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The Day the Delusions Died Konstantin Kisin

Published

11 months ago

October 23, 2023

The Good Samaritan Window, Chartres Cathedral, France, thirteenth century. God warning Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.

The Reality of Woke Ideology

Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.

The reaction to the attacks—from outwardly pro-Hamas protests to the mealy-mouthed statements of college presidents, celebrities, and CEOs—has exploded the comforting stories many on the center-left have told themselves about progressive identity politics. For many years, they opted for the coping mechanism of pretending that the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media organizations by the woke mind virus was no big deal. “Sure, students shutting down events they disagree with is annoying,” they would say, “but it’s just students doing what students do.”

October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media.

We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists.

In London, where I live, we watched the mayor deliver glib assurances that “London’s diversity is our greatest strength” in the midst of a wave of antisemitic attacks, and as Jewish schools were forced to close because of safety concerns.

Across the West, we noticed that our representatives refused to condemn Hamas’s kidnappings, and that the legacy media was all too eager to swallow and regurgitate Hamas propaganda.

Prior to the October 7 massacre, many students, alumni, and donors with the “unconstrained vision” trusted that the university—for all its many problems—remained the West’s best environment for civil discourse.

But then they watched university presidents who were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd fall silent, or offer the most slippery, equivocal statements carefully crafted to avoid offending anti-Israel groups. They watched an Israeli at Columbia get beaten with a stick, and heard reports about the physical intimidation of students on campuses across the country. They read about dozens of student organizations at Harvard signing a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of Israelis.

The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

This unpleasant conclusion is surprising only if you are still clinging to the unconstrained vision. But if there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.

Just as hope about the possibility of peace with jihadists seems suicidally naive, reconciliation with citizens seized by the woke mindset seems a long way off.

Immigration

Nowhere is the shift from the unconstrained to constrained vision starkest than on immigration.

For decades, both Europe and America basked in an “unconstrained vision” of immigration. In the U.S., the melting pot that could integrate the nineteenth-century Germans, Irish Catholics, or Japanese could surely absorb those crossing the southern border. And many of these new arrivals would do jobs Americans didn’t want to do. Europe needed immigration to deal with an aging population, with many European countries inviting people from their former colonies to fill labor shortages and skills gaps.

But over time, especially from the late 1990s onward, the unconstrained vision ran rampant through media and political elites, and immigration went from being a solution to specific problems to a moral good in its own right. (I am myself an immigrant. When I moved to Britain from Russia in 1996, net immigration into Britain ran at 55,000 people a year. Last year, net immigration stood at over 600,000 people.)

Over the past decade, more and more people in America and Europe have quietly shifted toward the “constrained” view of immigration. The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump were early warning signs of this ongoing transformation. Today, we see New York, where nearly 60,000 newly arrived migrants are putting tremendous strain on shelters and city services like healthcare, education, and public transport. The city has already spent over $1 billion to address this crisis, and projections indicate that housing costs alone could exceed $4.3 billion by next summer. Lifelong Democrats in Manhattan tell The New York Times that “we have too many people coming in,” and that “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”

Europeans have learned similar lessons from their own migrant crisis. In Britain, we spend approximately $10 million a day on hotels for people who have come here illegally. We refuse to deport foreign criminals over “human rights” concerns. Readers may recall seeing recent media reports about the small Italian island of Lampedusa, whose population quadrupled in a day as large numbers of illegal immigrants arrived. We have now learned that a man who shot two Swedish soccer fans dead in a terror attack in Brussels last week arrived there illegally via the island in 2011. The man was known to the authorities as a security risk due to his jihadi links, but when his asylum application was rejected in 2020, he was not deported. How many such people are allowed to come and stay in Europe is impossible to say, as hundreds of thousands of people make illegal crossings into Europe every year.

But despite these shocking statistics, the issue of illegal immigration has been impossible to discuss in polite company for decades. No matter how bad the problem became, to raise concerns about it would almost always lead to accusations of bigotry and xenophobia.

