Briahna Joy Gray, a.k.a. "Notorious BJG," has a résumé you'd expect of someone who is wrong about basically everything. She has two degrees from Harvard. She was a "journalist" for the Intercept and Rolling Stone, and worked for Bernie Sanders in 2020. She hosts an obscure left-wing podcast, and has been fired at least once for anti-Semitism.
Nevertheless, because she happens to be right about the most important things—war and the fundamental virtue of overwhelming military force—Briahna Joy Gray is a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year and honorary member of the neocon tribe.
People often reveal their true selves at their lowest moments. In May 2024, Gray was laughed off stage at the Dissident Dialogues festival in Brooklyn. She'd been utterly humiliated during a discussion about the war in Gaza after saying something normal Americans would regard as profoundly idiotic (although most Harvard faculty members would consider it brave and insightful).
"When Hamas is talking about eliminating Israel, it's talking about not killing all of the Jews," Gray said with a straight face. "It's about eliminating the idea of a Jewish state, ending a Jewish state, ending an ethno-nationalist state and having a state more like what we have in the United States of America." (Fact check: That is not what Hamas is talking about.)
"I hope someone drops a bomb on this entire building," Gray huffed to a fellow podcaster, lusting for disproportionate vengeance against "the most racist, Islamophobic audience" she'd ever seen. To be sure, Gray's privately expressed enthusiasm for targeted airstrikes against her enemies is (potentially) at odds with her public aversion to bombing actual terrorists. But her impulse was correct. Military force is the necessary and proper solution to nearly all of the world's problems.
We noticed Gray didn't say she wished someone would "fire a dinky rocket" at the building or "take them all hostage." Those tactics are for losers, and Gray knows it. Winners drop the bombs. She's still wrong about everything else. But the first step on the road to redemption is admitting you love war—and it's much easier to make that concession as a Free Beacon Man of the Year.
