When Crisis Brings Clarity

making sense of how we got here

Note: several links go to Twitter accounts that have embedded video of referenced events.

What the Left Has Become

A great deal of clarity is arriving in America in the wake of the murders, kidnappings, rapes, and other atrocities carried out by Hamas against Israelis last weekend. Not enough clarity, but a noticeable amount.

Many people whose politics are between center-left and campus-radical-left have been shocked by the responses they’re seeing: open celebration of what happened in Israel, including but not limited to nakedly pro-Hamas rallies being held in Dearborn, Michigan and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, congratulating Hamas for “a job well done”; American college campuses holding rallies calling for the death of Jews via “Intifada Revolution”; an American college professor requiring Jewish students to identify themselves and go stand in the corner of a classroom while he opined about how the crimes of “colonizers” are worse than the Holocaust (university statement here). Jewish college students who wish to continue their educations are now forced to be on campus with people who are openly supportive—to the point of Nazi salutes, rallies, and celebrations—of Hamas and attempts to wipe Israel off the map (including chants of “There is only one solution.”) George Mason University featured students celebrating the atrocities by chanting, “They’ve got tanks; we’ve got gliders, glory to the resistance fighters!” At least one Jewish student has been physically attacked on an American campus.

America’s lefty political organizations are responding similarly. The Black Caucus of the Young Democrats of America released statements in support of the Gaza “uprising.” The Chicago chapter of BLM deleted it after the backlash, but they tweeted this:

The hang glider is a representation of the arrival method of the rapist-murderers who killed hundreds at a music festival. When people were appalled and pushed back, they said — correctly — that they’ve been clear all along, as indeed they have been. Their sympathies have been on their websites and Instagrams and other public presentations all along.

These clarifying scenes have emerged (mostly) from leftist enclaves and institutions, especially college campuses—the very places that are regularly dismissed as bubbles where kids say and do stupid things for a year or two in the process of growing up, before they join the “real world.”

That comforting facade, that kids grow out of their stupidity when they leave campus, may have always been bullshit to some extent—I don’t know—but it’s been unquestionably, obviously, and glaringly bullshit for long enough now that most people who are waking up this week feel stupid for having missed it.

Some useful idiots are doubling down, of course, but a noticeable percentage of people are asking themselves, “How the hell did we get here? And how did I not see it?”

To the newly arrived: welcome! Congratulations on being willing to see reality now. Pull up a chair and have a seat while I give you some context, both on how we got here and how you missed it.

If you’re just figuring out right now that the left you thought upheld your values does not—that it in fact has a profound moral rot—I’m not judging you. I graduated college three years ago and had both incredibly wise friends and a based therapist helping me fight the brainwashing or I’d have missed it (at best) or fallen for it entirely (likely, I must admit).

My understanding of these dynamics is a quirk of timing and the blessing of good influences, not any virtue of my own.

The First Question You May Be Asking

In a surreal twist that has confused many, these events have occurred on campuses, the very places where sensitivity is taken to such extremes that “microaggressions” are rigidly policed and differing opinions are treated as violence that warrants violence in return. There are myriad examples of this, including such memorable events as over $100,000 in damage, including fires being set, because a pathetic provocateur was scheduled to speak on the Berkeley campus, and significant uproar, leading to hysterics and resignations, over the mere suggestion that Yale students were capable of choosing their own Halloween costumes.

Seeing scenes like these on campuses probably seems deeply incongruous. American campuses are bubbles of such astonishing coddling that the mere presence of someone who disagrees with leftist orthodoxy — Riley Gaines speaking in favor of the exclusion of males from women’s sports, including males who believe themselves to be women — is touted as a serious trauma to trans students, who are offered counseling and other resources to help them cope with the presence of a speaker who doesn’t want to share a locker room with them.

Misgendering, microaggressions, and other types of speech are regarded as violence, while actual violence—brutal, barbaric, shocking violence that the perpetrators livestreamed with pride—is celebrated.

How can this be? How can the same institutions that treat some types of speech as attempted genocide, including speech expressing such anodyne views as “there are only two sexes,” literally host pro-terrorism rallies?

It seems nonsensical, does it not?

In actuality, it makes perfect sense. Welcome to the world of intersectionality.

The Primacy of Identities

The notion of an “oppression Olympics,” a hierarchy of victimhood whereby the more oppression points you can claim, the more respect, esteem, and resources you are due, is not a new one. It’s been part of our cultural discourse for a long time.

To some of you, it has probably always seemed like a caricature, at best, or even a ridiculous strawman. It isn’t. The progressive left really and truly hews to this. It’s so deeply entrenched now that many of them don’t even have to think about it. There’s no need for a conscious sorting; it happens automatically and effortlessly.

