The Useful Idiots of the Red-Green Alliance

I recently spoke with Franziska Sittig, co-author of the 2025 book Intellectual Self-Destruction: How the West Gambles Away Its Future.

Sittig completed her master’s degree in International Affairs/European Politics at Columbia University in New York City and regularly publishes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was a Collegiate Associate at the Manhattan Institute in New York and a Research Intern at United Against Nuclear Iran. In 2016, she won the ZEIT Young Talent Award. She is a member of the New York chapter of the internationally active group “Students Supporting Israel.”

Sittig’s book reminded me a little of Thomas Sowell’s classic Intellectuals and Society, updated for the current moment. I spoke with her about her book; transcript below:

Rob Henderson: What is the Marxist-Islamist alliance? You and your co-author, Noam Petri, describe this alliance as a kind of ideological marriage of convenience between hyper-progressive campus culture and Islamist networks. Can you explain this alliance? What I’m really curious about is how each side views the other.

Franziska Sittig: It’s basically an ideological alliance of two groups that, as I’m going to elaborate on further, don’t really have anything in common. They could be further away in many aspects, but they have one united hatred, which is against the West—against America as the big Satan, Israel as the little Satan.

Rob Henderson: America is the big Satan. Israel is the little Satan. Is there a medium-sized Satan?

Franziska Sittig: Germany is the medium Satan. Probably.

Rob Henderson: Alright.

Franziska Sittig: They both share the worldview of viewing the entire West as a system of oppressors versus oppressed. And how they view each other—it’s interesting because Islamists are actually much more clever than we would think they are. They know exactly that they have to deal with more left-wing, hyper-progressive peoples in the West than conservatives. There was an imam, a pretty famous imam, a religious leader, who said that they know they have to talk to the left-wing people in the West because conservatives have principles and left-wing people do not have principles. These were literally his words. So they know pretty much that they can fool the hyper-progressives. And the hyper-progressives—they’re really fools because they don’t know whom they’re marrying, like the Islamists. I’ve talked to so many people, not just me—so many of us talked to progressives at Columbia and in Germany, online, and just asked them those questions: What would they think about Sharia law? How do they view the treatment of women in Arab countries? Were they aware that they would be thrown off a building in Gaza because of being progressive and gay? This is like the “Queers for Palestine” thing, because we both know that queerness and progressiveness often go hand in hand. And they never answered that question. They reacted with slurs toward me—“Oh, f-ck you, Zionists,” whatever. They never answered any of these questions.

Rob Henderson: Who was this person who said conservatives have principles and progressives don’t? What’s his name?

Franziska Sittig: It was an imam. I would have to look up the name.

Rob Henderson: I’m fascinated by that statement because, famously, Mao Zedong, the communist dictator of China, in the late 1960s when he was discussing his decision to meet with President Richard Nixon—who was a conservative right-wing Republican—Mao said that he wanted to meet with Nixon. And Mao's quote was, “I like to deal with rightists because rightists say what they really think, unlike leftists who say one thing and mean another.” The impression, at least from the perspective of at least one leftist icon, is that people on the right have principles and people on the left don’t. The imam’s quote is an interesting echo of history. So, next question. In the foreword by Reihan Salam, he describes your book as a timely warning about a red-green alliance—the sort of woke Marxist alliance between utopian leftism and murderous Islamism. How much of that alliance depends on hating the same things versus sharing a united vision?

Franziska Sittig: Let’s assume those two groups defeated the West—they defeated us capitalists and Westerners. What would happen? The Islamists would have the vision of a theocratic system where divine law would rule everything, would be above everything. Public and private affairs would be governed alike. Civil law, family law, inheritance, sexual behavior, speech—all those things would be subordinated to Sharia law. And we would never have anything remotely like equality before the law, because Muslim men would be first-class citizens, Muslim women would have very little authority, and then non-Muslim citizens would just—no one would care about them. That would be the system they envision. And you might have different views on how hyper-progressives would view their future—but I think we could agree that they would want equality of outcome in every single possible way, which is never going to be possible. But they would force it. Merit would be viewed as suspicious and success would always require some justification in a hyper-progressive, even Marxist system. And I think we would pretty easily understand that those two visions of the future don’t have anything in common. The only thing they would have in common is this totalizing point of view of a world order. But they would have different gods. One of them would subordinate everything under Allah and the other to the warmth of collectivism. That totalizing view would probably be the only common denominator. And if only Islamists and Marxists were left, I don’t know how many years they would get along with this different vision of how society should be. And then they would just cut off each other’s heads. I would predict probably about five years.

Rob Henderson: Five years. That’s how long they would get along with each other.

