Warren, discussing claims before the International Court of Justice that Israel has engaged in “genocide” in Gaza, told a crowd at the Islamic Center of Boston, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.” As Noah Rothman observed, Warren’s team unconvincingly tried to walk this back by claiming that Warren was “not sharing her views on whether genocide is occurring in Gaza” but simply predicting the path of the ICJ’s legal process (I say unconvincingly not only because her statement was a declarative and definitive assertion that the court has “ample evidence” to support the charge but also because it’s consistent with how Warren has talked about the Gaza war). She did so when even Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged under oath this week that “we don’t have any evidence of genocide.”

Like some of her shoddy academic work or her hypocrisy, deceit, and baseless hysteria in political debates or her biographical whoppers, one could ascribe this simply to dishonesty and political pandering. But first of all, this is all she does. Her economic arguments and analogies are almost invariably things that a person of modest intellect and familiarity with the world can see right through, like her thinking there’s a monopoly on sandwich shops or straining to compare Big Tech to baseball umpires. Her math is no better. Nor is her legal analysis, such as her claim that, in the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court justices “forced their unpopular agenda on the rest of America” by . . . letting Americans vote on the abortion issue.

The Gaza thing, however, is not just something so easily rebutted and so incautious about the details that it was politically stupid to say. It also reflects an inability to think.