Meet the Gay Muslim Man Running the Women’s March

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Ahead of Election Day, women wearing red Handmaid’s Tale costumes, rainbow scarves, and toting warning signs about their private parts rallied in D.C. for Kamala and abortion.

The crowd was so small that the media hardly bothered reporting on the rallies.

The Women’s March had come a long way since it claimed to have brought out millions to protest Trump in 2017. And the long way it had come was mostly down. In an early preview of the antisemitism controversies in today’s leftist movements, the March fell apart when its leaders were revealed to be bigots who hated Jews and supported the Nation of Islam

But with Trump back, the Women’s March is back too. And the pre-election rallies are supposed to usher in much bigger post-election and post-inauguration rallies using the “power of diverse women” as part of “a women-led movement” to beat men and take back power for women.

There’s one problem with the Women’s March: its chief of staff is a man.

Aquib Shaheed Yacoob, the chief of staff of the Women’s March, is a gay Muslim man who cut his teeth on early BLM activism in Ferguson through Amnesty International. Then he became the chief of staff to Tamika Mallory, one of the three March leaders, just as controversy broke out over her support for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan who had praised Hitler

After Mallory’s departure, Yaqoob climbed through the ranks until the Muslim man became the chief of staff for a leading feminist organization which describes itself as “women-led.”

Has the Women’s March redefined the definition of a woman? Or has Aquib Yacoob?

Yacoob does use the trendy ‘He/Him/They’ pronouns implying that some vague undefined part of him has transcended the gender binary, but that falls far short of even identifying, let alone being, a woman. The Women’s March failed to respond to a request for comment on how they define women or “women-led movement”, or whether Yacoob will identify as one by next week.

The presence of a gay Muslim man in the top ranks of a “women-led movement” reflects the larger reality that most leftist organizations are interchangeable pieces of the same movement with the exact same politics who use different brands to appeal to different demographics.

Yacoob became the chief of staff at the Women’s March and a managing partner at the AdAstra Management Collective, a leftist movement consultancy which had worked with the Women’s March, with Amnesty International, where he had previously worked, and the Ford Foundation, which funds the Women’s March, Amnesty International and other AdAstra clients.

AdAstra was founded by Rachel O’Leary Carmona who is the executive director of the Women’s March and a former director of Amnesty International. AdAstra includes multiple people who are also associated with the Women’s March including Yacoob, Noor Mir, a Pakistani activist with Amnesty International and senior advisor to the Women’s March, Tabitha St. Bernard, a founder of the Women’s March, and Shawna Knipper, who is a secretary of the Women’s March.

What does it mean that Amnesty International, a British organization set up in 1961 based on a hoax, and the Women’s March, a trendy modern American group, overlap in this way? The same thing as the revelation that Axe, Dove, Ben & Jerry’s and Breyers are different brands of the same British multinational. Behind the familiar ice cream, soap and cause names are a handful of organizations making up one larger movement staffed by many of the same people.

The Women’s March appears to be AdAstra. And AdAstra names the Ford Foundation as a client, but the infamous radical foundation also funds AdAstra. A number of AdAstra’s people have their own consultancies including Yacoob whose group is named BrownManRunning.

And that is why a gay Muslim man is the chief of staff of a “woman-led movement”.

The Women’s March is just a recruitment arm for the larger leftist machine. The Left doesn’t actually care whether the Women’s March is run by women, men or some random combination of pronouns, only whether it recruits warm bodies for the “resistance” against Trump.

But “resistance” like “woman-led” is another empty brand for the larger movement. Behind the “resistance” is a massive foundation with total assets of $20 billion. Behind the “resistance” are private consultancies that actually place and run the front groups that the media covers.

The “resistance” is the establishment which has a highly developed corporate system for finding teams to run the front groups that manufacture the facade of a populist leftist movement

Are Aquib S. Yacoob and AdAstra doing a good job with their part of the “resistance”?

After Trump’s victory, the Women’s March tried to start a dance party outside the Heritage Foundation. The New York Times was obligated to report that “while a band and a D.J. played upbeat songs at top volume, the crowd did not do much more than sway to the beat.” The New York Times did not report anything about who was actually behind the Women’s March.

The forces behind the Women’s March would like to launch another fake resistance dancing to its tune. They are so convinced that no one is paying attention to the man behind the curtain that their “women-led” movement has a literal man behind the curtain as the chief of staff.

The “resistance” is composed of fake populist front groups like the Women’s March or Black Lives Matter that claim to speak for tens of millions, promise to turn out millions, but are actually controlled by small groups of political consultants who deliberately cultivate a radical image.

Their mission is to recruit, rally and riot, to create chaos, tear apart the country and prevent the government from functioning. The media covers them as if they were actual organic popular movements rather than wholly manufactured front groups which did not arise spontaneously in response to an event, but were the work of operatives funded by foundations who were calculating how to best recruit gullible college students to bring the Left back to power.

Activism is not an outraged response to oppression, but a career funded by some of the wealthiest special interests in this country. The causes are products not passions and the activists are professionals whose job is to sell the product. The product changes all the time.

One day they’re for human rights, the next day they’re for Hamas. One week they’re fighting for the environment, another week they’re fighting for illegal aliens. One month it’s abortion and another it’s anti-war or pro-crime because the activists are as interchangeable as their causes.

And if you doubt that, ask the gay Muslim man running the “women-led” Women’s March. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.