"In the debate about whether to take the woke version of progressivism seriously as a revolutionary ideology or whether to regard it primarily as a kind of performative intra-elite signaling..."

"... the 'land acknowledgment' phenomenon has always loomed as the strongest exhibit for the it’s-all-just-performance case.... For instance, the Harvard Art Museums, their priceless collections attached to the country’s richest university, want you to know that they are 'located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge.' Also, they 'pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present.' A form of respect paying that leaves the obvious corollary unsaid: They have no intention of giving the land back! But now that comedy has been undermined, just a bit...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "When ‘Decolonization’ Isn’t Just Academic Rhetoric" (NYT).

"For some participants in progressive politics, apparently, the fact that the dead Israelis — the civilians, the families, the children — could be depicted as occupying somebody else’s land was enough to make their killings laudable, or at least defensible, or at least enough to complicate any simple condemnation of the men who butchered them. And that realization will make it harder to listen to land acknowledgments hereafter without hearing an undercurrent of dark self-abnegation — distinct from moral preening insofar as it speaks, we now know, to people who might actually take the self-condemnation seriously and who might see the land acknowledgers as baring their own flesh before the knife."

That made me think of the line — posted on X while the massacre was going on — "What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers."