Over the past couple of years, a comforting narrative took hold: namely, that intolerant progressive identity politics and “cancel culture,” of the kind that characterized the mid-2010s and early 2020s, have receded. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s not always true, especially around certain topics. I’d know. I’m a junior at Columbia University, and I’ve spent the past 48 hours under a barrage of messages, like the ones above, urging me to commit suicide or demanding that my career and life be destroyed. 

My crime: publishing an essay in a student magazine, the Columbia Sundial, that questioned the ironclad narrative on campus that Jane Doe, of the “Cornell 7” controversy, is a victim of rape.

My co-author, Christina Ma, and I argued that the case highlights a contradiction in American liberalism: we celebrate libertine sexuality while infantilizing women when this yields predictably troubling results, such as those at Cornell. “The sexual revolution,” we wrote, “created a hyper-liberal, pro-sex culture that insists that ‘women can do whatever they want with their bodies.’ In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there’s a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it.” 

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More to the point: I believe that this globally divisive topic should be — indeed, must be — subjected to good-faith, reasonable contestation. (I write here in my personal capacity, and not as the Sundial’s deputy editor.) My detractors disagree. Even in our supposedly “post-woke” age, any debate on the Cornell matter is immediately mistaken for “misogyny.” To investigate is to promote “rape culture.” To raise doubts is to undermine the “lived experience” of all women. 

The Sundial was founded in 2024 to foster debate, counter excessive editorial censorship, and publish ideas from an array of perspectives that Columbia’s other publications won’t touch. The project has been difficult: the general student body finds the publication too “conservative,” conservatives find it too “liberal,” pro-Palestinian students consider it to be “genocidal,” and Zionist activists on campus complain when we publish Israel-skeptical views. 

Yet precisely this heterodox ethos, Ma and I and some others on staff believed, needed to be carried into our coverage of the “Cornell 7.” The process was controversial, even on our board. Our three-member editorial board, of which I am part, subjected the piece to extra scrutiny. One board member even ended up resigning after the article was published, in the wake of the massive backlash that ensued.  

Nonetheless, Ma and I pushed the piece through, and it received the sign-off of all members of the board, including the since-resigned member. On the same day, we published a piece from an opposing point of view, taking issue specifically with my own writing and public statements on the “Cornell 7” affair. 

Within hours of the story going live, Ma and I received more than 60 comments on Instagram and more than 100 “shares.” As of the time of this writing, it has garnered more than 300 “shares.” Students posted about it relentlessly, and with limited exceptions, in abusive language — attacking both Ma and me, and the Sundial writ large. Very few people messaged me personally; instead, they chose to harass other members of our staff for being associated with me. 

The Sundial is no stranger to controversy. At the height of the Gaza encampments, the magazine dissented from pro-Palestinian groupthink. But no backlash has been as intense, uncompromising, and extreme as the one that now confronts us. 

The campus, en masse, has turned against us. The student-run Columbia Political Review published an open letter to the Sundial. It claimed a commitment to the “dissemination of multipartisan ideas” but added that “journalism relies on standards of respect and zero tolerance for sexism and sexual assault.” It accused us of unspecified “inaccuracies,” and of perpetuating “a culture of campus violence, rape, and assault.” The CPR also pressed the Sundial to re-evaluate its publishing guidelines and “commitment to public safety,” and conduct a review of our decision-making process.  

Even the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance, or CODA, of which I was once a board member, has condemned us. The group wrote in a statement that “CODA exists because we believe in free expression and the open exchange of ideas, including ideas we disagree with.” But, you know, not really. The statement went on: “Open discourse requires that every member of our community be able to speak. This article does the opposite: it promotes rape culture and works to silence survivors of sexual assault.” 

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CODA also canceled a student press panel that was scheduled to take place, in which the Sundial’s editor-in-chief was slated to participate. The Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus’s principal student publication, weighed in with their reporting, which heavily relied on claims that our essay raised concerns about “safety” and quoted two of our staff members who are circulating a petition around campus for the Sundial to “cease organizational operations” until their demands are met. 

Our student opponents, in effect, believe that prevention of sexual assault — a term that has come to encompass any activity that the accuser finds unwanted or distressing — can be accomplished through punishment of the perpetrators; to this end, allegations of sexual assault must be believed without question. 

This activist position has long elided the difference between violent rape, a crime, and a host of other more ambiguous situations that are regrettable but not criminal, and are difficult to punish by law. Our essay argued that the libertine culture that both men and women participate in is responsible for many situations perceived as assault, and that in order to prevent this form of assault, the culture itself might need to change.    

Activists may wish to silence this perspective, but student journalists and self-proclaimed “free-speech” organizers shouldn’t. It is distressing that students can believe that they are in favor of “multipartisan ideas,” “open discourse,” and “journalism” — all while silencing dissenting voices on topics that are less comfortable. Members of my generation, who were mere children when the first wave of cancel culture crested, appear to have learned nothing where it really matters.

Tackling disorder and making streets welcoming for families should be a no-brainer — the very foundation of good government at the local level. Yet over the past decade, many blue jurisdictions abandoned these basics in the name of racial justice and “equity.” This had the predictable result of associating such places, in the public mind, with open drug use, needle-strewn sidewalks, tent cities, and rampant antisocial behavior. 

Conservatives made political hay of these failures, and who could blame them? Now, however, Mamdani — one of the most popular Democratic politicians in America — is reclaiming social order for the Left and implicitly questioning the ultra-libertarian social ethos that earlier captured the movement. If he succeeds, it could mark a sea change in progressive thinking. But where is Mamdani getting these ideas?

The answer is, in part, a person: Bhaskar Sunkara. The founder of Jacobin magazine, the president of The Nation, and a contributor to these pages, Sunkara counts Mamdani as a friend and ally. Sunkara has also been quietly but steadily injecting a healthy dose of social realism — some might even say conservatism — into a progressive movement that has been besotted with ideas like defunding the police, legalizing all drugs, and abolishing the family.

“It’s about making sure that these citizens, regularly using hard drugs, living in tents, who are even gambling on their phones, are able to reach their potential and contribute to society,” Sunkara tells me recently, as we sit down for an interview at Jacobin’s downtown-Brooklyn offices.

Sunkara, who rails against vices from porn to sports betting to even alcohol, strenuously avoids coming across as a Right-wing culture warrior. One senses in his tone that he doesn’t want his more culturally conservative positions to come across too strongly or, as he puts it, in “authoritarian” fashion: “As a society, [we] should have a normative vision of a good life, but also leave room for minority preferences.” 

But even that is an astonishing statement for a figure who used to be the vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America and who remains arguably the single biggest intellectual force behind it. As the DSA makes dramatic gains among young voters nationwide, it’s notable that one of its most important theorists believes that we “should have a normative vision of a good life.”

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On the core economic issues, he’s in broad alignment with many of his DSA comrades: Medicare for All and, on a grander scale, a “constitutional socialism” that would work within America’s existing framework to infuse socialism into the republic and its market economy. Crucially, Sunkara’s vision of socialism wouldn’t get rid of the market, but rely on market mechanisms to price and allocate goods efficiently. (He lays out this vision in his new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, co-authored with fellow Leftist intellectuals Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs.)

When it comes to culture, though, Sunkara in some ways easily meets the definition of “conservative” as it’s understood by most in 21st-century America. This, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for his being a “man of the Right.” There is a long tradition of Leftists — George Orwell, Dorothy Day, and Christopher Lasch among them — who opposed the excesses of capitalism not only when it came to market activity, but also in the social and private realms. Moreover, “actually existing socialism” from China to Cuba has often been socially conservative in many respects — and in the “authoritarian” fashion from which, to be clear, Sunkara shrinks.

But ask your average DSAer today on an American college campus about how, or even whether, to address crises like porn addiction or cannabis-use disorder, and you will be mistaken for a Republican and simply brushed aside. I would know. I attend the uber-activistic Columbia University, and this has happened to me too many times to count. Sunkara acknowledges this, as well, but he doesn’t place the blame on socialism or Leftism. Instead, per Sunkara, this way of thinking is “more common just among young people in general,” whereas you’ll find less of it among the Bernie bros and old-school socialists.

