The Brains Trust of Intersectionality

Munroe Bergdorf, a trailblazing transgender model was sacked from L’Oréal after she tried to defend her comment that all white people are racist. In a bizarre rant, she further stated that Western society as a whole is a system rooted in structural racism and white supremacy, and tied herself in proverbial knots, defending the claim that even Heather Heyer (the woman recently murdered protesting racism in Charlottesville) is in fact also a white supremacist. In a simultaneous case, the UK’s Channel 4 interviewed someone, who declares herself an “Islamist anti-colonial feminist” named Nadia Chan. The trouble was, she is also a virulent racist and anti-Semite. In a now deleted segment, which caused heavy backlash as soon as it came out, Nadia said, that Muslims like London mayor Sadiq Khan were equivalent to traitors. When asked, if she would be okay with more Muslim representation she replied she wouldn’t be, as that would mean diluting her identity to appease the British public, her identity, in this case, meaning her religion.

These might be two separate and superficially different incidents, but they are qualitatively very similar and underline the same cultural tensions that lead to these scenarios. For all their faults, Nadia and Munroe were being absolutely honest about their convictions, in the sense they were espousing the same subversive thoughts they grew up with and which reflect the cultural forces that influence who they are. They are both nominally British. But they refuse to identify with the land, values or culture they were born into, and actively resist assimilation. Nor do they share any fellow feelings, affection or solidarity, with their countrymen, and possibly, nor will they ever.

That is not to say, they are actively looking to migrate to utopian lands where they can live their dream lives. In what now seems like a social law, the people who are most critical of the West as an entity, usually prefer to live nowhere other than the West, even when given the choice to migrate. Nor is it that they are representative of the thousands of other LGBT and sexual and racial minorities who live and work in the UK and Europe, including Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists. It hardly needs mentioning as it is so obvious, that LGBT people officially still enjoy more rights and freedoms inside the West than they do outside. Munroe’s rise to her place of prominence in the public eye and with L’Oreal is a testimony to that fact. Likewise, Nadia can proudly spout her frankly racist and anti-Semitic hatred against any and every one she hates, because of the freedom of speech she currently enjoys in the West. (Somewhat ironically this is not the case for women in the Islamic countries she wishes the West would emulate.)

But the commonality of these two situations lies in the rhetoric. From Linda Sarsour to Chelsea Manning, Melissa Click to Bahar Mustafa, this is the rhetoric of Intersectionality. There are a group of people, who will always look for and try to subvert the very system which gives them the platform and the life they enjoy. The words used by both Nadia and Munroe are the words of post-modernist critical theories, found in every Western university in the taxpayer funded departments of Gender Studies or Peace and Conflict studies, for example. Nor is it a scenario which is solely British. One can remember Rutgers Professor Kevin Allred, or self-declared communist Drexel professor George Ciccariello-Maher.  Not to mention the 12 out of 13 academics who signed the letter de-platforming Milo in Berkeley, who were from Critical theory, Gender studies and a Post-Colonial/Postmodernist/Marxist backgrounds.

All these disciplines, starting in the 1970s are offshoots of the post-modernism and the Euro-Marxist Frankfurt school, which question the fundamental assertion of scholarship—that activism and bias should not be substitutes for scientific enquiry. The language that emanates from people like Munroe, or Nadia is simply the logical endgame of a school of philosophy which, regardless of the problem it seeks to answer, has found the same answer, and the answer is that everything is the fault of the racist, capitalist, patriarchal West. Everything in the world is a problem caused by (choose for yourself) or a combination thereof, of Western colonialism, capitalism, racial supremacy, or even worse, Zionism.

This section of academia, and the corner of Western society it poisons, thrives on such mono-dimensional research, spun by self-referential journals, and further research, which acts more as propaganda than logical nuanced enquiry. None of the claims or assertions are usually corroborated with scientific methodology. Activism usually isn’t grounded in tried and tested scholarly principles. Articles and analysis based on such research are actively cited by parts of media, social media and the blogosphere, which are again manned by writers, media personalities and bloggers, who are the products of the same education system. Finally, these disciplines act as a societal echo chamber, which keeps on repeating the same rhetoric argumentum ad nauseam, until it becomes an accepted truth. The original Frankfurt School of thought realised that the Proletarian revolution is unlikely in the West, and therefore subversion is the only alternate way of bringing about the desired social engineering. These are the same corners of Western academia, where such ideology gives rise to conspiracy theories about the Iraq war, or 9/11 being an inside job; ideas which are now proliferating into society, the ramifications of which we are now observing around us.

Nadia and Munroe only reflect the mainstreaming of a subversive ideology that seeks to undermine the West. One can theoretically co-exist with people holding diverse and opposing viewpoints—but in the battle of ideas it is unwise to accept a creed which is designed to subvert, dominate or destroy the very social contract that forms the building blocks of a tolerant and multicultural society.