You Can’t Be Anti-Identity Politics And Pro-Zionism. My Former Colleagues Are Hypocrites.

I dedicated my career to opposing identity politics, but my former allies are now threatening our cause.

Classical liberalism is under attack. At a level unseen in a century, when communism, fascism, and progressivism were all simultaneously ascendant, both the Left and Right are adopting authoritarian ideologies that would undo the principles that have undergirded free societies since the Enlightenment. These authoritarian ideologies are called “identity politics,” manifesting in the intersectionalism of the woke left as well as the white nationalism and Christian nationalism of the identitarian right.

I’ve dedicated my career to defending classical liberalism and advancing its most pure variant: libertarianism. In service of this, as the intersectional menace arose over the past decade, I did everything I could to combat it. I produced videos with tens of millions of combined views explaining the flaws in this ideology, authored my book Redefining Racism, and took a job as the first full-time employee at an upstart non-profit: the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR). At FAIR, I collaborated with many of the most famous names in the anti-identity politics movement: Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, Coleman Hughes, Niall Ferguson, Michael Shermer, and many more. To affiliate with FAIR, people were required to accept a certain set of principles dubbed “The Pro-Human Pledge”—at the very top of this pledge was the following text I assisted in crafting, reflecting a major ethic of classical liberalism:¹

I seek to treat everyone equally without regard to skin color or other immutable characteristics. I believe in applying the same rules to everyone, and reject disparagement of individuals based on the circumstances of their birth.

In the years since FAIR’s establishment in early 2021, the cultural discourse has changed. Where then Black Lives Matter, DEI, and #MeToo were the hot topics, today, the woke excesses of those movements have been broadly recognized and forced into decline. Instead, a new slate of issues has arisen to give Americans something to fight with each other about. Perhaps the largest of these is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—given resurgent focus due to Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza, one of the most deadly wars for civilians of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, this shift in discourse has revealed the glaring hypocrisy of a majority of my former colleagues. Where once they promoted “treat[ing] everyone equally without regard… to immutable characteristics” and “applying the same rules to everyone,” they now spend their time defending an ethnonationalist ideology in direct contradiction to these principles: Zionism.

Beyond the harm this ideology poses to Palestinians (and Jews), I fear my colleagues’ hypocrisy will undermine the fight against identity politics here in the West and presage the collapse of classical liberalism.

I was raised in a manner designed to entrench a love for Israel as a core aspect of my identity. Despite being an American with no close family in Israel, I was sent to schools where from early childhood we sang the Israeli National Anthem (Hatikva), flew Israeli flags, took classes focused on modern Israel, celebrated Israeli holidays, were bussed to participate in pro-Israel protests, and more. Despite most of the community’s educators and parents being left-leaning within the Israeli political spectrum, the maps of Israel we used included all of the West Bank and Gaza (even after Israel nominally withdrew from Gaza in 2005) with no distinction in their status from Israel-proper. I spent a full semester in Israel during my senior year of high school, during which I spent a week in a simulation of IDF basic training. My experience is common for Jewish-Americans, documented perfectly in the recent film Israelism.

It was thanks in large part to this upbringing, coupled with discovering that much of what I was taught was false, that I adopted the values commonly associated with the anti-woke movement. I saw how a victimhood culture derived from the true horrors of historical antisemitism and the Holocaust left children terrified of encountering antisemites when they ventured outside of the community, something that never actually happened to me or any of my friends even once. I saw how this victimhood culture motivated identity politics that not only sought to justify ethnic separatism and dual-loyalty to a foreign state, but demanded that the United States fund their ethnonationalist project. I saw how any critique of this identity politics was fraudulently dismissed as antisemitic through a motte-and-bailey tactic that claimed criticism of Israel was allowed in theory, yet seemingly never in practice. I saw how enormously successful those claims of bigotry were in coercing either compliance or silence.

When I witnessed dissident minority voices such as John McWhorter, Wilfred Reilly, Andrew Sullivan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and so many more all recognizing this same pattern within their communities and speaking out against identity politics’ newfound cultural dominance, I saw a growing movement with a cause I understood and wanted to fight for. I knew already that many of the individuals involved in this movement—Bari Weiss in particular—were inconsistent in practicing the values that they preached when it came to Jewish identity politics, but I thought that so long as the values we all purported to share could be spread widely and persuasively, those suffering from less cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning would be capable of putting the pieces together for themselves.