Anyone with any identity characteristics that rank high on the Oppression scale is due respect, trust, deference, and entitled to have their feelings catered to, to the fullest extent possible.

If you have, or are perceived to have, fewer Oppression points than anyone else in the situation at hand? Mere disagreement, no matter how politely and carefully expressed, is enough to qualify you for the status of “enemy,” and any conflict, of any kind, constitutes an immediate finding of guilt for whatever -ism applies (racism if you’re white or Asian and disagreeing with a black person; transphobia if disagreeing with a trans person, etc.).

It is important to note, and call out, the dichotomy that applies in these situations. The finding of guilt is instant and unquestionable — only an immediate apology and acceptance that you need to be educated and have work to do on yourself is acceptable. This creates a strange but entirely accepted dichotomy, where white people who want to be kind and good and virtuous are meant to simultaneously accept that racism is such a defining evil that it warrants dismantling all the institutions of the West and that it’s such a nothingburger that having any kind of emotional reaction when being accused of racism makes one “fragile.” Likewise, racism is the central fact of the West, they believe—but also so subtle that it can be totally invisible, requiring platforms to accept, on faith, the word of members of the sacred caste that yes, indeed, the malevolent spirit was here, and influencing things.

On an institutional or “systemic” level, beyond who’s by default regarded to be the aggressor in any interpersonal situation, lies notions of “colonization.” The idea of “colonizers” is a loose synonym for everything that these people hate — namely, the systems that have built the west, especially capitalism.

The myth of a utopian past where peaceful BIPOC (black and indigenous people of color, one of their favorite acronyms) lived in harmony with nature and one another, a beautiful existence free from suffering that ended with the appearance of the evil white colonizers, is core to the progressive left’s assessment of everything. This tweet is from the days when Twitter had to consider you “notable” to get a blue check:

The reasoning behind these appalling reactions to barbaric violence perpetrated against innocents stems directly from this mindset.

Oppression Makes People Innocent by Definition

In the intersectional mindset, people who are oppressed, by definition, cannot commit oppression, crimes, or other bad acts against their oppressors. This means that they regard no black person as capable of being racist, no woman as capable of sexism, and no victim of “colonization” is wrong for how they respond against their “colonizers,” regardless of how barbaric their act.

I understand how outlandish this may sound, but if you are finding yourself recoiling, take a minute to consider the reactions to the Hamas atrocities. Scroll back up and click on some of the links. Watch the videos from American campuses linked therein. (I tried to embed them, but the Elon Musk/Substack spat means that videos can no longer be embedded in Substack posts.)

A pro-Palestine student from George Mason University wrote this:

Please understand that this is a mainstream view on the left.

Understand that when college professors said, in response to the barbaric attacks, things like “Did you think decolonization was just a word from your DEI seminar?” they were not kidding.

Understand that the “decolonization is not a metaphor” signs at many of these protests is meant literally. They see raping, killing, and kidnapping Israelis as morally righteous resistance by an oppressed group against their oppressors.

Palestinians are oppressed, ergo anything they do to their oppressors is resistance, not barbarism. By definition, they are incapable of anti-Semitism, racism, or other “isms” because they have more Oppression points than the Israelis who are their “oppressors.”

These identity metrics are intensely powerful in intersectional analysis, because they go to the heart of how they define “power dynamics.”

Power Dynamics Are All They Recognize

We all understand power dynamics to a certain extent, and even adults can find themselves in imbalanced situations. We recognize this, and allow for its necessity. This is why, for example, a therapist who tries to date a patient can lose his/her license. The therapeutic relationship is one with a whopping power imbalance, because that’s the only way it can work for the patient’s benefit.

Our ethical standards for mental health professionals take as a baseline notion the idea that a therapist has far more power in all relationships with patients, and therapists are required to conduct themselves accordingly—enforcing boundaries, and assuming a great deal of responsibility for patient well-being.

In the Woke intersectional mindset, an analogous power dynamic is at play in literally every human interaction, based on the identity metrics of the people involved. This is why a white male in conflict with a black woman has no hope of escaping accusations of racism and sexism — the idea that she could have equal power and agency is one that does not exist in Woke understanding. It will not be considered for one moment, any more than an ethics board would take a patient at her word who insisted that her sexual relationship with her therapist was not the therapist’s fault, it was hers.

The Woke mindset and its calculus of guilt, innocence, oppression, and the primacy of these things is behind the accepted idea that when black people tell you that you said or did something racist, you did, period. When a woman tells you that you said or did something sexist, you did, period. The fact of the other person’s identity factors gives them the sacred right to name your crime. As long as you have more oppression points than the other person, you are by definition innocent.

