The extreme leftist “woke” culture is a disease that has infected the country and French officials are now sounding the alarm that it must not infect France itself.
“Woke” culture is an ideology that breaks every interaction with anything on the planet down to the identity of the person interacting with it. For instance, it gave birth to the 1619 Project, which boils America down to nothing but its sin of slavery and claims that America really started when the first slave arrived in America in 1619, not upon the founding of the country in 1776. Like Nazism did with the Jewish people, wokeism teaches that white people are to blame for every problem under the sun and that in order to obtain true equality, they must be disadvantaged in various ways while other races must be given special treatment and benefits.
According to the Daily Mail, French officials see what’s happening in America and are making it clear that they need to be ideologically opposed to it:
In a speech in October on the ‘Fight against Separatism’, Macron warned against leaving ‘the intellectual debate to others’ as he cautioned of the ‘certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States’.
His education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer also warned in October that there is a ‘battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities’.
Even the French recognize that American universities have become breeding grounds for this stunted ideological position that makes no room for context, history, or nuance:
Some French intellects have also argued that American universities are to blame for giving justification to acts of terrorism carried out by Muslims.
After three Islamist terror attacks last fall, Education minister Blanquer accused the universities of being complicit.
He was supported in an open letter from 100 prominent scholars that blasted social theories ‘transferred from North American campuses’.
One of the signatories, Gilles Kepel, argued that American influence led to ‘a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’
Historian Pierre-Andre Taguieff notes it’s all driven by a “hatred of the west, as a white civilization and that the agenda of these enemies to the west can be summed up in three words: “decolonize, demasculate, and de-Europeanize.”
France’s laws make it illegal to collect data based on race and reject the idea of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” instead, putting more focus on fundamental rights and values such as equality and liberty.
Whether or not this push from French politicians to halt the tide of identity politics actually works remains to be seen, but it really puts into perspective just how damaging this American-born ideological virus is. When viewing it from the outside, it’s easy to see just how divisive and ugly woke ideological adherence is. It prohibits discussion and social growth by proclaiming any ideology but its own is pure evil. It makes villains out of innocent people and victims out of powerful ones. It makes someone’s defining characteristic their race or sex, not personality, ideas, or talents.
It’s a shallow ideology based on out-of-context storytelling and ignorance. It needs to be stopped.
