On July 25, twenty-one-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into a crowd at Berlin’s Pride festival before stabbing attendees with a machete. One woman was killed and twenty-nine people were injured. German authorities described the incident as a suspected Islamist terrorist attack; Ballout was shot dead in a confrontation with police the following day.

The response to the attack is the latest example of how identity politics is beginning to break down under its own contradictions. For instead of anger, there were anxious appeals not to let the attack “divide us,” as though divisiveness lay in the public’s reaction rather than in the murderer’s motives. Identity politics only condemns violence when the attacker belongs to a “privileged” group and the victim belongs to a “protected” one. When those roles flip, as they did in Berlin, the outrage goes quiet. This double standard is now so obvious that it is destroying the public’s ability to have honest, serious debate about real problems.

Back at the very start of my academic career, in the early 1990s, a colleague once remarked that “method is the net designed to catch the fish it is designed to catch.” It was, of course, the heyday of postmodernism, and such mantic utterances were a staple of those seeking membership of the academic club. Yet there is a kernel of truth there, especially when applied to identity politics, the practical fruit of postmodernism in public life. Identity politics is a net designed to catch the villains it is designed to catch. More than that, it is also designed to delegitimize discussion of their villainy in any terms other than those the identity politicians choose to allow. Read more»

Carl R. Trueman, “Berlin and the Contradictions of Identity Politics,” First Things (July 30, 2026).

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