The leader of a newly launched progressive campus advocacy group affiliated with More Perfect Union, a prominent left-wing media organization, liked social media posts justifying the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and expressed similar sentiments in at least one now-deleted X comment.

Elise Joshi, a Gen Z activist and influencer, is taking the helm of a new campus organization, More Perfect University, that is casting itself as a populist left rival to Turning Point USA, the right-wing advocacy group that has played a key role in pulling younger voters to President Donald Trump and promoting conservative values at colleges and universities across the country.

More Perfect University, which was announced on Wednesday, is the creation of More Perfect Union, founded in 2021 by Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). In a splashy video, Joshi said the new group will extend More Perfect Union’s “fight to campuses,” vowing to equip students “with the tools to unrig our broken economic system” and stressing the “responsibility to speak truth to power falls on us.”

But while Shakir has long been known as a vocal critic of Israel, his own record of commentary on such issues does not appear to have gone as far as Joshi, whose past social media activity has notably sought to excuse the violence perpetrated by Hamas.

In one since-removed X comment from Oct. 7, 2023, for instance, Joshi suggested the Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages were an act of justified resistance linked to a broader movement including violent efforts to oppose slavery, apartheid and colonialism.

“It seems a lot of people forgot how slavery abolition, South Africa’s apartheid, and every independence movement against colonization was achieved,” Joshi wrote in the post, a screenshot of which was reviewed by Jewish Insider.

Joshi, who at the time was a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she emerged as an outspoken youth activist with a sizable following on TikTok, also liked some comments posted on the day of the attack that expressed similar views, other screenshots show — including by one user who had asked, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”

In another post liked by Joshi, a user wrote, “Folks start really fighting back and all of a sudden everyone is a pacifist. Real revolution and decolonization is not fun. It is painful and violent.”

It is unclear when Joshi’s post alluding to the Hamas attacks was deleted. She did not respond to a request for comment from JI about her social media activity.

Elsewhere, Joshi, a former executive director of Gen-Z for Change, has summarized her negative views on Israel, reflective of the waning support for the Jewish state seen among younger voters on both sides of the aisle.

“A Jewish state in Palestine requires and has always required the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians so a Jewish majority is possible,” she wrote last June. “It requires a siege on Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank to prevent 5 million+ Palestinians from having equal rights.”

In a follow-up post to X, Joshi added that “Israel’s existence requires the subjugation of the indigenous Palestinian people who have inhabited that land for thousands of years.”

“The status quo is violent, from routine bombing to home demolition. To start and end with condemning Hamas only fuels the widely recognized apartheid state,” she said just two days after the Oct. 7 attacks.

Joshi, who has proudly identified on social media as an “anti-Israel activist,” has not indicated how More Perfect University will approach questions about the Middle East on college campuses, where protests and related forms of student activism have grown quieter in recent months, even amid ongoing war with Iran.

“My top issues are climate and unions, but I see the genocide in Gaza (not ‘conflict in the Middle East’) as a moral issue that’s fundamental to being human,” she said in a May 2024 post, commenting on polling results suggesting the war in Gaza and accompanying campus demonstrations did not rank among the most important concerns of college students. 

“GENOCIDE IS NOT RANK-ABLE,” she argued.

More Perfect Union did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

In a sign of the coalition she is seeking to build as the new leader of More Perfect University, Joshi shared a complimentary social media post from Hasan Piker, a controversial far-left Twitch streamer who has drawn criticism for frequently using antisemitic rhetoric and doubling down on his support for Hamas over Israel.

“Incredibly stoked for this!” Piker enthused in an X post on Wednesday about More Perfect University, which Joshi amplified on her social media accounts.