Puzzling Similarities Between Cole Allen And Thomas Crooks

I'm intrigued about what's coming out on the "Hinckley Hilton" shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, and the Butler, PA shoter, Thomas Crooks. Both seem to have been quiet and unassuming, both were good students, but their families had been worried about them and their apparent relationship with firearms. Nevertheless, that both would wind up attempted presidential assassins came as a surprise to friends and employers. Regarding Crooks, according to Wikipedia,

One investigation only found a "lunch detention in middle school for chewing gum" as bad behavior growing up. He joined the National Technical Honor Society in 2021 while a junior in high school. In 2022, he graduated Bethel Park High School with high honors and won a $500 "star award" from the National Math and Science Initiative. Crooks earned a score of 1530 out of 1600 on the SAT, as well as perfect grades on three Advanced Placement exams. Classmates and school officials characterized him as being quiet{.}

. . . During his freshman year of high school, Crooks anonymously posted threats online, warning students at Bethel Park High School to not come to school the next day. Here, Crooks had claimed to have placed bombs inside the bathrooms in the school's cafeteria. Many students stayed home the following day. The threats were dismissed by the school's administration, and no legal actions were taken.

. . . He was employed as a dietary aide in a nursing home at the time of the shooting. According to the nursing home, which is less than a mile away from where he lived, he had passed a background check and "performed his job without concern". He had been accepted into both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh, and planned to attend the latter. He had been a member of a local shooting club for at least a year.

. . . Crooks' father noticed his mental health declining in the year before the shooting, and particularly in the months after graduation. He later told investigators that he had seen his son talking to himself and dancing around his bedroom late at night, and that his family had a history of mental health and addiction issues. Crooks was also making depression-related queries online, investigators found. Interviews with his teachers, friends, and co-workers suggest that many people who interacted with him regularly did not know he was troubled.

Allen's background is pretty similar; he was also quiet and a good student who seemed promising:

Allen's academic record is striking. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology — Caltech — in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Caltech confirmed his graduation to multiple news outlets. He went on to earn a master's degree in computer science at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. According to a Caltech graduation announcement still online from 2017, he was active in a Christian student fellowship and a campus club for Nerf gun enthusiasts during his undergraduate years. In the summer of 2014, his online resume says, he completed a competitive summer research fellowship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

. . . For the last six years, Allen had worked at C2 Education, a Torrance-based test prep and college counseling company. In December 2024, the company's Facebook page named him Teacher of the Month. According to the Los Angeles Times, Allen tutored several high school students who were members of the Asian American Civic Trust, a Torrance-based nonprofit. Its president, Dylan Wakayama, told the Times the students "thought he was very intelligent, proficient in biology, mathematics and science. They thought he was on the nicer, quiet side."

According to WBALTV,

Bin Tang, a computer science professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, told The Associated Press that Allen took a few of his classes before graduating.

“He was a very good student indeed, always sitting in the first row of my class, paying attention, and frequently emailing me with coursework questions. Soft spoken, very polite, a good fellow. I am very shocked to see the news,” Tang wrote in an email.

But at the same link,

Secret Service and Montgomery County Police interviewed Allen's sister at their residence in Rockville, Maryland. She said that her brother had a tendency to make radical statements and his rhetoric constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world.

She also confirmed Allen purchased two handguns and a shotgun from Cap Tactical Firearms and kept them stored at their parent’s home, and that their parents were unaware that Allen was keeping the firearms in the home. He would regularly go to the shooting range to train with his firearms.

His brother also doesn't appear to have been surprised to receive a copy of his manifesto just before the shooting:

He had written about targeting Trump administration officials, and his family raised concerns with law enforcement before the event, President Donald Trump said Sunday in an interview on Fox News Channel.

. . . White House officials told our Washington Bureau and Investigative Unit that Allen's brother had notified the New London Police Department in Connecticut of Allen's alleged manifesto, which he had sent to his family members minutes prior to the incident.

Another similarity between Crooks and Allen is that despite their high academic performance, they worked in low-level jobs unrelated to their career aspirations, Crooks as a dietary aide in a nursing home, Allen as a part-time tutor at a tutoring and test cramming company. Both lived with their parents.

The knee-jerk reaction to Cole Allen so far on the right has been to blame the education system, while on the left, it's to blame guns. I think both miss the point; I get the impression that Crooks and Allen concentrated in technical fields, where they both did well, and not in fields where they might have been exposed to leftist propaganda. The guns, of course, are a symptom, not a cause.

I'm inclined to note that in males, the typical age for the onset of schizophrenia is between late teens and early 30s, and the circumstances we're learning about Allen and Crooks seem to be pointing in that direction. The most productive thing we can do is get the quackery out of the mental health profession and get much more serious about studying subjects like schizophrenia.

More From The Country That Gave Us Fabian Socialism

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately… https://t.co/6CXZhMfa4K pic.twitter.com/W8h9O03Q1A

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) April 17, 2026

Now and then, most recently here and here, I've reviewed the late 19th century idea that the best strategy to counter the threat of world proletarian revolution was to temporize with working-class demands, but nevertheless gradually capitulate to them. This was a product almost exclusively of the UK bourgeoisie. According to Wikipedia,

As one of the founding organisations of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and as an important influence upon the Labour Party which grew from it, the Fabian Society has strongly influenced British politics.

