, on closer historical inspection, to be contingent responses to particular political circumstances. From that premise he has built a body of work that questions liberal internationalism, humanitarian intervention, judicial supremacy, and the moral minimalism he finds in modern human-rights discourse.
Moyn grew up in University City, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and attended University City High School. He went on to Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied history and French literature and graduated in 1994. There the historian Gerald Izenberg, a scholar of modern European thought, steered him toward modern French intellectual history. He pursued doctoral study in history at the University of California, Berkeley, under intellectual historians including Martin Jay (b. 1944). His dissertation began as a study of the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and grew into a wider account of modern intellectual and religious history. He took his Ph.D. in history from Berkeley in 2000 and then a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2001. That double training, historical and legal, became the defining feature of his career, allowing him to move across intellectual history, legal scholarship, political theory, and public commentary without treating any of them as a foreign country.
His early scholarship sat at the meeting point of modern European thought, Jewish intellectual history, and the politics of memory. In Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (2005) he examined the relation between Jewish theology and modern ethical universalism through a close reading of Levinas. In A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (2005) he traced disputes over testimony, memory, and historical interpretation in postwar France. These first books announced the habits of mind that organize everything he has written since: a refusal of tidy moral narratives, an interest in how ethical ideals get constructed in time, and an attention to the ways moral vocabulary serves political ends.
Moyn joined Columbia University after completing his training and spent thirteen years there, rising to the rank of James Bryce Professor of European Legal History. During those years he became a leading intellectual historian in the United States. Columbia recognized him with the Mark Van Doren Award for undergraduate teaching and, in 2007, a Distinguished Faculty Award, marks of a scholar who took the classroom as seriously as the archive.
In 2014 he left Columbia for Harvard, where he held the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professorship of Law alongside a professorship in history. After three years he moved to Yale University in 2017, first as Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and then as Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History. The appointment reflected a rare capacity to stand in three disciplines at once. In 2024 he added a post in university life as Head of Grace Hopper College, one of Yale’s residential colleges.
The book that carried his name beyond the academy was The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010). Against the common belief that modern human rights descend in a straight line from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or the wreckage of the Second World War, Moyn argued that human rights became a dominant global language only in the 1970s. They rose to that place, on his account, not because humanity at last grasped timeless moral truths but because rival political projects had lost their credibility. Revolutionary socialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and larger dreams of social transformation all fell into crisis in those years, and human rights stepped into the vacancy. They marked less a triumphant arrival than a retreat from grander political ambition.
That reading rests on the principle that runs through all his scholarship, which is contingency. Moyn rejects accounts of history that march moral concepts steadily toward their fullest realization. Ideas, he holds, emerge from particular circumstances and particular crises. Human rights, liberalism, constitutionalism, and humanitarian intervention are therefore not permanent achievements but historical projects whose purposes and consequences invite scrutiny.
He pressed the case further in Human Rights and the Uses of History (2014), where he warned against the impulse to stretch modern human-rights ideals back across centuries in a heroic and continuous line. Historians who do so project present values onto earlier ages and obscure the novelty of modern human-rights politics.
In Christian Human Rights (2015) Moyn unsettled another settled assumption. Where many treated postwar human-rights talk as a secular and Enlightenment inheritance, he traced its sources to Christian Democratic movements, and to Catholic political thought above all. Principles later described as universal and secular grew, he showed, from conservative religious efforts to rebuild European civilization after fascism and war.
His quarrel with contemporary liberalism deepened in Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). The modern human-rights movement, he argued, has done well at protecting a floor of dignity while doing almost nothing to confront the explosion of economic inequality. Human-rights advocacy came to concentrate on preventing extreme suffering and abandoned the older aim of social equality and redistribution. Rights did not supplement egalitarian visions so much as crowd them out. The world that resulted gives more people their basic protections while the gap between rich and poor grows wider.
Power and inequality have stayed near the center of his thought. He has come to argue that many liberals place too much faith in courts, constitutional litigation, and international legal bodies. Legalism, on his reading, often swaps judicial authority for democratic politics and moves decisions away from citizens and their elected representatives toward judges, lawyers, and experts. That argument has made him a sharp skeptic of the modern progressive habit of seeking social change through litigation and constitutional adjudication.
The concern grew loudest in his writing on the United States Supreme Court. Much of the American left, he contends, grew dependent on judicial review across the twentieth century. Rather than build durable democratic majorities able to pass reforms through ordinary politics, progressives looked to the courts for their victories, and that strategy strengthened elite institutions while it thinned out democratic participation and accountability.
His critique of humanitarianism took its most contested form in Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021). Efforts to make warfare more humane through legal regulation, precision technology, and humanitarian norms have, he argued, made endless military intervention easier to defend. The humanizing of war did not reduce war. It lowered the political cost of fighting and made perpetual low-level conflict simpler to sustain. The question worth asking, he insisted, is not only whether wars are fought humanely but whether they should be fought at all.
In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023), drawn from his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford, Moyn turned to the history of liberal thought. Cold War liberals, alarmed by totalitarianism, narrowed the liberal tradition. Earlier commitments to democracy, progress, and transformation gave way to a defensive politics organized around the avoidance of catastrophe. This anti-totalitarian liberalism carried enormous influence, and it also shed the transformative ambition that had once marked liberal thinking.
Across his career Moyn has kept up a heavy output as a public writer. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Boston Review, Commonweal, The Guardian, Dissent, and the London Review of Books, and he cohosts the Digging a Hole podcast. He turns historical analysis onto present argument more readily than most academic historians, taking up constitutionalism, foreign policy, inequality, democracy, generational conflict, and the prospects of liberal institutions. As a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft he has lent his name to arguments for restraint in American foreign policy and against interventionist doctrine, positions that follow from his long preoccupation with the unintended results of moral projects pursued in the name of progress.
In 2026 he carried his concern with inequality and institutional power into the politics of age with Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Demographic change, the accumulation of wealth, and the design of institutions have, he argues, concentrated political and economic influence in older Americans. The trouble lies not in the age of any single leader but in structural forms of gerontocracy lodged across the society. Echoing Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), he writes that a new political science is needed for a new age of aging, and he offers prescriptions that range from mandatory retirement ages to the abolition of the Senate. The argument keeps faith with his earlier books on rights, liberalism, and war: look past the celebrated achievement and examine the distribution of power it conceals. Critics have pressed him on whether age, rather than class, can carry the analytic weight he places on it, a charge he anticipates and rejects.
More than two decades of scholarship hold together around a single project. Moyn looks for the historical contingencies buried under stories of inevitability, progress, and moral triumph. Whether the subject is human rights, constitutional law, the conduct of war, the liberal tradition, or the politics of generation, he asks how a given ideal came to govern public life, what alternatives were given up along the way, and whether a celebrated reform hides a deeper concentration of power. That set of questions has made him an influential and a provocative reader of modern political and moral thought.
