It is fashionable in Quebec to slay the threat woke said to be straight imported from the United States. We no longer count the number of torn shirts and solemn appeals to combat the excesses linked to the “culture of cancellation” coming from American campuses which would be stormed by ugly leftists.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
We rarely hear about another threat, not woke at all that one, which is however much more worrying on certain American campuses.
As evidenced by the report by my colleague Léa Carrier, American universities are at the heart of a fierce culture war. As the midterm elections approach, there is a radicalization of conservative and reactionary forces on campuses.
At the forefront of this battle is the conservative group Turning Point, co-founded by 29-year-old polemicist Charlie Kirk, president of Students for Trump, often a guest on Fox News to defend conspiracy theories about vaccines or the last election ” stolen”.
We are not talking about a small, obscure group made up of a handful of reactionary young Americans, but rather the largest and richest student organization in the United States, which is radicalizing the next generation of Republican leaders. An organization that claims to be for “freedom” on campuses and elsewhere, but which has a very strange conception of it. This includes the “freedom” to attempt to silence “radical” professors, publishing a “watch list” for “leftist propaganda” of those who dare to criticize, for example, white supremacy.
A “freedom” that has resulted in many of the professors whose names ended up on this list receiving death threats and hateful messages after, for example, speaking out in the media in the wake of the death of George Floyd. A way of telling them: be free and shut up…
On some campuses, the divide is so marked between progressive and conservative students that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to debate without fearing for one’s safety. This is the case at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where, as Léa reports, a particularly toxic climate in 2019 put an end to the long tradition of cordial electoral debates between young Democrats and Republicans. And for good reason: what’s the point of debating with a guy like Christian Secor, ex-political science student at UCLA, self-proclaimed fascist, who was at the head of an extreme right-wing association on campus? To do so is to contribute to the normalization of dangerous ideologies, as if all opinions were equal and deserved to be debated.
Christian Secor, a gunslinger and white supremacist, was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for his part in the Capitol Riot. On January 6, 2021, he burst in with hundreds of rioters carrying the flag of the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic extremist movement America First, of which he had established a branch on the UCLA campus.
Far from being anecdotal, this case is rather emblematic of a growing cleavage on American campuses where the cursor of what would constitute a socially acceptable idea is constantly pushed a little further, a little lower, exactly as within the Republican Party. The result, as UCLA professor David Myers rightly points out, is to blur the line between the mainstream and the extreme.
Reading Léa’s report, I thought back to the very enlightening essay panic at the university (Lux, 2022) by Francis Dupuis-Déri. The book debunks several received ideas about this famous current woke American campuses which, if rumors are to be believed, would threaten our universities now besieged by feminists and anti-racists.
By taking an interest in the ancient and recent history of the university, the professor of political science at UQAM puts things into perspective and denounces the moral panic created around these issues. No, rest assured, there is no more totalitarian tyranny in the universities than there is an ogre under your bed, he pleads, with extensive research in support.
What seems paradoxical, to say the least, is that while a handful of scandals are being blown up woke on American campuses, the otherwise terrifying rise of increasingly radicalized conservative forces on those same campuses is generally glossed over.
In Quebec, the situation is certainly less intense, notes Francis Dupuis-Déri. “Our polarization of the political field is not yet as strong as in France and the United States. »
If we find students who are followers of far-right ideas and that online networks are easily deployed in a few clicks, we are not talking about organized student associations as we find on American campuses.
For those who have academic freedom and freedom in general at heart, the situation is no less worrying. Although we do not have the equivalent in Quebec of an organization like Turning Point which publishes lists of “leftist” professors to “watch”, there have been several cases of progressive and feminist academics having received threats of dead.
In some particularly alarming cases, there have been criminal prosecutions leading to convictions. Last summer, an anti-feminist blogger who revered the author of the Polytechnique bombing was found guilty of fomenting hatred against women. On his blog, he launched calls to kill feminists and burn down universities, he gave tips on how to carry out a massacre in a school, he attacked professors in feminist studies at UQAM, including Francis Dupuis- Déri himself, sowing fear in the university1.
For some reason, this appalling affair did not generate the same stir as the N-word controversy at the University of Ottawa. No shirts torn by polemicists. No call from the Prime Minister to defend freedom of expression, our values of equality or the importance of the feminist heritage in Quebec. Find the mistake.