In acknowledging this reality, Sunkara puts it charitably: “I think the common response on the Left is, like, ‘Let’s just focus on Medicare for All’” and put the cultural debates to the side. There is also, he suggests, a class dimension to Left tolerance for social vice and disorder. “I think you often find this thing — upper-middle-class people will have lifestyles for their own children and themselves that are quite conventional, low tech, etc., but kind of not want it for other kids.” 

He doesn’t see why socialism should necessarily equate to American-style socially liberal policy prescriptions. Though he warns of the dangers of going too far in the other direction. He tells me he would have “probably” supported gay marriage back when that debate was happening, as opposed to civil unions, but he explains that “even in socialist countries, on the gay and lesbian question, it was considered kind of a bourgeois decadence in places like Cuba, until Cuba opened up, I guess, really, in the ’90s on this issue.”

The degree to which such speech is wholly verboten on the Left — including among the somewhat-less-woke new crop of DSA politicians — can’t be overstated. And yet Sunkara doesn’t blink in saying so, speaking to me in a calm and elevated cadence, matter-of-factly. He may well be one of the minds behind Zohran Mamdani, but one could simply not imagine the same sentence issuing from the mouth of the New York mayor. 

I ask Sunkara about Taylor Lorenz, the Leftist tech blogger, who mocks “‘Leftists’ arguing that porn addiction and social media addiction is real.” Sunkara would be one such Leftist. Indeed, one of a very few. “You get the dopamine hits. It just seems fairly obvious,” Sunkara replies. “I’m one of the few people [who] doesn’t have a beef with Taylor in part because I just have muted her.” 

“Prohibition [of alcohol] was, in fact, a success,” he adds later, unprompted by me. “Prohibition actually led to a decrease in crime, a decrease in domestic violence, a decrease in certain fights and other sorts of public disturbances. Yes, there was an increase in organized crime. That increase, I think, pales in comparison to other advantages.” Though “it’s too late now” to have Prohibition policies reinstated, he laments, Sunkara has previously spoken in support of Utah liquor laws, which limit the sale of high alcohol-by-volume drinks to state stores, impose drink limits at bars, deploy state-mandated devices for measuring the volume of alcohol in a single drink, and proscribe happy hour. 

What, then, does Sunkara have in mind when he urges resistance against the “authoritarian” impulse in fortifying restraints against vice? 

He wouldn’t jail people for marijuana use but would get rid of omnipresent dispensaries (there’s one right outside the Jacobin office). While “porn is very difficult to regulate,” he concedes, he maintains that age-verification is a good “barrier to entry,” particularly for those most vulnerable to its dark and addictive side: “You’re just creating a little bit more friction for like a 13-year-old or a 12-year-old. But by the time someone’s 16 or 17, they can navigate around it and access porn if they want, which I don’t think is a huge problem.” Sunkara believes it’s possible for a man who regularly consumes porn to have positive relationships with women, but that it’s just “common sense” that younger exposure will lead to “pathological outcomes.” We “really need to hold the line” on things like sports betting and, in general, “see how we could regulate and roll back elsewhere.”

Put another way: Sunkara may not be rushing to absolutely prevent everyone from consuming booze, ingesting marijuana, watching porn, and gambling. Yet he sees all of these things as inherently bad — stuff we would be much better off without — and instead seeks maximum moderation within our current societal constraints. That, needless to say, is a far cry from the “porn-good” and “marijuana-good” libertarian orthodoxy on much of the Left. 

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Unlike many DSA comrades, Sunkara is also unapologetically patriotic. “America was the most racist country in the history of the world, and I think the Left actually does a great discredit to its own history when it pretends like it still is,” he said, to much subsequent internet virality, on what would turn out to be one of Ross Douthat’s last podcast episodes for The New York Times. Sunkara elaborates this point in our interview: “We live in communities, and we have to draw where the level of fellowship [is]. I’m a New Yorker. I’m an American. I also am broadly a man of the Northeast, so I feel fellowship with Ontario, a greater fellowship than I do with Alberta.” This, he cautions me, does not take away from his universalism, but is the reality of how our political organization works. 

It’s an outlook in stark opposition to the DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, the pro-Palestine hard-liner who delivered a June upset to the five-term, establishment incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District. Chevalier’s X history includes tweets such as: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” On the case of Chevalier, Sunkara says, “I think Darializa came out of a campus radical background,” and that we should wait and “see what she does in office,” because “you could find equal examples of people coming out of the religious Right and having certain rhetoric before they’re in public office.” 

His comfort with patriotism also allows him to reach audiences that would otherwise never hear a socialist message. “I would speak to anyone as long as they also have an audience that’s worth my time,” he says. “So Fox News, you know, three out of four times that Fox News reaches out to me, I’ll say yes.” The only exceptions are when outlets are “openly fascist, openly nativist in the sense that they don’t respect my right to be a part of the American polity, even though I was born here.” 

Would he go on Tucker Carlson? “I could never beat Tucker Carlson in a debate,” he says, “and I don’t necessarily want to agree with him because I do think there [are] undertones to his work that are not only nativist, but I also think that his criticism of Israel is something we should be very wary of.” He adds: “I don’t think a Leftist should necessarily go on Tucker because also then you’re blurring the line between your critique of Israel as a Leftist and his critique of Israel, or your critique of Trump and his critique of Trump.” 

Some of Sunkara’s social prescriptions may seem excessive, and not only to socialists. But he’s trending in the right direction at a time when America is racked by deleterious forms of antisociality that line corporate pockets, whether Big Weed’s or Big Porn’s. To be sure, it’s hard to imagine the DSA embracing Sunkara’s practical, socially moderate, pro-American model of democratic socialism. Then again, a year ago, it would have been hard to imagine Zohran Mamdani, a onetime champion of defunding the NYPD, urging the Left to stop coddling disorder.

This phenomenon is appearing in all kinds of non-porn and porn-adjacent content. Quentin Tarantino, for example, was an early adopter, starting with his magnum opus Pulp Fiction in 1994, and has stuck with the preoccupation throughout his career. He featured Qualley’s own bare feet prominently in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. On Instagram, risqué but not technically pornographic OnlyFans models striking poses involving their feet will periodically appear on my feed — often multiple times throughout the day. Zoomers tend to be shy of sex conversations, but with clues here and there — feet jokes, the feet-featuring reels I’m sent, side comments that fixate on women’s footwear — it’s clear to me that it’s an interest among my cohort. 

The best statistics, however, come from foot-porn numbers, available from Pornhub, and concern material showing actual naked people in a video. According to the porn aggregator’s 2025 report, the “feet” category gained a 69% (don’t laugh) increase in views over the course of the year. More to the point, Gen Z viewers’ searches for “feet” were 347% more frequent than searches by other generations. The only category that Gen Z seemed to like more, compared with older generations, was “party,” at +385%. As Pornhub sadly put it, this was a manifestation of “the need for connection” sought by Zoomers. 

The 24-year-old Julia Filippo, among the most viral in the ever-expanding cadre of Miami OnlyFans girls, plays to the interest. Scroll her Instagram, and you’ll see her sucking on a long, phallic lollipop with her leg bent over behind her head, and four individual, smaller lollipops placed between her white-pedicured toes. In another post, captioned “glizzy time,” she’s in a bathtub filled with hot dogs: in one photo, her leg is bent up as she stares at the hot dog she’s placed between her toes; in three others, in slightly different poses, she’s pointing her toes, which are holding a mayonnaise-globbed hot dog, at the camera. Hungry yet? In still another, Filippo performs a sexualized version of the king pigeon yoga pose, staring at her foot with her tongue out, as if she’s ready to lick it. 

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Filippo has 1.2 million followers on her main Instagram account and 292,000 on her secondary one. Meanwhile, there’s also wikiFeet, where you can browse and rate celebrity feet. While men are included, it’s the women the website boosts and who get by far the most attention. FeetFinder, a platform that allows one to anonymously sell feet pics online, estimates that its “established creators” make between $2,000 and over $5,000 a month — just for pictures of their feet. 

