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Moral inconsistency is a pretty normal part of the human condition. Attitudes to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) are a case in point. While the vast majority of Americans support access to the technology, which now accounts for over 90,000 births per year, many struggle with a key component of it: the destruction of embryos in the process. Indeed, whereas 82% of Americans believe IVF is morally acceptable, only 49% say the same about destroying excess embryos, according to recent polling by Gallup. This presents moral purists with a conundrum.

So far, Americans have mostly been able to hold such competing views. Even among those who believe that an embryo is a person with rights, only about one in ten say access to IVF is a bad thing, according to Pew Research Centre. Yet state courts, state legislatures and pressure from the Christian right are making the contradiction harder to sustain. In February Alabamas Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF counted as children under state law, causing the temporary closure of fertility clinics. In June the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents 13m Christian evangelicals, overwhelmingly voted to oppose IVF as currently practised, calling it dehumanising, and calling on the government to curtail it.

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Will IVF really be the next frontier in America's culture wars? - The Economist

In the summer of 2023, it was reported that a former British member of Parliament was trying to take legal action to shut down threats to her good name. So far, so predictable: But rather than a particular person or publication, Antoinette Sandbach wanted to instruct lawyers to act against the very process of doing history. Sandbach a Conservative and then Liberal Democrat member of Parliament who lost her seat in the 2019 election is the great-great-great-grandchild of the landowner Samuel Sandbach, a man who became wealthy through his exploitation of enslaved peoples. Malik Al Nasir, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, had been conducting genealogical research on his fathers family and their history of enslavement for more than a decade before he formally began his doctorate degree exploring Sandbach Tinne & Co. His research into Samuel Sandbach and his associates and their activities in British Guiana in the late 18th and early 19th centuries connected this history not only to the Caribbean but also to Liverpool, where Al Nasir grew up and where Samuel Sandbach had brought the vast wealth he earned through slavery and empire.

Al Nasir presented some of this historical narrative in a TED talk and mentioned the connection between the slaveholder and the former lawmaker. After first approaching Al Nasir and then his doctoral supervisor, asking for this reference to be removed, Antoinette Sandbach threatened the University of Cambridge with legal action. She argued that since she was no longer a sitting member of Parliament, she had a right to be forgotten and should not be singled out publicly in this manner. These attempts to shut down research were met with uproar, which was not dampened when Sandbach seemingly tried to draw comparisons between the treatment of enslaved people and the treatment of women in 19th-century Britain. Ultimately, the University of Cambridge rejected her request to have her name removed from the research on the grounds of academic freedom.

Sandbach claimed that she welcomed the research and that she was appalled by the actions of her ancestors. And yet her stated desire to have her name removed from the research because she was no longer a public figure (as well as on somewhat tenuous grounds of personal safety) seemed to undermine any serious attempt to reckon with her familys history. The Sandbach family still owns some of Samuels estate, bought with the profits of slavery, and Antoinette is a named director of the company managing the holiday cottages there. She is also not the first of his descendants to become a legislator; Charles Stuart Parker (1829-1910), Liberal politician and writer, was Samuels grandson. The power, both economic and political, that the family inherited from Samuel Sandbach persists, and Al Nasirs research shows the threads of empire that are still woven through contemporary Britains economy and political establishment.

Alex Renton, a writer who is also descended from a family of slaveholders, addressed this history in a piece urging Antoinette Sandbach to accept her legacy and atone for her past. Renton, whose book Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Familys Story of Slavery grapples with his own inherited history, argued that you cannot, as a family, or as a nation, select the good bits of your story to boast about, and erase whats uncomfortable. His position on this history is clear and unambiguous: I am ashamed of what they did, and I accept my part as their descendant in the collective denial of the history. But Renton is probably an anomaly in the way that people, institutions, corporations and nations choose to engage or not with these histories of atrocity and violence.

To understand the chasm between Renton and Sandbach, it is necessary to appreciate the enormous gap between two different political positions on the role and value of the past in the present; and it is impossible to do that without understanding the emotional register of debates around imperial history in Britain today. In part, this is a story about the divergence between academic narratives of the British Empire and the accepted popular stories that exist about imperialism in wider society. This gap, between imperial historians and a much larger group of people who feel ownership over the countrys history, has created an increasingly fraught context for talking and writing about the British Empire in the U.K. at least.

When people think about history, they might imagine it to be fairly dry and dusty as an academic subject: the chronicling of what happened in the past, and why, which could seem uncontroversial to the point of boredom. But history has never been simply academic: It provides the backstory that we use to make sense of who we are in the world, and that applies just as strongly to national histories as it does to the histories of individual families.

National histories have often been constructed from the top down, focusing on the great men (and occasional great woman) who supposedly effected change through their own personal brilliance, or sometimes their failings. Narratives of the British Empire for a British audience have traditionally been framed around figures like Robert Clive, aka Clive of India, the first British governor of the Bengal Presidency, who oversaw a period of aggressive imperial expansion and presided over the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed perhaps 10 million people. While education secretary, Michael Gove declared him to be one of the heroes and heroines of history that schoolchildren should learn about in his proposed new national curriculum for British schools. The point, in 2013, when historians and history teachers pushed back against these proposals might be seen as a key moment in the rift between the opposing sides in the British history wars.

For the last decade, the question of who gets to interrogate historical questions, and why they are motivated to do so, has become very fraught in Britain. And the topics that have become most central to this controversy are the British Empire, British imperialism, and ideas about race, identity and belonging in the British nation. (In America, we can see similar tensions playing out around the histories of slavery, the Civil War and the Confederacy.) The big debates have centered on the necessity, or otherwise, of telling new stories about empire: ones that center voices from below (including the voices of those who were enslaved, attacked, oppressed and discriminated against because of their race) and explore the impact of slavery and empire in Britain, including their continuing legacies today. Another reason to date the beginning of this argument to 2013 is that this was the moment when the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project at University College London published their landmark public database, which traces the financial shadows cast by slavery, tracking the compensation paid to former slave owners in the 1830s as part of the process of emancipation. It seems unlikely now, but this was received with relatively little controversy, though a lot of interest, at the time. Even the major right-wing newspapers focused mostly on drawing attention to the slave-owning pasts of the families of then-Prime Minister David Cameron, author George Orwell or actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

This seems unlikely in hindsight because there has been, to put it mildly, something of a backlash against this historical work both from within academia and from outside. It has been asserted, by many of their opponents, that the historians who seek to retell these stories from these perspectives are doing so because of political motivations that render their work unacademic, unrigorous and thus invalid. What these historians see as widening the scope of inquiry, adding new voices to the debate, and bringing in new viewpoints, new sources and new theoretical frameworks, their opponents see as an ideological crusade that seeks to distort or erase the past. Because of the stakes of this debate, in which historians are seeking to add nuance to a narrative that has often been self-congratulatory or complacent a story of how the British made the world through an empire that was largely moral, civilizing and humane the discussion is often conducted in a particular emotional register.

