Exceptionalism is No Excuse

“We are the world in small. A nation is a human 
thing. It does what we do, for our reasons. Surely
if we're civilized, we can put away the knives."

- The Lion in Winter, James Goldman

Over a decade ago, I wrote two optimistic posts on Palestine. It was 2014 and things looked promising.

Americans finally started to sympathize with the plight of Palestinians and consider their grievances. In the first post, I gave great credit to Jon Stewart who humanized Palestinians when few other celebrities had the courage to do so. Anthony Bourdain was another prominent media personality who stepped up. 

But I added that weathering the War on Terror had also played a large part. We had regrets over invading and occupying Iraq. Those eight futile years of violent quagmire set the stage for introspection and healthy skepticism about our country's foreign policy. It was both totally unexpected and long overdue.

We did a great deal to regret. As occupiers, we had naturally acted like occupiers. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is just one example: We had dehumanized the Iraqis nearly immediately. America's Constitution explicitly forbids the use of “cruel and unusual punishment” in the original 1789 Enlightenment language. It's one of those things Americans think of as a defining trait that affirms our moral authority as the good guys. It's an important component in our collective self-image. We need to believe that we don't do those things. But the Bush Administration arrogantly defended its use of torture. Then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint."

We routinely raided homes in the early morning hours and droned family gatherings. We called ourselves “liberators" – initially confidently, later defensively. That claim got stale fast. You cannot occupy another country without becoming a monster in the process. If the populace wants you out, your only two options are leaving or getting vicious. And things predictably escalate after the latter. Evil deeds are inevitable: It's a given. The tragedy has a trajectory and what's “quaint" is thinking it could play out any other way.

Equally predictably, anyone who questioned the righteousness of our purpose was quickly accused of self-hatred, disloyalty, and/or terrorist sympathies. Early on, George W. Bush said, “You are either with us or you are with the enemy." By 2008, such rhetoric had gone from stale to rancid and that factored into Barack Obama winning the White House. But another significant side-effect of this was Americans began to see the Israeli Occupation of Palestine with the discomfort of self-recognition. 

Of course, American gentiles already knew that Jewish people who criticized Israeli apartheid got called “self-hating," but our recent experience made it hit different. We saw the very same manipulative playbook being employed. American gentiles became less likely to see this as some communal squabble we should probably stay out of. We now had some first-hand insight and could no longer ignore that we were already deeply involved. Our shared shame slowly began to dawn on us and it got awkward and damning – mostly for officialdom and its centrist explainers, less so for ordinary Americans with working moral compasses.

Each newly seen political or military similarity opens our eyes to others. There are so many similarities that some are still unreported or underreported. For example, Israeli prisons and detention centers for Palestinians are just as horrific as Abu Ghraib – arguably worse. Of course, respected human rights groups like Amnesty International have documented that Israelis have used systemic torture for years, yet our press remains fairly deaf to that fact. So, for many Americans, there are still fresh surprises ahead. ...

The job factors of an occupation don't change a whole lot across time and place. New technology may be deployed, but the overall goals remain the same. So you still become a monster in the process. Each time, politicos and pundits insist, “This time, it's different." And each time it isn't.

It was never difficult to connect the dots, but now we could no longer ignore those dots. Again, we felt embarrassed for our friend and ally – and for ourselves as well. We'd seen this movie before. Indeed, we were its starring actors and it was a costly colossal flop that we hoped to forget and not become known for.

In my second post, I tried to explain the situation in Palestine with two analogies: The first was historical and the second was science fiction. Between the two, I'd hoped to cover all my bases.

I'd opened that post with a comparison between modern Israel and early America. Europeans arrive and decide that God gave them the natives' land. Manifest Destiny gets invoked, etc. It's pretty familiar history.

The army is charged with keeping the peace between the natives and the settlers, but there's nothing just or objective about how they enforce this “peace" since they're the same ethnicity as the settlers and conquest is the army's ultimate aim as well. It mirrors Wilhoit’s Law which states: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”(1) In both cases, the out-groups are the natives.

