Thanks for your thorough response. I'm Trace—we chatted via email. My position on something like this is always complicated: my role is to provide background research and context so that when Katie and Jesse cover the topic, they have a thorough picture of it. As part of that role, when I need a fuller picture of things, I will at times reach out to involved parties, but that happens on an episode-by-episode basis. But while I have my own opinions, nobody listens to BARpod to hear what I have to say about things. I will neither agree with my bosses on every particular nor expect them to parrot my views. I work for this podcast because I trust them to be reasonable and accurate on sensitive issues whether or not I'd present those issues with precisely the same gloss, but their words are not mine, nor mine theirs. All this to say: I feel responsible to respond here because we chatted at length and I take my responsibility to be an honest broker seriously, but my opinions are mine and mine alone.
I'm going to divide my response into two parts: First, a preamble to cover specific factual/contextualization discrepancies or objections. Second, a more substantive response to the core of your project that represents the heart of the disagreement.
**1: Your specific factual/contextualization disputes**
First off, one point where I wholly agree with you: you mention that the episode praised Ungar-Sargon's film while downplaying yours. I agree that it could have done more to emphasize that your film was significantly more prominent and impactful.
Segments are, by their nature, summaries. Much more background goes in than can be presented within any given segment. This adds frustration for people with deep involvement or investment in stories—they know so many more layers of the conflict, so many more rabbit holes to dive into—but there is an unavoidable trade-off between conciseness and depth. Generally speaking, when I research segments, I spend a while diving into all publicly available information on the topic, then, if I have specific questions left unanswered by what is public or needing further clarification, reach out to the involved parties. You and I talked at some length over email, which I appreciated.
You mention frustration that we didn't end up looking at the recordings you have or have further Zoom conversations with you. The conversations you mention do a lot to shed light on the specifics of Ungar-Sargon's campaign against you—that he smeared you as a white nationalist in private, based on the disputed conversation. I believe your account of that campaign more-or-less in full, but it's not inconsistent with what's in the episode, and while those recordings would have been relevant if Katie & Jesse had elected to spend more of the segment on the specifics of that campaign, they elected to focus instead on the initial dispute itself. I appreciate your openness and willingness to go on the record in detail. It meant that we got more from you, and heard more of your story, than any other person mentioned in this episode. But while I'd have no problem talking further in any format, I'm confident in my understanding of your views based on taking a deep dive into your Substack, watching your documentary, and our conversation over email. While hashing out more specifics could be interesting, it was not necessary for the episode.
For what it's worth, I'm personally less sympathetic to Ungar-Sargon than Jesse was in the episode, mostly tied into my general wariness towards leftist activists. You mention a lot of spurious allegations that I have no reason to think apply to you: sympathy to QAnon, Christian Nationalism, brainwashing, white nationalism and racial separatism, so forth. I aim for precision in my own words and am generally put off by sweeping or spurious accusations tying people in with All Forms Of Badness. I do not believe you are personally a white nationalist, QAnon, Christian Nationalist, or anything of the sort. As with Katie and Jesse in the episode, I don't believe talking with Stefan Molyneux makes you a white nationalist. Generally speaking, I think it's worth engaging with whoever is willing to hear you out and find common ground where it can be found; I trust your account of areas of agreement and disagreement, don't think talking with him is a sign of sinister intent or beliefs, and personally and emphatically stand in favor of talking to a wide range of people.
One point of order: you say our framing that you were responding to Ungar-Sargon's accusations is inaccurate; I mostly disagree. The relevant articles and timing:
While it's true that "How to Deradicalize a Movement" (in which Ungar-Sargon personally and publicly makes his claims about you) was published after your own article, your response came after people in the intactivist movement made specific, personal accusations of antisemitism towards you in public, and after Ungar-Sargon signed his name to an open letter against antisemitism on an outlet that made it unambiguous that you were one of the people accused of antisemitism. I stand by BARpod's coverage of the timing.
