Shtetl-Optimized

Update (Nov. 6): I’ve closed the comments, as they crossed the threshold from “sometimes worthwhile” to “purely abusive.” As for Mamdani’s victory: as I like to say in such cases (and said, e.g., after George W. Bush’s and Trump’s victories), the silver lining to which I cling is that either I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and things won’t be quite as terrible as I expect, or else I’ll be vindicated.

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This Halloween, I didn’t need anything special to frighten me. I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else. I saw people smiling, dressed up in costumes, and I thought: how?

The president of the Heritage Foundation, the most important right-wing think tank in the United States, has now explicitly aligned himself with Tucker Carlson, even as the latter has become a full-on Holocaust-denying Hitler-loving antisemite, who nods in agreement with the openly neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—i.e., plausibly the next President of the United States—pointedly did nothing whatsoever to distance himself from the MAGA movement’s lunatic antisemites, in response to their lunatic antisemitic questions at the Turning Point USA conference. (Vance thus dishonored the memory of Charlie Kirk, who for all my many disagreements with him, was a firmly committed Zionist.) It’s become undeniable that, once Trump himself leaves the stage, this is the future of MAGA, and hence of the Republican Party itself. Exactly as I warned would happen a decade ago, this is what’s crawled out from underneath the rock that Trump gleefully overturned.

While the Republican Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews like me have no place in America, the Democratic Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews have no place in Israel. If these two movements ever merged, the obvious “compromise” would be the belief, popular throughout history, that Jews have no place anywhere on earth.

Barring a miracle, New York City—home to the world’s second-largest Jewish community—is about to be led by a man for whom eradicating the Jewish state is his deepest, most fundamental moral imperative, besides of course the proletariat seizing the means of production. And to their eternal shame, something like 29% of New York’s Jews are actually going to vote for this man, believing that their own collaboration with evil will somehow protect them personally—in breathtaking ignorance of the millennia of Jewish history testifying to the opposite.

Despite what you might think, I try really, really hard not to hyperventilate or overreact. I know that, even if I lived in literal Warsaw in 1939, it would still be incumbent on me to assess the situation calmly and figure out the best response.

So for whatever it’s worth: no, I don’t expect that American Jews, even pro-Zionist Jews in New York City, will need to flee their homes just yet. But it does seem to me that they (to say nothing of British and Canadian and French Jews) might, so to speak, want to keep their suitcases packed by the door, as Jews have through the centuries in analogous situations. As Tevye says near the end of Fiddler on the Roof, when the Jews are given three days to evacuate Anatevka: “maybe this is why we always keep our hats on.” Diaspora Jews like me might also want to brush up on Hebrew. We can thank Hashem or the Born Rule that, this time around, at least the State of Israel exists (despite the bloodthirsty wish of half the world that it cease to exist), and we can reflect that these contingencies are precisely why Israel was created.

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Let me make something clear: I don’t focus so much on antisemitism only because of parochial concern for the survival of my own kids, although I freely admit to having as much such concern as the next person. Instead, I do so because I hold with David Deutsch that, in Western civilization, antisemitism has for millennia been the inevitable endpoint toward which every bad idea ultimately tends. It’s the universal bad idea. It’s bad-idea-complete. Antisemitism is the purest possible expression of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, who blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life, and who dreams in his resentment and rage of reversing the moral and scientific progress of humanity by slaughtering all those responsible for it. Hatred of high-achieving Chinese and Indian immigrants, and of gifted programs and standardized testing, are other expressions of the same worldview.

As far as I know, in 3,000 years, there hasn’t been a single example—not one—of an antisemitic regime of which one could honestly say: “fine, but once you look past what they did to the Jews, they were great for everyone else!” Philosemitism is no guarantee of general goodness (as we see for example with Trump), but antisemitism pretty much does guarantee general awfulness. That’s because antisemitism is not merely a hatred, but an entire false theory of how the world works—not just a but the conspiracy theory—and as such, it necessarily prevents its believers from figuring out true explanations for society’s problems.

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I’d better end a post like this on a note of optimism. Yes, every single time I check my phone, I’m assaulted with twenty fresh examples of once-respected people and institutions, all across the political spectrum, who’ve now fallen to the brain virus, and started blaming all the world’s problems on “bloodsucking globalists” or George Soros or Jeffrey Epstein or AIPAC or some other suspicious stand-in du jour. (The deepest cuts come from the new Jew-haters who I myself once knew, or admired, or had some friendly correspondence with.)

But also, every time I venture out into the real world, I meet twenty people of all backgrounds whose brains still seem perfectly healthy, and who respond to events in a normal human way. Even in the dark world behind the screen, I can find dozens of righteous condemnations of Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation and the others who’ve chosen to play footsie with those seeking a new Final Solution to the Jewish Question. So I reflect that, for all the battering it’s taken in this age of TikTok and idiocracy—even then, our Enlightenment civilization still has a few antibodies that are able to put up a fight.

In their beautiful book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson set out an ambitious agenda by which the Democratic Party could reinvent itself and defeat MAGA, not by indulging conspiracy theories but by creating actual broad prosperity. Their agenda is full of items like: legalizing the construction of more housing where people actually want to live; repealing the laws that let random busybodies block the construction of mass transit; building out renewable energy and nuclear; investing in science and technology … basically, doing all the things that anyone with any ounce of economic literacy knows to be good. The abundance agenda isn’t only righteous and smart: for all I know, it might even turn out to be popular. It’s clearly worth a try.

Last week I was amused to see Kate Willett and Briahna Joy Gray, two of the loudest voices of the conspiratorial far left, denounce the abundance agenda as … wait for it … a cover for Zionism. As far as they’re concerned, the only reason why anyone would talk about affordable housing or high-speed rail is to distract the masses from the evil Zionists murdering Palestinian babies in order to harvest their organs.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that Willett and Gray actually have a point. Yes, solving America’s problems with reason and hard work and creativity, like the abundance agenda says to do, is the diametric opposite of blaming all the problems on the perfidy of Jews or some other scapegoat. The two approaches really are the logical endpoints of two directly competing visions of reality.

