Religion is a Mental Illness

Against Racialism, Left and Right

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, perplexing forms of open anti-Semitism have cropped up on both sides of the

Compact

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, perplexing forms of open anti-Semitism have cropped up on both sides of the political aisle. First visible on the political left with an eruption of protests and even of violence on Ivy League campuses, it also appeared soon enough on the political right.

What has transpired is a complex story about the academy and the internet, the elite and the fringes—one that we must confront directly as it reveals something rotten in our politics. This concerning trajectory can only be changed through the restoration of higher principles that once kept these threats in check. In the face of dangerous identity-based ideologies, it is crucial to return to America’s historic defense of colorblindness, meritocracy, and fair play.

Left-wingers have participated in anti-Israel and pro-Hamas agitation, in some cases even defending the Hamas militants who massacred approximately some 1,200 innocents, including at a music festival. Keffiyeh-clad student protesters captured buildings at Columbia, eventually setting off a wave of copycat flashpoints at other universities. Elites institutions like Harvard—which previously had issued statements on political controversies ranging from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo to the war in Ukraine—suddenly went silent on the Israel-Hamas war in the name of protecting freedom of speech.

These institutions have failed to keep in check the simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed ideology that undergirds the worldview of today’s left. The provincial-minded elites that call the shots in these institutions tend to filter every conflict through this ideological lens, looking primarily to skin color and then power dynamics as the main criteria for judging the rectitude of a cause. Palestinians, with their slightly darker skin tone and less developed economy and military, fit the “oppressed” mold, thus making the Jewish state their “oppressor.” 

Though this line of thought dates back to the 1960s (think of the Black Panthers’ alliance with the Palestinian cause), this is the first time that it has come to dominate discourse on university campuses. This is thanks in part to the collapse of intellectual diversity on campus. But it also has attracted numerous students and professors because of the prevalence of victim worship and the subsequent resentment toward successful groups. In their eyes, Palestinians are a kind of eternal victim. A pseudo-historical narrative tells us they have been victimized for time everlasting, and lack any agency in their own fate. Ironically, the oppression of the Jews dates back to biblical times, yet American Jews are one of the most successful groups in academia and other intellectual professions. The success of a minority group throws a wrench into the left’s narrative gears.

Across the political aisle, anti-Semitic ideologies have a history of appearing in the form of conspiratorial thinking on the fringes of American conservatism. Lately, it has been the non-traditional right-wingers—who, because of how our politics works, have been lumped in with “conservatism” writ large—who espouse such views. Take Kanye West, who was a kind of ally to Donald Tru.mp and then embedded himself within the right, eventually suffering from mental breakdowns and going off on anti-Semitic rants. 

Or Candace Owens, who, although always controversial, once understood where the lines lay. This was in part because of her employers, her partners, and the rules on platforms like YouTube or X (formerly Twitter). Yet in recent months, she began questioning whether the Axis powers deserved Western antipathy, and even apologizing for Kanye’s threat to “go defcon three on some Jews” and musing about a “small ring of people in Hollywood who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield” their supposed crimes (always careful to hedge, she insists this characterization doesn’t apply to American Jewry writ large, but the hallmarks of classic anti-Semitism are unmistakable in her discourse).

On X, many right-wing accounts espouse open anti-Semitism, often posting allegedly ironic memes about Adolf Hitler. I once posted something about critical race theory, and was told by one of these accounts, “Well, you know that critical race theory was invented by Jews.” Though this kind of right-wing conspiratorial thinking is nothing new, the fact that it has become so commonplace on online platforms like X is an alarming novelty that merits our concern.

The growing distrust of mainstream institutions that is characteristic of today’s right can’t be written off completely. This sentiment—ushered in by figures like Donald Tru.mp—swept away the broken establishment Republican consensus, yet it has failed to fill the ideological vacuum it has created. Tru.mp tried to fill it with partisan politics but lacked an adequate intellectual framework. Those who retrofitted their ideologies to Tru.mp attempted to create an intellectual substructure for his presidency, in some cases ushering in a kind of chaotic element. To be sure, chaos can create space for creativity. But it always comes with a downside.

This ideological vacuum is compounded with relaxed censorship policies on platforms like X, thanks to its new owner, Elon Musk. To be sure, this has allowed more space to express legitimate viewpoints and is preferable to the old censorship system. But it has also allowed conspiratorial thinking to gain traction. Worse, it has opened the door to alt-right influencers and the so-called Groypers, who have taken politics as a method of garnering attention and then monetizing it either on or off their platforms. This has all been exacerbated by the disappearance of gatekeepers and overall quality control within the post-establishmentarian right.

At face value, the fact that such seemingly opposed cultural subsets can find a point of convergence is perplexing, to say the least. One is in the academy, an elite group pursuing prestige. The other is on the internet, a fringe phenomenon, pursuing clicks. But if we take a closer look, we find that both are identity-based movements. Both movements are driven by envy, resentment, fear, and the impulse to locate a scapegoat to achieve their general political objectives. What’s at stake in these two groups having such an influence over discourse is something much bigger than the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

Should we fail to restrain their growth, we will have two large factions in the United States that want to abandon the principles of colorblind equality, fair play, and judging individuals on their own merit. Thus, this isn’t just a question of anti-Semitism, but a question of how we want to govern our society. It is in our best interest as a nation to reject both left-wing identity politics, which seeks to categorize everyone in an intersectional hierarchy and then use the state to force equity or the equalization of outcomes, and right-wing conspiratorial thinking, a form of pessimism used to pin one’s failures on someone else’s success.

We are blessed to live in a country where people can succeed when they work hard and put their talent to good use. It is imperative that we fight to maintain a narrative that reflects this reality, rather than capitulating to pessimistic ideologies divorced from the facts. 

In 1790, George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, RI. This letter offers us a model of how American principles can assimilate minority groups and, in particular, American Jews. Some scholars view it as the first time that Jews were welcomed as full citizens of a modern national polity. Washington acknowledged that Jews have the same liberties, rights, and benefits of citizenship. And that citizenship requires all of us to work hard, to contribute to society, and to play by the rules. 

Washington’s letter should cause us to reflect on how far we have come since the time he wrote it. Today, our nation is home to a diverse mix of people from a variety of continental, racial, and religious backgrounds. The principles that Washington laid out are precisely the ones that can still work today if we are dedicated to them. The recent surge in racialist and conspiratorial thinking calls us to renew the case for these principles and to argue for them. 

This is the only way forward for the country.

Opinion | Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?

An incident at Columbia suggests that schools beset with antisemitism are beyond salvation.

nytimes.com

The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

Regarding the first question, some argue that the furor over the campus protests is much ado about not much. The demonstrators, they say, represent only a small fraction of students. The ugliest antisemitic expressions occasionally seen at these events are mainly the work of outside provocateurs. And the student protesters (some of whom are Jewish) are acting out of youthful idealism, not age-old antisemitism. As they see it, they aim only to save Palestinian lives and oppose the involvement of their universities in the abuses of a racist Israeli state.