That, I think, takes care of the technical specifics. On, then, to the heart of your disagreement with both me and BARpod.
You have a novel project. You mention you've had a lot of fun diving into critical theory and applying it to your area of passion, and it shows. It's definitely interesting, to say the least, to read what looks like a sincere and thorough effort to understand the tenets of both pop and academic critical theory, then artfully swap in terms like "systemic pedophilia" for "systemic racism" and "Jewish fragility" for "white fragility". It's creative, it's clever, it's an unusual approach.
You talk at length about part of the motivation for your project being the feeling that Ungar-Sargon and his allies want you to adopt critical theory, and that if you do not they will destroy your career: that approaching the issue from a rights-based perspective will mean people call you racist, white nationalist, and so forth. That is not, precisely, the case. They don't want you to read critical theory texts and adapt the specific arguments within them to support your cause. They want you to *be a progressive.* They look at you and notice you're the sort of person who is willing to vote for Donald Trump (please correct me if I'm wrong on this), to talk with Stefan Molyneux even about benign topics, to prod against progressive values. And they want you to adopt not a specific framework often used to justify their values, but the values themselves.
Meanwhile, you encounter in the BARpod audience a group of people who has already decided that many of the values within that sphere are questionable or ill-founded. Katie and Jesse in specific have built their careers in defiance of voices accusing them of all sorts of vile behavior, aiming to cast them out of the bounds of polite conversation. I accepted long ago that my comfort within spaces like this means there's a subset of progressives who simply will not listen to me, who will look at me with deep suspicion, and who will hurl all kinds of spurious and unpleasant accusations against me. I've been called a fascist, a terrorist, and much more. But I stand where I do, and the BARpod audience stands where *they* do, because we fundamentally reject many tenets of critical social justice.
This puts your argument in an awkward position. When you object that people treat accusations of fragility as inoffensive when said about white people, but offensive when said about Jewish people, you run into two separate groups. First: progressive activists, who rightly notice that you are aiming to upend the progressive stack, casting accusations of privilege and oppression in a way that misaligns with their own perceptions of those terms, and thus treat the term as unacceptable bigotry against an oppressed group. Second: people like me, who rightly notice you are accepting the legitimacy of the progressive gloss on terms like "white fragility" to claim they are *not* bigoted, something we never agreed to in the first place.
I dislike, and reject, the redefinition of racism to "systemic racism" as practiced by critical theory. So *of course* I'm unimpressed with your redefinition of pedophilia to "systemic pedophilia", with its accompanying and deliberate intense accusations towards the people around you. Progressives, meanwhile, embrace the idea of systemic racism as practiced by critical theory, but notice accusations of pedophilia tend to be hurled against them by conservatives, so they reject the idea of "systemic pedophilia" as red meat for their most rabid opponents and couldn't care less how precisely you can argue it as a parallel to "systemic racism". That's not the game they're playing.
Of course terms like "white fragility" and "abolish whiteness" are expressions of bigotry against white people. You know that now, and you knew that when you argued against Eli Ungar-Sargon back in the day. So by accepting that same frame and turning it on Judaism and Jewish people, you will find that many who reject much of the frame of progressivism look at it and say "Yes, this is antisemitic in the same way that those terms are anti-white in critical theory." For those who uncritically accept the progressive frame, meanwhile, you have already found that they say "Yes, this is antisemitic because it targets an oppressed group in a way that feeds into the narrative of the oppressors."
You may object. Your objections *may even be well-founded in your understanding of critical race theory.* But you are doomed to convince neither those like me who argue more in line with the rights-based framework, nor those like Ungar-Sargon who argue more in line with the progressive frame. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and in adopting the tools of critical theory, you will find yourself pushing away those who already looked at critical theory and walked away unimpressed just as much as you repel progressives.
