Four seconds. That’s how long it took a grown man to go from screaming threats across a debate table to attempting to choke my partner Yoseph Haddad from behind in a parking lot. I watched every second of it, because I was standing right there…Not watching a clip after the fact, not reading a recap. I was in that room from the first question to the moment Feitosa was pulled off Yoseph, and I even filmed a good chunk of it myself. So when I tell you what happened Monday night in Las Vegas, this isn’t secondhand.
The format was billed as a 10 vs 1 style debate. Yoseph on one side, a rotating cast of anti Israel activists, both Islamist and white nationalist, on the other with the lineup changing every 30 minutes minutes or so. I went in expecting bad faith. I did not expect the almost total absence of anything resembling an argument coupled with violence.
Here is what passed for evidence of Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide” in the debate: one activist stated, as if it settled the matter, that Jews were kicked out of 109 countries throughout history and that this must mean they did something to deserve it. Ahistorical nonsense, but also, explicitly, victim blaming for centuries of expulsion and persecution. Nobody in that room blinked when he said it. That was the intellectual ceiling for most of the debate.
Then came Dennis Feitosa, aka ‘Def Noodles’. A groyper activist from Brazil affiliated with white supremacists who has been condemned by the California Republican Party where he attempted (and failed) to run for office. Def Noodles is also a man whose confidence far surpasses his intelligence, so none of what followed actually surprised me. What he offered wasn’t a debate. It was ten to fifteen minutes of him screaming and threatening violence at Yoseph while contributing exactly zero arguments. He tried, visibly and repeatedly, to bait Yoseph into a physical fight. Yoseph didn’t take it. instead he said, more than once, ‘why would I fight you? I’m here to talk.’ That refusal made Feitosa angrier, not calmer, because he thought he could goad someone into violence that he himself instigated. So he kept screaming that Yoseph was afraid, called him a bitch, reached for every expletive he had, because he had nothing else. Not once, not twice, but three separate times, he put his hands on Yoseph. After the second, the debate was called off and the production team told Def Noodles to get out of the studio.
That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Like the loser he is, Feitosa waited in the parking lot and along with his little boyfriend from Gaza, Adam, who had also taken part in the debate earlier, they both began harassing both myself and Yoseph. Feitosa was immediately threatening violence and after his friend pulled him away, Yoseph walked away, no incident, posing no threat to anyone, done for the night. Then, Feitosa came at him from behind and tried to choke Yoseph. That’s when Yoseph hit him, once, in self defense, and Feitosa ended up on the ground. I have the footage. Anyone claiming otherwise is welcome to watch it.
While all of this was happening to Yoseph, I was sitting to the side observing the debate — and saying absolutely nothing to anyone. Yet I still became a target for the Groyper/Islamist crowd. As mentioned before, one of the Palestinian activists in the room, Adam, a creepy looking weasel who more closely resembles a lesbian than a man (no shade to lesbians, whom I support and adore), spent the debate attacking me for being Jewish because he wasn’t man enough to have the confrontation with Yoseph. This was despite me not interacting with this rather creepy individual in any capacity who seemed to be lurking around from before the debate even started. I never spoke to him, nor do I know (or care) who he is — yet In typical Islamist style, Adam, who goes by @Pali_lebo on social media, stalked the person he thought would be easier to harass — a woman. He even waited until hours after his own participation in the debate to stalk me in the parking lot. When he got called out for that on social media after the fact, he claimed that he was “antagonized the entire debate” by myself and Yoseph — a hilarious statement given the fact that I didn’t interact or speak to this person the entire time I was there. Literally no one was speaking to him — yet he inserted himself by chasing a woman around the parking lot. Nice look. Of course, the harassment of women by people like Adam (and the subsequent lying) is not an accident, but a feature of the Palestinian cause, which he exemplified so brilliantly.
Meanwhile, Feitosa has spent the days since the debate in a full public crash out, replying to everyone mocking him for getting violent and getting schooled by Haddad. Instead of taking the L, however, he keeps repeating that Yoseph was “gloating about having bombed schools” and “killing children.” This is a figment of his imagination. I was in that room for the entire debate. I did not miss a word. That never happened. Nothing even close to it happened. What actually happened was Feitosa screaming accusations, expletives, and trying to fight while Yoseph refuses to take the bait.
But let’s play Feitosa’s game for a moment. Let’s pretend, hypothetically, that Yoseph had said something like that, and meant it.
So what?
Nobody has a right to put their hands on another human being because they didn’t like what that person said. The fact that Feitosa and people like him genuinely believe otherwise tells you everything about the values they’re bringing into American discourse, and none of it belongs anywhere near a debate stage.
