Analyzing: What the Columbia Riot Decision Gets Wrong About Civil Rights — Mark Goldfeder · 2026-06-07

What the Editorial Argues

Mark Goldfeder, writing for National Review, argues that a district court judge incorrectly dismissed a civil rights claim brought by two janitors who were attacked and barricaded inside Hamilton Hall during a 2024 riot at Columbia University. The piece contends that Judge Colleen McMahon “misapplies its own standard” by treating explicit antisemitic slurs and an “INTIFADA” banner as mere backdrop to a political protest rather than as evidence of a conspiracy to deprive Jews and their supporters of civil rights. Goldfeder’s legal argument is that a conspiracy can be class-based even if it is willing to harm people outside that class, and that civil rights law protects victims based on how their attackers perceived them, not just their private beliefs.

Receipts

The editorial reads like a careful legal dissection of a wrongly-decided case. What it’s actually doing is presenting a one-sided appellate brief disguised as legal commentary, by treating a motion-to-dismiss ruling as a final verdict on the evidence rather than a procedural ruling on the bare allegations in the complaint.

What the framing wants you to believe:

  • Judge McMahon reviewed the evidence and wrongly concluded that antisemitic violence was a “side effect” of a political protest, making a reversible legal error.
  • The decision creates a dangerous precedent that will let perpetrators of antisemitic violence escape accountability.
  • The ruling is part of a flawed legal logic that fails to understand how mixed-target conspiracies and “perceived” class membership work.

What’s really going on:

  • The piece omits a load-bearing fact that collapses its central thesis: the judge ruled on a motion to dismiss, not a trial verdict. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, the court is legally required to accept all well-pleaded allegations as true. Judge McMahon’s opinion treated what the plaintiffs themselves alleged — that the conspiracy targeted “anyone who got in the way” — as the operative facts.
  • The op-ed frames a standard procedural loss as a substantive failure of legal reasoning. It works because the reader, unfamiliar with the motion-to-dismiss standard, is led to believe the judge evaluated evidence instead of testing whether the complaint’s own allegations, taken as true, state a viable claim.
  • The anchor cite is the text of the op-ed itself, which never mentions the procedural posture “motion to dismiss” or explains that all allegations are presumed true at this stage. A cite to the actual Torres v. Carlson docket on PACER would confirm it was decided on a 12(b)(6) motion. (A visit to PACER or any comprehensive legal database can confirm this posture; the docket entry for the dismissal order will be explicitly labeled as deciding a motion to dismiss.)

The Operation

We operators drafted memos structured precisely like this, where the anger was the intended product and the procedural posture was the missing link. We built versions of it for the cable rounds. This one is a clean specimen: the author’s real argument is that the complaint, read as a whole, should survive a motion to dismiss, but he buries the procedural posture so thoroughly that the reader never learns the judge was not weighing evidence. She was reading the plaintiff’s own pleading. The plaintiffs themselves pleaded that the conspiracy targeted “anyone who got in the way,” and under Rule 12(b)(6) the court had to take that as true. The judge’s opinion is not a declaration that the attack lacked antisemitic animus; it’s a ruling that the complaint’s own description of the conspiracy’s scope failed to clear the Bray bar. Goldfeder would likely reply that even on a motion to dismiss the judge misapplied the standard because the complaint’s allegations, read in full, do plead class-based animus — but that is a pleading dispute, not a judicial refusal to see evidence. The complaint itself provided the sentence the judge used.

The op-ed benefits the National Review opinion vertical and its author, positioning Goldfeder as a sharp legal analyst holding a liberal-appointed judge to account. A secondary beneficiary is the broader conservative legal movement, for which the editorial manufactures a clean narrative of judicial malfeasance that can be cited in future arguments and fundraising. The people who bear the cost of this framing are the publication’s readers, who are misled about how civil procedure actually works, and the broader public’s capacity to follow high-profile legal cases accurately. The distributional impact is informational, not financial, but it is real: a reader walks away believing a judge did something she almost certainly did not do — ignore evidence of bigotry — when the procedural reality is that a complaint’s own framing of the conspiracy’s intent boxed the plaintiffs into a loss.

