The Incoherence of My Critics: An Analysis of DC Shepard’s Substack Post as “Moral Performance, Liberal Paternalism, and Logical Collapse”

 

 

 

DC Shepard is precisely the kind of texbook white liberal racist that I recently wrote about in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Corporate State. He is also an opportunist and a time-waster from hell.

That aside, his Substack post under examination presents itself as a principled intervention in debates surrounding the Bahá’í Faith, Israel–Palestine, and online harassment. In practice, however, it functions less as an analysis than as a moral performance—one that relies on narrative authority, selective quotation, and the conflation of personal grievance with political critique. The author repeatedly claims allegiance to “truth, justice, and historical accuracy,” yet the text consistently substitutes these ideals with affective escalation, ad hominem framing, and an assumption that moral certainty can be asserted through tone rather than demonstrated through argument.

At the structural level, much like Chris Bennett’s butthurt ramblings, the post is incoherent. It denounces harassment while engaging in it; it rejects ad hominem attacks while centering its narrative on character judgments; it claims neutrality while demanding allegiance to its own interpretive frame. The repeated insistence that critics are “morons,” “deluded,” or in need of mental health intervention is not incidental—it is the primary argumentative engine. Disagreement is never treated as a difference in evidence, methodology, or interpretation, but as pathology or malice. This move forecloses debate while allowing the author to posture as the sole adult in the room, a classic feature of what might be called performative liberal rationalism: the belief that one’s own position is self-evidently reasonable, and that dissent must therefore be irrational, extremist, or dangerous.

This posture is reinforced by the post’s handling of private communications. The selective publication of chat logs—explicitly acknowledged as partial (“what I was able to save”)—is presented as transparency, while simultaneously accusing the other party of bad faith and manipulation. This is a textbook example of narrative asymmetry: the author controls the archive, controls the framing, and then imputes intent (“obfuscation,” “fear of retaliation”) as fact. The result is not evidence but insinuation. In analytical terms, this collapses the distinction between documentation and storytelling, weaponizing intimacy and context-stripping to produce reputational harm under the banner of accountability.

Ideologically, the post exemplifies a familiar liberal contradiction. It denounces power, coercion, and authoritarianism in the abstract, yet repeatedly enacts them at the interpersonal level. The author assumes the right to police tone, to declare which forms of speech are legitimate, and to threaten public exposure as a disciplinary tool. This is not emancipatory critique; it is paternalism—the belief that one’s own moral clarity authorizes the regulation of others, and in this case an explicitly racist one. That this posture is paired with frequent declarations of empathy, trauma, and identity does not mitigate the contradiction; it intensifies it, because lived experience is treated not as context but as a shield against scrutiny.

Finally, the post’s treatment of complex geopolitical and religious history reveals a deeper methodological failure. Assertions accumulate without stable criteria of relevance or verification; sweeping claims sit alongside disclaimers that “none of us are experts”; and moral judgments shift depending on narrative convenience. The author wants the authority of scholarship without its constraints, and the urgency of activism without its discipline. What emerges is not analysis but bricolage: fragments of history, politics, and personal narrative stitched together by affect rather than logic. In sum, DC Shepard’s Substack post is best understood not as a contribution to understanding, but as a case study in how liberal moralism collapses into coercion and outright racism when challenged. It demonstrates how appeals to reason can coexist with, and even mask, practices of silencing and reputational control. For readers genuinely interested in critique—whether of religion, politics, or power—the post offers a cautionary example: when certainty replaces rigor, and performance replaces argument, “truth” becomes a brand rather than a standard.

A further feature of the post—subtle but consistent—is its pro-Zionist tilt, not in the form of explicit endorsement, but through asymmetrical epistemic charity. Israeli state narratives are repeatedly granted the status of presumptive reasonableness (“plausible,” “complex,” “context-dependent,” “fog of war”), while Palestinian claims, resistance discourse, or structural analyses of settler colonialism are treated as suspect, emotive, propagandistic, or irresponsible. This is a classic liberal maneuver: one side is framed as tragically imperfect but rational, the other as morally expressive but analytically deficient. The effect is not neutrality but hierarchization of credibility.

This asymmetry is reinforced through language. Israeli violence is consistently mediated through abstractions—“security,” “defensive aid,” “deterrence,” “geopolitical necessity,” “Iron Dome costs”—while Palestinian suffering is acknowledged primarily as humanitarian fallout rather than as the predictable consequence of a colonial structure. October 7 is foregrounded as a civilizational rupture demanding moral clarity, while the Nakba, occupation, siege, and decades of dispossession are treated as regrettable background noise requiring moderation of tone. In this way, history is flattened into a moral presentism that privileges the shock of Israeli trauma while rendering Palestinian historical memory excessive, sloganized, or destabilizing.

