Heretic hunting
People who disagree with you about everything are bad. People who disagree with you just a little are pure evil.
I’ve noticed something interesting about the anti-Israel - and increasingly, openly pro-Hamas and pro-mass-murder - protests which emerged after the October 7 pogrom.1
That is, they never seem to target the most explicitly pro-Israel candidate in the 2024 Presidential race, nor his Republican allies.
On the Israeli partisan spectrum, Joe Biden would be a moderate while Donald Trump would arguably be to the right of Netanyahu, out there with the most extreme West Bank settlers.
Trying to find a consistent thread through Trump’s foreign policy beliefs, statements and actions is enough to drive one mad, but it’s hard to imagine him pushing back against any proposed Israeli action, up to and including annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.
But the pro-pogrom crowd has largely left him alone. They have taken over several universities, and angrily protest exhibitions about the Nova Music Festival massacre (which didn’t happen and also the Zionists deserved it) and even go after the homes of museum trustees and college administrators, and have dubbed Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” for his stubborn insistence on Israel’s continued existence.
But Trump? If there have been any big pro-Palestinian demonstrations at his rallies, I must have missed them.
I've seen some people argue that this is because the extreme left actually wants Trump to win. And believe it or not, there may actually be something to this.
Specifically, they don’t want Trump to be President. But they want him to win the Presidential election.
“Accelerationism” is basically the idea that societal collapse is necessary in order to bring about the long overdue Glorious Revolution or race war, depending on which end of the horseshoe you’re on.
The fringe left leaves the re-election of Donald Trump as president will be the spark that ignites an uprising. And, to be fair, they might be correct. If he wins, I might be tempted to take the leprechaun’s advice and start burning things.
But that's not the whole story.
Another aspect of this is that people tend to hate heretics even more than those who were never true believers in the first place.
In Morning After the Revolution, her very entertaining book about the culture-war battles of 2020 and beyond, Nellie Bowles notes that most struggle sessions occurred within progressive spaces, which turned out to have been dens of racism and white supremacy this whole time:
The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything but some minor tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon. I’d watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members, who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.
A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. It’s about sniffing them out at your coffee shop or your office. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.
Go after Trump, and not only will you fail to turn any of his acolytes against him, the MAGA faithful will rally around the MAGA flag and support him more vigorously than ever.
But when you go after politicians and public figures who are at least kind of adjacent to your side, and you might be able to shame or intimidate them into keeping their mouths shut.
As some are now finding out the hard way.
Of course, this kind of thing isn’t just a left-wing phenomenon. Not even close.
David French could tell you a few things about life as a conservative heretic who won’t bow to the Orange God-King. Yes, he has a New York Times column now, but it’s probably not worth this:
The harassment began in 2015 when French was publicly critical of Trump, but it escalated when his name was leaked as a possible third-party candidate.
“I saw images of my daughter’s face [an Ethiopian girl French adopted] in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her,” French writes. “I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a ‘niglet’ and a ‘dindu.’”
Meanwhile, in France, the far-right has responded to its European election triumph by tearing itself apart.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f13be0a-07b1-4014-ab06-319329b228a4_428x767.png)
When you think “religious war” you tend to think of people belonging to completely different faiths having it out. But as often as not it involves members of the same religion, but different sects - Catholic vs. Protestant, Sunni vs. Shia - trying to kill each other.
This has led many to conclude that religion causes wars. But when you see the same kind of thing happening in political and ideological spaces, I get the impression it’s not so much religion making people do bad things, so much as people making religion do bad things.
Take religious faith away, and before you know it we’ll find something else to fight about.
Note that I didn’t say “emerged after Israel launched its military campaign in response to the October 7 pogrom.” The protests - more like celebrations, early on - came first.