What we have witnessed over the last two weeks—with enormous pro-Hamas rallies in cities like London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.—has the potential to change the immigration debate in a decisive way. It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has recently announced the intention to deport illegal immigrants “on a large scale” as his coalition hemorrhages votes to anti-immigration parties. France has banned pro-Palestine protests and warned that foreign nationals who take part will be removed from the country. Britain has also threatened to revoke the visas of foreigners who praise Hamas. Whether this represents a permanent realignment toward a more constrained view of immigration or merely a temporary blip on the path to progressive dystopia remains to be seen.

Border Security

To express concern about border security has for many years been coded as “right-wing.” But how many people, after the horrors of October 7, believe that a secure border is anything other than the most basic test of national security?

I have just returned from a week in Los Angeles where, on recognizing my name, every single Armenian Lyft driver struck up a conversation in Russian. Once the inevitable complaints about the rising cost of living were out of the way, several shared with me their own journeys into the U.S. and those of their families. I was struck by the fact that those who came in the 1990s and 2000s had usually come legally, but more recent arrivals had made their way through Mexico. One man told me about smuggling his two brothers and 80-year-old father through the southern border: “It’s easy,” he told me.

I have no doubt he is correct: 2023 saw the highest number of illegal crossings since records began. And polling shows that the American people, who are otherwise uniquely welcoming of new arrivals, aren’t happy about it. The problem with illegal immigration isn’t just its scale; it’s that we have no idea whether the people coming are 80-year-old Armenian retirees or jihadi terrorists plotting another 9/11.

It is clearer now than ever before that borders aren’t about bigotry, they’re about security. In a sign of the times, Joe Biden is now continuing work on the border wall that Democrats spent years criticizing Donald Trump for erecting.

The West

The reason the readjustment is necessary and, in my view, highly likely, is that proponents of the unconstrained vision have been allowed to ride roughshod over the concerns of ordinary citizens. They have used this window of opportunity to implement extraordinarily impractical and outright harmful ideas because they take the unbelievable levels of safety, plenty, and freedom we enjoy in the West for granted. The one form of privilege you will never hear them address is the first-world privilege that we all benefit from every day.

They have done this because the fundamental flaw in the unconstrained model of the world is a failure to understand Thomas Sowell’s greatest maxim: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. When you let your institutions be captured by an ideology of intolerance and illiberalism masquerading as progress, that has consequences. When you sow division at home and signal weakness abroad, that has consequences. When you debase the public’s faith in what they are told by the media and their government, that has consequences too.

Western civilization has produced some of the most stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs in human history. If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism.

Will this waking-up moment persist? It depends, in large part, on our courage to look reality in the face.

As Sowell explained, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

And the truth is that we have indulged in magical thinking for too long, choosing comforting myths over harsh realities. About terrorism. About immigration. And about a host of other issues. In our hunger for progress, we have forgotten that not all change is for the better. Now the world is paying the price for that self-indulgence. Let’s hope recent events are the wake-up call we so desperately need.

Konstantin Kisin is the co-host of the podcast Triggernometry. You can read all of Konstantin’s work on his Substack.

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Are U.S. Airlines ‘Playing Into Iran’s Game’? Jay Solomon

Published

1 hour ago

September 16, 2024

For most of the past year, none of the three major U.S. carriers—United Airlines, American Airlines, or Delta—have flown to Israel. (Photo by Jack Guez via AFP)

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, defines his campaign against Israel as being won as much through economics and psychological coercion as through victories on the battlefield. And nearly a year into the Jewish state’s war with Hamas, Iran’s military proxy in the Gaza Strip, Khamenei’s strategy appears to be advancing—with an assist from the U.S. airline industry.

For most of the past year, none of the three major American carriers—United Airlines, American Airlines, or Delta—have flown to Israel, citing the Gaza war and the security threats posed by Tehran and its military allies. And none of these airlines have offered definitive time frames for when their flights might resume. This has left Israel’s national carrier, El Al, as the only direct connection between the country and its closest ally and economic partner on the other side of the world, and has sent airfares between the U.S. and Israel skyrocketing.

