Coded Language and Ideologically Pure Actions in Professional Psychology
A case study in asymmetric moral standards and how betrayal of colleagues has been wrongly justified
In professional spaces, I greatly value viewpoint diversity. For background, as a cognitive-behaviorally oriented clinical psychologist, in my early career, my professional approach was very much in the minority in the geographic area where I live and work. To survive in my literal home environment, I needed an appreciation for other theoretical approaches and how they informed my own work. These differences in theoretical viewpoint often turned to moral differences. The application of one theory was grounded in recognition of individual mental structures that, according to the prevailing theory, were beyond empirical scrutiny. The view was that only through careful individual analysis could a skilled professional recognize the full range of factors that led the client to seek therapy. On the other side, the assertion has been that only through careful empirical analysis could the profession achieve a scientific approach to treating psychological conditions, and do so reliably for the greatest number of individuals. Both of these perspectives have merit, but as people move to adhere to each theory more tightly, the greater the impulse to regard the opposing position in negative moral terms. The negative moral stance involves differences in perspective on how best to render client care. However, there are facets of each perspective that merit consideration, and so categorical moral judgments are ultimately unhelpful.
It is essential to highlight this because the remainder of this article is devoted to calling out the ideologically extreme positions of a few members of the profession who recently put their extremism into the public square. The moral dimension is that as each side goes to greater extremes and views the other side with moral suspicion, the greater the justification for actions that undermine any chance of good-faith viewpoint diversity discussions.
My experience navigating diverse professional viewpoints has been personally beneficial. But don’t take my word for it. There have been recent calls for science itself to embrace viewpoint diversity, including calls for collaborations between individuals whose positions on empirical questions differ sharply. When it comes to professional engagement, civil disagreement is essential. Unfortunately, this also requires that all parties recognize the need for these differences and act in good faith toward one another. There must be a genuine recognition that other viewpoints add and enhance your own. What follows is an illustration of several colleagues who regarded their actions as pure and morally justified, stated good-faith intentions, but whose behavior belied those intentions.
The Public Space
A colleague alerted me to an episode of a radio show, which was available as a podcast after airing on March 13, 2026. The show has a Jewish-progressive theme, and the station itself has been a liberal outlet for decades. I knew at least one of the guests, and it was someone I also knew was a contributor to the extremely lopsided and harmful antisemitism resolution that was just passed by the American Psychological Association (APA). The entire purpose of the podcast was specifically to discuss the recent proposals that were either passed or defeated/deferred at the last meeting of the APA council. Dear readers, please also note that I am not naming any of the radio guests. This recent entry explains why.
I’ll refrain from a minute-by-minute analysis of the broadcast. To do that level of critique would require a separate Substack entry for every ten minutes of the one-hour broadcast. Instead, there are two key moments that illustrate how radicalism, hidden under the cloak of professionalism, results in serious damage and severely undermines collegiality. Further, some of the material is through language specific to that ideological lens. As a result, listeners who are not well-versed in far-left-wing concepts may feel like they need a decoder ring. This Substack provides at least a partial guide.
Core Critique #1: Misapplication of a Social Science Concept
Just before the 33-minute mark of the broadcast, the guests discussed a proposal from a professional group of Jewish psychologists to be granted a seat on the council as members of the ethnic psychology associations. This proposal and the reaction from some leaders made the news just ahead of the council meeting in February. One of the guests declared, authoritatively, that the proposal itself was a gesture of ‘white racial grievance.’ This statement was based on a widely held assertion that Jewish individuals in the United States are white. But the guest’s statement takes it one step further by suggesting that the entire premise for seeking a voting seat (one of over 180 seats on the Council) was based on a false claim of minority status. This same guest, only a few minutes earlier in the broadcast, made the wildly unsupported claim that 30% of psychologists were Jewish. Never mind that there are no reliable statistics on how many psychologists are Jewish; however, if the Council membership were any indication, there are presently fewer than 5% on that body right now.