Franziska Sittig: So the first part of your hypothesis is definitely correct—they share this one common enemy: the West, Israel, America. That’s literally the main thing that unites them. It’s not so much a shared vision of the future, because as we just saw, it would diverge.

Rob Henderson: In your book, you and your co-author argue wokeness functions as an autoimmune disease of civilization, which is a useful analogy to capture what’s happening. A striking, evocative metaphor. Can you walk through what that means? How do you see the West’s moral immune system—commitment to tolerance, pluralism, self-criticism, the hallmarks of a liberal democracy—being turned against the West itself?

Franziska Sittig: An autoimmune disease is basically that the body isn’t able to distinguish between healthy and dangerous cells. The body kind of attacks itself because it can’t distinguish between them. And wokeness is something Noam and I always thought of as—woke people fighting against the very system that would enable all their beliefs and demands of racial justice, social justice, complete equality. They fight against a system that enabled them to live after those beliefs. And they wouldn’t realize that wokeness itself was diametrically opposed to what they wanted to make a permanent order. For example, we both know that woke admissions to jobs or universities—they try to eliminate racism, but they’re often much more racist than anything. If they specifically demand applications from Black or Latino people and white people are frowned upon, I mean, that is much more racist than anything else.

Rob Henderson: I find the categories interesting. With gender, there seems to be this binary: it’s men, and then women plus non-binary are categorized together, which I find interesting. I saw this at Cambridge when I was in grad school. They would have women’s groups, women’s sessions, women’s meetings, and anyone was welcome unless you were a cisgender male. Women and then men who identify as women—they’re all welcome, but no one else. I always thought, why do women willingly go along with being categorized alongside people who are something completely different?

Franziska Sittig: It just shows the function of an autoimmune disease. By establishing this wokeness system, they don’t understand that the very beliefs and assumptions they want to have as an order are being threatened by all their systems of wokeness.

Rob Henderson: One of the most provocative claims in the book—you talk about the US showing the rest of the world the ropes when it comes to ideological capture. I’ve written about this. I wrote an essay many years ago about America exporting wokeness. You’ve lived in both Germany and in the US, and I’m curious if you notice any differences in how this dynamic has played out—what political extremism looks like in Germany versus the US.

Franziska Sittig: Specifically regarding the campus protests, it was on both sides of the Atlantic—and pretty much everywhere else in the world—Jewish students who rang the alarm bells. No one else. The majority society didn’t understand.

Rob Henderson: In both the US and Germany?

Franziska Sittig: In both the US and Germany, and also Australia for that matter. The majority society wouldn’t notice what they had gotten into. As a difference, I would say in the US we had Republican politicians, lawmakers, and then also the progressive crowd like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib getting into the debate pretty quickly—they would take a side and either support or call out the protesters. In Germany, it almost didn’t enter the political debate. It was viewed as a student sub-phenomenon that would blow off eventually, that would remain within the realm of universities. Most politicians in Germany didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it. As an effect, we didn’t have any federal executives, like task forces against antisemitism, signed in Germany—not a single one—whereas Trump, early 2025, signed an executive order.

In Germany, it didn’t really have an effect on political life. There were not as many encampments in Germany. And if there were, they were covered by media not to the same extent as here. No political leaders would speak out for or against those encampments. And in Germany—this is a problem because of our migration mechanism—we have much more of this than the US. When there were streets filled with anti-America, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine, and lately pro-Mullah protesters, they were students, of course, but they were also many non-students—just regular people of Arab and Turkish background. These people are able to fill the streets much more, I feel, than in America because we have a different migration situation than the US. And they’re never being held accountable. A growing number of migrants of this particular background are being treated a bit like children in Germany—they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions. And if anyone has to pay for it, it’s Germans—Germans who are law-abiding citizens—they have to play the adults in the room and are being held responsible for what happened. The blame is often shifted toward the Germans, that we didn’t do enough to integrate them in society, that we didn’t tolerate their beliefs, cultural differences, and that is the reason they radicalized so much. If only we were a little bit more tolerant, then everything would have been fine. But as I said, if anything, we have been overly tolerant and empathetic toward cultural differences and religious practices that normally would be totally opposed to our value system. We have been more than tolerant.

Rob Henderson: On the political left, this belief that if there are any failures to integrate, it’s because the host culture hasn’t done enough—they need to do more, more tolerance, more inclusion, more compassion, more empathy. And then when that fails, to just keep doing that, which backfires. You describe anti-Zionism as a Trojan horse. This is a question I’ve long wondered about, ever since I first set foot on a college campus more than a decade ago: What makes Israel specifically such a uniquely effective mobilization project? It seems to be a lightning rod for political activists. What is it about Israel?