A few figures closely associated with the movement were working class, like Ben Tillett, or titled nobility, like Bertrand Russell, but their overall social alignments were more consistent with what Marx and Engels called the bourgeoisie, which most in the movement authentically were. It's always puzzled me that working-class members of the Labour party seem never to have been remotely suspicious that members of the bourgeoisie were making policy putatively intended to benefit the working class.

I've argued here that once the classic threat of world proletarian revolution a la the Soviet Union in 1917 dissipated with the collapse of the same Soviet Union in the late 20th century, Fabian socialism became a solution in search of a problem. In addition, the outcome of the 1926 General Strike in the UK was an indication that the traditional tools of the working class short of revolution, strikes, were ineffective and alienated the bourgeoisie.

But also, the bourgeoisie effectively co-opted the Labour Party from the start; The UK writer Peter Hitchens has come to recognize this strain of opinon. According to Wikipedia,

Previously a Marxist-Trotskyist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of the party, which he views as the foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.

At the same time he made these moves, the focus of the class struggle moved from the traditional conflict between the working class and capital to the damage government policy on immigration is doing to the working class. Peter Hitchens is certainly aware of this:

Straight from the horse's mouth

“When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.”

—Peter Hitchens pic.twitter.com/KG41rDWVKl

— The Knowledge Archivist (@KnowledgeArchiv) April 19, 2026

But I'm not sure if even here, he understood the problem: it wasn't that the bourgeois wannabe "revolutionaries" in the universities didn't really like Britain, it was that they didn't like the UK working class. This was, after all, the real subtext of the 1926 General Strike, and it still seems to be an underpinning of UK bourgeois attitudes.

Take, for instance, the opinion of Rowan Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and whose views seem utterly typical of UK bourgeois leftists. The X post embedded at the top of my post here calls out Williams's position on "grooming gangs", an outcome of bipartisan UK immigration policy since the immediate postwar period:

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately targeting white working-class girls for abuse and even murder because they're white and not Muslim.

What he believes, rather, is that there have been "events," mere brute facts, like the interaction of particles at the atomic level; something for which, ultimately, there can be no human blame. There were "institutional failures," which might as well be a description of a sewage overflow caused by mismanagement of a local drainage system.

Curious, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are the girl victims of UK grooming gangs working class?" It answered,

Yes, research and official inquiries consistently show that a large majority of the girl victims in UK grooming gang scandals come from working-class or impoverished backgrounds.

Reports from high-profile cases in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford identify several common socioeconomic factors among victims:

Working-Class Backgrounds: Victims were predominantly from working-class families, often characterized by reviewers as coming from "marginalized" or "deprived" areas.

. . . Institutional Classism: Inquiries, such as the Casey Review, found that "classist attitudes" among police and social workers often led to victims being dismissed as having made "life choices" or leading "risky lifestyles" rather than being recognized as children under threat.

Targeting of Vulnerability: Perpetrators frequently targeted girls they perceived as being from less stable or supported backgrounds, using gifts of alcohol, drugs, or mock affection to groom them.

Experts and commentators on platforms like Al Jazeera and LSE Blogs argue that the intersection of class and race played a critical role in why these crimes went undetected for so long.

In other words, while I've already pointed out that a largely unmentioned consequence of UK high immigration policy was to keep working-class wages down, another consequence was more directly to oppress the working class by setting up conditions whereby its daughters would be raped by the immigrants, while both media and police agencies minimized the problem. And national bien pensant spokespeople like the Archbishop of Canterbury seem to endorse this whole strategy.

I'm beginning to think that the problems of class conflict as asddressed by Trump and the MAGA movement are substantively different from how they're addressed in the UK. The US bourgeoisie simply doesn't hate its working class; bourgeois media figures like Mike Rowe respect its work and support its interests, while the UK bourgeoisie doesn't just want to keep them down, it actively oppresses them. And this simply isn't new, it's been there at least since the 19th century. The UK has problems that a Trump, or a Trump-like figure, can't solve.

The Raiders Of The Lost Ark Thought Experiment

Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark poses what amounts to a thought experiment that's at its basis not too much different from the one Rabbi Pesach Wolicki poses in the YouTube presentation I've discusssed over the past two days: it boils down to the question of what we would do if the Old Testament history and prophecies turned out to be more than just a collection of comfortable fairy tales; instead, they have some bearing on current events.

Wolicki argues that the Old Testament contains numerous prophecies that the nation of Israel will be restored. Chrome AI Mode gives this summnary: Deuteronomy 30:3–5 Return from scattering to the ancestral land; Isaiah 11:11–12 Global regathering from the four corners of the earth; Jeremiah 31:31–34 Establishment of a New Covenant and spiritual renewal; Ezekiel 37:1–14 National resurrection (Valley of Dry Bones); and Amos 9:14–15 Permanent restoration and rebuilding of ruined cities.

