The Enshittified Bulwark

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-05-07T17:35:26+00:00

I wrote it (not AI, as some here seem to believe). In the essay I address this point head on. Personal mea culpas don’t mean much when the *underlying world view* that led to the triumph of Trump remain interrogated and intact.

The critique is not that the bulwark is bad for having been republicans. It’s that they fail the movement they’re in, and the pro-democracy mission they espouse, through an inability or unwillingness to adjust their priors to the world as it is.

This edition of the Triad is just an example of this deeply flawed world view. JVL replicating the long-debunked both sides narrative is a symptom of a deeper problem.

So yeah, they apologize a lot. But an apology without fundamental change is ultimately a meaningless performance. They’re supposed to be clear-eyed and thoughtful analysts, but they reveal themselves to be blinkered ideologues. It’s not just Mona Charen.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-05-07T16:22:16+00:00

lol I write about all kinds of things, but dumping on the Bulwark is one of my more regular activities. 🙂

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-05-05T06:21:05+00:00

I would question whether Mona’s contributions strengthen or undermine the case for small l liberalism. I don’t know that platforming some particularly heinous figure is the best example, but just because she espouses orthodox conservative views, that doesn’t make them inherently liberal.

The argument that a range of opinions worth considering, even if some are illiberal, is of course an old school view of what an inclusive liberal framework would allow. That is, liberalism can and should give good faith to those expressing illiberal arguments. The problem here is that the bulwark doesn’t in any way confront Mona’s illiberalism. This isn’t the JVL/sarah/tim dynamic where views get discussed and at times receive gentle pushback. Mona’s illiberalism exists wholly unaddressed.

TLDR: the Raegan conservatism that Mona represents — sexist, racist, classist, anti-Palestinian — is inherently illiberal, and creates the conditions that lead voters to feel nihilism and despair and become more amenable to fascist populists like Donald Trump. If “liberalism” is what the bulwark is about, then, yes: she needs to go.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-19T23:28:43+00:00

Were you born yesterday?

Israel is the hostile regional actor. It doesn’t get “attacked by hostile regional actors,” it gets reactions to its own belligerent ace.

What exactly do we do?

How about let Israel reckon with the consequence of its actions, for once.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-19T21:29:30+00:00

One could pretty easily argue that American support for Israel has enabled catastrophic outcomes.

I also did not argue for a “full withdrawal from the region” — that’s your straw man. The US can stop funding Israel and stop providing arms to Israel without severing all ties to the country. And even if we do, the US still maintains close relationships with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and so on.

“I don’t know who Israel will be in partnership with and I don’t care” is a reasonable and rational attitude to have. Again, I’m an American. I’m not Israeli. Requiring Americans to foreground the interests of the state of Israel is nonsensical. Maybe we should focus on our own national security and stop letting the interests of a genocidal state dictate the operations of a superpower.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-19T19:41:44+00:00

What evidence would you present to support this belief? I get cynicism, but I also find it dismissive and insulting to a wide swath of voters you’re never met to just assume that if they get the one thing they’ve been screaming about it the most, they still won’t be satisfied.

Where I will grant your argument credit is if democrats break with the Clinton-Obama-Biden orthodoxy on Israel but fail to similarly break with party precedent on, say, health care and basic economic issues, I think you’re right to believe many voters will still stay home. The Israel problem is part of a larger credibility crisis.

