Here at Current Affairs, we enjoy poking fun at people who have an inflated sense of their own importance. Political pundits are satisfying targets for mockery because they have tiny brains but enormous egos. We laughed and laughed when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens erupted in high dudgeon after someone on the internet called him a “bedbug.” We doubled over in merriment when Bari Weiss announced she was leaving the Times in part because people posted nasty emojis about her in the company Slack. 

One of the reasons pundits and Public Intellectuals are funny is that so many of them are thin-skinned and easy to annoy. Witness Ben Shapiro storming off a television show after receiving some critical questions, Jordan Peterson losing his temper, or pro-Israel Tablet writer Eve Barlow writing an entire column complaining that people on Twitter call her “Eve Fartlow,” an act of oppression she compared to a “pogrom”: 

 “I don’t know who crafted the first tweet that simply said ‘Eve Fartlow,’ but whoever it was—bot or human—started a fire. Over the past two weeks, Twitter has been littered with the words ‘Eve Fartlow.’ Every time I tweet, this title is the response I attract, and it is pelted at me irrespective of what I write... I wondered if the bombardment of “Eve Fartlow” tweets was engineered to drive me insane. Perhaps it was a form of digital waterboarding aimed at forcing me to surrender, delete all my accounts, log out of all my devices, and commit digital suicide. “Eve Fartlow” is not my name, regardless of how many thousands of times it’s echoed back at me by trolls online…

Of course, writing a whole article about it only encouraged more online trolls to use the name “Eve Fartlow.”

At Current Affairs, we have lampooned these types of people in cartoons, written parodies of their columns, and said sarcastic things about them on social media. When we’ve been feeling serious, we’ve meticulously deconstructed their arguments to demonstrate exactly why their views aren’t worth taking seriously. But there has always been a spirit of gleeful jest underneath it, the pleasure that comes from satirizing the ridiculous. 

Lately I’m not feeling nearly so inclined to have fun. Ever since Israel began its outright genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people, destroying their homes and schools, starving them, and plotting the mass expulsion of the survivors, the amusing buffoons of the U.S. pundit class have ceased to make me laugh. Now they just horrify me. They are grotesque, soulless people. I might once have enjoyed a chuckle at the inanities published in Bari Weiss’s Free Press (“I am scared to cook most meats,” etc.), but then I remember that Weiss personally helped put a target on the back of Palestinian academic Refaat Alareer, that her publication puts out articles that minimize Israel’s mass killings, whether by explaining away malnutrition deaths (They were already sick!) or outright denying the existence of starvation in “The Gaza Famine Myth.” Nothing to laugh at here, especially not given the disturbing news that this pro-genocide propaganda outlet may soon be merging with CBS News! 

Or Consider Matt Yglesias, the influential Washington blogger who was widely read among members of the Biden administration. I’ve written an article about him with the headline: “Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything.” Only a slight exaggeration there, as I show exhaustively in the piece. But I noted that one of the issues he was most egregiously wrong about was Palestine. Yglesias didn’t really seem to have any understanding of the issue, saying “the pro-Palestinian thing you are supposed to say is that Israel is settler-colonialism,” without addressing the fact that obviously Israel is engaged in a settler-colonial project. They build settlements, for God’s sake! They’re currently decimating Gaza so they can expel its surviving inhabitants and resettle the territory. They say this outright! But Yglesias seems to have no time for the Palestinian cause. He has argued that leftists “don’t really care” about Palestine (“or anything else”), but are just trying to build “factional power.” He cannot fathom that they might actually care about human rights. Arabs and Muslims, he says, are committed to Palestine as a form of “right-wing nationalism.” Fellow centrist pundit Noah Smith, whose ignorant takes on socialism and the work of Noam Chomsky have been discussed in this magazine before, says that “Palestine people…lie, all the time, about everything,” repeating the false allegation that New York Times images of Gazan children with bullet wounds were a hoax. Like Yglesias, Smith believes that leftists are simply using Palestine as a “wedge issue” to gain “factional power within the Democratic Party.” (Not clear how that works, since being pro-Palestine has long been a way to lose power in the Democratic Party, as Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman can attest.) Both men, like liberal influencers David Pakman and Brian Tyler Cohen, largely ignore Gaza in their published writings, and show very little interest in what is happening to Palestine. 

Some are even worse. Ben Shapiro is busy repeating the falsehood that Hamas, rather than Israel, is trying to starve the people of Gaza. Stephens engages in outright genocide denial. Despite the overwhelming consensus of human rights groups that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Bret Stephens insists that because the death toll is “low,” a genocide cannot be taking place. Of course, the death toll is not low at all. Life expectancy in Gaza has been cut in half, tens of thousands of children are dead, and the overall death toll (while unknown) is likely well over 100,000, with the strip having been bombed on the level of Dresden in World War II. We know that Israel’s intelligence chief said after Oct. 7th that Israel needed to kill 50 Palestinians for every Israeli killed, even if these were children, in order to teach the Palestinians a lesson. This is explicitly genocidal, because it is a deliberate effort to eliminate at least part of an ethnic group just because they are members of that group. 

Everyone who is not speaking out against the destruction of Gaza, and identifying who is responsible, is complicit in this terrible crime. That includes people like Pete Buttigieg, who continue to issue vacuous expressions of generic sympathy for the suffering of Palestine, without having the courage to state the obvious: Israel and the United States are engaged in a campaign to destroy Gaza and render it unlivable, after which Israel plans to expel the surviving population to whichever poor country can be bribed into accepting Palestinians. Like with the others, we’ve had fun joking about Pete and his “please respect me” beard, but he’s stopped being amusing. Just last week, he described our nation’s relationship with Israel like a Sesame Street character might: “We, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend—I think you put your arm around your friend.” 

Every generation finds itself in a distinct historical moment that confers distinct obligations. Those who were alive and able to act when the monstrous ideology of Nazism was on the rise were obligated to do everything in their power to stop it. Today, we in America find ourselves in a country that is causing unbelievable human suffering, and which is at this very moment creating the conditions for a massive ethnic cleansing that would dwarf the number of people expelled during the 1948 Nakba. It’s clear from its officials’ statements that Israel is simply waiting for the right opportunity to carry this out, and they have the full support of President Trump. 

It is the duty of every person to do what they can to stop this horror before it is brought to its ghastly completion. Yet many of our leading liberal and “moderate” commentators in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and now “The Argument” have revealed themselves to have rotted souls, to be incapable of basic moral thinking. We have seen that beneath their foolishness, there is a certain kind of downright evil that can watch children slaughtered by the thousands and yet not lift a finger to object or try to stop it. Yglesias is apparently incapable of believing that anyone actually cares about Palestinians—simply because he doesn’t. I used to laugh at these people. Now they terrify me. What hope does humanity have when an outright genocide can take place and be met with indifference or support by the leading liberal commentators?

But while they may have failed to reach basic minimum standards of human morality, the rest of us can act differently. We can follow the example of the heroic Palestinian solidarity movement and call a crime a crime, and refuse to look away when we see our country arming and funding the slaughter of innocents. We can build alternative information outlets that tell the truth and do not explain away or ignore atrocities. We can look at these sorry figures as cautionary tales, warning us about the kind of people we could turn into if we pursue clicks, dollars, and our careers, rather than remaining steadfastly committed to caring about what happens to other human beings.