In the outright porn category, adult superstars like Riley Reid have embraced foot fetishism, too, and wholly departed from hardcore content creation. Reid posted on X on Jan. 14, “did someone say feet content?” holding her open-toe heels up to a mirror, and on Mar. 18, “these feet got dance moves” to a video of her moving her feet around and wiggling her toes.

Graphic foot-porn tends to be some combination of the female performer enthusing about how “sexy” or “cute” or “little” or “smelly” her feet are (depending on the foot-proclivity in question), followed by her (or her co-star) maybe enthusiastically removing her heels or sneakers or sandals or pantyhose, maybe some toe-sucking (by her male counterpart, and sometimes, herself sucking her own toes), then maybe a footjob (like a handjob, but with feet), and … you can imagine the rest. There’s also fully solo feet-play, and lesbian feet play, involving genital stimulation, mutual foot-licking, foot-deepthroating, and other such goodies. Sometimes the actress’s feet will be well-kept and, dare I say, pretty; other times, they’ll be dirty, which is probably the point for some viewers. Still rarer, but definitely out there, is the inverse dynamic: a female porn actress sucking on a man’s toes. 

This odd new interest demands the question, why now? The foot fetish is one of the oldest recognized fetishes, and has long been an emblem of deviant sexuality, but during the great kink mainstreaming that took place in the era of Tumblr and the sex apps, it wasn’t particularly prevalent. An informal poll of Boomer and Gen X kinksters, including Melanie (her name has been changed), a 58-year-old woman who frequently uses the Kinkster platform to solicit BDSM encounters, turned up no one who’d ever encountered the interest in the wild. Melanie said she has been involved in the kink scene throughout her adult life and has met dozens of men through it, including of younger generations such as Millennials, and that she’s never come across foot fetishism.

Zoomers, however, were raised on porn, and no one can avoid it online anymore. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, who is a practicing Muslim, has a hijabi wife, and is 41 years old, has openly said: “every third video that scrolls on its own, is gonna be some OnlyFans model.” And the algorithm likely plays its part in encouraging the fetish. Filippo, for instance, is clothed on Instagram, even if scantily so, which meets Meta’s anti-porn threshold. Instagram seems to optimize such pornographic-but-not-officially-porn content. OnlyFans promotions on X, which have the option of showing graphic content, also seem to skew towards feet pics — leading one to suspect that such material gets the most clicks. The promotion by the platforms must, to some extent, create even more demand.

But in a more human sense, perhaps because Zoomers are overexposed to graphic porn content, eroticism has moved elsewhere, to content that is more interesting because it’s traditionally less explicit. The foot fetish is also alluring because it still has an aura of weirdness and taboo, so it can still shock in a porn-universe where little is shocking. What is more, in an increasingly sex-averse world, it substitutes as an object of desire. 

There’s traditional sex appeal to some of it — Filippo is conventionally attractive, showing a lot of skin, whatever — but it isn’t the point. Nor is the appeal sexual humiliation, in the old-fashioned sense. The Zoomer interest is of a different variety than, say, the 59-year-old, Leftist independent journalist Glenn Greenwald’s leaked tape from spring of last year, in which he paid to suck on a Brazilian male prostitute’s toes. Greenwald wore a schoolgirl skirt throughout the affair and showed the man that he’d sent him $2,000 by PayPal after he was done, to top off the humiliation ritual. 

To the straight Zoomer man, a woman’s foot is a location upon which to channel desire; he doesn’t want to experience pain or degradation or anything like that per se. The foot-as-object is the point, not submission. The foot provides very little sexually, in comparison to other body parts, and thus feels safer, and is even more appealing to a sex-avoidant generation. Will Gluck, the director of the new romantic-comedy One Night Only, said that he avoided significant nudity and sex-heavy scenes specifically because younger movie-goers are made uncomfortable by them. I, for one, am 19 years old, and I remember that in middle school, one of my more annoying friends stole my phone from me and proceeded to follow multiple foot fetish accounts on Instagram — I probably spent hours thereafter unfollowing all these accounts. That, at least, was my introduction to all this.  

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And there may be something to the foot itself. Women take better care of their feet than men and wear nicer shoes, but then why wouldn’t a man have the urge to masturbate to a woman’s manicured hand, too, or fixate on it during sex? Freud recognized the foot as an object of particular sexual fixation, speculating that it was a “phallic substitute,” for when a child recognized that his mother did not have a penis. 

There’s also a sense of return to a pre-Sexual Revolution sexuality. Overstimulated by porn and scared by actual sex — and by many accounts having worse and more awkward sex at that — Zoomers long for re-mystification. 

The last really major era for the foot fetish, by contemporary standards, might have been the 1950s, with a defining artifact of the moment Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, featuring the late Brigitte Bardot. For Vadim, the actress’s feet were a topic of fixation in a way that immediately recalls 2026. Bardot plays a young orphan girl who’s been placed with a family — in Saint-Tropez, no less — where she navigates relationships with men from opposing ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. In the opening scene, the camera zooms in on Bardot’s feet as she’s sunbathing. In another, she’s scolded for walking around barefoot in the shop she works at, as if this alone made her a slut. She also bikes barefoot and walks throughout the town barefoot. All throughout the film, there are numerous close-ups of her feet. The film would come to define the wild and playful “Bardot aesthetic” and also was seen as shattering the sexual mores of the ’50s. That feet had the ability to do this is a tribute to their sexual power. 

Of course, what followed during and after the Sexual Revolution was actual sex — more of it in film; more of it in the real world; more of it pre-marital. Zoomers aren’t doing as much of that, but their foot fetishism demonstrates that sexuality, in some form, will always be present. When Zoomers do have sex, it’s also often different — many need to have sex as if they’re imagining themselves in a porno, wherein fixations on objects of desire such as feet would come in. Unlike Tarantino, who operates in a sex-and-kink-celebrating world, Vadim was not necessarily thought of as a foot fetishist. Feet were understood as an expression of sexuality, even if somewhat scandalous. What else is Gen Z’s foot fetish, if not just that? Chanel is just being honest about it — and making a great profit on a mere fraction of a shoe, as well. 

This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be —  a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.

Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”

Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security. 

“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.” 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.” 

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Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her. 

On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator S.E. Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.” 

Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”  

Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.

Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks. 

Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”

Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire. 

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian. 

Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said. 

Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?

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The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.” 

The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.

Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection. 

One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana. 

Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.

The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.

So, where is he taking me? I wonder, as we cross the Potomac. He’s also behaving erratically — jittering in his seat, changing lanes without turn signals, and aggressively honking at the car in front of him. I check my Uber app to make sure I got in the right car. I tell myself that a 5-foot-5-inch-tall college student wearing a polo shirt probably won’t be murdered underneath an interstate overpass in Northern Virginia, at least not tonight. 

Everything turned out fine with my Uber. I made it to Alexandria, and had a long and pleasant dinner with a friend. Later that evening, though, I was checking my phone on a street corner when I saw three men approaching me. Something about them seemed off — the way they walked, the look on their faces, the possible bulge of a gun holster on one of them. “You OK?” one asked me, with suspicion, in a strong Southern accent, a menacing grin on his face. “Yeah, how about you?” I replied, in my best, high-pitched, safely-American-sounding voice. 

This, in a nutshell, is mass-migration society. On the same day that I — an ethnic-Iranian, with skin as brown as ever in the 90-degree heat and the last name Mohammadi — am upset by a rude foreigner who seems not to know where to take me, I’m also on the receiving end of what, in days of peak woke, we would have all agreed was a “microaggression.” 

Mostly, such experiences are uncomfortable and annoying, but obviously not life-threatening. Increasingly, however, they define a global reality plagued by “diversity stress,” as UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari has written. And this reality has now been captured by the thriller Citizen Vigilante, a low-budget, 89-minute movie directed by the relatively unknown German independent filmmaker Uwe Boll and released last month. This obscure film has received attention in large part due to Elon Musk, owner of X, promoting it on his platform. It is artistically lacking — little more than Right-wing slop, akin to a Dinesh D’Souza production. But its celebration of violence and the chaotic society it portrays is useful in thinking about our own mad predicament. 