There’s something to these points. With notable exceptions, campus life at these schools is somewhat less roiled by protest than the media makes it seem. Outside groups, as more than one university president has told me, have played an outsize role in setting up encampments and radicalizing students. And few student demonstrators, I’d wager, consciously think they harbor an anti-Jewish prejudice.

But this lets the kids off the hook too easily.

Students who police words like “blacklist” or “whitewash” and see “microaggressions” in everyday life ignore the entreaties of their Jewish peers to avoid chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Students who claim they’re horribly pained by scenes of Palestinian suffering were largely silent on Oct. 7 — when they weren’t openly cheering the attacks. And students who team up with outside groups that are in overt sympathy with Islamist terrorists aren’t innocents. They’re collaborators.

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.

They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.

That’s the significance of the leaked images of four Columbia University deans exchanging dismissive and sophomoric text messages during a panel discussion in May on Jewish life on campus, including the suggestion that a panelist was “taking full advantage of this moment” for the sake of the “fundraising potential.”

Columbia placed three of the deans on leave. Other universities, like Penn, have belatedly moved to ban encampments. But those steps have a grudging and reactive feel — more a response to Title VI investigations of discrimination and congressional hearings than a genuine acknowledgment that something is deeply amiss with the values of a university. At Harvard, two successive members of the task force on antisemitism resigned in frustration. “We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see,” wrote Rabbi David Wolpe in his resignation announcement.

That’s the key point. More dismaying than the fact that student protesters are fellow traveling with Hamas is that with their rhyming chants and identical talking points, they sound more like Maoist cadres than critical thinkers. As the sociologist Ilana Redstone, author of the smart and timely book “The Certainty Trap,” told me on Monday, “higher education traded humility and curiosity for conviction and advocacy — all in the name of being inclusive. Certainty yields students who are contemptuous of disagreement.”

And so the second question: What are Jewish students and alumni to do?

It’s telling that the Columbia deans were caught chortling during exactly the kind of earnest panel discussion that the university convened presumably to show alumni they are tackling campus antisemitism. They were paying more lip service than attention. My guess is that they, along with many of their colleagues, struggle to see the problem because they think it lies with a handful of extremist professors and obnoxious students.

But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?

Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it. That could take decades. In the meantime, Jews have a history of parting company with institutions that mistreated them, like white-shoe law firms and commercial banks. In so many cases, they went on to create better institutions that operated on principles of intellectual merit and fair play — including many of the universities that have since stumbled.

If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give a Penn or a Columbia — or just a rising high school senior wondering where to apply — maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new. That’s a subject for a future column.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. – Rob Henderson

Why I Left the Left

Not your typical red pill narrative

freeblackthought.substack.com

Not your typical red pill narrative

There are so many “why I left the left” stories, but I promise you this isn’t your typical red pill narrative. I didn't go from a Democrat to a Republican or a woke leftist to a conservative. This false dichotomy—this idea that there's only left and right—is how I got into this mess in the first place. I want to discuss how I ended up on the left, why I left the left, and where I stand now as someone disappointed by both political options we are presented with today.

As a Gen Z individual, I witnessed social media indoctrinating many people my age into wokeness. For me, it was through school. My home culture played a part, especially the heavy emphasis on identity politics, where being black was supposed to determine my decisions, particularly political ones. But the full woke hierarchy—the idea that every aspect of your identity has to be categorized as either oppressed or oppressor—was introduced to me through my school’s DEI program. Affinity groups at school, separated by race to discuss oppression, introduced me to the privilege-oppressed hierarchy, or what could be called the “whose-feelings-matter-more hierarchy.”

I learned that white people were more privileged than non-white people, men more privileged than women, straight people more privileged than gay people, Christians more privileged than Muslims, and so on. This was supposed to determine a person's morality—judging people not by their actions or words but by these arbitrary labels of “oppressed” or “privileged” based on group identity.

At first, I didn’t buy into the DEI identity politics because it contradicted what I saw with my own eyes. I had friends of all races. I had friends that were men. I had friends that I was being told were more “privileged” than I was, but I never felt oppressed or harmed by them. However, my views changed in 2016 when Trump was nominated for president. As a high school senior in Texas, I didn’t know much about his politics (I wasn’t following any of his speeches), but I heard from teachers that if Trump were elected, America would become a post-apocalyptic hellscape where my rights would be violated, and I would be enslaved or put into a concentration camp because I was a black woman.

Living in a predominantly Republican area, many of my friends supported Trump. I never questioned their support of Trump’s policies; I simply assumed my friends—my white friends, my male friends—were voting for someone who wanted to harm me because they were privileged. That was what I was being told and taught in school.

The next year, I went to MIT in Boston—one of the bluest cities in one of the bluest states—where the DEI and identity politics culture was even more intense. Everyone was paranoid about offending someone due to the serious social and academic repercussions. The DEI department at MIT was super intense, and you could get in serious trouble for offending someone with “hate speech,” a loosely defined term that pretty much meant asking, (1) Did you offend someone?, (2) How badly were their feelings hurt?, (3) And where are they relative to you in the hierarchy? The answers would determine what repercussions you’d face.

I don’t want to pretend this had everything to do with the people around me. There was no one putting a gun to my head and telling me I had to accept these crazy ideas. No one forced me to believe that you had to validate everyone’s pronouns and identities or else you were harming them. No one forced me to believe that you couldn’t wear certain makeup or hairstyles or you were harming them. No one forced me to believe that you couldn’t state certain factual truths about history or the world, or else you were harming people. All of these were ideas that I accepted willingly.

One of the craziest things that I believed during that time was that I was non-binary. For one thing, I wasn’t a very stereotypical girly girl, and I had (and still have) some traditionally masculine traits. I tend to prefer leadership positions, and I was told that if I didn’t identify as non-binary, I would be invalidating the people who did because I shared similarities with them in the way that I acted and behaved. But honestly, there was a second, subconscious reason: I knew, on some level, that if I identified as non-binary, I would gain more oppression points in the hierarchy. I wouldn’t feel so paranoid about my words offending people.

This paranoia (of offending people) was so intense—at least for me, and I would assume for others—that I was willing to accept something or to claim that I was something that wasn’t true. By the end of my first semester in college, I was at my most woke. I was paranoid about offending people, sensitive to being offended, and aggressive in policing others’ actions and words. I even reported people to the DEI department for being offensive. (I was a menace!)

But things changed when I got sick and was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. At 18, I ended up in the hospital with half of my body paralyzed, the youngest person in the adult ward of the hospital, in need of 24/7 care.

Even though I identified as non-binary, I was still biologically female. Needing a female nurse for my safety and personal comfort conflicted with my identity as non-binary and the fear of offending someone. To ask for a female nurse—to acknowledge a difference between male and female—meant invalidating my own non-binary identity. More importantly, I wondered about the hospital’s definition of “female.” What if I got a nurse who identified as a woman but wasn’t what I was asking for? In that case, I’d have to clarify what I meant by “female” or “woman,” which might offend someone. Offending someone (I thought at the time) meant harming them, which was the worst thing I could do.