I'm not a progressive activist. Neither are you, much as you've worked to adopt their frame. It's obvious to anyone who listens to you, obvious as soon as you talk about things like being willing to stay in connection with people who say things you dislike, obvious throughout your body of work. That's not a condemnation: most progressive activists dismiss me the same way they dismiss you. It's just an observation. I don't treat accusations of racism, or antisemitism, or transphobia, or homophobia, or any number of other real or illusory slights as reason to cut contact with people or treat them as vile. So long as people are willing to be courteous and productive, I don't treat even serious moral disagreements as cause for cutting contact, or spreading rumors, or anything of that sort. So when I say "I think your concept of Jewish fragility is antisemitic," I am not saying "...and therefore people should cut contact with you and treat you as an outcast." I'm not saying "your criticisms of Judaism are inherently outside the bounds of permissible discussion"—heaven knows, as an ex-Mormon, I'm familiar with both the delicacy and the value of criticizing religious practices. What I *am* saying is that I reject the premise that anti-white concepts in critical theory are not anti-white, and therefore reject the conclusion that anti-Jewish concepts in your own critical theory are not anti-Jewish.
I believe, with full context, that the podcast was correct to call those elements of your work examples of antisemitism within the intactivist movement. It's impossible to say that without some implicit judgment, but I'm not looking to start a fight, cast you out of your movement, anything like that. All I hope to convey is that your approach, creative as it is, will persuade neither progressive activists like Ungar-Sargon or "heterodox" skeptics of social justice activism like Katie, Jesse, or me.
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate your acknowledgment of my perspective.
What you articulated in your reply, which I would summarize as “critical theory has problems, so applications like yours have problems too” and “your opposition doesn’t actually want you to do what you’re doing” is a reasonable perspective.
Fully responding would be a podcast or article-length discussion, so while my perspective is different, I’ll save it for a future substack post, rather than the comments section.
Part of my challenge in responding to criticisms is that they’re often mixed with personal attacks. I’m happy to engage intellectually, but false claims about who I am as a person aren’t something I want to indulge. Unfortunately, such accusations have been what those who don’t like my work have primarily chosen to focus on.
If you or any other podcaster wants to talk ideas in a longer format, I’d be happy to. I’d also add that the ideas discussed in both our podcasts are a small part of the book Children’s Justice, and there is a lot more in the book that I think we might find agreement on.
Yeah, I get that it's tricky when criticism of your ideas is mixed with condemnation of you as a person. As far as longer discussion goes, I'm always happy to chat, but have very little of substance to add to a conversation on circumcision specifically—my focus within this area is much more on the broader cultural and social trends around the critical social justice movement.
Still, Brendon deserves a podcast too. He has clearly unmasked Eliyahu as someone who is only trying be in control of the voices of those who oppose circumcision. Brendon’s documentary was about circumcision. Eliyahu documentary was about Jewishness and circumcision. Eliyahu is only relevant because antisemitism sells for clicks. Brendon has never been motivated by clicks. Eliyahu obviously is jealous of Brendon’s accolades which Eliyahu’s hasn’t even come close to. Nobody watched Eliyahu’s documentary. Millions have watched Brendon’s. If you never knew Brendon and watched his documentary then heard some random podcast like the one you work for smearing Brendon as antisemitic then you would be very confused because the only thing you know about Brendon is the documentary he made which contains no references to Jews or slander of any kind. Is your podcast in the business of dismaying the public? Or are you just in it for the clicks because someone’s accusing Brendon of antisemitism?
Excellent response, Brendon. Well explained.
Hi Brendon,
Thanks for your thorough response. I'm Trace—we chatted via email. My position on something like this is always complicated: my role is to provide background research and context so that when Katie and Jesse cover the topic, they have a thorough picture of it. As part of that role, when I need a fuller picture of things, I will at times reach out to involved parties, but that happens on an episode-by-episode basis. But while I have my own opinions, nobody listens to BARpod to hear what I have to say about things. I will neither agree with my bosses on every particular nor expect them to parrot my views. I work for this podcast because I trust them to be reasonable and accurate on sensitive issues whether or not I'd present those issues with precisely the same gloss, but their words are not mine, nor mine theirs. All this to say: I feel responsible to respond here because we chatted at length and I take my responsibility to be an honest broker seriously, but my opinions are mine and mine alone.