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Citizen Vigilante, then, is not the mass-migration society movie I want, but it might be the one we deserve in our moment of online edgelording, heightened and extreme political rhetoric, and self-interested hyper-individualism. The movie is the story of a former US soldier (Armie Hammer), turned angry vigilante against migrant violence, and it distills the persistent chaos and apprehension of mass-migration society — by appealing to people’s baser instincts, and triggering their increasing fear of the Other.

Hammer’s character, Sanders, has inherited his estranged father’s fortune and finds himself in “Europe” — we aren’t told where in Europe, though the movie is filmed in Croatia — assuming the mantle of a wealthy landlord. In the opening scene, a young mother and her son are in a supermarket, all lovey-dovey, only to exit onto the street — where a black man suddenly stabs the mother in the neck, and she falls to the ground, blood gushing out. Clearly, Boll is pulling no punches with the racial fear-mongering. 

Sanders sets himself up as an avenger for the native-born population, fighting both the migrants (portrayed as murderers and rapists) and the liberal, stereotypically Euro-institutionalist judges who decline to prosecute them — by just going ahead and killing everybody. Think of him as the strong and silent but easily irritated type. Hammer — yes, the same Armie Hammer who has texted women that he was “100% a cannibal” and wanted to cook and eat their ribs (10/10 pillow talk) — plays him, in his comeback attempt to film, as a righteous, anti-social lone wolf who repeatedly says: “I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.” 

In one outlying instance, Sanders also defends two young women against two white men who are attempting to roofie them. But overwhelmingly, the movie presents the migrants as the problem, and the anti-migrant crusade as justified. Its protagonist also has the predictable populist, almost-anarcho-libertarian streak. “What if everything they taught you was utter nonsense?” he asks the people of Europe at one point, to whom he speaks in blurred-out videos by hacking the main news station. Referencing Nietzsche — never a good thing, coming from a violent man — he declares: “We can change history, the state, the court, the police…. They only exist to control you.” 

Many half-baked scenes follow: Sanders frequents a brothel, where the prostitute says she’ll charge 30 “bucks” per sex position (“bucks,” as in dollars, are not used in Europe); actors, confusingly, speak in a mix of European and American accents; the vehicles Sanders uses all have “EU” license plates (those don’t exist), whereas the cars in the background clearly have Croatian ones; scenes switch fast and with little plot development — in one instance, the Interpol investigator tracking Sanders for his vigilante-crimes manages to get his DNA off of a bar glass, and seconds later, we see a SWAT team entering Sanders’s temporary residence, where he is in a (somehow) impenetrable metal box, from which he manages to shoot the entire armed team and escape.

In the movie’s most viral scene, Sanders enters the home of a Syrian family whose son, alongside a group of others, took turns raping a young girl. While he is interrogating the family, the daughter, in order to justify the rapes, says that European girls “dress wrong and just make boys horny with their miniskirts — they show their legs and breasts.” The rapist himself says that he thought “she wanted it.” And the father argues that he’s teaching his kids “values from Quran.” Sanders gets the kid to call his friends and co-rapists, who aren’t in prison, thanks to a woke, liberal judge who argued that they were just having trouble assimilating, and invite them over. 

Our hero shoots the entire family dead, and then shoots each and every one of the rapists as they enter.

Finally, in the last scene, Sanders calls the Interpol investigator and tells him that “Islamist extremists and the blind-sided woke Left” are taking over Europe, and that things must change. The investigator then gets hold of the prime minister, and we are led to believe that he has been convinced by Sanders’s argument, which is Right-wing slop in the sense that it makes broad-brush-stroke reference to “woke,” and sees “Islamists” as the problem. 

Ultimately — unlike the better-directed and incomparable vigilante story, Taxi Driver — the viewer isn’t left rooting, not even uncomfortably so, for the lone man who takes justice into his own hands. This wasn’t Boll’s intention, but it is hard to see Sanders as anything other than a freak of nature: someone who is using social chaos for moral license to kill. To the sane viewer (i.e., not Elon Musk), it will be clear that Sanders himself is the gone-mad product of mass-migration society. 

Much as Citizen Vigilante itself is an artifact of mass-migration society rather than a critique of it, the reaction to the movie, too, indicates the confused, constantly warring state of a society plagued by diversity stress. 

As Mehdi Hasan correctly noted in his debate last week with Boll on Piers Morgan’s show, the fact that the film is set in just “Europe” has the effect of flattening Europe — crime, migration, and social attitudes differ among individual European states — while reinforcing American conservatives’ beloved narrative of Europe having devolved into a Third World hellscape. Anyone can exit Frankfurt’s Main Station and conclude that something has gone deeply wrong, but to portray all of Europe as if it were Mogadishu is just incorrect. Hasan had facts on his side. Boll, while he poorly articulated and defended himself — at one point saying he couldn’t hate Muslims because he has Muslim friends — had vibes many people are feeling. So they spoke past each other, each man angry about his own parochial issue. 

Further to the Right, there has emerged a theory that Citizen Vigilante is “Jewish.” The nutty Candace Owens, in her recent appearance on Shawn Ryan’s show, linked Armie Hammer to a bizarre Jewish-Bolshevik plot: Armie’s great-grandfather was Armand Hammer; Owens says this means “arm and hammer,” i.e., the hammer and sickle, and is not a coincidence. The content of her theory doesn’t matter; what does is that she’s tapping into a widespread feeling that people need to defend their group interests against an “adversary,” however real or imagined.  

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In actuality, that adversary is not the individuals who hail from different lands, but the overarching system that has bred this chaos in the first place. In a US context, the mass importation of illegal immigrants who work below minimum wage and compete with Americans for jobs is not solely bad policy — it’s also indicative of capitalism’s cynical tendency to extract profit at any social cost. The H-1Bs whose hiring by corporations, in effect, amounts to an American Kafala, are not just here by mistake; it’s because the state actually doesn’t represent its people over a stream of easy-to-control labor. Without limitations, job protections, and proper protocols for assimilation, both migrant and native become strangers; sometimes, violent strangers. 

At one point last week, Citizen Vigilante was trending number one on Amazon Prime. Although it has a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 6%, the production has a shockingly high audience approval rating of 93%: a sign that Right-wing slop may indeed sell. Meanwhile, Boll’s native Germany has essentially banned the movie. And Musk, who may well have a role in the creation or distribution of the film, has promised that “Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better.” Still more, an anonymous source told Puck that Hammer was “in tears” when he first saw Boll’s final cut: “Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting,” he supposedly said. If the measure of a good film were buzz-to-cost ratio, Citizen Vigilante would be among the best ever.

The reality is that it is wrong to have a strong opinion one way or another on Citizen Vigilante. Really liking it probably means you buy the argument that Muslims are culturally and religiously obligated to kill you; or that Muslims, as individuals, inherently foster places filled with rape, filth, and danger — and a visit to Istanbul or Doha or any number of Muslim-majority cities would easily shatter that view. Really despising the movie, by contrast, probably means you neglect to see the issue at hand. The insanity might end if we were able to not talk past each other about it, which shows no indication of happening. There are legitimate Left reasons to be disappointed with mass-migration society, as are my own, without any need to concede to (segments of) the Right’s race-religion absolutism.

Until then, we will just have to deal with the annoyances of unbalanced job competition, large groups of people not being invested in the national project, the isolation of migrants and non-migrants alike — and the annoyance of Uber drivers named Mohammed smirking at the fact that they don’t know where to take you. Everyone loses.

The contrast is exemplified by two of the papers’ most prominent writers: the Times’ Russian-born columnist Masha Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer for commentary, couldn’t be more different from the Post’s Marc Thiessen, who’s gaining a lot of attention these days as President Trump’s favorite print columnist. Gessen is a cosmopolitan progressive; Thiessen is a conservative Catholic and former Bush administration official. 

The two should be at odds, and in some ways, they are. But when it comes to foreign policy, they sing almost exactly the same hawkish, pro-empire song, albeit in slightly different keys.

Start with Gessen. There’s a pattern of immigrants coming to America, then asking the US government to start wars with their native lands. In 2022, for example, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov called on the West to throw Russia “back into the Stone Age.” Or take Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-born human-rights defender who spent recent years calling for a Western military attack on her homeland — only to retract her endorsement once that happened and produced predictably disastrous outcomes. 

