Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and enter your name and email.
Today is my birthday, but I received an unexpected gift earlier this week—a story that practically wrote itself.
It came in the form of a comment on Peter Wood’s latest piece for Minding the Campus, a piece that critiques two young activists advocating for causes funded, knowingly or not, by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operatives. The comment, from a man named Rajesh Barnabas, does not engage with Wood’s central argument or question the alarming influence of CCP money in American protests. Instead, Barnabas launches a personal attack, focusing on Wood’s race and gender.
He argues that Wood, as a “privileged white male,” has no right to comment on or photograph the two women, framing Wood’s critique as a violation of anthropological ethics and comparing it to the outdated “colonizing, exoticizing gaze.”
In response, commenter Dr. Ed offered a sharp retort: “And as to your racism and ageism, according to your own purported ‘ethical’ values, you lack any right to comment on [Wood] at all because your name is ‘Rajesh’ and not ‘Ralph.’ Such are the consequences of your twisted values.” I quite literally laughed out loud when I read that response. But I also saw a deeper issue at play: Barnabas’s comment encapsulates exactly what’s wrong with the modern left.
Instead of addressing the substance of Wood’s argument—namely, the uncomfortable fact that young activists (likely college students) are unwittingly advancing the agenda of a foreign authoritarian regime—the best he can do is accuse Wood of wielding racial and gender-based power dynamics.
This kind of identity-obsessed response sidesteps the real issues in favor of performative outrage. And worse, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how public discourse works in a free society. Wood was in a public place, where photography is allowed, and his commentary is grounded in real concerns about ideological subversion—concerns Barnabas chooses to ignore. As Wood writes, “Are they knowingly agents of CCP subversion?” The real issue isn’t who is taking the photograph but what these activists are doing and whom they’re unwittingly supporting.
This pattern of diverting criticism by invoking race and gender is symptomatic of a left that has lost touch with the core principles of debate and accountability—two things desperately needed in higher education and politics. Rather than engaging with the troubling facts at hand, they opt for a superficial critique that avoids substance altogether.
The only upside in their doing so is that they unwittingly provide a gift to those of us still dedicated to intellectual honesty: undeniable proof that the left is unwilling to confront uncomfortable truths. And, as for my gift, well, this was a story that practically wrote itself.
Photo by Peter Wood — NYC Subway — Originally Posted Here
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