In recent days, the cost of a round trip economy flight to Tel Aviv from New York on El Al is around $2,500, according to Israeli travel agencies, up from around $899 before October 7, 2023. United, American, and Delta previously all had at least one daily flight to Israel from New York or Newark, and together served Israel three times a week from Boston, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

The suspension of the American flights is feeding into the economic and diplomatic isolation that Iran’s leaders are seeking, according to Israeli political and business leaders. “The American carriers are playing into Iran’s game,” said Eyal Hulata, who served as national security adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, from 2001–2003.

Jerusalem’s allies in Washington are urgently seeking to establish clearer U.S. government guidelines for when U.S. airlines should halt traffic to Israel, and when it can resume. If not, they warn, American carriers risk bolstering, even unwittingly, the economic coercion that Iran and Israel’s critics in the West are pursuing, often under the banner of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, or BDS.

“In my view, unless there’s an objective process put in place to prevent the politicization of air travel, I predict that in the future the BDS movement will try to weaponize air travel as a new means of boycotting Israel,” U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York) told The Free Press. “And a travel ban has the potential to be the most potent weapon in BDS’s war against the Jewish state.”

Torres wrote the presidents of American, Delta, and United in August asking them to map out the guidelines they followed in deciding to suspend their routes to Israel. None of the three airlines issued an official response to Torres’ letter, and his staff says they have communicated with the U.S. carriers’ government affairs teams, but didn’t disclose the result of these discussions.

Current and former Israeli officials told The Free Press they’re particularly confused by the U.S. airlines’ decisions as a number of Middle Eastern, African, and European carriers are currently flying to Tel Aviv despite these security threats. That includes three airlines from the United Arab Emirates—Etihad Airways, FlyDubai, and Wizz Air Abu Dhabi—whose government only normalized diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. These pacts seek to integrate Israel economically and diplomatically into the wider Arab world.

“They should fly to Israel exactly like the Gulf countries and others do,” said Hulata, the former national security adviser. “And if they don’t do this because they are scared of rockets, then there’s something fundamentally wrong in their decision making.”

Hulata, who now serves as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, added: “There hasn’t been a rocket anywhere close to the airport for months.”

Passengers scan the departures board at Ben Gurion Airport on September 2, 2024. (Photo by Ameer Abed Rabbo/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The three major U.S. carriers initially halted air travel to Israel last October 7 after Hamas militants crossed the country’s southern border and slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The airlines’ decisions weren’t ordered, however, by the U.S.’s airline regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA only cautioned American carriers against flying to Israel at the time.

The FAA’s position was actually much more restrained than in the summer of 2014. Then, Hamas rocket strikes close to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport—the primary international hub near Tel Aviv—caused the airline authority to briefly suspend all outbound U.S. flights. Israeli officials were incensed, arguing the ban amounted to an assault on the country’s economy. American supporters of Israel, including former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, flew to Tel Aviv on El Al flights to show solidarity.

The three U.S. airlines have said in public statements that their decisions on Israel are tied solely to the security threats posed to their crews and passengers. United and Delta briefly resumed flights to Tel Aviv in June, but then suspended them in August in the wake of the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran—an attack Tehran blamed on Israel and vowed to avenge.

The Iranian military and its proxies launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel in April in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian compound in Syria. But they were almost all intercepted by Israel, U.S., European, and Arab air defenses. The Israel Defense Forces and Pentagon remain on high alert for another Iranian reprisal.

At present, Delta says its flights remain canceled through October 31; American Airlines cites March 2025 as a potential resumption date; and United Airlines says its services to Israel remain on hold indefinitely. “Our flights to Tel Aviv remain suspended—we look forward to resuming flights as soon as it’s safe for our customers and crew,” a United spokesperson told The Free Press.

American declined to comment and Delta said it is “continuously monitoring the evolving security environment and assessing our operations based on security guidance and intelligence reports and will communicate any updates as needed.”