Psychology has been struggling with the issue of white supremacy and how to address it for several years. And, white supremacy unquestionably demands our attention, with the social sciences the right place for it to happen. One arena in which reasoned debate on the challenges posed by white supremacy, among other social problems, recently took place was the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The following two Substack posts nicely lay out both sides of the discussion: one argues that the concept has been too expansive and politically lopsided, and the other that it demands nuanced attention in scientific discourse. What the guest on the radio show assumed, and what he buttressed with his fantasy statistic, is that he could comfortably and immediately draw a direct line from Jews to whiteness and thus negate any minority status for Jewish professionals. This ideological imbalance went unchallenged on the show. This kind of rhetoric is enormously harmful. The willingness to make sweeping generalizations and abuse psychological concepts in the process sets the stage for dangerous discrimination and poses a serious risk to colleagues and the public.
Core Critique #2: The Triumph of Left-Wing Identitarianism over Identity Politics
Mary Douglas’ classic book, Purity and Danger, lays out the social parameters by which groups protect themselves from risky external entities. What began as an essential evolutionary response to a dangerous world where literal survival risks lurked around every corner has, over generations, evolved to the point that interpersonal and viewpoint differences can result in expulsion from one’s group. Douglas noted that we maintain social boundaries and possess an innate drive for purity in our social connections, including ones that pose no real survival risks.
Douglas’ conceptualizations have proven durable in the sixty years since her book was first published. However, social scientists, the very people who are supposed to fully recognize these boundaries as virtual rather than real, have also shown a remarkable readiness to fall into the very same need for social and ideological purity.
There is a small set of influential psychologists who have contributed to the identity-based discrimination that is currently at the center of a good deal of professional turmoil. My colleague, Miri Bar-Halpern, and I recently referred to this unique form of discrimination as left-wing identitarianism.
Returning to the broadcast, at 41:20 into the show, the discussion turned to Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who was the first elected official to publicly denounce the APA for its inability to address antisemitism among its members. Torres has recently come under fire from within his own party for accepting donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He also has a clear public record of supporting Israel. On the show, the guests and hosts gratuitously booed Torres and compared him directly to Haman, the villain at the center of the Jewish holiday Purim. Yes, you read that correctly - for the left-wing sin of accepting money from AIPAC and supporting Israel, Torres was compared to the historical figure who attempted to wipe out the Jewish people. Imagine if the psychologists on this show had just occasionally taken seriously any critiques of their misguided policy ideas. Maybe someone would have stopped them from saying or proposing things that are so manifestly wrong.
Listeners to the show might be confused by this reaction if they are also well-versed in identity politics, where pursuing justice for marginalized individuals is considered best accomplished, at least in part, by members of those very same marginalized groups. Torres is the first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress. The district he represents is one of the poorest in the country, consistently among the top 3 for poverty for well over a decade. He has an incredibly high approval rate in his district. And, notably, the two guests on the show do not live or work in his district.
Pause for a moment to reflect on the last two paragraphs. You might be wondering why Torres was booed on a progressive radio show, one that champions the liberal values Torres has represented in Congress. Well, Torres has committed a single ideological violation by accepting money from AIPAC, a political action committee that has been attacked by the far left for its ongoing support of Israel. Torres’ failure to check every single box on the progressive litmus test has been the sole reason for his vilification in far-left circles. And the full-throated reaction on the show by the guests and hosts is a perfect illustration of the left-wing identitarianism concept that Dr. Bar-Halpern and I have discussed. Identitarianism is historically a right-wing biological purity demand used to justify racism. When formulated from the left, once someone violates their exacting moral relativistic standards, there is no redemption. Right-wing identitarianism espouses the ‘one-drop’ model. This is a viewpoint whereby if someone has any ancestor, no matter how remote, from a minoritized background, it is equivalent to being a member of that minority group. The left-wing equivalent of the ‘one-drop’ perspective is that any deviation from their moral demands will make one morally irredeemable. It doesn’t matter what policies Torres has advanced or his personal background and identity; in their eyes, he has a ‘one drop’ violation, and that is enough to invalidate every other socially desirable act he has achieved for his constituents. His purity gone, as per Douglas’s framework, then he needs to be gone, too.
The Big Picture and Where We Go Now
The podcast discussed here was probably not widely heard. The station is tiny, driven by membership rather than advertisement revenue. Publicly available estimates of membership hover in the very low five-digit range. However, the viewpoints expressed by psychologists on that particular show reflected a symptom of the movements in psychology that have contributed to the severe ideological bias, shorn of connection to the science the field is supposed to represent.