Standing at the summit of this genre is Masha Gessen — or “M. Gessen,” as she now prefers to be called. (Gessen, who was born female, identifies as both non-binary and trans — I won’t explain how that works because I really don’t know.) Her Pulitzer citation this week lauds her for an “illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”

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Four of Gessen’s seven prize-winning essays compare the Trump administration to Russia and Vladimir Putin. In these “illuminating” essays, Gessen argues that the Supreme Court ruling allowing Trump’s executive order to only list two sexes on US passports is just like a Russian bureaucrat who wouldn’t allow her to reclassify her ethnicity from Jewish. In another, she alleges that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s overzealous targeting of Jimmy Kimmel was parallel to Putin’s seizure of power in Russia. And in still another, she asserts that we are entering a specific authoritarian “moment” in America that recalls Putin’s abolition of elected governorships of oblasts, the war in Georgia, and killing of Alexei Navalny. Finally, Gessen compares Soviet Russia to today’s United States, contending that “it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.”

It is true that Russia is not the most “inclusive” country in the world for LGBT people like Gessen. It’s a society operating on a totally different set of mores — a reminder of the vaunted “cultural differences” respected by liberals in the case of nations they like, and only anathematized for nations they don’t like. Add to this Gessen’s fearmongering that the United States is becoming totalitarian, like Russia, and she is offering classic, 2016-style Trump Derangement Syndrome, rallying the liberal base to fight absolute evil in order to vindicate absolute good. Ironically, this bankrupt, hate-baiting approach comes at a time when there are legitimate and even bipartisan reasons to be disappointed with President Trump — the economy, the war in Iran.

Gessen-ism, then, goes something like this: Russia is terrible because it denies that I’m trans; America and liberal democracy are great because they let me be trans; Trump is turning America into Russia; so we should arm Kiev and send more Ukrainian men into a meat grinder so that I can be trans. 

Such an approach ignores the plentiful evidence of Western provocation of Russia, not to mention a pre-Trump consensus to do so: NATO’s official stance since 2008 that Ukraine will join the alliance; the fact that the late Sen. John McCain traveled to Ukraine during the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution and promised that Ukraine’s future would be with Europe and thus the West; Obama diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous leaked phone call boasting that Washington would be in charge of the Ukrainian transition and “fuck the EU.” There has always been a clear Washington objective to turn Ukraine, a neutral buffer state, into an American client. For Gessen, this is not relevant. The world is a big battle between Putin-style authoritarianism and Democratic Party-style social progressivism, and the latter must triumph — popular will and the realities of foreign policy be damned.

Gessen’s is a pro-war flavor that appeals to the progressive, trans-rights absolutist, still woke-ish readership of the Times. But the incredible power of the American media’s system for “manufacturing consent” — if Epstein-obsessives will forgive the Noam Chomsky reference — is that it does so in ways that are appealing to partisan sensibilities, while enforcing the same bottom line: an expansive American empire is good; war is necessary; the economic status quo should go unquestioned and unchallenged. 

Which brings us to The Washington Post — a paper that is now markedly different from The New York Times. Since Bezos took active interest in the paper he bought years ago, and influenced by his alliance with the Trump White House, the Post has become noticeably Right-coded. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Feb. 26, 2025, Bezos announced that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Since then, the Post has staffed its editorial-page with lots of establishment conservatives, while more progressive-minded staff have quit or been ousted. 

Yet notwithstanding these partisan and ideological differences, the foreign-policy bottom line at the new Washington Post is remarkably similar to the one at the Times.

Behold Marc Thiessen. Unlike Gessen, Thiessen is a native-born American, a devout Catholic, and a rock-ribbed conservative: he served as George W. Bush’s director of speechwriting between 2007 and 2009 and joined the Post as a columnist shortly thereafter. Put another way: while Bezos has made the aims of the publication narrower and more explicit, the Post was pushing a hawkish line even before Bezos’s acquisition in 2013 and his editorial interference beginning in 2025. 

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In 2014, Thiessen argued that the United States should not have pulled out of Iraq. Recently, he went on Fox News to recycle Iraq War talking points for use in Iran, insisting that America should just kill any leaders who don’t want to make a deal. Even more bizarrely, in early March, Thiessen wrote an op-ed stating that the “Trump Doctrine” — expressed via the war in Iran — somehow ends forever wars, perhaps in a vain attempt to sell this war to a New Right that has grown skeptical of foreign entanglements. 

But Thiessen is not against forever wars — he loves them, and he’s even defended torture by the CIA. He’s obviously overjoyed that Trump, who ran on a largely antiwar and populist platform, has ended up reverting to the old ways of the Republican Party and effectively destroyed, at least for the time being, any New Right governing agenda embracing restraint abroad. For instance, Thiessen declared in a Trump-lauding piece that Ukraine was one of the president’s great accomplishments in 2025. He had in mind not Trump’s early attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict, mind you, but the president’s willingness to maintain and even expand arms transfers: “He is doing more to help Ukraine than Biden ever did.” 

Browse Thiessen’s Post profile, and you will find that almost every single article is about how Trump took a hawkish stance and why it was so great. While engaged in a journalistic enterprise that looks like the diametrical opposite of Gessen’s — not Trump-bashing, but Trump-praising — he is, in fact, reinforcing the same policy agenda.  Unfortunately, the Thiessens of the world have understood just how well Trump responds to flattery. 

Because of that, Thiessen is now a frequent mention on the president’s Truth Social posts. On April 23, Trump commented on a Thiessen op-ed about how he didn’t need a deal with the Iranians: “Very true!!! President DJT.”

Thiessen and Gessen represent opposing American political ideologies, and wholly different reads on Trump. But to the hawkish uniparty, that doesn’t matter. The goal has always been a Pride Parade, whether in Tehran or Moscow (preferably both). That, we are told, is freedom. It’s why you must shut up about gas prices. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Fishback represents a new kind of candidate: a younger version of President Trump, who, like his MAGA role model, understands the value of clickbait, shock value, and information overload. Fishback, however, has even fewer limits, a shorter attention span, and a new crop of populist promises. He can also, due to his youth and novelty, be freshly anti-establishment and offer yet another Republican reboot. And he’s rarely out of the news cycle. Just this weekend, he captured headlines after an arson attempt at his Florida home. 

So far, Fishback’s visibility appears greater online than in real life. He’s polling at anywhere between 5% and 23% and has, as of Jan. 14, raised a paltry $19,000 for his campaign. The Right-tilting pollster Patriot Polling shows the highest overall support for Fishback and indicates that he is leading Donalds in the 18-29 age cohort. If you’ve encountered his “based” and “red-pilled” Zoomer-friendly messaging on X (formerly Twitter), that seems plausible. 

Fishback’s candidacy is, in some ways, a profound indictment of American politics as it is practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century: not just because he trades in racist invective and has ties to open anti-Semites — but because these antics mask a somewhat reasonable populist agenda. Indeed, until recently, Fishback came across as MAGA but not especially radical or unhinged; he has taken a far-Right direction only since deciding to run for governor. In other words, he has concluded that he can’t effectively challenge his party’s pro-business and pro-war orthodoxies without dabbling in online extremism. In his persona, populism and transgression have fully merged. 

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The gubernatorial hopeful, 31, is slender, energetic, and seizes upon every opportunity to refer to himself as a “fourth-generation Floridian” — presumably on his father’s side, since his mother is from Colombia. He’s originally from South Florida, currently lives in the Panhandle, and dropped out of Georgetown at 21 to start his own hedge fund. 

He first gained media attention last year on DOGE’s coattails, following his proposal that Elon Musk create “DOGE Dividends” — i.e., send money saved through gutting government programs directly to citizens as stimulus checks. Before that, he worked as a trader for Greenlight Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, and founded Azoria, an anti-DEI investment firm committed to “free thinking, excellence, and meritocracy,” which he launched at Mar-A-Lago in December 2024. In attendance was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who described Fishback as “truly one of the most articulate people I know.” 