Some object to calling Israel a settler-colonialist project, but the differences are minor, and the similarities are significant.(2) My analogy is admittedly not original, but it works. Strip away the academic language and it becomes harder to argue with: The Israelis are doing what we did, except with much better tech.

For example, below is a photo of a mass grave after the “Battle" of Wounded Knee (1890) where the U.S. Army had massacred at least 250 Lakota people. In this specific instance, the army didn't have bulldozers to push the rubble over the bodies as had frequently happened in Gaza.

Indeed, denying the parallel is ridiculous since we've always been encouraged to see ourselves in Israel. We were both young countries and called “The Promised Land." Long before the founding of modern Israel, Biblical comparisons were made in Pilgrim times: America was often called Zion. But we had assumed that this would always be a positive comparison. Now that it's soured, it gets defensively dismissed.

I'd closed my post with a sci-fi analogy by asking how Americans would resist an interstellar invasion and occupation because it's hard to imagine any earthly country managing that. Would we resort to terrorism if space aliens started settling their families here? Of course we would – to ask the question is to answer it. We would do our utmost to make them feel unsafe and discourage encroachment. Yes, others would practice nonviolent resistance, but violence would be inevitably in the mix.

I'm going to delve deeper into the first analogy because there's a specific facet that I want to highlight.

Some say it's outrageous to suggest that Israelis are currently committing genocide in Gaza since the Jewish people have previously been the victims of genocide themselves. The doubters talk like it's impossible.

But it's neither outrageous nor impossible because it's quite common. Human history is filled with stories of victims subsequently becoming victimizers as a result of their suffering: Revenge, anger transference, and ordinary garden variety hypocrisy can all be found in stunning abundance. In fact, I had quoted Benjamin Franklin on this pattern in my second post:

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised [sic.] it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.(3)

Then I quoted historian V.G. Kiernan on how the Dutch behaved after winning their independence from the Spanish Hapsburgs in the Eighty Years' War (1566-1648): “It did not escape comment that the Dutch were no sooner gaining their freedom at home than they were depriving other people of theirs, an inconsistency repeated by several European nations later on."(4) 

Speaking of the Dutch, we can fast forward to the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa and see the same thing: The British Empire was absolutely brutal to the white Dutch “Afrikaner" settlers, but that didn't make those settlers any kinder to black Africans whose land it was. No, indeed an important facet of the subsequent peace was white cooperation in oppressing Blacks. For the Afrikaners, it was a consolation prize for the loss of their political independence. For actual Africans, it was no consolation at all.

There are a couple of American parallels here. White Afrikaners had their own hardy pioneer mythology and South Africa's Apartheid regime mirrored America's Jim Crow. And, as both Desmond Tutu and Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out, Israel did the same. Similar situations frequently breed similar practices.

America has often been called “a laboratory of liberty." Unfortunately, it has also been a laboratory for the opposite, and you don't need to be an outside observer to spot that. For example, during the American Revolution, people on both sides recognized the hypocrisy in fighting for liberty while holding slaves. Even Thomas Jefferson himself saw this despite his own hypocrisy as a slave owner:

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes (meaning whippings), imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose powers supported him thro’ his trial and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.(5)

Don't ignore those words because Jefferson wrote them: Other Americans who didn't own slaves said the same. Abigail Adams wrote, “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”(6) And as abolitionist Judge St. George Tucker wrote shortly after the American Revolution in 1796, “[W]e were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained.”(7)

This lesson isn't limited to slavery: It applies to all other wrongs that one group can do to another. The point I'm making is that enduring oppression doesn't make it impossible to become an oppressor – quite the opposite: It makes it more probable because you become more prone to abuse any power you get later.

Why? Because you may come to believe “that's just how the world works" and decide to “be on the winning team." “If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Or, if they won't let you join their cruel and exclusive club, you can become like them: You can think like them and copy their methods. This metamorphosis is common because you'd rather think of yourself as a victor than a victim, and so to some extent you accept what you endured was some natural hazing ritual: The world is tough, and it had toughened you up. You then rationalize that this is just “realism." After all, “It's a dog eat dog world."

