If The Facts Do Not Conform To The Theory, They Must Be Disposed Of

 I find that various political theories can be helpful in allowing us to understand aspects of the world and organize those observations into coherent world views. However, it's possible both to have a bad theory and/or not allow for the theory to be contradicted by what you observe in the actual world. In general, I find most Leftist theories to have minimal explanatory properties, though there are often helpful correctives to conventional wisdom. I wouldn't start with Marxism or Critical Race Theory, but it's helpful to run things past those theories to see what shakes loose.

Jon Chait's newsletter addressed this. Since I can't really link to it, I'll quote it in full.

Jill Filipovic and Katha Pollitt have both written excellent columns on the refusal of many Western progressives to acknowledge that the October 7 terrorist attacks included rape. In the immediate wake of the attacks, the rape allegation was not conclusive, in part because almost every witness to the attack had been either murdered or abducted. This early period of uncertainty allowed allies of the pro-Palestinian activist movement to tell themselves the rapes hadn’t occurred, and they clung to this position even as proof mounted.

The thought system that produced this denial is a very Western tradition of radical activism. If you have any familiarity with the history of communism, which produced adherents and fellow travelers who denied Soviet atrocities, this is an unsurprising dynamic. Emma Green has an excellent report that explains how these ideas are reproduced, using the words of the activists themselves.

“When I spoke with students involved with S.J.P., they insisted that what’s happening in Gaza is not ‘complicated,’” she reports. This section is especially enlightening:

Sean Eren, another steering-committee member, told me that “S.J.P. is oriented in a special way. The idea is to appeal to people who know nothing.” Chapters start “small, with more tangible, visible elements of the Palestinian struggle,” and link those to prominent historical episodes elsewhere, such as apartheid in South Africa or the oppression of Native Americans in the U.S. “We go from apartheid to understanding what settler colonialism means. And then, from settler colonialism, we move to imperialism. And then, for example, what does Marxism have to do with Palestine?”

Appeal to “people who know nothing,” and then inculcate a simplistic explanation that divides the world into good and evil — well, it’s nothing if not a successful formula.

This is why these activist groups so adamantly resist complication. When you are training your adherents to treat rapists as noble heroes and their victims as oppressors, you cannot allow anything to undermine your moral binary.

If there’s anything to be taken away from the exposure many liberals have gotten to the radical views of pro-Hamas demonstrators, it should be that this worldview is not a naïve or overexuberant version of their own beliefs. It is a fundamentally illiberal ideology that is just as alien to liberal democracy as Trumpism.

I've had a few run-ins with this sort of thinking online. My opinion of Gaza is that it's war crimes all the way down. Hamas committed war crimes in 10/7; they committed more war crimes by intermingling their defensive positions with population centers, refugee camps and hospitals, then Israel committed war crimes by striking those positions, impeding refugee movements and restricting aid. While there are clear victims here, there isn't a clear "good guy". Embracing nuance like that shatters the clear narratives of "genocide" or "colonialism" that simply don't stand up to fair-minded scrutiny.

As Chait has been hammering for years now, this sort of doctrinaire worldview is incompatible with liberal (as in free) thought.