Here is a true story from my college days to further illustrate this point — identity metrics are all that matter, and further, they always matter.

Scene: Classroom, Diversity Issues 2, Spring 2019.

Shocked (white, female) classmate: “Are you saying that white privilege doesn’t exist for anyone, ever?”

Me: “No. I’d have to think for a long time, and do some research, before I’d make that argument, if I’d make it at all. I’m saying that I think the assertion that white skin always creates privilege in absolutely every situation is unwarranted and frankly ridiculous.”

Several other (all white, both female and male) classmates: chime in with various assertions of “That’s racist,” and “That’s a white supremacist viewpoint!” and “How can you be so blind?” and “Spotted the racist!”

Me (surprisingly calmly): “I want to offer an example to make sure I understand your argument. Right now, at this moment, there are white teenagers in West Virginia in foster care because their parents are both dead or both incarcerated or otherwise unable to be parents due to opioid addiction. They are dirt poor. Some of them barely have two sets of clothing, and their foster parents are likely just barely above the poverty line and taking them in to get a little extra money to feed their own kids with. Their lives are stress and poverty 24/7 for reasons that are no fault of their own. They have nobody on their side, no consistent source of love, are taking care of themselves at all times. You are saying that those teenagers all, 100% of the time, in all situations, have privilege over Sasha and Malia Obama?”

Aforementioned classmates, without any hesitation: “Yes” and “Absolutely” and “Of course they do,” with nodding heads.

Me: (looks at the professor hoping for sanity).

Professor: (nods in agreement with my classmates).

Me: “Um, ok then. I can see I’m not going to get anywhere, so I’ve got my participation points for today and I’ll shut up now.”

To get my degree in mathematics, I had to take three courses approved for diversity credit. Like most of the STEM majors, I took the “Diversity Issues” sequence, which the various STEM departments rotated offering and scheduled conveniently in the buildings where most of spent most of our time. As none of our courses had enough DEI garbage in them to get the diversity board’s stamp of approval (at least, not then….) we didn’t have the option of, for example, a history major, who could get a D-credit by taking a course on the history of “Queer Activism.”

I was already steeped in the leftist victimhood culture, but these courses deeply inculcated the worldview. The conversation I described was atypical only because dissenting views were so rare. To this day, I sometimes find myself slipping into this mindset; the indoctrination was that powerful, and effective. (I wrote about one such incident here.)

Just One Example: They. Mean. It.

Here’s an essay by an anti-racist activist explicitly refusing to condemn Hamas and tying the cause of “anti-racism” to Hamas’ “resistance” against the Israelis. Ask yourself what they would do to you if they had power and you openly disagreed with them, and how American college campuses would react. Do you think you’re more human to them than the kidnapped babies and Holocaust survivors in Israel? If so, why?

We Are Decades Late to the Fight

The Left owns the universities, but they also own K-12. American children have been getting indoctrinated in this mindset for a long time now, and it is so powerfully influential that it may not be possible to exaggerate the extent of the damage. I was in a local public school a couple of weeks ago and managed to take a few pictures. Notice that the core foundation of the (overwhelmingly white) school, the very ground under their feet, is evidence of their status as oppressors, and their understanding of oppressor/oppressed dynamics extends to their very existence, as humans, oppressing the earth.

What can you do?

Start educating yourself. James Lindsay’s work at New Discourses is a good place to start if you want a deep, rich theoretical grounding in the history and roots of the movement. If you’re more interested in how the interpersonal dynamics and psychology play out, Josh Slocum’s Disaffected podcast is a good place to start. (Link goes to his Substack; search for Disaffected on your podcast app.)

Most importantly, recognize the importance of this moment.

Change is hard, and painful, and right now you’re probably stuck between the pain of seeing what the left has become and the pain of changing—possibly having to consider that maybe the people you thought of as bad, dumb, unenlightened, or evil got at least some things right.

The most human and understandable reaction of all is to immediately start rationalizing, talking oneself into not changing, letting the momentum of thinking of yourself as a “good person” in part because of your politics carry you through this painful experience without really re-examining anything.

Try to resist this. Try to consider the possibility that you really have missed some crucial changes on the left, and that what is required of you now is the courage to consider that you might have been wrong—that it wasn’t just ridiculous college kids, it really is a bigger problem than that.

I went through this myself, and it wasn’t easy. But it was worth it.

I wish you luck.

Follow-up to this piece: my attempt to apply mathematical logic to how Israel responds to the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

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About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

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