Extremism thrives in ‘keyboard courtroom’ — America must think like jurors, not mobs
The West is losing its ability to tell truth from falsehood, and the consequences are no longer abstract. What we’re witnessing is the rise of what I call the “keyboard courtroom,” a digital arena in which out-of-context photos and doctored videos pass as “proof” and where moral judgments are rendered instantly, emotionally, and often incorrectly.
In the keyboard courtroom, terrorism is reframed as “resistance,” victims are recast as “oppressors,” and atrocities are dismissed as propaganda, while unverified claims spread unchecked. Our geostrategic enemies — China, Russia and Iran — play an outsized role, spreading divisive falsehoods. And a growing number of Americans, especially younger voters who get most of their news online, are ill-equipped to assess, at a baseline level, the veracity of what they’re seeing.
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The results are startling. For the third time in a single week, Jewish businesses and ambulances were targeted in a fire-and-bombing spree that’s consumed London — all while the government watches the alarming spike in British antisemitism with mostly disinterested silence. This follows closely an attack a few weeks ago in Michigan, where a deranged anti-Israel advocate crashed an explosive-laden car into a Jewish school, with over 140 Jewish children inside — an attack many media outlets justified by noting that the terrorist’s family members had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.
What they mostly failed to add was that those same family members had been targeted because they were Hezbollah operatives — sworn to the destruction of the Jewish State and its seven-plus million Jewish citizens.
None of this moral confusion should surprise us. We saw it on full display on Western campuses and in Western media outlets in the aftermath of the Hamas pogrom of October 7, in which 1,200 Jews were brutally murdered, scores of Jewish women were raped, and dozens of Jewish children were kidnapped and held hostage for hundreds of days. In one now-infamous example, a Yale professor called the rape-and-killing bloodbath “exhilarating.”
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I’ve spent the last two-plus years trying to understand how we got here, speaking at dozens of universities, high schools, and religious centers across the country. What I’ve found is that the problem isn’t just bias. It’s method. We’ve lost any semblance of a basic framework for evaluating contested claims.
There is, however, one place where ordinary people still get this right: the courtroom.
I’m constantly amazed by the extent to which twelve complete strangers get together in the jury box, analyze hundreds of pieces of evidence, listen to hours of argument and then issue precisely the right verdict. It’s not because they understand the nuances of patent or antitrust law. It’s because they’re given a methodology that’s been tested over hundreds of years to help everyday people apply their common sense to complex problems.
We call these playbooks “jury instructions.” But we might as well call them “truth guides.”
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Courtrooms aren’t perfect, but they’re the best laboratories we have for the adjudication of contested claims because they give ordinary people a way to think through hard issues. We start with objective evidence — physical evidence created before the dispute arose, images that can be time-stamped and geolocated, statements a party made against its own interest. We rely on the observations of neutral third parties. When a party lies, we hold it accountable. When it “loses” evidence or refuses to produce it, we draw the appropriate inference. And when the facts cut in different directions, we say so and explain why some kinds of proof deserve more weight than others.
This is how civilized societies resolve complicated disputes.
If we want to prepare the next generation of Americans for the information war we’re now fighting, we must teach them, starting in middle and high school, to separate analysis from advocacy and to mark the clear line between facts and slogans. We must train them to evaluate contested claims with an open mind, hewing closely to established facts and governing rules, and steering clear of emotion masquerading as argument, bias cloaked as certainty, prejudice posing as principle.
We must teach them, in short, in the keyboard courtroom, to be more like jurors.
*The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and are not those of the federal judiciary.*
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