The issue Wolicki raises is simple: it's hard to avoid thinking that the modern Israeli nation-state is shaping up to be some sort of fulfillment of these prophecies. It's certainly possible to argue that the Biblical prophecies aren't meant to be literal, they are some sort of poetic or sublime expression of the end times leading to the final judgment, a time which is still yet to come, and which no man can predict. Nevertheless, the mere existence of modern Israel as a prosperous, sovereign territory is a problem for the ancient and medieval notion that the Jews are cursed to perpetual exile.

Wolicki says there are two ways to deny this problem: first, to claim modern Jews aren't the Jews of the Old Testament, and second, that the modern Israeli nation-state is just a secular entity that happens to exist in a troubled part of the world, and we owe it no more favored treatment than any other nation-state that it may or may not be in our interest to support. In other words, modern Israel simply is not the Israel portrayed in the Old Testament.

I said yesterday that one minor imperfection in Wolicki's argument is that he directs it primarily at people like Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson, whom President Trump rightly (to my mind) characterizes as "low IQ". Can we find higher-IQ figures who see things the same way? I think the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser is one candidate. He's become a highly vocal opponent of the Iran war, for instance, here. His objections are based primarily on "just war docrine", which I've criticized elsewhere, but I think other objections are closer to the problem raised by Wolicki's modern Israel conundrum. For instance, he criticizes Trump for going back on his view that the US has no business in the Middle East:

It also should not be forgotten that for Trump to bring the U.S. into a major new war in the Middle East would be contrary to his own longstanding rhetoric. For example, in 2019, he said:

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE…..

But then, contradictory and reckless statements are par for the course with Trump. . . . His record is one that can be characterized as unstable and unprincipled at best and shamelessly dishonest at worst. This reinforces the conclusion that his judgment on grave matters such as war cannot be trusted.

Feser's view of Biblical Israel is pretty dark, as in this X post reproduced on his blog:

These idiotic Elmer Gantrys should re-read their Bibles, where they'll find that the history of the people of God is portrayed not as one of virtue rewarded with endless military victories and material blessings, but rather one of continual moral corruption and apostasy on which divine punishment is repeatedly visited.

It seems to me that this is a serious misreading of the Old Testament history books -- yes, Israel stumbles, procrastinates, and resists God's call in Exodus and Numbers, but it does establish a state in the Promised Land, often via battles in which God actively blesses the effort. There are both bad kings and good ones, after all, and the ultimate king will be from David's line. It seems to me that Feser here is following Augustine's view, which is echoed by Aquinas, that the Jews are fated to eternal exile, which is not in fact the Biblical prophecy.

Next, Feser pretty clearly sees Israel as a modern nation-state entirely separate from Old Testament Israel, and the US has no business getting involved with Israel's wars:

I think that Israel can indeed make the case that it has a just cause, at least insofar as its aim is simply to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. (A more ambitious goal of regime change would be much harder to justify, for the same reason that, as I said in my earlier article, it would not be justifiable for the U.S. to attempt regime change. But here I am just addressing the more limited aim of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability.)

However, this does not entail that the U.S. is justified in attacking Iran. Note first that the recent U.S. bombing was not carried out in response to any act of war on Iran’s part against the United States.

The problem is that the US has been acting generally consistent with a national policy established in 1948 by President Truman:

Harry Truman understood what the land of Israel meant to the Jewish people and recognized their history in the region. From the time of Abraham, and with expulsion by the Romans, a time spanning almost 4000 years, the Jewish people had desired to occupy the land. He recognized their history was more than 4,000 years, Harry Truman recognized this and made a moral choice in affirming the Jewish state.

So the US has generally supported Israel as both a moral objective and a matter of national policy, whether Feser agrees with this or not. It's his right to argue against this, but the policy is the policy. Second, the official Catholic policy on Israel is at best ambiguous:

After clearly stating that the Catholic view does not understand the current nation of Israel as a theological entity, Benedict adds, “At the same time, however, it was made clear that the Jewish people, like every people, had a natural right to their own land. . . . In this sense, the Vatican has recognized the State of Israel as a modern constitutional state, and sees it as a legitimate home of the Jewish people, [even though] the rationale for which cannot be derived directly from Holy Scripture” (178). The modern nation-state of Israel is not what the Bible is referring to when it speaks of Israel, but the nation of Israel can be supported for other reasons.

Thus, when one speaks of “the right of Israel to exist,” one ought to differentiate the reasons one asserts this right. Claiming that the nation-state of Israel has a right to exist because the Bible says so is something entirely different than claiming that the Jewish people have a right to their own nation according to natural law. The fact that Zionism can be used to describe either position only exacerbates the confusion.

Wolicki suggests that the precise meaning of the modern state of Israel vis-a-vis Catholic teaching is still in development, but it currently says that independent of the Old Testament, the Jews have a right to be in Israel, and the Vatican recognizes this as a practical matter. Feser insists that as a secular nation-state, Israel has a right to pursue its national interests according to natural law, but US policy violates natural law insofar as it supports Israel militarily.

On this, he disagrees with 78 years of US policy, which he's entitled to do, but this does tend to push him to the fringe, and it doesn't automatically refute Truman's position that this is a moral decision just because, say, Truman was a Baptist, not a Catholic. The Catholic Kennedy supported Israel as well.