I was terribly wrong.

Today, with some notable exceptions such as Glenn Loury, Glenn Greenwald, and Zaid Jilani, the mainstream of the anti-woke movement has done nothing to reconcile their hypocrisy. At best, some have simply avoided commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but many more such as Douglas Murray, Coleman Hughes, Richard Hanania, and Brianna Wu have made it their new crusade despite seemingly knowing little about the conflict before October 7th. Many in this space have focused on the identity politics seen in the excesses of pro-Palestinian protests and the rise in genuine antisemitism—both exaggerated but valid concerns I have reported on myself—to distract from the fact that the Jewish identity politics they support was the spark that created the entire conflict and that American taxpayers have been forced to fund it to the cost of over $160 billion and our national security interests.

Meanwhile, the more consistent faction of the identitarian right has had no issue identifying the hypocrisy. Social media posts in support of Zionism by purportedly anti-identity politics classical liberals are filled with comments from identitarians calling it out. Revealing this double standard has become the greatest weapon in their war against classical liberalism, allowing them to demolish trust in those claiming to be anti-identity politics. For those who have not yet made up their mind about identity politics, with that trust goes acceptance of not just the messenger’s lone hypocritical statement, but the credibility of the entire classical liberal worldview that the messenger purports to advocate.

Identitarians have forced people to make a choice: either every group gets to do identity politics or none of us do. They seek to make identity politics allowable for white and Christian nationalists; I seek to protect individual rights from the whim of any collective. I will lose if too few stand with me.

When confronted with this hypocrisy, some prominent anti-woke voices have claimed to me that it’s just an illusion. By being anti-identity politics, they never meant all identity politics! That would be “absurd,” they claim. After all, the Civil Rights Movement was identity politics. Women’s suffrage was identity politics. I’m engaged in “equivocation,” they claim. All they ever meant by “identity politics” was the way activists demand deference to their point of view by appealing to their group identity (aka standpoint epistemology). I hope this argument already strikes readers as an ahistorical account of the anti-identity politics movement, but in case it doesn’t, let me leave no room for them to claim that we weren’t all on the same page about what identity politics is and wiggle out of their hypocrisy.

Let’s first review the etymology of the term “identity politics.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) definition of “identity politics” is “The adherence by a group of people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to political beliefs or goals specific to the group concerned, as opposed to conforming to traditional broad-based party politics.” While not added to the dictionary until 2010, OED cites the first known usage of the term cites back to 1973, when it was used to describe the cause for the collapse of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a prominent far-left group during the 1960s which splintered due to competition between its radical factions, which varyingly wanted to focus on “black liberation,” “third world” peoples, or fighting for a variety of other group’s causes. With each faction wanting to privilege their group’s interests above others, SDS could no longer cohere in working toward shared goals and split into multiple independent organizations (including the famed Weathermen domestic terror group).

However, the term’s prominence in leftist discourse is primarily credited to its usage by the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a black feminist lesbian socialist organization. In a 1977 statement, they explained,

We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

Despite claiming to “reject pedestals,” as Marxist socialists their conception of what being “levelly human” meant was twisted from what we consider equality to mean in liberal societies. To CRC, in line with the socialist mantra of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” “levelly human” meant equality of outcome or “equity,” not the liberal notion of equality under the law or equality of opportunity. As such, while CRC may not have thought of their activism as demanding pedestals, in fact they were. Ironically, a popular meme used by more contemporary leftists to advocate for equity in the tradition of CRC literally depicts the rearrangement of pedestals.

Read one of many critiques of the logic behind this graphic here.

Of course, pressuring institutions to redirect funding with an agenda to advantage certain identity groups over others—be that funding for healthcare, welfare, daycare, or anything else—requires an equal revocation of resources from other groups. Even if CRC’s specific goals sound noble to you, seeking them out by putting the interests of one’s identity group at odds with others’, rather than through policies designed for the benefit of humanity broadly (as advocated through left-liberal John Rawl’s identity-blind “veil of ignorance” thought experiment), will lead society to degenerate into competing identity groups each vying for control of the state to plunder their opponents’ resources for their own gain, a situation described in depth by economist Frédéric Bastiat.