Online, the candidate is better known for his controversies than his policies. Fishback associates with Groypers, and for weeks in December, the banner on his homepage on X showed him shaking the hand of a young man wearing Fuentes’s blue-and-white “America First” hat. The Never Trump Substack The Bulwark has anointed Fishback America’s “First Groyper Politician.” And Fuentes himself has good things to say about him, adding that he’d endorse him, but “I don’t want to hurt him.” 

Fishback doesn’t call himself a Groyper, but his racial edgelording is of a piece with Fuentes’s. In addition to his comments about Donalds, he has said Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t know what a fork is. On Jan. 30, anti-Semitic provocateur Mo Khan posted an image of himself wearing a “Noticer” hoodie, as Fishback smiled, his hand on Khan’s shoulder. (On our depraved algorithms, to “notice” means to uncover the supposed “truth” that Jews run the world.) “Fishback for Florida,” the post’s caption read. A few days later, Fishback quote-tweeted a post about IKEA’s new $5, 20-inch-long hot dog, calling it “goyim nonsense.” (The online Right likes to suggest that unhealthy fast food is engineered by the Jews for non-Jews, often branding it “goyslop.”)

Fishback has also indulged in high-profile online feuds, like one with OnlyFans model Sophie Rain, and another with Ron DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw. Rain has criticized him for his proposed 50% sin tax on the pornographic platform’s creators. “Sophie, pay up. It’s time to give our public school teachers a raise,” Fishback fired back. In Pushaw’s case, Fishback released text messages that she says have ended her political career. She was providing informal advice to Fishback’s campaign, but they had a falling out. Fishback, Pushaw claims, started a rumor that the two were sleeping together; the candidate, in turn, showed that Pushaw had repeatedly called him in a desperate bid, apparently, for him to drop out of the governor’s race and endorse Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins instead. Speaking to the Miami Herald, he accused Pushaw of suffering from “Fishback Derangement Syndrome.” Pushaw wouldn’t speak to me on the record.

Controversy swirls around Fishback offline, as well. He has been accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, an accusation that he denies, and of which he was exonerated in court. (The woman who alleges the abuse, Keinah Fort, did not respond to my request for comment.) His former employer, Greenlight Capital, is suing him. The New York-based hedge fund alleges that Fishback, who worked there from 2021 to 2023, misrepresented his title as “head of macro” to promote his own new firm Azoria, and spent more than $37,000 on “extravagant” personal expenses, while claiming inability to pay damages. (Fishback is countersuing). 

Yet all this is in contrast to a bold and sometimes even inspiring vision for Florida. Fishback refers to himself, above all, as an economic populist, and is much more vigilant about the excesses of the free market than the average Republican (and, today, perhaps even the average Democrat). He has vowed to visit every single Florida county, and also plans to visit every Waffle House in the state. 

On policy, he seeks to end Florida’s ever-expanding suburban sprawl, restore the state’s lush citrus groves, and prevent Blackstone and other private-equity firms from buying up homes and thus removing entry-level housing stock from the reach of first-time buyers. (This is a nationwide problem: in the second quarter of 2025, real estate investors had bought up a whopping third of single-family homes, and in many communities, private equity owns up to 20% of homes.) Incredibly rare for a politician on today’s Right wing, he’s an advocate of Amtrak, and one of his very first campaign promises was to bring the Sunset Limited back through the Panhandle and into Miami, a route suspended in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two decades ago. He also seeks to institute paid maternity leave, and divest from Israel to provide payments to young couples instead. And he promises to prevent the construction of high-energy-consuming and space-occupying AI data centers, and ban foreigners from buying Florida properties — for the latter policy, he heeds the example of Liberal Party-governed Canada. 

I traveled from Gainesville, in Florida’s interior, to St. Augustine, on the coast, to attend a Fishback campaign event in mid-January. The four-lane highway between the two cities passes through tidal marshes and small towns with a single Dollar General, and not much else, on their main strip. As the landscape becomes more urban, it turns into a depressing and monotonous sprawl. This is the struggling Florida Fishback is talking to, the one that exists outside the enclaves of Disney World, Palm Beach, and Miami’s Design District. By contrast, the same weekend I was in the state, Trump was at Mar-A-Lago, attending a ceremony officially naming the strip stretching from the president’s exclusive club to the airport “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard,” in accordance with a bill the state legislature and Gov. DeSantis enacted in June.

Fishback’s St. Augustine event was at a supporter’s home in a middle-class planned community engulfed in the sprawl between I-95 and the city’s picturesque Spanish Colonial old town. The candidate wore a slick suit with an open-collar shirt, and the crowd was mostly middle-aged, intrigued by his more sensible policy proposals but skeptical of his online messaging. He gave a riled-up denunciation of establishment Republicans, which was received positively. On podcasts, Fishback has a notably calm, elevated delivery, whereas here, he was exhilarated and sometimes on the verge of shouting. He made some surprising points for a Republican and far-Right figure, celebrating Zohran Mamdani as a politician who focuses on affordability, for example. Fishback also mentioned that he is the only gubernatorial candidate who speaks fluent Spanish. Back on X, however, he criticizes the existence of Spanish-language media in the state. 

Following the campaign event, I sat down with him at a Starbucks a few minutes away, where he was joined by his father, his girlfriend Francesca Deckert, and a youthful campaign staff, some with visible outlines of nicotine-pouch tins in their pockets. (Deckert herself has been the source of plentiful controversy, and, per Laura Loomer’s digging, seems to have released risqué content under the name “Crypto Barbie.”)

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By Nikos Mohammadi

“To the extent that my policies are controversial,” Fishback tells me, “it’s because they’re upsetting a status quo that has been totally monopolized by establishment Democrats and Republicans.” He explains that his objection to Donalds, who has the endorsement of both Trump and Turning Point Action, is that his opponent wants to “increase dense urban housing,” a problem much more serious, Fishback thinks, than his own race-tinged remarks. On Sophie Rain, he claims not to be saying anything intentionally designed for rage-baiting, but adds, “It’s controversial in the current political and cultural climate to say that young women should aspire to be moms or nurses or lawyers and not aspire to sell photos of their body on the internet.” (Never mind those images that seem to show his own girlfriend, Deckert, sporting only two black nipple pasties.) 

Other comments, he asserts, were just joking around, as the old saw goes. “Vivek’s a friend,” he says, “I’ve known him for years.” (Indeed, in April 2023, he appeared amicably on Ramaswamy’s podcast.) He also mentions a recent friendly interaction with LaShonda Holloway, a black woman running for Congress and a Democrat with whom he agrees on affordability issues. She “didn’t seem too bothered. She had known about the comments [about Donalds]. She had known who I was.”

When I called Fishback out for his association with Fuentes, he denied familiarity with Fuentes’s most viral comments about women, blacks, and the Jews, and added, “I’m not going to allow people from a foreign country or from New York City to slander voters in my state because they watch Nick Fuentes.” 

The odds appear to be stacked against Fishback in Florida, a state with a large libertarian (“Florida Man”) and neocon (“Miami hawk”) contingent and an older population, unlikely to vote for a far-Right Zoomer-coded Millennial. The state is also swinging Democratic, at least in some places and in the short term. Miami just elected its first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years — in large part due to Latinos souring over the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policies. On the other hand, Fishback may not care too much about losing Miami and Boca Raton if it means he can get Gen Z and the working class out to polls elsewhere, just as Mamdani simply gave up large swaths of the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, and Tribeca. At around the same time in Mamdani’s campaign last year, the current New York mayor appeared the same or worse off than Fishback does today.

If we want to see the direction in which politics are trending, Fishback’s recent moves are telling. It might be expected that he’d swing to the center now that his name is out there, but instead, he has gone more unhinged. Speaking to a large crowd at the University of Central Florida on Feb. 4, Fishback said that “under no circumstances” would he even visit Israel, and referred to the holiest site in Judaism as “a stupid wall.” The students applauded. He also took a page from the MAHA playbook, arguing that the industrial food provided in public schools is unhealthy and sets students up for failure, and proposing that school cafeterias be run by local small businesses and serve local meat and produce. The crowd of teens and 20-somethings was silent — until he referred to the unhealthy food as “goyslop,” and then the students erupted, exuberantly. What united the crowd was not race, or even really gender (though most were male), but age.

