a luxury we could no longer afford.”
What started out as a book about Hillary Clin-
ton and feminism morphed into a meditation on
the phenomenon. In a series of tart, funny chap-
ters, she takes on pussy hats as needlessly offensive
and alienating to potentially pro-female men and
women, goes after the “weaponized victimhood”
of the #MeToo movement, and suggests that the
Trump administration’s abuses at the Mexico bor-
der are horrible but not equivalent to the Holocaust.
Yes, she is controversial.
Daum devotes much of the book to
critiquing the latest wave of feminism
and her own relationship to the millen-
nial and 20-somethings of the #MeToo
movement. She regrets intersectional
feminism, a mainstreamed, once aca-
demic theory that makes a kind of
victimhood power hierarchy based on layers of
marginalized status including being gay, female or
a racial or ethnic minority. She rejects college rape
statistics and suggests that manipulative and even
lying young women do exist—and that some college
men get a raw deal in campus “kangaroo courts.” She
recounts the ugly food fight between younger and
older women over an anonymous sexual miscon-
duct allegation against comedian Aziz Ansari that
older women regarded as a mere bad date.believe it or not: some academics and
writers, who wouldn’t be caught dead in Don-
ald Trump’s MAGA hats, have started complaining
about language policing and other forms of intel-
lectual bullying on the left. So says Meghan Daum
in her new book, The Problem With Everything: My
Journey Through the New Culture Wars, which will
be published this month by Gallery Books.
Daum, 49, an author, journalist and sometimes
teacher at Columbia University, has a deep distrust of
dogma. Since 2016, she writes, she has distracted her-
self from her personal woes—divorce,
the upheavals of middle age—by click-
ing onto social media. That’s where she
witnessed angry lefties swarm individ-
uals who expressed opinions that devi-
ated from a rigid set of rules related to
how we talk about race and gender.
She watched with growing fascination as the
Trump election, a profound challenge to progres-
sive ideals, did not bring the opposition together,
but splintered it, with the movement eating its
own. “Almost immediately, the resistance became
not just a front line against Trumpism but its own
scorching battleground,” she writes. “There was no
amount of outrage that couldn’t be outdone, no
wokeness woke enough. Apparently any admission
of complexity was a threat to the cause. Nuance wasBYNINA BURLEIGH
@ninaburleighSTRANDED IN THE 1890S
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NEWSWEEK.COM 45
Taking on
Political
Correctness 101
In her new book, journalistteacherʀamethrower Meghan 'aum
declares war on the thought police