I'm going to divide my response into two parts: First, a preamble to cover specific factual/contextualization discrepancies or objections. Second, a more substantive response to the core of your project that represents the heart of the disagreement.
**1: Your specific factual/contextualization disputes**
First off, one point where I wholly agree with you: you mention that the episode praised Ungar-Sargon's film while downplaying yours. I agree that it could have done more to emphasize that your film was significantly more prominent and impactful.
Segments are, by their nature, summaries. Much more background goes in than can be presented within any given segment. This adds frustration for people with deep involvement or investment in stories—they know so many more layers of the conflict, so many more rabbit holes to dive into—but there is an unavoidable trade-off between conciseness and depth. Generally speaking, when I research segments, I spend a while diving into all publicly available information on the topic, then, if I have specific questions left unanswered by what is public or needing further clarification, reach out to the involved parties. You and I talked at some length over email, which I appreciated.
You mention frustration that we didn't end up looking at the recordings you have or have further Zoom conversations with you. The conversations you mention do a lot to shed light on the specifics of Ungar-Sargon's campaign against you—that he smeared you as a white nationalist in private, based on the disputed conversation. I believe your account of that campaign more-or-less in full, but it's not inconsistent with what's in the episode, and while those recordings would have been relevant if Katie & Jesse had elected to spend more of the segment on the specifics of that campaign, they elected to focus instead on the initial dispute itself. I appreciate your openness and willingness to go on the record in detail. It meant that we got more from you, and heard more of your story, than any other person mentioned in this episode. But while I'd have no problem talking further in any format, I'm confident in my understanding of your views based on taking a deep dive into your Substack, watching your documentary, and our conversation over email. While hashing out more specifics could be interesting, it was not necessary for the episode.
For what it's worth, I'm personally less sympathetic to Ungar-Sargon than Jesse was in the episode, mostly tied into my general wariness towards leftist activists. You mention a lot of spurious allegations that I have no reason to think apply to you: sympathy to QAnon, Christian Nationalism, brainwashing, white nationalism and racial separatism, so forth. I aim for precision in my own words and am generally put off by sweeping or spurious accusations tying people in with All Forms Of Badness. I do not believe you are personally a white nationalist, QAnon, Christian Nationalist, or anything of the sort. As with Katie and Jesse in the episode, I don't believe talking with Stefan Molyneux makes you a white nationalist. Generally speaking, I think it's worth engaging with whoever is willing to hear you out and find common ground where it can be found; I trust your account of areas of agreement and disagreement, don't think talking with him is a sign of sinister intent or beliefs, and personally and emphatically stand in favor of talking to a wide range of people.
One point of order: you say our framing that you were responding to Ungar-Sargon's accusations is inaccurate; I mostly disagree. The relevant articles and timing:
April 2022 - Beyond the Bris publishes "Standing Against Antisemitism"(https://www.beyondthebris.com/standing-against-antisemitism/), specifically referencing your use of the term "Jewish fragility" and other elements of your work as a cause in accompanying articles: here (https://www.beyondthebris.com/refuting-jewish-fragility-why-antisemitism-harms-the-genital-autonomy-ga-movement/) and here (https://www.beyondthebris.com/a-case-study-in-undermining-the-cause-of-genital-autonomy-through-jewish-scapegoating-antisemitic-tropes/), initially published in March
7 May 2022 - You publish "A Response to Slander" (https://www.hegemonmedia.com/p/response-to-slander)
17 May 2022 - Ungar-Sargon publishes "How to Deradicalize a Movement" (https://www.eliungar.com/circumcision/2022/5/17/how-to-deradicalize-a-movement)
While it's true that "How to Deradicalize a Movement" (in which Ungar-Sargon personally and publicly makes his claims about you) was published after your own article, your response came after people in the intactivist movement made specific, personal accusations of antisemitism towards you in public, and after Ungar-Sargon signed his name to an open letter against antisemitism on an outlet that made it unambiguous that you were one of the people accused of antisemitism. I stand by BARpod's coverage of the timing.