So I’m sitting in the hospital, and I’m weighing these two alternatives: Either (1) I prioritize my safety, which means I have to give up everything that I think is moral, or (2) I do what I think is right, but that means putting myself potentially in a more dangerous situation. I decided to put my safety first. I asked for a female nurse. I was ready to specify what I wanted, but I was in Texas at the time, and this was 2018, so it was not an issue. Gender ideology wasn’t very widespread; they knew exactly what I was talking about, and I ended up with a nurse who was a woman.

But this led to a moral crisis. What I believed to be moral and what I believed to be true were at odds. And it wasn’t just this dilemma—I’d discovered a serious flaw in my entire path of thinking, a deeper philosophical issue. Were reality and morality incompatible? Surely, that couldn’t be right.

Returning to school, I had a lot of questions: Is it true that hurting someone’s feelings is the worst thing that we can do and is actually the equivalent of physically harming someone? We are pretending that “man” and “woman” don’t have definitions, but this conflicts with biological reality. Why are we doing this? Is it healthy to constantly live in fear and be paranoid about being a bad person when nothing that you’re doing or saying has any bad intent?

These questions led to a lot of pushback. Some people seemed nervous that I was asking questions, and they would either quickly change the topic or whisper something like, “Oh, of course, these ideas are true. Why are you even asking? We don’t ask if these ideas are true. It’s just obvious.” Some got angry: “Why are you asking questions?! Trump supporters ask these types of questions! Fox News right-wing conspiracy theorists ask these types of questions! Are you a Trump-supporting, Fox News-watching, right-wing conspiracy theorist?—because that means that you’re against us! Either you’re with us, or you’re against us, and if you’re asking these questions, you’re siding with the people who are trying to enslave you and put you in concentration camps and doing all of these evil things!” These reactions were, in retrospect, a very obvious red flag, and I wish that at this point I’d realized I was in a kind of cult, but unfortunately, I didn’t.

If it’s not obvious, everything that I believed at this time was something somebody else said that I blindly followed as if it were true. I didn’t have the self-esteem to think through these ideas and consider whether they made sense. My peers, family members, friends, and mentors accepted these ideas, so I had no legitimate reason to question or challenge them. I fell back into accepting these beliefs, or at least that’s how I made it appear. While I reverted to calling myself non-binary, policing other people’s language, and reporting people to the DEI department, I secretly struggled with the idea that this was all wrong.

I began to realize there were so many cracks, inconsistencies, and illogical aspects to what I believed that I couldn’t put my head back in the sand and pretend they weren’t there. This was a really hard time in my life. I became depressed because I believed that asking these questions and searching for the truth made me a bad person.

Then the COVID pandemic came along, which surprisingly saved my life. During lockdowns, I was forced to sit with my thoughts and acknowledge the doubts and confusions that I had without any of the external influences that kept me trapped in this mindset. After thinking things through, I concluded that almost everything I believed was bullshit. But I still needed an extra push to fully trust my brain.

I was struggling with that self-esteem bit when I coincidentally had a conversation with my brother, who was not a Trump supporter, didn’t watch Fox News, wasn’t a right-wing conspiracy theorist, and had no interest in politics at all. Out of nowhere, he asked me, “Have you met these people in Boston who are crazy? They can’t define what a woman is. They’re offended by everything. They think facts don’t matter if they hurt people’s feelings.” Hearing this from my non-political brother made me realize I wasn’t the only person asking these questions. It was the nudge I needed to accept that it’s okay to ask questions and to explore alternatives to the woke nonsense I’d been taught. I started to pay attention to what was happening around me and think through what people were saying, what they believed, and why.

COVID may have been the catalyst for me to reassess my beliefs, but it also hit me particularly hard. Living with an autoimmune disorder, I was one of the individuals the government claimed their policies around lockdowns, mask requirements, vaccine mandates, and other measures were intended to protect. Unfortunately, they did the opposite. I know how to take care of my health. I’ve been doing it for years. I know when to wear a mask, but the government mask mandate—in Boston, you had to wear masks in public spaces—caused the price of masks to skyrocket and, in many places, created a shortage. Getting a mask under those policies was much harder for me.

Further, I needed to go to my specialist for treatment, but I had to travel to get there. The government required vaccines to fly, but my disorder makes certain vaccines riskier. I faced a dilemma: Should I risk my health by getting the vaccine or by not getting it? Not getting it would mean that I couldn’t travel to see the one specialist who could treat my rare condition. The shutdowns were another challenge. I preferred staying home to avoid crowded grocery stores, but when they closed all “non-essential” businesses, the remaining “essential” ones became overwhelmed. This, again, led to shortages of necessities like food and medical supplies (not to mention toilet paper!), and since delivery services were also suspended, I was forced to venture out for supplies that were often out of stock. None of these policies improved my life in any way.

I remember confiding to some of my friends (who happened to be woke leftists), “Hey, I have an autoimmune disorder, and these policies are not helping me, I don’t think I support them.” Their unsympathetic response was, “Are you listening to Trump supporters? Are you watching Fox News? Are you suddenly a right-wing conspiracy theorist?!”

Not long after, the BLM riots happened, and I had friends who couldn’t leave their houses because they were under curfew. It became apparent that these riots stemmed from non-factual beliefs about a police shooting. I remember asking questions like, “Do you really think that burning down buildings and businesses is going to get you what you want in this situation, which is policy change?” And the response that I got back was (can you guess?) that I must be a Trump-supporting, Fox News-watching, right-wing conspiracy theorist. There were no facts or logic behind their beliefs, just parroting what they heard, believing it made them good people.

Many had their “red pill” moment in 2020, leaving the Democrats and embracing conservatism. And let me be honest: when I left the left, I first called myself a conservative, not because I believed everything conservatives said, but because I saw it as the lesser of two evils. When I took the time to explore the full range of ideas out there—because there’s more than just woke or conservative, there’s more than just Democrat or Republican—I realized that I didn’t have to call myself a conservative or woke. Neither label applied. I realized I could reject both, and I did.

The conservative movement has almost all of the same flaws as wokeness. Many conservatives are easily offended, valuing faith and feelings over facts. They might get upset when they see a man wearing a dress, a woman expressing her choice not to marry or have children, or someone speaking Spanish (rather than English) at the grocery store. Many conservatives are religious, and like wokeness, their beliefs often lack a factual or evidentiary basis. Christianity, like gender ideology, relies heavily on subjective belief. I was briefly labeled a conspiracy theorist for expressing some ideas associated with conservatives, and I even joked about it. But there’s truth to the stereotype. Many conservatives blindly accept claims from sources like Fox News or personalities like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens without demanding evidence.