Franziska Sittig: It’s that “the Jew”—the abstract notion of “the Jew”—has been there for centuries, actually ever since the crucifixion of Christ. You could attribute to Jews all kinds of negative traits you could ever come up with: bankers who control the economy, control the weather, people who murder Christian children and drink their blood, people who murder Palestinian children. There has never been a lack of any negative attribute that you could attach to this abstract notion of the Jew. And then when Israel came into existence, it was basically that this abstract version of the bad Jew had a geographic location. And that location just came attached with this. I think it’s really this centuries-, even millennia-old abstract notion of the bad Jew. You could blame-shift at every time—when there was mass hunger, when there was financial crisis, whatever happened, the Jews could always be used as a scapegoat. And I think this enabled people to view the homeland of the Jew as the worst place on earth, no matter if there were many more casualties in South Sudan or Yemen or Iran. This long-held prejudice against the Jew just enabled it.

Rob Henderson: That’s interesting. I think for a lot of people they would think the causal arrow is: Israel, displacement of Palestinians, the land—and that gave rise to anti-Zionism.

Franziska Sittig: But it was never a territorial conflict. If you just look at the different agreements that were offered to the Palestinians—if it had been about territory, they would have agreed to the partition plan in 1948, they would have agreed to many other compromises offered after that. It was never about that. It was because they never wanted to get along with the fact that they would have to live alongside Jews.

Rob Henderson: I think for a lot of people, there has to be some kind of reason for all this antisemitism. “Oh, it must be Israel, it must be some sort of geopolitical conflict or dispute about territory.” But it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s always been this kind of ambient antisemitism and that Israel just gave people an excuse, a justification, to finally let out this hate that had always existed—latent hate. I find that persuasive. After October 7th, I remember seeing a lot of accounts online, left-leaning accounts, and they were posting a lot of ugly antisemitic stuff. And I thought, do they hate Jews or do they just hate white people? Is this just—oh, to them Jews are just white, so they can vent all of this hatred? But then I started to see the memes and online vitriol and it was extremely antisemitic. It wasn’t just anti-white. It was a different and shocking level of hatred. And then I understood these people truly do hate Jewish people specifically. Why do they hate Jews? And maybe this just means I’ve spent too much time on elite campuses and I’ve been marinated in anti-white sentiment for so long I’ve become numb to it, but antisemitism still shocks me.

Franziska Sittig: You can have a lot of prejudice against many minority groups. Here in the US, there was a lot of prejudice against Irish immigrants and Italian immigrants. You can be prejudiced toward Muslim people. But there’s no other group that has simultaneously been described as subhuman and omnipotent at the same time. The Jews are the only group that has those two contradictory attributes ascribed to them. And that’s just something people can’t deal with. On the one hand, you view them as dirty, as people who steal and lie and do all those very low-level things, and then you have the financially successful bankers and the related prejudice that they would control the world economy and the weather and everything else. And we can all agree that this is paradoxical, to view a minority group this way.

Rob Henderson: Whatever bad thing happens, whatever you don’t like, the Jews are responsible. If you don’t like socialism, it’s the Jews. If you don’t like capitalism, it’s the Jews. If you don’t like cosmopolitanism, it’s the Jews.

Franziska Sittig: And once they had established their homeland, they also didn’t like it. They didn’t like that Jews were cosmopolitan and pretty much at home everywhere, that they were a people of the diaspora. Once they had established their homeland and were there to stay, people also didn’t like that.

Rob Henderson: Final question. You and your co-author are both young, relatively early in your careers, and many people your age who write books like this would soften the edges, hedge their bets, qualify their arguments. I wouldn’t, but a lot of people would. So what motivated you to write something this direct and unsparing—something that could potentially get under people’s skin and people might object to or take offense at?

Franziska Sittig: The whole point of writing any book, I think, is that you want to get under people’s skin. There’s no point in writing only half-truths and softening the edges. There’s literally no point—otherwise we could have just dropped the project if that was our goal. And since our generation, Gen Z, has always been described and accused of being snowflakey and soft—like we need to be pampered all the time and we can’t face harsh reality—we wanted to make the point that this is not necessarily the case. We as Gen Z can very well deal with reality. We have to deal with reality. And it was at the same time a call on our generation to be more like the adults in the room, to deal with the reality they have often created themselves, and to understand the consequences they’ve created by their own false ideals and pro-terrorism support and antisemitism. We basically hope that some people from our generation would wake up.

Rob Henderson: Franziska Sittig, thank you.

Franziska Sittig: Thank you.

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