There’s a certain kind of intellectual liberalism that mistakes detachment with discernment. That sees neutrality as virtue and discomfort as a failure of reason. That doesn’t acknowledge the need for different tactics during a time of violence than during a time of peace. Listening to Ezra Klein’s conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates a week or so ago about their difference in perspective related to Charlie Kirk and Klein’s response, I was struck not by any disagreement, but by his unwillingness to join Coates in the conversation he asked him to have. It wasn’t ignorance. It was insulation. The kind that lets someone describe moral collapse as an abstract dilemma rather than a clear and urgent reckoning.

I found myself deeply frustrated by how Klein tried to unwed humanity and decency from what he kept calling “politics,” as if compassion were an accessory to strategy rather than the substance of it, even as Coates provided example after example. The exchange reflected the logic that lets disinformation thrive: not through outright lies, but by reframing truth as subjective. The insistence that everything is up for debate becomes its own form of propaganda. It creates the illusion of fairness while eroding the possibility of clarity.

This is the illusion that feeds disinformation: the belief that civility must be preserved at all costs, even when people are being dehumanized. Klein’s insistence on humanizing, even persuading, those most committed to hate made space for cruelty under the banner of complexity. His stance flattered itself as sophisticated because it refused to take sides. Refusing to take sides in a moral crisis is not neutrality; it is complicity. It’s the kind of analysis that flatters itself as intellectual precisely because it feels nothing. Because empathy has been miscast as bias.

The work my team and I have been doing to map the parallels between the Post-Reconstruction era and the present came to mind as I listened, especially when Coates evoked that history. That first brief window after the Civil War was framed as reconciliation but quickly became reinvention, a reshaping of Black suffering through new terms and tolerances. In the years that followed, the nation performed civility even in the midst of extreme violence: Black legislators assassinated, schools burned, voters terrorized. At the same time, many newspapers adopted the rhetoric of “unity” and “national healing” even as they suppressed or erased demands for racial justice. It was an era obsessed with the optics of peace rather than the substance of justice.

That performance echoes now, dressed in the language of bipartisanship, balance, and bridge-building for which only one side is responsible. The same slight of hand allows disinformation to thrive: a strategic confusion between peace and appeasement. When people in power speak of the “other side” as if the difference is merely perspective, they blur the moral line between harm and discomfort and between those demanding equality and those denying humanity.

Klein’s view suggested that politics must be purely pragmatic. Coates reminded him that pragmatism without morality becomes its own ideology, one that always protects power above all else. His weariness was apparent, reminding us that the exhaustion of trying to remind a country that dehumanization is not a policy position. The idea that we are fully human should not be controversial, especially when hatred is treated as nothing more than a trite opinion, and yet, somehow, it still is.

Coates wasn’t trying to win an argument; he was trying to keep us human. His clarity felt like an act of defense against a culture that prizes cleverness over conscience. As my friend Keron said when we were texting about the episode, they weren’t even having the same conversation. Klein was talking about inputs and tactics; Coates was talking about people. That difference is everything. One measures proximity to power. The other measures the cost of surviving it.

This is the same battle Post-Reconstruction activists fought. It is the struggle Ida B. Wells faced when she named lynching a national shame while politicians urged “patience.” They were told they were being divisive — urged to reach across the aisle to the people burning their homes. The Post-Reconstruction story is not only about failed reform; it is about how America repeatedly chooses the appearance of civility over the practice of justice.

The parallel to the onramp of today’s disinformation wars is unmistakable. When truth itself is treated as partisanship and empathy as weakness, manipulation finds open ground. We are told to debate facts that should be settled and to entertain arguments that are fundamentally inhumane. Propaganda thrives in polite company, protected by the illusion of intellectual balance. Even today’s war on SNAP is an example—the fact that whether or not millions of people, the vast majority of whom are CHILDREN, are elderly, are disabled, or are workers (and many are working full-time for corporations who were given tax incentives to pay so little that we pay again for those workers to subsist) should have access to food. That people should eat and should have a proper runway when benefits are being decimated should not be the issue. How to prevent these situations should be the topic of conversation.

What stands out in Klein’s framing is the treatment of morality as private and apolitical. Yet morality — the belief in the dignity of human life — is what politics is meant to organize around. The idea that the two can be separated is both a luxury and a lie: the luxury of those whose lives are not at risk and the lie that such separation preserves democracy rather than corrodes it.

Post-Reconstruction taught that no system built on selective empathy can endure. Disinformation, then and now, is not only about what people believe but about who they are permitted to stop believing in. The notion that everything is debatable conceals a deeper falsehood — that everyone’s humanity is negotiable.

Drawing a line, as Coates insists, is not the opposite of dialogue; it is the condition for it. Honest conversation requires shared recognition of reality. Naming what is intolerable is the first act of truth-telling. In this moment, that act remains revolutionary.

Truth has a temperature. It is not cool or detached; it burns, humbles, and reveals. Many would rather debate than feel, mistaking analysis for courage. History, from Reconstruction to now, continues to teach the same lesson: the refusal to name wrongs in real time always becomes the preface to something worse.

The work ahead is not only about drawing lines. It is about rebuilding conscience before the illusion of civility keeps us unprepared to fight against the violence that has already started accelerating.