It is striking that both Renton and Sandbach, while making very different points, use the language of emotions to talk about their relationship to their own family histories. Sandbach is appalled. Renton is ashamed. The way that we approach imperial histories as individuals or as nations is often framed as an emotional, as well as an academic, process. When King Charles III visited Kenya in fall 2023, he spoke of the greatest sorrow and deepest regret caused by the history of British violence during the Kenyan independence struggle. Almost two decades earlier, in 2006 the year before the bicentenary of the ending of the slave trade then-Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote an article in which he also expressed deep sorrow for Britains shameful history of the exploitation of enslaved peoples. Neither figure apologized, explicitly, for British history; imperial apologies are still a contentious issue in Britain. But both, apparently, felt sorrow, shame, regret.

The emotions evoked by historical research into the British Empire colonial violence, exploitation, slavery are not always comfortable, and nor are they experienced as politically neutral. In September 2020, the British heritage organization the National Trust published a report, Colonialism and Historic Slavery, representing several years worth of research into the connections between properties under their purview and British imperial history. The report, which particularly focused on the transatlantic slave trade, included a gazetteer that demonstrated the importance of tracing these histories through British heritage properties. These included houses such as Speke Hall, near Liverpool, which was owned by various wealthy British figures including a pro-slavery legislator and a plantation owner who financed his own slave ships and received compensation from the British state when slavery was abolished. Other properties had more ambiguous connections: Bath Assembly Rooms had been created through subscription, including money donated from many prominent slaveholders, but had also hosted an animated and effective antislavery speech by William Wilberforce. One notable inclusion was Chartwell, in Kent, formerly home to Winston Churchill included because of Churchills long-standing support for British imperialism, demonstrated in moments such as his vote in 1935 against the Government of India Act that sought to give the colony more political independence.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the political context in which the report was released, it immediately became controversial among right-wing commentators. Two months earlier, the statue of Edward Colston had been pulled down and dunked into Bristol Harbor. Colston was a 17th- and early 18th-century trader of enslaved people who spent much of his profits on philanthropic works that duly saw his name commemorated in concert halls and schools across the city of Bristol; his statue, erected at the end of the 19th century, had been controversial among the local population for decades. The transatlantic Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement had ignited a grassroots initiative to remove the statue by force after years of campaigning had failed. The four central protesters were arrested for criminal damage, amid condemnations from Conservative politicians and the right-wing press, before being unexpectedly acquitted in 2022. It was in this febrile atmosphere that the National Trust report years in the making, unconnected to BLM except perhaps in sympathy was released.

The controversy around the report was performed in a particular emotional register. The first headline from The Telegraph newspaper on the report was Churchills Home on BLM List of Shame; in some of its many subsequent pieces, the paper described the report as a roll of shame, as well as self-flagellation. The Daily Mail adopted the list of shame label in much of its coverage, in one story quoting a Conservative councilor who had canceled her familys membership of the National Trust because of the naming and shaming of innocent families who had left properties to the organization. The weekly news magazine The Spectator referred to the document as a shameful manifesto; although in this instance, of course, it is the National Trust itself that is supposed to feel shame, for evoking this history in the first place.

The idea of shame as a reaction to history is interesting. It can be a genuine emotional response to finding out something about your country, institution or familys dark past. But in this coverage, this wasnt how shame was being used. Instead, the reader was invited to feel outrage and anger, both that historical figures like Churchill were being shamed by this research, and by extension that they because of their admiration of figures like Churchill, or simply because of their British heritage were being told to feel ashamed as well. The idea that the National Trust wanted people to feel ashamed, as well as parading their own self-flagellation in public, became part of the accepted narrative about this colonial history project.

My book, Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain, which was published in the summer of 2023, explores the ways that empire has shaped British society, politics and culture from World War II to the present day. As part of this story, it deals with the contemporary cultural context, and the defensiveness with which the British media, as well as politicians and institutions, respond to any revision of British imperial history as an attack on British culture itself. Somehow, I did not anticipate that this defensiveness would extend to the reception of my book, but of course it did. And the tone of several of the reviews was striking, once again, in the emotional responses evoked by my argument.

The print headline of the first review, in The Telegraph, was Galtieri Good, Empire Bad, Britain Awful. While I was startled to discover my description of Leopoldo Galtieris rule of Argentina as unpopular, violent and undemocratic rendered as positive, I was more surprised by the idea that reckoning with British imperial history meant writing the nation off as awful. The review was generally positive about the historical research and argument of the book, and dismissive of my politics as a historian. Fair enough; its safe to say that I didnt necessarily write it with The Telegraph in mind. But the reviewers suggestion that the book was pessimistic reads like another emotional response to history writing and it was interesting to see this description applied to a book dealing with the resilience of migrant communities, resistance to imperial violence, and contemporary attempts to retell histories of empire from the bottom up.

Not all the reviews of the book sat within this emotional register. But it was noticeably the coverage on the right of the political spectrum that tended to do so. In The Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook finished his (negative) review with two paragraphs devoted entirely to my apparent desire for the reader to feel shame about this history, which he couched as my enthusiasm for telling people off. He told his readers: She ticks off the authors of a government pamphlet for not appreciating the colonies long histories, and reprimands young Voluntary Service Overseas workers. I apparently accuse the Pathe newsreels, and Im disappointed by the Ladybird books (a series of simple and colorful books for young children, both fiction and nonfiction, from fairy tales to history books). He finds ever more synonyms for this: disapproving, tells off, reprimands all feature. He finishes: And in her conclusion, she takes aim at the biggest target of all the British people, disappointingly resistant [to] any reappraisal of their nations imperial past. But I dont think people are resistant. I think theyre just bored.

Sandbrooks response to my work is obviously gendered; male historians are rarely accused of scolding their readers. But as well as downplaying my research as shrewish nagging, Sandbrook demonstrates his discomfort with being asked to reconsider imperial historiographies, or to think critically about the relationship between contemporary Britain and its empire in the past. Being told off is an uncomfortable experience, but it is worth pointing out that all of these disapproving verbs are Sandbrooks own; he has read schoolmarmish disapproval into the book because I would guess he thinks I am trying to make him, and readers like him, feel guilty about their more positive view of empire and imperialism. This was made more explicit in a subsequent rehash of his review in the online magazine The Critic, which was headlined Spare Us the Wagging Finger.

People have the right to write bad reviews of any book that they dont enjoy, but its interesting to see how this criticism illuminates particular anxieties and insecurities about historical narratives in Britain today.

There is an increasing tendency to present historians or, at least, a woke coterie of historians as po-faced censors, committed to dourly upbraiding our readers as well as our subjects for their moral failings, who demand that people feel guilt and shame for the past. The terms revisionist and moral relativist are thrown around a lot, without much clarity about what they actually mean. There is a sense among sections of the right that academic history (and academia as a whole) is increasingly being captured by researchers with little technical skill or intellectual ability, who want to use it simply to advance their own brand of identity politics and make everyone else feel bad in the process. But where has this idea, and the increasing gulf between attitudes to the history of empire, come from?

