French President Emmanuel Macron is a liberal politician who was endorsed by Barack Obama.
Macron is far from a Bible-believing conservative or right-wing in any real way, and his policies including the recent push for regulations to clamp down on the dangerous spread of Islamic extremism in France are actually very moderate.
He has also had to put up with ongoing mass protests in France’s “Yellow Vest” movement that are angry at his policies, and he’s mostly avoided overreacting.
But even Macron and the French people have a limit to their tolerance of what kind of ideologies and social movements they will allow in their nation. The French President now says “woke” left-wing politics has gone too far and is starting to ruin France.
And Macron blames America for exporting these ideas into his country.
What’s Macron Talking About?
In many ways France is the origin of many progressive ideologies and the birthplace of left-wing philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. These thinkers challenged tradition, religious authority and class power in ways that led to enormous upheaval.
But intersectionality and neo-Marxist cultural leftism of the kind found among American Antifa members or in its university lecture halls isn’t quite the same as French leftism, and the US-exported ideology has Macron and French leadership concerned that toxic ideas around race and victim status will further divide French society.
In particular, a growing segment of younger French activists and progressives are angry at France’s colonial past and racial tensions, and small incidents involving race or French sins of the past take up a huge place in the national media and focus.
Macron and a number of thought leaders and politicians in France blame “wokeism” and the American-style progressivism for amplifying this style of politics and social activism.
NEW – Politicians, prominent intellectuals, and academics in France have voiced concern that 'out-of-control leftism and cancel culture' from the United States is undermining the French society and attacks the French heritage (Daily Mail)
— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) February 10, 2021
Who’s Really to Blame?
Tensions swirl in France and have worsened after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty for showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad during a class debate on freedom of speech, class conflict over rising inequality and a growing anger funneled through the #MeToo movement and BLM supporters enraged over the death of George Floyd in the US.
The French university system is also part of an ongoing conflict over what subjects are legitimate and pushing American style identity politics. Macron is looking to win more votes from conservatives and last summer weighed in that that making everything about race in the universities is “breaking the republic in two.”
It’s undeniable that Hollywood culture as well as American newsmedia and culture now permeates almost every corner of the globe. And it’s undeniable that it’s causing enormous cultural damage to many countries, even France.
But to blame America for the poison ideas of critical race theory, wokeism and intersectionality is definitely an oversimplification. Under the Biden Administration it’s obvious that extreme left wing cultural ideologies are going to be promoted – along with globalist anti-family organizations like the United Nations and others – but it’s also clear that these ideas would have no real impact in a society that was fundamentally healthy at heart.
In other words, the real people to blame for extreme woke politics and race-baiting intersectionality are those who believe it. They are not just innocent victims of genius brainwashing professors, politicians and activists: the believers are willing participants in a false narrative which they know at heart is a lie but which they think will give them power to punish those they believe are their enemies.
Believers in extreme progressivism – in France, America or anywhere else – have chosen to believe in a toxic ideology in order to wield power. They are ultimately the ones responsible for its devastating effects and the ones who must be increasingly shunned in public and private life because of the danger and malice of their ideology.