Conservatives often engage in identity politics as well. It’s common to see individuals on social media disparage the achievements of black people, attributing their success to affirmative action or DEI policies without evidence or consideration of the individual’s merits. They make assumptions based solely on race, mirroring the flawed privileged-oppressed hierarchy often associated with the left. This is the point where some will say, “Oh okay, well you’re not an ‘extremist,’ you don’t believe in the extreme left or the extreme right, so therefore you’re a ‘centrist,’ you’re somewhere in the middle—you believe in a mix of both.” Frankly, that’s absurd. I don’t think of myself as halfway between crazy and crazy. Rational thinking is not on a spectrum with crazy at each pole; consequently, I reject this left-right dichotomy altogether. It’s illogical to place conservatives on one end of a spectrum and woke people on the other. I don’t identify as woke, conservative, or a centrist. So, what am I?

First, I am a rational thinker. I value logic, facts, and evidence. I think for myself. You won’t hear me deferring to anybody else to determine my views. I will never say, “Oh yeah, so-and-so thinks this is true, or so-and-so has these credentials, therefore, everything they say is right.” That’s not how I think. I also will never claim morality should be based on people’s feelings regardless of facts; morality and reality are not opposed. Second, I consider myself an individualist. I completely reject the idea that someone’s race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, or any of these unchosen characteristics determine what somebody should say or do, how they should think, or how they should be judged. I have my brain, as everybody else on the planet does, so I will judge each person based on their beliefs and actions in their unique circumstances, not based on some unchosen group they’re part of. Third, I’m a capitalist without apology. I believe in the individual’s capacity for rational thought. Every person should be allowed to live according to what they know best suits their circumstances.

I don’t believe that either the Democrats or the Republicans truly embody these ideals. They fail to grasp that people have their own minds and require the freedom to make decisions for their own lives. This lack of understanding is reflected in their policies. Someone will inevitably say, “Well, you must be a libertarian.” No, I don’t identify as a libertarian, and the reason behind that deserves its own dedicated story (perhaps I’ll share one if there’s enough interest).

Despite the abundance of “why I left the left” stories out there, my motivation for sharing this testimonial stems from the realization that many people find themselves in a situation similar to mine. They are abandoning the left, recognizing the presence of an incredibly bizarre and cultish ideology that’s reaching a boiling point. Yet, they’re simultaneously dissatisfied with what they observe in the conservative movement, leaving them feeling lost and unsure where to turn. Like me, they feel politically homeless.

I understand that this sense of political homelessness can be isolating, but I want to assure anyone experiencing these feelings that you are not alone. Countless individuals share our perspective, and I am committed to creating content that challenges the false dichotomy that you must be either left or right, Republican or Democrat, conservative or woke. This notion is fundamentally flawed and simply untrue.

There are many ways of thinking, and I want to explore them on my YouTube channel and in other forums, including the Journal of Free Black Thought. You can be your own person. Build trust in yourself, use your brain, and come to your own conclusions about things. How do you describe your political philosophy or orientation? Do you consider yourself left or right, woke or conservative, Democrat or Republican, or libertarian? Or are you politically homeless like me?

Kiyah Willis is a fellow at Objective Standard Institute focusing on cultural trends and their causes and consequences. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kiyah worked as a data analyst before transitioning to philosophy. You can find her advocating reason, individualism, and liberty on Twitter and TikTok and on her Substack, Growing to Truth.

Editors’ note: This essay is a lightly edited transcript of a YouTube monolog. The video is linked below, in the body of the essay.

A paradigm shift in countering antisemitism: Make American values relevant again

The Jewish community's inability to counter the growing antipathy toward Israel and Jews on college campuses with its current policies compe

eJewishPhilanthropy

While the Jewish world was reeling from the inhumanity of the Oct. 7 massacre, an immediate aftershock came in the form of the anti-Israel rallies on college campuses and on the streets of major cities. Since that time, the protests have only intensified. Opposing Israel has become fashionable in some circles. Campus activists feel imbued with a sense of historic mission, perceiving themselves as the modern embodiment of the protest movements of the 1960s. Many Jewish professionals and lay leaders remain overwhelmed and unclear as to how to proceed. Years of investment in countering various forms of antisemitism have been proven inadequate. It should be clear by now that we need a new strategic approach and a comprehensive plan to enact it.

The post-Oct. 7 reality dictates a strategy that counters underlying ideological currents, places Jewish concerns in the context of broader American interests and upholds American and Western values. The current focus on antisemitism makes it appear that the strife on and off campus is a Jewish problem rather than an American problem. Antisemitism is low on the relevance scale for most Americans, but the health of American society is central. Based on our assessment of what went wrong, current survey data and key trends, we believe that the Jewish security is inextricably linked to firming up larger support for American values and a renewed commitment to the U.S.’s key geopolitical interests. We further argue that American Jewish organizations should prioritize work with new partners in civil society who share this mission and who should take center stage in effecting a larger cultural shift. In short, we believe the best defense against antisemitism is restoring the commitment of Americans to the nation’s founding principles under which American Jews and other minorities have thrived.

The anti-Israel narrative — Israel as an apartheid, colonialist enterprise — gained limited support on college campuses over the past few decades. Yet trends in survey data indicate that while the anti-Israel narrative caused a slow erosion of support for Israel, the overwhelming majority of college students remained neutral and attitudes towards Jews were largely unaffected. In fact, the data through 2016 indicates that, even in the face of hostile campus rhetoric, most college students and most Americans cared little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The issue was just not relevant to them and they remained in the “middle” — neither “core supporters” nor the “unreachable.” Likewise, antisemitism among college students remained low. Research indicated that the large group in the middle represented an opportunity as it could be swayed towards Israel once it was shown the broader face and humanity of the Israeli people.

So if the same anti-Israel narrative has been around for decades, what explains the dramatic increase in its acceptance now? Simply put, anti-Israel forces have found a way to make their cause relevant to a growing swath of Americans by linking it to the significant cultural and ideological shifts over the past ten years.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and changes in the social media landscape, a binary ideology that divides society into oppressors and oppressed, skyrocketed in popularity on campuses. Anti-Israel groups successfully aligned themselves with activist groups representing marginalized communities, thereby significantly expanding the cohort of young Americans sympathetic to their cause. For the first time, Jewish students found themselves excluded from student social justice activities due to their sympathies towards Israel.

In the heated aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, this binary, oppressor-oppressed ideology found new audiences outside campuses. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, which frequently enshrined the oppressor-oppressed ideology, gained broad-scale penetration into numerous mainstream institutions including business, government, media, science, medicine, culture, K-12 schools, etc. So while the State of Israel and, now, Jews are seen by many as white, privileged oppressors in a broad swath of institutions, Hamas is increasingly seen as a legitimate resistance movement representing the marginalized.

It is important to note that notwithstanding the titular expression of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, protests against Israel on U.S. campuses are about far more than the Jewish state. Instead, they are often part of a larger agenda that aims to reshape the power structure, dismantle the larger social order, defund the police, undermine the very notion of meritocracy and undo the market economy and concept of private property. Many protesters on campus explicitly cite this larger worldview as a motivation for their campus activism. 