The gap between popular ideas of imperial history a celebratory look at Britains adventurous past and academic scholarship on imperialism can be traced back at least 30 years. From the early 1990s, in a movement heavily influenced by the postcolonialism of writers like Edward Said, histories of the empire were reframed and reinterrogated. Rather than exploring empires largely via a history of power from above an elite version of empire focused on governments, armies and geopolitics historians began to think about the way that imperial power could be understood from below. This new imperial history movement sought to think about British imperialism as a story that could be told from the perspective of the colonized as well as the colonizer. This soon developed into a corresponding focus on empire as something that happened at home, in the U.K., in the metropole (the center of an empire), as well as on the peripheries, in the colonies. These histories increasingly focused their analysis on race, class, gender, sexuality and other markers of identity as they were shaped by, and shaped, imperialism. This approach pioneered by historians such as Catherine Hall, Antoinette Burton, Dane Kennedy, Ann Laura Stoler, Bill Schwarz, John Mackenzie and Mrinalini Sinha became extremely influential in British (and American) university history departments.

The focus on histories from below, and the effort to unpick ideas about Britishness and the legacies of the British Empire in the British metropole, means that these histories are not celebratory stories of imperial conquest. Instead, these are nuanced explorations of material that tells a different tale: Either through looking at different sources, or by returning to the old sources from a different perspective, new imperial historians have constructed a history of British imperialism that explores the colonized and their experiences, as well as the colonizers, centers the importance of empire in the metropole, and rejects a patriotic impetus to prioritize stories portraying Britain as a humane or civilizing imperial force.

However, the wider popular narratives in Britain about imperialism have largely been resistant to these developments. For a long time in Britain, outside the academy imperial history was told as a story of gung-ho adventures, as the British charged around the globe civilizing natives and building railways. Decolonization, if thought about at all, was treated in smug comparison to the brutality of the French, Belgian and Portuguese empires. The British, it was often claimed, had been fundamentally humanitarian in both running and ending their empire. Imperial nostalgia an aesthetic, as well as political, movement was part of the British cultural affect around the austerity politics of Camerons premiership and the Brexit vote. The British people who voted to take back control from Brussels might not have explicitly imagined a return to an imperial sovereignty in which Britain ruled over a quarter of the globe. But the idea that something had been lost in decolonization (and sometimes explicitly in the mass migration of people of color from former colonies to build lives in the former metropole) that might be regained in Brexit was not uncommon in the narratives surrounding the campaign to leave the EU.

In this context, then, it is not surprising that historians of empire who seek to unpick narratives of triumphant conquest and civilizing missions and replace them with stories of brutality, incompetence and exploitation are not popular. This historiographical shift was legitimately understood as a political movement, and less legitimately seen as a distortion of real histories or serious scholarship. The BLM movement from 2020 accelerated many institutions reckonings with the intersections between their own histories and those of the empire, and of racism and discrimination more widely in British society (which, new imperial historians would tend to argue, were themselves rooted in imperial histories). But this was often met with a fierce backlash, and not only from outside these academic institutions: In the scandal at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, research into the connections between the university and the slave trade was dismissed as a fad by emeritus academics who claimed the historical researchers had an agenda in developing their research and who tried but failed to prevent the publication of the report.

As a historian, it can be difficult to set out what history should actually be for, given this context. I would like to believe that historical knowledge is more than trivia and window dressing, but I am also uncomfortable with the idea that there are lessons to be learned from history that justify its survival as a subject of study. In truth, these lessons from history do not exist, because historical events are contingent, legible only in the context in which they occurred. And so any attempt to use the past in this way is shaped irrevocably by which history books you read, and what conclusions you draw from them, rather than some innate historical reality in which every time you press X button, Y will happen.

People can sometimes appear starry-eyed about the role of history in society: The idea that if we all simply knew better what had gone before, then we would have a more coherent, more intelligent, perhaps even kinder or more just politics today. This would be nice, but again, comes down to which histories you want to engage with and why you want to engage with them. There have been discussions recently about mandating study of the British Empire on the national curriculum for schools in England and Wales (which currently only mandates study of the Holocaust, as well as requiring a sweep of history from medieval to modern and the study of some history beyond Britain). But this well-meaning intervention sidesteps the fact that there are many ways to cast these historical narratives: For decades, British schoolchildren were fed narratives of British colonial expansion as a God-given civilizing mission, supported by a map on the wall showing the colonies in pink. More recently, it is clear that many people remember from their school days only that British campaigners ended the slave trade, rather than the extent to which the British profited from a trade in enslaved peoples throughout the brutal years of its existence. There are many pernicious examples in history textbooks around the world of the ways that the past can be twisted into stories to support national narratives of greatness and glory. History can be a weapon, for anybody who wants to pick it up and use it as one.

Historians have good reason to appreciate that the past can be a burden that weighs heavily on people, communities and movements; exposing the worst excesses of history in the present does not necessarily or often mean being able to bring about any justice for those who were injured in the past. But many historians are still motivated by a desire to expose past injustices, or even to try to right historical wrongs, at least rhetorically. History might sometimes usefully be deployed to ask states and institutions to apologize for their past behavior (although historians, more than most people, might be ambivalent about the value of an apology for history) or, for example, to return the obvious plunder of imperial violence. But historians are not writing with the desire to make readers, personally, feel responsible for the wrongs of their ancestors. Much of the defensive critique of these new histories seems to assume that this is the case: that historians are trying to rewrite the past, the facts of which people thought they understood, to make them, today, feel ignorant and guilty. But sometimes we are merely asking our readers to distance themselves: to think, critically, about the histories that they thought they knew, and perhaps to think again.

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Britain's Imperial Past Has Become a Battleground in the Culture Wars - New Lines Magazine

The Pentagon this week is once again at the center of Americas culture wars, as the Republican-led House considers adding divisive provisions from its far-right members to its version of the annual defense policy bill.

Far-right lawmakers have proposed amendments to the $895.3 billion legislation that would restrict service members access to reproductive health care and certain diversity protections. They also are seeking to block future U.S. assistance to Ukraine and Palestinian civilians, expand the militarys presence along the Mexico border, and roll back environmental protections sought by the Biden administration.

The House approved some of those proposals Wednesday, despite opposition from Democrats. More debate is expected Thursday, and the most partisan measures will face tremendous hurdles to final passage as the House will have to reconcile its legislation with whatever version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passes the Democratic-led Senate this summer.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) commands only a slim majority 218 Republicans to Democrats 213 and had to rely on Democrats this year to pass an emergency $95 billion funding package to aid Ukraine, Israel and other allies over objections from the GOPs far-right flank. But Johnson has given no indication he will aim for a similar bipartisanship on the NDAA, leaving vulnerable Republicans from swing districts with tough decisions to make on whether to support the most hard-line proposals on issues like abortion ahead of this years elections.

