Pip deSales: Goldman Mill — a demilitarized microstate founded on absolute peace, currently doing more geopolitical heavy lifting than most nations with actual armies.

Mara Jones-Tate: NR Davis brings us dispatches from the Mill today, covering Prime Minister Regina Goldman’s Gaza op-ed in the New York Times and her diplomatic response to the Trump administration’s territorial ambitions. Let’s start with the NYT essay and what Goldman is actually arguing about Gaza.

Gaza, Moral Clarity, and the False Choice

Mara: The central tension in Goldman’s New York Times guest essay is one she names directly: the claim that defending Palestinian rights and opposing antisemitism are incompatible positions. She rejects that framing entirely, from the founding logic of Goldman Mill itself.

Pip: She sets up her authority early — the Framework of Absolute Peace, Goldman Mill’s founding document, codifies “total demilitarization, absolute bodily autonomy, and universal equity regardless of creed, race, or geography.” That’s the ground she’s standing on.

Mara: And from that ground she makes the sharpest move in the piece, separating state accountability from ethnic identity: “To insulate any government from accountability by wrapping its military actions in the sacred cloak of an entire ethnic and religious identity is a profound disservice to truth.”

Pip: Which is the argument in one sentence. Criticizing Netanyahu’s government isn’t antisemitism — and conflating the two, she says, actually erases Jewish identity by flattening it into a single political position.

Mara: She’s equally unequivocal on antisemitism itself, calling it “a unique and persistent toxin that has historically paved the road to the gas chambers.” The essay holds both positions simultaneously, which is exactly her point — solidarity, she writes, is not a finite resource.

Pip: The reader responses published alongside the essay map the full range. A Brooklyn reader calls it “a masterclass in moral clarity.” A Chicago reader pushes back, arguing Goldman’s microstate framework doesn’t translate to nations facing asymmetric security threats. A Philadelphia college student calls it a lifeline — feeling caught between rising antisemitism and institutional pressure that labels any criticism of Israeli policy as hate speech.

Mara: That last letter lands the essay’s stakes in the most concrete terms. The rhetorical apparatus Goldman describes isn’t abstract — it’s shaping what young Jewish activists feel they’re allowed to say.

Pip: From Gaza to a different kind of geopolitical theater — one involving Sharpies, renaming Lake Ontario, and the general vibe of a real estate pitch gone rogue.

Trump, Bluster, and the Microstate’s Response

Pip: The question Goldman addresses in her September tenth breakfast remarks to embassy staffers is deceptively simple: how does a pacifist microstate respond to expansionist absurdity without either panicking or pretending it’s harmless?

Mara: She frames Trump’s recent declarations — claiming Canada, Mexico, Iceland, demanding Lake Ontario and New Mexico be renamed — as “cartographic fever dreams,” and the transcript notes laughter in the room. But she pivots fast.

Pip: Right, because the laugh is the setup, not the punchline.

Mara: She’s precise about why: “the mindset behind them is not harmless. It reflects an imperial posture that views sovereign peoples, historic cultures, and shared natural ecosystems as mere assets on a balance sheet to be acquired, rebranded, or bullied into submission.”

Pip: Three responses follow — refuse to mirror the panic, anchor resistance in human dignity, and deploy principled humor. The duck pond renamed the “Trump Ego Memorial Basin” got enthusiastic applause, apparently, though the Environmental Ministry had concerns about the ducks.

Mara: The radio interview on WGPM — Goldman speaking with her spouse, journalist Ari Lieber — covers the same ground from a different angle. She’s talking to Millers directly, people feeling exhausted and angry watching authoritarian politics from across the water.

Mara: Her advice there: “We fight back by simply continuing to succeed. Every month that Goldman Mill runs a budget surplus, guarantees health care, and provides a Basic Minimum Income, we are actively disproving their entire worldview. Our existence is the resistance.”

Pip: Existence as counter-argument. That’s a different register than the diplomatic speech, but the logic is identical — you don’t step into the ring, you change the game.

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Pip: Moral clarity on Gaza, calm steadiness against expansionist noise — Goldman Mill’s week in diplomacy covers a lot of ground for a microstate with a duck pond.

Mara: The through-line is the same in both cases: dignity as active strategy, not passive retreat. More from the Mill next time.