The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.
.. She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is “not a real woman” and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.
.. Plus, they’ve argued, many of these tweets were written five years ago! Ancient history.
.. “Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur!” read the tweet, which featured a “#SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor” — a pink and purple Pop Art-style portrait of Ms. Shakur, better known as Joanne Chesimard, a convicted killer who is on the F.B.I.’s list of most wanted terrorists.
.. Like many others, CNN’s Jake Tapper noticed the outrageous tweet. “Shakur is a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba,” he tweeted, going on to mention Ms. Sarsour’s troubling past statements. “Any progressives out there condemning this?” he asked.
In the face of this sober criticism, Ms. Sarsour cried bully: “@jaketapperjoins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.”
.. There’s no doubt that Ms. Sarsour is a regular target of far-right groups, but her experience of that onslaught is what makes her smear all the more troubling. Indeed, the idea that Jake Tapper is a member of the alt-right is the kind of delirious, fact-free madness that fuels Donald Trump and his supporters. Troublingly, it is exactly the sentiment echoed by the Women’s March: “Our power — your power — scares the far right. They continue to try to divide us. Today’s attacks on #AssataShakur are the latest example.”
.. What’s more distressing is that Ms. Sarsour is not the only leader of the women’s movement who harbors such alarming ideas. Largely overlooked have been the similarly outrageous statements of the march’s other organizers.
.. Ms. Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convictedof trying to kill six police officers.. But the public figure both women regularly fawn over is Louis Farrakhan... Ms. Mallory posted a photo with her arm around Mr. Farrakhan, the 84-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments.. “And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!” he warned Jews in a speech at a Nation of Islam gathering in Madison Square Garden in 1985. Five years later, he remained unreformed: “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters.” Or this metaphor, directed at Jews: “You have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.” He called Hitler “a very great man” on national television. Judaism, he insists, is a “gutter religion.”.. Mr. Farrakhan is also an unapologetic racist. He insists that whites are a “race of devils” and that “white people deserve to die.”.. Feminists will find little to cheer in his 1950s views of gender: “Your professional lives can’t satisfy your soul like a good, loving man.”.. But the nightmare of the Trump administration is the proof text for why all of this matters. We just saw what happens to legitimate political parties when they fall prey to movements that are, at base, anti-American. That is true of the populist, racist alt-right that helped deliver Mr. Trump the White House and are now hollowing out the Republican Party. And it can be true of the progressive “resistance” — regardless of how chic, Instagrammable and celebrity-laden the movement may seem... Will progressives have more spine than conservatives in policing hate in their ranks?.. what I stand against is
- embracing terrorists,
- disdaining independent feminist voices,
- hating on democracies and
- celebrating dictatorships.
If that puts me beyond the pale of the progressive feminist movement in America right now, so be it.
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Earlier in his speech, he claimed, “If we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart—and fast—we’re not going to have a country anymore—there will be nothing left.” That is to say that isis is capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not at the height of the Cold War—the destruction of the United States. This is not simply an error of degree but a failure of category. Trump, of course, offered himself as our only apparent savior. “We have an incompetent Administration, and if I am not elected President that will not change over the next four years,” he added.
.. Trump’s concept of graduated citizenship coexists comfortably with his insistence that collective responsibility be placed on the communities he considers suspicious. “Now, the Muslim community, so important,” he said. “They have to coöperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith.” This thinking is not unfamiliar to anyone who has observed how racism works, how it suggests that one must constantly prove oneself worthy of trust.
If applied consistently after mass shootings, it would require that we hold the communities in Newtown and Aurora, the students at Virginia Tech, and the residents of the hundred and seventy-nine communities where shootings have occurred responsible for the violence of their neighbors, classmates, and relatives.
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
The new weapon she brought was the insight that Donald Trump’s anti-élite grievances contain a constant denigration of America, and of the vast, collaborative project of making it better. “He called our military a ‘disaster,’ “ Clinton said. “He said we are, and I quote, a ‘third-world country.’ “
.. The liberal line during the past week has been that Clinton ought to call Trump a fraud. Her attack, when it came, ran deeper. The real, devastating charge in Clinton’s San Diego speech was that Trump does not believe in America.
.. You could measure the depth of the hit in Trump’s response. Normally so gleeful on Twitter, he sneered at her for using a teleprompter, and that was about it. Then, in a transparent effort to steal the headlines, Trump resumed his attack on the federal judge presiding over one of the lawsuits against Trump University
.. Foreign policy is natural territory for Clinton, its substance and subtleties familiar, but it also has another helpful feature: it lets her mostly avoid the tensions within modern liberalism. She doesn’t have to talk about the nineteen-ninties.
.. in California, where the main political fault lines are not between conservatism and liberalism but within liberalism itself: between the vaulting meritocracy of Silicon Valley and the poverty it obscures, between middle-class progress and environmental conservation, between minority politics and expression in a place that no longer really has a majority.
.. in Santa Clara County, the center of Silicon Valley, which last year was reported to be the national leader in average wages but also had a double-digit poverty rate.
.. It is telling that Clinton, attacked relentlessly by Sanders for giving paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, never really defended her view of capital’s role in the economy
.. Either Clinton really believes that her husband’s Administration resolved the basic problems of social design or, more likely, she is enough of a partisan that she will not publicly describe where it went wrong. One way or the other, she has a blind spot.
.. That up-and-up-and-up-again cadence that she uses when she’s promising the new jobs and infrastructure bound to come in her Administration was gone entirely.
.. she seems to have acquired an idea of her opponent and, in turn, herself: that she is the patriot in the race, and the believer.