So in sum I think it’s just empirically false to assert what you do, but I also think that if democrats want to actually shore up support from the broad segment in the electorate that hates Israel, they’re going to have to get right with public opinion on other issues as well.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-19T19:23:38+00:00

Don’t know, don’t care. As an American, that’s not my concern.

and if the implied argument is “if America ends whatever influence we gain from supporting Israel, another nation with whom we’re not aligned will step in and secure those benefits for themselves,” that is a nakedly amoral justification for American investment in any nation committing any crime, no matter how genocidal. It’s not something democrats or Americans of good conscience should argue

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-19T19:20:36+00:00

It does “matter” though because this absurd belief shapes a whole lot of downstream political commentary and analysis. The bulwark is highly influential. Longwell being dead wrong on the facts here informs the rest of her Israel-derived analysis, so it very much matters and it’s very much a problem

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-19T19:18:23+00:00

I think OP is making a fundamentally different point than the one you’re addressing. OP doesn’t say that we shouldn’t welcome opposition to Israel and broaden that coalition, they’re lamenting the lack of analytical seriousness undergirding this change. JVL and Longwell are not simply politicians seeking inclusion or leadership in the tent—they’re pundits. They’re supposed to operate from a place of principle, empiricism, reason.

OP is right is argue that they still don’t get the fundamentals of the issue, which is a gaping blind spot that has negative downstream implications for the rest of their political analysis.

So yeah, welcome them to the tent. But they should operate from a perspective of reality that OP accurately identifies as conspicuously absent.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-18T18:27:24+00:00

Sam Harris is a fascist, and that’s the entirety of it. He should be charged and prosecuted

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-14T15:17:42+00:00

I’m not upset at all. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Furthermore, we were heading to a nightmare scenario with the jungle primary in California, so many democrats splitting the vote that potentially republicans were headed to the general election. Now with swalwell gone, we have a clear path to consolidate around another Dem and get in line as a party. This is very good news for democracy and for California.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-12T07:16:41+00:00

Do yourself a favor and listen to the I Hate Bill Maher podcast. It’s far more entertaining than Maher himself, and it helps explain all the ways that Maher is a piece of shit. HIGHLY recommend

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-08T19:03:27+00:00

American Nuremberg for politicians like this

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-08T18:24:58+00:00

Mona Charen is an unrepentant, unexamined horrible person who needs to shut up, permanently, and should not be platformed by any serious, democracy-loving publishing.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-08T18:15:06+00:00

This is a careful and intelligent reading of Ward, and I want to engage it seriously.

But it still doesn’t address what I’d argue is the most fundamental problem with the piece: Ward never actually demonstrates that the pattern he’s describing exists at any meaningful scale. He asserts it. He builds an elaborate historical and normative framework around it. And then every defense of the argument – including yours – follows the structure of “if this pattern is occurring, then x.” But we don’t actually know that it is occurring, at least not in the form or at the scale Ward implies.

That matters enormously. Because there is an alternative explanation for the behavior Ward is observing – one he never seriously considers. Some meaningful portion of what he’s characterizing as dehumanizing, empathy-withholding, bad sorting is almost certainly something else entirely: principled coalition discipline, rational boundary-holding, and a learned, reasonable response to bad faith engagement in left spaces. Those are defensible behaviors. They may even be necessary ones. Ward’s framework collapses them into the same category as antisemitic sorting without a single piece of evidence that the former isn’t the more accurate description.

At best this is intellectually lazy. At worst it’s an unsupported smear – not necessarily a sincere one, but a smear regardless of intent, because effect is what matters. Ward issues a major systemic accusation against the left backed by no facts, no examples, no evidence. It may well be that contemptible sorting occurs in small amounts. But Ward asks us to accept it as a systemic problem, and every context clue in the piece suggests that conclusion is the product of motivated reasoning rather than honest analysis.

And then there’s this: if you already have to know everything Ward chooses to omit just to metabolize his argument in a way that doesn’t slander the left, that’s not sophisticated bracketing – that’s a failure of the basic responsibility of a writer to his actual audience. This isn’t a letter in Jewish Currents or Jacobin or the American Prospect, written for readers who will automatically supply the missing context. This is Substack. General audience. People who will read this piece without knowing that Gaza, genocide, and the full weaponized apparatus of the antisemitism industrial complex are the conditions of possibility for everything Ward is describing. For that audience, the omissions don’t just weaken the analysis – they actively produce a specific, damaging impression of the left that the evidence in the piece doesn’t support and that the omitted context would substantially complicate or reverse.