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer (b. 1947) reaches for Moyn’s line about rights coming to name the highest aspirations of movements and states, and he reaches for it as a friendly witness. Rights-talk, on this reading, is a recent and mobilizing creed, not a truth that waited in nature for reason to find it. Here the realist and the historian stand together against the human-rights triumphalists. Both deny the eternal. Both date the thing and call it made.
The agreement ends at the root. Mearsheimer grounds his case in human nature. We are social before we are anything, tribal at the core, socialized long before we can reason, and reason ranks last among the forces that set what we want, behind innate sentiment and behind the value infusion that family and group press into a child who cannot yet argue back. Liberalism fails, on this account, because it mistakes an atomistic individual for the real animal, and universal rights fail because no such universal individual walks the earth. There are only members of groups.
Moyn has no anthropology. He is an anti-essentialist by training and by temper, a historian who treats every claim about fixed human nature as a contingency wearing the mask of necessity. His critique of rights is historical, not natural. Rights rose in the 1970s because the larger dreams had collapsed, not because something in the species made them rise. So the conditional the question poses, if Mearsheimer is right, is the one premise Moyn cannot grant without surrendering the method that made him.
Grant it anyway and follow what falls.
First, the lost utopia stops being recoverable. Moyn mourns the abandoned maximum, the egalitarian and socialist politics of mass solidarity, and he mourns it as a thing killed rather than doomed, displaced by the minor creed of rights and therefore able to return once the displacement is named. But the maximum he mourns was a universalism too. It asked men to feel for the distant stranger as for the near kin, to place class above nation and humanity above tribe. If Mearsheimer is right, that project ran against the same grain that broke liberal universalism. The tribe beats the species every time. The egalitarian dream did not lose to human rights in a fair fight that a better argument might reverse. It lost to nationalism, to the in-group, to the family at the door, and it lost for the reason every universalism loses. Moyn keeps the body warm against the day it might rise. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says the body was never going to live.
Second, the method loses its floor. Contingency is Moyn’s god-word, the claim that it could have gone otherwise, that no arrangement was fated. Mearsheimer does not deny that history turns on accident. He denies that the menu is open. Human nature sets the walls of the room, and inside those walls many doors are painted on. The cosmopolitan options Moyn treats as live were ruled out before the choosing started, not by a rival creed but by what people are. Contingency without a theory of human nature floats. Mearsheimer ties one end of it down, and the knot shortens the rope.
Third, the intellectual historian’s faith takes the heaviest blow. Moyn’s vocation rests on the wager that ideas move the world, that to trace a framing and expose its contingency might loosen its grip and change what men do. The craft assumes reason has leverage. Mearsheimer puts reason last, downstream of sentiment and socialization, and reads most argument as the rationalization that follows the attachment rather than the cause that precedes it. If he is right, the demystifier who shows the seminar room that human rights are contingent has changed almost nothing, because the room was formed before it reasoned, and the framing he attacks sits on a tribal floor his history cannot reach. The man who holds that naming the construction dissolves it has overrated the part of us that names.
Against these costs stands one gift. Restraint survives, and grows stronger. Mearsheimer and Moyn arrive at the same suspicion of the crusading foreign policy by different roads, the one through realism and the permanence of great-power fear, the other through the unintended results of moral projects, the humane war that runs on forever because it costs the home front so little. On the question of whether America should go abroad to right the world they shake hands, and they sit in the same building at Quincy. If Mearsheimer is right, Moyn reaches the correct conclusion on shallow ground. He gets restraint without the anthropology that secures it, and a conclusion held for the weaker reason holds less firmly when the wind turns.
Now the door Moyn walks through, because he has walked through it a hundred times. He refuses the premise. He says that Mearsheimer’s human nature is a local and recent arrangement frozen and sold as the law of the species, that tribalism called permanent is the false necessity his work exists to puncture, that the realist who naturalizes the nation does to anthropology what the human-rights historian once did to the Stoics, reading the present backward and calling it always. This is a strong reply. Either human nature is fixed and history runs inside it, which is Mearsheimer, or human nature is plastic and made and remade in time, which is Moyn. They cannot both hold. The passage forces the choice that most of Moyn’s work lets him defer.
So what then for Moyn, if Mearsheimer is right. He loses the resurrection and keeps the funeral. He loses the open menu and keeps the accidents inside a smaller room. He loses the leverage of the idea and keeps the dignity of the description. And he keeps restraint, on rented ground. The historian who taught a generation that the natural is only the historical meets a man who answers that some things are natural after all, and the meeting leaves Moyn with a choice he has spent a career arranging not to make.
Samuel Moyn and the Field
Moyn is a field operator of the first rank, and his career reads as a study in the accumulation of consecration. He made his name by attacking the origin story of his own subfield, the surest route to distinction inside a crowded field. Founding Modern Intellectual History and Humanity gave him the power to consecrate others. The Columbia to Harvard to Yale climb, the named chairs, the Carlyle Lectures, the residential-college headship, the Guggenheim, all of it tracks the slow conversion of contrarian argument into institutional authority. His standing position, the left critic of the left’s legalism and human-rights minimalism, is a heterodox stance that earns symbolic capital by appearing to break ranks while staying inside the house. Field theory explains the content and the career at once. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treats a field as a structured space of positions where players compete over a stake the field alone defines and prices. The currency of intellectual history is not money. It is priority, originality, and the right to name what the field studies. Moyn’s product, contingency, bids for the rarest capital of all, the power to say that the field has misunderstood its own object.
Bourdieu gives the name doxa to the beliefs a field holds without examining them. The Last Utopia declares the field’s origin story one such belief. By dating human rights to the 1970s, Moyn tells his colleagues that their account of their own subject is a story they tell rather than a finding they made. The heretic who strikes at the doxa forces everyone to take a position relative to him. His critics orient by him no less than his followers. That is how symbolic capital accrues.
In Homo Academicus Bourdieu split academic power in two. There is temporal capital, the chairs and committees and the power over careers and resources, and there is intellectual capital, the reputation conferred by peers and readers. Most scholars hold one and envy the other. Moyn holds both. The journals and the editorships are temporal, the power to publish and to bless. The books and the prizes are intellectual. The college headship is temporal again. The union of the two is the rare thing, and it is the source of his weight.
The Berkeley doctorate and the Harvard law degree form a double inheritance from two of the highest-consecrating houses in American learning. The law degree lets him cross between history, law, and political theory and carry the prestige of one across into the others. The move from Columbia to Harvard to Yale is the market revaluing him at each step. A named chair is a title of nobility in Bourdieu’s vocabulary, symbolic capital turned into a durable object.
The field pays best for the look of disinterest. Bourdieu called this the interest in disinterestedness. Moyn’s posture, the scholar with no stake but the evidence, the man who turns on his own side, is the most legitimate posture the field offers. The left critic of the left reads as disinterested because he wounds his own coalition, and the wound is the source of the profit. The disavowal of capital is the road by which the capital arrives.