If any of this drama sounds familiar, thats because it is. The House voted along partisan lines a year ago, narrowly passing an NDAA saddled with ideological provisions and shattering a decades-long tradition of bipartisanship around the annual bill, which sets Pentagon policy and guides spending for the year ahead. Most were later stripped from the bill when the House and Senate versions were merged.

Last year, House Republicans loaded up the NDAA like it was a MAGA wish list, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said this week. The NDAA should represent a good-faith attempt to keep America safe. If what happened last year happens again Republicans will be looking at a very steep uphill battle to get this bill across the finish line.

Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, which drafted the defense policy bill, implored colleagues to focus on amendments to advance the security of our nation and the needs of our service members.

House lawmakers on Wednesday began debating some 350 proposed amendments to the bill a list narrowed by the Rules Committee from more than 1,350 that were submitted. The process is expected to stretch into Thursday, with a vote on the defense bill likely to occur Friday.

Already, Republicans managed to secure the addition of several contentious amendments, including a measure introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, to prohibit funds from being used in support of President Bidens climate agenda. Others, led by Reps. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) and Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.), would bar U.S. defense funding for building or rebuilding in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip when the war between Israel and Hamas ends, and for transporting Palestinian refugees to the United States.

Liberal Democrats have been deeply critical of the Biden administrations ongoing provision of billions of dollars in weapons to Israel amid a crippling eight-month war that has so far destroyed most of Gazas infrastructure and killed more than 37,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The administration is pushing for a cease-fire, appealing to regional partners to lay the groundwork for postwar governance in Gaza, and it has sought ways to move humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians amid the fighting.

The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), characterized Mast and Arringtons amendments as counterproductive to U.S. and Israeli interests, and called the effort to block Palestinian refugees biased and somewhat bigoted.

A proposal to curtail U.S. funding for NATO, put forward by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to prohibit government spending on electric vehicles and related infrastructure were voted down Wednesday.

Republicans and Democrats on the Armed Services Committee said the legislation approved by their panel authorizes broad and badly needed improvements to service members pay and benefits, including a 19.5 percent raise for junior enlisted personnel, and expanded child-care access, plus improvements to dilapidated military housing and other infrastructure around the world.

No service members should have to live in squalid conditions. No military family should have to rely on food stamps to feed their children [or] have to wait weeks to see a doctor or mental health specialist. But thats exactly what many of our service members are experiencing, Rogers said Wednesday on the House floor. This bill goes a long way toward fixing these things.

The NDAA remains one of the few pieces of legislation routinely passed by an otherwise deeply partisan and chronically deadlocked Congress.

In keeping with previous years, this bill authorizes expanded development and procurement of weapons and technology to maintain the United States decisive edge in an increasingly tense strategic competition with China. It also approves continued and in some cases, expanded support for key American partners such as Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, and seeks to bolster the Pentagons role in U.S. border security.

Members of the Armed Services Committee from both parties acknowledged Wednesday that the 1,022-page bill isnt perfect, but they stressed that it was the product of months of bipartisan work.

The radically different House and Senate bills that emerged following the amendments process last year made for a tense, lengthy negotiation and ultimately delivered an embarrassing defeat to House Republicans when they were forced to accept a final bill largely stripped of the most contentious provisions.

Members of the Armed Services Committee urged their colleagues to avoid such a production this year, but that appears unlikely in a deeply divisive election year.

I am confident that by the time we get to the end of the process, as we always do, we will have once again a bipartisan product, Smith said earlier in the week. Lets just get there earlier this time, save ourselves the aggravation. Its where were going to wind up anyways, so why dont we just go ahead and do it?

Smith said, Any effort to go after reproductive health care, any effort to go after the rights of the LGBTQ community, are going to be problems, as is any effort to block the efforts of DOD to have a truly inclusive military. Lawmakers are expected to debate such far-right proposals Thursday.

Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.

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Culture wars spark again as House weighs massive defense policy bill - The Washington Post

Amid mayhem and miasma, its easy to get stuck in the moment and forget the broader context. After all, how could we remain indifferent to the sight of hundreds of police officers in riot gear, wielding batons and tear gas and firing rubber bullets to clear the encampments of mostly peaceful protesters demanding that their universities stop doing business with Israeli institutions? How could we not be appalled by the cowardice of university presidents who caved in to the pressure from rich donors and mighty lobbies, and betrayed the fundamental freedoms that they were tasked to protect?

We couldnt and we shouldnt. Neither should we forget, however, that there is a difference between condemning the excessive use of force in quelling the protests and uncritically lauding, or even idealizing, the protesters, or drawing questionable parallels between todays demonstrations and their precursors. Just as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement demanded a broad cultural reckoning with racism, pro-Palestine activists in colleges are leading a rapid shift in U.S. public opinion on Israel and Palestine, wrote Arun Kundnani in New Lines. This is a rather bold statement, considering that 75% of Democrats and 60% of independents were already opposed to Israels actions in Gaza, according to a Gallup poll conducted in March. These numbers indicate a decline in support for Israel compared with November 2023, but the trend predated the wave of protests currently sweeping university campuses and was likely caused by other factors.

Kundnanis claim doesnt square with how Americans feel about the protests either. According to a YouGov poll of 9,012 U.S. adults carried out from April 28 to 30, Americans are more likely to strongly or somewhat oppose (47%) than support (28%) pro-Palestine protesters on college campuses. Many also have doubts about divestment policies: 40% of the respondents believe that it would be unjust for universities to divest from Israeli ties, while 25% say it would be just.

So what are the sources of this enthusiasm? What leads Kundnani to argue: The journey of this generation of young protesters resembles the path trodden by their grandparents, who began the 1960s marching for civil rights and ended the decade with opposition to the Vietnam War? If its the dwindling popular support for Israels war, that was already happening. In a Pew Research poll of 12,693 U.S. adults in February, only 38% of the respondents said Israels conduct of the war was acceptable, while 34% said it was unacceptable, with the remaining 26% unsure. In any case, as Kundnani himself concedes, protests havent succeeded in closing the rift between public opinion and the Biden administrations support for Israel.

Its true that various groups involved in todays protests acknowledge their debts to past movements. Hence the manifesto of Columbia University Apartheid Divest begins by stating that they are a continuation of the Vietnam anti-war movement and the movement to divest from apartheid South Africa. The Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University conclude a joint Statement on Campus Protests by saluting the previous generation [who] mobilized to oppose the Vietnam war and end apartheid in South Africa. But how similar are todays protesters to their predecessors? Could we picture any of the protesters who occupied Columbia Universitys Hamilton Hall in 1968 complaining in front of TV cameras that they could die of dehydration and starvation and asking for basic humanitarian aid, as one of their contemporary counterparts, Johannah King-Slutzky, a doctoral student in English and comparative literature at Columbia, did?