The post also reproduces a familiar Zionist-liberal trope: that naming genocide or settler colonialism too forcefully is itself dangerous, irresponsible, or extremist. Calls for restraint are framed as intellectual seriousness, while structural critiques are dismissed as “maximalism,” “team-sportification,” or social-media radicalism. This move does not deny Palestinian suffering; it disciplines how it may be spoken about, insisting it be rendered legible only within categories that do not threaten the legitimacy of the Israeli state project itself. What is excluded is not empathy but implication.

Finally, the author’s repeated insistence on being “against both sides” masks a deeper imbalance: Hamas is treated as a totalizing moral referent whose crimes contaminate Palestinian claims as such, while Israeli state violence is continually individualized (Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, bad leadership) and thus conceptually separable from Zionism as a political structure. This is not accidental. It is the signature move of liberal Zionism: condemn excesses, preserve foundations. One may criticize policy endlessly so long as the underlying colonial settlement remains beyond question.

Taken together, these patterns amount to a soft pro-Zionist orientation—not the ideological Zionism of slogans and flags, but the procedural Zionism of framing, burden-shifting, and moral gatekeeping. It is precisely this subtlety that makes the bias effective: it presents itself as balance while quietly deciding in advance whose narratives require skepticism and whose deserve patience.

We should also mention that what is at work here is not incidental bias but racialized epistemic authority, precisely in the sense Charles W. Mills identifies in The Racial Contract (1999). Mills’ central insight is that modern liberalism is not racially neutral but structured by an unspoken agreement among whites to define reality, reasonableness, and moral credibility in their own image. Under the racial contract, white subjects—especially white men—are positioned as the default knowers: their perspectives are presumed objective, their judgments universal, their interventions corrective rather than coercive. This is not an attitude; it is an inherited cognitive framework.

Seen through this lens, the pattern I describe is not accidental: that my attackers are always white men. The repeated appearance of white male attackers is not about individual prejudice but about who feels authorized to discipline dissent. They do not merely disagree; they assume the right to adjudicate which narratives are credible, which emotions are excessive, and which critiques are “irresponsible.” Mills calls this epistemology of ignorance: a structured way of not-knowing that allows white subjects to dismiss challenges to racialized power as irrational, extremist, or dangerous, while maintaining a self-image of fairness and moderation.

This is why the attacks consistently take the same form: pathologization (“delusional,” “unhinged”), moral paternalism (“you’re harming your own cause”), and tone-policing masquerading as reason. These are not neutral rhetorical moves; they are enforcement mechanisms of the racial contract. They function to protect dominant frameworks—liberal Zionism, Western geopolitical realism, institutional religion—from structural critique by recoding such critique as emotional excess or moral failure. What is being defended is not merely a position, but a monopoly on rationality itself.

Crucially, Mills emphasizes that the racial contract persists even among self-identified progressives. Liberalism does not abolish racial hierarchy; it refines it. Thus the white liberal male subject can sincerely oppose “racism” while simultaneously exercising racialized authority—deciding which histories may be told, which forms of suffering are intelligible, and which accusations go “too far.” The violence here is epistemic rather than physical, but it is no less real: it silences by redefining speech as illegitimate before it can be heard.

In this sense, the attacks are not aberrations but symptoms. They reveal the ongoing operation of the racial contract in contemporary discourse: a contract that licenses white male voices to function as arbiters of reason, while rendering challenges from outside that positionality suspect, excessive, or pathological. To name this is not to essentialize whiteness, but to expose a structure that continues to organize who may speak as human, rational, and authoritative in the first place. Nevertheless, it is racism and the white male liberal is its greatest purveyor.

In the case of DC Shepard, the operation of racialized authority is further complicated—and obscured—by a form of pink-washing, in precisely the sense anticipated by Joseph Massad in Desiring Arabs (2007). Massad’s central argument is that Western liberal sexual politics often function not as emancipation but as a civilizational technology: sexual identity is mobilized as a badge of moral modernity that authorizes intervention, judgment, and discipline of non-Western subjects. Queerness, in this register, does not disrupt imperial or racial hierarchies; it is recruited to stabilize them.

