As last year’s anti-Israel campus upheavals unfolded, one question kept coming up: How did this happen?
How did thousands of American college students, including some Jewish students, end up marching and chanting alongside activists who excuse Hamas, romanticize terrorism, and deny the Jewish State’s right to exist?
The answer isn’t only politics. It’s an academic worldview that has shaped how many students are taught to interpret history and power – and how they are trained to sort societies into neat categories of oppressor and oppressed.
That worldview also helps explain the reflexive anti-Americanism now common on elite campuses, where the United States is described as inherently racist, its system as irredeemable, and its influence abroad as something close to a moral crime.
The engine behind this moral inversion is a campus orthodoxy with a respectable-sounding name: postcolonial theory.
Often described as “the academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism,” postcolonial theory entered universities in force in the late 1980s and ’90s, steadily remaking large parts of the humanities and social sciences – especially literature, history, cultural studies, and education.
Under the banner of “decolonizing” knowledge, postcolonial theory has pressured professors and administrators to reframe modern history around a single interpretive idea: the West as oppressor, the non-West as oppressed.
Concepts of colonialism and empire have become the one tool to explain everything: power, economics, culture, identity, borders, inequality, and conflict.
In this framework, Israel is cast as a “settler-colonial” state akin to apartheid South Africa. Once that libel is accepted as fact, positions that deny Israel’s right to exist or treat it as a pariah become morally normalized in the classroom, while Zionism is presented as a European domination project rather than what it is – the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.
The result is predictable. By the time students encounter Hamas propaganda, too many of them have already been conditioned after years of academic exposure and institutional messaging to see the most extreme Palestinian position – denying Israel’s legitimacy and justifying “resistance by any means” – as perfectly understandable, if not praiseworthy.
That same intellectual machinery trains students to view the United States as hopelessly imperialist and racist. U.S. foreign policy is interpreted as neo-imperial management of an unjust global system. Courses and “decolonize the university” initiatives explicitly link critiques of Israel with critiques of “American empire,” encouraging students to see both as two fronts of the same structure that must be dismantled.
So, a great many students now respond to political crises already predisposed to view America and Israel as the villains of the story. Anti-American and anti-Israel interpretations resonate immediately and require little additional propaganda to take hold.
While postcolonial theory furnishes the grand narrative of Western domination, another social theory – intersectionality – acts as an accelerant, mapping it onto overlapping identities of race and gender and into a politics of grievance. Postcolonial theory explains the big picture; intersectionality translates that picture into a language of injury and solidarity.
As it developed, postcolonial theory also built a protective, specialized jargon – featuring terms like subaltern, hegemony, othering, hybridity, worlding, and decolonization – which has become a portable moral vocabulary. People who never studied postcolonial theory nonetheless speak it, often without realizing its source.
In academia, the postcolonial studies lexicon serves as a gatekeeping device. To sound competent, one has to speak of “hegemonic discourse,” “subaltern standpoints,” and “Eurocentric epistemologies.” The code words signal membership, and mastery of the associated concepts becomes a de facto requirement for academic and student advancement.
Postcolonial theory is even embedded in teacher training, DEI bureaucracies and “decolonizing the curriculum” initiatives, giving it official pedagogical status. As a result, the upheaval on campus feels like something bigger than activism: an intellectual conquest engineered by a credentialed elite that has cast itself as the new revolutionary vanguard.
This doesn’t happen by accident. The postcolonial studies revolution advances by controlling hiring, narratives, and institutions. Scholars generate the theories, administrators bake them into policy, and journalists and cultural producers broadcast the dogma to the broader public.
Worse, what began as a specialized university discourse has migrated into K–12 classrooms, so that American children now learn history and literature through a postcolonial script of settler colonialism, racial oppression, and “decolonizing resistance.”
And somewhere between middle school decolonizing lessons and high school ethnic-studies requirements, a switch flips. Especially in deep-blue states, students begin speaking the priestly postcolonial lingo until it becomes their default language for reacting to every headline.
For supporters of Israel, this poses an enormous challenge. By the time many students reach college, they have internalized a quasi-religious creed in which Israel is cast as the ultimate oppressor. So, a lecturer defending Israel isn’t seen as an opponent to be debated but a blasphemer to be silenced or prevented from speaking in the first place, even violently, if necessary.
To put it in historical perspective, postcolonial theory has a tighter grip on universities – and a deeper formative impact on students’ moral and political outlook – than the campus Marxism of the Cold War era ever achieved. In the 1950s through the ’70s, Marxism’s campus presence was real but subcultural: radical student groups, some humanities departments, pockets of “critical theory.” Postcolonial and decolonial frameworks have become something else entirely: a quiet operating system across whole sections of the modern university that influences hiring, curricula, and institutional policy.
Postcolonial theory has even replaced classical Marxism as the organizing worldview of today’s international left, especially in universities and the activist organizations they feed.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Democratic Socialists of America. A serious reading of the DSA platform – and the rhetoric of its political star, Zohran Mamdani – requires a working familiarity with postcolonial theory.
That makes sense, because New York City’s new mayor is actually a son of postcolonial studies. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a tenured Columbia University professor and a prominent postcolonial theorist.
Raised in that intellectual household, Mamdani is the first major American political leader whose public persona, policy agenda, and political positions – especially his extreme anti-Israel stance, including longtime support for BDS – have been molded by postcolonial theory and its everyday interpreter, intersectionality. His astonishing rise to power and obvious appeal to younger, highly educated voters are alarming proof of the extent to which a once-esoteric academic doctrine has entered the electoral arena.
We underestimate the threat at our own peril. Yet too many critics are still battling the wrong enemy. Like generals refighting the last war, many conservative commentators keep warning about Marxism while the real offensive comes from a post-Marxist formation – postcolonial theory fused with intersectionality – that has already occupied the schools, the seminar rooms, and the minds of countless American children.
What can be done to fight back?
An important first step is to drag postcolonial theory out into the open, to make it a political issue.
Parents who have never heard the term must be taught to recognize what it does. Like townspeople in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, many students look normal enough, but their intellectual lives have been quietly repotted in the pods of postcolonial theory. What emerges is smooth, dead-eyed certainty – the unmistakable mark of brainwashing.
That is how we got the sickening spectacle we watched in 2025: American students, trained to see the world as oppressors and oppressed, chanting for the destruction of the Jewish State – and calling it justice.