The problem is that the official Catholic position on Israel supports its existence only because of the situation on the ground -- it sets aside the question of scripture. Wolicki speifically addresses the situation on the ground as making the Church's ancient and medieval positions on the Jews and perpetual exile absurd, but he adds the pesky problem of scripture -- yes, scripture says the Jews brought their trials on themselves, but it also says this won't be permanent, and right now, the situation appears to be changing in significant ways.

This is the basic metaphor that accompanies the scene where the Ark of the Covenant is opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- what if the Old Testament isn't just comfortable fairy tales? In that case, you'd better not mess with Israel, huh? Natural law doesn't necessarily govern everything in that case. I keep getting the impression that Feser keeps refusing to take that into consideration -- if natural law is all that matters, we don't need the Old Testament at all, nor indeed the New one. This is at the root of Feser's problem.

Rabbi Wolicki Looks At Traddy Catholics -- II

I'm continuing to discuss Rabbi Wolicki's arguments against the traddy (mostly) Catholic anti-Zionists, which I started yesterday. I've embedded the same video above, but I'll be talking about the second half of it, which begins at 6:51. I used to teach rhetoric over 50 years ago, and his argument here is one of the best pieces I've ever seen. I admire it simply as an astonishingly good argument, separate from its subject matter, which I also find compelling. It's reminiscent of Aquinas, in that it spends a great deal of time considering opposing arguments, but it doesn't follow Aquinas's formal stucture.

Beginning at 6:51, he summarizes the position he's taken in the first half of his argument, in which he agrees with the contemporary position of the Catholic Church, "that the Jews are participants in God's salvation is theologically unquestionable. How can that be possible? . . . How that can be possible remains an unfathomable divine mystery."

The official position of the Catholic Church is that the Abrahamic Covenant was never revoked. He goes on to quote Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI supportng this position. But then he moves to the objections from the Catholic anti-Zionists, especially their assertion that the Jews in Israel today aren't the Jews of the Old Testament. At 10:25:

So, let me sum this up. You have a new theological reality. OK, the Jews are no longer just witnesses in exile, because that just doesn't hold water any more. The Jews are now acknowledged by Pope John Paul II, by Pope Benedict, by the Vatican itself in official documents, as a living people who still have a covenant. OK, and here's the key point. Once you accept that the Jewish people of today are the same Jewish people and still have a covenant with God, you can't just ignore what has happened in the history of the 20th century.

You can't ignore the survival of the Jewish people in exile. You can't ignore the return, and the ingathering, and the sovereignty in the land of Israel. . . . You don't have to jump all the way to full theological endorsement of Christian Zionism in the modern state of Israel, and the Vatican itself has not done that. The Vatican says it's still a mystery to be worked out. But you also can't go back to Augustine as if nothing has changed.

Let me say this a slightly different way. If Augustine was alive today, with a state of Israel, with millions of Jews ingathered from the four corners of the Earth, living in a prosperous, independent state in the land of Israel, he never would have said what he said, it woulld have been incoherent, it would have made no sense. But that's what some of these traditional Catholic voices are trying to do. They're trying to say that Augustine is still true, that the doctrines they've inherited for centuries are still true.

But they have a problem. What do they do? The Jewish people are back in the land of Israel. Reality contradicts that theological position. If they accept that the Jews are still the Jews, if they accept that the covenant is still in force, then Augustine's entire framework starts to fall apart, in light of current events. So what's the work around? The work around is to say that the Jews of today aren't the real Jews. Now, you notice from what John Paul II said, and what Benedict said, obviously that's not the opinion of Catholic leadership.

But these podcasters and public noisemakers who are saying that the Jews of today aren't the real Jews. . . . the reason they're doing it is that if they accept that the Jews are the Jews, then they have to face the fact that. . . the actual Jewish people from the Bible have returned to their land in mass numbers, ingathered as the Bible predicts [e g Isaiah 11:11-12]. They have to deal with that. They don't want to deal with that. So, rather than adjust their theology, as the Vatican is trying to do, and as, frankly, Christian Zionists have also done, they also would inherit this theology from Augustine.

It took different forms. It's also known as replacement theology or supersessionism, that the church has replaced Israel, the Jews don't have a covenant any more, Protestants believed that, too. Luther believed that, too. But what Christian Zionists have done is they've adjusted their theology to the reality. They said, "Hey, wait a second. It looks like the Jews actually still do have a covenant." OK, so you don't have to go all the way to where they are, but this denial of Jewish identity, understand where it's coming from. It's not just crass anti-Semitism.

It's coming from a place of trying to hold onto their theology in the face of a reality that denies it. So they claim that today's Jews aren't really Israel, and therefore the modern state of Israel is completely meaningless. In other words, they're protecting their theology by rejecting reality, even though the Catholic Church itself, its leadership going back decades, as I've just shown you, is moving in the opposite direction. Now, it hasn't fully worked out all the implications yet, but it has already taken the most important step. It has afirmed, as you saw from those quotes, that the Jewish people are still in covenant with God.

