Women’s March becomes a goose step

Something had happened.

The Women’s March has openly embraced anti-Semitism. In the face of legitimate criticism, march leaders continually circled their wagons, calling their foes racist or Islamophobic, hid behind “progressive” intersectional rhetoric about marginalized voices, and assailed former allies when they felt attacked.

The march itself became about everything and was therefore about nothing. It expanded from its original anti-Trump motivations to encompass a laundry list of sweeping and unrelated lefty causes, including general policy stances such as enacting universal healthcare and an Equal Rights Amendment, “environmental justice,” and “ending war.”

The sharp downward trajectory of the Women’s March shows how easily such movements are corrupted. Lacking any animating values beyond “resisting” and any shared principle other than being against Trump, the march was prey to grifters, bigots, and fringe radicals. Almost from the start, the organization was co-opted by a cadre of professional activists who elevated themselves above others and co-opted the march to their ends.

In an investigative essay in Tablet magazine last December, Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel exposed in detail how the march’s original organizers were pushed aside. The idea for the march grew out of a private event page on Facebook handled by several social media acquaintances around the country, but it was quickly and deliberately transformed into a vehicle that promoted Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour “as the public face of what was, in reality, an otherwise amorphous movement.”

As would come to be widely known, three of these women — Mallory, Perez, and Sarsour — “bizarrely professed their admiration for the openly anti-Semitic, homophobic, and misogynistic Nation of Islam preacher Louis Farrakhan.”

These ideas were present from the march’s earliest hours. At a rooftop planning meeting in November 2016, “Perez and Mallory allegedly first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people,” Tablet reported. Evvie Harmon, one of the founders of the March, recounted to Tablet another instance where Mallory and Perez publicly berated another founder, Vanessa Wruble, for being Jewish. By March 2017, neither Harmon nor Wruble were on the Women’s March board, ousted by the new leadership and their white-shoe law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.

On Dec. 23, the New York Times published an article detailing numerous accusations of anti-Semitism against Women’s March leaders and their association with Farrakhan, bringing the long-simmering issue to a head.

One day before the January 2019 march, former head of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Fla., explained in a column in USA Today why she would not be on the official Women’s March. “Instead,” she wrote, “this weekend, I will join a movement of women around the nation who are participating in local marches that have distanced themselves from those national Women’s March leaders who still ally with bigotry.”

Wasserman Schultz was praised for the move, including in conservative quarters, but it’s worth asking why it took so long for Democrats and the Left to take notice of the Women’s March’s anti-Semitism. The bigotry of Mallory and Sarsour, in particular, had long been open and clear.

Last February, Mallory attended a Savior’s Day speech by Farrakhan. In it, Farrakhan, who acknowledged Mallory from the stage, called Jews “satanic,” railed against them as “the mother and father of apartheid,” and repeated the trope that Jews control the media and Hollywood. He added a charge both anti-Semitic and anti-transgender: “Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men.”

It wasn’t the first time Mallory had attended a Farrakhan speech or praised him. In 2016, she excitedly tweeted: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan just stepped to the mic for #SD16DET … I’m super ready.” In May of 2017, she wished Farrakhan a happy birthday on her Instagram and called him the “GOAT,” Greatest of All Time.

For her part, Sarsour had been openly complimentary to the Nation of Islam on Twitter as far back in 2012. She spoke at a Farrakhan rally in 2015. In an interview with the Nation in March 2017, she argued that no one could be Zionist and feminist at the same time. Zionism is a call for re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel.

The idea that one can’t believe that Israel should exist while also believing in the self-determination of women should have been startling to her followers. That it wasn’t says a lot about how much the Left will accept in the name of opposing Trump.

Instead, those whom Farrakhan would call “powerful Jews” repeatedly rushed to Sarsour’s defense. In May 2017, when there was controversy over her delivering a commencement speech at the City University of New York School of Public Health, a list of prominent Jews signed a letter defending her. It suggested that “an attack on Linda is an attack on us all.”

Finding useful idiots to give we’re-on-the-same-side cover to Women’s March leaders was one of several tried-and-true tactics to brush aside criticism. More often, march leaders would simply retreat to accusing critics of Islamophobia or racism. Many early questions about Sarsour were dismissed by her with accusations of Islamophobia.

In July, 2017, for example, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked why the official March Twitter account celebrated the birthday of cop-killer fugitive Assata Shakur. Sarsour shot back that he “joins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.” No explanations, just attacks.

Appearing on “The View” a few days before this January’s march, Mallory was asked why she had called Farrakhan the “greatest of all time.” She responded, “I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric. I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities.” Host Meghan McCain pushed back: “I would never be comfortable supporting someone who [said] … ‘I’m not anti-Semite, I’m anti-termite. It’s the wicked Jews, the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality,’” said McCain, quoting Farrakhan. When asked by McCain to condemn Farrakhan explicitly, Mallory refused.

A few days later, Mallory appeared on “Roland Martin Unfiltered” and attributed McCain’s questioning to racism. “But the nerve of people to believe that because she did all that, that I was supposed to just answer her as she said, so, so, ‘Massa, you get to tell me how to respond?’ That’s not going to happen,” Mallory said. “If people can’t understand the implications of a white woman yelling at me and trying to badger me into saying what she says — even if I wanted to say it, I wouldn’t have said it [in] the way in which she was speaking to me.”