Naturally I have a preference between those visions. So I’ve been on a bit of a spending spree lately, in support of sane, moderate, pro-abundance, anti-MAGA, liberal Enlightenment forces retaking America. I donated $1000 to Alex Bores, who’s running for Congress in NYC, and who besides being a moderate Democrat who favors all the usual good things, is also a leader in AI safety legislation. (For more, see this by Eric Neyman of Alignment Research Center, or this from Scott Alexander himself—the AI alignment community has been pretty wowed.) I also donated $1000 to Scott Wiener, who’s running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in California, has a nuanced pro-two-states, anti-Netanyahu position that causes him to get heckled as a genocidal Zionist, and authored the excellent SB1047 AI safety bill, which Gavin Newsom unfortunately vetoed for short-term political reasons. And I donated $1000 to Vikki Goodwin, a sane Democrat who’s running to unseat Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in my own state of Texas. Any other American office-seeker who resonates with this post, and who’d like a donation, can feel free to contact me as well.

My bag is packed … but for now, only for a brief trip to give the physics colloquium at Harvard, after which I’ll return back home to Austin. Until it becomes impossible, I call on my thousands of thoughtful, empathetic American readers to stay right where you are, and simply do your best to fight the brain-eaten zombies of both left and right. If you are one of the zombies, of course, then my calling you one doesn’t even begin to express my contempt: may you be remembered by history alongside the willing dupes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. May the good guys prevail.

Oh, and speaking of zombies, Happy Halloween everyone! Boooooooo!

Last week, I gave the Patrick Suppes Lecture in the Columbia University Philosophy Department. Patrick Suppes was a distinguished philosopher at Stanford who (among many other things) pioneered remote gifted education through the EPGY program, and who I was privileged to spend some time with back in 2007, when he was in his eighties.

My talk at Columbia was entitled “Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics.” Here are the PowerPoint slides, and here’s the abstract:

The fact, or conjecture, of certain computational problems being intractable (that is, needing astronomical amounts of time to solve) clearly affects our ability to learn about physics.  But could computational intractability also play a direct role in physical explanations themselves?  I’ll consider this question by examining three possibilities:

(1) If quantum computers really take exponential time to simulate using classical computers, does that militate toward the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, as David Deutsch famously proposed?

(2) Are certain speculative physical ideas (e.g., time travel to the past or nonlinearities in quantum mechanics) disfavored, over and above any other reasons to disfavor them, because they would lead to “absurd computational superpowers”?

(3) Do certain effective descriptions in physics work only because of the computational intractability of violating those descriptions — as for example with Harlow and Hayden’s resolution of the “firewall paradox” in black hole thermodynamics, or perhaps even the Second Law of Thermodynamics itself?

I’m grateful to David Albert and Lydia Goehr of Columbia’s Philosophy Department, who invited me and organized the talk, as well as string theorist Brian Greene, who came and contributed to the discussion afterward. I also spent a day in Columbia’s CS department, gave a talk about my recent results on quantum oracles, and saw many new friends and old there, including my and my wife’s amazing former student Henry Yuen. Thanks to everyone.

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This was my first visit to Columbia University for more than a decade, and certainly my first since the upheavals following the October 7 massacre. Of course I was eager to see the situation for myself, having written about it on this blog. Basically, if you’re a visitor like me, you now need both a QR code and an ID to get into the campus, which is undeniably annoying. On the other hand, once you’re in, everything is pleasant and beautiful. Just from wandering around, I’d have no idea that this campus had recently been Ground Zero for the pro-intifada protests, and then for the reactions against those protests (indeed, the use of the protests as a pretext to try to destroy academia entirely) that rocked the entire country, filling my world and my social media feed.

When I asked friends and colleagues about the situation, I heard a range of perspectives: some were clearly exasperated with the security measures; others, while sharing in the annoyance, suggested the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the “intifada” has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching. Of course we can all pray that the current ceasefire will hold, for many reasons, the least of which is that perhaps then the obsession of the world’s young and virtuous to destroy the world’s only Jewish state will cool down a bit, and they’ll find another target for their rage. That would also help life at Columbia and other universities return to how it was before.

Before anyone asks: no, Columbia’s Peter Woit never showed up to disrupt my talk with rotten vegetables or a bullhorn—indeed, I didn’t see him at all on his trip, nor did I seek him out. Given that Peter chose to use his platform, one of the world’s best-known science blogs, to call me a mentally ill genocidal fascist week after week, it meant an enormous amount to me to see how many friends and supporters I have right in his own backyard.

All in all, I had a wonderful time at Columbia, and based on what I saw, I won’t hesitate to come back, nor will I hesitate to recommend Jewish or Israeli or pro-Zionist students to study there.

In response to my recent blog posts, which expressed views that are entirely boring and middle-of-the-road for Americans as a whole, American Jews, and Israelis (“yes, war to destroy Hamas is basically morally justified, even if there are innocent casualties, as the only possible way to a future of coexistence and peace”)—many people declared that I was a raving genocidal maniac who wants to see all Palestinian children murdered out of sheer hatred, and who had destroyed his career and should never show his face in public again.

Others, however, called me something even worse than a genocidal maniac. They called me a Republican!

So I’d like to state for the record:

(1) In my opinion, Trump II remains by far the worst president in American history—beating out the second-worst, either Trump I or Andrew Jackson. Trump is destroying vaccines and science and universities and renewable energy and sane AI policy and international trade and cheap, lifesaving foreign aid and the rule of law and everything else that’s good, and he’s destroying them because they’re good—because even if destroying them hurts his own voters and America’s standing in the world, it might hurt the educated elites even more. It’s almost superfluous to mention that, while Trump himself is neither of these things, the MAGA movement that will anoint his successor now teems with antisemites and Holocaust “revisionists.”