That, I think, takes care of the technical specifics. On, then, to the heart of your disagreement with both me and BARpod.
**2: Is your work antisemitic?**
You have a novel project. You mention you've had a lot of fun diving into critical theory and applying it to your area of passion, and it shows. It's definitely interesting, to say the least, to read what looks like a sincere and thorough effort to understand the tenets of both pop and academic critical theory, then artfully swap in terms like "systemic pedophilia" for "systemic racism" and "Jewish fragility" for "white fragility". It's creative, it's clever, it's an unusual approach.
Unfortunately, you failed to internalize one of the central tenets of the philosophy you now attempt to reclaim, and I think on some level you know you failed to internalize it: The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house (https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf).
You talk at length about part of the motivation for your project being the feeling that Ungar-Sargon and his allies want you to adopt critical theory, and that if you do not they will destroy your career: that approaching the issue from a rights-based perspective will mean people call you racist, white nationalist, and so forth. That is not, precisely, the case. They don't want you to read critical theory texts and adapt the specific arguments within them to support your cause. They want you to *be a progressive.* They look at you and notice you're the sort of person who is willing to vote for Donald Trump (please correct me if I'm wrong on this), to talk with Stefan Molyneux even about benign topics, to prod against progressive values. And they want you to adopt not a specific framework often used to justify their values, but the values themselves.
Meanwhile, you encounter in the BARpod audience a group of people who has already decided that many of the values within that sphere are questionable or ill-founded. Katie and Jesse in specific have built their careers in defiance of voices accusing them of all sorts of vile behavior, aiming to cast them out of the bounds of polite conversation. I accepted long ago that my comfort within spaces like this means there's a subset of progressives who simply will not listen to me, who will look at me with deep suspicion, and who will hurl all kinds of spurious and unpleasant accusations against me. I've been called a fascist, a terrorist, and much more. But I stand where I do, and the BARpod audience stands where *they* do, because we fundamentally reject many tenets of critical social justice.
This puts your argument in an awkward position. When you object that people treat accusations of fragility as inoffensive when said about white people, but offensive when said about Jewish people, you run into two separate groups. First: progressive activists, who rightly notice that you are aiming to upend the progressive stack, casting accusations of privilege and oppression in a way that misaligns with their own perceptions of those terms, and thus treat the term as unacceptable bigotry against an oppressed group. Second: people like me, who rightly notice you are accepting the legitimacy of the progressive gloss on terms like "white fragility" to claim they are *not* bigoted, something we never agreed to in the first place.
I dislike, and reject, the redefinition of racism to "systemic racism" as practiced by critical theory. So *of course* I'm unimpressed with your redefinition of pedophilia to "systemic pedophilia", with its accompanying and deliberate intense accusations towards the people around you. Progressives, meanwhile, embrace the idea of systemic racism as practiced by critical theory, but notice accusations of pedophilia tend to be hurled against them by conservatives, so they reject the idea of "systemic pedophilia" as red meat for their most rabid opponents and couldn't care less how precisely you can argue it as a parallel to "systemic racism". That's not the game they're playing.
Of course terms like "white fragility" and "abolish whiteness" are expressions of bigotry against white people. You know that now, and you knew that when you argued against Eli Ungar-Sargon back in the day. So by accepting that same frame and turning it on Judaism and Jewish people, you will find that many who reject much of the frame of progressivism look at it and say "Yes, this is antisemitic in the same way that those terms are anti-white in critical theory." For those who uncritically accept the progressive frame, meanwhile, you have already found that they say "Yes, this is antisemitic because it targets an oppressed group in a way that feeds into the narrative of the oppressors."