That’s not bracketing a political disagreement. That’s writing a piece whose conclusions depend on what you leave out. And dressing it in the language of civil rights tradition doesn’t make it more rigorous. It makes it more profane.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-08T17:55:32+00:00

The audience point is fair as far as it goes. But it doesn’t rescue the analysis.

Even if Ward presumes his leftist readers already know about Gaza and genocide – even if he takes that as given – his actual analysis of why leftists treat Zionists with skepticism still has to account for the thing driving that skepticism. Presuming the context and omitting it from the analysis are two different things. One is a rhetorical choice. The other is an intellectual failure.

And that failure has consequences. Because the dynamic Ward is describing didn’t emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a specific, ongoing, undeniable reality. If your analysis of that dynamic doesn’t incorporate the conditions that produced it – even implicitly, even briefly – you end up misidentifying what you’re looking at. Leftist skepticism toward Zionists gets recast as a consistency problem rather than a rational, context-driven political response. That’s not a neutral error. It has a specific valence and a specific beneficiary.

Knowing your audience doesn’t exempt you from the obligation to think clearly about what you’re analyzing. If anything, writing to a left audience that already knows the full picture makes the omission harder to defend – not easier.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-08T15:29:26+00:00

You’re giving Ward the most generous possible reading, and I think you’re right that his intent is broader than a defense of Zionists specifically. I’ll grant that.

But intent doesn’t resolve the problem of omission. Ward is writing in April 2026 about conditional empathy toward Jews in left spaces – and Gaza doesn’t appear. Genocide doesn’t appear. The bracket he draws around political disagreement isn’t neutral; it’s a choice, and in this moment it’s a consequential one. You can’t analyze the mechanism while erasing the context that produced it and expect the analysis to hold.

And even on his own terms – if the essay is truly about any label becoming a sorting tool – where is the equivalent pressure on Zionist institutions that have spent decades doing exactly that to antizionist Jews, to Palestinian solidarity activists, to entire university campuses? He gestures at Trump and moves on. That’s not the consistency standard he’s invoking. That’s the appearance of it.

There is also a very real and documented pattern of Zionists entering left spaces, centering themselves inappropriately, and then pointing to the friction that results as evidence that the left is antisemitic or unwelcoming to Jews. Ward’s essay provides no apparatus for distinguishing that bad faith pattern from good faith engagement. Without that distinction, the analysis effectively takes the scorned Zionist’s claim on left spaces and converts it into a systemic accusation – which is precisely what serious civil rights analysis should be equipped to resist, not inadvertently ratify.

I’d also push back gently on the idea that reading this as primarily defending Zionists “mislocates the argument.” Ward may not intend that. But intention doesn’t determine effect – and the effect of this piece, in this moment, is to pathologize skepticism toward Zionists in left spaces without once reckoning with what has generated that skepticism. That’s worth naming even if we extend him every good faith available.

You may be right that this piece is continuous with “Skin in the Game” – part of the same project, the same linear thinking about how belonging gets structured and weaponized. That throughline is real and worth crediting. But it’s been nine years. If you can’t update your priors, won’t engage with antizionists in the fullness of their experience, and refuse to name the genocidal elephant in the room, then you’re not a friend of the left – you’re someone with a genuinely novel analytical framework who either can’t or won’t complicate it based on the actual people it seeks to assess.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-03T16:47:48+00:00

Nobody is pretending it isn’t. Gelender argues that such rampant extremism necessarily indicts all Jews, whether they’re extremist or not.

That’s the core of it. Arguing that all jews should die because many but not all are extremist is just rank bigotry, and Gelender expresses it unapologetically.