What would the UCLA students who staged protests and sit-ins against Dow Chemical a company that produced napalm, a chemical agent that the U.S. military dropped on civilians in Vietnam recruiting graduates on campus in 1967 have thought of Colorado-based freelance writer Linda Mamoun, who posted the following on X (formerly Twitter): There was a protester in the liberated zone at @UCLA with a potentially fatal banana allergy. Counterprotestors invaded the encampment and saw all the no bananas warnings. The next day they came back waving bananas like settlers waving machine guns & smeared bananas everywhere. Arent the casual use of terms like humanitarian aid and liberated zone and the comparison of banana-waving counterprotesters to settlers waving machine guns an insult not only to anti-war and anti-apartheid protesters of yesteryear but also hundreds of thousands of Gazans who are trying to live through the unlivable?

Then there is the question of the potential negative effect of the tactical choices made by the militant minority on the broader public, whose support pro-peace forces and, even more so, the Palestinian people desperately need. A recent Axios poll conducted May 3-6 shows that a large majority of students themselves (81%) are against destroying property and vandalizing or illegally occupying buildings. The survey of 1,250 college students also found that only a small minority (8%) have participated on either side of the protests, a finding that partly overlaps with the numbers shared by New York City officials indicating that nearly 30% of the people arrested at Columbia and 60% of those arrested at City College were unaffiliated with the respective universities.

This isnt intended as a polemic against well-meaning commentators such as Kundnani, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (The New Yorker, May 8) or Alberto Toscano (In These Times, May 9), or to diminish the importance of the protests, however imperfect and befuddled they may be. Rather, my aim is to problematize the feeling of elation and joy that characterizes progressive reactions to the protests to offer a reality check by taking a step back and revisiting how the debate played out in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7. In many ways, todays unwarranted romanticism is the mirror image of the sense of disbelief and confusion that gripped progressive commentators and academic circles in the face of the reactionary backlash that followed Hamas brutal attacks and shows how detached from reality the global left has become.

The irony was there for all to see from the very beginning. The crisis of academic freedom we are currently facing is as acute as any since the McCarthy years in the United States, Judith Butler wrote in Boston Review. The charge of anti-Semitism has been instrumentalized to shut down speech in ways that should be acutely alarming for anyone who cares not only about free speech in the public domain, but academic freedom on college campuses. But wasnt it the left that pushed for speech codes, deplatforming speakers and canceling events deemed potentially offensive to some groups before the tables turned on Oct. 7? Did Butler think that no one would notice the irony?

The thing with irony is that its a double-edged sword, which not only conceals but also exposes. As David Foster Wallace, one of the brightest minds of the 1990s American literary scene, once reminded us, irony exploit[s] gaps between whats said and whats meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are; it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies.

But what do we do once these hypocrisies are revealed? Do we expect, for example, the growing number of Palestinians who hold Hamas leaders responsible for the pain inflicted on them or the families of over 100 Israeli hostages whose whereabouts are still unknown to agree with author Steve Salaita that Hamas is one of the greatest red herrings of the modern age part rhetorical device, part hobgoblin, part delusion, that its a perpetual cipher and simulation, as he wrote on Nov. 25 in the memorably titled Hamas Is a Figment of Your Imagination?

More generally, did the left really believe that the rest of the world would be swayed by the arcane theories concocted on university campuses and activist hangouts, and start seeing things differently?

Perhaps some did and some didnt. But even the more moderate members of the global left were shocked by the ferocity of the assault on academic freedom after Oct. 7. The pushback was indeed swift and brutal. Some like freelance writer Najma Sharif, who tweeted on the day of the attacks what did yall think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers, or Albany Law School Professor Nina Farnia, who tweeted on the morning of the incursion that the Palestinian resistance is tearing down the walls of colonialism and apartheid were summarily executed by online influencers or right-wing media. Others like Stanford instructor Rabbi Dov Greenberg, who asked Jewish and Israeli students in a class to identify themselves, take their belongings and stand in a corner, with the alleged aim of showing them how he believed Israel treats the Palestinians, or Jemma Decristo, an assistant professor in American studies at the University of California, Davis, who threatened Zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation in the U.S., saying, They have houses w addresses, kids in school. They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more were either asked to take a leave or sacked. And many like the Columbia University Middle East studies professor Joseph Massad, who penned a piece for the Electronic Intifada the day after the attacks depicting them as innovative, a major achievement and a source of jubilation and awe faced calls for their dismissal.

The backlash quickly morphed into a broader onslaught on freedom of speech. Harvard and Columbia students who endorsed the Palestinian cause were doxxed; job offers were rescinded for at least three Harvard Law students who on the night of the attacks signed a controversial statement holding the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence; major donors started to pull the plug on their gifts, accusing university managements of failing to condemn Hamas or tackle antisemitism on campuses.

And it wasnt just students and academics. Politicians, artists and journalists, too, have borne the brunt of growing censorship. These included Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by the House for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel (something she did not in fact call for); the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli and the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, respectively winners of the 2023 LiBeraturpreis award and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, who saw their award ceremonies canceled; and the editors in chief of Artforum (David Velasco) and eLife (Michael Eisen), who lost their jobs for publicly declaring their support for Palestine. It was clear already one month into the Israel-Hamas war that this was just the beginning and an ominous portent of things to come.

Yet none of this was surprising or unexpected for those familiar with the toxic culture wars that were raging around the hot-button issues of race, gender, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration in recent years. The current reactionary backlash has been a long time in the making, spurred by the presidency of Donald J. Trump and gathering pace toward the end of 2020 in response to the wave of riots and protests that rocked the country following the brutal police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. This was also when conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, the intellectual kingpin of the antiwoke movement, started to make headlines in mainstream news media. He was locked on target and had nothing to hide. Weve needed new language for these issues, he decreed in a 2021 New Yorker profile. Political correctness didnt work anymore, Rufo explained, since this isnt about elites trying to enforce a set of manners and cultural limits. Rather, the culture warrior went on, Theyre seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race. Its much more invasive than mere correctness. Other terms like cancel culture or woke were either vacuous or too broad, and didnt translate into a political program. Critical race theory, on the other hand, was the perfect villain. His final objective? To politicize the bureaucracy and to contest some of these essentially corrupted state agencies and then create rival power centers within them.

Fast forward to 2024. With two books under his belt, including the New York Times bestseller Americas Cultural Revolution, fellowships at various conservative think tanks and a seat on the board of trustees of New College in Florida (to which he was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis), Rufo is now leading the offensive against academic freedom, with his eyes on a new prey: the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.

But the success of the current backlash and the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices cannot be grasped through a one-sided focus on the machinations of particular individuals, or the broader conservative establishment. What is often and conveniently forgotten amid the ongoing tragedy is that it always takes two to tango, as the cliche goes, and the left is just as culpable for the recent crackdown on academic freedom and freedom of speech as the right. As I show in my recent book Cancelled: The Left Way Back From Woke, far from being victims or innocent bystanders, dominant strands of the progressive movement have been active participants in culture wars, gratuitously and sometimes viciously mimicking the rights ways: a Manichean simplicity, a bunker mentality and an intolerance of dissent. Yet there is one major difference: While conservatives direct their efforts to eradicating their opponents, the current left targets its own hence the relentless quest for ideological conformity and the obsession with policing speech and identifying microaggressions among fellow progressives who are seen as a greater threat to dominant social justice orthodoxies than conservatives.

