Alpha polemicist Sam Harris is an enthusiastic and persuasive debater, but in his June 5 substack post, reproduced in the Free Press, titled, "Why it's futile to debate Israel's enemies," he informed his readers that he would no longer debate antizionists.
Harris has concluded that it is pointless to debate with people who take a dimmer view of those who shoot rabid dogs than they do of the rabid dogs themselves. As he explained, "if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about "jihadists" and their various groups – Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc. – I'm talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise)." There is a "world of difference," he writes, between people who "'love death' more than everyone else loves life."
What Harris had to say – and I really recommend reading it in full – resonated in a personal way for me. Because everything he has learned about intransigent Zionophobes, I learned through many years of immersion in the dog wars. So I used the "rabid dogs" metaphor above advisedly.
Very early in my public opinionating journey, in December 2003, I wrote the first of what would turn out to be dozens of columns on the perils of pit bull love. My editor titled it "Muzzle the terrorists in our midst," a reflection of the column's guiding metaphor. My lede was a Colorado attack by pit bulls on a victim that left a scene so bloody several firefighters at the scene sought counselling afterward.
I anthropomorphized the pit bulls involved in the attack, likening them to "suicidally single-minded fanatics from a family known to lawmakers as armed, trained and dangerous, with a record of previous attempts. Family relatives have been implicated in terrorism elsewhere."
I'd done my research on pit bulls. I assumed everyone knew that genetically entrenched traits are the very essence of "breeds," which are the products of forced-mating, assembly-line eugenics. Dogs have been around for millennia, but Nature only produces mongrels. Pro-active breeding for traits prized by humans is only a few hundred years old. You don't get Labradors (hunting), bloodhounds (tracking) and sheep dogs (herding) through assortative mating. These "working" dogs cooperate with humans and obey rules. And pit bulls? They were bred to inflict pain on other animals, while ignoring pain inflicted on them. And not much else. They don't obey rules when their high prey drive triggers their attack instinct. Once they start, it's difficult to make them stop. Unlike other dogs that bite and release or slash and release, the grinding motion of pitbulls' shark-like teeth rends flesh down to the bone (and beyond) in no time. They get high on their blood lust. Other dogs often avoid them, and informed rational humans do too.
I also assumed that in making an argument that some dog breeds are more high risk than another, statistics and epidemiology are your friends. And they are – again – for rational people. So I was unprepared for the fiercely hateful email blowback I got (this was before social media.) I was "Mrs Pitler" to one furious respondent. Another wished me a gruesome death by pit bull, rather undermining his case.
Intrigued as well as repulsed by the ardor of the pit bull defenders, I ventured deeper into the weird and creepy cognitive slums of "Pits-burg." It's a cult. And its characteristics closely resemble the cult of jihadi love. Cult members admit that their deeply "misunderstood" pittie does show up frequently in news about dog-related maulings, maimings, dismemberments and deaths. But in their eyes, it's all a giant conspiracy (which the police, animal control people and the media are all in on).
So basically the SRUV – Sudden, Random, Unprovoked and Violent - maulings are an act of "resistance." Just like poor Hamas on October 7! What else was the pit bull supposed to do about that baby who hit him on the nose with her rattle? What else were Hamas supposed to do with Jews who won't allow Israel to be dismantled? They both had no choice but to murder those aggressive provocateurs!
Pits-burg's residents are the "odd couple" of the dog world. On the one hand, you have the dog fighters who would never use any other breed of dog, because they freely acknowledge the special character of their "game" breed that makes them fight to the death – a trait that can't be taught or compelled in any other breed. They embrace their canine jihadis' genetics because they make a lot of money off them.
On the other hand, you have progressive intellectuals and their useful idiots who protest Breed Specific Legislation (because "all dogs bite"; in Pits-burg, a band-aid is "culturally" equivalent to limb amputation and facial reconstruction). This "horseshoe alliance" is no accident, nor is it a coincidence that the concept of pit bulls as pets in ordinary households – far from the world of dog fighting and drug gangs they had been confined to for generations – became a "thing" from the 1970s on.
That's when multiculturalism, identity politics and Critical Race Theory took over the universities. For academics, all of these pernicious influences mapped perfectly onto canines, because, as George Orwell so accurately observed, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." Now, thanks to an advocacy movement that is the canine world's equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, pit bulls are the most popular breed in the U.S.
Personally, I was shocked to encounter allegedly superior intellects falling prey to the ridiculous idea that it is "racist" to discriminate against pit bulls, given that dogs and humans are, you know, two different species? I mean, you can't have racism present if the allegedly racialized victim is incapable of understanding concepts at all, let alone the "right" not to be discriminated against. But Kool-Aid comes in many strange flavours, and intelligence alone is no barrier to a thirsty virtue seeker in a politically deranged era.
The late John Homans, former editor of New York magazine, and then Politico, parroted pit bull advocacy bromides in his otherwise well-researched book, What's a Dog For? Cultural gadfly Malcolm Gladwell aligned discrimination against pit bulls with the racialization of African-Americans in his book, What the Dog Saw. Journalist Tom Junod romanticized pit bulls in Esquire Online, also adducing the disingenuous race card: "The opposition to pit bulls might not be racist. It does, however, employ racist thinking." (This is pure anthropomorphism; such logic would make it "racist thinking" to prefer Labradors over pit bulls as guide dogs for the blind.)
Canadian journalist Anthony Douglas Cooper, my erstwhile debate opponent, took pit bull love to a new level of canine jihadi laundering in writing a Dr. Seuss-style children's book for pre-schoolers about a lovable pit bull named Galunker, who has been rescued from a dog fighting operation, and is "as dangerous as a marshmallow." (In real life, no pit bull could be a higher risk for unpredictable violence than one that is already experienced in blood sport.) The pit bull movement provided an aggressive promotional campaign that rivalled Pallywood for disingenuousness. (See my review of the book for all the nauseating details.)
It was then, recognizing in Galunker the fanatic's tactic of indoctrinating children with a Big Lie while they're too young to understand what is happening to them, that I realized: This is the first time in the history of human-animal relations that an actual ideological movement has formed, not to promote the well-known virtues of a beloved breed, but to promote denial of a beloved breed's well-known vices. And because both jihadis and their victims are of the same species, this is a phenomenon that maps very well onto terror apologism and Hamas/Hezbollah ennoblement.
Human deaths by dogs have been normalized in our culture. (Pit bulls are responsible for up to 90% of other animal deaths, but nobody cares about animals on animals, just as Islamists are responsible for vast swaths of other Muslims' deaths, but nobody cares about Muslim-on-Muslims violence.) Before 1970, even one dog-related human death would have been front-page news. In 2025, 64 of 84 North American dog-related killings were committed by pit bulls, 6% of the canine population. Yet millions of dog owners believe they are good dogs that get a bad rap.
Similarly, Islamism account for 80% of global terrorism. Islamist terrorism was not supported in the general population before wokeism achieved dominance in western culture. And then the narrative was that only a small number of Muslims are terrorists, and Islam – the "religion of peace" (to be fair, you don't hear that trope too often any more) – should not get a bad rap on that account.
I understand and approve of Sam Harris's resolution not to debate critics of Israel any more. The siren call of atavistic bloodlust, "woke" by ideology that favours narratives over evidence, has colonized the spaces once occupied by their hearts and brains. Same with multicaninists.
A pox on both their houses.
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