As strictly defined by OED or CRC, identity politics doesn’t only apply to such situations, but could also apply to the removal of barriers that discriminate against certain groups. This was the nature of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Liberal Feminism, and other movements that sought to expand civil rights—equality under the law—to previously disenfranchised groups. In these cases, one group’s success need not come at the other’s loss.

However, contextually, CRC was founded in reaction to what they perceived to be the failures of Liberal Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement. In practice, CRC’s usage of “identity politics” saw various identity groups' interests as inherently in conflict under capitalism, for example, referring to “white heterosexual men” as “the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.” “Identity politics” has continued to be used by the Left to refer to activism in the tradition of CRC ever since. This is what has allowed critics of identity politics to use the term despite their explicit support for many of the movements that fall under its technical definition, as signaled by our prominent usage of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglas, and other civil rights icons in FAIR’s early marketing materials.

Opposition to identity politics can take many forms. Most straightforwardly, it could refer to cash transfers to certain groups, such as the reparations opposed by John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes. It could also refer to affirmative action or DEI policies that use identity as a factor in admitting, hiring, or promoting people, as opposed by Bari Weiss and Christopher Rufo. It could also refer to cancel culture policies seeking to shut down free speech for the benefit of certain identity groups, such as trans activists demanding the use of alternative gender pronouns be mandated by law in Canadian Bill C-16, as opposed by Jordan Peterson. It could also refer to the white ethnonationalism opposed by just about everyone until its recent resurgence.

Another manifestation it could take, yet taken by not one of those individuals, is opposition to Zionism.

The phrase Zionism was first coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890. It meant, simply, “Jewish nationalism.” The term quickly grew in popularity and was used by Jewish nationalists of various types, including Zionism’s most prominent voice, Theodore Herzl, until the movement coalesced around the settlement of Eretz Yisrael—Palestine—at which point Jewish nationalists seeking other goals distinguished themselves through alternative nomenclature, such as “Territorialism.” From the beginning, to be a Jewish nationalist meant to oppose assimilation into European societies as a solution to antisemitism, varyingly because assimilation was seen as either undesirable or impossible.

Indeed, antisemitism was an immense problem, at that time most notably manifested in Russian pogroms. While assimilation may have been possible in previous decades and centuries through conversion to Christianity and intermarriage, the rise of racial pseudoscience voided that option before the coming Holocaust. A nationalist movement seeking emancipation from discriminatory treatment was thus understandable and needn’t be identity politics (at least not in its negative, “in practice” meaning). A secessionist movement seeking independence for Jewish districts, a movement to an unoccupied tract of land, or the purchase of sufficient land to form a state on would have been ways to remove barriers to Jewish freedom without revoking anyone else’s.² But with the selection of Palestine as Zionism’s target, motivated by religious attachment despite many Zionists' atheism, that became impossible.

A common refrain from early Zionists, popularized by Israel Zangwill, was “A land without a people for a people without a land.” However, after a scouting trip to Palestine, it was Zangwill himself in 1904 who warned the movement that “There is... a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. … so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population.” Zangwill was regarded as “disloyal” by much of the Zionist movement for publishing this information. When the movement formally rejected an offer for land in British East Africa, Zangwill left to found Territorialism.

Zangwill’s prediction, of course, came true. Palestine’s Arab population, knowing the Zionists' plan to build a Jewish state on land that they’d already been promised independence on, were infuriated by continued Jewish immigration. They repeatedly refused partition plans which would have either forced the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of their homes or left them as second-class citizens under Jewish rule (as Israeli-Arabs were until 1968). Then, in 1948, approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were forcibly expelled or fled due to fear intentionally induced through Zionist terrorism. Unarmed Arab civilians who tried to return home to Israeli territory after the war were shot at. The Israeli state passed a series of laws to formally confiscate Arab land and reassign it to Jewish owners, despite many Palestinians still even today holding the keys to their confiscated property. The United Nations, which had voted for the partition of Palestine, quickly passed another resolution demanding Israel allow the war’s refugees to return, which Israel has refused for 77 years and counting. In 1967, Israel further conquered the West Bank and Gaza, where it instituted an apartheid system that denied civil rights to the millions of Palestinian Arabs it governed over while allowing Jewish settlers to further dispossess Arabs of their internationally recognized land.

Today, Zionism, being Jewish nationalism, continues to demand the maintenance of Israel’s character as a Jewish state.