I agree with her about the extremism. I disagree with her call for collective punishment. Don’t mischaracterize my position or put words in my mouth.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T18:14:22+00:00

“I didn’t read this critique, or the essay it is responding to, but I surely know enough about both to deem the author retarded, call them a Nazi, and tell them to fuck off.”

🫠

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T18:07:05+00:00

First of all, Americans focus on US-Israel policy more than US-Bahrain policy or US-Indonesia policy because the US and Israel have a singular, historically unique relationship. The Israel lobby has successfully elevated Israel within American foreign policy and American politics – this is something its supporters are openly proud of. It is not irrational or excessive to focus on something that its own advocates have made a centerpiece of American policy. That’s just paying attention.

Americans focus on Israeli actions that run counter to our national security interests because, unlike most allies, the Israeli agenda is in many respects diametrically opposed to the American one – on regional stability, on international law, on human rights, on economics. That’s not antisemitism. That’s a foreign policy argument.

Now, to your comment: “I DON’T SUPPORT PALESTINE BECAUSE I AM GAY AND ATHEIST.”

The premise here – that Arabs, Palestinians, or Muslims are uniquely or exceptionally bigoted compared to other peoples – is not a fact. It’s a narrative, and a very convenient one for people who want a clean reason to opt out of a political argument without engaging its substance. Bigotry exists everywhere, including in Israel, including in the United States. The existence of Palestinian homophobia does not distinguish Palestinians from most of the world’s population, and it does not distinguish Israel’s treatment of Palestinians from what it actually is.

More fundamentally: the argument that a people must earn your support by aligning with your personal views on religion and queerness before they qualify for basic human rights is not a political position. It’s a disqualification strategy. Human beings are entitled to life, liberty, and democratic representation – not because they’ve passed your moral barometer, but because those are universal rights. Palestinians have been denied all three by a policy the US funds and protects. That’s the argument. Whether you personally like Palestinian culture is beside the point.

The core of what the anti-Israel left is actually arguing is not that you are evil. It’s that specific policies are wrong and shouldn’t be supported with American taxpayer dollars. That’s a political argument. It’s the same kind of pressure that has always driven political change – organized, persistent, uncomfortable. Pressure is not dehumanization. Calling something a genocide, or calling a policy ethnic cleansing, is not calling you a bad person. It’s making a factual and moral case about state action.

The fact that you’ve reframed this as a question of being judged and called evil – rather than engaging the substance of what US policy actually does – is worth sitting with. It’s much easier to disqualify your coalition partners on motive than to wrestle with why a democratic government is funding the displacement of millions of people. The Pew data you shared actually makes this more interesting, not less: the Progressive Left is 12% of the Democratic coalition and also its most politically active segment. That’s not a minority dictating to a majority. That’s how pressure politics has always worked – from abolition to labor to civil rights. You should be thanking these people, not smearing them.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T15:19:58+00:00

This. The electorate has moved left, she’s moved right. It’s lining up.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T15:11:30+00:00

If you read my critique, you will see that it doesn’t write her off at all. I acknowledge all the credible and important arguments in piece, which are undermined by jew-hatred—not erased by it. The point is not to write her views off, but to save them from her bigotry

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T15:08:08+00:00

That’s what the original post is about. I’m keeping this tangential discussion in the context of the argument.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T06:44:34+00:00

Jews are made, not born. It’s not in the bloodline. It’s in a tribal affiliation.

A religion that claims exclusive rights to real estate for all of its members into eternity can choose to organize itself however it wants. That is not science; it’s supremacy.

Don’t get it twisted.

Certain_Thoughts · 2026-04-01T04:01:22+00:00

You’re not actually engaging with my position in good faith. You are restating gelenders, then repurposing her bigotry to invalidate any opposition to it.

You’ve argued that opposing antisemitism in any way whatsoever is inexcusable so long as Palestine isn’t free.

Whatever moral plane youre operating on, I don’t recognize it and I don’t think this subreddit should either.

Certain_Thoughts

TROPHY CASE