This is exactly what occurs here. Shepard’s trans identity is repeatedly invoked—explicitly and implicitly—as a kind of moral inoculation: a guarantee of progressive legitimacy that pre-empts critique. Disagreement is reframed not as a contest over evidence or interpretation, but as a failure to respect vulnerability, identity, or trauma. Yet this appeal to queer marginality does not interrupt the underlying structure of authority; it repackages it. Shepard still speaks from the position of the adjudicator: deciding which narratives are credible, which histories are excessive, which forms of speech are irresponsible, and which critiques “go too far.” The racial contract Mills describes remains intact; it is simply articulated through a different liberal vocabulary.

Massad would recognize this immediately. What is being exercised is not queer resistance but liberal sexual exceptionalism: the idea that alignment with Western sexual modernity confers epistemic superiority. This allows Shepard to occupy a paradoxical role—simultaneously positioning themselves as marginalized and as disciplinarian. Palestinian narratives, anti-Zionist critiques, and non-Western epistemologies are treated as emotionally driven, sloganized, or dangerous, while Shepard’s own framing is cast as sober, humane, and rational—even when it relies on selective quotation, pathologization, and threat of exposure. Sexual identity here functions as a moral credential, not as an analytic lens.

This is the precise mechanism Massad warns against: sexuality becoming a tool of governance rather than liberation. Pink-washing does not require support for Israeli state policy in explicit terms; it operates by positioning Western liberal sexual subjects as the measure of ethical maturity, thereby rendering structural critiques—especially those emerging from colonized or racialized positions—suspect by default. When Shepard dismisses radical critiques as “maximalist,” “irresponsible,” or “dangerous,” while simultaneously invoking their own vulnerability, they are enacting what Massad identifies as the imperial logic of sexual modernity: difference is tolerated only insofar as it does not challenge the civilizational hierarchy.

Crucially, this does not negate Shepard’s trans identity or experiences. Rather, it exposes how identity can be instrumentalized within liberal discourse to shield power from critique. As Mills reminds us, the racial contract adapts; it does not disappear. In this case, it adapts by speaking in the language of queer inclusion, trauma-awareness, and humanitarian concern, while continuing to police the boundaries of legitimate speech and historical interpretation. Pink-washing thus becomes the perfect complement to liberal Zionism: it allows one to appear anti-oppressive while sustaining the very epistemic structures that make oppression legible only on Western terms.

What emerges, then, is not an inconsistency but a pattern: racialized authority (Mills) operating through sexual modernity (Massad) to discipline dissent, foreclose structural critique, and preserve the moral centrality of the Western liberal subject. The violence here is not physical but epistemic—and it is precisely this kind of violence that both Mills and Massad insist must be named if critique is to be anything more than decorous disagreement.

        What the DC Shepard/Bennett cases reveal is not an idiosyncratic failure of judgment but the convergence of three analytic structures that modern liberal discourse works hard to keep separate: the racial contract (Mills), sexual modernity as governance (Massad), and the Manichaean logic of colonial reason (Fanon). Read together, these frameworks explain how a subject can sincerely present themselves as progressive, anti-fascist, and anti-oppressive while reproducing a racialized hierarchy of knowledge and moral authority.

Charles W. Mills shows that liberalism rests on an unspoken agreement that allocates epistemic authority along racial lines. The “reasonable” subject—calm, objective, corrective—is historically white and male, even when that subject disavows racism. This is not a matter of intent but of authorization: who is presumed competent to define reality, adjudicate disputes, and discipline excess. In the present case, this authority manifests as tone-policing, pathologization of dissent, and the conversion of disagreement into evidence of irrationality. The move is classic Mills: challenges to dominant frameworks are not refuted; they are rendered unintelligible.

Joseph Massad explains how this racialized authority adapts under contemporary conditions through sexual modernity. In Desiring Arabs, Massad demonstrated how Western sexual identities—particularly when framed as emancipatory—function as civilizational credentials. They authorize intervention, judgment, and tutelage over non-Western subjects while appearing to stand outside power. This is not liberation but what is called pink-washing: sexuality becomes a moral technology that distinguishes the modern from the backward, the rational from the excessive. In Shepard’s posture, queer identity operates precisely this way—not as an analytic lens that unsettles power, but as a shield that consolidates it. The speaker remains the arbiter; only the vocabulary has changed.

