Progressives (selectively, as readers will see) advocate identity-based frameworks that analyze historical actors—especially Europeans in the Americas—as collective agents whose actions are interpreted through categories such as ethnicity, race, and structural power. They use this frame to describe the history of America as an act of colonization.
This description is accurate. Colonization involves the movement of people from a foreign territory into a new land with the goal of settlement, resource use, and the transformation of local society. Colonization establishes institutions, farms, towns, and social structures to sustain the settlers and assert long-term control. The English colonization of North America in the seventeenth century illustrates this process well. English settlers not only claimed land but also created enduring communities and governance systems rooted in those long established in their countries of origin. What emerged from the process was a new cultural and social order. This is how America was possible.
One can lament colonization and the (negative and positive) effects it has on indigenous populations. However, once long established, those born into the new cultural and social order are native to it. For indigenous peoples, the moment to prevent the establishment of settler colonies and the displacement of populations already there is when it is occurring. In the case of the United States, the process is complete. The country is a multiracial, primarily Christian society with a secular republic, and those native to it have a right to cultural integrity and national identity on this basis.
Yet when contemporary migration produces dense cultural enclaves and visible cultural and social transformation in Western countries, for example, the Muslim enclaves that have formed across Europe and in places in North America, such as in Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, criticism of colonization is not merely set aside. Instead of interpreting these developments through the same group-level lenses used to describe the history of European settlement, the discourse shifts to a language of cultural relativism, individual rights, and religious liberty. The native population is not supposed to regard migrants in terms of ethnic identification and tribal affinity. If they do, they’re smeared as racists and xenophobes.
I am not arguing that the ethnic enclave in the West is analogous to towns established by colonizers; rather, I am saying that it is the thing itself. The West is being colonized. If progressives insist that demographic change, disruption to native cultural sensibilities and traditions, and institutional transformation count as colonization when practiced by historically powerful groups, then intellectual consistency demands a clear explanation for why the same dynamics we are experiencing today must be described in different terms.
There is no clear explanation. Thus, we are confronted by a double standard. For some reason, the native peoples of Europe and North America are racist and xenophobic for seeking to assert cultural integrity and national identity, and on that basis restrict migration; non-Western cultures are entitled to do the same without being smeared in the same way. Indeed, resistance to Western settler colonialism is lauded; not only is Western resistance to mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) characterized as racist, but so would be white European mass migration to MENA areas.
To illustrate this double standard, consider a hypothetical scenario in which millions of white Europeans—fleeing climate challenges, cultural shifts in their home countries, economic stagnation—begin migrating en masse to a Sub-Saharan African country like Kenya. Today, less than one percent of the Kenyan population is white of European descent. These hypothetical settlers, drawn from nations like France, Germany, and Poland, arrive with capital and a shared ethnic identity, establishing dense enclaves in urban centers such as Nairobi and Mombasa, as well as rural areas rich in arable land.
The white European migrants build churches, schools teaching European languages and curricula, businesses prioritizing their networks, and even gated communities that replicate suburban European lifestyles. Over time, these groups advocate for policy changes: dual-language signage, relaxed land ownership laws to facilitate further settlement, and so on. Birth rates among the migrants outpace the local population, leading to demographic shifts where white Europeans comprise 20-30 percent of certain regions, influencing local elections and cultural norms.
Would the native Kenyan population—predominantly black Africans with diverse ethnic groups like the Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Luhya, and Maasai—react with alarm? One imagines so. Community leaders would likely organize protests against “cultural erosion,” citing the influx as a threat to control over resources, indigenous languages, and traditions. One would expect that they would demand stricter immigration controls, deportation of undocumented settlers, or even quotas on European-owned land to preserve national identity.
Such resistance would likely be framed by local voices as a defense against neo-colonialism, echoing historical grievances from British rule. Progressive commentators in the West and globally would applaud or at least sympathize with this stance, portraying resistance as righteous anti-imperialism. One can picture media outlets running headlines like “Kenyans Fight Back Against European Encroachment,” drawing parallels to anti-apartheid struggles or decolonization movements. Any European migrant complaints about “anti-white racism” would be dismissed as tone-deaf entitlement, rooted in historical privilege. Progressives would emphasize the collective rights of the indigenous population to maintain sovereignty, arguing that unchecked migration risks repeating the harms of past colonization.
Now, reverse the scenario: Suppose millions of black African Muslims from Sub-Saharan countries migrate to a European nation like France, forming enclaves in cities such as Marseille or Paris. If native French citizens—predominantly white Europeans—voice similar concerns about cultural integrity, demographic change, or institutional shifts (e.g., calls for halal options in schools or mosque construction by those coming from Muslim-majority countries like Senegal or Gambia), they would be swiftly labeled racist, Islamophobic, or xenophobic by the same progressive voices who condemn white European migration to Sub-Saharan Africa.
When one turns the dynamic the other way around, the discourse pivots to cultural relativism and individual rights: freedom of movement, the moral imperative of diversity, and religious liberty. Collective interpretations of the migration as “colonization” are rejected as bigoted fearmongering, even as the dynamics mirror historical European settlement patterns. This 180-degree reversal reveals the inconsistency: Non-Western natives are granted legitimacy in asserting group-based resistance, while Western natives are expected to dissolve their cultural boundaries in the name of progress.
In light of the double standard, two things are necessarily kept in mind. First, the hypocrisy, wrapped in the selective CRT language of the “perpetrator-victim” dynamic, has propagandistic value: disordering our conceptual vocabulary to avoid politically disadvantageous conclusions (for the transnationalist project) about how societies are reshaped by large, sustained population movements. Second, since the welcoming attitude towards migrants by so many millions of Europeans is hard to imagine as a naturally occurring one, socializing people to harm themselves involved concentrated power and a concerted plan. Two obvious and necessary questions follow: Who possesses that power? And how did they prepare so many Westerners to welcome their own destruction?
Here’s how: In the post-colonial scholarship, the term “colonial collaborators” refers to local individuals, groups, or elites within a colonized society who cooperated with the external power driving colonization. The colonizing force commandeers the sense-making apparatus—education, mass media, popular cultural production—and socializes the young and the cognitively vulnerable to embrace cultural relativism—the false attitude that all cultures are morally equal, except those of a uniquely evil civilization—and to think poorly of themselves for wanting to keep their culture and societies European. This is the work of progressivism. The American progressive and his social democratic comrades in Europe are the colonial collaborators. But he won’t tell you that. Instead, he will present himself as your moral better. That so many people agree with him tells us how far down the road we have travelled to post-Western civilization.
freedom and reason 