France is concerned about America's Wokeism.
Yep, perhaps the most far-left democracy on the planet – a nation that spearheaded a global climate deal and was founded on secular humanism – is concerned at how off the rails American culture and politics has gone.
The primary source of concern from French leaders and scholars is the drivel coming out of American universities these days and being exported worldwide.
In October, French President President Emmanuel Macron warned about "certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States."
His education minister also said the nation is fighting a "battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities."
"No one has the right to cowardice anymore," said education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer. "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 suuuuuper secular French government does not recognize race, instead seeking to rally a diverse blend of ethnic groups and religious beliefs around common societal values and democratic processes.
What a novel idea, right??
This week, however, the new director of the Paris Opera felt the need to profess his faith in American Wokeism, publishing a 66-page report on how he's going to "diversify" staff (translation: force racial quotas) and ban blackface.
French intellectuals are also connecting American Wokeism to Islamist terror attacks, which would only come as a shocker to anyone who hasn't seen the alliance between Marxist and Islamic thought in the last century on the world stage.
A hundred French scholars wrote a letter that blasted U.S. colleges, decrying the dangerous social theories such as Critical Race Theory that are being "transferred from North American campuses."
Scholar Gilles Kepel had this to say about intersectional teachings on group identity and equity:
"[It causes] 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-André Taguieff came right out and said that the racial ideology in America right now predominantly comes from a "hatred of the West, as a white civilization."
"The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, demasculate, de-Europeanize. Straight white male — that's the culprit to condemn and the enemy to eliminate."
If you're reading this and feel triggered, let me point out again that France is a thoroughly secular nation. As in, modern-day France was founded on a revolution where they killed thousands of priests and set up the atheistic Cult of Reason in place of the Church. These are not alt-right white supremacists.
These are traditional liberals pointing out how absolutely bat-bleep crazy the American left has become in recent years.
If you still consider yourself a centrist in the U.S. sociopolitical landscape, you might want to pay attention.