You may object. Your objections *may even be well-founded in your understanding of critical race theory.* But you are doomed to convince neither those like me who argue more in line with the rights-based framework, nor those like Ungar-Sargon who argue more in line with the progressive frame. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and in adopting the tools of critical theory, you will find yourself pushing away those who already looked at critical theory and walked away unimpressed just as much as you repel progressives.
I'm not a progressive activist. Neither are you, much as you've worked to adopt their frame. It's obvious to anyone who listens to you, obvious as soon as you talk about things like being willing to stay in connection with people who say things you dislike, obvious throughout your body of work. That's not a condemnation: most progressive activists dismiss me the same way they dismiss you. It's just an observation. I don't treat accusations of racism, or antisemitism, or transphobia, or homophobia, or any number of other real or illusory slights as reason to cut contact with people or treat them as vile. So long as people are willing to be courteous and productive, I don't treat even serious moral disagreements as cause for cutting contact, or spreading rumors, or anything of that sort. So when I say "I think your concept of Jewish fragility is antisemitic," I am not saying "...and therefore people should cut contact with you and treat you as an outcast." I'm not saying "your criticisms of Judaism are inherently outside the bounds of permissible discussion"—heaven knows, as an ex-Mormon, I'm familiar with both the delicacy and the value of criticizing religious practices. What I *am* saying is that I reject the premise that anti-white concepts in critical theory are not anti-white, and therefore reject the conclusion that anti-Jewish concepts in your own critical theory are not anti-Jewish.
I believe, with full context, that the podcast was correct to call those elements of your work examples of antisemitism within the intactivist movement. It's impossible to say that without some implicit judgment, but I'm not looking to start a fight, cast you out of your movement, anything like that. All I hope to convey is that your approach, creative as it is, will persuade neither progressive activists like Ungar-Sargon or "heterodox" skeptics of social justice activism like Katie, Jesse, or me.
All the best.
Hey Trace,
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate your acknowledgment of my perspective.
What you articulated in your reply, which I would summarize as “critical theory has problems, so applications like yours have problems too” and “your opposition doesn’t actually want you to do what you’re doing” is a reasonable perspective.
Fully responding would be a podcast or article-length discussion, so while my perspective is different, I’ll save it for a future substack post, rather than the comments section.
Part of my challenge in responding to criticisms is that they’re often mixed with personal attacks. I’m happy to engage intellectually, but false claims about who I am as a person aren’t something I want to indulge. Unfortunately, such accusations have been what those who don’t like my work have primarily chosen to focus on.
If you or any other podcaster wants to talk ideas in a longer format, I’d be happy to. I’d also add that the ideas discussed in both our podcasts are a small part of the book Children’s Justice, and there is a lot more in the book that I think we might find agreement on.
Thanks again for your reply.
Best,
Brendon Marotta
Yeah, I get that it's tricky when criticism of your ideas is mixed with condemnation of you as a person. As far as longer discussion goes, I'm always happy to chat, but have very little of substance to add to a conversation on circumcision specifically—my focus within this area is much more on the broader cultural and social trends around the critical social justice movement.
Still, Brendon deserves a podcast too. He has clearly unmasked Eliyahu as someone who is only trying be in control of the voices of those who oppose circumcision. Brendon’s documentary was about circumcision. Eliyahu documentary was about Jewishness and circumcision. Eliyahu is only relevant because antisemitism sells for clicks. Brendon has never been motivated by clicks. Eliyahu obviously is jealous of Brendon’s accolades which Eliyahu’s hasn’t even come close to. Nobody watched Eliyahu’s documentary. Millions have watched Brendon’s. If you never knew Brendon and watched his documentary then heard some random podcast like the one you work for smearing Brendon as antisemitic then you would be very confused because the only thing you know about Brendon is the documentary he made which contains no references to Jews or slander of any kind. Is your podcast in the business of dismaying the public? Or are you just in it for the clicks because someone’s accusing Brendon of antisemitism?