To remain a Jewish state, Israel denies equality to the Palestinians it occupies and the right of return to Palestinian refugees both in the occupied territories and neighboring nations. The Israeli parliament (Knesset) also passed a “Basic Law” (the equivalent of a Constitutional Amendment in U.S. law) making explicit that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” Despite this, Israeli-Arabs have been granted broadly equal rights, yet many discriminatory laws remain in place.

Of course, there are severe issues with Palestinian and Arab identity politics too (although Arab nationalism is a more inclusive nationalism, defining its nation merely as those who speak Arabic, live in the Arab World, and feel that they belong to the Arab nation—potentially including Jews). But it’s Jewish identity politics that sparked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, continues to complicate its resolution, and is barring millions of people from their property and civil rights. And here in the West, where the Palestinian cause has traditionally been championed by the Progressive Left, only classical liberal advocates for Palestinians like myself ever claimed to oppose identity politics; it’s Israel’s advocates who claim to oppose identity politics, yet hypocritically endorse it for Jews.

To understand how this hypocrisy has manifested, we can look at the statements of those who rose to fame as identity politics’ biggest opponents.

Douglas Murray’s 2019 book The Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller that led the charge in explaining the threat identity politics posed before the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement proved him right in 2020. In the book, Murray wrote,

‘Identity politics’, meanwhile, has become the place where social justice finds its caucuses. It atomizes society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. … It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring with them some added bonus. For example (as the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it), the assumption that there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay.

After October 7th, Murray became a war correspondent embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces and has been spreading pro-Israel propaganda throughout the media. As he expressed in an interview with Ben Shapiro, apparently Murray believes “a heightened moral knowledge” can be the main characteristic of one particular identity group though:

Western Civilization is based on the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem. Athens is under great assault always, but it’s not actually under existential assault. … Western civilization could not survive the destruction of the Jewish state because it would be, among much else, the cutting away of the whole tree that we’re on and Western Civilization would die.

Murray’s chosen expert on identity politics, Coleman Hughes, is no better. Hughes made his name advocating for “color blindness,” a subject he writes beautifully about:

Color blindness is neither racist nor backwards. Properly understood, it is the belief that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy. …

The earliest mentions of color blindness I am aware of come from Wendell Phillips, the President of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the man nicknamed “abolition’s golden trumpet.” In 1865, Phillips called for the creation of “a government color-blind,” by which he meant the total elimination of all laws that mentioned race. …

Among the main goals of the civil rights movement was the elimination of laws and policies that used the category of race in any way. … to advocate for color blindness is not to pretend you don’t notice color. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives. …

To discriminate in favor of some races, you must discriminate against others. This discrimination creates an endless cycle of racial grievance and resentment in every direction. … True anti-racism means creating color-blind processes—processes where racial bias literally cannot enter—even if they do not yield results that mirror the census. …

Color blindness is the best principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy. It is the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run. It is the best way to fight the kind of racism that really matters. And it is the best way to orient your own attitude toward this nefarious concept we call race. We abandon color blindness at our own peril.

After October 7th, Hughes too switched his focus to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also spreading propagandistic falsehoods. Hughes’s mention of the “endless cycle of racial grievance and resentment” and how color blindness “lowers[s] the temperature of racial conflict” is particularly insightful language to apply to Israel, yet he has failed to apply it. In a deeply flawed essay defending Israel from allegations of apartheid, Hughes notes that “In the Palestinian national movement, the common denominator has been the rejection of a Jewish state of any size and scope.” Apparently, it’s valid for Hughes and Wendell Phillips to reject state-enforced racial preferences, but not for Palestinians. Hughes’ view is elaborated upon in a colleague’s essay that he endorsed as “an excellent piece… that closely approximates my view on Israel-Palestine”:

The problem in 1929 was not “the occupation,” but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine. This refusal stands in contrast to repeated (if not always full-hearted) Jewish acceptance of a two-state solution, including the Jews’ acceptance of the Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947. …

Lifting the blockade on Gaza and unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank would amount to suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true of the suggestion that there could be a unified state of Jewish and Arab citizens from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

For Hughes, it seems “color blindness is the best principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy” everywhere but Palestine before 1947, and “the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict” everywhere but between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

