Shaping the Narrative on “Decolonization”

How public opinion shifted on the pro-Hamas campus protests.

In politics, crisis often presents itself as bewilderment and confusion. The role of the intellectual is to explain what’s happening and shape public opinion toward a constructive end.

Such is the case with the recent pro-Hamas protests on university campuses. They emerged as a surprise. But the spectacle was rooted in an ideology—“decolonization,” or “post-colonial theory”—that had long been germinating on campus. Following the Hamas terror attacks against Israel, the ideology manifested itself on college campuses with hideous force.

In the week following the atrocities against Israel, I made an explicit call for conservatives to connect the dots between these left-wing ideologies and the violent protest movements that would soon establish encampments and occupy buildings across the country.

Some of this work has broken through the noise. Americans now understand that there is something deeply wrong with their universities. Congress has called numerous university leaders up to Capitol Hill to testify. And support for the pro-Hamas protests has plummeted, causing a major rift within the Democratic Party establishment.

The center-Left has even followed my lead. Over the past month, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker have all published articles that, even according to my critics, recapitulate my basic argument. We established the narrative on the Right, then disseminated it leftward, capturing a majority coalition in support of our position.

The stakes are extraordinarily high. As I wrote less than a week after 10/7:

The outcome of “decolonization” is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people on the street, and mutilating infants in their homes. For the radical academics, the process is less brutal but barbaric all the same: it means destroying our best institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige. […]

Americans need to understand that the massacre in Gaza is not only a foreign outrage. The same ethno-radicals who cheer Hamas’s destruction of civilization abroad also want to commit civilizational suicide here at home.

If you find this work valuable, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber. We are shaping public opinion and making arguments that will show up in the mainstream press six months later. All of it depends on your support.