Except this acceptance doesn't erase your resentment. You still consider what you suffered an outrageous injustice. But it's totally okay for you to do that to someone else, even if they've done nothing to you. You think your struggles are heroic stories and weave them into your identity, but you also think those who you go on to wrong have got nothing to complain about. We got ours: They can get theirs. They can try.

Basically, you believe respect and decent treatment must be won, typically militarily. And since your unworthy subjects haven't “made history" by successfully rebelling, you rationalize that they “have no history" or any stories worth listening to. Then you get busy erasing their history since permitting them a voice calls the righteousness of your conquest into question. For the oppressed, getting respect hinges on their winning a rigged game: Everyone must beat near impossible odds to get their rights recognized.(8) Of course, once you adopt this “might makes right" mindset, scoffing at the very idea of rights is not far off.

And we see this on the individual level as well as the collective level: After all, most child abusers were themselves abused as children. I hope you saw this comparison coming.

A similar lack of sympathy can be seen even if a group or individual's status doesn't change. If you're stuck in a static hierarchy, shit still rolls downhill. After all, why wouldn't it? This Saturday Evening Post cover “Anger Transference" (03/20/1954) by Richard Sargent below arguably trivializes this dynamic by sanitizing it,(9) but it shows that it was known. The story is familiar enough that it can be told without words to a broad audience. That's how simple this story is:

This is obvious to everybody except the militantly oblivious. Unfortunately, whole countries fit into that latter category. They insist they are special exceptions to the human family – the dynamics I described above somehow don't apply to them. They're told their country is God's special little boy, so they get spoiled rotten and get away with murder.

Take American Exceptionalism for example. We believe we're innately good, and thus the bad we do must good too. It's not bad when we do it, and how dare you say we did it. Then we admit what we did by quickly pivoting to “Yes, but you say that like it's a bad thing. Feeling justified is all that matters: Actually being justified is an irrelevant technicality that only those annoying killjoy morality nerds care about.

Guilt is evidently a large part of this defensive reflex, but there's also a feedback loop at work here. Being above reproach provides convenient cover for doing more horrible things. And then you can shift suspicion onto those with less social clout – like your victims. Power makes it easy to both do harm and place blame. It creates a vicious cycle since easy means tempting: It's an intoxicating combination which often corrupts members of hallowed groups or institutions. Take any collection of people and tell them they're inherently superior beings. Pride and groupthink will do the rest. Then watch all the usual human horrors unfold.

This is how killer cops and pedophile priests become epidemic problems. If people believe that members of these respected groups and institutions can do no wrong, then the wrongdoing will of course worsen. The belief that it's impossible will ironically make it more probable. Healthy skepticism works like a vaccine: A little doubt, both inside and out, keeps groups more trustworthy. Without that doubt, corruption sweeps through the group like a disease. Of course, the group's zealots are rabid anti-vaxxers.

Naturally, this dynamic attracts evil new members – human turds who want those perks. Entry gets them prestige and the protection of a powerful institution with an internal culture of cover up. The shield isn't instant: It's relatively easy to throw some reckless rookie under the bus if they don't know where the bodies are buried. But once ensconced, coworkers will cover for them and higher ups will swiftly quiet any threat to the institution's image. Whether by design or otherwise, that's where all the incentives inevitably point.

And as the group gets powerful, it also gets cocky. There's a shift in image management from projecting purity to flaunting impunity. Critics still get silenced, but the focus is on public punishment not coming up with convincing coverups. It's a bit like British libel law which overtly prioritizes protecting reputations.

Institutions are just as human as individuals. Governments and other organizations postpone or phone-in obligations that don't enthuse them. Institutional resistance mirrors personal stubbornness. Corporations act like psychopaths: They're selfish, manipulative, boastful, and cannot accept responsibility for their actions or feel remorse. But a lack of feeling isn't the issue here since groups and organizations feel things too. They can absolutely be as vengeful, petty, or delusional as any spoiled human bully.