And once you say that, you've opened the door to a question that can't be avoided forever, which is, "What does it mean?" If the covenental people of God are back in their land and no longer scattered among the nations, what does it mean? That's the question. And that's the tension you're seeing play out right now. That's why they're throwing this temper tantrum and screaming at Christian Zionists that they're heretics. I kind of feel for these Catholics, because they have a theological construct, and it's crumbling.

At the beginning of this video, I said this has to do with theology versus eschatology. Let me explain what I mean. Theology is trying to understand God. OK? So we could have a different theology and coexist with each other forever. So, for example, I as a Jew don't believe in the Trinity. A Christian who believes in the Trinity has a different concept of the Godhead than I do, and we don't need to sort out that difference. You believe what you believe, I believe what I believe, and we can coexist. It doesn't have to come to a head at any point.

But eschatology is different. Eschatology is what we believe religiously, or in terms of our faith, about how the end is going to play out. Right? How is history going to play out. When you make an eschaological assertion that contradicts my eschatological assertion, . . . someone's gonna be right, and someone's gonna be wrong. So if your eschatological assertion is that the Jewish people have lost their covenant, and instead are going to remain in exile in perpetuity, . . . and at the same time, I as a Jew would be saying, for all those 2,000 years, "Nope, we are going to return one day. . ."

So, picture it's . . . 500 years ago, and there's a Christian saying, "You've been in exile for 1500 years, and you're going to remain in exile forever, that's my tradition, that's what I believe." And a Jew says, "No, I believe that no matter how long we've been in exile, we are going to go back." So at the time, they have a dispute that doesn't come to a head. But what happens when history plays out, and it does come to a head, and one belief about the future, that the Jewish people will come out of exile back to their land, suddenly is true?

When you make an eschatological assertion, you have to be ready for the possibility that history might move in a different direction. And then, what do you do about it? . . . That's what this whole thing is about. That's why these traditional Catholics are lashing out. . . . They want, out of a sense of piety, somewhat, they're looking at their traditions and saying, "Listen, these are our great theologians, this is the faith tradition that we've inherited. . ." But unfortunately, that includes this eschatological assertion by Augustine that has turned out to be refuted by the facts on the ground.

So when the Vatican is grappling with that and adjusting their theology, they're actually being humble. They're looking at what God has done in the world and saying, "OK, we need to reassess this." But it's these traditional Catholic podcasters and loudmouths that we're seeing on line . . . rather than adjust their theology to the new reality, they're denying the reality on the ground, they're denying that the Jews are the Jews. I hope this made sense.

Again, he's focusing on people like Candace Owens, who, as I'm gradually learning, seems to think Rabbi Lowicki was a key member of the Jewish conspiracy to assassinate Charlie Kirk, nor Megyn Kelly. But neither Candace Owens, who married her husband after a week's courtship and seems to have "converted" with him to Catholicism soon after, apparently without going through RCIA/OCIA, or Megyn Kelly, a cradle Catholic who nevertheless only decided to become observant enough in her mid-50s just to start to secure a decree of nullity for her first marriage, is an especially good Catholic.

And Tucker Carlson isn't Catholic at all, though he seems to be the sort of Episcopalian who thinks he sorta-kinda is. If these are the only people Wolicki is singling out, this might almost be a straw man argument. But what of more serious-seeming Catholics who claim to be traditionalist, like, say, Edward Feser and his circle? Holding Wolicki's perspective up to them might be closer to a steel man argument. I want to look at Feser and some of his arguments against Israel tomorrow in the context Rabbi Wolicki has given us.

Rabbi Wolicki Looks At Traddy Catholics

Lately I've been following US-born Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, because he puts me onto new trains of thought that take off from issues that have been sitting at the back of my head for a while. In the video embedded above, he offers some insights into traddy Catholics that I'd been wondering about myself -- now, he has no opinion on the Latin mass; he's into Hebrew. He doesn't care if you receive the sacrament kneeling or standing, in the hand or on the tongue; the sacraments aren't his thing.

But he brings up a strain of opinion that he attributes not to Catholic leadership, but more exclusively to traditionalist Catholics:

What you're hearing more and more are claims that the Jews of today aren't really the Jews, that the state of Israel has no significance, and of course, from those same circles and in the same conversations, attacks on Christian Zionism and calling it a kind of heresy. And this is a very serious issue, and it points to something very deep going on here, because it's not really about politics. There was something about Christian theology that is being argued about, debated about, that's what this is really about, and I'm gonna unpack that here.

I'm an outsider, I'm a Jew, I'm a rabbi, but I have spent many years involved in Jewish-Christian relations, and I would like to share with you my take on what's going on with Christian theology, specifically Catholic theology today, about the Jews, cuz it explains a lot of what is going on. You see, for most of Chnristian history, going back to Augustine of Hippo, this is over 1500 years ago, there was a very specific way of understanding the Jewish people, which became the mainstream accepted doctrine of the church.