One of Hughes’ close collaborators is John McWhorter, who has been writing against identity politics for decades. McWhorter has expressed substantially more nuance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than many others in the anti-identity politics movement, but has not taken up as consistent a worldview as his podcasting partner Glenn Loury. McWhorter has, in the past, explained the importance of integration:

Hybridicity is what we want. We can’t have balkanization. There are people who love that idea of the “salad bowl” as opposed to the “melting pot,” but it’s very simple. There’s a very simple fact: there is not one recorded example in history or today… where groups of people live largely separately, rarely marrying out, in perfect peace. And the reason for it is because one group is oppressing another, or there are wary cast boundaries in the culture. There’s no such thing as the salad bowl except as a transition. If we really want to get past race, getting past race doesn’t mean whites will love us to death and in the meantime we will hunker down behind this barrier kind of warily seeing these people who hurt us in the past. That’s not getting past race. Getting past race is… all of us mixing together.

Yet, when it comes to Zionism, apparently, it was ok for the ethnically mixed Palestine to balkanize and Jews to hunker behind a barrier. It was, by the way, the same Israel Zangwill who left the Zionist movement who created the concept of the “melting pot” that McWhorter lauds. Criticizing Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message, McWhorter defended the 1947 partition of Palestine, explaining,

Does Ta-Nehisi know that partitioning is something that’s happened in many places in the world? Israel and Palestine is just one place. And in all of those cases, you’re talking about people on different sides of a divide who can’t stand each other, so certainly there are going be racist assumptions, but Coates seems to think that Israel has no right to have considered that place their homeland.

McWhorter further refused to dismiss contemporary Zionist apartheid:

If you’re going to look at something and call it apartheid and write artistically about that, that’s one thing. But why the apartheid? When we call it a complex situation, I’m afraid here that what complex means is that to simply diss Zionism right out... you have a case to make. … He’s not somebody who seems to make a case.

Konstantin Kisin is another figure who built a following railing against identity politics, his language being some of the most direct of anyone. Among a long record of writing and speaking on the topic, Kisin has tweeted,

Identity politics is a cancer.

Pushed by untalented, envious and resentful failures who want to drive us apart and play to our worst instincts.

It works because humans are pre-wired for tribalism. It therefore takes conscious effort to resist.

That effort is worth it.

As well as “My New Year's resolution is to make it OK for people to describe identity politics as what it is: the new racism.” And “Nothing annoys me more than people who see identity politics for what it is and engage in it for tactical reasons anyway. Stop. Playing. Their. Game.” And “Identity politics is stupid. But for Jews, it is especially stupid. Can we please be the one ethnic group that does not go along with this absolute garbage.”³

Meanwhile, despite claiming not to be “off the fence” in favor of Israel until September of 2024, Kisin has been attacking the famed “Palestine will be free from the River to the Sea” chant since the beginning of the war, seeing the removal of Israel’s apartheid state and Jews as synonymous (a claim appropriately critiqued by Kisin’s podcasting partner Francis Foster). Kisin doubled down on the idea that Palestinian Arabs should not be granted freedom on the land they were violently expelled from in an essay a few months later, in which he endorsed a monologue from Real Time with Bill Maher where Maher argued that Palestinians should not be allowed to return to their land since other peoples have been expelled from their lands too. It’s possible, actually, to oppose ethnic cleansing consistently.

There was also Kisin’s interjection when he moderated a debate last May between myself and Briahna Joy Gray vs. Eli Lake and Michael Moynihan at the Dissident Dialogues festival. When Briahna noted that we shouldn’t “essentialize populations,” Kisin responded, “Danes don’t do October 7th.” After a clip of the exchange went viral on X and Briahna criticized Kisin for it, Kisin responded by labeling her “DEI Barbie,” a transparently racist choice given Briahna works in independent media where no DEI policy can gain you a following.

Kisin, McWhorter, Hughes, and Murray have all done much of their writing on the subject for The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s publication that built its brand by publishing anti-identity politics takes. Weiss is a lifelong Zionist activist, and if there were any one media ringleader organizing people to talk out of both sides of their mouths about identity politics, it would be her. In her video “Why DEI Must End For Good,” Weiss criticized DEI for being “a powerful ideological movement bent on categorizing every American not as an individual worthy of equal rights and dignity because of their individuality, but as an avatar of an identity group. A person’s behavior prejudged, according to that group, setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game.” Similarly, in her introduction to an essay from anti-identity politics whistleblower Jodi Shaw, Weiss explained,

Every day I get phone calls from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past.

