Leviathan’s Mal-adapted Immune Response

I think what I see in society, and in individuals, including myself, is a kind of hyper-sensitized moral immune system: one that reacts aggressively to certain forms of bigotry while remaining apathetic toward others. For example, I see open hostility toward Muslims or Somalians while the U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, delivers a speech addressing the expulsion of a student at Florida State University for verbally attacking another student who was wearing an IDF shirt.

What I think may be happening to our society is that we have been given social vaccines repeatedly throughout our lives. Our moral outrage has been trained, or conditioned, to be hyper-focused in some directions and largely inactive in others. And, to be honest, if there were a button that many of my friends could press that would instantly remove every Russian from the planet, I think some of them would press it without hesitation.

So why do I bring this up? Because a maladapted social immune response makes a society easy to manipulate. All it takes is a single, highly amplified racist moment, for example George Floyd, or an antisemitic incident, such as the Florida State case, and the public becomes consumed with outrage. Meanwhile, our government continues to drop bombs on civilians around the world, which goes largely unnoticed.

When this government destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretenses, such as claims about weapons of mass destruction or supposed Taliban involvement in 9/11 , the public consciousness essentially blacked out and woke up years later with a hangover. People might criticize Dick Cheney or George W. Bush, but very few connect them to the broader neoconservative machinery that enabled those wars in the first place, machinery that now runs this country.

What I think is happening now is a hijacking of the so-called Red Pill movement. I do not think Goliath’s next move is the ole “Black v White” or “Sunni v Shia” playbook. I think it is attempting to make the current moment about “Americans vs Jews”, rather than what is actually happening, which is widespread public outrage directed at Israeli government policy toward Palestinians.

I grew up with Holocaust education like everyone else. I watched Schindler’s List as a kid and was told the last thing I would ever want to be is a Nazi prison guard, that I should not just follow orders. I was taught, very clearly, about the evil of Hitler and the moral horror of becoming a passive participant in atrocity. Now people are witnessing behavior from the IDF that looks disturbingly familiar to what we were explicitly taught never to excuse or normalize.

Most people are not falling for it, although some definitely are. The people I know do not think this is about “the Jews.” I am seeing a lot of so-called red-pilled influencers, such as Nick Fuentes, who appear to be deliberately trying to create antisemitism. I think the end goal is to conflate criticism of state power, specifically Israel, with antisemitism in order to justify hate speech laws, deportations of naturalized citizens, and expulsions from college campuses. At the end of the day, this is about freedom of speech and ideas, and criticizing a government is not the same thing as hating an ethnic or religious group. Treating them as interchangeable is not only dishonest, it is a tactic.

And like any tactic that relies on a misfiring immune system, it only works as long as the conditioning holds.