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that in the wake of Oct. 7, most surveys of young people show high levels of support for Palestinians/Hamas and declining support for Israel. The majority are no longer in the swayable middle. Moreover, for the first time since the Anti-Defamation League began measuring such trends, young Americans are more likely to believe antisemitic tropes than older Americans. In short, by aligning with cultural shifts occurring among the progressive left, anti-Israel forces — many representing extreme Islamist perspectives — have successfully made their narrative relevant to many young Americans.

While the Jewish community was busy maintaining support for Israel in the political arena, ideologues sought to and succeeded in changing the culture. We are now experiencing the downstream effects of our collective failure to counter dangerous cultural trends.

If Israel is to retain American support down the road and if Jews are to be safe in this country, then action must be taken to reverse these cultural shifts. For the most part, the Jewish community has responded to the post-Oct. 7th onslaught with well-funded efforts to counter antisemitism and anti-Zionism. It is not doing enough to make its case more relevant to Americans than it was years ago, unlike the anti-Israel camp, which broadened its appeal in the intersectional arena.

Yet there is good news amid the bad. In this highly charged environment, Israel and its allies have lost support among college students, but not among most Americans. Raucous anti-Israel protests on campuses have alarmed many Americans, who are concerned that these anarchists pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. The Jewish communal world needs to take a page from its enemies’ playbook and make its cause more broadly relevant by aligning with the significant percentage of Americans who believe in the American dream, oppose chaos and support the principled use of American power in the world. Jews represent only 2% of the American population; we cannot win this battle on our own.

The Jewish community needs to work with those who are already fighting back on various fronts and to catalyze the energies of those who may be concerned but are not yet taking action. The focus of such coalitional efforts must be on strengthening the American narrative and values, not on antisemitism or Israel. And these efforts need to be led by diverse American voices rather than Jewish groups, as they will be seen as more believable and less likely to have an agenda. In short, the Jewish community needs to lead from behind.

We are currently developing a white paper that lays out in greater detail the needed strategic shift and will be holding sessions in person and online in the coming months. For more information, email: [email protected] 

Melanie Phillips: Dead Israelis disturb the narrative. They upset the narrative. By which I mean that it's not just a view, it's become a kind of-- not even just a cause, it's a kind of article of faith among the progressive West that Israel was created by the Jews through Western guilt over the Holocaust, being parachuted in to a country called Palestine and uprooting the indigenous people of Palestine who've been there since time immemorial and taking over and booting them out and then oppressing the rest who remain. And who wish to expand their territory as a result.

Every single part of that is untrue. It's a lie. It's a falsehood, okay. But that is the narrative. The narrative is of oppressive Israelis and oppressed Palestinians. And therefore, because in our victim cultural world, if you are a victim and you are oppressed, you are given a moral free pass for anything that you do. Anything that you do that's bad, cannot be-- you cannot be morally responsible for it. It must be the result of what's been done to you.

So, Palestinian terrorism has been regarded as, okay we don't-- we don't approve of it, we can't bear violence but nevertheless it's resistance, it's understandable given the despair that they are in.

And conversely, anything the Israelis do as the oppressors cannot ever-- they cannot ever be victims. They cannot ever be victims; they can only be oppressors.

Suddenly one has, suddenly, people with this mindset have been faced with the appalling visual proof that the people and the cause they've supported resulted in acts of barbarism, of a kind that nobody ever thought they would see again after the Holocaust. And it's been perpetrated by people that they have broadly supported and a certainly a cause they have absolutely supported. And suddenly the cause turns into something which is genocide.

But they've been accusing Israel of genocide, which is amazing considering the population of Gaza and the Palestinian territories has increased by what, three times, four times since 1948 when Israel was created? That's some genocide. But put that to one side.

So, it's to serve the narrative and they can't have that. Now, why can't they have that? Why can't they say, okay it's a bit embarrassing to have to admit that the cause I've pinned my idealism on for the last 30 years is actually fake, but nevertheless, I have to agree, um, uh you know, uh, right.

Now, why can't they say that? And my view having been part of that way of thinking for a long time and certainly having had all my friends and colleagues as part of that way of thinking for a long time, and studied them up close, my view is that they can never say this to themselves because it's not simply a question of saying they're wrong, their belief system is based on the fact that every single thing they believe encompasses and embodies moral virtue.

They believe in the betterment of society, they believe in creating a better world, they believe in standing up for the oppressed against the oppressor, they believe in justice against Injustice, they believe in in all these wonderful things. And consequently, anybody who stands up and says anything against them, against any of these wonderful things is not only wrong but evil and has to be stamped out as basically an enemy of humanity. Now, we see this in our domestic politics, victim culture and all of that, over a range of domestic issues.

But it is absolutely part of their moral personality. What they dread more than anything else, the worst thing in the world that could happen to them, is to take a position which in their minds would make them a right-winger and therefore evil, or evil and therefore a right-winger, because all evil comes from the right and all right wingers are evil.

And consequently, faced with this situation that they saw on October the 7th unfolding in front of our horrified gaze, they are faced with the challenge in which they say to themselves, you know am I supposed to junk what I've believed? That will make me an evil right-winger. And that's so terrible to them because they think that will disintegrate their entire moral personality.

So, they're going to find a way of dealing with this. So, we hear, for example, on the one hand the silence. The silence from so-called "feminists" who have told the entire male population of the world they are intrinsically evil because they're all intrinsically potential rapists and therefore, you know, "the patriarchy" and all the rest of it you know.

Untold numbers of men are unable to have proper relationships with women because of that. All those feminists are silent. Well not perhaps all, perhaps some have come out. Silent when faced with the appalling rapes of women in that October the 7th atrocity. And the way they deal with it is by saying saying, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Regardless of what we've all seen and heard.

So, there's those people who are silent. And then there are people who try to invert it. They say, well, I mean it was terrible, yes and of course I abhor these brutal things, but nevertheless, but, but, but...

As soon as you hear the "but," you know. The cause, the cause. And when you say to them, as I have done over decades, what are you talking about, the cause? What cause of despair? You're talking about the fact they don't have a Palestine state? They have been offered a Palestine state over and over again from the 1930s onwards. The last offer consisted of approximately 95% plus of the territory they were demanding, and their reaction has always been to refuse and to start murdering Jews again.

And when you say that to them, they say, no, no that's not true, that's not true, and they bring up a whole load of chaff, verbal chaff. In other words, their reaction is, it's not true, it's not true, I'm not believing what I'm seeing in front of my eyes even.

Because they cannot ever tolerate this idea that their moral personality was based on a monstrous inversion of morality.

Ivy League LGBTQ+ numbers soar and students point to identity politics

More than a third of students at Stanford and Brown and over a quarter at Yale and Harvard identify as LGBTQ+, per recent polling. That’s fa

New York Post

While just 7% of Americans are LGBTQ+, students at Ivy League universities are identifying as non-straight at rates as much as five times the general public.

Brown University made headlines after a student poll revealed a whopping 38% of their student body is not straight.