I get calls from young people just launching their careers telling me that they feel they have no choice but to profess fealty to this ideology in order to keep their jobs. …

Any ideology that asks people to judge others based on their skin color is wrong. Any ideology that asks us to reduce ourselves and others to racial stereotypes is wrong. Any ideology that treats dissent as evidence of bigotry is wrong. Any ideology that denies our common humanity is wrong. You should say so. Just like Jodi Shaw has.

“Any” is strong and clear language Weiss has repeatedly proven she doesn’t actually believe. Both before and after writing that, Weiss has long advocated that the dissent of anti-Zionism is evidence of antisemitism. Weiss further explains in her book, How To Fight Anti-Semitism,

When people say they are anti-Zionist, it is important to be clear about what they seek. What they seek is the elimination of an actual state in the Jewish ancestral home where more than six million Jews, more than half of whom have roots in the Middle East, live with their families, not to mention some two million non-Jewish citizens, who are not spared when Israel is attacked by its enemies. With the notable exception of a few hundred committed anarchists in Brooklyn and Berkeley who think all nation-states should disappear, anti-Zionists do not support the elimination of any other country in the world. Just one state. The Jewish one. …

And what happens when the anti-Zionist dream—a one-state solution or the elimination of Israel—is imposed? To have even the most superficial understanding of Middle Eastern politics and history is to know that it would result in massive carnage or genocide …

Anti-Zionism is not just anti-Semitism because of current reality. Anti-Zionism is also anti-Semitism because of history. … As many well-intentioned people look to understand why a very small but very vocal group of Jews seems as deeply opposed to Jewish interests as many of our community’s enemies, these Jews ought to be understood in context, as part of a long history of left-wing anti-Semitic movements that successfully conscript Jews as agents in their own destruction.

Deconstructing Weiss’s flawed arguments would take a book of its own. To quickly cover some of them: no, anti-Zionists do not generally support the elimination of “just one state”; no, a one-state solution wouldn’t clearly lead to genocide; and no, anti-Zionism isn’t “opposed to Jewish interests.” But for the purposes of this essay, all one needs to see is that Weiss does not truly believe that “any ideology that treats dissent as evidence of bigotry is wrong.” She does not truly oppose any “ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past.” She does not believe that every “individual [is] worthy of equal rights and dignity” if it’s Israel’s dominion they’re under. And she does believe that behavior can be “prejudged… setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game” when it’s an Arab vs. Jewish zero-sum game for control of Israel.

Perhaps the most frustrating hypocrisy from Weiss to me personally is her criticism of wokeism for requiring people to “profess fealty” to an “ideology in order to keep their jobs.” Shortly after Weiss published that, during Israel’s “Operation Guardian of the Walls” assault in Gaza, I tweeted a mild clip from Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show that advocated for peace and Weiss (one of FAIR’s Board of Directors members) saw the tweet, sent it to my boss, and told him such views shouldn’t be tolerated at FAIR. Less than two months into my job, when I was the one “just launching their career” who wouldn’t “profess fealty” to Israel, I had to spend over 90 minutes in an evening phone call with my boss defending myself and ultimately agreed to take the tweet down to avoid losing my job. I’m hardly alone in facing damage to my career from Weiss’s cancel culture. At its worst, it plausibly contributed to the assassination of a civilian Palestinian academic, Refaat Alareer.

Adjacent to The Free Press’s bubble and friendly with them is Jordan Peterson, likely the most famous and financially successful superstar of the anti-identity politics movement. Of identity politics, he rightfully explained,

Identity politics is a sick game. You don’t play racial, ethnic and gender identity games. The left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let’s say, and the right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they’re equally dangerous. The correct game, as far as I’m concerned, is one where you focus on your individual life and try to take responsibility for your actions.

After October 7th, Peterson endorsed an article that passionately advocates nationalist identity politics on behalf of oppressed Jews:

The Jews by right of suffering immeasurable, persecution without relent, an attempt at their full extermination, DESERVED their own place — the place of their birth, where they had been for millennia, the land of their history, and the land promised to them in the incomparable record and exaltation, the Torah. …

Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time.

Support for Israel is the moral test of democratic leaders and all people with thinking and fair minds.