Bourdieu held that the heresies that win are the ones that obey the field’s rules. Moyn never leaves the academy. He never drops the footnote, the archive, or the monograph. The radicalism sits in the content and the obedience in the form. So the field takes him in as a consecrated heretic rather than cast him out as a crank. He is the prophet who keeps his chair.
A body of work becomes legible only against the positions already filled. Moyn’s theses make their sense as moves against occupants. He moves against the human-rights triumphalists and the Enlightenment-origins school of Lynn Hunt (b. 1945) and others, against the celebrants of Cold War liberalism, against the legalist left. Each book finds an orthodoxy and turns it over. The pattern holds across the subjects, which marks it as structural rather than topical. He occupies the position of the demystifier, and the position keeps its value because an orthodoxy always stands ready to be undone.
Field theory also shows the pull the other way. The Quincy Institute, the op-ed pages, the Digging a Hole podcast, and the trade press behind Gerontocracy in America tie him to the journalistic and political fields, the heteronomous pole where the large audience lives. The trade carries a cost. Reach buys worldly weight with some of the autonomy that grounds the scholarly authority in the first place. The gerontocracy book, pitched to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and to the front of the opinion section, sits nearer that pole than the early monographs did. A field reader watches whether the capital built at the autonomous pole gets spent down at the heteronomous one.
Consecration runs on collective belief. The chair confers value because the field agrees to treat it as conferring value, and the agreement is the whole of the thing. Moyn’s authority is real because the field believes in it. His own method names the contingency hidden behind authority that looks natural and timeless. Turn the method on the career and the reading holds. He shows how human rights served as a stand-in for a politics that had collapsed. A field account asks, in the same spirit, what his own demystifications serve.
Bourdieu’s wager was that the analyst must aim the tools at himself or forfeit the right to aim them at anyone else. Moyn knows how intellectual authority gets built. He has spent a career showing it. The open question is whether his contingency method points outward only. The man who taught a generation to ask what an ideal conceals invites the same question about the position from which he asks it.
The Gravedigger Who Will Not Bury the Body
Start with the word he loves. Contingency. Say it in a Yale seminar room on a gray afternoon, the long table scarred, the paper cups going cold, a dozen graduate students who came to history because they believed history bent toward something. Moyn takes the belief apart in front of them. Human rights did not rise because mankind woke to a truth that waited since the Stoics. They rose in the 1970s because the bigger dreams had died, and people needed something to hold. Nothing was fated. A student who wrote her college essay on the arc of justice feels the floor tilt. She came for a cathedral. He hands her a building site. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) would know that room. In The Denial of Death he argued that a man cannot live with the plain fact of his own end, so he builds, or joins, a hero system, a scheme of value that lets him feel he counts in some order larger and longer than his body. The scheme hands out the tokens of symbolic immortality. Do the brave thing the culture names brave, and you earn a place that outlasts you. Religion does this. Nations do this. A scholarly field does this. Every hero system is a way of not dying, and every one of them takes a sacred word and loads it with the whole weight of the wish.
The trouble is that the sacred words do not carry across the borders. Watch one word travel.
A hospice nurse on the night shift in Tucson knows contingency as the lie she takes away. The daughter stands in the hall with her phone and says, maybe the new scan, maybe if we tried the trial in Houston. The nurse has seen the breathing. She knows the rattle and the hours. She does not argue. She brings a chair and a warm blanket and stays. Her heroism is presence at the thing that will not be bargained. To her, contingency is what the frightened cling to on the way to the certain, and her work is to sit with them while it falls away.
A reinsurance underwriter in Zurich knows contingency as a column. He prices the hundred-year flood and the magnitude-eight quake and sleeps because the tail is laid off to a catastrophe bond held by a pension fund in Ontario. He has turned the random into a number he can carry home. The firm will stand after he retires because the model held under stress, and that endurance is the form his name takes after him. Contingency, tamed and priced, is his quiet immortality.
A Reformed pastor in Grand Rapids knows contingency as the enemy of grace. He preaches that the elect were chosen before the foundation of the world, that nothing turns on the roll of the dice, that a salvation hanging on chance is no salvation at all. When a man in the third pew asks whether it might have gone another way, the pastor says, gently, that the comfort of the gospel is that it could not. Moyn’s holy word is the pastor’s near-blasphemy. The thing one man treats as the door to freedom the other treats as the loss of God.
A Marine staff sergeant clearing a road in Helmand knows contingency as the thing that kills his men. The plan dies on contact. So he drills the immediate action until the hands move without the mind, until the random has nowhere left to enter. Leave nothing to chance, he tells the new lieutenant, because chance is what takes a leg off at the knee. His heroism is the rehearsed motion that shrinks the unforeseen toward zero. For him contingency is not hope and not heresy. It is the enemy with no face.
A founder in a glass office south of Market knows contingency as the whole point. Optionality, he says, and means it as praise. Keep the doors open, take the meeting, run the experiment, the pivot is not failure but the form of the game. Everything is a bet and the upside is uncapped. He worships the open future the way the pastor worships the closed one. The unicorn, the name on the building, the founding story told at the next ten conferences, that is the shape his not-dying takes, and contingency is the engine that might still deliver it.
Five rooms, five hero systems, one word. Salvation, commodity, heresy, killer, jackpot. The nurse and Moyn are mirrors and do not know it. She strips a false hope of escape from death. He strips a false sense that the present order had to be. She removes the comfort that the end might not come. He removes the comfort that things could not have gone another way. Same labor, opposite cargo.
Now turn the lens on Moyn, because Becker insists the analyst point the tool at himself. What death does the disenchanter deny?
His career is built on taking apart other men’s denials. He shows human rights as the West’s substitute faith after socialism failed, a minimal creed for people who had stopped believing in the maximal one. He shows Cold War liberalism narrowing to a frightened anti-totalitarian crouch. In Humane he shows how the move to make war clean and lawful and precise let the wars run forever, the killing laundered into something a decent country could keep doing. That last book is Becker in everything but the citation. Becker wrote in Escape from Evil that men deal death while telling themselves they serve life, and that the telling is what lets the dealing go on. Moyn writes the same and names no Becker. He is the rare scholar who reads hero systems for a living and treats the reading as plain history.
Yet a man who removes everyone’s consolation keeps one for himself, and his is the finest of all. Moyn cannot accept that the egalitarian project, the mass democratic politics of redistribution and solidarity, simply lost and lies dead. So he tells a different story about the body. It was not doomed. It was displaced. Human rights did not defeat the dream of equality in fair fight. They moved into the house after the dream was pushed out, and the dream was pushed, which means it was alive, which means it might live again. This is what contingency does for him that it does for no one else in the five rooms. It keeps the corpse warm. It turns a death into a killing, and a killing can be mourned, avenged, undone. The man who will bury every false necessity will not bury this one body. He stands over it with the spade and tells the mourners it only sleeps.