It isn't difficult to see how all this applies to Israel. When any military says it's “the most moral army in the world," that grandiose boast strongly suggests they're committing every war crime in the book. Israel's unabashed brutality is certainly more breath-taking than ever before, but it's always been pretty blatant.

For example, during the nonviolent Great March of Return border protests (2018-2019), Israeli snipers shot 6,016 Palestinians, killing 189 and deliberately disabling and maiming the rest. A UN Commission report found that snipers “shot at journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognizable as such." 

Well, of course: That's what the scope is for. If you can hit individual limbs, you can definitely tell who you're shooting. Those press and medic vests help too. The targeting of journos goes back decades, but this was then a shocking new escalation which helped nudge the shift in American sympathies.

The Gaza War that began in October of 2023 has stepped up the precision kid-killing quite a bit. US, UK, and Canadian surgeons who volunteered there saw children with head wounds on a daily basis. Airstrikes are less precise, which is why Israel deploys drones afterwards to pick off the wounded. 

Another way to be thorough is to make a second airstrike on the same location shortly after. These “double tap" strikes not only kill any kids who might've survived the first strike but also EMTs, firefighters, and panicked parents who rushed to the scene to find their children. This is, incidentally, exactly what Donald Trump did to that girls school in Iran recently. Snipers basically do the same thing – shoot someone and wait for a friend or relative to arrive to give aid or collect the body and then shoot them too.(10)

Violence is not the only tool of conquest. Israel systematically denies Palestinians sanitary water. Sixteen years ago, Amnesty International reported 90 to 95% of Gaza's water was undrinkable. What little Gazans get comes in by truck. Israel will not allow them the equipment they need to repair their water treatment facilities. Dig a water well, and Israelis will fill it with cement. Burning or bulldozing olive orchards is another frequent Israeli tactic. Making land temporarily unlivable is a longstanding strategy for stealing it. Native American tribes of the Great Plains were dependent on hunting the buffalo, so of course we drove the buffalo to near extinction in order to starve Natives into submission.

Since the “ceasefire," Gazans have been dying from easily preventable diseases this winter because Israel won't allow supplies in. This combines with deaths from cold and malnutrition. Infant deaths from hypothermia are called “Wet Tent Syndrome." Israel targeting Palestinian health and infrastructure is biological warfare on par with our giving Native Americans smallpox contaminated blankets.

I'm not trying to play clever by drawing these parallels: I'm pointing out a frequently practiced strategy. Worldwide, when one group wants to dispossess another, this is what they typically do. They don't limit themselves to overt murder. They use every pressure point they can find, whether direct or indirect. And these indirect strategies are indeed war crimes. I haven't changed the subject by pivoting from violence.

But things have long been coming full circle. The tools and strategies of occupation have come home and gotten turned on Americans. The term for this inevitable effect is called “imperial boomerang." We are part of an obscenely profitable international oppression industry and every growing industry always looks for new markets to sell their products and services in. Again, it's about where incentives direct behavior.

The brazen militarization of domestic police departments has been pointed out for decades now, but the warnings were ignored and here we are now. It started in the Sixties with S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams and has steadily increased ever since. How much it has since been normalized worldwide is astounding. Cops now look like they belong on the Death Star, and toys accordingly reflect that: 

Looking like good guys predictably interferes with striking terror into the populace, so black armor it is. Those baby blue riot helmets of the 1960s are long gone. Sci-fi fascism is the fashion and it complicates feigning a friendly face, hence the incongruity of the toys above. No irony is intended and it's impossible to parody. As I wrote before, the messaging shifts from projecting purity to flaunting impunity, and their gear says “You can't touch us, but we can touch you."

Police training programs have encouraged officers to adopt a “warrior mindset" and see the neighborhoods they patrol as enemy territory. Sometimes the training materials praise Adolf Hitler. The results have been pretty much what anyone would expect: Lawless law enforcement killing without consequences. The use of no-knock raids stateside is difficult to distinguish from what we did in Iraq or what Israel does in Palestine. It causes frequent tragic “accidents" that, like school shootings, get accepted like natural disasters. 