One more detail worth sitting with — Feitosa’s performative commitment to “America First” (or as he put it “America only”) is rather ironic when you consider the fact that he himself was raised in Brazil and is more than likely a dual national himself.
In sum, this week we saw a fragile immature man with no actual debate skills scream himself out of a discussion, then engage in violence repeatedly, and finally get punched after he assaulted and attempted to choke Yoseph in the parking lot. May all Nazi groypers meet the same fate.
FIVE STORIES YOU SHOULDN’T MISS
1. Exposed: the Cambridge PhD who Stands with the Islamic Regime
Cambridge has opened a formal investigation into a 2011 PhD thesis by Islamic republic propagandist Shirin Saeidi that four Iranian former political prisoners now say misquoted or fabricated their words entirely, with several saying they never met her. One survivor, jailed in 1985 while pregnant and forced to give birth behind bars, accused Saeidi of “extensive distortion, misrepresentation and fabrication” of her identity in the published book. Saeidi has since been fired from the University of Arkansas for reposting a call to “thrust the dagger from Doha into the throats of the Zionists.” Academia keeps discovering, one investigation at a time, how many of its “Iran experts” in fact have suspicious ties to the Islamic regime itself, as they conveniently lobby the regime’s propaganda through American (and British) universities.
2. The Blockade is Working
A US Navy helicopter fired two Hellfire missiles into the engine room of the cargo ship Vela Nova in the Gulf of Oman on Tuesday after its crew ignored repeated warnings and kept sailing toward an Iranian port. CENTCOM says it has now diverted 55 vessels, disabled three, and boarded two since reimposing the blockade. This is what real pressure on the Islamic regime looks like: not statements, not strongly worded letters, but ships that don’t make it to port. More of this, less of the Oman shuttle diplomacy that keeps handing Tehran off ramps. Meanwhile on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated the U.S. has the ability to maintain the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely — which may be necessary to apply the right pressure to the Islamic regime.
3. Why ICE is Right to Keep “Screaming Mary’s” family
DHS is refusing to let the son and family of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the 1979 hostage crisis spokeswoman known as “Screaming Mary,” self deport to Turkey instead of facing removal proceedings, and the critics are missing the point. Self deportation isn’t mercy, it’s an exit with no consequence and no record, and for a family this tied to the regime’s founding, that’s exactly the problem. A negotiated walk to a third country lets Tehran claim the story ends however it wants and denies Washington any leverage in a case that touches the regime’s own hostage taking history. DHS says their presence itself was assessed as a foreign policy threat; letting them choose their own off ramp undercuts the deterrent value of the removal itself.
For context, Ebtekar was a 19 year old university student in November 1979 when Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy and took 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. She became the English speaking spokesperson for the hostage takers, appearing constantly before Western cameras to justify the siege, which earned her the nickname “Screaming Mary” in the American press. She never faded into the past after that either. She went on to hold senior positions inside the Islamic regime itself, including vice president for environmental affairs, making her part of the government’s establishment rather than a relic of one radical moment. In a move that rights a historical wrong allowing Screaming Mary to come to the U.S. in the first place, her green card along with that of her son, daughter in law, and 16 year old grandson have all been revoked.
4. Mamdani’s Selective Outrage: Two stories in one week
In May, Mamdani skipped NYC’s Israel Day Parade, saying he can’t back any state that “privileges one religion over another,” then showed up at the Pakistan Day Parade this week, a country that is officially an Islamic state where Christians, Shi’a Muslims, Hindus and Ahmadis face documented persecution. The same week, his office claimed the NYPD had “strongly recommended” a security detail for his wife Rama Duwaji’s trip to Syria and Lebanon, only for the NYPD to publicly contradict City Hall and confirm no such recommendation was made. This is a mayor who campaigned on defunding the department now wanting it to escort his wife through two Level 4 warzones on a personal trip, and blaming staff when the story fell apart.
5. Colombia Recognizes the Golan Heights as Israel
This week Colombia’s foreign ministry recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, becoming only the second UN member state to do so after the US in 2019, calling it essential to Israel’s national defense. This move follows Bogota’s restoration of full diplomatic relations and its withdrawal from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.
WHAT’S NEXT
We are rapidly approaching the 60 day MoU deadline between Washington and Tehran, which expires this Sunday, August 16th, and Pakistan is already scrambling to keep both sides at the table before it lapses. Watch what happens the moment that deadline hits. Either Tehran gets another extension it hasn’t earned, or the Hormuz blockade tightens for real and we find out how much of Iran’s swagger over “regional concurrence” survives contact with an actual dollar amount lost per day. Sunday will tell us more about this regime’s real leverage than six months of statements from Oman ever did.