(2) Thus, I’ll continue to vote straight-ticket Democrat, and donate money to Democrats, so long as the Democrats in question are seriously competing for Zionist Jewish votes at all—as, for example, has every Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime so far.

(3) If it came down to an Israel-hating Squad Democrat versus a MAGA Republican, I’m not sure what I’d do, but I’d plausibly sit out the election or lodge a protest vote.

(4) In the extremely unlikely event that I had to choose between an Israel-hating Squad Democrat and some principled anti-MAGA Republican like Romney or Liz Cheney—then and only then do I expect that I’d vote Republican, for the first time in my life, a new and unfamiliar experience.

In my last post, I wrote about all the hate mail I’ve received these past few days. I even shared a Der-Stürmer-like image of a bloodthirsty, hook-nosed Orthodox Jew that some troll emailed me, after he’d repeatedly promised to send me a “diagram” that would improve my understanding of the Middle East. (Incredibly, commenters on Peter Woit’s blog then blamed me for this antisemitic image, mistakenly imagining that I’d created it myself, and then used their false assumption as further proof of my mental illness.)

Thanks to everyone who wrote to ask whether I’m holding up OK. The answer is: better than you’d expect! The first time you get attacked by dozens of Internet randos, it does feel like your life is over. But the sixth or seventh time? After you’ve experienced, firsthand, how illusory these people’s power over you actually is—how they can’t even dent your scientific career, can’t separate you from any of the friends who matter most to you (let alone your family), can’t really do anything to you beyond whatever they induce you to do to yourself? Then the deadly wolves appear more like poodles yapping from behind a fence. Try it and see!

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Today I want to focus on a different kind of message that’s been filling my inbox. Namely, people telling me to stay strong, to keep up my courage, that everything I wrote strikes them as just commonsense morality.

It won’t surprise anyone that many of these people are Jews. But almost as many are not. I was touched to hear from several of my non-Jewish scientific colleagues—ones I’d had no idea were in my corner—that they are in my corner.

Then there was the American Gentile who emailed me a story about how, seeing an Orthodox family after October 7, he felt an urge to run up and tell them that, if worst ever came to worst, they could hide in his basement (“and I own guns,” he added). Amusingly, he added that his wife successfully dissuaded him from actually making such an offer, pointing out that it might freak out the recipients.

I replied that, here in America, I don’t expect that I’ll ever need to hide in anyone’s basement. But, I added, the only reason I don’t expect it is that there are so many Americans who, regardless of any religious or ideological differences, would hide their Jewish neighbors in their basements if necessary.

I also—despite neither I nor this guy exactly believing in God—decided to write a blessing for him, which came out as follows:

May your seed multiply a thousandfold, for like King Cyrus of Persia, you are a righteous man among the Gentiles.  But also, if you’re ever in Austin, be sure to hit me up for tacos and beer.

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I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence.

I’ve learned, for example, that there are no words, however balanced or qualified, with which I can express the concept that Israel needs to defeat Hamas for the sake of both Israeli and Palestinian children, which won’t lead to Woit calling me a “genocide apologist who wants to see all the children in Gaza killed.” Nor are there any words with which to express my solidarity with the Jewish Columbia students who, according to an official university investigation, were last year systematically excluded from campus social life, intimidated, and even assaulted, and which won’t earn me names from Woit like “a fanatic allied with America’s fascist dictator.” Even my months-long silence about these topics got me labeled as “complicit with fascism and genocide.”

Realizing this is oddly liberating. When your back is to the wall in that way, either you can surrender, or else you can defend yourself. Your enemy has already done you the “favor” of eliminating any third options. Which, again, is just Zionism in a nutshell. It’s the lesson not only of 3,000 years of Jewish history, but also of superhero comics and of much of the world’s literature and cinema. It takes a huge amount of ideological indoctrination before such things stop being obvious.

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Reading the SneerClubbers’ armchair diagnoses of my severe mental illness, paranoia, persecution complex, grandiosity, etc. etc. I had the following thought, paraphrasing Shaw:

Yes, they’re absolutely right that psychologically well-adjusted people generally do figure out how to adapt themselves to the reigning morality of their social environment—as indicated by the Asch conformity test, the Milgram electric-shock experiment, and the other classics of social psychology.

It takes someone psychologically troubled, in one way or another, to persist in trying to adapt the reigning morality of their social environment to themselves.

If so, however, this suggests that all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people—a realization for which I’m deeply grateful.

Hardly for the first time in my life, this weekend I got floridly denounced every five minutes—on SneerClub, on the blog of Peter Woit, and in my own inbox. The charge this time was that I’m a genocidal Zionist who wants to kill all Palestinian children purely because of his mental illness and raging persecution complex.

Yes, that’s right, I’m the genocidal one—me, whose lifelong dream is that, just like Germany and Japan rose from their necessary devastation in WWII to become pillars of our global civilization, so too the children in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran will one day grow up in free and prosperous societies at peace with the West and with Israel. Meanwhile, those who demand an actual genocide of the Jews, another one—those who pray to Allah for it, who attempt it over and over, who preach it to schoolchildren, who celebrate their progress toward it in the streets—they’re all as innocent as lambs.

Yesterday, in The Free Press, came the report of a British writer who traveled to southern Lebanon, and met an otherwise ordinary young man there … who turned out to be excited for Muslims and Christians to join forces to slaughter all the Yahood, and who fully expected that the writer would share his admiration for Hitler, the greatest Yahood-killer ever.

This is what the global far left has now allied itself with. This is what I’m right now being condemned for standing against, with commenter after commenter urging me to seek therapy.

To me, this raises a broader question: how exactly do you keep your sanity, when you live on a planet filled with brain-eaten zombies?