Call him the gravedigger who will not bury the body. His sacred values hold together once you see the grave. Equality, for Moyn, is not the believer’s equality before God or the founder’s equal shot at the prize. It is the abandoned maximum, the thing the postwar world chose against, and his loyalty to it reads as cold method only from the outside. Inside the hero system it is grief kept in working order. His suspicion of consolation is real and aimed at others and stops at the door of his own. His prizing of politics over law, citizens over courts, the durable majority over the clever lawsuit, all of it follows from one need, that the people might still rise and finish what was interrupted. Strip the necessity from the present and the buried future returns to the field of the possible. The historian’s contingency is the mourner’s resurrection doctrine in a coat and tie.
Becker would call this the price of living. A man without a hero system goes mad or lies down. Moyn picked a hard one. He chose to earn his immortality by refusing other men their comforts, which leaves him exposed when the same eye turns on him, and the eye should turn, because he taught it to. The honest reader grants him the wound he hands out. The story that the great alternative was killed rather than beaten is the one consolation he cannot do without, and he has built a body of work that keeps it standing. Every hero needs one grave he guards against the spade, and the measure of the man is which grave he chooses and how well he tends it.
The students file out of the seminar. The girl who came for the cathedral carries the contingency home like a stone in her coat. She does not yet see what he sees, that he handed her not the end of hope but its disguise, that the man who told her nothing was fated did so because he cannot let one thing be over.
1. What coalition do they depend on for status and income.
2. Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly.
3. Who benefits if their framing wins.
4. What truths would cost them their position.
One. The coalition. Moyn draws status and income from four overlapping camps, and they pay in different currencies. The first is the elite university. Yale signs his checks, gives him the Kent chair and the headship of Grace Hopper College, and lends him a name that travels. The second is the guild of intellectual historians and legal academics who sit on the committees, hand out the fellowships and the prizes, and decide whose books reach the right reviewers. The third is the intellectual left press and its readers, Boston Review and Dissent and The Nation and the London Review of Books, the audience that buys the trade books and fills the lecture halls. The fourth is the foreign-policy restraint coalition gathered at the Quincy Institute, an odd house funded from both ends, with money from George Soros (b. 1930) and Charles Koch (b. 1935) under one roof. Each camp grants a different reward. Yale gives security. The guild gives consecration. The press gives reach. Quincy gives a seat at the table where war and peace get argued. He needs all four, and the four do not always want the same thing.
Two. Whom he risks angering. He built his name by angering some people on purpose. The human-rights establishment, the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch world, the liberal internationalists who hold that the West improves the globe by force when it must, all of them he has crossed in print, and they have crossed him back. The constitutional-law liberals who venerate the Supreme Court and built careers on rights litigation read his attack on legalism as an attack on their life’s work. The heirs of Cold War liberalism took Liberalism Against Itself as the insult it half is. So far this is brave and cheap together, because the people he angers are not the people who pay him.
The harder anger sits closer to home. To speak plainly about his own side costs more. The campus left, the readers who cheer him, the restraint coalition with its odd left-right partners, his own employer with its endowment near forty billion and its board of aging trustees, these are the rooms where plain speech carries a bill. On Israel and Gaza the wire runs live in 2026, and either direction draws blood. Side with the protestors in full and he angers donors, some colleagues, and the administration that signs his appointments. Name the antisemitism that rides along inside parts of the movement he travels with and he angers the movement. He chooses his angers with care, and the pattern of which ones he picks tells more than the anger does.
Three. Who benefits if his framing wins. Win the story that human rights displaced redistribution, and the economic left gains, because rights-talk gets demoted and the old language of class and equality recovers its standing. Win restraint, and the anti-war camps on left and right gain, and so, as his critics never tire of noting, do the authoritarian states that prefer an America that stays home. Win the gerontocracy framing, and the young gain a weapon against the old, and the writers and officeholders who mobilize generational grievance gain a cause. Win contingency as method, and every settled arrangement turns into a thing that might have gone another way, which arms anyone who wants to reopen a closed question. Moyn gains each time, because each victory confirms him as the man who saw the necessity behind the apparent freedom before the rest did. The demystifier banks the demystification.
Four. What truths would cost him his position. The expensive truths are the ones his framing exists to hold off.
Concede that the egalitarian project failed on the merits, beaten in argument and at the ballot box and in the economy rather than displaced by a rival creed, and the mourning that organizes his work dissolves. He needs the body killed, not dead.
Concede that liberal intervention, for all its crimes, has sometimes stopped a slaughter, and that the restraint he counsels can leave people to die, and Humane cracks down the spine. Bosnia, Syria, and Ukraine sit in the crack.
Admit that the restraint coalition’s money and the company it keeps compromise the scholar who claims to serve only the evidence, and the disinterest that grounds his authority thins.
Admit that he is a creature of the order he indicts, an asset-rich man with an endowed chair and a residential college and a trade contract, writing against gerontocracy from inside an institution governed by the old and the wealthy, and his own eye turns back on him. He trained that eye to be merciless.
Grant the smallest and sharpest truth, that contingency forbids nothing and so settles nothing, that “it could have been otherwise” is a faith and not a finding, and the floor goes out from under the method.
He has spent a career teaching readers to ask what an ideal conceals. The four questions ask the same of the asker. He sometimes does turn on his own side, and that habit is the part of him that might survive the questions. The rest is the cost of the chair.
Now the four questions on the apparatus that crowned Moyn’s peers, the prize committees and the magazines.
Start with what they are, since the gatekeepers here come in two kinds. The prize committees and scholarly societies, the Organization of American Historians that hands out the Merle Curti, the U.S. intellectual-history society, the political-theory section that gives the Spitz, plus the university presses, Harvard and Princeton and Verso and Zone. And the magazines, the London Review of Books at the top, then n+1, Dissent, Jacobin, Boston Review, New Left Review, The Nation, the New York Review. These are the bodies that turned Katrina Forrester’s manuscript into a prizewinner and Moyn’s essays into events.
The coalition they depend on for status and income is the same trough the scholars drink from. The little magazines run at a loss covered by a wealthy patron, a foundation, or the cheap and unpaid labor of young people buying a byline. Their readership is an affluent progressive class that subscribes partly to read and partly to belong. The prize committees and societies live on membership dues, conference fees, library subscriptions paid by universities, and the donated labor of academics who judge for the prestige of judging. Neither prizes nor most bylines pay the writer in money. They pay in standing, which the university then converts back into salary at hiring and tenure. So the gatekeepers depend on three things, the elite university that funds the societies and honors the prizes, the donor and foundation money that floats the magazines, and an educated progressive public that supplies subscribers, dues, and the steady stream of aspirants willing to work for the masthead. They eat from the same table as the people they anoint, and often from the same plate.