Augustine famously taught that the Jews were meant to survive, but in a very particular condition. In his magnum opus City of God, he writes that the Jews, like Cain, were marked. He writes this in Book 15, Chapter Seven. OK? What he basically says there, I'm not gonna read you the whole passage, he says, quote, Cain was marked, so that no one should kill him, and thus, that people, meaning the Jews, had been marked, not slain, but dispersed.

. . . So Augustine explains that the Jews are dispersed through the lands, and thus by their own scriptures are a testimony to us. In other words, the Jews were to exist, but scattered, powerless, and serving as witnesses to Christian truth. And elsewhere in City of God, Book 18, Chapter 46, he comes back to this topic, and there he frames it around a verse in Psalms, and here's what he writes there: "A prophecy about this thibng was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read. And he quotes a verse, this is Psalm 59, verse 11 or 12, depending on if you're going with a Jewish or Christian translation,

My God, His mercy shall prevent me.
My God has shown me concerning mine enemies,
That You shall not slay them, lest they should at last forget Your law:
Disperse them in Your might.

. . . What Augustine posited was that the Jewish people are to exist perpetually in exile, scattered and powerless wherever Christians are, so that they could serve as a testimony to the punishment that comes upon a people for rejecting Jesus. . . . This framework held for well over a thousand years. It explains a world in which the Jews are in exile, the Jews have no sovereignty, and they're scattered everywhere, dependent on everyone else. That's Augustine's model, and it is called "witness theology".

But here's the problem. That model only works if the Jews are scattered and powerless. And today, they're not. Today, the Jewish people are back in our land, we've been ingathered from the four corners of the Earth, we are sovereign, and we have power. So in other words, the reality on the ground no longer fits Augustine's theology, and this creates a problem for traditionalist Catholics who look at Augustine's theology as the axiomatic, unassailable truth.

Here I think Rabbi Wolicki is probably giving traddies a little too much credit: I simply can't imagine that Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, or their fellow-traveling Episcopalian Tucker Carlson knows that Augustine even wrote City of God, much less ever read a word of it. Still, for those more familiar with Augustine, this is a telling point. But the rabbi goes on,

Now, the official Catholic Church, its actual leadership, has been grappling with this question for decades. And that's what's led to numerous pronouncements, starting with the Second Vatican Council in 1965, but it has accelerated in recent years, they're dealing with this problem. Let me take a step back and explain the problem very simply again. In the work of theology, we're trying to understand God. Augustine himself referred to theology as faith seeking understanding, not achieving understanding, but seeking it.

And what a theologian does is they look at the word of God, they look at everything God said in scripture, and they then look at the world and try to make sense of it and explain God. And Augustine looked at a world where the Jews were powerless and weak and scattered in exile, for centuries already, and they were going to remain that way for centuries after him, and he was grappling with the question, what to do with the Jews. So he posited that the Jews had lost their covenant of ever returning to their land. . .

Now, the Vatican has been adjusting their theology to the new reality. You see this very clearly in the Vatican's 2015 document, which was issued on the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. . . . This is a quote from that document, from 2015:

"From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God's salvation. God has never revoked his convenant, "for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. (Romans 11:29)"

In this post last month, I traced this view to Lumen Gentium, "which taught that the Jewish people 'remain most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues.'" I should reiterate that I have little choice but to be a Vatican II Catholic. I was converted to the post-Vatican II Church after 30 years as an Episcopalian, whose 1979 Book of Common Prayer was itself heavily influenced by the Vatican II mass, with its three-year lectionary and alternate forms of worship.

But what I've transcibed here isn't quite half of Rabbi Wolicki's argument, which goes on to insist that the reeestablishment of Israel is an eschatological question. If nothing intervenes, I'll talk more about this tomorrow.

This Is Actually Starting To Look Like A Governing Paradigm

I've been saying for the past few days that the US-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi Pesach Wolicki has some of the best insights into the issues surrounding the Iran war. Here's what he had to say yesterday about the off-again on-again negotiations in Pakistan: At 19:50:

They're trying to create uncertainty, to slow down the US decisionmaking. . . . Donald Trump is driving them nuts because of how fast he moves. He gives an ultimatum, and it's just like 48 hours or a couple days, or, you know, a short ceasefire, two weeks, negotiate, come to the table, you don't come to the table, boom. Open the Straits of hormuz. Oh, you didn't open them? Boom, blockade. . . . It completely counteracts their usual strategy, Westerners are usually so easy for them to deal with.

They just drag things out, and they have another summit meeting and another negotiation in a different European city, and the American diplomats love that, getting on planes and being negotiators. And that's what we've always seen in previous administrations. And the speed at which they're doing things is not to their liking. So they're trying to slow down US decisionmaking by creating uncertainty under which they'll negotiate in the hopes that the Americans might say, "Well, OK, you know, we do want a deal, and we can get them to the table if we do X, Y, and Z."

That's what they're hoping for. . . . And it all comes back to what I was saying from the beginning of the war, from before the war. . . . The regime's number one fear . . . what they're ultimately concerned with, is will they be in power when Trump is finished with whatever he's doing. Cuz even if they're badly battered, even if the people and the infrastructrure is destroyed, they know that the Chinese money will be there, . . . even if it takes a decade, or two decades, they will rebuild, they will suppress their people, and they will remain in power. They want to survive.