I’m still struggling with that question, but the best I’ve come up with is what I think of as the Weinberg Principle, after my much-missed friend and colleague here at UT Austin. Namely, I believe that it’s better to have one Steven Weinberg on your side while the rest of humanity is against you, than the opposite. Many other individuals (including much less famous ones) would also work here in place of Steve, but I’ll go with him because I think most of my readers would agree to three statements:

1. Steve’s mind was more in sync with the way the universe really works, than nearly anyone else’s in history. He was to being free from illusions what Usain Bolt is to running or Magnus Carlsen is to chess.
2. Steve’s toenail clippings constituted a greater contribution to particle physics than would the life’s work of a hundred billion Peter Woits.
3. Steve’s commitment to Israel’s armed self-defense, and to Zionism more generally, made mine look weak and vacillating in comparison. No one need wonder what he would’ve said about Israel’s current war of survival against the Iranian-led terror axis.

Maybe it’s possible to wake the zombies up. Yoram Arnon, for example, wrote the following eloquent answer on Quora, in response to the question “Why are so many against freeing Palestine?”:

When Westerners think about freedom they think about freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, freedom to form political parties, etc.

When Palestinians say “Free Palestine” they mean freedom from Jews, and from Israel’s existence. They’re advocating for the abolition of Israel, replacing it with an Arab country.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is free, in the Western sense of the word. If Israel were to disappear, Palestinians would fall under an autocratic regime, just like every other Arab country, with none of the above freedoms. And, of course, Israelis would suffer a terrible fate at their hands.

Pro Palestinians are either unable to see this, or want exactly that, but thankfully many in the West do see this – the same “many” that are against “freeing Palestine”.

Palestinians need to accept Israel’s right to exist, and choose to coexist peacefully alongside it, for them to have the peace and freedom the West wants for them.

Maybe reading words like these—or the words of Coleman Hughes, or Douglas Murray, or Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, or Yassine Meskhout, or John Aziz, or Haviv Rettig Gur, or Sam Harris, or the quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch—can boot a few of the zombies’ brains back up. But even then, I fear that these reboots will be isolated successes. For every one who comes back online, a thousand will still shamble along in lockstep, chanting “brainsssssss! genocide! intifada!”

I’m acutely aware of how sheer numbers can create the illusion of argumentative strength. I know many people who were sympathetic to Israel immediately after October 7, but then gradually read the room, saw which side their bread was buttered on, etc. etc. and became increasingly hostile. My reaction, of course, has been exactly the opposite. The bigger the zombie army I see marching against me, the less inclined I feel to become a zombie myself—and the clearer to me becomes the original case for the Zionist project.

So to the pro-Zionist students—Jewish of course, but also Christian, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and everyone else—who feel isolated and scared to speak right up now, and who also often email me, here’s what I say. Yes, the zombies vastly outnumber us, but on the other hand, they’re zombies. Some of the zombies know longer words than others, but so far, not one has turned out to have a worldview terribly different from that of the image at the top of this post.

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I’ll keep the comments closed, for much the same reasons I did in my last post.  Namely, while there are many people of all opinions and backgrounds with whom one can productively discuss these things, there are many more with whom one can’t. Furthermore, experience has shown that the latter can disguise themselves as the former for days on end, and thereby execute a denial-of-service attack on any worthwhile and open public discussion.

Addendum: The troll who sent the antisemitic image now says that he regrets and apologizes for it, and that he’s going to read books on Jewish history to understand his error. I’ll believe that when he actually sends me detailed book reports or other evidence, but just wanted to update.

Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. They watched the murders with attitudes ranging from ineffectual squeamishness to indifference to unconcealed glee.

Now the man has kidnapped your last surviving child, a 9-year-old girl, and has tied her screaming to train tracks. You can pull a lever to divert the train and save your daughter. But there’s a catch, as there always is in these moral dilemmas: namely, the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks, in such a way that, if you divert the train, then it will kill his children. What’s more, the murderer has invited the entire town to watch you, pointing and screaming “SHAME!!” as you agonize over your decision. He’s persuaded the town that, if you pull the lever, then having killed five of his children to save only one of yours, you’re a far worse murderer than he ever was. You’re so evil, in fact, that he’s effectively cleansed of all guilt for having murdered most of your family first, and the town is cleansed of all guilt for having cheered that. Nothing you say can possibly convince the town otherwise.

The question is, what do you do?

Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob. Zionism is the belief that, while you had nothing against the murderer’s children, while you would’ve wanted them to grow up in peace and happiness, and while their anguished screams will weigh on your conscience forever, as your children’s screams never weighed on the murderer’s conscience, or on the crowd’s—even so, the responsibility for those children’s deaths rests with their father for engineering this whole diabolical situation, not with you. Zionism is the idea that the correct question here is the broader one: “which choice will bring more righteousness into the world, which choice will better embody the principle that no one’s children are to be murdered going forward?” rather than the narrowly utilitarian question, “which choice will lead to fewer children getting killed right this minute?” Zionism is the conviction that, if most of the world fervently believes otherwise, than most of the world is mistaken—as the world has been mistaken again and again about the biggest ethical questions all through the millennia.

Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have. It’s deeper than any of my beliefs about “politics” in the ordinary sense. Ironically, it’s even deeper than my day-to-day beliefs about the actual State of Israel and its neighbors. I might, for example, despise Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, might consider them incompetent and venal, might sympathize with the protesters who’ve filled the streets of Tel Aviv to demand their removal. Even so, when the murderer ties my child to the train tracks and the world cheers the murderer on, not only will I pull the lever myself, I’ll want Benjamin Netanyahu to pull the lever if he gets to it first.

Crucially, everything worthwhile in my life came when, and only when, I chose to be “Zionist” in this abstract sense: that is, steadfast in my convictions even in the face of a jeering mob. As an example, I was able to enter college three years early, which set the stage for all the math and science I later did, only because I finally said “enough” to an incompetent school system where I was bullied and prevented from learning, and to teachers and administrators whose sympathies lay with the bullies. I’ve had my successes in quantum computing theory only because I persisted in what at the time was a fairly bizarre obsession, rather than working on topics that almost everyone around me considered safer, more remunerative, and more sensible.