The constant onslaught of copaganda in movies and television has done a lot to foster acceptance. In 2022, just over half of American broadcast network dramas were police shows. That's not including comedies like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine" or reality shows like “COPS" (now in its 37th season). This enormous portion has actually been far higher: In 2020, it was seventy percent. While the portrayal of police on television is generally benevolent, movies routinely revel in the darkness by heroicizing vigilante cops. It's an old trope.

Fortunately, the general public is no longer tolerating these tragedies even if government is. Black Lives Matter was possibly the largest protest movement in American history. Yes, law enforcement responded with additional violence and cities did by boosting police budgets. It's grimly similar to how Washington regularly rewards Israel's carnage. But rote copaganda cannot cope with popular outrage anymore.

One important flash point was Atlanta, Georgia, where the city government had bulldozed most of the only forest that Blacks enjoyed easy access to. Why? To build a mock city training facility for police to practice urban warfare tactics in. The project was colloquially called “Cop City" and highlighted the connections between seemingly unrelated issues like environmental racism and police militarization. Protesters trying to save the forest initially resisted non-violently before police shot and killed Manuel Paez Terán. The cops claimed Terán had fired first. Surprising almost nobody, the autopsy suggested otherwise.

Protesters were designated as domestic terrorists and prosecuted under the Rico Act, which was originally passed to combat organized crime. It is important to note that this authoritarian approach began under Joe Biden. Donald Trump was naturally happy to take advantage of the groundwork that had been done, but too few grasp that is a strong argument against doing it in the first place.(11)

Cop City is only one of many such facilities being planned and built nationwide. This is all part of a long-going and expensive preparation effort to suppress dissent in America. But, as I mentioned, it is also part of an international industry. And that industry sells technology as well as training.

Take Palantir, for example. The tech firm designs Artificial Intelligence for their clients to manage mass surveillance by sifting through enormous amounts of real time data from countless electronic sources to monitor people's step-by-step movements. Palantir helps Israel select strike targets in Gaza; but here in the States, the firm intends to track migrants (and citizens), facilitating snatching them off the street.(12)

Palantir is hardly the only technology company doing such stuff. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are also involved. Silicon Valley enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the Israeli military. But Israel is not just a client – they have their very own growing surveillance tech industry just as they have their very own arms industry. And both industries test their new products on Palestinians: The practice is called the “Palestine Laboratory." Israel then sells these oppression products to some of the worst autocrats in the world. This practice began with Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Pariah states are tight like that.

But again, behind all the fancy technology is the mentality of being an occupying force and that remains the same whatever the locality or period in history. Ultimately, both the technology and the training are extensions of the evil desires behind them. We need to deal with all three rather than obsess over one extension or the other. Recent examples of imperial boomerang vividly illustrate this. 

Consider President Trump's occupation of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His vastly expanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has been treating immigrants and citizens alike very much like the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) treats Palestinians. As mentioned before, they've been raiding homes and workplaces, detaining innocent people, tearing families apart, and destroying their victims' property in the process. The parallels are no coincidence since the IDF trains ICE. This has been extensively documented.

On January 7th of 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, a 37 year old mother who was no threat to anyone. ICE had repeatedly prevented medical attention from reaching her in time. A medic identified himself but ICE refused to let him treat her. Then ICE blocked ambulances from reaching her for fifteen minutes while she bled to death. The IDF routinely does this to Palestinians they wound.

The second person in that city who ICE had shot and killed in broad daylight was Alex Pretti on January 24th. Pretti was an ICU nurse who was trying to shield two women who ICE agents were shoving. One of the women is an EMT who begged the ICE agents to let her perform CPR on him. Just as before, ICE agents refused in order to deny him even the slightest chance of surviving. They wanted their kill to stick.

