So much for intersectionality. The Women’s March in Chicago will not take place next month, and at least part of the reason appears to be growing controversy over the organization’s tolerance for anti-Jewish figures such Louis Farrakhan and Muslim activist Linda Sarsour.
This appears the reality even though some march officials are downplaying it, with Women’s March Chicago issuing a November statement attributing “the decision not to hold a January rally after its October ‘March to the Polls’ to a lack of resources given the expense and manpower required to host the events,” writes the Washington Examiner.
“But one board member told the [Chicago] Tribune in an article published Wednesday that the move had the ‘side benefit’ of further distancing the Chicago team from its national counterpart. National Women’s March organizers have been widely criticized for links to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic comments,” the site continued.
“That sort of infighting within the movement is very painful. It’s very painful to watch,” Sara Kurensky, Women’s March Chicago board member, told the outlet,” the Examiner further relates. “When a handful of leaders … say something, they are not speaking for an entire movement.”
Among his many bigoted comments, Farrakhan has called whites “potential humans” who “haven’t evolved yet,” Adolf Hitler “a very great man,” and in October likened Jews to “termites.”
Farrakhan has also praised Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory; she in turn applauded him on social media. She also once posted a picture of herself embraced by him, “referring to him as ‘the GOAT’ (Greatest Of All Time),” reported the New York Post last month. “So when she pointedly refused to condemn Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT comments after being asked, it was no surprise.”
Then there’s the co-chairman of the 2017 Women’s March, the hijab-sporting Linda Sarsour. She has praised Sharia law and Farrakhan, said in September that “American Muslims shouldn’t ‘humanize’ Israelis,” and in July “tweeted birthday wishes at a fugitive cop-killer,” the Post further informed.
So while the Examiner reports Women’s March Chicago communications lead Harlene Ellin as saying that her organization “never planned to march in January 2019” in the first place, that their main march was moved up to October, and that this “has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on at the national level,” this rings hollow.
After all, the Chicago affair just mirrors a broader division within the movement. As The Hill tells us, “Teresa Shook, a co-founder of the national movement, in November called for national leaders to step down, after having ‘allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs.… The Washington state chapter announced earlier in December that the group would dissolve in protest, and the Rhode Island chapter declared it is separating from the national movement.”
So, again, so much for “intersectionality,” the belief that disparate leftist groups can unite where their interests intersect. This is, namely, “to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male,” stated moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who said that intersectionality “is like NATO for social-justice activists.”
The reality is that there isn’t actually honor among thieves — or leftists — and there’s only temporary unity. This was apparent among the first modern leftists, the French revolutionaries, when they began killing their own and, ultimately, their movement’s main author, Robespierre. It was also evident when the Russian Revolution’s Bolsheviks outlawed the Mensheviks and, later, when Joseph Stalin purged the “old Bolsheviks.”
Today’s leftists are just like yesterday’s, too — only more so. Furthermore, the real issue isn’t policy differences but prejudice differences. The Women’s March minions are of one heart on hating white men (the scapegoat), the patriarchy (which doesn’t exist), and America (which they’re trying to ensure won’t exist). But on Jew hatred and some other issues, there’s division.
Just consider the widening rift between feminists and “transgender” activists. Feminists fought to muscle their way into the men’s realm, using double standards all the way, and succeeded in putting female reporters in men’s locker rooms and girls in boys’ sports; now the “transgender” types are muscling their way into the women’s realm, putting boys claiming girlhood in girl’s locker rooms and men in women’s sports. Pity that.
It’s only getting worse, too. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks both considered a proletarian rise necessary; they largely differed only on tactics, with the Bolsheviks favoring revolutionary change and the Mensheviks evolutionary change.
But today’s leftists are far more splintered, a result of the West’s intensifying relativism, about which I write much. For only embrace of Truth (absolute by definition), ever and always the same, can unite people (though different perceptions of it can be problematic). But upon rejecting Truth and adopting the notion that “everything is relative,” everything ultimately becomes relative to oneself.
Then emotion becomes the most common arbiter; thus are leftists so feelings-oriented. Everyone begins marching to the beat of a different drummer (often the one in his head), and “values of the day,” shifting goalposts, shifting “morals,” and ideological balkanization result.
When pondering this and the current Women’s March divorce, brought to mind is novelist William Inge’s observation, “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” In our time and place, this means old-line feminists find themselves impugned and leftist movements sometimes split. But when one leftist faction achieves enough power, heads are split. Leftist useful idiots never seem to learn this except the hard way — and when it’s far too late.
Image: Screenshot of website of Women’s March Chicago