And as the world learned a decade ago, I was able to date, get married, and have a family, only because I finally rejected what I took to be the socially obligatory attitude for male STEM nerds like me—namely, that my heterosexuality was inherently gross, creepy, and problematic, and that I had a moral obligation never to express romantic interest to women. Yes, I overestimated the number of people who ever believed that, but the fact that it was clearly a nonzero number had been deterrent enough for me. Crucially, I never achieved what I saw for years as my only hope in life, to seek out those who believed my heterosexuality was evil and argue them out of their belief. Instead I simply … well, I raised a middle finger to the Andrea Dworkins and Arthur Chus and Amanda Marcottes of the world. I went Deep Zionist on them. I asked women out, and some of those women (not having gotten the memo that I was “problematic,” gross, and worthless) said yes, and one of them became my wife and the mother of my children.

Today, because of the post-October-7 public stands I’ve taken in favor of Israel’s continued existence, I deal with emails and social media posts day after day calling me a genocidal baby-killing monster. I’ve lost perhaps a dozen friends (while retaining hundreds more friends, and gaining some new ones). The haters’ thought appears to be that, if they can just raise the social cost high enough, I’ll finally renounce my Zionist commitments and they can notch another win. In this, they oddly mirror Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC, who think that, if they can just kill and maim enough Israelis, the hated “settler-colonialist rats” will all scurry back to Poland or wherever else they came from (best not to think too hard about where they did come from, what was done to them in those places, how the Palestinian Arabs of the time felt about what was done to them, or how the survivors ended up making a last stand in their ancestral home of Israel—even afterward, repeatedly holding out olive branches that were met time after time with grenades).

Infamously, Israel’s enemies have failed to understand for a century that, the more they rape and murder, the more Zionist the hated Zionists will become, because unlike the French in Algeria or whatever, most of the Zionists have no other land to go back to: this is it for them. In the same way, my own haters don’t understand that, the more they despise me for being myself, the more myself I’ll be, because I have no other self to turn into.

I’m not opening the comments on this post, because there’s nothing here to debate. I’m simply telling the world my moral axioms. If I wrote these words, then turned to pleading with commenters who hated me because of them, then I wouldn’t really have meant the words, would I?

To my hundreds of dear friends and colleagues who’ve stood by me the past two years, to the Zionists and even just sympathetic neutrals who’ve sent me countless messages of support, but who are too afraid (and usually, too junior in their careers) to speak up in public themselves: know that I’ll use the protections afforded by my privileged position in life to continue speaking on your behalf. Know that I’m infinitely grateful, that you give me strength, and that if I can give you a nanoparticle of strength back to you, then my entire life wasn’t in vain. And if I go silent on this stuff from time to time, for the sake of my mental health, or to spend time on quantum computing research or my kids or the other things that bring me joy—never take that to mean that I’ve capitulated to the haters.

To the obsessive libelers, the Peter Woits and other snarling nobodies, the self-hating Jews, and those who’d cheer to see Israel “decolonized” and my friends and family there murdered, I say—well, I don’t say anything; that’s the point! This is no longer a debate; it’s a war, and I’ll simply stand my ground as long as I’m able. Someday I might forgive the Gentiles among you if you ever see the light, if you ever realize how your unreflective, social-media-driven “anti-fascism” led you to endorse a program that leads to the same end as the original Nazi one. The Jews among you I’ll never forgive, because you did know better, and still chose your own comfort over the physical survival of your people.

It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything.

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Update (Aug. 29): This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7, to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me, messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground. With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today. And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response,” or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?” And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.

To say that this experience radicalized me would be an understatement. Indeed, my experience has been that even most Israelis, who generally have far fewer illusions than we diaspora Jews, don’t understand the vastness of the chasm that’s formed. They imagine that they can have a debate with outsiders similar to the debates playing out within Israel—one that presupposes basic factual knowledge and the parameters of the problem (e.g., clearly we can’t put 7 million Jews under the mercy of Hamas). The rationale for Zionism itself feels so obvious to them as to be cringe. Except that, to the rest of the world, it isn’t.

We’re not completely on our own though. There remain decent people of every background, who understand the stakes and feel the weight of history—and I regularly hear from them. And whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics, so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters. It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.

A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was delighted to meet in person, like Joe Carlsmith and Jacob Falkovich and Daniel Reeves. The conference was at Lighthaven, a bewildering maze of passageways, meeting-rooms, sleeping quarters, gardens, and vines off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, which has recently emerged as the nerd Shangri-La, or Galt’s Gulch, or Shire, or whatever. I did two events at this year’s LessOnline: a conversation with Nate Soares about the Orthogonality Thesis, and an ask-me-anything session about quantum computing and theoretical computer science (no new ground there for regular consumers of my content).

What I’ll remember most from LessOnline is not the sessions, mine or others’, but the unending conversation among hundreds of people all over the grounds, which took place in parallel with the sessions and before and after them, from morning till night (and through the night, apparently, though I’ve gotten too old for that). It felt like a single conversational archipelago, the largest in which I’ve ever taken part, and the conference’s real point. (Attendees were exhorted, in the opening session, to skip as many sessions as possible in favor of intense small-group conversations—not only because it was better but also because the session rooms were too small.)

Within the conversational blob, just making my way from one building to another could take hours. My mean free path was approximately five feet, before someone would notice my nametag and stop me with a question. Here was my favorite opener:

“You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

“Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part.

One night, I walked up to Scott Alexander, who sitting on the ground, with his large bald head and a blanket he was using as a robe, resembled a monk. “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

I replied, “you know, after all these years of being coy about it, I think I’m finally ready to become a Rationalist. Is there, like, an initiation ritual or something?”

Scott said, “Oh, you were already initiated a decade ago; you just didn’t realize it at the time.” Then he corrected himself: “two decades ago.”

