One-Ideaism Is Brain Rot

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

 

I’m not writing about a tweet or about Hasan Piker, but I do have to start with a tweet about Hasan Piker, the streamer making life difficult for Democrats.

 

The other day I saw this clip, in which Piker says, “I have no problem with the Houthis. … If you think I’m a terrorism supporter for that reason, then yeah, I’m a f—ing terrorism supporter.” If you watch the extended version there are more f-bombs, and he explains that what he has in mind is Houthi “militancy” in the Red Sea, which he says is a “perfectly moral action.”

 

I responded to this with a simple factual observation: “The official slogan (the Sarkha) of the Houthis is: ‘God is the greatest. Death to America. Death to Israel. A curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam.’”

 

Now, I don’t retract or apologize for that. But I got a very good email from an old friend, who has a sometimes-annoying habit of being my intellectual ombudsman. I’ll leave his name out of it. Let’s call him Cromwell, because that will likely annoy him.

 

In reference to my tweet, Cromwell wrote (in part):

 

I agree with you about the slogan supporting the claim that the Houthis are terrorists. But, in fairness to the Houthis, they don’t actually kill a lot of Israelis and arguably even fewer Americans (two Americans drowned attempting to seize Houthi assets, but I don’t think the Houthis are traditionally credited with those kills).

 

They would if they could! But their primary impact is on Yemen, followed by [Saudi Arabia]. There’s a whole lot of countries they’ve killed more citizens of than Israel or America. There’s [a third of a million] dead Yemenis as a result of the civil war that [the Houthis] are the primary cause of, and that’s probably not their biggest impact on Yemen. Their millions of child soldiers and ex-child soldiers are just a part of their blight on the world.

 

Piker wants the debate to be about whether he should be supporting people who oppose America and Israel. He’s in a minority on that, but a lot of people who disagree with him have considerable patience for those views.

 

Surely instead the debate should be about his support for child soldiers, for slave raids into Africa, the abuse of variously: Bahai, women, UN staff and other hostages, land mines, and so on and so forth. People already know that Piker isn’t opposed to political violence against America, Jews, and Israel. But I believe they don’t know the depravity he’s willing to endorse as a reward for antisemitic violence.

 

This is in part because your tweet was far from the first writing to fall into a trap of responding to support for the Houthis by condemning them for being terrorists against the U.S., Israel, Saudi, and others (the Saudi and others complaint being more legitimate but often ignored). …

 

Cheers,

 

[Cromwell]

 

I think this is a fantastic point. I fact-checked some of the stats in Cromwell’s dashed-off missive. One can offer some quibbles, the biggest probably being the “millions” of child soldiers bit. I think it’s fairer to say that the Houthis are working on having millions of child soldiers. There are already many thousands of them, and the Houthis are building a pipeline for more. In 2023 alone, the Houthis sent more than a million kids to “summer camps” where they were indoctrinated with jihadi ideology and forced into a kind of militarized slave labor. Here’s an excerpt from a State Department summary (emphasis mine):

 

An international organization reported these camps took place between May and June 2023 in nine governorates, with children as young as 10 years old exposed to military training. An NGO reported that in one camp, children as young as seven were taught to clean weapons and dodge missiles. Cases of the unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers by the Houthis and government and government-affiliated forces occurred with some familial knowledge or consent, while some cases occurred through coercion or threats of retribution if families refused to comply with recruitment, specifically by the Houthis. In other cases, monetary and material support – including offers of salaries and food baskets for families as well as waiving registration fees for the next school year – were reportedly incentives for joining the Houthis. An international organization and an NGO reported in cases where families refused to send their children to join Houthi forces, officials removed the child’s family from beneficiary lists entitled to humanitarian assistance and abducted and detained children, who were subjected to various forms of abuse, including sexual violence. Government and government-affiliated forces and other armed groups, including the Houthis, used boys mostly in combatant roles, to guard checkpoints, lay land mines, and to drive military vehicles, and forced other children to carry out support duties such as delivering supplies and escorting. In 2023, Yemeni officials did not report demobilizing any child soldiers; however, government and government-affiliated forces and Houthis detained children for alleged association with armed groups.

 

So, pretty bad stuff, and I think Cromwell was directionally right in his indictment.

 

I’ve been noodling this for the last few days, and I think it is a really good illustration not just of how anti-Israel monomania leads to intense moral myopia, but of how binary thinking generally is a form of brain rot that I stepped in a little bit.

