French Leaders Including Macron Slams US' Out Of Control Woke Leftism And Cancel Culture; Call It A Threat To France

Expressing concern over out of control woke leftism and cancel culture imported from the United States, many prominent politicians, intellectuals and academics in France have said that these American ideas are threatening the French identity.

The French intellectual are saying that the ideas on race, gender, post-colonialism, particularly those emanating from US universities are undermining the French identity.

Even, French President Emmanuel Macron had sided with those raising concerns over American Leftism contaminating France.

In October last year, while delivering a speech on the 'Fight against Separatism', Macron warned against leaving 'the intellectual debate to others' as he cautioned of the 'certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States'.

French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer had also warned that there was a 'battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities'.

Earlier this week, Paris Opera's new chief Alexander Neef released a 66-page report on diversity at the firm in which he vowed to diversify staff and to ban blackface. The report came after five black members of the ballet company called for greater diversity in the firm in an open letter last summer.

French Far-right political leader Marine le Pen as well as country's newspaper Le Monde targeted Neef for the decision.

Le Monde said that Neef had soaked up Americal culture for 10 years while he worked in Toronto, Canada.

Besides, the publication of new book by social scientists Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel in which they claim that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects.

Responding to the New York Times, Noiriel said that academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data".

It is illegal in France to collect data based on race and for many, the country's national identify rejects diversity and multiculturalism, instead focusing on fundamental rights and core values like equality and liberty.

Earlier last year, protests similar to those in US had erupted in France after police violence.

The wave of protests sparked further backlash in universities, as students began to put pressure on institutions to disinvite well-known speakers.

Activists also targeted a play at Sorbonne University where white actors were to wear masks and dark make up.

Several French intellectuals and leaders have also spoken out against 'cancel culture' in universities and also blamed US varsities for providing justification to terror attacks by Islamic terrorists.

Las year, French Education Minister Blanquer had accused the US universities of being complicit with terrorists by providing the intellectual justification behind their acts.

Blanquer was supported by 100 prominent scholars in a open letter, in which they slammed social theories 'transferred from North American campuses'.

A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “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.’’