The first thing I did, after coming out as a Rationalist, was to get into a heated argument with Other Scott A., Joe Carlsmith, and other fellow-Rationalists about the ideas I set out twelve years ago in my Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine essay. Briefly, my argument was that the irreversibility and ephemerality of biological life, which contrasts with the copyability, rewindability, etc. of programs running on digital computers, and which can ultimately be traced back to microscopic details of the universe’s initial state, subject to the No-Cloning Theorem of quantum mechanics, which then get chaotically amplified during brain activity … might be a clue to a deeper layer of the world, one that we understand about as well as the ancient Greeks understood Newtonian physics, but which is the layer where mysteries like free will and consciousness will ultimately need to be addressed.

I got into this argument partly because it came up, but partly also because this seemed like the biggest conflict between my beliefs and the consensus of my fellow Rationalists. Maybe part of me wanted to demonstrate that my intellectual independence remained intact—sort of like a newspaper that gets bought out by a tycoon, and then immediately runs an investigation into the tycoon’s corruption, as well as his diaper fetish, just to prove it can.

The funny thing, though, is that all my beliefs are the same as they were before. I’m still a computer scientist, an academic, a straight-ticket Democratic voter, a liberal Zionist, a Jew, etc. (all identities, incidentally, well-enough represented at LessOnline that I don’t even think I was the unique attendee in the intersection of them all).

Given how much I resonate with what the Rationalists are trying to do, why did it take me so long to identify as one?

Firstly, while 15 years ago I shared the Rationalists’ interests, sensibility, and outlook, and their stances on most issues, I also found them bizarrely, inexplicably obsessed with the question of whether AI would soon become superhumanly powerful and change the basic conditions of life on earth, and with how to make the AI transition go well. Why that, as opposed to all the other sci-fi scenarios one could worry about, not to mention all the nearer-term risks to humanity?

Suffice it to say that empirical developments have since caused me to withdraw my objection. Sometimes weird people are weird merely because they see the future sooner than others. Indeed, it seems to me that the biggest thing the Rationalists got wrong about AI was to underestimate how soon the revolution would happen, and to overestimate how many new ideas would be needed for it (mostly, as we now know, it just took lots more compute and training data). Now that I, too, spend some of my time working on AI alignment, I was able to use LessOnline in part for research meetings with colleagues.

A second reason I didn’t identify with the Rationalists was cultural: they were, and are, centrally a bunch of twentysomethings who “work” at an ever-changing list of Berkeley- and San-Francisco-based “orgs” of their own invention, and who live in group houses where they explore their exotic sexualities, gender identities, and fetishes, sometimes with the aid of psychedelics. I, by contrast, am a straight, monogamous, middle-aged tenured professor, married to another such professor and raising two kids who go to normal schools. Hanging out with the Rationalists always makes me feel older and younger at the same time.

So what changed? For one thing, with the march of time, a significant fraction of Rationalists now have marriages, children, or both—indeed, a highlight of LessOnline was the many adorable toddlers running around the Lighthaven campus. Rationalists are successfully reproducing! Some because of explicit pronatalist ideology, or because they were persuaded by Bryan Caplan’s arguments in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. But others simply because of the same impulses that led their ancestors to do the same for eons. And perhaps because, like the Mormons or Amish or Orthodox Jews, but unlike typical secular urbanites, the Rationalists believe in something. For all their fears around AI, they don’t act doomy, but buzz with ideas about how to build a better world for the next generation.

At a LessOnline parenting session, hosted by Julia Wise, I was surrounded by parents who worry about the same things I do: how do we raise our kids to be independent and agentic yet socialized and reasonably well-behaved, technologically savvy yet not droolingly addicted to iPad games? What schooling options will let them accelerate in math, save them from the crushing monotony that we experienced? How much of our own lives should we sacrifice on the altar of our kids’ “enrichment,” versus trusting Judith Rich Harris that such efforts quickly hit a point of diminishing returns?

A third reason I didn’t identify with the Rationalists was, frankly, that they gave off some (not all) of the vibes of a cult, with Eliezer as guru. Eliezer writes in parables and koans. He teaches that the fate of life on earth hangs in the balance, that the select few who understand the stakes have the terrible burden of steering the future. Taking what Rationalists call the “outside view,” how good is the track record for this sort of thing?

OK, but what did I actually see at Lighthaven? I saw something that seemed to resemble a cult only insofar as the Beatniks, the Bloomsbury Group, the early Royal Society, or any other community that believed in something did. When Eliezer himself—the bearded, cap-wearing Moses who led the nerds from bondage to their Promised Land in Berkeley—showed up, he was argued with like anyone else. Eliezer has in any case largely passed his staff to a new generation: Nate Soares and Zvi Mowshowitz have found new and, in various ways, better ways of talking about AI risk; Scott Alexander has for the last decade written the blog that’s the community’s intellectual center; figures from Kelsey Piper to Jacob Falkovich to Aella have taken Rationalism in new directions, from mainstream political engagement to the … err … statistical analysis of orgies.

I’ll say this, though, on the naysayers’ side: it’s really hard to make dancing to AI-generated pop songs about Bayes’ theorem and Tarski’s definition of truth not feel cringe, as I can now attest from experience.

The cult thing brings me to the deepest reason I hesitated for so long to identify as a Rationalist: namely, I was scared that if I did, people whose approval I craved (including my academic colleagues, but also just randos on the Internet) would sneer at me. For years, I searched of some way of explaining this community’s appeal so reasonable that it would silence the sneers.

It took years of psychological struggle, and (frankly) solidifying my own place in the world, to follow the true path, which of course is not to give a shit what some haters think of my life choices. Consider: five years ago, it felt obvious to me that the entire Rationalist community might be about to implode, under existential threat from Cade Metz’s New York Times article, as well as RationalWiki and SneerClub and all the others laughing at the Rationalists and accusing them of every evil. Yet last week at LessOnline, I saw a community that’s never been thriving more, with a beautiful real-world campus, excellent writers on every topic who felt like this was the place to be, and even a crop of kids. How many of the sneerers are living such fulfilled lives? To judge from their own angry, depressed self-disclosures, probably not many.