Frantz Fanon supplies the final piece. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), he shows that colonial discourse divides the world into a Manichaean structure: reason versus passion, order versus chaos, humanity versus excess. What matters is not overt hatred but classification. The colonized subject is permitted to speak only within narrow parameters; outside them, speech becomes noise, threat, or pathology. This logic persists in liberal form. Structural critiques—of Zionism, settler colonialism, religious power—are recoded as “maximalism,” “irresponsibility,” or dangerous rhetoric. Meanwhile, state violence is contextualized, proceduralized, and rendered tragic-but-rational. The Manichaean divide remains intact.

When these three frameworks are read together, the pattern becomes unmistakable. Mills explains who gets to speak as reasonable; Massad explains how sexuality is used to certify that reasonableness; Fanon explains what happens to those who refuse the frame. The result is a liberal subject who can condemn oppression in the abstract while actively policing the boundaries of critique in practice. This subject does not deny suffering; they manage it. They do not silence directly; they delegitimize. They do not claim supremacy; they claim neutrality—and neutrality becomes the most effective form of domination.

Crucially, this triangulation shows why appeals to identity alone cannot resolve the problem. Marginality in one axis does not negate dominance in another when the epistemic structure remains unchanged. A queer or trans subject can fully inhabit the racial contract; indeed, sexual modernity often enables its renewal. The authority to decide which histories are credible, which grief is admissible, and which language is acceptable remains concentrated in the same place. What changes is the alibi.

Fanon warned that colonial power would survive its formal demise by migrating into culture, language, and morality. Mills shows how liberalism provides the architecture for that survival. Massad shows how sexuality becomes one of its most effective instruments. The DC Shepard/Bennett episodes is thus not a personal drama but a contemporary instantiation of this lineage: racialized authority speaking through liberal sexual virtue to discipline anti-colonial critique.

To name this is not to deny identity, trauma, or sincerity. It is to insist that emancipation cannot be measured by who speaks, but by how power is organized in speech itself. Where critique is permitted only on terms set by the dominant frame, liberation remains performative. And where sexuality is mobilized to certify moral superiority while foreclosing structural analysis, pink-washing becomes indistinguishable from governance.

 

A further structural layer worth naming is the recurring association of these actors with Unitarian Universalism, an affiliation that is not incidental but philosophically consequential. UU has long positioned itself as the ethical vanguard of liberal modernity: anti-dogmatic, pluralist, inclusive, and post-theological. Yet this very posture has made it a particularly effective carrier of what Mills would call the racial contract in moral form—a space where white liberal reason presents itself as universal conscience.

Historically, UU emerged as a religion of moral management rather than transcendence. Its authority does not derive from revelation or tradition but from ethical consensus, procedural deliberation, and affective correctness. This makes it exceptionally adept at producing normative subjects: individuals trained to identify injustice abstractly while retaining the prerogative to police how injustice may be named. In this sense, UU often functions less as a religion than as a catechism of liberal civility, one that sanctifies moderation, tone, and incrementalism as moral virtues in themselves.

This aligns seamlessly with Mills’ account of liberalism’s epistemology of ignorance. Within UU-inflected discourse, structural critiques—especially those that implicate Western power, Zionism, or settler colonialism—are frequently reframed as “divisive,” “unhelpful,” or “extreme,” not because they lack evidence, but because they disrupt the moral equilibrium UU culture is designed to preserve. The default subject of UU ethics is still implicitly white, Western, and managerial: the one who convenes dialogue, moderates conflict, and decides when critique has gone too far.

Joseph Massad’s analysis sharpens this further. UU spaces are among the most enthusiastic adopters of liberal sexual modernity as moral capital. Queer inclusion becomes a badge of civilizational maturity, often mobilized to distinguish the enlightened West from allegedly backward religious or cultural others. Yet this inclusion rarely translates into anti-imperial critique. Instead, it frequently coexists with pink-washing, where sexual progressivism is used to justify skepticism toward anti-colonial movements framed as insufficiently “modern,” “safe,” or “values-aligned.” Sexual ethics become a litmus test for legitimacy, rather than a site of solidarity.

Fanon would immediately recognize the dynamic. UU-style liberalism reproduces the Manichaean world not through overt domination, but through moral pedagogy. Those who speak within its register are reasonable, humane, and responsible; those who exceed it are emotional, radicalized, or dangerous. The colonized—or those speaking from colonized epistemic positions—are permitted to testify only insofar as they do not indict the structure itself. Suffering may be acknowledged; causality must remain vague.

