There’s something happening right now in San Francisco politics that our usual political vocabulary is failing to describe. We reach for familiar terms — protest, accountability, activism, hit job — but none of these quite captures what’s going on. What we are witnessing is something much more primal and ancient: public rituals of denunciation whose primary function is to perform — not to correct, to persuade, or even to punish.
The medieval term for this was the auto-da-fé: the “act of faith” enforced through the public humiliation of a designated target — often through a burning at the stake, in front of a crowd whose ecstatic participation was itself the point. State Senator Scott Wiener is simply one of the latest prominent San Franciscans to find himself at the center of one, but he’s not alone.
Clinical and neuropsychologist Orli Peter, Ph.D. has a new technical term for what we are witnessing: moral intoxication. Peter brings three decades of trauma treatment across some of the world’s most divided communities, including Iranian refugees, West Bank Palestinians, and Arab, Druze, and Jewish Israelis, in addition to her work as a former RAND consultant on the psychological dynamics of terrorism. She presented her complete model of moral intoxication as the instinct-injured mind’s response to sustained cognitive warfare for the first time at the Contemporary Antisemitism Conference at the University of Haifa, July 7–9. What follows is an effort to show how this live, developing research applies on the ground here, across four dramatic San Francisco and California cases, with the goal of sketching out what it will take for us to start building up our civic immunity against it.
The brain model: moral intoxication as a psychological epidemic
Propaganda is not an individual information-having or information-lacking problem — it’s a cognitive warfare tactic — one that hijacks the attention of many readers and triggers an intense psychological state. The problem is not epistemological; it’s neuropsychological. Moral intoxication is that state of complete emotional capture.
Moral intoxication is not an argument. It is a condition.
The fuse is what Orli Peter calls the kindled brain: repeated exposure to emotionally charged content — images of atrocity, narratives of existential threat, rituals of collective outrage — that physically lowers the brain’s threshold for triggering. Judgment gets worn down through repetition, not argument. The kindled brain becomes hypersensitive, requiring less and less stimulus to produce a full reaction. This is the preparation stage — the creation of the communal vulnerability.
Social media is the delivery mechanism. These platforms were engineered for engagement — they run on the same variable reward schedule that makes slot machines so addictive. Propagandists recognized this lever and loaded it with morally intoxicating content. The morally intoxicated person presses it, gets a food pellet of righteous feeling, and wallows in feeling extraordinary — with no actual inner work required. Peter describes the substitution function precisely: you don’t have to become a better person. You can simply condemn someone you’ve been taught is worse than you and voilà. In an instant, you’ve morally catapulted yourself above them. No inner work required.
The addiction loop compounds the trap. As dopamine thresholds keep rising, demanding more extreme behavior for the same high, the kindling keeps lowering the threshold for getting triggered. The brain becomes easier to set off and harder to satisfy. The only options are escalation or withdrawal.
The collective kindling of enough brains produces its own auto-da-fé automatically — no propagandist or coordination required. The moral super-spreaders sustain it themselves, each one pressing their lever and receiving their food pellet. Moral certainty eclipses moral consistency. Escalating behaviors begin to feel not merely justified but morally necessary.
Moral intoxication has become a social epidemic with a pathogen, a transmission mechanism, identifiable vectors, vulnerable populations, and — crucially — a preinfection window during which immunity could be built. This series will demonstrate four analytical tools across four cases. These tools have a name. We’ll get to it.
One of these tools is the crack — that place where the fabricated narrative gets stitched onto reality, with its poorly sewn Frankenstein-style seam. Leonard Cohen named it poetically:
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
The seam and the crack are the same thing, seen from different angles: one from the engineering of deception, and one from the poetry of truth. Once we’ve understood how to spot it, we’ll develop the capacity to notice it before the narrative hardens.
That capacity has a name as well. We’ll get to it.
Case one — Wiener at Dolores Park
On the evening of June 26, State Senator Scott Wiener was attempting to attend a Pride Trans Shabbat gathering at Dolores Park when a masked figure in full Hamas-adjacent costume approached him and subjected him to what can only be described as a choreographed humiliation ritual. The encounter was captured on video. The assailant later described it as spontaneous.