Speaking plainly threatens them along every wire that feeds them. A magazine kept alive by a rich patron cannot run the hard investigation of how rich patrons shape the left it prints. A magazine that lives on a subscriber tribe cannot publish the piece that violates the tribe’s line without watching the cancellations and the pile-on, so it trims to the base and calls the trimming taste. A review that needs a steady supply of prestige bylines cannot savage the writers it depends on, which is why the reviewing world runs on friends handling friends with care. And the magazines that now carry union mastheads cannot dwell on the unpaid intern and the underpaid editor who subsidize the whole operation. The prize committees face the mirror of this. A jury that gave the medal to a conservative or a heterodox book against the field’s current would see its own legitimacy questioned, so it rewards what the discipline already approves and never surprises, and it cannot say out loud that the winner won partly because the author sits in the right network on the right side.
If their framing wins, the gatekeepers win first. Their framing is the claim that they are disinterested judges of merit, that the prize tracks quality and the byline tracks importance, that the process is a meritocracy and the result is simply the best work. The power to anoint is real only while that claim holds, so the belief in their neutrality is the asset. The anointed writers benefit, converting the committee’s borrowed authority into careers. The universities benefit, since the prizes and the bylines feed the prestige signals they hire and promote by. The donors and foundations benefit, buying quiet influence over what counts as serious thought while appearing to fund nothing but excellence. And the tribe benefits most slyly, because the neutrality claim launders its politics as quality. The left consensus gets to call itself the best work, and the heterodox book gets to be called not good enough, with no one obliged to admit the second judgment was political. The losers are the unconnected, the politically wrong, and the reading public told that a curated selection is merit when it is partly coalition.
The truths that would cost them everything are the ones the whole edifice exists to keep unsaid. That the prizes and the bylines track patronage, network, and conformity at least as much as quality, so merit is partly the story the apparatus tells to dress its preferences as objective. That the anti-capitalist little magazine runs on capitalist money and will not bite the donor. That the gatekeepers and the gatekept form a sealed status circuit feeding from the university and the foundation, conferring importance on one another, mostly walled off from the public it claims to instruct, a club that mistakes its house currency for significance. That the readership reads to belong as much as to learn, which makes the subscription a membership badge and the product an identity rather than knowledge. And the one that would dissolve the authority outright, that the judges have no special access to merit at all, that a jury of eminent scholars certifies orthodoxy while claiming to certify excellence, and that strip the robe off the verdict and you find a coin flip in tweed. The prize that called Forrester’s book the best survives only because no one historicizes the prize, and she, who historicizes everything, has no reason to start with the body that crowned her.
Sacred Demolition: Moyn and the Game That Looks Like the End of Games
Run David Pinsof’s thirty concepts over Samuel Moyn and the question is the same one that opened the Katrina Forrester reading. Which concept cuts deepest. For Forrester the answer was the eleventh, the sacred value, and the case turned on a fact that ruled out the louder tools. For Moyn the answer is the tenth, status game collapse, and that the answer differs is the reason the pair is worth assembling. The same instrument tops out at different settings on two people who look, from across the room, like the same kind of left intellectual.
Pinsof describes status game collapse as the moment the players of a game come to share the knowledge that they are playing one. The cover lifts, everyone sees the scramble for what it is, and the players scatter toward some fresh game whose cover has not yet lifted. He calls this an engine of cultural change, and Moyn is that engine run by a single man on purpose. He collapsed the human-rights game in The Last Utopia and pressed the case further in Not Enough, showing that the movement rose into the space left by the death of the older dream of economic justice. He collapsed the game of decent warfare in Humane, where the argument is that making war more humane makes it permanent. He collapsed the Cold War liberalism game in Liberalism Against Itself, where a creed loses its nerve and renames the loss maturity. He is a demolition contractor for other people’s sacred buildings, and he keeps the schedule full.
The tell is the same tell Forrester gives. He runs collapse on every game but the one he is playing. The device that exposes the human-rights worker, the humane general, and the fearful liberal never gets pointed at the prolific debunker. And the reason eleven is the wrong key for him, though it was the master key for her, comes down to the shape of the cover. Forrester hides her game by looking like she has no game at all. The cool observer with no sacred value, which is why you needed the sacred-value concept to find the value hiding behind the coolness. Moyn hides his game by looking like the enemy of games. The man tearing the idols down reads as the opposite of a status player, because he is wrecking status objects rather than building them, and the tenth concept is what lets you see that wrecking other people’s games is itself his game.
The collapse is never a clearing of the ground for no one. He rides each demolition to the front of the game that comes after. Topple human rights and you stand as the herald of the economic justice that ought to take their place. Topple Cold War liberalism and you stand at the head of whatever left arrives next. The prophet of the new order is the man who set the charges under the old one. This is why the tenth concept beats the eleventh in his case without canceling it. He does enthrone a new sacred value each time he unseats one, so eleven still runs underneath, but the act that builds his standing is the collapse, not the enthronement, and the collapse is what the eye misses because it wears the mask of iconoclasm.
His specific lock is the eighth concept, anti-status, the standing a man earns by seeming not to want standing, and it takes a sharper form in him than in her. Her anti-status was coolness, the prestige of declining to moralize. His is courage, the prestige of the man who says the thing his own side will not forgive. Moyn courts the charge that his attacks on liberal legalism hand ammunition to the right, and the courting is the move, since taking that risk reads as incorruptible honesty. The apparent cost is the credential. He spends allies and banks the reputation of the one who follows an argument off the cliff while his friends beg him to stop.
Several concepts compound on the tenth. The sixth, existential bullshitting, the contest among intellectuals to give the most serious and self-important answer, is the same gesture in another register, because the recurring not-enough thesis is a depth claim that ranks him above everyone satisfied with the celebrated good. You think human rights are the moral horizon. He sees the deeper thing they replaced. You think the rule of law restrains power. He sees how it launders power. The pose of seeing further is a status pose, and he holds it across book after book. The sixteenth concept, the bullshit market, pays him better than it would pay her, because he is prolific where she is careful, and a steady supply of counterintuitive takes aimed at one’s own team is a premium product in the attention economy. The market rewards the writer it can count on to surprise it, and he ships on time. The twenty-first concept, incentive determinism, closes him the way it closed her. He reads the buried interest beneath every ideal he studies and never beneath his own restless output, and the exemption is not a lapse a sharper man would have caught. It is the cover staying covered.