The intraleft discussion of the Palestinian question is no exception. It was none other than Salaita who wrote the 2013 hit piece Dershowitz and Finkelstein: Comrades at Heart? for the Electronic Intifada, in response to a controversial interview with the leftist political scientist Norman Finkelstein, in which he accused the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement of being a cult whose ultimate objective is the destruction of Israel. The bad blood between the BDS movement and supporters of a two-state solution is no secret, and Finkelsteins trademark incendiary style is certainly not for the faint-hearted or those seeking polite exchange. That doesnt make him the son of Holocaust survivors, author of multiple books critical of Israel (including the seminal The Holocaust Industry) and an activist who has devoted his entire life to the Palestinian cause the enemy, however, and certainly not someone on a par with Alan Dershowitz, who successfully campaigned to block Finkelsteins tenure bid at DePaul University.

Finkelstein isnt the only pro-Palestinian intellectual who has been exposed to the scourge of the decolonialist left a range of academics, activists and writers who consider settler colonialism, imperialism and racism as one single monolithic structure and call, in the words of Texas Tech University professor Jairo I. Funez-Flores, for the dismantling of the entire colonial order of things, including not only Israel but other settler colonial states such as the U.S., Canada and Australia. The list is painfully long. Writing in the publication Mondoweiss on Nov. 8, the Ramallah-based writer Abdaljawad Omar accuses Adam Shatz U.S. editor of the London Review of Books and author of The Rebels Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon of turning into a moral policeman, quickly brandishing the baton of condemnation and readily adopting with full intensity Israels curated and sensationalized version of the events of Oct. 7. Omar also accuses Yezid Sayigh an adviser and negotiator in the Palestinian delegation to peace talks with Israel and author of Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 of historically downplay[ing] the Palestinian struggle. Salaita castigates progressive politicians Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and leftist intellectuals Naomi Klein and Judith Butler for failing to discern the seriousness of an emergency in the Global South. Western academe was completely unprepared for the material demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand, Salaita wrote in another post on Oct. 19. If the insurgency promises to inflict real damage on the oppressor, then members of that intelligentsia will rush to condemn it on moral grounds.

Its important to note here that these arent minor squabbles over matters of policy and strategy or a question of semantics. Klein and Butler, for example, are vocal BDS supporters who have no qualms about referring to Israel as a settler colonialist state. But the BDS movement has itself come under attack from the decolonialists. Palestinian-American activist Nerdeen Kiswani, for example, wrote on X on May 16 that solidarity with Palestine must go beyond symbolic divestment, adding: If we do not continuously question and revise our overall strategy with guiding principles that go beyond BDS demands, we risk becoming an NGO masquerading as an anti-imperialist solidarity organization.

It was clear all along that this was a losing battle, that the left couldnt beat the right on its own turf given the vast disparities of power between the conservative establishment and campus activists and progressive media voices. The tide had already started turning toward the end of 2020, reaching a peak on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, assaulted police officers and reporters, and vandalized and looted the offices of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress, leaving five people dead and many injured. This was followed by the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022; the nationwide moral panic over critical race theory, which led to Floridas 2022 Individual Freedom Act, popularly known as the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited the teaching of what some legislators defined as divisive ideas in public educational institutions the first of 140 educational gag orders passed by state legislatures in 2022 (an appellate court later struck down the Stop WOKE Act for violating the First Amendment); and the slew of book bans that targeted specific communities and topics (PEN Americas Index of School Book Bans lists 1,477 instances of individual books banned during the first half of the 2022-23 school year, an increase of 28% compared with the prior six months).

In this broad scheme of things, Oct. 7 was simply the straw that broke the camels back, allowing the right to take a giant step toward gaining the upper hand in an escalating culture war. The crackdown on campus protests, which has led to the arrest of over 2,000 demonstrators on charges of trespassing, property vandalization and disturbing the peace, suggests that the right may not be far from a total victory either.

Yet every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case, it takes the form of an opportunity to do some soul-searching, draw lessons and, above all, reconsider our relationship with reality to better cope with the threats posed to basic liberties and rights.

For starters, we now know that culture wars were never about free speech or academic freedom. Reactions to Oct. 7 and Israels massive military response, which has claimed over 35,000 lives so far (of which 15,000 are children), have exposed the hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. Its clear, without any shadow of a doubt, that not all lives matter, at least not to the same extent, depending on which side youre on; that safe spaces, microaggressions and even womens rights apply only to certain groups; and free speech is seen as antisemitic hate speech if its directed against Israels wanton disregard for human rights and international law in Gaza and the West Bank.

The hypocrisy is particularly glaring in the case of conservatives who spent a good chunk of the last decade grumbling about cancel culture and the woke takeover of higher education institutions. Im not talking here about journalists like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, who publicly pleaded guilty as charged when they were accused by fellow journalist Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine on March 2, 2018, of being Zionist fanatics of near-unhinged proportions, or neocons like Douglas Murray, who makes no secret of his contempt for Islam or, conversely, his admiration for far-right authoritarian leaders like Victor Orban and Benjamin Netanyahu. Rather, I am referring to self-described classical liberal or libertarian free speech absolutists who didnt hesitate much before joining the McCarthyesque hunt to seek out and destroy anybody who criticizes the Netanyahu governments policies or objects to the dehumanizing, unabashedly racist rhetoric of prominent Israeli politicians.

The overall picture remains bleak. Its truly like nothing else weve ever seen before, Radhika Sainath, an attorney with the civil rights group Palestine Legal, told The New York Times in December. The organization has received more than 450 requests for help with campus-related cases since the Hamas attacks, more than a tenfold increase from the same period last year. These included the suspension of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the umbrella organization for pro-Palestinian campus activism in the U.S. and Canada, in four universities (Brandeis, Columbia, George Washington and Rutgers). The list continued to expand in the lead-up to and during campus protests; Columbia became the first private university to ban Jewish Voice for Peace and the Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT) suspended the Coalition Against Apartheid, an offshoot of SJP.

Classes have been moved online; graduation and commencement ceremonies have been canceled or postponed; several students were either expelled or barred from graduating. Meanwhile, censorship and the clampdown on academic freedom have reached grotesque proportions. In one widely publicized case, the Harvard Law Review halted the publication of an already-accepted, fully edited article by the Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah. It would have been the first article written by a Palestinian scholar for the prestigious law review. The saga continued when the Columbia Law Review published a longer version of Eghbariahs article, Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept, on June 3. According to The Intercept, the journals board of directors (a group of prominent alumni and law school faculty members who oversee the students running the publication) asked the editors to run the article with a disclaimer, and when the student-run editorial board rejected that proposal, the board of directors took the unprecedented step of pulling the entire journal website down. (The website was back online and the article reinstated at the time of writing.)

