There’s a genre of Substack essay about

Similar to FTTTG, I too remain a longtime admirer of Freddie’s writing. Yet he’s a baffling figure because he’s often flagrantly wrong in precisely the same shape that he’s insightfully correct. He’ll write brilliantly about how movements need measurable outcomes and material gains, then turn around and defend activism that produces neither — as long as it aligns with his priors.

As FTTTG observed in his piece:

it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.

This same pattern — rigorous standards, applied selectively — emerges starkly in Freddie’s treatment of Palestine activism, another pet issue he refuses to sully with criticism.

Municipal Foreign Policy

Consider Portland’s city council, which has the highest concentration of Democratic Socialists of America members anywhere in the country. DSA is nominally about advancing socialism — healthcare, wages, worker power — but the organization has rapidly transformed after Oct 7th into one singularly focused on Israel as an unyielding litmus test. In Portland, where DSA actually holds power, the hollowness of this fixation becomes impossible to ignore.

We’re told, particularly by the DSA’s own platform, that America has a lot of problems. Yet when a conflict is as remote and intractable as Israel/Palestine — with no local representatives, no policies within reach — activists desperate to justify their cultish fixation are forced to manufacture local outlets for their rage.

“Municipal foreign policy” is a phrase that should be self-evidently absurd, and yet DSA members of the Portland City Council, having apparently solved every problem in their city, thought it worthwhile to sign a bizarre anti-Israel pledge.

There’s a lot to examine but buried among the usual performative banalities is a promise to “investigate” whether weapons for Israel were manufactured or transported within city limits.

I had to blink several times when I read it to truly understand the bottomless pit of stupidity involved.

First: are there even weapons manufacturers within Portland city limits? The closest I could find is Teledyne FLIR, which specializes in thermal imaging, but that’s located about 20 miles south of the city. It’s possible some niche machine shop within the city produces specialized components (say, precision ball bearings) that might end up in larger assemblies, which might be used for military purposes, which might be sold to Israel. But we’re talking about a chain of maybes wrapped in plausible deniability.

Second: “investigate” what, exactly? Did someone break a law? Is there even a law to break? Why would the city council investigate instead of law enforcement? Does the council even have investigatory authority? The questions multiply faster than the answers.

Third: Minor point but has anyone heard of the Commerce Clause? The entire reason we moved beyond the Articles of Confederation was to create a free-trade union within the United States. We specifically dismantled interstate customs enforcement to avoid forcing truck drivers to navigate through a swiss cheese logistical landscape.

Fourth: even assuming Portland hosts weapons distribution, even assuming some law was broken, even assuming the council successfully blocks it…now what? At best, you’ve rerouted a truck carrying ball bearings through Beaverton instead of Portland. Congratulations on freeing Palestine, I guess?

The rest of Portland’s DSA pledge is more useless symbolism. One demand is to review Portland’s nine sister city affiliations (ceremonial partnerships between cities to promote cultural exchange) and reconsider whether Israeli cities belong on the list. Nothing says “materialist priorities” quite like severing pseudo-diplomatic ties with Ashkelon while your own city struggles with rampant homelessness and a fentanyl crisis.

And lest you think that Portland is an unrepresentative blip of the DSA’s priorities, in New York City, the DSA made similar demands of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s incoming administration. Among their requirements is that if NYC ever creates the promised government-run grocery stores, they must not carry Israeli products. Remember, we’re facing an affordability crisis, which is why it’s critical to ensure no Jew profits from your government-distributed feta cheese!

Ask yourself: if Palestinian activism was really about U.S. complicity or policy change, why are city councils with zero foreign policy jurisdiction burning political capital on performative resolutions about a conflict they can’t influence? The answer is obvious — the signaling ritual has to take priority over actual consequences, whether for Palestinians or Portlanders.

The Pattern Freddie Identified

This genre of hollow, preening, performative navel-gazing is something

But what matters is always the behavior because it is the behavior, the material expression of racism in the world, that actually affects the experience of being Black. We privilege the material not merely because material harms are more damaging, immediate, and persistent than emotional harms.

Or his other essay on performative racial advocacy:

deference politics in its essential form: at a moment of mass discontent over the state of race and policing, Black Americans got the absurd performance from Congressional leaders but not the substance of better policy.

Or his other other essay on performative racial advocacy:

What does this policy, argument, or claim do in fact, for real human beings, in material terms? Put another way, if we got our way, could we see the effects of that with our own two eyes? I can see hungry Black kids getting food. I can’t see white liberals “holding space” for Black people. We must return to the real.

Or his other other other essay on performative racial advocacy:

…leaving us with generations of progressive people who think that doing politics is all about feeling and not doing, who mistake posting black squares on Instagram and liking Frank Ocean for doing politics.

And yet, when you suggest that Palestinian activists have nothing material to show for their efforts, he’s apoplectic with rage:

And when you ask him to articulate what material gains they’ve made, he glitches out and cannot answer. Someone who demanded measurable outcomes everywhere else suddenly has only vibes to offer. It’s fascinating how he can be spectacularly wrong in exactly the same way he’s spectacularly right.

The pattern is hard to miss: Freddie demands material outcomes for Black activism but exempts Palestinian activism from the same scrutiny. Perhaps there’s a principled distinction I’m missing — he’s free to treat one group differently from another, but intellectual honesty requires explaining why. How does one group invite rigorous materialist critique while another gets a pass?

Freddie clearly has the platform and intellect to articulate his reasons. Instead, his engagement with me has been relegated to what he himself would call “the bitter end of content” — drive-by sniping devoid of substance. He’s accused me of cowardice dozens of times, supposedly because I quote-tweeted him to an audience 5% the size of his own. I’ve emailed him multiple times offering direct discussion, an unconstrained opportunity to expose my errors. Silence. Then another sneering drive-by weeks later.

Freddie’s personal evasion mirrors the larger problem: what happens when movements, or their defenders, refuse accountability? He knows the Palestinian movement is failing to achieve material gains. He knows that attempts to justify sister city revisions or municipal investigations of weapons manufacturing would be horrendously humiliating displays. He knows he cannot possibly justify boycotting a falafel shop because the owner was born in the wrong country.

He knows he cannot, on a deep constitutional level, defend the indefensible. Freddie’s intellectual apparatus simply won’t cooperate.

Freddie knows that if a movement is failing its own putative priorities, critique becomes essential, not optional. And he knows this because he’s written about it with remarkable clarity on — yes you guessed right!! — the topic of performative racial advocacy:

If you care about BlackLivesMatter, you are enjoined by principle to defend it from itself, and that means being willing to express unpopular opinions, such as the reality that the movement has absolutely no sense of direction, no broadly agreed-upon goals, and no idea about how it would achieve them if it did.

Replace “BlackLivesMatter” with “Palestinian activism,” and Freddie’s own argument clicks into place with an extremely satisfying precision.

I hope that someday Freddie learns to read, and hopefully his own essays, because he’s apparently missing out on some banger insights. No fucking way, you’re saying there’s another FdB essay on the efficient ways to learn to read? The man is a treasure.