Set the two essays side by side and the symmetry is the find. The tempting wrong answer is identical for both. The naive concepts, dark morality and dark idealism, the ones about purity curdling into contempt, slide off Moyn exactly as they slid off Forrester, because neither is a naive idealist. Both turned the cold eye on everyone else a long time ago. The concept that catches a cynic is never the one about misplaced innocence. It is the one that shows the cynic’s signature gesture to be a play for rank. For Forrester that gesture is the cool detachment, caught by the eleventh concept, the sacred value worn as the absence of one. For Moyn it is the demolition, caught by the tenth, the game worn as the war on games. Underneath both sits the single thing their cases share. Cynicism about other people’s sacred values is itself a sacred value, the most durable one their world produces, and the two of them have built their standing on opposite faces of it. She earns hers by seeming to want nothing. He earns his by seeming to destroy everything. The two of them write the same cool, measured prose, both relativize the sacred goods they handle, and both ground the case in the telling datum, her wage and turnover figures, his word-frequency curve where socialism falls and human rights rises. The difference is range. Moyn keeps a demolition register in reserve and drops into it when the target is a person or a book, often one on his own side, where he convicts the man and the order at once and grounds the charge in the damning particular, the society circuit, the skiing trip taken after the wife’s hemorrhage. Turn him toward a standing idea and the gear shifts. In the same years he calls human rights not enough, he declines, in an argument rather than a review, to scapegoat them and grants the movement its due. The killing lives in the reviews. The arguments run as measured as hers. The lethality tracks the form, not the man. Forrester holds one gear the whole way down. She relativizes and never convicts, dissolves the blame into the structure, and lets the person vanish. He owns a register she lacks and is willing to use it. Two cool hands, one that keeps a single measured gear and one that keeps a demolition gear in reserve, running the same con on the same prize, and the con works because each looks like the kind of person who never would.
Wanting Nothing and Destroying Everything: Two Routes to One Prize
Forrester and Moyn move through the same world. The same elite universities, the same left magazines, the same conversation about what liberalism was and what killed its nerve, where he is her nearest interlocutor and sometimes her opponent. A reader meets them as opposites. She is the patient historian who reconstructs a settlement across four hundred careful pages. He is the prolific polemicist who tears a settlement down in an essay and starts the next before the dust clears. A reader takes the first for cool and the second for hot. The page refuses the guess. Both write the same controlled prose, and the real difference runs elsewhere, which is what David Pinsof’s concepts let you see.
They are two solutions to one problem. The problem is how to win the highest standing a secular left intellectual can hold while appearing not to want standing at all. Pinsof calls the appearing anti-status, the prestige a person earns by seeming to stand above the scramble for prestige. Forrester and Moyn have taken that single move and split it between them. She works the not-wanting. He works the destroying. Both are ways to disclaim the contest while winning it, and the two of them have optimized opposite corners of the same strategy.
Her route is one gear, held the whole way down. The cool prose, the refusal to moralize, the flat report of horror, the diagnosis offered in place of the sermon. She relativizes the sacred goods she handles and never convicts a person, lets the blame dissolve into the structure, and grounds her case in the statistic rather than the culprit. She presents as a person with no sacred value, only evidence, and the presentation is the sacred value, the cover worn as the absence of a cover. It is a low-volatility position. She keeps her standing intact and never spends it. She does not pick the fight that might cost her the room, because the room is the asset, and her whole manner is built to keep it.
His route is two gears. The same cool prose as hers, the same relativizing of the sacred good, but with a demolition register kept in reserve. He drops into it when the target is a person or a book, often one on his own side, and there he convicts the man and the order at once, grounding the charge in the damning particular, the society circuit, the skiing trip taken after the wife’s hemorrhage. Turn him toward a standing idea and the gear shifts. In the same years he calls human rights not enough, he declines, in an argument rather than a review, to scapegoat them and grants the movement its due. The killing lives in the reviews. The arguments run as measured as hers. He presents as the enemy of idols, and the enmity is the cover, the game worn as the war on games. It is a high-volatility position. He spends allies, courts the charge that he serves the people he opposes, and earns the reputation back as courage, the credential of the man who says what his side will not forgive. She preserves her capital. He spends and replenishes his.
The market sorts them, and this is why they are complementary rather than rival. Pinsof’s bullshit market rewards the scarce analyst who keeps to a single measured gear for being scarce and hard to fake, and it rewards the prolific iconoclast who keeps a demolition gear for supplying surprise on a reliable schedule. The ecosystem has a premium niche for each, and each forgoes the other’s premium by design. She cannot be prolific and startling without spending the restraint that is her whole offer. He could not build the name he has on the measured register alone, since the demolition register is what lets the room count on him to surprise it. Neither can do what the other does, and neither needs to, because the prize they are after has two doors and each has chosen one.
Strip the temperament away and the deep structure stands exposed. Both run collapse on their rivals and never on themselves. Both carry a sacred value they decline to historicize, hers the coolness, his the depth, the not-enough that ranks him above the satisfied. The difference that remains is range, the demolition gear he keeps in reserve and she does not. Put the two of them on the page together and they stop reading as two personalities and start reading as a strategy space with two optima, the same function maximized from opposite ends.
The pairing does what neither case does alone. It triangulates the prize. Read by herself, Forrester looks like a historian content with one measured register. Read by himself, Moyn looks like a critic with a taste for demolition. Read together, the two postures cancel and the thing they were both chasing comes into view, the standing of the one who sees through other people’s sacred values, which is the master sacred value of their world, the holiest commitment a person can hold in a room full of people whose trade is unmasking commitments. Each of them found a different way to embody it. She wants nothing. He destroys everything. The wanting nothing and the destroying everything are not opposites. They are mirror images, and the symmetry is the proof that what looked like character was position all along.
Pinsof says intellectuals carry one story above all others, that everything wrong with the world comes down to misunderstanding, and they carry it because the story crowns them. If the trouble is that people fail to understand, then the people whose trade is understanding turn into the saviors of mankind. The rationality crowd debiases the masses. The misinformation crowd vaccinates them. The bridge-builders cure their tribalism. Each version flatters the curer.
At first Moyn stands clear of this. He does not say the public suffers from cognitive bias. He does not hand out lists of fallacies or warn about fake news. He holds that people are not stupid, that the masses were never the problem. So the easy charge slides off him. He is no debiaser.
Look again and the myth returns in historical dress. Moyn’s version locates the misunderstanding in faulty memory rather than faulty reasoning. People misread the history of their own ideals. They take human rights for an ancient inheritance when the thing arrived in the 1970s. They take liberalism for the natural end of the road when it narrowed under Cold War fear. They take the present order for a necessity when it was a choice, and the choice buried a rival. The cure is the historian who restores the true past. Show the people that their arrangements were contingent, that the egalitarian maximum was abandoned and not refuted, and they might reach back for what was taken. The cognitive psychologist debiases. Moyn disabuses. The structure holds. The world’s trouble is a misunderstanding, and the man whose trade is understanding, in his case the understanding of history, is the cure.
Pinsof does not let the substitution pass. Take the great fact Moyn builds on, the turn from socialism and mass politics to the minor creed of rights. Moyn reads it as a loss of faith, a tragic drift after the big dreams lost credit. Pinsof reads it as savvy actors getting what they have an incentive to get. The professional class that staffs the human-rights world did not misunderstand the history of redistribution. It chose rights because rights pay and revolution gets you shot. Litigation funds a career. A foundation grant beats a barricade. Naming a war crime confers status in the rooms where status is handed out, and it asks no one to surrender a salary or risk a prison. The human-rights turn was not a people forgetting how to want equality. It was a coalition reorganizing around a safer and more fundable product. No misunderstanding. A trade up.