 

Forget about Piker himself—I think he’s a midwit buffoon monetizing his midwittery by exploiting the faddish ignorance of his fans. But the fad is real. I need to stipulate that I think the “genocide” rhetoric about Israel is ridiculous propaganda. That doesn’t mean all criticisms of Israel, specific Israelis, settlers, etc., are without merit. But even when they have some arguable merit (and I am happy to argue about how much), these objections are often embedded in the broader “Israelis are the new Nazis” b.s.

 

Ironically, such claims are often made by Tucker Carlson types who also want to insist that the Nazis weren’t that bad. So even when there are debatable points on offer, they lose their moral or persuasive force for me because they are attempts to season a slanderous stew of lies with some half-truths. This is a time-honored tactic of demagogues and zealots. Take a few reasonable claims—COVID-era school closures were bad, healthy young people didn’t need to take the vaccine, etc.—and use them for a preposterous conclusion: COVID was an op by the deep state to destroy America!

 

What I like about Cromwell’s point is that “resistance” to Israel has become a way to buy a moral indulgence. The Houthis are good because they fight Israel (even though they really don’t—because they’re too far away). The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, which Piker calls “perfectly moral,” have been “justified” by claiming the ships being targeted have some ties to Israel. But this is mostly a rhetorical fig leaf, as they have attacked numerous ships with no ties to Israel, the U.S., or Britain. Simply saying you’re committing violence in the name of the anti-Israel cause is enough to buy not just exoneration, but endorsement.

 

When Hamas raped and slaughtered Israeli citizens on October 7, members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions crowd struggled to figure out how to calibrate their moral compasses. Some passed the test, obviously, condemning the horror. But a dismaying number of people didn’t. They celebrated the rape and murder, even when it was still ongoing.

 

What’s really remarkable about this way of thinking is how much it reflects the tendencies of Western arrogance the anti-Zionists claim to oppose. For them, the only issue is their pet issue of Israeli villainy. It is a bright line dividing the forces of good and evil. When anti-communists would defend Augusto Pinochet or Francisco Franco or some other right-wing or America-aligned autocrat, the left would mock and condemn these defenses as the sort of imperialistic immorality inspired by anti-communist paranoia and American hegemony. They’d point to the very real evils being committed by these regimes, insisting that complicity with them was an outrage. This wasn’t just true of useful-idiot supporters of the Soviet Union or the various Marxist rebels fighting for “national liberation”—it was also true of the much broader anti-anti-communist left.

 

In the 19^th century, various forms of radicalism often went by the label of “one-ideaism.” Whether it was the socialism of Fourierism, or the extreme abolitionism of John Brown, or the extremism of “slave power” maximalists, or even the fight for women’s rights, the critique was the same: If you cram all of your political passion into a single issue, you’re blinding yourself to other important issues.

 

One-ideaism is binary thinking. If one issue defines the good, then any issue that distracts from or hinders that issue is definitionally the bad. We’ve seen this sort of thing metastasize in our political culture. On the right, when support for Trump became the definitional crux of what it meant to be a conservative or even a Republican, then disagreements with Trump couldn’t just be wrong; they had to be heretical. Trump likes Russia, so Russia must be good. He thinks tariffs are smart, so objections to tariffs must be not just stupid, but treacherous. We see the same thing in reverse on big swaths of the left. Trump is bad, therefore whatever he likes must be bad. Praising something Trump does is considered just as treasonous for the popular front of the left as criticizing Trump is treasonous for the right.

 

When you look under the hood at the most virulent forms of anti-Israel madness, it becomes obvious that the arguments supposedly supporting it are pretextual. The people who prattle about Israeli “theocracy” have very little to say about Iranian or Saudi theocracy. The people who insist Israel is an “apartheid” state say little or nothing about Chinese “Han supremacy” and Jim Crow with Chinese characteristics. How many protests against the erasure of the Uyghurs and of Tibet have the people who wake up every morning shouting about Israeli “genocide” attended?

 

For that matter, how many of the “NatCon” nationalists who claim to consider national borders and national sovereignty to be their lodestars have spent much time condemning Russia’s brutal violation of both in Ukraine? How many are even troubled by our neo-imperial bullying of Europe over Greenland, or of Canada, or the vassalization of Venezuela? Again, Trumpist popular frontism is more important than intellectual consistency.

 

Some of this stuff can be chalked up to the intellectually corrupting demands of politics, some to the laziness inherent in letting one idea define you, and some to a kind of moral hysteria. For some people, it’s all one of these explanations, but for most I think it’s a combination of all three.