Above is a typical sample of what’s been filling my inbox, all day every day. The emailers first ask me for reasoned dialogue—then, if I respond, they hit me with this stuff. I’m sharing because I think it’s a usefully accurate depiction of what several billion people, most academics in humanities fields, most who call themselves “on the right side of history,” and essentially all those attacking me genuinely believe about the world right now. Because of their anti-Nazism.

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 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:

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.Steve’s toenail clippings constituted a greater contribution to particle physics than would the life’s work of a hundred billion Peter Woits.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.

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.