Activists have been gaslit into believing that protecting labor rights is racist and defending women’s spaces is bigotry
What do Greta Thunberg, Simone Biles, and the American anti-ICE protesters have in common, besides a flair for theatrics and a knack for setting fire (sometimes literally) to the causes they claim to champion?
The latest chaos gripping California like a leftist would a reusable tote bag containing oat milk and guilt, started at Home Depot in California. Immigration authorities raided one of the chain’s parking lots in Los Angeles, which quickly escalated from “can I help you find a hammer?” to full-blown urban dystopia. The next thing you know, someone’s standing on a flaming car waving a Mexican flag like they just unlocked a Grand Theft Auto achievement. But let’s rewind.
Why Home Depot? Because, according to the Wall Street Journal, the White House instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target undocumented workers hanging out in those parking lots. Think of them as the gig economy’s open-air waiting room, just like the food delivery platform guys perched outside McDonald’s, only with more drywall experience. They’re trying to land quick jobs from people who’d rather pay under the table than decode a Swedish or Chinese manual to assemble one.
And just like that, the entire progressive apparatus decided this was the next hill to die on. “These are hardworking members of our community!” they cried. “They do the jobs Americans won’t do!”
Hold up. When did defending a labor underclass become progressive chic? Didn’t the left used to rage against this kind of exploitation? Corporate America must be thrilled that the revolution now comes with a free supply of cheap, compliant labor and a hashtag campaign to promote the idea that if you’re against it, then you’re a fascist.
So congrats, leftists. You’ve handed the working class over to the pro-Trump populists like a party favor.
Want to actually help undocumented foreigners in America? Try opposing the foreign policy dumpster fire that helped displace them: sanctions, economic sabotage, CIA meddling, and those “extraterritorial legal tools” that make doing any business with them back home feel like pulling the arm on a Vegas slot machine.
Your activist forebears knew this. Cesar Chavez didn’t just fast for farmworkers; he opposed the Vietnam War, because he understood exploitation doesn’t stop at the border. Tom Hayden fought for unions and against war. Dorothy Day started the Catholic Worker Movement and still managed to call out empire.
Today’s left, meanwhile, is acting like unpaid NATO interns on social media, slapping flags on their bios and cheering military adventures in the name of “human rights.” In 1999, if you protested globalism, you were a leftist. Today, you’re more likely to get tackled by Antifa.
Nowhere is this ideological faceplant more obvious than in modern feminism. Take the recent online cage match between Olympic legend Simone Biles and former swimmer turned women’s sports defender Riley Gaines.
It kicked off when a Minnesota girls’ softball team won a championship with a male pitcher. Gaines tweeted, “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”
Biles vaulted into the culture war and landed face first: “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!!” Then she added, “Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.”
And just like that, one of the most decorated female athletes on Earth decided that women’s sports are too exclusionary. Simone Biles, icon of women’s physicality, now dunking on other women to make room for men in their lanes. How very empowering. Simone Biles somersaulted right over feminism and landed in patriarchy’s lap.
Second-wave feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, who once dedicated a chapter to female physical strength in Moving Beyond Words, lamented how she “spurned sports” and felt “angry for and at myself” for denying her own physical potential.
Now imagine what Steinem might have said if her shot at athletic expression had been stomped out by a guy in a ponytail and jock strap lapping her on the track.
No one’s saying trans-identified males can’t enjoy sports. But sacrificing women’s opportunities so Chad can pitch for the varsity women’s team on a full scholarship isn’t exactly progress. Even Biles once joked, back in 2017, “ahhhh good thing guys don’t compete against girls or he’d take all the gold medals !!”
Well, now they do. And Biles is cheering them on. What a win for feminism. Look, this isn’t complicated. It’s not feminism if you need a prostate to qualify. Seems that the most fragile thing about a women’s sports record these days is the ego of a man in a wig trying to beat it.
How long before uterus-free “women” decide abortion’s not a women’s issue? Or take women’s seats in government or society? Or tell insurance companies to deny coverage for ovarian cysts because they don’t personally have them? The slippery slope here is basically a gender neutral waterslide.
Meanwhile, guess who just got deported from Israel? Greta Thunberg, the climate’s poster child. “We were 12 peaceful volunteers sailing on a civilian ship carrying humanitarian aid on international waters. We did not break laws. We did nothing wrong,” she said after landing in Paris.
Turns out climate change, which tragically supplanted tangible environmental problems like water and air quality, isn’t the media darling that it once was. Maybe because people are too busy surviving economic policies crafted by the same technocrats Greta once marched beside. Maybe she’s realized that saving the planet from carbon means even less when the people on it are starving and getting bombed.
So now Greta’s gone from scolding world leaders at Davos to helping to ferry aid under siege. You know things are off the rails when she’s one of the only ones on the left with the logical sense to ditch a nonsense globalist cause for a real one. Too bad she couldn’t just ride around on Greenpeace ships and actually do useful things for the environment like document actual environmental crimes. Those causes have now been upstaged by hot air.
Which brings us to the bigger picture of those real causes. Labor, feminism, and the environment have been hijacked, gutted, and replaced with mindless vibes, slogans, and slacktivist online moralizing. No wonder so many average voters with these leftist sensibilities feel politically orphaned, or have gravitated to the anti-establishment and anti-globalist Trump camp.
Ask yourself how we got here. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, steady march, backed by the very establishment that now pretends to loathe itself. That is, until Trump wandered in and tipped over the whole display.
Instead of fighting for their own interests, people are applauding their own decline, gaslit into believing that protecting labor rights is racist, defending women’s spaces is bigotry, and questioning foreign military interventions makes you a fascist.
The activism that used to scare the establishment has long since become it. The real revolution won’t be televised — it will probably just be shadowbanned.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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