. . . The number one threat to the regime is not American and Israeli military action. The number one threat to the regime is the Iranian people. . . . We also have to remember we're talking about Twelver Shiite Muslims who believe that the adversity they undergo and the defeats that they undergo are, you know, obstacles that are put in their way, and they need to persevere. This all goes back to the origin story of Shiite Islam, so they're not deterred by all of the destruction. . . . Trump keeps waiting for them to cry uncle. Because, come on, how much damage can you handle? The answer is a lot.

. . . They're still at the point where they believe that giving in to American demands and projecting weakness and submission to American demands, if they project that to their people, that's a greater threat to the regime . . . than the American attacks themselves. And therefore, I don't believe that they are going to come to the negotiating table.

This analysis, especially the part about the Muslim strategy of rope-a-doping negotiations, matches what's been at the back of my head for some time. But Rabbi Wolicki is tying it to the basic need of the Islamist regime to control its people. Then it dawned on me that the Western Left is actually finding this appealing. They're starting openly to root for Iran:

Year of our Lord 2026: Democrat US Senator openly rooting for Iran to defeat the US in battle. Every Dem on the Hill ought to be hounded today by every reporter to answer for this lunatic. pic.twitter.com/8ixSVsGFRo

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) April 21, 2026

Put this in the context of Barack Obama warming up to Zohran Mamdani, who seems to be at minimum a closet Islamist, not just a socialist:

Barack Obama met with Zohran Mamdani for the first time on Saturday at a childcare center where the former Democratic US president and mayor of New York City read to preschoolers and led a sing-along.

. . . Obama and Mamdani did not take questions after reading the book Alone and Together to the children – and leading a sing-along of The Wheels on the Bus.

Obama, a standard-bearer for the Democratic party, has offered to be a sounding board for Mamdani, 34. Mamdani’s star power, youth and progressive agenda has made him stand out in Democratic politics.

In fact, "right-thinking people" appear to be moving in this overall direction. Alan Dershowitz notes this morning:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times editorial writer, Tom Friedman, says he is “torn” between his wish to have Iran defeated and his unwillingness to see Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, who he regards as “awful human beings,” “strengthened.” He worries that a victory over the nation he correctly describes as being “a terrible regime” would benefit the leaders of the two democracies that the mullahs regard as “Satans”.

. . . All criticism of countries should be comparative in our imperfect world, and a single standard is essential to all moral and legal judgments. Being torn between the victory or defeat of wildly non-comparable countries and their leaders is dangerous and wrong. Comparing Israel and the U.S., on the one hand, with Iran, on the other and being “torn” about who should win is like comparing Churchill to Hitler and being torn about who should have won World War II. Churchill was a deeply flawed colonialist, but Hitler was the worst butcher in history. Even if Netanyahu and Trump were both “engaged in anti-Democratic projects” (as Churchill had been) that would not justify being torn about defeating the most dangerous, anti-Democratic and anti-semitic tyranny since Nazi Germany.

By putting them in the same category and being “torn” over who should prevail, Friedman makes Iran seem like just another imperfect nation whose victory – which would entail its acquisition of a nuclear arsenal – would not pose an existential threat to Israel and a growing danger to the United States and its other allies.

The reason Friedman and those who think like him are "torn" is that they're looking at Iran and actually starting to like what they see. I'm not sure if Dershowitz, or even Wolicki. quite recognizes this. The cause is that the Marxist-Leninist model, based on the idea of a proletarian world revolution, was never workable and demonstrably failed, especially as a means of state control. The main intellectual counterstrategy, as I've been noting here, was Fabian socialism, but with the failure of the proletarian revolution model, Fabian socialism became a solution without a problem.

So the intellectual left has been casting about for a new governing paradigm, one that will succeed in keeping the working and lower middle classes under control, when Fabian socialism failed to do this. It's looking at the mullahs, who, love 'em or hate 'em, so far seem to be effectively controlling their people in the face of overwhelming American and Israeli force. They're starting to like what they see.

In My Lifetime, Avant-Garde Jews Have Done A 180

From Alan Dershowitz in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

I am a lifelong Democrat. I started campaigning for the party’s local candidates as a teenager in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been a registered Democrat for 67 years, made speeches for John F. Kennedy as a college student, and can count on one hand the number of Republicans I’ve ever supported for any office.

I still disagree strongly with the GOP on abortion, the separation of church and state, immigration, healthcare and taxes, among other things. Yet I’ve decided to bite the bullet and register as a Republican.

. . . I intend to work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate, and I urge those who share my concerns about the increasing influence of radicalism in the Democratic Party to vote, campaign and contribute for continued Republican control of Congress. I will contribute money to Republican candidates, campaign for them, make speeches at Republican events, and urge pro-Israel Americans to change party affiliation or at least vote against Democrats. Until something changes, I will vote Republican for representative, senator and president.

I wish I could designate myself as a “foreign-policy Republican,” but there’s no such option, so I have to go whole hog. By registering as a Republican rather than an independent, maybe I can have some influence on moving some Republican policies toward the center. I have given up on trying to change the Democratic Party. My main goal is to send a message that many traditional Democratic voters can’t accept what it is becoming—a replica of left-wing European parties that are hurting their countries.