Perhaps the most extreme hypocrite of everyone in the anti-identity politics space is Richard Hanania, a reformed white identitarian, himself of Palestinian Christian heritage, who wrote a book on how contemporary American identity politics arose out of Civil Rights law.

Hanania has tweeted, “Nationalism is another form of identity politics. A substitute for a healthy and meaningful personal life.” Hanania is also an advocate of open borders immigration policy, convinced into this position through the work of noted libertarian economist Bryan Caplan. Hanania doesn’t just support open borders for the United States, but has referred to the United Arab Emirates as an “open borders utopia.” Hanania also supports illegal immigration, explaining, “I think that being willing and able to cross a border illegally and live in the shadows is a very good selection mechanism. I want a society of people who don’t follow unjust laws.” He has also argued that open borders should appeal to critics of Islam specifically since Muslim immigration to non-Muslim societies leads them to assimilation and apostasy.

Nonetheless, Hanania not only opposes any right of return for Palestinians but supports the explicit ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s entire population:

Eventually, I think that we can get to a place where emptying Gaza becomes seen as a realistic option both within and outside the region. But it will require Israel to extinguish all hopes of Palestinian statehood first. The US can be useful here by continuing to provide support to Israel, refraining from putting pressure on it on humanitarian grounds, and trying to incentivize other nations to accept Palestinians as refugees.

What I’ve gathered here represents only a tiny sample of the most clear-cut examples of hypocrisy from the biggest names in the anti-identity politics movement. The problem is much larger in scope than I can show in one essay.

And the hypocrisy is not limited to Jewish ethnonationalism in Israel, but also domestic Jewish victimhood culture, cancel culture, and crackdowns on free speech in the name of stopping antisemitic hate speech.

It pains me to name so many figures whose work I’ve admired, whose insights have informed my own, and who I helped promote through my work at FAIR. I still value much of what they’ve accomplished. No one is irredeemable, and I hope that they can one day see how backing Jewish identity politics has endangered our previously shared cause and reverse course. But knowing what I do about political psychology, I’m not counting on it.

If they cannot resolve their hypocrisy, then the rest of us must distance ourselves from them and make it known that they don’t represent the anti-identity politics movement, we do. A principled anti-identity politics movement must hold firm to the belief that no collective identity should ever override individual rights.

I co-founded The Black Sheep with Salomé Sibonex to build a home for those willing to speak unpopular truths to dysfunctional collectives. At first, that mostly meant working within the anti-woke media ecosystem led by these individuals and speaking truths about identity politics to the dysfunctional woke left. But as our “allies” risk our goals here at home to advantage their pet ethnonationalism halfway across the world, we’ve become black sheep to the movement we were recently a part of, slandered as “woke right” or “kapos.” Despite our best efforts, sadly, at this point it’s become clear the herd has rejected us. Challenging Zionism has hindered my and Salomé’s careers, but this is the risk that comes with being a black sheep. When that happens, it means it’s time to go your own way and build a new herd.

The stakes could not be higher. If we allow this hypocrisy to persist, we will watch as classical liberalism becomes an antiquated view associated with political hacks. Either we fight for a consistent, principled opposition to identity politics, or we watch as hypocrisy and tribalism destroy the very foundations of a free society and, as Weiss so eloquently put it, “pull all of us into the past.”

1. Under libertarianism, one maintains the right to act in a discriminatory manner so long as such discrimination isn’t enforced through government force. The classical liberal principle is “equality under the law.” I discussed the important implications of this distinction in a recent conversation with Benjamin Boyce. However, one’s understanding of the value of this principle in law tends to correlate with an understanding of why this is a positive ethic to follow in other aspects of life, as we did at FAIR.

2. As often mentioned by defenders of Israel, Zionists did purchase land in Palestine before 1948. However, this land was only 5.67% of the total area of British Mandatory Palestine and they never intended to limit their state to that area. Additionally, much of it was purchased from absentee landlords who had taken ownership of the deeds through coerced expropriation of the land from its residents under the Ottoman Empire.

3. Kisin has one Jewish grandparent on his father’s side and was raised by Christian parents. Thus, he would not be considered Jewish by the vast majority of Jews. He has frequently identified as a Jew when useful for commenting on certain topics, but at other times has said his distance from Judaism means it doesn’t provide “much basis for having strong opinions.”