In Gaza, Does Silence Equal Violence?

The era of mandatory opinion once again rears its head

Israel is apparently threatening to destroy Gaza City in a “mighty hurricane” of bombardment if hostages aren’t released, so most of what’s written below is about to be irrelevant. But I’ve been pestered for years to say something about this issue and decided over the weekend to do so, so here it is.

Friday, amid news that Bari Weiss of The Free Press struck a $200 million deal to take over CBS, I tossed off a note about Bari, CBS, and “tears of legacy media.” A deluge of outraged comments followed. The math was Bari = Bad Person = Not Funny (when you solve for X in a lefty political equation, X inevitably equals Not Funny). Bari and I are not close. Once, I believed she was boxing me out of the Twitter Files and had to suppress thoughts of strangling her (she proved vital to the project). We have opposite politics. When she organized a debate on whether the U.S. should “still police the world,” she hired Lee Fang and me to argue the contra against her friends Jamie Kirchick and Bret Stephens. I came from independent media and won’t ever leave, while I believe she always hoped to return to prestige media, preferably as its conqueror.

When that actually happened, it was hilarious. CBS turned the 60 Minutes legacy of Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner into a rooting section for German meme-polizei and transformed the stage David Letterman made famous into a venue for dancing-syringe propaganda, but now came begging, ballgag in mouth, for a $200 million discipline session from a vaccine-skeptical Substack dominatrix. How do I not laugh at that?

This wasn’t laying laurels at the feet of Bari’s Israel views, just Schadenfreude before dingbats like Oliver Darcy, whose breathless coverage made it seem like CEO David Ellison kidnapped the very virtue of News by hiring Bari after vowing not to “politicize” CBS. This is the same Darcy who in his CNN days asked Comcast to deplatform Newsmax, OAN, and FOX. He also once retweeted, “Your Substack newsletter won’t make you a millionaire.”

That seemed funny to me, but hundreds of Palestine advocates online disagreed, racing to the more obvious explanation: conspiracy! I was a “Mossad toady,” an “apologist for a genocidal lying cunt,” either “caping” for a future CBS job (“You’ll get that FP paycheck eventually!!!!!”) or “horny AF.” One of the helpful qualities of the progressive left in America is its willingness not just to list jokes you may not make, but to write down exactly what you may say in their place. So, “The Nation couldn’t turn a profit if gifted the world’s oil supply” is out, but “Bari Weiss is an apologist for genocide” is correct. Don’t ponder whose cock Stephen Colbert’s mouth gets to holster now, but instead remember: “Bari Weiss is a Jewish supremacist agent for a foreign apartheid state.” And so on.

Israel supporters will argue with you. They will get defensive on days like today and lecture you about the history leading up to their decision. American advocates for Palestine don’t bother arguing. Since they don’t admit the possibility of honest disagreement, they move straight to the corrupt reasons you must have for failing to already embrace their view: payoffs, blackmail, cowardice, or submission to the Great Jewish Conspiracy. That once-forbidden last idea they suggest with the giddiness of teenagers who’ve just discovered oral sex.

Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence, who I like but deems me scum for not embracing His Issue, put it this way after the Bari column: “This really breaks my heart. Matt is officially into his Vegas lounge act years. I don’t get it. Do they have pictures of him next to a dead hooker in St. Petersburg?” The irony is, I’d bet Russell initially became a fan of mine because I think for myself and don’t regurgitate bromides about “threats to the region” or “rape camps” or the “existential threat to democracy” or whatever the official propaganda line of the day was at the time. Now though, it breaks his heart that I’m not speaking the magic words: genocide, Zionist, settler colonialism, etc. I don’t talk about hang-gliding terrorists or hostages either, but no matter. Left-activist clichés are better than Pentagon versions, so failure to salute them makes me a genocide apologist with a dead hooker on my conscience.

For those who wonder why I don’t talk about this issue, let me share a story or two: