Imagine, for a moment, that the ghosts of Shakespeare’s plays—Banquo, Hamlet’s father, Julius Caesar—were to step across the boundary of fiction into the halls of Congress or the modern news cycle. These spectral figures were never meant to take action themselves; they hovered, hinted, warned—but they never engaged the living world directly. Ghosts, by their nature, are unseen, unaccountable, and unanchored. And yet, today, our public square is increasingly crowded with just such figures—not from beyond the grave but from behind screens. Many would rather haunt than inhabit, lob than live, snipe than stand. They posture, provoke, and vanish. We’ve become a nation increasingly governed by those who wish to wield consequence without presence, accusation without ownership, opinion without flesh. And it’s killing our Republic.
We call it “ghosting” now—not just the quiet exit from a text conversation but the deeper cultural reflex of hiding. Of vanishing from dialogue. Of dissociating when the moment requires standing tall. It’s especially ironic in a time when so many men posture online about masculinity, invoking the likes of Andrew Tate as the ultimate alpha. And yet, unlike Tate—agree or disagree—who at least shows up and owns what he says, many of his loudest disciples won’t. They stay hidden, masked, lobbing rhetorical grenades from the safety of anonymity—never stepping into the light of real human discourse.
You’d be forgiven if it happened just once. But when it happens again and again—and I mean innumerable times—you start to notice a pattern. You’re scrolling through the digital town square () and someone lobs a loaded comment. Not a thoughtful question. Not an earnest observation. A grenade.
Of late, one of the most common examples concerns “the Jews.” Sometimes it’s wrapped in pseudo-scholarly language. Sometimes it’s laced with unhinged vitriol. But always, it trades in the same tired insinuations: that Jews—as a monolith—secretly run Hollywood, or debase American culture, or invented liberalism, or faked or exaggerated the Holocaust, or control governments, or are uniquely to blame for the decline of Western civilization. Never mind that no coherent documentation or testimony is provided. Never mind that these assertions collapse under five minutes of genuine scrutiny. They’re asserted as if they were obvious—and if you question them, you must be part of the cover-up.
I’ve seen it in comment threads, message boards, fringe channels, and conspiracy rabbit holes. But what’s even more revealing than the claims themselves—some outlandish, some more insidious—is what almost never happens: the person making them almost never steps forward in full view, name to name, to defend them. They rarely engage in good-faith conversation. They retreat. They obfuscate. They reframe. They ghost.
And I can’t help but think: if you really believed what you just said, if you were convinced it could hold up in the light, wouldn’t you want to bring it there?
This is not about any one controversy. It’s about the spirit of our age—an era of anonymous accusations and ideologically possessed half-truths, hurled from the shadows by people who want to sound brave without being brave. They don’t want to be questioned. They don’t want to be corrected. They want to appear as prophets while hiding behind a handle.
It’s not even that their conclusions are always wrong. Some touch on real patterns worth exploring. But their method reveals something deeper: a collapse of confidence in truth and, with it, a rejection of integrity. They commit the very error they denounce—attributing sweeping evil to loosely associated people based on identity rather than actual proof, while condemning others for doing the same. It is intellectual cowardice draped in the cloak of rebellion.
And what’s worse, this is no longer the exception. It has become a cultural norm.
From its very beginning, the American Republic was built on a different wager: that truth could and should be discovered in the light of open discourse and that citizens—endowed with reason, dignity, and conscience—could bring their ideas to the public square and allow them to rise or fall before the judgment of others.
The First Amendment—freedom of speech—was not intended as a license for chaos but, rather, as the lifeblood of a Republic of equals. It presumed a human being willing to speak what he believed, to own it, and to let it be examined. Thomas Jefferson himself wrote: “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
And across generations, thinkers of every stripe have reaffirmed this. Frederick Douglass, in 1860, warned: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Abrams v. United States, defended “the free trade in ideas” as the best test for truth. Even John Stuart Mill, James Baldwin, and modern contrarians like Chomsky, Peterson, and Greenwald—though wildly different in worldview—agree on this point: truth must be exposed to challenge if it’s to be trusted.
But today, truth is not being challenged. It is being hidden. Not by governments alone (though the Twitter Files showed government actors and platforms colluding to suppress disfavored but factual information). Not just by the media (which insisted that President Biden was cognitively sharp or that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”). But by us. By citizens who no longer believe that reason works. Who treat disagreement as a threat. Who exchange argument for insinuation and accountability for anonymity.
The danger here is not just censorship but a Republic populated by people who no longer believe in the dignity of standing face-to-face.
We’ve entered an era where slander is safer than speech. Where ideas are pushed in memes not reasoned in essays. Where truth is no longer something to be pursued but assumed—so long as it flatters one’s tribe.