Former Democratic mayor of Chicago and longtime political operative Rahm Emanuel appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on April 17, 2026. Emanuel quoted Ari Fleischer, who said in reference to antisemitism on the political right and left that “Republicans have a cold, and Democrats have a fever.” Fleischer was press secretary to former Republican President George W. Bush. I highlighted both Emanuel and Fleischer to show that this concern has been expressed from both sides of the political aisle.
The abject failure of colleagues who were directly involved in crafting a policy regarding antisemitism was due to their ideological biases. These same colleagues have since demanded viewpoint diversity in any additional policies the APA might take up, but, in pursuit of their own harmful policies, they adhered to viewpoint ideological homogeneity that would impress Mary Douglas by showing the durability of her concepts of social purity.
Contemporary moral psychology has made clear that people on each side of the political aisle are concerned with harm1. How they conceptualize harm is where the differences lie. Lost in this discussion are the differences in moral viewpoints among people who share the same identity, and may even differ in degree on the same side of the political aisle, while still showing sharp distinctions in what constitutes harm. What is depicted here, in examining two specific aspects of a podcast in which all participants were on the same side of the political aisle, is that they viewed their positions as morally justified. There is no faulting that, and those viewpoints deserve engagement. What is problematic is that there are clear fault lines where the moral actors are blinded to how the full range of positions on their own side of the political aisle characterize moral dimensions of what is or is not harm. Worse, because of the extremity of the positions they held, they found it morally defensible to pursue their policy proposals by any means possible. The APA resolution on antisemitism is a particularly clear distillation of this moral one-sidedness, borne of good intentions but harmful in practice precisely because it is one-sided.
If the profession has any hope of recovering from the immense harm inflicted by the recent APA Council meeting, urgent reforms are needed. Re-examine the ideological lopsided antisemitism resolution, and immediately amend it to reflect the hazards of antisemitism from both the political left and right. Remedies in the by-laws include mechanisms for the Council to act quickly2. Correct the record on the kinds of political adventurism in which the APA regularly engages. And recognize that demands for civility come not only from words, but from deeds. At the moment, the purveyors of radicalism coursing through the profession may say things in public settings that sound civil, but their deeds, such as pushing forward with the recent antisemitism resolution despite serious warnings about the harm, represent profound uncivil acts. It simply cannot persist this way if the profession is going to serve the public in any productive manner.
For an excellent discussion of moral psychology, see Gray, K., & Pratt, S. (2025). Morality in our mind and across cultures and politics. Annual Review of Psychology, 76, 663-691.
Dean, thank you for another excellent and thought-provoking post. I found myself furiously nodding in agreement and wanted to extend the conversation with a few comments below.
Why should white supremacy in America unquestionably demand our attention? America is a majority white people country (> 60%). Why is that bad? It’s what our country is. Nobody likes the KKK and the idea that white people are better than everyone else, but why should white Americans apologize for being American? Who should they apologize to, and why?
Does Jewish supremacy in Israel unquestionably demand the attention of Israelis? Why would it? Israel is a majority Jewish country. Should Israeli Jews apologize for their existence? And to whom and on what basis?
Dean, what you describe having been subjected to is clearly an intentional smear for radical leftists to lump Jews in with white people based on their assumption it’s shameful to be white (aka a member of the majority race in the US). The horror! White people are bad, so if Jews are white, they are therefore bad.
I am learning from woke leftists that I am supposed to be guilty for being white. That this makes me inherently bad. Even if my ancestors didn’t arrive on the Mayflower.
I’m not aware of a movement now or at any time in my career of white people trying to do anything on behalf of white people to the exclusion of anyone else, in order to advance whiteness. The very idea is ridiculous. We were/are just people who happen to be white doing good work in our profession.
When I think of the leaders in our profession, I think of their amazing contributions, and they are white, black, Jewish, Norwegian, Icelandic, etc. They are all awesome and I do not sort them into identity-based groups and assign a value to each based on their status on a supposed victim hierarchy. What they all have in common is merit, regardless of identity.
Why is it bad to be white? And arguing that Jews are white? Who is saying it’s bad, who are they, and where are they coming from? Who are the people cheering them on and organizing the profession and its structures around hatred for the majority of people in the country in which we live?
I disagree, respectfully. Name names. Post links. Call out bigots. They wouldn’t hesitate to cancel you and you know it.