“Honestly I’m not surprised by that statistic,” an anonymous senior at Brown University told The Post. “At Brown, there’s no social pressure to fit into a box or hide your identity.”

Other Ivies aren’t far behind. In fact, more than a third of students at Princeton and more than a quarter at Yale and Harvard identify as LGBTQ+, as per recent polling — and campus sources chalk it up, in part, to politics and a desire to join an “oppressed” group.”

According to the Census Bureau, 20% of Gen Z is LGBTQ+, far more than older cohorts. But Ivy League students far outstrip their generation as a whole.

According to Abigail Anthony, who graduated from Princeton University with a degree in politics this year, a progressive and identity-consumed culture on elite campuses could be contributing.

“Since sexual orientation identity is largely non-falsifiable, many people will claim LGBTQ status to join the ‘oppressed’ group,” she told The Post.

According to a Princeton student newspaper survey, 35% of the 2023 graduating class identified as something other than straight.

“It could be that students at elite schools are more inclined to be obsessed with social acceptance and professional advancement, and … profess an LGBTQ identity to indicate their political beliefs on a campus that leans left,” she added.

At schools for which historical data is available, the proportion of students who are not straight is skyrocketing. Brown jumped from 14% in 2010 up to 38% this year.

Some 29% of Yale’s class of 2023 identified as something other than heterosexual when they were surveyed as freshmen in 2019. That’s up from just 15% of the class of 2020 when they were asked by the school paper in 2016.

And the proportion of LGBTQ+ students at Harvard tripled over the last decade, from 10% of incoming freshmen in 2013 to 29% in 2021.

The most recent data from Cornell comes from 2017, when 21.4% of freshmen were LGBTQ+. The University of Pennsylvania is an outlier, at just 15% as of 2022.

Ben Appel, 40, finished his undergraduate degree in 2020 as an adult student at Columbia’s General Studies program. And, although he is gay himself, he said his Gen Z classmates were markedly more likely to identify as “queer.”

“Queer is as much politics as it is a sexual identity. Maybe even more so,” Appel, author of the forthcoming book “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic,” told The Post. “The Ivies have a lot of really privileged kids. I’m sure many are motivated to identify into a so-called marginalized community in order to earn some social cache.”

He thinks a growing number of amorphous labels allow more people to fall under the LGBT umbrella than ever before.

“The ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrellas have expanded to include gender-nonconforming people and even people who would normally be considered straight,” Appel noted.

Anthony agrees: “In some instances, a straight person will identify as bisexual but simply continue dating the opposite sex.”

Although Columbia hasn’t published similar figures, Appel and another Columbia graduate both estimate they are in line with other Ivy League schools.

“It’s becoming a majority,” an anonymous member of Columbia’s class of 2022 observed.

Appel said that Ivy League universities are particularly likely to have curriculum that is fixated on gender and sexuality.

“It makes sense that these polls were taken at Ivy League universities,” he told The Post. “Students take one queer theory course and come out as queer.”

At Princeton this year, 35% of seniors identified as something other than straight, compared with just 25% of incoming freshmen. And nearly one in five Princeton grads this year came out while in college.

Cornell developmental psychology professor and young adult sexuality expert Ritch Savin-Williams believes that Gen Z students are coming out in larger numbers due to increased social acceptance — especially on progressive campuses: “The shift has been in the visibility and the willingness of individuals to express it and to declare it.”

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." -- Charlie Munger

The scenes from before the festival radiated love and kindness. That 10-second clip of Shani Louk dancing, you watch it and you think, this is what they fought for.

And then there's the image of Shani Louk on the back of that truck and the one of her being dragged through the streets of Gaza, thousands cheering and running after her desecrated body. Can you even imagine a starker contrast of good versus evil? It was joy, love, life versus violence, rape and death. Surely, I thought in my naivete, the left would see themselves reflected in these music-loving young people who looked like they had stepped out of the Haight Ashbury in the 70s. Surely Noa Argamani begging for her life as the butchers ride off with her would Inspire in the left a sense of identification and a corresponding sense of fear and anger. How could it not?

Friends it did not. Leftist women found nothing in their hearts to say about it for months. There was a total failure of the international feminist community to stand up for the Israeli women who had been brutalized by Hamas in a particularly sexual way. Despite the preponderance of evidence, there was a code of cilence from the usual suspects. Some would even deny it. YouTube personalities formed what I like to call an "Our Hamas Would Never" Brigade to defend the butchers and the rapists from the evidence of their crimes, insisting it was all war propaganda.

Now this would be bad enough. But you have to remember, these women, these publications, these YouTube personalities, you have to remember who they are. These aren't people who, in general, feel that one should have a high standard of evidence before making an accusation of rape. The exact opposite is true. These are the people who demanded that all standards around evidence for accusations of sexual assault be completely suspended. These are the people who demanded that a standard of affirmative consent be deployed to judge whether a woman had consented to sex, and without that affirmation, any sexual encounter was to be deemed rape.

These are the people who recoded bad sex as rape, sex one regretted as rape, flirtation as harassment, regrettable kissing as assault. And then they turned around and said, well does shooting nails into a woman's vagina truly count as rape? Does chopping off a woman's breasts really count as a sexual war crime? Would our Hamas, who after all are very religious people, ever rape anybody?

Never mind that Hamas had filmed themselves committing these atrocities, had bragged about themm had GoProed them and sent the images to these women's families, never mind that they had little booklets with helpfully translated phrases into Hebrew like, take off your pants. The left was silent, the feminists were AWOL.

How could this possibly be? How could it be that just six years after the MeToo movement, which gave voice to the outrage women felt at being sexually harassed at work, which upended gender relations and wreaked havoc on workplace after workplace because men had complimented their female co-workers, how could it be that these same women who demanded "believe all women" could turn around and say, actually don't believe the confessions of terrorist rapists? The same women who demanded men be fired for asking women out and driven from public life for having consensual sex with underlings, were now defending, with their words or with their silence, the mass rape of Israeli women, siding with men who had driven nails into women's vaginas and cut off their breasts to play with them. The same women and organizations who turned flirting at the office into the civil rights issue of our time, when presented with evidence of the mass rape of Jewish women immediately began to say, we need more context, we need more evidence, remember the plight of the true victims here, who it turned out, were the perpetrators.

They took their standard of "believe all women" and turned it on a dime to "don't believe the bragging of rapists" because their victims were Jews. And this isn't just on the leftist fringe unfortunately. On CNN Dana Bash asked Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who I believe is the head of the progressive caucus, she said to her, "I have seen a lot of progressive women generally speaking that are quick to defend women's rights and speak out against using rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent on what we saw on October 7th and what might be happening inside Gaza right now to these hostages."

