Tag: Identitarian movement

For participatory republican democracy to work, the president added, pluralism was a non-negotiable prerequisite. South Africa’s complicated history, persistent racial disparities, and the associated violence render the problem Obama was addressing an urgent one, and it is not directly applicable to civic life in the United States. And yet, stripped of its regional context, you could be forgiven for thinking that Obama was taking a swipe at his compatriots. Washington State’s Evergreen State College exploded last year when biology professor Bret Weinstein objected to a student-led initiative called the “day of absence,” in which white students were asked to voluntarily leave campus. Weinstein called it a form of racial segregation. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni observed, people like Mark Lilla, a Democrat and opponent of identity politics, come under attack from progressive activists who take issue, not with their ideas, but with their race and gender. “White men: stop telling me about my experiences!” read the graffiti that Bruni recalled seeing deface an advertisement for a campus talk Lilla was prepared to deliver in 2017. It only seems to become difficult for liberals to find evidence of the left’s efforts to silence those with perceived majoritarian traits when they are called to account for this separatism. When the president only called on women at a 2014 press conference, his White House made sure to call around to reporters after the fact to make sure they noticed. Divisive identity politics is now how both political parties approach the electorate.

A Conservative council candidate in Watford, Darren Harrison, has been suspended after it was alleged that he was a supporter of the pan-European white supremacist organisation Generation Identity and associated with the English Defence League’s former leader Tommy Robinson. An investigation is under way.” Harrison was contesting a ward in a Tory-Liberal Democrat marginal. He had campaigned with James Cleverly, a Tory party vice-chairman, and featured on local party social media. His links with Generation Identity, an anti-Islam organisation with strong links to far-right groups across Europe, were alleged in an investigation by Vice News. Sellner was stopped at Stansted airport at the weekend when he planned to address the movement’s first conference in Sevenoaks, Kent. The event broke up early and some attendees were confronted by anti-fascist campaigners. Scuffles broke out and one protester was arrested. The suspension of Harrison comes at the end of a difficult week for the government. It has been dominated by its disastrous handling of the long-settled Windrush generation and the way the Home Office’s hostile environment has operated. In the London mayoral elections in 2016, the Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith’s campaign against Sadiq Khan was widely condemned for its anti-Muslim overtones.