One of the most depressing facts about being a student today is the monopoly of influence that the radical Left seemingly exercises on university campuses.

In the past year, the press has been awash with stories about the role of the radical Left in student politics. To name a few incidents, the National Union of Students (NUS) has refused to condemn ISIS for fear of being ‘Islamophobic’, while cooperating with widely condemned organisations like CAGE. Ethnically segregated ‘safe spaces’ have been set up in student unions, while ‘diversity’ officers have tweeted #killallwhitemen. Abortion debates have been deliberately shouted down, while NUS officers have appeared at events glorifying terrorism. Noble causes – against racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination – have been debased of all meaning by radical student representatives who have abused their platforms and made young people out to be laughing stocks.

Long before Brendan O’Neill coined the term ‘Stepford student’, the late American literary critic Harold Bloom had a perfect description of this kind of thinking: the school of resentment.

Decades of critical theory, Frankfurt Marxism and postmodern essays have reduced much of modern academic discussion to a relativistic mixture of pernicious thoughts and collective self loathing. Books and individuals, once analysed according to their aesthetic or intellectual merit, have been reduced to a crude set of calculations based on biological, sexual and gendered characteristics. If people are the product of structural oppression, then the path of righteousness and justice supposedly lies with the most oppressed. In the prevailing power balance, those who enjoy the most ‘privilege’ lose the game of top trumps. Every time. The ideas of Marcuse, Foucault and Derrida, once used to deconstruct power structures within texts, became the intellectual defence of censorship and suicide bombing that is all too common amongst a certain type of person on the Left.

Gay rights have not been immune from the radical Left’s authoritarianism. The fight against discrimination of gays and transsexuals should be the cause of all good people, regardless of one’s position on the political spectrum. The US Supreme Court’s decision to back gay marriage last week, in spite of vocal opposition inside and outside the court chamber, has been welcomed by the majority of gay rights campaigners as a powerful victory for equality. That is, unless you happen to be a member of Oxford’s ‘No HeterOX’, a group that describes itself as “a platform of discussion and expression for Oxford’s Queer and Trans community.”

Like many of Oxford’s other radical discussion forums – most notoriously Cuntry Living and Skin Deep – I left the Facebook page of ‘No HeterOx’ a number of months ago. I felt online discussions were being hijacked by vocal extremists from Oxford’s radical Left, who used the platforms to shame any dissenting voices into silence. This past week, some of my friends made me aware of a toxic argument that had been developing. Within fifteen minutes of reading a lengthy thread, I came across a number of comments that were truly shocking and faced little criticism from other members.

Annie Teriba, a vocal student activist and delegate of our student union to the NUS, wrote “f*ck privileged gays.” Alongside other members of the group, Teriba clarified that she believed ‘privileged’ gays to be in the payroll of prisons and arms companies. Such generalised accusations recall a ridiculous NUS motion to condemn gay white men who have apparently appropriated the mannerisms of black women by asserting they have an “inner black woman.” Gay white men, on the receiving end of horrific homophobic abuse for centuries in Europe (especially in Russia today), are now attacked by other gay rights campaigners as enjoying male and white ‘privilege.’

Another member, Zuleyka Shahin – a recent candidate to become President of the Oxford Union – added that “mostly privileged white gays, gay white men, cis white gay men, Judeo-Xtian white men, Zio white men… are complicit in the funding of wars and the social genocide of my people.” When I typed ‘Zio’ into Google, the first result that came up was David Duke, a prominent American neo-Nazi. This begs the question of whether Oxford’s radical Left actually care what they sound like to the student population, never mind the rest of the world. How can they claim to stand for justice and equality when they borrow from the rhetoric and tactics of fascists? While ironically claiming that they want a ‘safe space’ free from structural discrimination in all its forms, they display insensitive bigotry to gay white men and Jewish people.

By their twisted logic, if white gays and Jews claim to be ‘discriminated’ whilst appearing to enjoy immense amounts of political and economic influence, they are no longer an oppressed group. In fact, they have been co-opted into the oppressive mechanisms of the Western liberal democratic state. Worse than that, they use their historic oppression to silence the voices of their victims, whether in the form of ‘pink washing’ or ‘Holocaust guilt.’ This is why white gays have supposedly hijacked other victims’ struggles, or why Jews gunned down in Paris are more ‘privileged’ than the Muslim terrorists who killed them. As evidenced in Oxford, this is why much of the modern radical Left cannot compute antisemitism among elements of the Muslim community, or even within their own ideological movement, which they erroneously believe to be free of any prejudice. The critique of power on the radical left can easily descend into a critique of ‘Jewish power'; for the revolutionary Left, antisemitism has become the “anti-imperialism of fools.”

This is also why certain individuals on the radical Left, like Bahar Mustafa at Goldsmiths (who tweeted #killallwhitemen) or Annie Teriba at Oxford, feel they can write unpleasant diatribes about gay white men or ‘cisgender’ white men, irrespective of whether or not they have actually oppressed anyone.

One book that left an indelible mark on me was Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left?’ In it, Cohen reminds us that “people with brown skins are as capable as people with white skins of forming a fascistic movement.” In that vein, another blogger, Tom Owolade, has written in an excellent piece;

Above all, it is our common humanity that must prevail over a student movement saturated with monotonous anti-Western and anti-egalitarian bigots posing as progressives. Collectively, we must hold our elected representatives to account, ensuring that they can truly engage with the serious concerns of an otherwise estranged student body. ‘No HeterOx’ could certainly be more receptive to the criticism it has received from here as well as other quarters. But hey, what do I know? I am just a cis white straight Jewish male with Conservative inclinations. And I need to check my privilege.

This article has been republished in modified form by the Oxford Tab.