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About this time last year, @ymeskhout posted an article titled "I Hope Freddie deBoer Learns to Read Someday", in which he noted a peculiar inconsistency in deBoer's writing output. deBoer presents himself as an avid supporter of racial equality in the US, but has repeatedly emphasised that equality can only be achieved in terms of the real and the tangible, not the emotive, performative and symbolic. Meskhout cites four separate articles of deBoer's in which he makes variations on this basic point: ("Government has tools to fight Black poverty. It does not have tools to fight white hatred... Poverty lives in the world. Hatred lives in the head.", "What does this policy, argument, or claim do in fact, for real human beings, in material terms?... I can see hungry Black kids getting food. I can’t see white liberals 'holding space' for Black people.")
However, deBoer's demand for real, tangible, actual results vanishes as soon as the topic turns to his other pet issue, the cause of Palestinian nationalism. Here, unable to cite any material gains the movement has accomplished, he is more than willing to tout meaningless symbolic victories as a substitute ("the degree to which Palestine and Palestinian interests have gained ground in American public opinion can hardly be overstated"). In this regard, deBoer is far from alone: many pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist activists seem to prefer framing the conflict in terms of the symbolic rather than the material. To give a perfectly banal example, during the Ed Sheeran/Macklemore controversy, it was remarkable the number of people I saw on Instagram who seemed actively excited about Sheeran's supporting acts dropping out of his tour in protest of Macklemore's removal, as if their doing so in and of itself constituted a massive tactical victory for the cause. Even here, when I ask our pro-Palestine posters what the movement has actually accomplished in real terms, they will generally list things like changing responses to Pew surveys, the number of European countries which have "recognised" the state of Palestine, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, the emergence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a potential frontrunner for the Dems in 2028 – all of which are certainly nice to have, but don't really have anything to do with the movement's ostensible goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state and/or dissolving the state of Israel. Charitably, one might argue that these are instrumental victories: that, for example, electing a mayor of New York who's sympathetic to the cause is a necessary precondition for establishing an independent Palestinian state, that the movement is patiently laying the groundwork for material victories they will achieve down the line. Less charitably, one might argue that the movement's symbolic performative victories are a consolation prize for its paucity of tangible ones, or indeed that the symbolic performative victories are the entire point of the movement and the ostensible goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state is just window-dressing.
Nowhere is the triumph of the performative over the material more apparent than in Ireland, one of the most rabidly pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist countries in the entire world. Ireland's economy is in large part propped up by the array of American tech companies with offices in its borders (Google, Meta, X etc.), none of whom the government can afford to alienate by being too overt in its hostility to Israel. Hence, visible displays of support for the Palestinian cause have been almost entirely symbolic in nature: boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest, attempting (and failing) to rename a park in south Dublin, calling for the Irish football team to refuse to play against Israel. It's rather staggering how emotionally invested Irish people get in such matters of objectively negligible consequence, a prime example of Sayre's law.
This week, Ireland is hosting a meeting of the European Political Community and an informal meeting of the European Council, for which significant chunks of the city centre in Dublin are closed off owing to security concerns. Numerous heads of state are in attendance, including Zelensky, Andy Burnham, Mark Carney among others. Joe and Hunter Biden were also in the city, during which they went to Trinity College so that Hunter could be honoured by the Hist debating society. (Trinity College is perhaps the most affluent university in the country, and also the wokest by a country mile.) As they were leaving the building in which the ceremony was being held, pro-Palestinian activists began pelting the Bidens with cartons of milk and accusing Joe of having "blood on [his] hands". Three have been arrested, including a man in his fifties.
Let's pause for a moment and consider the following:
To sum up: pro-Palestine activists decided the best way to advocate for their cause was to hurl heavy objects at a senile octogenarian being treated for cancer, a man with no real power to help establish an independent Palestinian state in the unlikely event that he even understood what was being asked of him.
It is difficult for me to imagine an action which would make the pro-Palestine movement seem more like a gang of petulant, irascible thugs. (Presciently, in his acceptance speech Hunter observed that "We are living in an age of bullies.") Not only are the superficial optics of the thing utterly appalling, not only will this not move the needle on a Palestinian state one millimetre, there is no plausible pathway by which this action could possibly have moved the needle thereon. It's just childish emotional reasoning/magical thinking: Biden was the leader of the US, the US provided aid to Israel, therefore the leader of the US at the time must be punished, even if this has no measurable impact on our ostensible goal of "freeing Palestine" or even sets the movement back.
But I already know that no Irish person with any sympathy for the Palestinian cause will ever be able to bring themselves to condemn this temper tantrum, or to admit that it was a strategic miscalculation. At worst, they will defend it and say that Joe got what was coming to him; at best, they will deflect and say something to the effect of "oh boo hoo, poor Joe got a bit of milk on his coat. Just think about what the people of Gaza have to go through Every. Single. Day for eighty years". I will remonstrate with them. I'll ask them: let's suppose we grant your premise that Joe Biden "deserved" to be pelted with cartons of milk. What will the act of pelting him with cartons of milk actually accomplish for the Palestinian people? Does it improve their lives in any way? And I have this horrible feeling that all I'll get in response is an eyeroll or a blank stare.
It's like they don't even understand the question.
Years ago Sam Harris had a point about the trend of "milkshaking" conservatives. That it was play acting an assassination. Conservatives weren't worked up about milkshake on their shirts so much as the obvious game of "I'm not touching you", but with murder.
As a person who receives specific and actionable death threats, Sam Harris doesn't like such obvious dry runs of murdering public figures for being insufficiently progressive.
There were also rumours that the milkshakes were mixed with cement, which could very well have been actually fatal. Maybe?
This was absolutely a confirmed antifa tactic during the summer of Floyd. There's video of Andy Ngo getting pelted with one in Portland and IIRC it gave him a concussion.
Yes, but, fact checking organizations have asserted that is false and debunked. LLMs have ingested these assertions and repeat them as truth. As I learned by looking at Google's AI summary about the "far right extremists" and the debunked concrete milkshaking.
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Semi-related but the Ilhan Omar Cidering of 2026 seems to have largely fallen off the docket as well.
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I don't know about fatal, but quick drying cement is nasty stuff that causes chemical burns. Not pleasant and easy to notice acid burns but instead insidious deep tissue basic burns that don't start hurting until it is much too late.
Google tells me maybe it was used in Portland. Quick-dry cement milkshaking Andy Ngo and his supporters. The police reported it happened. Responsible fact checking organizations deny such claims. Which might be true; maybe law enforcement and Andy Ngo are wrong. But if such "fact checkers" told me it was raining I would disbelieve them until I felt water on my head. They're such captured partisans I fully trust them to "fact check" away any possible wrongdoing by antifa against the wicked Mr. Ngo.
Edit: reading about this for the first time, antifa really went far on this one. They severely beat Andy Ngo until he had a brain hemorrhage. Also milkshaked him and others. Milkshaking, with concrete or not, is on the not-at-all-subtle continuum of violence from antifa against their enemies. They of course won't be prosecuted for such attacks.
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