President Macron: U.S. “Woke Leftism” Poses Threat to French Society

In a report from the New York Times this week, we learn that French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing back – hard – against the idiotic social justice theories that have taken over American politics and threaten to do the same thing in France. The paper reported that Macron and other French intellectuals are warning that American wokeness poses an “existential threat” to France’s “intellectual and cultural heritage.”

“Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture,” The Times reported. “With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media. Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society.”

In a speech last year, Macron warned that many of the subjects that France used to excel in “have been undermined” by nonsensical social justice theories.

“And in so doing, we have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the Republic by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding to other academic traditions,” Macron said. “I am thinking of Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours.

“And when I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours, I say to myself that it is reasonable to make this choice,” he continued. “And so we must, very clearly, re-invest, on a massive scale, in the field of social sciences, history, understanding of civilizations by creating posts, by stepping up dialogue, academic and scientific debate in order not to allow the knowledge, the understanding of Islam as a religion, of the civilization it underpins and its contribution to our country and our continent to become ideological and exclusively political debates.”

Macron isn’t the only one pushing back against the modern left. In an interview last year, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said that “Islamo-leftism” was ruining French universities.

“No one has the right to cowardice anymore,” Blanquer said. “There is a fight to be waged against an intellectual matrix coming from American universities and intersectional theses, which want to essentialize communities and identities, at the antipodes of our republican model which, for its part, postulates equality between human beings, independently of their characteristics of origin, sex, religion. It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of our society and a vision of the world which converges with the interests of the Islamists.”

The French, of course, have plenty of reasons to push back against the normalization of Islamism, given their recent history of deadly terrorist attacks. But then, one would think – given the events of last summer – that Americans would have plenty of reason to push back against militant black communism. Unfortunately, we now have a leader who embraces it wholeheartedly and is appointing its champions to his administration.

It’s a sad day when President Macron, of all people, stands as an example of anti-leftist courage. But apparently, that’s how bad things have gotten.