Fishback, who obviously can be reasonable, has concluded that the path to victory is to traffick in irrationality. Love him or hate him, he’s determined, crazy, and, somehow, poised to have a shot. 

In the following hours, Clavicular took to X to gleefully celebrate. One post of his reads, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” It features an AI-generated image of him running over a tatted-up black man in his Cybertruck (in real life, the man was indeed black — this matters, given Clavicular’s musings about racial IQ and his liberal use of the N-word). The first comment beneath his post asserts, “unfathomably based.” James Fishback, the ascendant and Groyper-esque Republican contender for Florida governor, tweeted, and Clavicular reposted: “@Clavicular0 did nothing wrong.” 

The stalker had apparently previously harassed Clavicular, and he’s alive and expected to survive. The streamer was also reportedly taken in for questioning by Miami Police, who did not press charges. Whether or not Clavicular hitting a man clobbering on his windshield legitimately falls under self-defense is beside the point. Normal people simply don’t shamelessly advertise that they drove over a fellow human being. (There has also been speculation that the entire affair was staged, which is a real possibility with internet personalities, but which is perhaps even worse.)  

Then again, Clavicular is hardly a normal person. He initially gained notoriety in November for injecting fat-dissolving peptides into the cheek of his 17-year-old then-girlfriend. He engages in bone-smashing, pounding himself in the face either with his bare fist or with a hammer, a practice he endorses as promoting muscular jaw growth. He takes crystal meth to stay lean. According to fellow online-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes, Clavicular is a “chad” (an attractive and confident man, in contrast to an involuntary celibate) and a “WANGHF” — “white-ass n—r going hard as fuck.” “I’m like Nietzsche … I heralded the coming of the overman,” says Fuentes, implying that he was a harbinger for Clavicular. 

On Kick, the streaming platform that is a major competitor to Twitch, Clavicular boasts 97,800 followers as of this writing. Tune in, and you might see him at a club, approaching girls, microphone-on-chest. An hour into the new year and freshly unbanned from the platform, he was on Kick, interacting with two girls in a manner bordering on coercion, pressing them to pose for him to take a photo. On the chat, multiple users were suggesting, “run over George Floyd.” After around two minutes, the connection was “lost,” I surmise because the approach did not go as anticipated.

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How Trump saved Columbia

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Clavicular may seem to be an extreme case and an outlier — demented, pathetic, and dangerous in equal measures — but unfortunately for society, and especially for conservatives, he seems to have a project and a somewhat coherent set of beliefs. These were on useful display three days after the Cybertruck incident, when Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles released a  two-hour-long interview with the streamer — the first collision between Clavicular and mainstream conservatism. 

It would be hard for anyone over the age of 40, much less someone unacquainted with the lingo of the chronically online Right, to follow their conversation. Knowles — one of the more traditionalist conservatives out there — began by acknowledging the profoundly absurd nature of their rendezvous: “I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with people from a wide variety of backgrounds: priests, exorcists, scientists, refugees. Never before, though, have I sat down with a looksmaxxed, meth-head, livestream-cel.” The same week the episode was released, Knowles had also interviewed the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. 

Knowles repeatedly attempted to persuade Clavicular of his worldview: a concern for electoral politics, society at large, and faith and family. The Catholic commentator advocated for “spirituality-maxxing.” Knowles wondered if looksmaxxing for its own sake amounts to mere vanity. “In a lot of regards, it could be perceived that way,” replied Clavicular serenely. 

Here, in stark contrast, are the two grand Right-wing persuasions of the internet. Both spring from Gen Z’s concern with the direction of society and its crisis of meaning, as well as Zoomers’ very real material concerns. The first emphasizes strong communities, religiosity, and public policy in pursuit of the common good. That’s largely the conservatism of YouTube video essays, podcasts, and youth organizing. The latter, epitomized by figures such as Clavicular and Andrew Tate, says something like this: Society is decadent, morals are gone, and so I — the radically atomized individual — am going to do absolutely everything that I can to succeed. The proposition that “God is dead, and we have killed him” is the so-called conservatism of Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.

A viral segment of the interview had Knowles and Clavicular clashing on transgenderism. Knowles contended that it’s in the public interest to maintain societal order and prevent degeneracy and the mutilation of fellow citizens. Clavicular was unmoved: “The way I see trannies is that’s one more person to mog,” meaning to outshine. “Go descend yourself, that’s fine with me.” (“Ascending” is the online Right term for attaining higher status.) 

On the likely presidential matchup between JD Vance and Gavin Newsom, Clavicular argued, “JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs…. [Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.” I suppose most Americans agree that Newsom is conventionally better looking than the vice president. But that Vance’s looks constitute him being “subhuman”? “How are you fat and expect to lead a country?” quipped Clavicular. Clavicular agreed with Knowles’s assessment of the California governor as a “liar” and “degenerate.” Nonetheless, he’d vote for him “100 times over” merely because of physical looks.

Those still wondering if there can be good-faith overlap in agenda between figures like Clavicular and traditional conservatism should retire their hopes. Knowles was desperate to find areas of agreement with Clavicular (successfully), and to persuade him to use his powers for the good of his community, his nation, and others (unsuccessfully). Clavicular shut it all down by simply not caring. Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of Michel Foucault springs to mind: “I had never seen such an amoral — not immoral, amoral — person in my life.” 

Ironically, Clavicular’s individualism-maxxing is far more at odds with today’s conservatism than would have been the case 10 years ago. In the Right’s more libertarian days, from the 1980s to some point in the early part of this decade, the individual was the foremost unit of political emphasis. The predominant view was that people made decisions and were wholly responsible for them, and that the government had little role — if any — in making itself a vehicle for the country’s improvement. 

Trump changed this view, breaking with long-held conservative fetishizations of the free market, small government, and neoliberalism. Yet the paradox is that with Trump, young men had someone to look up to who disregarded norms, proudly belittled others, and knew how to win. Instead of asking what the winning was for, substantively speaking, a good chunk of the Gen-Z Right took to idolizing the hyper-atomized individual who could do anything alone.  

And so today, we find some of the newest members of the Right celebrating and defending a streamer who injects a cocktail of drugs into himself every day, who smashes his skull, and who got expelled from college in three weeks for hiding testosterone in his dorm room — a concoction he has been, at first secretly and now openly, injecting since he was 14 years old.

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All this — even down to the testosterone — is bizarrely similar to the mistakes the young Left made a decade ago, when the common good took a backseat to hyper-individualism in the realms of sex, gender, and lifestyle. The Left’s flagship movement, of course, was trans. We saw self-proclaimed champions of rationality and of working-class politics promoting the notion that any small boy could become a girl — that he wasn’t really a boy at all. This opened the door for corporations to market Pride and “diversity,” appealing not to a collective American identity, but to boutique groups, and their supposedly morally superior particularistic inclinations. We got “Somaliweek presented by Amazon,” never mind the company’s egregious labor violations. 

The Left’s historic antiwar stance, too, was jettisoned somewhere in the apparent need to promote American-style liberal democracy abroad, justifying an ever-expanding slate of foreign wars precisely on individualistic grounds (cue “human rights”). Somewhere along the line, between watching Don Lemon on CNN and grabbing $6 iced matcha lattes, Leftist youth forgot that the advancement of our society as a whole belonged in their calculations.

Thus, Clavicular can be seen as the Right-wing embodiment of the transgender craze; the eternal pursuit of physical “betterment” that leads to nothing much, and in all likelihood to nothing better. And the tragedy is that this Right hyper-individualism, just like the Left variety, is deeply intoxicating to young minds. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts — almost certainly run by Gen Z interns and staffers — clearly recognize the power of “mogging.” In October, DHS released a reel showcasing “Life after all criminal aliens are deported” (since deleted from their official X page due to copyright issues). Spliced between images of Trump in his heyday and clips from 1980s films, appears a pale-white, freckled Gio Scotti, the Italian model and e-girl lauded by the online Right for her “genetic superiority.” Newsom, the liberal who stands for nothing more than vibes and electoral success, has realized the efficiency of “mogging,” too. In the aftermath of Clavicular’s disparaging comments about Vance, Newsom’s Press Office tweeted out an old, particularly unflattering image of Vance. Clavicular quote-tweeted, “Huge impact moment.”