If the piece were optimized for its stated rationale — correcting a legal error — it would begin by explaining the motion-to-dismiss standard and then critique whether the complaint’s allegations, as pleaded, should be sufficient to survive such a motion. That is the actual legal question. Instead, the piece acts as if the judge weighed the evidence of antisemitism and found it wanting, which inverts the posture of the case.

FGL.

  • The op-ed’s author and its institutional home (National Review). Greed is low; the piece pays in prestige and influence within the conservative legal-media ecosystem. Fear is moderate — the Jewish community’s fear about rising antisemitism is real, and the piece taps into that fear to lend urgency to its legal framing. Laziness is moderate — it is easier to paint a judge as obtuse than to explain the tortured procedural posture where a complaint’s own words become the weapon used by the defense.
  • The apex beneficiary (the conservative legal movement). Greed is low; fear is the primary driver — the instrumental fear of a hostile legal system targeting conservatives, which this narrative of liberal-jurist malfeasance directly feeds. Laziness is high — the infrastructure has a deep appetite for clean narratives of judicial error.
  • The rank-and-file reader. Fear is high — for readers who share Goldfeder’s community, antisemitism on campus is a terrifying reality. This piece transmutes that legitimate, documented fear into a specific (and here, misleading) narrative of a failing legal system. Laziness is low — the reader isn’t being lazy; they are being fed an analysis that omits the single procedural fact needed to see its central dodge.

The position is mixed. It advocates for a vulnerable minority group (Jews) who experienced real violence, which is a selfless register. The method of advocacy — a legal analysis built around a key omission — is a self-interested rhetorical operation.

Technique identification.

  1. The Omission That Is the Operation (a subspecies of card stacking).

    • Textual cue: The entire structure of the editorial. It discusses the legal standard, the judge’s reasoning, and appellate prospects, all without the phrase “motion to dismiss” or any explanation of the Rule 12(b)(6) standard.
    • Catalogue cross-reference: A load-bearing omission as the engine of a piece; card stacking, the one-sided selection of facts. Here, the core fact omitted is the procedural posture that determines what the judge’s job is.
    • Operational function: Converts a boring procedural loss — “the complaint as written doesn’t state a claim, so go back and amend it or see if the state tort system works” — into a thrilling and enraging narrative of judicial malfeasance: “A federal court just told them that none of this adds up to a civil rights violation.” The “this” cleverly conflates the violent incident with the complaint’s bare-allegation-of-intent. The judge ruled on the latter.
    • Lineage: The practice of repackaging an op-ed as an appellate brief while hiding the posture has a lineage that stretches back at least to the Federalist Society’s post-Bush v. Gore opinion-page campaigns, where the opinion page became the shadow appellate court. The technique is now standard across the conservative legal-media ecosystem.

  2. The “Misapplies” Framing (frame-engineered relabeling).

    • Textual cue: “The court misapplies its own standard.”
    • Catalogue cross-reference: frame_engineered_relabeling — the legal dispute is reframed as a judicial error rather than a pleading deficiency. “Misapplies” is the frame that activates the reader’s outrage circuit.
    • Operational function: At a 12(b)(6) stage, the “standard” is not merely a legal rule to be applied; it is a lens for reading the plaintiff’s own complaint. If the plaintiffs pleaded that the conspiracy targeted “anyone who got in their way,” the court is not “misapplying” that fact by citing it — it is legally bound to accept it as true for the moment. Goldfeder wants the court to discard the plaintiffs’ own allegation about the conspiracy’s breadth and instead weigh the slurs more heavily, which is a summary judgment argument, not a motion-to-dismiss one.

  3. The Appellate Brief in Op-Ed Drag.

    • Textual cue: The closing line: “…the Second Circuit should have the chance to say so on appeal.” The preceding paragraphs arguing the Klan Act analogy, “mixed-target conspiracies,” and perceived-class membership.
    • Catalogue cross-reference: Not a named technique in the catalog so much as a structural observation: writing for an appellate panel while purporting to write for a general readership.
    • Operational function: The piece functions as a shadow legal brief designed to influence the Second Circuit’s climate before an appeal is even filed. It is permissible advocacy, but labeling it “What the Columbia Riot Decision Gets Wrong About Civil Rights” — a title focused on the judicial failure — serves the propaganda function, not the legal one. The actual title of a dispassionate analysis would be closer to “Why the Torres Complaint’s Own Pleading Led to Dismissal, and What an Appellate Challenge Would Look Like.” This is the audience-management function in its most refined form: it directs the reader’s ire at a single judge, preparing the cultural ground for an appellate narrative.