This is the Alan Dershowitz who served as an appellate advisor in the 1969-70 Chicago Seven trial and helped the defendants develop a legal strategy of "political theater", disrupting the courtroom to turn the trial into a condemnation of the Vietnam War and the US government. This is the Alan Dershowitz who secured a 1976 reversal of adult film star Harry Reems's obscenity conviction.

Between my sophomore and junior years in high school, my family moved from a white-bread Republican New Jersey suburb to Bethesda, which in contrast was very, very upscale Jewish. My first day in the new high school, two young Jewish ladies took me under their wing as a sort of project, insisting I was a "monolith" and needed a thorough re-education.

They introduced me to subjects like Bob Dylan, Paul Krassner, and Jules Feiffer, and things went on from there. It continued in college, an Ivy, where there were far more Jewish students than there are now. I'd studied German, and I got pretty good at Yiddish.

In other words, I got to know avant-garde Jewish culture of the 1960s pretty well. I lost touch with my high school mentors long ago, but thinking of them now, I wonder what they would say about what the Jewish avant-garde seems to be in the process of becoming.

Let's take another contrast, between the avant-garde Jewish comic Lenny Bruce (no relation) and the current comic Ben Bankas, who makes it plain that he's half-Jewish on his father's side but frequently identifies as Jewish in his monologues. The avant-garde Lenny Bruce of the 1950s and 1960s

eventually appeared on television on the Steve Allen Show and other programs. Yet as his fame grew, so did the edge to his comedy and social commentary, which led to his legal troubles.

Bruce was arrested at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in 1961 for using sexually explicit language. Although he was acquitted, law enforcement agencies put him under greater scrutiny, resulting in drug arrests in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

In a December 4, 1962, performance at the Gates of Horn club in Chicago, Bruce was arrested for and eventually convicted of violating a state obscenity statute. On appeal, he was defended by distinguished First Amendment scholar and law professor Harry Kalven Jr.

. . . Undercover police detectives attended his two 1964 appearances at Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, and they arrested him on obscenity charges after each show. His trial attracted media attention, and artists including Woody Allen and Norman Mailer testified on his behalf. A three-judge panel convicted him of obscenity and sentenced him to serve four months.

After Bruce’s conviction, nightclubs across the country blacklisted him for fear they would face obscenity charges.

It's worth pointing out that at the time, Bruce was defended for in effect being "art", as opposed to his characterization by police as essentially a pornographer. In other words, Bruce wasn't a low class smut merchant, he was a bourgeois artist whose work was intended to appeal, and did appeal, to the bourgeoisie -- nothing low-class about him. Following his death of a drug overdose in 1966, he's nevertheless been celebrated as a martyr for all the right bourgeois reasons, freedom of expression, freedom from religion, civil rights, blah blah blah:

What is certain is that no comedian has proved more culturally significant without moving into TV and films - the means by which the likes of Woody Allen and Adam Sandler achieved wider fame.

The 1974 biopic Lenny, in which Bruce was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, was nominated for six Academy Awards.

There was a further Oscar nomination for the 1998 documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, narrated by Robert De Niro.

Bruce has inspired or been name-checked in songs by numerous artists including Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Nico, REM, Steve Earle, Simon and Garfunkel and Genesis.

He is also one of the celebrities immortalised on the cover of the Beatles's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the distinguished company of Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein and Gandhi.

But let's turn to a similar avant-garde comic of our time, Ben Bankas, one of whose routines is embedded above (language warning). A native of Canada, not long ago, he moved to Austin, TX, but especially when he returns to Canada, great efforts are made to have his venues cancel the engagements. (Of one such organizer, he quipped, "He got my show canceled. I guess he's finished his bucket list. Now he can apply for MAID.")

Bruce's supporters in particular argued that his shows effectively represented bourgeois liberal values; Bruce himself doesn't appear to have represented any particular class identity in his on-stage persona, other than perhaps a timeless gadfly.

Ben Bankas is a very different matter: he represents himself as working class: he wears jeans, with a wrinkled shirt over a prominent belly and a scruffy beard. In his routines, he often holds and sips from a beer can. In effect, he's the non-collegiate worker championed by Mike Rowe, blurting out uncomfortable truths not too different from Lenny Bruce's, but in effect saying Bruce's bourgeois supporters are themselves as hyopcritical as they were in Bruce's time.

But of course, Ben Bankas's audiences are bourgeois themselves. I asked Chrome AI mode, "How much do Ben Bankas tickets cost?" It replied,

Ben Bankas tickets typically start as low as $24.00, with an average price of around $44.29. However, prices vary significantly depending on the city, venue, and seat location. For example, some shows in major markets like New York City can start much higher, between $116 and $169.

That leaves aside parking and drinks at the clubs, not a cheap date by any means. Now that I think of it, I wonder what my avant-garde Jewish-girl mentors would say now about Ben Bankas.

I actually think I'd have a pretty hard time convincing them he's in the same league as Bob Dylan, Paul Krassner, and Jules Feiffer, but I think the case can be made.