This travel ban has forced Americans needing to go to Israel to either pay higher El Al fares or find more time-consuming routes through Europe. One U.S. defense expert who needed to meet Israeli security officials in Jerusalem this month to discuss the Iranian threat told The Free Press it took weeks to arrange a flight. No seats on El Al flights were available, and he eventually went via Paris on Air France. “It’s stunning how hard it was to get there,” he said.

Still, the outspokenness of a number of U.S. airline unions against travel to Israel has raised concerns among members of Congress and the Israeli government that politics may also be factoring into the flight ban.

A day after the October 7 attack, the president of the Allied Pilots Association, Captain Ed Sicher, ordered the union’s 16,000 members to refuse any requests from American Airlines to fly to the Jewish state. “As noted in APA’s initial update yesterday regarding the safe evacuation of working American Airlines crewmembers from Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that the country is now ‘at war.’ The Israeli security cabinet weighed in today, declaring that the country is in a ‘state of war,’ ” he wrote APA members. “Until further notice, if you are scheduled, assigned, or reassigned a pairing into Israel, refuse the assignment by calling your Chief Pilot or IOC Duty Pilot.”

In February, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA joined six other major American unions in calling for a formal U.S. ban on military supplies to Israel until Netanyahu agrees to a cease-fire with Hamas. “It is clear that the Israeli government will continue to pursue its vicious response to the horrific attacks of October 7 until it is forced to stop,” reads the statement from the AFA-CWA and six other unions. The spokeswoman for the AFA-CWS, Taylor Garland, has also regularly posted and reposted items on social media demanding a Gaza cease-fire and criticizing the military tactics of the Israel Defense Forces.

Garland and the AFA-CWA declined to respond to numerous requests from The Free Press to comment on Israel and whether the organization backs a U.S. flight ban if the Netanyahu government doesn’t agree to a cease-fire with Hamas. Other airline unions, trade associations, and pilots, however, downplayed the idea that politics were driving decisions, but rather cited security and basic economics. A number noted that insurance costs for the U.S. carriers rise in conflict zones, while the overall demand for flights decrease. Also, the length of U.S. flights to Israel require overnight stays for American pilots and crews, something that’s not normally an issue for European or Middle East carriers.

“Our number one concern as pilots, no matter where we’re flying—it doesn’t have to be to Tel Aviv, it can be to Toledo—it’s got to be safe and secure,” said Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the APA. “We didn’t make that call, but American Airlines did. Oftentimes, they will bring in a third layer, and that’s commercial interests.”

One pilot from a major U.S. carrier told The Free Press he regularly signs up to fly to Tel Aviv when the ban appears set to be lifted. But then the airline again cancels, following a new security assessment. “It hurts us financially, but the decision is really down to our security department,” said the airman.

The suspension of U.S. flights to Israel has contributed to a broader shock to the Israeli economy since the war with Hamas erupted last October. Israel’s calling up of 360,000 reservists after the Hamas attack, roughly 4 percent of the population, has placed a particular strain on the economy. The country’s growth contracted 1.4 percent during the second quarter of 2024 from the year earlier, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, and its exports of goods and services dropped 8.3 percent. The Israeli economy experienced a double-digit contraction in the months directly preceding the Hamas attack.

“Aviation has a big impact on our country because we’re like an island,” said Professor Nicole Adler, dean of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Business School. “I know that we have Syria and Egypt and so on around us. But most traffic is coming in via airlines, and it’s very sad that this war has gone on for as long as it has.”

Since October, Iran and its proxies across the region have made no secret of their desire to constrict international trade and passenger traffic going into and out of Israel. According to Iranian officials, this will both drain Israel’s economy and impose a psychological toll on the broader populace.

Much of Tehran’s efforts have centered on the Red Sea, where the Iranian-backed Houthi militia has launched hundreds of attacks on tankers and other maritime vessels transiting through the Suez Canal—some on their way to Israel. Just this month, the Yemeni militants launched six missile strikes on international maritime traffic, including on Panamanian- and Saudi-flagged oil tankers.

