Over the past year, we’ve seen Democrat after Democrat denounce Israel’s legitimate actions of self-defense against Hamas in the same, and sometimes stronger, terms than their disapproval of Hamas. The legacy media, Ivy League, and student protesters have echoed this false equivalence between victim and aggressor. How has it come to pass that an American ally, attacked by genocidal foes who commit war crimes en masse against Israeli civilians, is treated by progressive elites as equally at fault as its attackers for the ensuing carnage?  

The explanation lies in the intersection of Hamas and anti-racism. 

Robin DiAngelo’s and Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racism ideology has taken hold over America’s elites. Its crux is that all disparities between races are due solely to systemic racism that privileges white people. Ergo, the population can be divided into two distinct categories: racists and anti-racists. To refuse to acknowledge systemic racism and white privilege is to endorse a racist society that oppresses minorities, with the apparent exception of Asian Americans, culturally, economically, educationally, socially, and through the legal system. Kendi prescribes the cure for this discrimination as more discrimination, this time against white people.

Grounded in this ideology, progressives not only had a hard time condemning Hamas’s murders, rapes, and taking innocent people hostage, many initially applauded them. Progressives view these atrocities through the lens of decolonizing the region from Israeli “settlers” and “colonizers.” Never mind that these descriptions of the Jewish state and its inhabitants are ahistorical. In the progressives’ world where everyone is either racist or an anti-racist, there is no neutral ground. White people must either become anti-racist allies, or be branded as aiding, abetting, and perpetuating systemic racism. Applied to Israel, this rubric means a person can only be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel. To proclaim oneself pro-Palestinian is to become an ally to the cause, and allies do not condemn even the most extreme measures the “resistance” takes to defeat the oppressors. 

Hence the angst of moderate progressives who, while they may know in their hearts that the decapitation and burning of babies and parading of raped girls and women through the streets is morally reprehensible, cannot help but feel that to criticize Hamas for its atrocities is a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. To condemn Hamas openly might undo their past virtue signaling and render them suspect as closet supporters of colonialism. The best we can expect from moderate progressives is that they might stew silently while their consciences simmer.

For pure progressives, there is no such angst. From Harvard and Cornell universities to America’s version of the Arab street, clear support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack ranges from radical professors to student organizations and protesters. Silent complicity from normally outspoken university administrators and the nation’s cultural and celebrity elites is equally problematic. These are very bad portents for America. 

Today, it is predominantly Jewish civilians in Israel who are the targets of Hamas extremists. Tomorrow, the “oppressor” class in America could be targets of home-grown progressive extremists. Anyone who belongs to those groups of people singled out as “settlers” or “colonizers” or “oppressors” is at risk.

This is not a paranoid fantasy. In academic and leftist ideology, the word “othering” is used to describe the process by which one group of human beings defines another as lacking basic human qualities. Othering seeks to identify a given group of people as fundamentally different to a degree that justifies the deprivation of what we think of as basic human rights.

In America, this process is already underway. President Joe Biden and his followers decry “MAGA Republicans” as threats to democracy, racist insurrectionists who pose a high danger of violent extremism. In a chilling expose in Newsweek last year, investigative journalist Bill Arkin laid bare the FBI’s plans for mass surveillance of Trump voters on the pretext that they represent a unique threat of violence in the presidential election. Made a donation to Trump or purchased ammunition for your fall hunting trip? You’re on the FBI’s list.

Thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s Executive Order 14035, it’s not just the FBI that has succumbed to “othering” and anti-racism. All federal agencies are under Biden’s orders to advance the Kendi and DiAngelo agendas. From the Education and Defense departments to Health and Human Services and Transportation, federal employees and military personnel are compelled to attend anti-racism indoctrination sessions steeped in progressive ideology. 

Predictably, the result is that federal authorities now target anti-“woke” parents who protest at school board meetings, observant Catholics, law-abiding gun-owners, and Trump supporters in general as possible extremists. People who diverge from the political and scientific orthodoxy on issues like climate change or COVID’s origins also find themselves ostracized, banned, or suppressed on social media and often hounded from their jobs. 

Ostracization is the least harmful outcome of “othering.” In its most extreme form, “othering” results in pogroms, massacres, even genocide.

Deprecated by national leaders and cast into the category of “other,” conservatives, Trump supporters, Catholics, and Jews can be treated as pariahs. In short order, they become despised groups, no longer worthy of equal treatment. In America today, only a thin veneer of justices in the judicial branch forestalls complete social and governmental repression of opponents of progressivism.

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From Hitler to Stalin and Mao to Pol Pot, ideologically driven leaders throughout modern history have sought to liquidate their class enemies, exterminate racial and religious minorities, and persecute their political rivals.

Anti-racist ideology is ripe for exploitation in this manner, especially when America becomes a minority-majority country, which is why the anniversary of Oct. 7 should serve as a wake-up call to thinking people of all races and identities that the time has come not only to condemn Hamas but also to repudiate anti-racist ideology and end the elite-driven divisiveness in our society.

John B. Roberts II is a former political strategist and executive producer of the McLaughlin Group. He is the author of Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.