I’ve been thinking about the recent spate of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and airports and highways / bridges across the country. As always, opinions about such events are wide and varied. It seems to me that the commentary reveals the fault line of typical political discourse. Progressives laud these protests as vital forms of activism in the name of free speech with the idea that remaining silent somehow makes a person complicit in the whole affair. “Silence is Violence” signs are ubiquitous at these rallies and sit-ins. Thus, the calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.

On the other hand, plenty of conservative voices have voiced opposition to this view, particularly noting how blockading public highways disrupts the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. I read a report about a number of organ donor patients in the San Francisco Bay area whose care was limited or altogether nullified because these protestors blocked the Golden Gate Bridge for hours last week. In their view, these “protests” are more like domestic forms of terrorism.

But this also reveals something much deeper than one’s political leanings. This is also the outworking of the ideology of critical social theory — known more colloquially as “being woke” — which is held with religious-like fervor in the circles of academia today. In the new world order of intersectionality, the more oppressed an individual, the greater access to truth she possesses. According to this worldview, Muslims outclass Jews in terms of oppressed identity, which is historically inaccurate but fuels the anti-colonialism you’re seeing on these college campuses. And when you adopt this worldview, full blown antisemitism is just a step away — as we’ve seen on the campus of Columbia University, for example, as Jewish students have been harassed to the point that the Orthodox rabbi on campus issued a message urging Jewish students to return home until the situation improves.

This is what the new religion of our age demands.