If you’re puzzled by how many people on the left who aren’t Palestinians or Arabs can defend what Hamas did on October 7, think about cognitive dissonance. A lot of these people, many of whom are college students, are deeply invested in a belief system that calls israelis colonizers and oppressors, and sees Palestinians as the suffering oppressed. These opinions make the leftist students feel good about themselves. They are on the side of the underdog, on the side of goodness and compassion.

So when the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 came out, denial was a common line of defense. It simply didn’t happen, said some. The videos Hamas took to document the events were fakes. Some went so far as to say that Israelis actually killed and tortured their own people and blamed it on Hamas. This requires a serious divorce from reality, but reality isn’t all that real to young people who live their lives mostly on computers anyway, and who have been stuffed full of pro-Palestinian attitudes and slogans by so many of their teachers.

Approach number two – the rationalization and excuse-making – are mechanisms that come with the leftist territory.

[That’s part of the problem with this generation — a cultivation of unreality, both in concrete terms (online) and in pedagogical terms (Academia). A classical education would have grounded the last few generations in both reality and the values of Western culture, but just as importantly, it would have taught them how to reason through cognitive dissonance. Destroying classical education has had very bad outcomes on many levels. — Ed]