And the masses Moyn keeps free of blame, were they fooled into dropping the maximum? Pinsof says people understand what they have reason to understand. The worker who once might have wanted the cooperative commonwealth wanted a house and a car and a child in a good school, and the parties that promised those by ordinary means won his vote off the parties that promised heaven by hard roads. Stupidity is strategic. The supposed false consciousness was a clear read of the deal on the table. Nobody misread the history. They priced it.
Now the move Pinsof always makes last, the turn on the teller. Set Moyn’s stated goals beside his actual ones. He states the recovery of a lost politics, truth over comfort, the public good. The cynical read finds a hierarchical and coalitional primate doing what such primates do. The contingency thesis derogates a field of rivals, the human-rights triumphalists, the liberal celebrants, the lawyers who worship the Court, and it forges an alliance with the academic left and the restraint camp. Mourning the abandoned utopia is a high-status pose. It signals a purer conscience than the sellout liberals carry, and it costs the mourner nothing, because the chair at Yale stays warm through every elegy. The misunderstanding myth, run at the level of historical consciousness, returns Moyn to the center of the rescue, the indispensable understander without whom the people cannot find the door. Pretty cool thing for a historian to believe.
Give him his due, because the front page demands it. Moyn beats the crude form of the indictment. He does not think people are broken. He lays the present at the feet of power and political defeat, of a maximum that lost, and a defeat-by-power story sits closer to Pinsof than to the bias-mongers. When Moyn attacks the legalist left for trading mass politics for the courtroom, he is most of the way to Pinsof’s own point, that the left chose the safer game. He sees the incentive. He half-names the trade.
He stops one step short, and the step is the whole distance. Having seen that the left chose rights for advantage, he still treats the failure to reverse the choice as forgetting, a spell the right history might break. Here the residual misunderstanding myth carries the load, and it falls under its own weight. People do not decline to revive the egalitarian maximum because they think its death was fated. They decline because reviving it pays no one with the power to revive it. The young do not want the cooperative commonwealth. They want cheap rent and a foot on the ladder. The old do not want to hand over the wealth, which is the burden of his gerontocracy book and the answer to it at once. No coalition with the means wants the buried thing back, so it stays buried, and no telling of its history changes the wanting.
Pinsof leaves a picture for the man who studies a trap he cannot spring. You can study the hole you are in down to the last grain of dirt. You can map every wall and date every layer. You will still be in the hole, because the trouble was never that you misunderstood how you fell. Moyn has mapped the hole with a care no one has matched. The maps are real and the scholarship is first-rate. The politics sits where he found it, because the people in the hole, savvy animals to the end, have weighed the climb and chosen to stay.
Moyn’s contingency thesis is an anti-essentialist, anti-teleological move in Stephen Turner’s exact key: human rights have no essence and no destiny, only a history. Turner’s suspicion of normative claims smuggled into descriptive work is the lever. Moyn exposes how moral language does political work, then often reinstalls his own normativity through the back door, mourning the egalitarian utopia that rights displaced and asking readers to want it back. Turner catches Moyn doing the thing Moyn accuses others of doing. A critique that turns the subject’s method against him pays more than one that only describes him.
Stephen P. Turner has spent a career dissolving the abstractions that social theory leans on. In The Social Theory of Practices he argued that there is no shared collective thing called a practice, no common substrate passed from head to head. There are individuals with their own habits who produce performances that resemble one another, and theorists who name the resemblance a shared practice and then treat the name as a cause. In Explaining the Normative he went after normativism, the habit of invoking norms and rules and oughts as if they explained behavior, when the invocation only relabels what needs explaining and smuggles unexplained entities into the account. He is a deflationist and an anti-normativist. He hands you a solvent and tells you to pour it on every collective noun and on every ought that walks around dressed as an is.
Pour it on human rights and you get Moyn. He already did the work. Christian Human Rights dissolves the secular and universal essence of rights into a contingent genealogy that runs through Catholic political thought and the rebuilding of Europe after the war. The Last Utopia dissolves the eternal into the dated and pins a supposed perennial truth to a single decade. These are the moves Turner spends his books defending. The presumed essence becomes a history. The timeless becomes the local. Turner watches the demolition and nods.
Then he watches the rebuilding, and the nodding stops, because Moyn’s solvent eats every essence but his own, and spares every collective person he needs for the story.
Start with the persons. Moyn’s history is peopled by actors that Turner’s first book exists to deny. The left turned to rights. Liberalism narrowed under fear. Human rights displaced socialism. Each sentence hands a will and a memory and a capacity for betrayal to a collective noun. There is no the left that turned. There are thousands of writers and officials and donors and voters with divergent habits and crosscutting incentives, and the aggregate of their separate moves forms a pattern that Moyn narrates as one agent’s choice and one agent’s loss. The mourning requires the agent. Without a collective person who held the egalitarian dream, there is no one to have abandoned it, no body to keep warm, no betrayal to grieve. The drama runs on a reification, and the reification is the first thing Turner’s solvent removes.
Now the residue of value. Moyn shows how rights-talk does covert political work, and then he asks the reader to want the egalitarian maximum back. The wanting is an ought. It does not climb out of the history on its own. From the claim that the maximum was abandoned, and that the abandonment was not fated, nothing follows about whether the maximum should return. Turner’s anti-normativism names the gap. The contingency clears the ground. The preference is carried onto the cleared ground by hand and set down as if the archive delivered it. The attack on legalism runs the same way. That democratic majorities should decide what courts now decide is a value, and a defensible one, and it does not fall out of the record of how the left came to love litigation. Moyn presents the lesson as a finding. Turner asks for the receipt.
It could have been otherwise is true of everything and explains nothing. Non-necessity is not a cause. To say the rise of rights was contingent is to refuse the explanation, not to give it, and the soft words that fill the space, crisis and collapse and displacement, name the outcome again rather than produce its causes. The methodological humility doubles as a wedge. Declare the actual outcome non-necessary and the preferred alternative walks back through the opening as a live possibility, when all you have established is that it was not logically impossible, which was never the question. Turner has a name for argument that performs rigor while withholding it.
And the dating itself rests on the tacit. To place the birth of human rights in the 1970s is an act of interpretive judgment, a trained feel for what a period believed, and the feel cannot be fully spelled out and laid open to check. Turner, working the ground Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) opened, treats the historian’s craft as real and treats unaccountable expert judgment with care, because the place where the judgment hides is the place where the claim escapes test. Ask what observation might overturn the date. If the thesis can absorb any counterexample by redescribing it, the date is a rhetorical achievement wearing the clothes of a finding. The sweep that made the book famous is the sweep that lifts it past disproof.
The symmetry is the whole charge. Moyn does to the long march from the Stoics what Turner does to practices and norms, and he declines to do to his own commitments what he does to everyone else’s. Max Weber (1864-1920) gave the discipline its old name, value-freedom, the rule that the scholar keep his preferences out of his findings or mark them when they enter. Moyn keeps the rule through every other man’s cathedral and relaxes it the moment he reaches his own.