Yes, this is their training. But it takes a certain mindset to invent the training. And it takes the same mindset to think these are good practices that should be adopted here. And it takes the same mindset to accept the task of doing it with your own hands. In each of these cases, the mentality needs to already be there to some degree. Thus, this mentality is present at every level of the organization from top to bottom. 

This is why it's insanely naïve to say better training will fix this all by itself. The cruelty and brutality are already baked into everything: First, the agency actively recruits violent bigots to begin with. Then, the internal culture of the organization encourages their worst behavior. And finally their superiors give them unconstitutional guidelines. Obviously, they're going to totally ignore or forget any training that restricts their mayhem. But they'll definitely remember – and happily apply – whatever training magnifies their lethality. You can count on that at both the individual and institutional levels. Reform is impossible.

Such enthusiastic cruelty is a recurring characteristic of occupations. In the Old South, lynchings were often picnic occasions: People took photos and turned them into postcards. In Gaza, Israeli soldiers frequently filmed themselves killing unarmed civilians and post the videos on social media. This illustrates the impunity they feel and the limits of body cameras. After all, the ICE agents who shot Renée Good and Alex Pretti knew they were being filmed by volunteer observers. The observers were who they shot. Indeed, the agent who shot Good was filming with his own phone. Why do they do this? Collective intimidation and individual bragging rights: They want to terrify the locals and show off as warriors.

Budgets reveal what we really believe – or at least what our elites believe. They're documents that outline and quantify our society's sordid priorities, and it's often a sobering portrait. Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill" made ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency. If it were technically a military (and it's more a paramilitary than an agency), it would be the 11th largest army in the world. 

The scale's unprecedented, but the direction isn't. Our armed forces have long been larger than those of the next nine countries combined and US cities typically spend between 25 and 40% of their budgets on cops. These spending trends are related: As the police become more militarized, it becomes even more clear that the same violent national id is driving them both. Plus, it's pretty profitable to the people at the top.

We've been hearing “This isn't us: We're not like this" for sometime now. Native Americans and African Americans beg to differ. To them, America has been like this from the beginning. It's hard to argue with them since their history and recent lived experience are pretty fucking compelling.

Conservatives and their centrist cousins will of course bleat that this post is just another “blame America first" screed. Given the massive power that the US wields around the world, that's not a bad reflex to have since you'll usually be right. Uncle Sam can't plead that he's just a smol bean with scant effect on events.

But I'm not driven by some anti-American animus. I think America has it's good points and I even wrote a whole book entitled Conservatism is Un-American and Other Self-Evident Truths to highlight those good points and conservatives' historic hostility towards them. America is supposed to stand for liberty, equality, and democracy. I love these ideals, but of course conservatives don't. They never have.

And alongside all the horrors I've talked about there are examples of ordinary Americans resisting the evils I have detailed here. People risking their lives to protect not just their friends and neighbors but complete strangers as well. The slogan of Bernie Sanders' last presidential campaign posed the question: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know?" The people of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and all the other cities that ICE has invaded have answered “YES!" Conservatives and centrists are terrified by it.

I should add that what people are doing now mirrors what antebellum abolitionists did when attempting to prevent slave catchers from dragging former slaves back down south. But that's for another post.

Collectively, we've always been both monsters and those who oppose them. It's always been a perpetual struggle between the two roles with fence sitters in between, and most all individuals will be on different sides at different times. Telling ourselves that we're immune to becoming monsters because our institutions or national character will prevent it is when the danger is greatest. In any crisis, complacency is the enemy of decency. Principles are self-flattering fictions when not applied where they apply. Simply proclaiming principles is insufficient bullshit unless backed by action. 

Being the good guy isn't a birthright: Not for anyone or any country. It's either earned or forfeited every day and for everyone their record gets checkered over time. For most people, it's mostly good. But for those who think they're special exceptions who can never be questioned, it's chronically grotesque.

Pretending any different jettisons any claim to be taken seriously.

______________

1)  Yes, that's a quote about conservatism, but the power dynamic is identical and by this time it should be clear that excusing Israel's ethnic cleansing is pretty illiberal. The label “Progressive Except Palestine" (PEP) highlights this salient inconsistency.

