Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would "love" many people belonging to a "different group. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left. Similarly, the idea of "loving one's people" is odd, first in that it amounts to "loving one's self writ large," which, in its narcissism, hardly seems like a noble thing. More problematic than such defense is to make a cult of group differences (group "pride") in the way of the woke, and to place class issues at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, where they belong.

At best, it can occasionally be "interrupted"—through the "diversity training" at which DiAngelo excels and for which she charges a hefty fee. As Finkelstein says, "When the 'hour of serious danger' to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders' class-struggle insurgency, the 'true nature' of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile 'radicals' enlisted under the banner to stop him. But if the likes of Marx wouldn't qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn't that a reductio ad absurdum?Finkelstein seems to take particular pleasure in disemboweling this (as he says) non-scholar and non-activist, for his critique/massacre is a full 110 pages long and features withering juxtapositions with a titan, DuBois. One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture's pathologies. Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn't say much about these. The strategy of pure suppression is apt to lead many to think there might be something "dangerously truthful" to it—"the establishment doesn't want us to hear this because it's threatened by its truth! It counsels Black people not to trust whites, as their racism is so entrenched and so omnipresent as to poison their every thought and action.

One might object that he's painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn't deny this. He is the cool Black dude who is also the reliable—in Professor Cornel West's words—'mascot of Wall Street. With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading. You all earn poverty wages… [You have to] organize together, as one because you are one, to overthrow this wretched, corrupt, god-forsaken system. Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces.Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to "cancel" Sanders for his being a "privileged white male" with a supposed blind-spot on race. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it. It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic's "offensive" speech in the public square result in disciplinary action?

Even if such victims of woke defamation campaigns usually find their footing again or don't always suffer career consequences in the first place, the mob's impulse to censor and silence remains operative and ever-vigilant. Norman Finkelstein’s previous books include The Holocaust Industry, Beyond Chutzpah, and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict among others. Or, more precisely, that isn't a difficult task—it's so easy that Finkelstein is able to devote huge chunks of these chapters to sheer mockery—but it does require patience and a willingness to wade through endless intellectual muck.Moreover, if the "harmful" speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what's the great danger in letting someone say it now and then? When it comes to curbing speech," Finkelstein says, "experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the "oppressing" group—white vs. It's only a matter of time before a student announces, 'I'm she/her and I'm packing a thick, juicy nine-incher.