"Why is that?" she asked Pramila Jayapal. To which Jayapal replied, "I think that rape is horrific. Sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against the Palestinians. 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes, three quarters of whom are women and children," she said. Because "Our Hamas Would Never" lie about such a thing.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, which had an extensive article outlining the mass rapes, then shelved an episode of its popular podcast "The Daily" about the rapes due to internal pressure from its leftist newsroom, which apparently is chock full of members of the "Our Hamas Would Never" Brigade. the New York Times refused to stand by its own reporting when its sociopathic woke employees demanded that their audience be protected from knowing about this.

How is this happening? It's easy say this is just antisemitism. And I want to be clear: of course it's deeply fucking antisemitic. There's also the political calculation of trying to satisfy multiple constituencies and the fact that, and I think this is very important, the women's movement has been severely weakened by the transgender agenda, which has gotten women used to being asked to defend transgender rapists, for example in prisons, or transgender athletes beating up women in sports. I think that being forced to defend this has had a huge impact on the women's movement.

But it goes beyond that to the core of leftist ideology, which is built on a belief system that has erased the difference between right and wrong. Now, this belief system is one you will know well if you have been to a university in the last 40 years, or an American newsroom or on Tik Tok or in a meeting with any cultural institution in America, or any progressive organization including any liberal Jewish organization, or if you're on the board of a museum, or even in a writer's room in Hollywood.

People call it Critical Race Theory or Marxism or Social Justice. I call it Wokeness. Wokeness is when you take a worldview that was once based on the difference between right versus wrong, virtue versus evil, and you replace it with a worldview that does not distinguish between right versus wrong, but instead suggests that the world is built on the primary binary of powerful versus powerless. They ascribe inherent virtue to those they see as powerless and evil to those they see as powerful and they superimpose some characteristic onto the binary, whether it's race or gender or sexuality or national origin or religion, rendering all people, for example who they see as "people of color" powerless and oppressed and thus virtuous, and all white people powerful oppressors who are inherently evil and compromised.

This woke worldview absolutely dominates the left which means it dominates the cultural and intellectual output of the United States these days. Once our Elites were eager to offend the powers that be with their art and their scholarship or their journalism. Now they will conform at all costs. And the thing they conform to is the view that "people of color" are inherently virtuous no matter what they do, because they have no agency and are oppressed and marginalized, while white people are inherently evil, the root of everything bad and responsible for any ills that befall us. This is the source of 21st century leftist antisemitism. Every Jew is is coded as white, and thus they are the oppressors and thus they are bad, and every Palestinian is coded as a "person of color" and thus oppressed and thus inherently virtuous.

And that includes Hamas. Every Palestinian outranks every Jew on the oppression scale, and thus any Palestinian in conflict with any Jew is the one the left must side with. The Jew has all the agency and is the oppressor and the Palestinian has no agency and is the oppressed. Anything bad that happens between them must ergo be the Jew's fault because you cannot blame someone with no agency for anything. They are an innocent, like a child. To the woke, the less powerful has no responsibility to act ethically because their rank on the oppression scale means they cannot act at all. And thus they are inherently imbued with virtue no matter what they do.

Their abjection is their virtue and that goes for the terrorists among them as well. Because to the woke, "people of color" have no agency, when a so-called "person of color" commits a heinous act against a so-called white person, the agency of their actions must be reassigned to their victims, who have agency.

What this means is that when a Palestinian rapes a Jewish woman, the agency was her. It was not his. She remains the oppressor. His act was her fault and her suffering does not release her from the burden of her status as oppressor, even in death. That is why leftist feminists cannot side with raped Israeli women. To do so is to betray everything they believe.

They truly see the Israeli women as deserving of everything that happened to them and having brought it on themselves. Like the conservatives of yore who blamed rape on the miniskirt worn by the victim, the left today blames the fact that Israel has more power than Hamas for everything Hamas does. They simply cannot think their way out of seeing Hamas as virtuous, because to do so would be to admit that their entire worldview is not only wrong but is fucking disgusting.

"There's nothing more delicious than pretending to be good while acting in a sadistic manner." -- Nina Power

• From 2022 to 2024, the average number of anti-Jewish tropes endorsed by Americans increased from 4.18 to 4.31 out of 14. Using the original 11 statements comprising the ADL Index, agreement with 6 or more anti-Jewish tropes increased from 20% of the U.S. population in 2022 to just under 24% in 2024.
• In a reversal of past trends, younger Americans are more likely to endorse anti-Jewish tropes, with millennials agreeing with the greatest number of anti-Jewish tropes on average, at 5.4. They’re followed by Gen Z at 5, Gen X at 4.2, and Baby Boomers at 3.1.
• In addition to individual attitudes, more than 42% of Americans either have friends/family who dislike Jews (23.2%) or find it socially acceptable for a close family member to support Hamas (27.2%).

• Belief in conspiracy theories continues to be one of the main correlates of antisemitic attitudes, with an overall average correlation of .378 with anti-Jewish trope belief. Respondents who fall in the upper quartile of conspiracy theory belief endorsed over twice as many anti-Jewish tropes, on average, as those with the least conspiracy theory belief.
• Anti-Jewish belief also correlates heavily with social dominance orientation – the belief that there should be higher status groups and that they should suppress lower status groups. For example, respondents who at least somewhat agreed with the statement that some groups of people are inferior to other groups were 3.6 times more likely to fall in the top quartile of anti-Jewish trope belief compared to those who did not.
• There was also a strong relationship with the belief that the problems in the world “come down to the oppressor vs the oppressed.” Those who at least somewhat agreed with this belief were 2.6 times more likely to fall in the top quartile of anti-Jewish trope belief compared to those who disagreed with the statement.

• Significant percentages of Americans hold certain anti-Israel positions, such as 20.1% who expressed support for removing Israeli products from a local grocery store and 30.4% who said supporters of Israel control the media. Younger Americans take these positions at significantly higher rates.
• However, support for an independent Jewish state remains high, with 88.8% saying Jews have the right to an independent country. This is true even among those who take other anti-Israel positions. For example, 83.8% of people who believe that Israelis intend to cause as much suffering to Palestinians as possible believe that there should be a Jewish state.
• October 7th and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war has not resulted in major changes in the percentage of Americans who hold anti-Israel positions.
• However, in just about every anti-Israel position assessed, increased polarization appears evident. The proportion of respondents strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing with Israel-related policies grew from the summer of 2023 to the present, whereas the proportion of those who somewhat agreed or somewhat disagreed shrank.

• Respondents not comfortable buying products from Israel were 3.4 times more likely to be among the top quartile of believers in anti-Jewish tropes.
• Respondents who do not think Jews have the right to an independent country were 3.7 times more likely to be among the top quartile of believers in anti-Jewish tropes.
• Respondents who believe Israelis intend to cause as much suffering to Palestinians as possible were 4.6 times more likely to be among the most antisemitic Americans.
• Respondents who believe Israeli operatives are secretly manipulating US national policy through AIPAC or other influence tools were 7.5 times more likely to be among the top quartile of believers in anti-Jewish tropes.

What is the victim-oppressor mindset and how did it conquer the academy?