What makes UU particularly problematic in this constellation is its claim to stand above power. By disavowing dogma, it masks governance. By rejecting theology, it obscures metaphysics. By foregrounding inclusion, it conceals hierarchy. The result is a religious culture that can sincerely oppose racism, fascism, and intolerance in the abstract while actively disciplining those who name their liberal, Western, or Zionist instantiations in the concrete.

Taken together, the pattern is not that “UU people are bad,” but that UU operates as a moral technology of liberal order—one that trains subjects to manage dissent rather than confront domination. When combined with the racial contract (Mills), sexual modernity (Massad), and the Manichaean logic of colonial reason (Fanon), UU affiliation helps explain why so many of these actors exhibit the same gestures: appeals to civility, warnings about tone, accusations of extremism, and a reflexive defense of Western liberal frameworks under the guise of neutrality.

In short, UU does not merely attract this posture; it cultivates it. What becomes clear in these encounters is that Unitarian Universalism is not merely a background affiliation, but an active interpretive apparatus through which the Bayān is judged, disciplined, and ultimately delegitimized. The attack does not proceed by engaging the Bayān on its own ontological or juridical terms. Instead, UUism supplies a prior moral grammar that renders the Bayān inadmissible before it is even read.

The mechanism is consistent. UU discourse approaches religious texts through a liberal ethical filter that presumes: (1) religion is symbolic rather than ontological, (2) law is metaphor rather than binding reality, and (3) moral legitimacy is measured by alignment with contemporary liberal sensibilities. From within this framework, the Bayān can only appear as excessive, authoritarian, irrational, or dangerous—not because of what it says, but because it refuses the UU premise that religion must subordinate itself to liberal moral consensus.

This is where Mills’ racial contract becomes operative at the level of hermeneutics. The UU reader presumes the authority to decide which forms of revelation are “spiritual” and which are “extremist,” which laws are metaphorical and which are “too literal,” which eschatologies are poetic and which are “problematic.” The Bayān’s juridical seriousness—its insistence that law is ontological, not merely symbolic—violates the liberal epistemic order. Rather than grappling with this challenge, UU discourse pathologizes it.

Joseph Massad’s analysis clarifies why this pathologization so often takes the form of civilizational anxiety. UUism is deeply invested in liberal sexual modernity and moral progressivism as signs of ethical maturity. The Bayān, by contrast, does not derive its authority from modern sexual or political categories; it speaks from a prophetic rupture that precedes and exceeds them. This makes it unreadable within the UU moral economy. The response is therefore not debate but containment: the Bayān must be reframed as archaic, violent, cultic, or psychologically motivated, so that it need not be taken seriously as a rival nomos.

Fanon would recognize this instantly. The Bayān is not attacked as false so much as classified as illegitimate. Its claims are not refuted; they are rendered unthinkable. This is the Manichaean logic applied to scripture: liberal reason on one side, dangerous excess on the other. The UU subject positions themselves as humane mediator, while the Bayān is cast as a threat to order, pluralism, or “safety.” In this way, the Bayān is denied the right to speak as law, history, or ontology—it is permitted only as allegory, pathology, or curiosity.

What is crucial here is that UUism claims neutrality. It presents itself as post-dogmatic, pluralist, and tolerant. Yet this tolerance is strictly conditional. Traditions are welcome insofar as they renounce sovereign claims over truth, law, or history. The Bayān refuses this renunciation. It does not ask permission from liberal modernity to exist. That refusal is what provokes the attack.

Thus, when UU-affiliated actors “criticize” the Bayān, they are not engaging in theological disagreement; they are enforcing a liberal jurisdictional boundary. The Bayān is dangerous not because it is violent, but because it exposes the contingency of liberal moral authority itself. It reveals that liberalism is not the horizon of all reason, but one historical order among others—an order that reacts defensively when confronted with a text that names itself as law, judgment, and ontological rupture.

In this sense, the attack on the Bayān by these people is structurally identical to the attack on any anti-colonial nomos. It is not the content that is intolerable, but the claim to authority. UUism supplies the moral language—civility, pluralism, harm, responsibility—through which that authority is denied, while maintaining the self-image of openness. The Bayān is thus not argued against; it is managed out of discourse—which is why these people find me dangerous, because I am articulate and have successfully resisted against all their attempts.

To name this is not to exempt the Bayān from valid critique when legitamely warranted. It is to insist that critique must occur on shared terms. What UUism refuses is precisely that possibility unless it thoroughly assimilates it. And in refusing it, it reveals itself not as neutral arbiter, but as a theological arm of the liberal corporate order, tasked with ensuring that no rival revelation is allowed to speak as sovereign.