The young Right would be wise to learn from the young Left’s mistakes. Or suffer the same fate in a few years, as the nation turns away, exhausted, from the politics of incomprehensible jargon, antics, and tantrums. 

Such turmoil had become a routine part of campus life. It was as if the faculty and student body were expected to accept constant disruption, including the occupation of major buildings (Hamilton Hall and Butler Library); the hostage-taking of janitors (whom the protesters allegedly threatened as “Jew lovers” that they wished to “fuck up”); and the distribution of pamphlets that could’ve come straight from the Hamas Media Office. 

But then, something changed. This Oct. 7, for the first time in two years, a newfound tranquility prevailed. The group of pro-Palestinian agitators was small and mainly huddled outside the main gates on Broadway and 116th Street. There were no large disruptions or violent clashes with the authorities. My friends and I were shocked by how peaceful the day went: the protests took less time and featured far more measured rhetoric.

The Columbia Intifada, it seems, has died down — thanks to President Trump. His campus measures are unquestionably illiberal. But they’ve paradoxically helped to preserve reasonable discourse on campus.

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The scale of the cultural transformation is astonishing. As I looked through X, expecting to encounter the grievances of pro-Israel activists, I saw none. Lishi Baker, arguably Columbia’s most prominent Zionist activist, had only reposted images of inflammatory protest flyers out of Stanford, Concordia, Liverpool, and the University of Toronto-Mississauga — but not a single item pertaining to Columbia.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that corrosive pro-Palestinian radicalism has been totally eliminated. A pamphlet published by Students for Justice in Palestine commemorated “two years of resistance.” The tract justified Hamas operations against the “israeli Occupation Forces”—“israeli” written in all-lowercase letters, lest the students lend legitimacy to the Jewish state. Atop the tract, there was a disclaimer that it was “not affiliated with the terrorist, imperialist, Nazi-Zionist, colonizing, pig-loving, genocidal, war-profiteering ‘institution’ known as Columbia University.” 

At around 3 p.m., waiting at the 116th Street Station, I saw a posse of girls clad in keffiyehs and Palestinian flags heading aboard the 1 Train downtown. The air of disappointment about them was unmistakable. 

Over the past two years, Columbia’s campus culture became ontologically perverse. What the campus ideologues promoted was not a principled stand for stopping the death and ending the war — a feat Trump may have just accomplished — but a solidarity politics of donning keffiyehs, equating the NYPD to the KKK, and blindly using buzzwords like “decolonization” and “resistance.” In doing so, purportedly “Leftist” students ended up implicitly (and sometimes even explicitly) endorsing a hard-Right terrorist organization while simultaneously disparaging the Trump administration as “fascists.” As someone who is both anti-war and on the Left — at least, more than I am on the Right in the traditional sense — I quickly realized that I couldn’t associate myself with this movement.

I also had to give credit to Trump, who decided to fight fire with fire. On March 8, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia protest leader and negotiator. Khalil has since been released and is locked in a legal battle with the federal government over his immigration status. Throughout the Spring, ICE detained and attempted to deport various other foreign protest leaders at Columbia, most prominent among them Mohsen Mahdawi, as well as on campuses across the nation.

Both Khalil and Mahdawi are legal permanent residents, which makes the legal and ethical case for their deportation substantially more complicated than if they were mere student-visa holders. Based on the evidence publicly provided by the federal government (or lack thereof), I do not believe Khalil should have been detained, flown down to Louisiana, and prevented from witnessing the birth of his first child. Compelling arguments have been made both for and against Mahdawi’s attempted deportation, where the main disagreement appears to be whether the activist stood for principled dialog or apologized for terror. 

Simultaneously, the Trump administration successfully pressured Columbia into a $221 million settlement agreement, signed on July 23, over accusations of violating the civil rights of Jewish community members. In order to restore federal funding, Columbia incorporated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism into its Office of Institutional Equity. 

Like the student deportations, the IHRA definition is complicated at best. It defines as anti-Semitic speech “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel,” “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” There may be a correlation between individuals who lambast Israel as inherently racist and who engage in aggressive acts against Jewish students or occupy campus buildings. But that does not make the belief that Israel is a racist endeavor — however misguided — necessarily bigoted. 

Protesting the definition, the acclaimed Palestinian historian and Columbia scholar Rashid Khalidi withdrew his Fall course. Taking to the pages of the Guardian, he argued that the IHRA definition makes it “impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.” 

Khalidi is joined in his criticism of the definition by Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, FIRE, and two Jewish sociology professors, who argued in an op-ed in a campus paper that the IHRA definition is downright “anti-intellectual.” It is not yet clear how the definition will be enforced, but at present, it appears that calling the US government “Nazi” is acceptable, while calling the Israeli government “Nazi” is not. That is a glaring double standard, especially given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s International Criminal Court warrant “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” 

Bottom line, Trump’s measures — the attempted deportations of international students and the forcible incorporation of the IHRA definition — are illiberal. They curtail and discourage, to varying degrees, pro-Palestinian and even Israel-skeptic speech, collectively punishing some potentially benevolent actors for the bigoted, inexcusable actions of extremists. Dealing with the building occupations and anti-Semitism is one thing; deporting foreigners and equating anti-Israel rhetoric with anti-Semitism is another. 

In an ideal world, these two things would not be confused. But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a real world in which sometimes the defense of liberal norms requires heavy-handed measures. The relevant question now is not whether the Trump administration’s actions have been “right,” in an abstract moral sense, but whether they have been effective in restoring some semblance of liberalism on campus.  

By employing the machinery of civil rights for conservative ends and alleging that Jewish students were under attack, Trump has successfully leveraged the power of the federal government, promoted a reinvigorated commitment to nonviolent discourse, and forced Columbia to make reforms. Precisely which reforms have been enacted may appear troubling in the short term, but overall, Trump has successfully chilled violent protests on campus. All Columbia students will benefit from a renewed peace of mind when they ask a provocative question in class or find themselves debating a woke ideologue. Liberal norms of argument and contestation can’t survive a violent, disruptive environment. And thankfully, there has not been anything remotely close to an all-out ideological persecution on campus. Pro-Palestinian students still vociferously articulate their concerns, and they are still probably in the majority. 

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Beyond Columbia, by far the university whose reputation has been most strongly damaged by the campus protests and a breakdown of discourse, the Trump administration is seeking a compact with other elite institutions. This would, among other things, require colleges to freeze tuition for five years and provide free tuition to students, cap the number of international students, and recommit to nonviolence in order to secure preferential treatment. Reactions have been mixed, but it’s more likely than not that colleges will want to negotiate. This shows a case-by-case approach on the White House’s part. Columbia had the most egregious issues, and so we got student deportations and the IHRA definition; that will not necessarily be the norm across other campuses, as May Mailman, one of the Trump administration’s chief architects for higher-education policy, hinted at on Ross Douthat’s podcast.  

Radicalism that corrodes speech and viewpoint diversity can always come out of hiding, and there is always the possibility that Trump’s incursions into academia will intensify the hard-Left opposition. Some of my fellow Columbia students think that we are heading in the direction of Egyptian authoritarianism. Of course, that ignores that the federal government, in funding Columbia, has a say in the operations of the university. And that private universities are not directly accountable to the First Amendment and don’t exist in a vacuum, but are in a dialog with society and its values.

Critics will contend that I am overlooking an authoritarian power grab, intended not to promote peaceful, open discourse, but to eventually force every single student to comply with Trump’s prescribed worldview. Time will tell. Perhaps the disruptiveness of the pro-Palestinian protesters warranted giving them a taste of their own medicine, or perhaps Trump really does want every Columbia student to walk around wearing MAGA hats (some spottings have occurred for the first time this semester). The reader can decide which is more plausible. 

In the 2024 movie The Apprentice, Roy Cohn, the Joe McCarthy consigliere tells a young Trump in a fictionalized conversation, “When democracy is at stake, you’re damn right I’m willing to violate a few technicalities…You have to be willing to do anything for America.” For America and its elite institutions, Trump has done just that. And, at Columbia, there came an end to the madness. At least for now.