But the right-wing backlash wasnt only about Gaza either. It was also about settling scores, as is shown by concerted efforts to establish connections between support for Palestine and other pet targets of the antiwoke movement, such as Black Lives Matter and the DEI bureaucracy. Once again, the first salvo was fired by Rufo, just 11 days after the attacks: Hamas leader of Gaza: I want to take this opportunity to remember the racist murder of George Floyd. The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians. Hamas, BLM, DSA, decolonization same bloodlust. (Rufo took the quote from a Vice News documentary that aired in 2021.) He followed this up with an article in the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, in which he wrote: The foot soldiers of intersectionality most notably, Black Lives Matter (BLM), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the academic decolonization movement celebrated the militants who murdered civilians, raped women, and butchered babies.

True to character, Rufo didnt equivocate about his objectives: For years, these academics and groups had been able to hide their ideological commitments and operate with an air of respectability, he wrote. But after last weeks statements [the week following Oct. 7], they have encountered a well-deserved backlash. A similar point was made by conservative commentator Jason L. Riley in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 31. The anti-Semitism of the BLM movement isnt a quirk, he wrote in response to a now-deleted tweet by a BLM chapter in Chicago that included an image of a person paragliding with a Palestinian flag attached to his parachute and the text I stand with Palestine. For BLM activists, the greater good is scapegoating Jews, destroying Israel and exploiting racial division. And they are counting on the ignorance, complacency and guilt of white liberals to lend the movement credibility and power.

The strategy works like a charm, because decolonialists are still far from coming to terms with reality, trading on romanticism and the dream of a global anti-imperialist revolution. Like a fly in a bottle, they are banging against the glass, holding fast to the mantle of victimhood, even crying cancel culture, as knee-jerk reactions to the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay on Jan. 2 or, more recently, student protests have shown.

True, it wasnt the allegations of plagiarism that set the right-wing campaign against Gay in motion. The clock started ticking in a congressional hearing on Dec. 5, when she, along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, failed to stand up to Republican Rep. Elise Stefaniks browbeating tactics and chose to hide behind legal platitudes instead of taking a firm stance against antisemitism and all forms of discrimination on campus. But the sorry episode that followed wasnt Stefaniks or her conservative comrades doing and showed that no lessons were learned. Racist mobs wont stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism, Ibram X. Kendi, the anti-racism gadfly, tweeted on the day Gay tendered her resignation. Its racist. I mean, we have, no one has produced a shred of evidence that shows that the sole qualification that President Gay had was that she is a Black woman, said the journalist and creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 History Project Nikole Hannah-Jones. Plagiarism charges downed Harvards president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage was the headline The Associated Press opted for to report the resignation. The AP piece also contained a commentary by Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, who shared her fears [that] plagiarism investigations could be weaponized to pursue a political agenda.

The catch is that the number of instances of plagiarism had reached 47 by the time Gay resigned, covering half of all her published work, and included a long block of text lifted almost verbatim from a 1999 book by David Canon, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. Was this yet another example of double standards, as Kendi and Hannah-Jones implied? It certainly was, but not against Gay. As an anonymous op-ed in the Harvard Crimson of Dec. 31 noted, When students omit quotation marks and citations, as President Gay did, the sanction is usually one term of probationa permanent mark on a students record. A student on probation is no longer considered in good standing, the op-ed added, disqualifying them from opportunities like fellowships and study-abroad programs. Clearly, Harvard wasnt keen on dismissing cases of plagiarism as duplicative language, occasional sloppiness or technical attribution issues some of the euphemisms used to describe Gays infractions when they were committed by students. Was Gay under extra scrutiny because she was Black and a woman? Then why was the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne (white male), also forced to resign on July 19, 2023, after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades? What about Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely (white male), University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill (white male) and Princeton historian Kevin Kruse (white male Princeton and Cornell cleared Kruse of all allegations of academic misconduct)? None of this mattered to left-wing culture warriors who bent over backward to defend Gay. For example, Jo Guldi, a data scientist and historian at Emory University, suggested that new technology makes possible an expanded definition of plagiarism that does not match our concern with misappropriating ideas, while Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College in Connecticut, said that with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldnt be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.

Note the irony the total dissociation from reality and lack of self-awareness that prevent the left from seeing how its appeals to revolutionary emancipation have become mere gestures, shticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving, in David Foster Wallaces words. Are we really expected to entertain the possibility that plagiarism was used as a weapon of white supremacy, as claimed by the Los Angeles Times? The point here isnt whether instances of plagiarism or other misdemeanors could be weaponized to serve a particular political agenda. Of course they could, and they routinely are. The real question is, What do we do about it? Do we turn a blind eye to plagiarism when its committed by one of our own? Should we brush it aside just because its the wrong people (in this case, right-wing agitators) who discovered it? And isnt this act of deliberate ignoring also politically motivated, serving a different agenda, something like dereliction as a weapon of anti-racism? More generally, whats the difference between the likes of Kendi, Hannah-Jones and other contemporary figures on the left who told us to look away, and Rufo, who rushed to the defense of Israeli-American designer Neri Oxman (wife of the fellow anti-DEI crusader Bill Ackman) when she was accused of plagiarism soon after the Gay episode?

These may appear to be rhetorical questions. But they arent, for there is indeed an important difference between the two sides of the culture war and no, its not just the values they purport to champion. Reactionaries are trying to do their utmost to avoid internecine fights, sacrificing their own in the blink of an eye if they feel that they have become a liability for the broader antiwoke cause. When far-right political commentator Candance Owens parted ways with Ben Shapiros conservative website The Daily Wire after months of promoting anti-Semitic ideas, according to The Washington Post, Rufo weighed in and wrote the following on X on April 5:

I generally avoid intra-Right conflict, but the ongoing Daily Wire-Candace Owens dispute is an important moment for the Right, which, I believe, merits comment. Owens is a gifted speaker who has been able to turn controversy into attention [but] she is clearly traveling down an ugly, but, unfortunately, well-trodden path. Why does this matter? Because the Right faces an inflection point. There are serious people who are trying to advance a serious political movement with a vision for governing I consider the Daily Wire to be among them. I care about politics because I believe we have substantive work to do for the country. This requires putting together a coalition that is capable of taking responsibility. The choice is ours.

The same Rufo was also urging caution on campus protests: The Right should be careful not to overreact; the best approach is to remain quiet and let the Left tear itself apart. The longer the encampments stay, the more the Left will fracture.

And what were decolonialists doing while leading reactionaries strove to maintain a low profile, if only to keep the pretense? They were doubling down on moral purity checks, pumping up the dose of dogmatism and fanaticism and escalating the witch hunt against fellow progressives.