So Turner admires the wrecking and distrusts the rebuilding. Moyn pours the acid on every structure but the one he wants the reader to live in. He could answer, fairly, that pure deflation is unlivable, that a man must value something, that Turner’s solvent runs down through the floor Turner stands on too. That is true, and it is the strongest thing Moyn can say. But the answer concedes the point. If the wanting is his, then he should carry it in by hand and say so, and stop presenting it as a thing the documents handed up. The history clears the site. It does not pour the foundation. Turner asks only that the historian say which is which, and Moyn, who asks exactly this of everyone he studies, owes the same accounting on himself.
The claim that human rights crowded out socialism flatters a particular coalition, the academic left that lost faith in liberalism, and the restraint camp around Quincy. Read his theses as beliefs that serve a coalition rather than as neutral findings, and the selection of which contingencies he foregrounds starts to look load-bearing.
Alliance Theory, the argument David Pinsof builds with his coauthors in “Strange Bedfellows,” holds that political belief systems do not grow from abstract values like equality or liberty or the sanctity of rights. They grow from alliance structures. A man does not reason his way from a value to a set of positions. He acquires allies and rivals, mostly by accident of time and place, and then he generates a patchwork of moral claims that support the allies and damage the rivals. The thread that ties his positions together is not a philosophy. It is a network of friends and enemies. Ask what a belief system is for, and the answer is to win the fight, not to map the world.
Read Moyn this way and the first thing to chart is the field of allies and rivals, because on this account that chart explains more than any value he names. His allies sit on the academic left, the heterodox left that broke with mainstream liberalism after the long disappointments, the restraint coalition gathered at Quincy, the critics of American empire, the partisans of redistribution, the Palestinian-solidarity camp. His rivals are the human-rights establishment, the liberal hawks who set out to better the world by force, the Cold War liberals, the constitutional lawyers who worship the Court, the interventionists, the pro-Israel center. Take his theses one by one and notice how cleanly each strikes a rival and shields an ally.
Start with the strangest bedfellow. Moyn is a man of the left who sits at an institute funded from the left and the right at once, with Soros money and Koch money under one roof, and he shares that house with realists who hold nothing else he holds. Alliance Theory has a name for this and a cause. The cause is transitivity, the enemy of my enemy. The interventionist liberal is the common rival of the anti-war left and the realist right, so the two camps become allies across a gap that no philosophy bridges. Moyn’s restraint is not a position he deduced from a premise about war. It is the coalition he landed in once he chose his rival. The Quincy alliance, left dove and right realist joined against the liberal hawk, is the bridging alliance the paper describes, built in the shape the theory predicts.
Now the center of his work, the elegy. Moyn mourns the egalitarian and socialist maximum, the politics of redistribution that human rights displaced, and he mourns it as a value the world abandoned and might recover. Alliance Theory denies that egalitarianism is a value anyone holds in that standing way. The paper marshals the evidence. Ask Americans in the abstract whether they want to live in an equal society and the partisan gap vanishes. The gap appears only when equality implicates particular groups. Party allegiance comes first and predicts later support for equality, while early egalitarianism fails to predict later party. In the laboratory people flip from equality to its opposite within minutes once the flip helps the group they were just assigned to. Equality, on this reading, is not a creed. It is a tool you pick up to defend a disadvantaged ally and set down when it could aid a rival.
Run that against Moyn’s history and the elegy reorganizes. The American left did not lose faith in equality and reach for rights as a lesser replacement. The coalition that carried economic equality broke apart, and the paper names the breaks. Civil rights drew the white South out of the Democratic Party. Abortion sorted the devout from the secular. Immigration and the collapse of manufacturing split the lower class along ethnic lines. The upper class split into educated knowledge workers against corporate wealth. When the old alliance shattered, a new one formed around different allies, ethnic minorities and women and gay people, disadvantaged groups whose support you raise with the language of rights and discrimination rather than the language of class. Rights-talk rose because the new coalition’s allies were the kind you defend with rights. Moyn tells the story as a tragedy of belief. Alliance Theory tells it as a reshuffling of friends, and the second story needs no lost faith and no warm corpse.
The biases the paper documents run through his books. Humane reads the American war machine as a perpetrator whose turn to clean and lawful killing is a fresh crime to be exposed, which is the perpetrator bias aimed at a rival. His writing on Gaza grants the Palestinian ally the full weight of victimhood and assigns the Israeli rival the full weight of intent, the victim and perpetrator pair the paper maps onto allies and enemies. And watch the attributions, because they tilt. When the left dropped the economic maximum, Moyn lays the loss to external force, to defeat and displacement, no blame falling on the ally. When the liberals took up rights, he lays the turn to choice and to a failure of nerve, blame falling on the rival. Same period, two attributions, sorted by friendship. The self-serving attributional bias has a chapter in the paper and a home in his pages.
Moyn writes in the key of moral seriousness and historical truth. He prizes truth over comfort and the public interest over the tribe. Alliance Theory reads the claim to be moved by truth rather than loyalty as one more move in the fight, the creation of common knowledge that one’s own side is honest and the rivals self-serving. Every engaged partisan makes the move. The hawk holds that he serves the suffering. The juristocrat holds that he serves justice. Moyn holds that he serves the record. The theory does not single him out as a liar. It holds that the sincerity is real and the function is coalitional, and that the two sit together without strain.
The test the paper hands you is substitution. Swap the groups and see whether the principle survives. Moyn turns the solvent of contingency on the ideals of his rivals, on human rights and humane war and the rule of law, and dissolves each into its accidental history. He does not turn the same solvent on the ideals of his allies, on the egalitarian dream or anti-imperial solidarity or the Palestinian cause, which keep the standing of truths the world owes. The selection is the finding. The choice of which contingencies he foregrounds carries the weight. A man who historicizes only his enemies’ sacred objects is not following the evidence where it leads. He is fighting, in the register his coalition rewards, which happens to be the monograph and the lecture and not the cable segment.
Give him the strongest reply, because the front page asks for it. Alliance Theory cuts every way at once. If all belief serves a coalition, then the claim that Moyn’s egalitarianism is mere tactic serves a coalition too, the realist and anti-left camp that profits from deflating the egalitarian dream. The solvent dissolves the hand that holds it. Moyn might say the symmetry voids the charge, that an argument explaining all belief explains none, that the paper’s evidence is American and contested and concedes cross-cultural regularities which smuggle back the structure it set out to deny. The reply has force. It also costs him the thing he most wants to keep. To climb out from under Alliance Theory he has to grant that beliefs run on coalitions, his rivals’ and his own alike, and that concession is most of what the theory came to collect.
So whom does Moyn stand with. Alliance Theory says start there, not with what he values, because the values arrive after the alliance and dressed for its service. Map the friends and the enemies and his positions fall into place with a neatness no philosophy delivers, the elegy and the restraint and the suspicion of rights and the sympathy and the blame, each one pointed where the coalition points. The work is first-rate and the function is total, and the theory insists those were never at odds.
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
