The world moves fast.
When John McWhorter and I sat down to record my most recent livestream last Thursday, December 12, the identity and motive of the Brown University shooter were unknown. Now, thanks in large part to an urgent tip from a semi-anonymous homeless man, law enforcement seems certain about both. The assailant was a disgruntled ex-graduate student from Brown’s physics department. He seems to have opened fire on an economics final exam review session simply because it was being held in a classroom where physics classes sometimes meet. According to law enforcement, he also murdered an ex-classmate, the highly regarded MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro, at the victim’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts. The gunman evidently took his own life in a storage unit, where his body was recovered.
Our speculations on the shooter and his motive in this episode are now moot, but John and I talk about many more live issues. The Hanukkah massacre on Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach led us to discuss the nature of Western anti-Israel sentiment. (If it needs to be said, we’re both revolted by this horrific act of violence.) John believes the rise of support for the Palestinian cause is an expression of domestic racialized morality onto an historically complex conflict. In his view, “settler colonialism” is little more than a euphemism for “black good, white bad.”
But I dispute this point of view. First, antisemitism predates our modern conceptions of racial difference. And second, the imposition of domestic racial concepts over a foreign conflict obscures the actual historical dynamics at play. We cannot simply write off concern over the people of Gaza and the West Bank as just so much woke virtue signaling, nor can we, for the same reasons, dismiss the valid humanitarian criticisms leveled at the State of Israel for their actions. To argue that peaceful Western critics of Israel’s policies are little more than confused “antiracists” (in the Kendian sense) is to wave away valid critiques of what one could accurately call settler colonialism.
From there we move onto a few more topics: the tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer, Trump’s apparently poor health (and John’s speculations thereon), and John’s reasons for not writing a memoir.
Our monthly subscriber Q&A comprises the second half of the show. Yan Shen and Joe Nalven called in to ask their questions themselves, and we take others on Maria Karina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize, Trump’s escalation of tensions with Venezuela, game theory and the post-Cold War (or pre-Cold War II) geopolitical order, John’s thoughts on AI, racism and group behavior, and the dismantling of DEI.
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