But are the sneerers right that, even if the Rationalists are enjoying their own lives, they’re making other people’s lives miserable? Are they closet far-right monarchists, like Curtis Yarvin? I liked how The New Yorker put it in its recent, long and (to my mind) devastating profile of Yarvin:

The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

The closest to right-wing politics that I witnessed at LessOnline was a session, with Kelsey Piper and current and former congressional staffers, about the prospects for moderate Democrats to articulate a pro-abundance agenda that would resonate with the public and finally defeat MAGA.

But surely the Rationalists are incels, bitter that they can’t get laid? Again, the closest I saw was a session where Jacob Falkovich helped a standing-room-only crowd of mostly male nerds confront their fears around dating and understand women better, with Rationalist women eagerly volunteering to answer questions about their perspective. Gross, right? (Also, for those already in relationships, Eliezer’s primary consort and former couples therapist Gretta Duleba did a session on relationship conflict.)

So, yes, when it comes to the Rationalists, I’m going to believe my own lying eyes over the charges of the sneerers. The sneerers can even say about me, in their favorite formulation, that I’ve “gone mask off,” confirmed the horrible things they’ve always suspected. Yes, the mask is off—and beneath the mask is the same person I always was, who has an inordinate fondness for the Busy Beaver function and the complexity class BQP/qpoly, and who uses too many filler words and moves his hands too much, and who strongly supports the Enlightenment, and who once feared that his best shot at happiness in life would be to earn women’s pity rather than their contempt. Incorrectly, as I’m glad to report. From my nebbishy nadir to the present, a central thing that’s changed is that, from my family to my academic colleagues to the Rationalist community to my blog readers, I finally found some people who want what I have to sell.

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Unrelated Announcements:

My replies to comments on this post might be light, as I’ll be accompanying my daughter on a school trip to the Galapagos Islands!

A few weeks ago, I was “ambushed” into leading a session on philosophy and theoretical computer science at UT Austin. (I.e., asked to show up for the session, but thought I’d just be a participant rather than the main event.) The session was then recorded and placed on YouTube—and surprisingly, given the circumstances, some people seemed to like it!

Friend-of-the-blog Alon Rosen has asked me to announce a call for nominations for a new theoretical computer science prize, in memory of my former professor (and fellow TCS blogger) Luca Trevisan, who was lost to the world too soon.

And one more: Mahdi Cheraghchi has asked me to announce the STOC’2025 online poster session, registration deadline June 12; see here for more. Incidentally, I’ll be at STOC in Prague to give a plenary on quantum algorithms; I look forward to meeting any readers who are there!

Yesterday, the Texas State Legislature heard public comments about SB37, a bill that would give a state board direct oversight over course content and faculty hiring at public universities, perhaps inspired by Trump’s national crackdown on higher education. (See here or here for coverage.) So, encouraged by a friend in the history department, I submitted the following public comment, whatever good it will do.

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I’m a computer science professor at UT, although I’m writing in my personal capacity. For 20 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve been outspoken in opposing woke radicalism on campus and (especially) obsessive hatred of Israel that often veers into antisemitism, even when that’s caused me to get attacked from my left. Nevertheless, I write to strongly oppose SB37 in its current form, because of my certainty that no world-class research university can survive ceding control over its curriculum and faculty hiring to the state. If this bill passes, for example, it will severely impact my ability to recruit the most talented computer scientists to UT Austin, if they have competing options that will safeguard their academic freedom as traditionally conceived. Even if our candidates are approved, the new layer of bureaucracy will make it difficult and slow for us to do anything. For those concerned about intellectual diversity in academia, a much better solution would include safeguarding tenure and other protections for faculty with heterodox views, and actually enforcing content-neutral time, place, and manner rules for protests and disruptions. UT has actually done a better job on these things than many other universities in the US, and could serve as a national model for how viewpoint diversity can work — but not under an intolerably stifling regime like the one proposed by this bill.

Last week I visited Harvard and MIT, and as advertised in my last post, gave the Yip Lecture at Harvard on the subject “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The visit was hosted by Harvard’s wonderful Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA), directed by my former UT Austin colleague Dan Freed. Thanks so much to everyone at CMSA for the visit.

And good news! You can now watch my lecture on YouTube here:

I’m told it was one of my better performances. As always, I strongly recommend watching at 2x speed.

I opened the lecture by saying that, while obviously it would always be an honor to give the Yip Lecture at Harvard, it’s especially an honor right now, as the rest of American academia looks to Harvard to defend the value of our entire enterprise. I urged Harvard to “fight fiercely,” in the words of the Tom Lehrer song.

I wasn’t just fishing for applause; I meant it. It’s crucial for people to understand that, in its total war against universities, MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc. with any intellectual scruples whatsoever. To my mind, this opens up the possibility for a broad, nonpartisan response, highlighting everything universities (yes, even Harvard 😂) do for our civilization that’s worth defending.

For three days in my old hometown of Cambridge, MA, I met back-to-back with friends and colleagues old and new. Almost to a person, they were terrified about whether they’ll be able to keep doing science as their funding gets decimated, but especially terrified for anyone who they cared about on visas and green cards. International scholars can now be handcuffed, deported, and even placed in indefinite confinement for pretty much any reason—including long-ago speeding tickets—or no reason at all. The resulting fear has paralyzed, in a matter of months, an American scientific juggernaut that took a century to build.

A few of my colleagues personally knew Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student at Tufts who currently sits in prison for coauthoring an editorial for her student newspaper advocating the boycott of Israel. I of course disagree with what Öztürk wrote … and that is completely irrelevant to my moral demand that she go free. Even supposing the government had much more on her than this one editorial, still the proper response would seem to be a deportation notice—“either contest our evidence in court, or else get on the next flight back to Turkey”—rather than grabbing Öztürk off the street and sending her to indefinite detention in Louisiana. It’s impossible to imagine any university worth attending where the students live in constant fear of imprisonment for the civil expression of opinions.