There’s no way to understand something like this as spontaneous. That’s the first thing we need to learn how to see — the crack that the Frankenstein-style stitching is trying to distract us from.
Nobody accidentally wears a full tactical antisemitic costume to a Pride event. The selection of that particular costume, for that particular gathering, on that particular evening, required planning. The masking was not simply a fashion choice; it was operational preparation for plausible deniability. You mask when you intend to do something you don’t want to be identified doing. The claim that the encounter was “spontaneous” is weaponized framing, and this framing serves as the load-bearing anomaly at the center of the narrative: the premeditated costume. Tug on that thread and the whole narrative unravels.
But the crack in the framing is only half of the picture. The crowd mobbing Wiener at Dolores Park was not doing politics — it was performing the auto-da-fé. Wiener’s decades of service to the LGBTQ community is a matter of public record. His explicit rejection of American Israel Public Affairs Committee funding and public criticism of the Israeli military conduct in Gaza are all well known, but none of that was relevant to what happened that night at Dolores Park, because the auto-da-fé does not run a logic check. The target’s guilt is presumed by the ritual — not established through evidence. What the crowd was experiencing — the ecstasy, the collective effervescence, the sense of righteous participation — was all the reward loop Peter’s research describes.
The moral intoxication was the point. Wiener was simply the object of it.
Cases two and three — the Golden Gate Bridge verdict and the classroom teacher
On July 2, a San Francisco jury convicted seven of the protesters who shut down the Golden Gate Bridge on April 15, 2024. The seven — part of a larger group of 26 who chained themselves together and to cars across the bridge’s lanes during the morning commute — were found guilty of misdemeanor false imprisonment and unlawful assembly.
The misdemeanor convictions address the surface. Whatever psychological infrastructure made 26 people willing to chain themselves to cars on a bridge during the morning commute — not to stop weapons shipments to Israel, which the action could not have accomplished, but to perform righteousness before a global audience — is entirely untouched by the jury’s findings. The auto-da-fé does not require a specific target the way the Dolores Park ritual did. It requires a stage, a crowd, and a collective experience of moral exhilaration. The Golden Gate Bridge was the stage. The morning commuters trapped in gridlock for hours — people with no connection whatsoever to the United States’ weapons policy or the war in Gaza — were incidental to the ritual’s function. They were not the audience. The world was the audience.
Laura Pinho, a Los Angeles Unified School District dance teacher, offers the clearest window into what moral intoxication looks like from the inside. At a CODEPINK webinar titled “Challenging Zionism in Our Schools,” Pinho announced that she had married a Gaza resident to help him obtain U.S. citizenship. She described her motivation in terms that constitute a clinical self-portrait: any action we take, no matter what the action is, it’s in the right direction if it’s for Palestinian rights and freedoms.
That sentence is not a political position: it’s a declaration of an altered state. That’s how the reward loop speaks, not the conscience.
The crack in the Pinho case is revealed within her GoFundMe timeline: fundraiser in early 2025. Abu Amra contacted her within days of her donation. The marriage took place on April 5. The announcement came on June 16 at the CODEPINK webinar — a gathering whose whole function was to serve as the reinforcement of moral identity and the collective experience of righteousness. The announcement was the operative act, but the marriage was the credential that made the announcement possible. Find the seam between the presented narrative — a teacher’s personal sacrifice for Palestinian rights — and the actual causal sequence, and the Frankenstein stitching becomes clearly visible. The timeline does not hold together on inspection.
There is one further dimension to the Pinho case that belongs in any honest accounting. She wasn’t merely acting on her own moral intoxication. She was deploying it institutionally against her captive student audience, boasting that she had steered them into radical anti-Israel protests. A teacher in a state of moral intoxication is a particularly dangerous vector. The classroom becomes a recruitment space. The reward loop gets passed down. In Part 2, we’ll see what it looks like when the mechanism moves from the street and the classroom to the corridors of institutional power.