A condensed version of Chapter 3 of The Coddling of the American Mind

afterbabel.com

There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically... divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other. — RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS, from Not in God’s Name: Confronting religious violence

Olivia, Thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They are important to me and the [dean of students] staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold. I would love to talk with you more. Best, Dean Spellman

I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. . . . When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. 

When I think of all the white people I have ever encountered—whether they’ve been professors, peers, lovers, friends, police officers, et cetera—there is perhaps only a dozen I would consider “decent.”

Ontologically speaking, white death will mean liberation for all. . . . Until then, remember this: I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.

[T]he ways should not be blocked [by] which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior. 

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.2

Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus

Chapter 3 of The Coddling explains how the oppressor/victim mindset created fertile ground for hate

afterbabel.com

Morgan is certainly right that it was mostly white males who set up the educational system and founded nearly all the universities in the United States. Most of those schools once excluded women and people of color. But does that mean that women and people of color should think of themselves as “colonized populations” today? Would doing so empower them, or would it encourage an external locus of control? Would it make them more or less likely to engage with their teachers and readings, work hard, and benefit from their time in school? More generally, what will happen to the thinking of students who are trained to see everything in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked “privilege” and the other is “oppression”? Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people down below are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males. [...] In short, as a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does binary, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity. Instead, some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyper-activating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor. Of course, some individuals truly are racist, sexist, and homophobic, and some institutions are too, even when the people who run them mean well, if they end up being less welcoming to members of some groups. We favor teaching students to recognize a variety of kinds of bigotry and bias as an essential step toward reducing them. Intersectionality can be taught skillfully, as Crenshaw does in her TED Talk. It can be used to promote compassion and reveal injustices not previously seen. Yet somehow, many college students today seem to be adopting a different version of intersectional thinking and are embracing the Untruth of Us Versus Them.

There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically... divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.

We Are Too Good for DEI

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that portray Black Americans as perpetual victims aren’t doing us any favors.

discoursemagazine.com

My impetus for dedicating the bulk of my career to combatting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives began on a listserv for Rhetoric and Composition, the field in which I teach as a professor. Upon hearing a well-received speech claiming that the teaching of Standard English to Black students was a form of racism, I wrote an email questioning the efficacy of that argument. My inquiry induced a level of opprobrium I did not expect. I was called a white supremacist, and blatant lies were spread about me on social media.

Besides these robust attempts to degrade me, I noticed a consistent infantilization of anyone Black who was “brave” enough to speak up against me. Mind you, this extremely woke listserv was a safe place to voice disdain for anyone who refused to embrace a victim narrative—no bravery required—but in order to abide by that narrative, anyone Black had to be cast as a downtrodden victim punching up and speaking truth to power. Anyone Black except me, of course. For wanting Black students to have the utmost agency and to flourish in today’s society, I, a Black man, was shunned by whites and Blacks alike.

The U.S. is currently celebrating Black History Month, and I’ve been asked to share my thoughts about how this month of celebration aligns with DEI initiatives. The answer to that question depends on the type of DEI. Some DEI initiatives align with the classical liberal values of the civil rights movement, and indeed of America’s founding, such as freedom and equal opportunity for all, regardless of skin color. Other versions of DEI, however, are undergirded by critical social justice (CSJ), an ideology that pits whites and Blacks against each other; whites are perpetual oppressors, and Blacks are perpetually oppressed. This variation of DEI, which I refer to as CSJ-DEI, is the ideology that was on display during the aforementioned listserv debacle. It insists on the perpetual victim status of Black Americans and, in so doing, is ideologically opposed to the celebration of Black Americans because it focuses on their trials, not their triumphs. Black History Month is supposed to be about Black empowerment, but CSJ-DEI depends on Black disempowerment.

One can get the gist of CSJ by understanding its primary tenet: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’” This philosophy assumes that racism is always already a part of any interaction between whites and nonwhites; one just has to find it. Assessing the facts of a particular situation is considered unnecessary, even naive. One need not think when it comes to racial justice; the narrative—the script—does the thinking. Does this lack of agency, this deference of volition to a pre-scripted narrative, sound empowering?

CSJ-DEI is about leaning into to the “downtrodden Black person” narrative, but that narrative does not align with the reality of today’s America. Forget about the growing presence of current or recent Black immigrants and the enhanced socioeconomic status of many Black Americans today. According to the altered reality of CSJ-DEI, Black people must still be seen as irredeemably oppressed. Scholars Julian Adorney and Jake Mackey call this altered reality a “virtuous lie,” defined as “a false or dubious claim that is asserted without qualification because it is thought to advance an ethical agenda.” Exaggerated police statistics and the insistence that Black Americans are still caught in a form of slavery are just the tips of this “virtuous” iceberg.  

Virtuous lies are anything but virtuous in these situations, but they show up in traditionally virtuous places, such as scholarly journals. In the scientific journal Cell, prominent scientists insist that the Black individuals among their ranks “continue to suffer institutional slavery.” In addition, a philosophy professor argues that the “years 1492 and 1619 and 1857 and 1955 are still now” and insists she means this in “a meaningful, non-metaphorical sense” (my emphasis). The absurdity of these statements is matched, if not eclipsed, only by the fact that these authors were confident their arguments would be taken seriously. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was emboldened enough to say that a false narrative is acceptable if it feels “morally right”; to insist on facts is to be misguided.

Black History Month is too good for CSJ-DEI. It is about the celebration of figures in Black history who beat seemingly insurmountable odds. It is about figures like educator Mary McLeod Bethune, lawyer Samuel J. Lee, congressman Josiah T. Walls and many others of whom most are unaware. I firmly believe that these figures would scoff at CSJ-inspired ideas such as equitable math, the demonization of debate and the violence of teaching Standard English to Black students.

The misalignment of Black History Month with CSJ-DEI is exemplified by one of the most consistently celebrated figures of Black history: Frederick Douglass. As a slave, Douglass taught himself to read despite the fact that it was illegal. He had to be astute enough to be autodidactic and clever enough to do it without getting caught. When he escaped into the free states, he rose to become the most sought-after orator of the 19th century. Douglass’ life is an implicit counterargument to the CSJ-DEI narrative: If Douglass could accomplish this as a slave two centuries ago, what excuses do Black people have for embracing victimhood today, in a truly free society of which Douglass could only dream?  

Ultimately, CSJ-DEI not only counters the spirit of Black History Month, but it insults the figures celebrated during that month. To pretend things are just as bad now as they were throughout American history is to disrespect the accomplishments of Black Americans. Black Americans today are here and thriving precisely because of their power and ability to rise above adverse circumstances. To insist we remain disempowered at all times is risible at best.

What Are We To Make of ‘Queers for Palestine’?

To the extent that we see every conflict as a battle between innocent victims and cruel victimizers, we will gloss over the moral complexiti

realityslaststand.com

As European Jews have slowly ‘become’ white over the last three generations (Brodkin, 1998), we have internalized White supremacy in general and anti-Black prejudice in particular...Immigrant Jews and their descendants assimilated into US society, becoming white, or sort of white...

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