To help calibrate where things stand right now, here’s the individual you might expect to be most on board with a crackdown on antisemitism at Harvard:

Jason Rubenstein, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, said that the school is in the midst of a long — and long-overdue — reckoning with antisemitism, and that [President] Garber has taken important steps to address the problem. Methodical federal civil rights oversight could play a constructive role in that reform, he said. “But the government’s current, fast-paced assault against Harvard – shuttering apolitical, life-saving research; targeting the university’s tax-exempt status; and threatening all student visas … is neither deliberate nor methodical, and its disregard for the necessities of negotiation and due process threatens the bulwarks of institutional independence and the rule of law that undergird our shared freedoms.”

Meanwhile, as the storm clouds over American academia continue to darken, I’ll just continue to write what I think about everything, because what else can I do?

Last night, alas, I lost yet another left-wing academic friend, the fourth or fifth I’ve lost since October 7. For while I was ready to take a ferocious public stand against the current US government, for the survival and independence of our universities, and for free speech and due process for foreign students, this friend regarded all that as insufficient. He demanded that I also clear the tentifada movement of any charge of antisemitism. For, as he patiently explained to me (while worrying that I wouldn’t grasp the point), while the protesters may have technically violated university rules, disrupted education, created a hostile environment in the sense of Title VI antidiscrimination law in ways that would be obvious were we discussing any other targeted minority, etc. etc., still, the only thing that matters morally is that the protesters represent “the powerless,” whereas Zionist Jews like me represent “the powerful.” So, I told this former friend to go fuck himself. Too harsh? Maybe if he hadn’t been Jewish himself, I could’ve forgiven him for letting the world’s oldest conspiracy theory colonize his brain.

For me, the deep significance of in-person visits, including my recent trip to Harvard, is that they reassure me of the preponderance of sanity within my little world—and thereby of my own sanity. Online, every single day I feel isolated and embattled: pressed in on one side by MAGA forces who claim to care about antisemitism, but then turn out to want the destruction of science, universities, free speech, international exchange, due process of law, and everything else that’s made the modern world less than fully horrible; and on the other side, by leftists who say they stand with me for science and academic freedom and civil rights and everything else that’s good, but then add that the struggle needs to continue until the downfall of the scheming, moneyed Zionists and the liberation of Palestine from river to sea.

When I travel to universities to give talks, though, I meet one sane, reasonable human being after another. Almost to a person, they acknowledge the reality of antisemitism, ideological monoculture, bureaucracy, spiraling costs, and many other problems at universities—and they care about universities enough to want to fix those problems, rather than gleefully nuking the universities from orbit as MAGA is doing. Mostly, though, people just want me to sign Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or tell me how much they like this blog, or ask questions about quantum algorithms or the Busy Beaver function. Which is fine too, and which you can do in the comments.

Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise.

No one on earth—certainly no one who reads this blog—could call me blasé about the issue of antisemitism at US universities. I’ve blasted the takeover of entire departments and unrelated student clubs and campus common areas by the dogmatic belief that the State of Israel (and only Israel, among all nations on earth) should be eradicated, by the use of that belief as a litmus test for entry. Since October 7, I’ve dealt with comments and emails pretty much every day calling me a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist.

So I hope it means something when I say: today I salute Harvard for standing up to the Trump administration. And I’ll say so in person, when I visit Harvard’s math department later this week to give the Fifth Annual Yip Lecture, on “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The more depressing the news, I find, the more my thoughts turn to the same questions that bothered Euclid and Archimedes and Leibniz and Russell and Turing. Actually, what the hell, why don’t I share the abstract for this talk?

Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws.  I’ll tell a story that starts with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability.  I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function, which grows faster than any computable function.  Work by me and Yedidia, along with recent improvements by O’Rear and Riebel, has shown that the value of BB(745) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47,176,870.  I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known, by us or our AI successors.  I’ll next discuss the P≠NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence.  As my own specialty is quantum computing, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers, assuming we get them, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable.  I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole, create a closed timelike curve, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe.

Now back to the depressing news. What makes me take Harvard’s side is the experience of Columbia. Columbia had already been moving in the right direction on fighting antisemitism, and on enforcing its rules against disruption, before the government even got involved. Then, once the government did take away funding and present its ultimatum—completely outside the process specified in Title VI law—Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to everything asked, to howls of outrage from the left-leaning faculty. Yet despite its total capitulation, the government has continued to hold Columbia’s medical research and other science funding hostage, while inventing a never-ending list of additional demands, whose apparent endpoint is that Columbia submit to state ideological control like a university in Russia or Iran.

By taking this scorched-earth route, the government has effectively telegraphed to all the other universities, as clearly as possible: “actually, we don’t care what you do or don’t do on antisemitism. We just want to destroy you, and antisemitism was our best available pretext, the place where you’d most obviously fallen short of your ideals. But we’re not really trying to cure a sick patient, or force the patient to adopt better health habits: we’re trying to shoot, disembowel, and dismember the patient. That being the case, you might as well fight us and go down with dignity!”

No wonder that my distinguished Harvard friends (and past Shtetl-Optimized guest bloggers) Steven Pinker and Boaz Barak—not exactly known as anti-Zionist woke radicals—have come out in favor of Harvard fighting this in court. So has Harvard’s past president Larry Summers, who’s welcome to guest-blog here as well. They all understand that events have given us no choice but to fight Trump as if there were no antisemitism, even while we continue to fight antisemitism as if there were no Trump.

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Update (April 16): Commenter Greg argues that, in the title of this post, I probably ought to revise “Harvard’s biggest crisis since 1636” to “its biggest crisis since 1640.” Why 1640? Because that’s when the new college was shut down, over allegations that its head teacher was beating the students and that the head teacher’s wife (who was also the cook) was serving the students food adulterated with dung. By 1642, Harvard was back on track and had graduated its first class.