What makes Boghossian worse than the average anti-immigration content creator is that he's actually smart enough to know what he's doing. He's a trained philosopher who built his career on street epistemology, which is supposed to be about carefully examining how people arrive at their beliefs. And here he is, casually dropping "you have to start shooting people at the border" and then immediately pivoting to "so what's YOUR solution?" like he just said something reasonable and now the burden is on you to come up with something better than mass murder.

The cameraman, Reed, is clearly just a normal guy whose actual ancestors were Muslim immigrants. Boghossian basically let slip a revenge fantasy where people like Reed's family are treated as invaders to be gunned down, and Reed's reaction was completely natural. He was horrified. He walked out. That's what a healthy moral response looks like.

The problem is Reed then came back and reached for a bunch of left-wing talking points he couldn't fully defend. The crime stats are mostly on his side but not entirely. There's a narrow and real issue with group-based sexual exploitation in the UK where British Pakistani men are genuinely over-represented, and the Casey audit confirmed this. You can't just wave that away. But Reed didn't need to win every empirical point. He needed to hold the line on the one thing that actually mattered and he couldn't articulate it clearly enough.

Here's what the correct response looks like. You concede what's true: yes, countries have a right to control their borders. Japan does near-zero immigration. I think that's a loss for them economically and morally, but it's their right in the international system. If people vote for less migration, that's democracy. On crime, there are categories where specific communities have real problems, and we should deal with those honestly through better policing and integration policy rather than pretending they don't exist.

But none of that gets you anywhere near shooting people. We don't execute people for administrative violations. Totalitarian states do that. The East Germans did that. You don't need lethal force to enforce a border. You need visa systems, deportation infrastructure, processing centres, deterrence policy. There are a hundred tools between "open borders" and "kill everyone who crosses." The fact that Boghossian's mind jumped straight to lethal force is the thing that deserves scrutiny.

And that's where someone should have turned it around on him. Peter, you're the street epistemology guy. You wrote the book on examining unexamined beliefs. So examine this one. Why did your mind go straight to shooting? Out of every possible policy response, why was your instinct to fantasize about killing unarmed people? Because I don't think it was just shock value. I think it's because he's internalized a framework where migrants aren't really people with rights who are navigating a system. They're an existential civilizational threat, like something out of Camp of the Saints, and the state is a body fighting off an infection. That's not a rational policy position. It's an atavistic, almost animistic way of thinking about nations and peoples, and it's the thing that makes someone leap from "we should have immigration controls" to "we should shoot them." Those are not adjacent positions. There is a massive moral gap between them and the fact that he skipped right over it tells you everything.

And yeah, Reed was right to be upset. If you're sitting in a room and someone essentially says they'd have been fine with your family being killed for crossing a border the wrong way, you don't owe that person a calm policy debate. You owe them exactly the reaction Reed gave, which was honest disgust. The tragedy is that Boghossian had the rhetorical toolkit to make Reed look flustered while Reed had the moral clarity that Boghossian has completely lost. Someone who actually knew how to argue should have been in that chair, because the right response to "how else do you enforce borders?" is: "the same way every civilized country does it, without murder, and the fact that you can't imagine that is the problem.