For those of us who opposed Trump, now that he's won we need to take seriously the arguments of good faith interlocutors who supported him. And, yes, it is possible to have voted for Trump in good faith. There were, in other words, legitimate reasons for supporting him. 🧵 I want to practice what I preach by speaking directly to people with whom I have profound disagreements — not to condemn but to listen.

For my new @washingtonpost column, I spoke to @michaelbd to understand how he went from Trump critic to Trump voter.

wapo.st/4gQ8gNT

Assad's fall blindsided Washington. But why? Two reasons are "Middle East exceptionalism" and the "myth of authoritarian stability" — myths that U.S. officials can't seem to let go of, despite their terrible track record understanding and foreseeing developments in the region. 🧵 For decades, U.S. and European officials have been uncomfortable with the chaos of democratic change. This is why they have undermined pro-democracy movements across the Arab world, including by propping up autocratic allies to the tune of billions of dollars in military aid.

I don't know why I have to say it but having ridiculous ideas doesn't make you a bad person. Most people have at least one to three ridiculous ideas but they're still our friends and family and we give them grace. 🧵 We had a big internet controversy yesterday. @DrAllyLouks made the mistake of posting about getting her PhD. Twitter mobs had become increasingly rare. Cancellations don't happen the way they used to. That's in part because X has become more right-leaning.

Probably an unpopular view but Biden's pardon of Hunter is understandable and perhaps even positive all things considered. It exposes the fiction that the law is neutral. It's not. It also shows that Democrats can be hypocritical, and exposing hypocrisy is a good thing. 🧵 Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother, to paraphrase Camus. The context of the Algerian war doesn't really apply to present-day America but the principle still holds.

shadihamid.net/p/between-just…

Something odd has happened. A “fascist” has risen to power in the world’s oldest democracy. Yet since Trump's victory, the language of autocratic doom has dissipated, a faint memory of a different era. Biden, after all, welcomed the would-be dictator to the White House. 🧵 In Harris’s concession speech, she did not seem overly troubled by the prospect — for the first time in U.S. history — of a fascist in the most powerful office in the land. Instead, she offered a succession of motivational platitudes.

Excited to share Part 3 of my three-part @washingtonpost series on 'Our Polarized Times'

When Trump won in 2016, it was the first and last time I cried about an election. Looking back, I feel a bit sheepish. No one should cry over an election. 🧵

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/… After it became clear Trump had won, my brother called me at midnight. “I’m not so much worried about us. I’m worried about Mom and Dad,” he told me. I started to tear up. Since my mother wears a headscarf, she is visibly Muslim in a way that I am not. 2/

Our new @washingtonpost editorial is out.

It's time to end DEI statements in higher education. Too often, they lead to self-censorship and ideological policing.

🧵

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/… Diversity statements became increasingly common after the 2020 George Floyd protests. One 2021 study found that about one-third of job postings at elite universities required them.

Earlier this month, MIT was the first top school to voluntarily end the practice.

I respect @petersavodnik too, and I think these are questions worth addressing. I will answer them in detail here.

1. Yes, Israel has a moral duty to ensure Hamas can never repeat Oct. 7 As I’ve said repeatedly, Israel has a right to defend itself. But even a war whose cause is just does not, and cannot, justify doing anything and everything in the name of that war, i.e. effectively destroying an entire territory, making it uninhabitable, and killing tens of thousands of civilians. Basically, Hamas argues that everything that Israel did before 10/7 justifies 10/7. Israel then argues that because of what happened on 10/7, everything it does afterwards is justified. They’re not exactly the same, but they rely on a similar, maximalist logic—that the laws of war are suspended when you’re dealing with a uniquely barbaric enemy.

Boiled down to its essence, this is Hamas’ argument. Hamas’ leaders don’t actually rely on theological arguments or defer to the rules of combat in the Islamic just war tradition. They don't even pretend to care. Hamas uses an almost entirely secular, nationalistic logic, a version of 'desperate times call for desperate measures.'

It's odd and unsettling to me that the irony is lost on Israel's most vociferous defenders that they're mirroring Hamas' arguments. As various Israeli officials and ministers have themselves suggested and even at times explicitly state, all Palestinians are fair game now that Hamas has declared war. Which was Hamas' argument on 10/7: that all Israelis were fair game because Israel had declared war on the Palestinians.

It's an utter embarrassment that the US has to airdrop aid to Gaza because it refuses for reasons that have never actually been made clear to put actual pressure on Israel—a state that, itself, depends on US aid—to let aid in. Shameful and absurd. The Biden administration's refusal to use our tremendous leverage with Israel to pressure it to treat Gazans like humans is one of the real policy puzzles of our time.