2) One technical difference is that while the Zionist founders of Israel largely came from Europe, they did not claim the land for the prestige and enrichment of some distant European power that they still felt allegiance to. Polish Jews did not claim Palestine in the name of Poland, and Warsaw did not appoint administrative governors. Another significant difference is Israelis have at least some historical connection to the land that the British didn't have to India, the French didn't have to Vietnam, and the Belgians didn't have to the Congo. But in all other aspects, such as displacing the indigenous population through terror, incarceration, and deliberate starvation, it resembles colonization. As Professor Rashid Khalidi explains, Ireland was England's first colony and it used the same subjugation techniques in all its subsequent colonies. Palestine was no exception and the Israelis perpetuated British practices against the Palestinians. This AJ+ video gives an accessible summation and explains why Irish people naturally sympathize with Palestinians: They know their own history and can recognize parallels. But others can struggle with this:

3) Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. by Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1959, 19:163-68.

4) V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1969), 11.

5) Thomas Jefferson, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1950),10:63.

6)  John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998), 68-72.

7)  George Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State of Virginia, (Westport, CT: St. Negro University Press, 1970), 70. Originally published by Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, 1796.

8) As the Matt Bors cartoon below shows, we see similar thinking even when the stakes are far smaller. We see the same callousness towards those you logically ought to sympathize with instead: People in the same straights you were once in yourself. The bullshit thinking I'm describing perpetuates misery by sabotaging solidarity. It's a self-inflicted divide and conquer that of course only bolsters the status quo.

9) No, the cover doesn't tie-into a pop-psych article inside. It's just a stand-alone gag to catch the eye and sell copies. The painter was probably trying to gently nudge the reader's conscience. After all, we're clearly supposed to sympathize with whoever is getting yelled at in any given panel and that shifts from one panel to the next. But my point here is most everyone would instantly recognize the dynamic being portrayed.

10) In fairness, this practice isn't unique to Israel: It seems to be a sniper thing. I first heard about its use during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. (What I hadn't heard then was that there was a company that offered “sniper safaris" for rich clients who paid extra to shoot children or pregnant women.) Along these lines, in 2024, it was been reported that Israeli quadcopter drones had been equipped with speakers to broadcast the sounds of women and children crying to draw potential targets out into the open. Snopes cautioned skepticism while simultaneously debunking claims that the technology didn't exist. To me, this says it most probably happened. After all, there's no question that Israel targets civilians, just as Russia targets civilians in Ukraine. And snipers all over the world often use various lures. And if tech exists to make it easier while minimizing the danger to your own side, it would be stupid not to use it. The technology may make it more terrifying – which incidentally benefits the Israelis – but the moral atrocity remains the same. It's just another new tool to do an old thing, and that's been a motif throughout this post.

11) Democrats have finally got to stop copying Republicans' constitutionally dubious “get tough" envelope pushing. Bipartisan imitating legitimizes these evil right wing schemes. Rationalizing that it's acceptable because a Democrat's doing it ignores two dangerous facts: First, the White House often changes hands and we shouldn't be on the precipice of fascism every time that happens. And second, it's still wrong no matter who does it. Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill was a massive disaster that the brought us a lot closer to the police state we are fighting today. The Violence Against Women Act was the only good component in it. The rest of it turbo-boosted the prison industrial complex making us the most incarcerated country in the world.  And Barack Obama did almost nothing to dismantle the George W. Bush's draconian projects. “Liberals" have been conservatives' constant accomplices in bringing us here.

12) In the article, a major tech investor named Paul Graham raised an alarm, accusing Palantir of “building the infrastructure of the police state." The company's PR department feigned offense prompting Graham to respond, “Palantir may try to act huffy and respond that it's unthinkable that the U.S. government would do this. But with this administration it's obviously thinkable." The company's CEO Alex Karp didn't bristle like its PR department. “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it's necessary to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them." Karp seeks to “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority." Incidentally, almost this whole post is pointing out unthinkable things getting thought and done. It actually happens quite a lot.