So in The Message he likens Israel to ‘the Jim Crow South’ – a spectacularly historically illiterate claim that could only make sense to a man for whom America is the centre of the universe and whose own story is the only story that counts. He writes about ‘the glare of racism’ he felt in Israel. He describes one incident where he and his party were made to wait 45 minutes at a checkpoint outside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. That’s it? How quickly his empathy evaporates when it comes to Israelis. How striking that the man who understands why a 20-year-old Gazan might join a fascistic pogrom seems incapable of understanding why a Jewish nation surrounded by hostile armies of anti-Semites might politely ask you to wait 45 poxy minutes before accessing a religious site.

Coates’s bending of the sorrows of the Middle East to his own petty agenda of grievance-mongering sums up what ‘Palestine’ has become for the 21st-century progressive. It has become a tool of vicarious victimhood, a means for the rich of the West to metaphorically mingle with the wretched of Gaza in the hope that some of their glow of suffering might rub off and add a little depth to these people’s identitarian complaining. When Coates says he felt the ‘glare of racism’ in Israel, and wonders what he would do if he were a downtrodden Gazan, he exposes the coveting of suffering that motors so-called Palestine solidarity. There’s an ironically neo-colonial vibe here, where a foreign nation is mined not for its resources or territory, but for that other most prized asset in the era of woke: the feeling of victimhood.

As to his confession that, in another life, he might not have been ‘strong enough’ to resist joining the rampage of 7 October – you couldn’t ask for better proof that pity for Palestine is a gateway drug to unhinged hatred for the Jewish nation. And that the modern politics of grievance teeters always on the brink of a politics of vengeance. Listen, if the end result of your ideology is wondering out loud about the circumstances under which you’d possibly join a pogrom, you need a new ideology.

On Wednesday, NRO’s Jeffrey Blehar, writing about the fallout from Tony Dokoupil’s CBS interview with Coates, says a friend of his quipped, “Gee, sure wish Tucker Carlson had taken this tone with Darryl Cooper.” The two men appear to have some surprising similarities in their worldviews.