On Sunday, the Houthis successfully launched a long-range missile at central Israel for the first time. Israeli defense officials said their air defense system largely destroyed the projectile, though some fragments landed on agricultural land and near a railway station.

This, combined with the reduced air traffic, has prompted self-congratulatory comments from Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Khamenei, that their multifront war against the Jewish state is working. Since becoming Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, the 84-year-old cleric has made clear that the path toward liberating Palestine will be achieved as much through making Israel unlivable to its Jewish residents as through open warfare.

“Four million people will leave Israel. [This means] reverse migration,” Khamenei told a television audience during a June 3 speech marking the death of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “In other words, the level of perplexity, confusion, and panic among Israeli officials has reached this degree. Pay attention to this! This is very important!”

Jay Solomon is an investigative reporter for The Free Press and author of The Iran Wars. Follow him on X at @jaysolomon, and read his last piece “How Close Is Iran to the Bomb?”

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To the Woman Who Trashed Me on Twitter Kat Rosenfield

Published

5 hours ago

September 15, 2024

“Why does the political landscape feel like high school?” asks Kat Rosenfield. (Mean Girls 2004, Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo)

Back when Donald Trump was last running for election, as the Great Awokening made its speech-chilling sweep through the American media, a small number of writers and public intellectuals admitted to not being entirely onboard with the new orthodoxy of privilege checking, sensitivity reading, racial affinity groups for 8-year-olds, and so on. These people were, depending on who you ask, either very brave or very stupid.

In public, and especially on Twitter, this cohort became objects of loathing and derision, excoriated by peers for refusing to “read the room.” But behind the scenes, we were inducted into a weird little priesthood of the unorthodox—mostly via Twitter DMs, which served as a sort of backchannel confessional for fellow writers who agreed that things appeared to be going off the rails, but were too afraid of being canceled to admit as much on main.

The first time I received one of these messages, it was from a woman named Jane. She was a colleague—we both had permanent freelance gigs at the same online teen magazine—and wanted me to know that she shared my concerns about the increasing hostility to free expression in progressive spaces.

“I’m trying to tell myself every day that this censorship, hypersensitivity etc is the natural exuberance of a new movement still feeling out its own limitations,” she wrote to me once, early on. “I spend so much time every day now wondering if my peers *actually* want to suspend the 1st amendment or are just angry/emotional/posturing.”

Jane would pop into my DMs every time a new censorship controversy erupted in our little corner of the internet, which is to say, we chatted frequently. When I wrote my first investigative feature about how the world of young adult fiction had been overtaken by campaigns to shame and censor authors in the name of diversity, she sent me effusive praise; when she worried aloud about her career, I offered advice and sent her leads on paid writing opportunities. When she wanted to vent about cancel culture, she always started by apologizing. She hated to burden me, she said; she just didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

Five years later, I had just published an article about the Covid-era campaign to eject Joe Rogan from Spotify when my friend Zac sent me one of those messages that almost invariably means someone is talking shit about you online: “Sorry,” he wrote, “but I thought you should probably know about this.” When I clicked on the link he’d sent, I discovered that I was being mocked via screenshot by a prominent podcaster who has always hated me for unknown reasons; what Zac wanted me to see was one of the first replies.

“I used to work with this person,” it read. “She was not always like this, but this particular strain of contrarianism is like heroin—there are very few casual users.”

The writer of this comment was Jane.

I thought of this incident recently while reading Kat Timpf’s book, which came out last week, I Used to Like You Until. . . A reflection on, per the subtitle, How Binary Thinking Divides Us, the book’s opening chapters are dedicated to describing the social liabilities of being employed at Fox News, where Timpf is a regular panelist on the late-night talk show Gutfeld! Her politics are more libertarian (small L) than conservative, and her brand of commentary more Phyllis Diller than Bill O’Reilly (she also does stand-up comedy), which makes her a bit of a misfit—if not on Fox News itself, then certainly in the minds of people who equate the network with a particular brand of shouty, Trumpy Republicanism.