Y'know all the Gen Z folks online who oversimplify the entire world and all morality into a binary oppressor and victim dynamic which...just doesn't reflect reality?
The ones who routinely regard murdering, raping, suicide bombing, gay-hating, misogynist terrorists...as the good guys?
Want to know how they developed this particular set of cognitive distortions?
This worldview, often seen among Millennials and very common among Gen Z leftists, was produced by the corruption of a good and useful bit of critical theory meant to address nuance, complexity, and compassion: intersectionality.
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality began as a way to explain how different forms of discrimination overlap and interact, especially for Black women who face both racism and sexism in ways that neither anti-racist nor feminist frameworks alone fully addressed.
A white woman might face sexism but not racism.
A Black man might face racism but not sexism.
A Black woman faces both, and often in compounded ways.
This seems like a helpful way to understand complexity in lived experiences, right?
Because it is! It's fantastic and appropriate and necessary! Sojourner Truth brought it up in 1851.
So late Millennials and Gen Z college students were exposed to sloppy versions of Crenshaw's thesis and, like a lab leak, the idea spread beyond academic critical theory into activist and online spaces...where it began to mutate into something else entirely.
Instead of just understanding overlapping disadvantages, intersectionality became a kind of oppression calculator.
People began to stack their marginalized identities in a way that assigned moral authority. The more marginalized identities you hold, the more your voice is prioritized.
If you have "privileged" identities (white, male, cisgender, etc.), you may be expected in leftist spaces to sit down, shut up, and only listen.
The problem: it is awfully illiberal to grant agency to (or take agency from) an individual based on their group association.
(Liberals recognize that as old fashioned bigotry masquerading as justice.)
So this framing helped flatten the complexity of individuals into a binary of oppressor or oppressed, based solely on which and how many marginalized identities one can claim.
This inevitably led to hierarchies of victimhood in which competing identities are ranked to determine whose suffering is more valid.
Leftists seemingly trade memes like the one below without irony:
That's the origin of Oppression Olympics.
This is where it went completely off the rails, with some movements and organizations deciding that only those with certain identities or performed political perspectives should be permitted to speak.
But...what if you're not a holder of one of these victim identities? Well, if you belong to a privileged group, you're now the proud owner of collective guilt and are held responsible for the system of oppression...even if you've personally done nothing wrong.
This made it easy to turn entire groups, millions of complex people in varying and nuanced circumstances...into simplified moral symbols.
If a group is judged powerful or privileged, it (and anyone associated with it) is an oppressor.
If a group is judged marginalized, it becomes the victim.
Wait, though - it gets worse.
Once this kind of "intersectionality" (which no longer resembled Crenshaw's) became part of the social media discourse, algorithms boosted simple, emotional content that aligned with the victim/oppressor binary. In social media, engagement is everything, and it distorts everything.
Gen Z folks are particularly susceptible to these distortions because they have spent most of their lives soaking in performative social media activism which offers a (wrong but) clear, simple, binary moral compass in a world which otherwise feels messy, confusing, and overwhelming. This gives them the opportunity to express solidarity with those who suffer injustice, which makes them feel like they're good people for siding with the good people against the bad people.
So intersectionality went from "people are complex" to "if you check [X] boxes, you are righteous, and if not...you're complicit."
Intersectionality started as a tool for empathy and nuance, helping us see how systems of oppression intersect and interact. This, I want to repeat, is great.
In social media activism, though, it got flattened into a worldview where people and nations are judged morally and collectively based on their group identities and perceived power.
You know how you can tell that this isn't really justice? Justice is rarely so simple, binary, and completely devoid of nuance.
Okay, so there's the mindset of the Gen Z leftist. Let's look at how they apply it to Israel.
The many and complex facts and long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict don't fit neatly into this framing, so the narratives must be re-written to cram them into the shape such leftists demand:
Framed as an indigenous, stateless people living under military occupation and suffering from systemic discrimination, they are exclusively innocent victims without agency who need the good people of the West to save them from...
Cast as a colonial, European, settler colonialist, imperialist, racist power, seen as inflicting structural violence on a vulnerable population.
And because these leftists don't read history (just memes and TikTok), they believe this oppression has been going on from time immemorial.
(That's perhaps part of where they get the idea that "Palestine" is an ancient civilization.)
This framework, this need to be on the right side of a false binary requires them to aggressively ignore, bury, appropriate, downplay, or invert all Jewish historical trauma, indigeneity, and security concerns...all to make a complex set of circumstances fit into the box of their simple moral binary.
Think about it. Isn't that the content of most of the ugly comments you get from them? Simple, moral binaries which aren't supported by facts, evidence, or reason?
(Yes, the far right Gen Z folks do the same thing for different reasons and in a mirror...where victim and Oppressor switch places. That's how we get CisHet white Christian males who are certain they're being oppressed, but that's a topic for another time, maybe.)
Israel as White Colonial Power
Israel is increasingly racialized as "white" or "European," despite its multi-ethnic population (including ~50% Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews and ~20% Arab citizens).
Zionism, instead of being recognized as a liberation movement for Jews after ~2000 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings, is recast as an extension of European settler colonialism...despite Jews being undeniably indigenous to the region and never meeting the definition of 'settler colonialism.'
The term's definition, the leftists realize, must be changed so they can cram Israel into the oppressor box! It's become a common tactic.
Remember when Amnesty International could only try to make "genocide" stick to Israel by changing the definition of genocide?
Remember when Ireland demanded that the ICJ change the definition of genocide for the exclusive purpose of slapping that label on Israel?
Its still effin' ridiculous, but at least this finally explains their cognitive distortion of reality: They must distort reality in order to feel okay about themselves.
Palestinians as Eternal Victims
Palestinians, to be crammed into this framing, are depicted as having no agency, portrayed solely as victims of Israeli evil.
Violence by Palestinian actors (terrorism, 138 suicide bombings, incitement...October 7th...) is justified, excused, or omitted as a "reaction" to occupation. They're oppressed, say the leftists, so they bear no responsibility for their choices.
Like children. Initializing, isn't it?
Israel's military, economy, and alliance with the US make it the powerful party and therefore the oppressor. Why?
Because the framing requires the more powerful side to be morally wrong...even if it is acting in self-defense.
Not satisfied with ordinary Jewish Erasure, this victim/oppressor framing erases:
Jewish indigeneity to the land.
The Holocaust's role in accelerating global Zionist momentum after WWII
The ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, most of whom went to Israel.
~2,000 years of Jewish ethnic cleansings and genocides.
This false binary requires that Jews be racialized as white and labeled privileged.
De-legitimizing the oppression of Jews usefully de-legitimizes their right to self-determination.
So history, facts and reason are set aside, any attempt to bring nuance to the conversation is shut down, any fact or point of view shared by an Israeli or a Jew is obviously a lie because Jews, remember, are oppressors. As a result, any defense of Israel is framed as siding with oppression. (As has been the case so many times before, Jews are just wrong and evil and will therefore be condemned regardless of what they do.)
Again, think about it. How many times on Tumblr have you seen a reasoned defense of Israel and the response from the tankies is something along the lines of 'you're lying and defending genocide?'
The victim-oppressor lens simplifies the complex, long-term Israel-Arab conflict into a grotesquely, dishonestly simplified morality play with a powerful villain and a powerless victim.
That's why kids who claim to care about justice do shit like this:
Understanding how they got like this is just the first step.
Can they be de-programmed?