8 years into the Trump era, there is still a widespread resistance to acknowledging that he might have appealing qualities. Which is odd. He *must* have some appealing qualities to have won 74 million votes. It's worth asking what they are and what they mean. 🧵 In my new @washingtonpost column, I try to make sense of the Trump paradox. He manages to be extreme without being dogmatic. His ideological nimbleness could even be mistaken for moderation—or, more precisely, "unhinged moderation."

wapo.st/3SxCnAh

Yes, I do think this is the intellectual undercurrent behind much of the aggressively pro-Israel sentiment I see. Palestinians (and Arabs) lost. They must accept defeat. The fact that they haven't is, for whatever reason, something that deeply offends.

https://twitter.com/Koefnielsen/status/1739589240155930895

This is where pro-Israel attitudes overlap with anti-wokeness. Anti-wokeness (if one isn't careful) can easily devolve into a disdain for the weak and marginalized—that if they are weak, then the fault in some sense is ultimately with them and not with those who oppress them.

Harvard President Claudine Gay's response to Elise Stefanik was embarrassing but not for the reasons people claim. It was embarrassing because she accepted Stefanik's premise that saying "intifada" is equivalent to a call for genocide, which is ridiculous.
The problem with these college presidents is that they're spineless technocrats who don't have the courage of their convictions. GOP officials are popularizing the idea that pro-Palestine sentiment = pro-Hamas sentiment. This should be rejected out of hand.

The head of an ostensibly mainstream Washington think tank @mdubowitz publicly smears me as "pro-Hamas" for questioning whether Israel has a plan for the day after in Gaza and for saying that Israel is engaged in a war, which no reasonable person doubts. I'm not sure if it's the best look for the CEO of a Washington think tank to tar Arab and Muslim writers as "pro-Hamas" based on policy disagreements. I don't know if @mdubowitz is animated by anti-Arab animus but I do think it's telling that he thinks that Arabs who disagree with him are terrorist supporters, a charge which has legal implications.

I finally got to reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Why I am now a Christian." Is it really possible to convert to Christianity and not mention Christ even once? Apparently it is. There's not the slightest sign of sincere belief. It's completely instrumental.

unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-… As Ayaan herself explains it, her main reason for being Christian isn't belief in Christianity. It's because of what she thinks Christianity means politically. She believes Christianity is the best available tool against the unholy trinity of China, Islam, and wokeness.

I do want to say a few words about @NoahPollak's smear of me as a "supporter of terrorism" because I think it's indicative of where the public conversation is going unfortunately. 1/

https://twitter.com/NoahPollak/status/1722338098548547711

It's open season on Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans in public life. It reminds me very much of the post-9/11 climate, which was stifling and constrained in a way that I think is really hard to capture for people who weren't around. This was the original "cancel culture." 2/

1. Finally read @Yair_Rosenberg's piece on 'What Hamas Wants.' Worth a read for a very different perspective than the one @dmarusic offered recently and which I much prefer:

I respect Yair a lot but take issue with a few things 🧵 wisdomofcrowds.live/p/the-revoluti…
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 2. My biggest critique is the assumption in @Yair_Rosenberg's piece that evil acts are inherently "irrational" and therefore Hamas is best understood as an irrational actor. There's no room for contingency, agency, or individuals in this account.

1. It should be possible to do things simultaneously. We can condemn Hamas' assault and its heinous acts against Israeli civilians while also not forgetting Israel has been a perpetrator of an often brutal occupation against the Palestinian people. 2. Yes, it's fair to describe what happened in Israel as its 9/11. But what that analogy tells us is that Israel should *not* replicate the mistakes, the zeal for war, the civil rights abuses, and utter destruction that the US exacted in the Middle East in its response.

Oriana Fallaci's 1979 interview with Khomeini is absolute chaos. And darkly funny.

"I'm sorry to hear that"

nytimes.com/1979/10/07/arc… This is probably the 5th time I've read the Khomeini interview and it never gets old. There are so many howlers. You almost get a Trumpian vibe from Khomeini in these moments, a kind of post-modern playfulness and looseness with observed reality.

The U.S. can stop Tunisia's descent into full-blown dictatorship. Here's how. The practical steps I lay out in this @ForeignAffairs article are actually things the Biden administration can do. But it has to do them now.

foreignaffairs.com/tunisia/dont-b… Often people mention Tunisia's still-pending IMF bailout in passing, but no one has really laid out in detail how using the loan as leverage might actually work. There are risks, which I acknowledge in the piece. But on balance this is the best (and likely last) option available.

In some ways, cancel culture was worse after 9/11. And the implications for U.S. policy were nothing short of disastrous. Be careful what you wish for. The post-Trump era, as bad and polarized as it might seem, is far preferable to recent alternatives. shadihamid.substack.com/p/reading-sayy… People complain about the "youth" a lot, including me. And on certain things the trend lines are pretty discouraging. On the other hand, when it comes to topics like the legacy of Sayyid Qutb, they feel empowered to write in a much more nuanced way.

DeSantis Derangement Syndrome is a reminder that liberals' obsession with calling the GOP "fascist" makes America collectively dumber.

My latest: shadihamid.substack.com/p/desantis-der… I had forgotten there was a large number of liberals obsessed with using the word “fascist” as a catch-all epithet. I wasn’t online as much, and I generally try to avoid following the news, for reasons @SarahTheHaider helpfully explains here:
sarahhaider.substack.com/p/the-news-is-…