In wanting to compel groups like Hamas to disappear, [Judith] Butlers position overlaps with that of Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote Hobart and William Smith Colleges professor Jodi Dean in a blog post on the Verso Books website, taking issue with Butlers rejection of violence as a form of resistance: Oppressed people fight back against their oppressors by every means necessary. (Dean was publicly accused by the president of her institution on April 13 of making students feel unsafe on campus and was relieved of classroom duties, pending further investigation.)

Or take the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israels call for a boycott of Standing Together, a grassroots movement of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. Standing Together prevents far-right extremists in Israel from blocking the vehicles bringing much-needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. Its members put their bodies on the line on so-called Jerusalem Day on June 5, as explained on the organizations official X account, in order to provide protective presence, de-escalate, and force the police to stop West Bank settlers who flocked to Jerusalem to attack Palestinians in the Old City.

Yet the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel calls Standing Together an Israeli normalization organization that is intellectually dishonest and seeks to whitewash Israels ongoing genocide in Gaza. How does Standing Together whitewash genocide? By trying to paint Israel as a tolerant, diverse, and normal state, and focusing on hatred rather than oppression as the problem and by refusing to call for an end to the genocide and underlying regime of apartheid, and demand accountability for those who are taking part in both.

Lets stop here and go back to the question with which I opened this essay: What are the sources of progressive romanticism? Put differently, are there any reasons for hope? There are no easy answers to this question, considering that one Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza, according to a November tally by the World Health Organization. If this figure is anything to go by, that means that almost 4,000 children were killed from Dec. 5 to Jan. 2, while the right and the left were squabbling over the fate of the president of the worlds richest university (lets not forget that these are not just numbers we can add up and multiply at will, but individual human beings in fact, children with names and grieving parents, siblings and young friends, not to mention the survivors, those designated by the chilling new abbreviation WCNSF: wounded child, no surviving family).

No doubt the congressional grillings of the presidents of leading U.S. universities were a spectacle to divert attention from war, and a crucial milestone in the process of settling scores. But why did the left take the bait? Was saving a proven plagiarist and the DEI bureaucracy more important than trying to stop more children from becoming additions to Al Jazeeras heartbreaking infographic Know Their Names? Similarly, why is the left investing all its hopes in what the writer Musa Gharbi has aptly called the Ivy Intifada? The term isnt used in a derogatory way. Gharbi acknowledges the symbolic importance of the protests, in particular for those Gazans who have sufficient access to the outside world to witness the protests online a rare source of encouragement and hope. But unlike some decolonialists, he is not romanticizing the protesters, who for the most part have no clue about what theyre protesting for: A survey of 250 students from across the U.S. by University of California, Berkeley political scientist Ron E. Hessner showed that while 86% of the respondents supported the slogan From the river to the sea, only 47% of these were able to name the river and the sea correctly when queried.

But students arent the ones to blame here. For all their faults, they are at least trying, showing us that despite all the talk of coddling and safetyism they are capable of organizing and taking a stance defying the violence perpetrated by the police and pro-Israeli counterprotesters. The real culprits are those supine university bosses who having spent years positively incentivising an entire generation to think of themselves as pleasingly disruptive social radicals, acting on behalf of a variety of oppressed victim classes have now swung to the other extreme without missing a beat, as Kathleen Stock put it in a May 10 article in UnHerd.

Then there are the decolonialist academics and activists who masquerade as the left and whom I have elsewhere termed reactionary progressives. They present culture wars as an epic showdown between the forces of evil and the morally righteous, when they are actually engaged in an imperialist war for control of more territory, more institutions and ultimately more power. What matters more for the purposes of this article is not the blatant hypocrisy of so-called free speech absolutists (didnt we know it?) but the decolonialist lefts colonization of progressive activism, its claim to a monopoly on moral authority and its eagerness to act as a self-appointed politburo that decides whats right and whats wrong, who is an ally and who is a traitor. Differences of opinion, or what the right calls viewpoint diversity, arent bad in and of themselves, of course, but unfortunately life isnt a Monty Python movie and decolonialists arent the Peoples Front of Judea bickering with members of the Judean Peoples Front instead of taking on the Romans though the similarities are quite striking.

The problem is, decolonialists wont be the ones who will pay the price for ideological purity. Sure, theyll get their events canceled, their awards withdrawn, their book contracts and membership to professional organizations rescinded. But thats the cancel culture they forced down the throat of fellow progressives up until Oct. 7. They will survive. The real price will be paid is paid by those who are caught in the crossfire between decolonialists and reactionaries: thousands of protesters filling the streets of Tel Aviv and asking for the resignation of Netanyahu, the families of Israeli hostages storming the Knesset, conscientious objectors like the 18-year-old Tal Mitnick, Jewish activists who occupied Capitol Hill in the early days of the war to call for a cease-fire and Israel-based peaceniks who are doing the messy work of day-to-day activism to build a future where all parties can enjoy what privileged decolonialist academics take for granted a life with dignity.

Whats needed at this point isnt romanticism, even less so decolonialist cynicism, but coming to terms with the reality of the world we live in. Wallace began his timeless 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio, with a parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says Morning, boys. Hows the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes What the hell is water?

The point of the fish story, Wallace told the students, is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. The most important reality many fail to see today is that we live in a very unequal and morally bankrupt world, and that its not possible to change this by copying reactionary ways of thinking. True liberation, Wallace reminded us, begins in our minds, and requires humility: The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

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Gaza and the End of the Culture War as We Know It - New Lines Magazine

Keir Starmer speaks as he meets victims of anti-social behaviour in Stifford Clays. John Keeble via Getty Images

Keir Starmer has pledged to end the Tory culture wars if he becomes prime minister.

In an exclusive interview, the Labour leader told HuffPost UK that people are exhausted by the political battles over issues such as trans rights.

And he said he wanted to focus on bringing people together rather than creating further division.

Rishi Sunak has been accused of stoking social division by making Esther McVey his so-called minister for woke in a reshuffle last year.

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch also announced last week that if they win the election, the Tories will amend the Equality Act to ensure that sex in the law means biological sex and not new, redefined meanings of the word.

Starmer has been criticised in the past for shifting his own position on transgender rights.

However, the Labour leader said his government would look to bring an end to those controversies on day one.

He said: I think people are exhausted by culture wars. My clear view is that the vast majority of the public in general in the UK are reasonable, tolerant people.

Live and let live is a very British thing, and what culture wars do is force people into taking sides that theyre not instinctively inclined to do. And its exhausting because youre constantly having a battle about this and a battle about that.

Thats why Ive said that politics needs to tread more lightly on peoples lives.

Starmer added: The Tories havegot nowhere else to go but this divisive culture war area, and I do think that if we do win the election I do want it to be a reset moment for politics in a number of different ways.

The most important thing to me personally is to restore politics to service, a sense that this we are here to serve the country, but also this sense of bringing people together.

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Exclusive: Keir Starmer Says He Will End Tory Culture Wars If He Becomes Prime Minister - Yahoo Movies UK