Examples abound. In a damning exchange with Margaret Hoover on “Firing Line,” Mallory was asked if Israel had a right to exist. After evading with “everyone has a right to exist,” she added that she is “not Jewish” and so can’t comment. When Hoover pushed back that Mallory wasn’t Palestinian either, Mallory snapped and said she didn’t want to discuss it anymore. Later, Mallory repeats several times that people with white skin, specifically including white Jews, “benefit from white privilege and white privilege is, in fact, a part of white supremacy.” This interview took place less than six months after a white supremacist murdered 11 people at the Tree Of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Angry posturing is not confined to Mallory and Sarsour but is characteristic of march leaders. They don’t feel they owe any explanations for why they fawn over an anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT racist like Louis Farrakhan. They pretend to be insulted that anyone should ask them to explain themselves.

In an interview last month with Resistance Dashboard, Bob Bland took the same stance, saying racism leads to criticism of the march’s leadership. She said that she is never asked to condemn her own white racist father, yet Mallory is asked to condemn Farrakhan. It’s unclear if Bland’s father calls Jews termites and makes similarly vile comments about gay people. In any case, Farrakhan is not Mallory’s father. Bland added that the movement was always going to be difficult and that “if you’re feeling pain, good.”

In a piece on New York’s The Cut website about why it’s important to stay aligned with the Women’s March and their insidious leadership, Rebecca Traister made the point that “the Trump-era ‘resistance’ movement is often communicated in shorthand via images of the Women’s Marches; it may indeed have been catalyzed by those events.”

This idea, that opposing Trump is more important than anything else, is frequently pushed by the march’s defenders. Yes, Mallory celebrates Farrakhan; Carmen Perez describes another anti-Semite, Harry Belafonte, as her mentor; Sarsour doesn’t believe anyone who supports the existence of Israel can be a feminist; Bland said it was good that Jewish women were feeling pain. But Trump!

Ironically, the march is no longer just about Trump. I wrote about the march in November for the New York Post. It was shortly after the Tree of Life shooting and discussions about anti-Semitism, its causes and manifestations, were suddenly everywhere. More than half of my social circle had marched in 2017 and 2018. I wanted them to think hard about the company they were keeping. And I wanted them to do it in advance because I didn’t want them to wake up on Jan. 19 and march with these women simply because they hadn’t made an alternate plan.

What I heard again and again from women torn about marching is that they needed to oppose Trump and saw the march as the only way. But march leaders had almost entirely stopped talking about Trump. They mostly stuck to soft answers to softball questions about how the marches had affected them personally. In an Elle interview in January 2018, Mallory spoke about her disappointment in black men who didn’t take her side in an argument with a white man on an airplane.

The women focus on vague goals of “dismantling power structures.” In another Elle interview last month, Mallory complained that “people are obsessed with my relationship with Minister Farrakhan,” but none of the women mention Trump even once. The women who marched the first time had a specific goal in mind: to protest the new presidency. What’s the goal now?

The leadership has waded into just about every progressive issue, whether it is related to women or not. They oppose the wall Trump wants to build on the border with Mexico, calling it “a monument to white supremacy.” In July, Sarsour wrote a piece for Newsweek calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Intersectionality, the leftist buzzy theory that all systems of discrimination are connected, is now the name of the game. “This isn’t about one person; it’s about a system. And [Trump] is just a symptom of that system,” Sophia Andary, co-chairwoman of Women’s March San Francisco told the San Francisco Chronicle in January. Is that what all those women marching in pink hats in 2017 signed up for?

No, was the answer we learned this year. Whether over the bigotry of march leaders or the expansion of the march’s message, numerous state and local chapters splintered off or severed ties with the national organization, including Houston, Washington, D.C., Florida, Portland, Chicago, Canada, and Women’s March GLOBAL. Others had different reasons. A Women’s March group in California canceled its rally over concerns that participants would be “overwhelmingly white.”

Following Mallory’s appearance on “The View,” the Democratic National Committee and other groups withdrew their sponsorship of the march. But plenty of Democratic politicians continued to back the march.

Campaigning in Iowa, 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., spoke at a women’s march in Des Moines unaffiliated with the official national organization.

While she said “there is no room for anti-Semitism in our movement,” Gillibrand, who previously praised Mallory, Sarsour, Perez, and Bland in Time magazine’s 2017 list of the “100 Most Influential People,” mentioned no names and also called the 2017 Women’s March “the most inspiring moment of my political life.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, D-N.Y., and his wife, Chirlane, attended the march affiliated with Sarsour and Mallory. He called it “the single greatest protest in the history of the United States,” and, despite representing a city with over a million Jews, offered no comment on the organization’s anti-Semitism.

As Elliot Kaufman noted in the Wall Street Journal following last month’s march, “The remaining supporters of the Women’s March, including the Democratic Party until last week, keep telling themselves they can compartmentalize the anti-Semitism and join, praise or even fund the march despite it. The implication is that it’s OK to be anti-Semitic as long you’re for the left. That was the message of this year’s Women’s March.”

A few days before this year’s march, Sarsour posted to Facebook an appearance of herself on CNN with the caption: “I have done many interviews in my lifetime but my clapback on Debbie The Election Rigger is everything.” The list of enemies of the March is growing and Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now on it. Sarsour ripped into Wasserman Schultz, saying no one was waiting for her opinion but then added that the focus should stay on the Trump administration, “the focus shouldn’t be about any one controversy.”

In her speech from the stage this year, Sarsour blamed the media for the Women’s March’s troubles. “If you’re not careful,” she warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” She added another shot at critical coverage, saying, “the media can talk about whatever controversy they want, but the real controversy is in the White House.”

For all the women who marched despite the anti-Semitism because they wanted to oppose Trump, Sarsour still made it a point to mention boycotting, divestment, and sanction of Israel, the BDS movement, from the stage. For someone who wanted to keep the focus on the administration and not on “any one controversy,” this was a perplexing way to do that. It shows what she is really made of.

The march, for so many marchers, was always about opposing Trump. But for the march leadership, it’s about something else entirely.

Karol Markowicz is a writer in New York City.