The Record

Receipts.

  • Anchor receipt for the procedural posture (unconfirmed — convergence threshold not fully met without a live PACER link, but the source is the public docket, accessible by any citizen): A check of the Torres v. Carlson docket in the Southern District of New York will show the defense filed a motion to dismiss, and Judge McMahon’s decision is a ruling on that motion. This is standard civil procedure; a motion to dismiss is always the first major defensive move. (This is a provisional-receipt flag: the docket entry is the definitive confirmation, accessible via any RECAP or PACER login.)
  • The op-ed’s own text serves as a receipt for the omission: It contains no mention of “motion to dismiss,” “12(b)(6),” or “accepting the allegations as true.” The language “the court’s view,” “the court’s central holding” avoids any phrase that would alert the reader to the posture.
  • The Per-Citation Accuracy Verdict: The editorial does not misrepresent the text of the legal decisions it cites (Bray, Griffin, Carpenters, Jews for Jesus). Its legal argument is “wrong” in the same sense a lawyer’s brief is “wrong” when the other side wins: it minimizes the case-dispositive problem for its client. The cited cases do stand for the general propositions Goldfeder asserts; the accuracy problem is that Goldfeder applies them to a phantom version of the Torres case where the slurry of antisemitic animus was an adjudicated fact rather than a pleaded allegation, ignored by the judge. The judge did not ignore it; the judge weighed its pleaded-in-complaint context — the conspiracy’s own alleged willingness to target anyone — and found the class-based element legally insufficient at this stage.

Load-bearing omissions:

  1. The procedural posture. This is the whole operation. The editorial is structured so that a general reader will never know the case was dismissed because the complaint’s own stated scope of the conspiracy — targeting anyone who got in the way — doesn’t clear the Bray bar.
  2. The actual remedy. A motion-to-dismiss dismissal is rarely the end. The editorial omits that the judge may have given the plaintiffs leave to amend their complaint to fix this very deficiency, which is a standard practice.
  3. The state-law backup. The editorial admits at the very end that “The state tort system can compensate Torres and Wilson for their injuries.” It omits that this is a massive argument against a federal civil rights remedy being essential to their recovery. The framing buries that a remedy exists; it just didn’t get to use the “civil rights” label the author prefers.

How to Recognize This

The pattern. An advocate writes a legal commentary that is actually a brief, designed to make you angry at a judge for “misapplying” the law when the real story is about a mismatched legal tool (the complaint) and a procedural phase (motion to dismiss) you’re never told about.

The mechanism. By omitting the procedural posture, the writer elevates their own (real) evidence of bigotry into a conflict with the judge. The reader is forced to choose: believe the evidence of bigotry, or side with the judge who “ignored” it. There is no third option because the plea-bargaining reality of a Rule 12(b)(6) motion was never provided.

Signals to recognize it next time.

  • The piece uses words like “refused” or “ignored” about a judge’s engagement with key facts in a very recent, high-profile case without ever mentioning “motion to dismiss,” “summary judgment,” or the standard of review.
  • The piece’s legal analysis sounds like an argument you’d hear from one lawyer in an appeals court, not a neutral summary. (It often concludes with a line like “…the appeals court should have the chance to say so on appeal.”)
  • The piece frames a complicated, multi-element legal test as having an “obvious” answer that the judge just perversely refuses to see.

Why it works. It leverages your legitimate fear and anger about a real, documented problem (antisemitic violence) and channels it toward a procedural ruling you don’t understand. You trust the evidence of the crime, so you must distrust the judge who “let them off.”

What to do when you see it. Go directly to the court’s actual docket. It’s public. Look at the defense’s filing just before the judge’s opinion. If it says “Motion to Dismiss,” the judge was not judging the evidence; she was judging the plaintiff’s own written words. Send every claim back to that context. The anger should usually be directed at the lawyers who wrote a bad complaint, or at the legal standard itself. The judge is often just the messenger.

We operators drafted memos structured like this, where the anger was the intended product. The structure works exactly once, unless you know to look for the missing link in the chain. Now you know where to find it. Trust the documented record. The record is what sets you free from the frame.