“I’m a leftist. I believe in the redistribution of wealth and power. I believe in universal health care for all. I believe that it’s obscene to have a single homeless person in the rich countries of the world. I believe in freedom.”
So says the yippie/cowboy lead character(s) in my short story: “Cowboy & Tribe“. The lines between fiction and author often blur. Not only his sentiments; they’re also mine. Equal rights for all. Free speech. Anti-censorship. A free and honest press. Pro-LGBT rights. Pro-animal rights. Pro-first and second wave feminism. Pro-secularism. Pro-choice. Anti-capitalism. Pro-socialism. Anti-totalitarianism. Pro-science and education and rational fact-based Socratic thought. Anti-authority. Fighting for the underdog. Standing up for what you believe in. Liberal, leftist ideals. Not much to ask for, is it?
But like old coke and new coke, the term leftist no longer means the same thing. If leftists of today can be compared to modern corn-syrup infused Coca-Cola, sweet, saccharine, lacking substance (and they can), I identify as old coke. Not classic coke of the pre-90s, further… back to the cocaine fuelled formula created by Confederate Colonel John Pemberton and sold at drugstore soda fountains across the states of late 19th century America.
To stretch the somewhat stretched metaphor to its close, I feel a little like those consumers of the 1880s would feel today upon swigging back a plastic bottle of the modern anaemic brown liquid—like something I believed in was co-opted, castrated, corporatized, turned into something unrecognizable from the original intention—and taken from me.
Every time I read a news story where someone proclaims themselves to be a leftist, my first response is: no, you’re not. When they in turn label someone else as far-right, my response is: no, they’re probably not.
If the intention of humanity is to lay waste to the planet, then no more efficient system could be devised than neo-liberalist capitalism, and equally, if humans desire to perpetuate illiberal values, inequality, ignorance, science-denial, discrimination, and right-wing dominance, no better tool could be devised than political correctness.
Humans And Their Bad Ideas Have Messed Up The World
A casualty of violent divisions and self-inflicted wounds, humanity stands at a crossroads. We’re destroying everything. We’re killing everything.
Covid-19 caused by zoonotic spillover because of the Chinese abusing and eating wild animals rips across the globe. Climate change deniers sit in positions of power, twiddling thumbs, as polar icecaps melt, fires ravage, and the temperature warms. Out of an estimated eight million species on Earth, one million are threatened with extinction. 40% of the world’s plant species are in danger of extinction. 1% of the population control 50% of the world’s resources. Capitalism, build upon the inherent error that continual growth—resource depletion—is possible, staggers from financial crisis to crisis. Corporations and tech companies vomit products and services which make our lives incomparably worse—Airbnb and its ilk result in skyrocketing rent for local citizens, and the impossibility of home ownership for the young—while deliberately addictive social media makes us less social, less informed and more isolated from fellow peoples of the world. Suicide rates rise; homelessness, alcoholism, and drug use proliferate.
What is the biggest problem with the world? Is it climate change? The far-right? The far-left? Racism? War? Or are these merely symptoms of a bigger problem that we cannot face? And even if we could, what could be done about it?
The paralysis human kind faces in addressing real issues can be laid squarely at polarity of political and social views, with both sides moving further away from facts and reality into shades of extremism. On the right we have rich, religious, climate deniers, and on the left rich, science denying elitists obsessed with political correctness. Neither make credible sense, or offer solutions to the problems humanity faces.
Definitions
Modern leftism is frequently termed the loony left. It is woke cancel culture. It is political correctness. It is infected with these poisonous concepts so badly that it’s difficult to separate. For clarity I will use the term “regressive-left” to refer to all the above, a phrase coined by Maajid Nawaz. Leftist without qualifier will refer to the classic liberal left of which I argue for resurgence.
...if humans desire to perpetuate illiberal values, inequality, ignorance, science-denial, discrimination, and right-wing dominance, no better tool could be devised than political correctness.
Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred. – Jacques Barzun
80% of Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem..."
No Matter Age Or Skin Color, the Vast Majority Hate PC Culture
Polls and surveys unanimously demonstrate people have had a gutsful of PC culture.
According to a 2018 report, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” 80% of Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.”
Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74% aged 24 to 29, and 79% under age 24. Youth is no good indicator of support for political correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either.
When you break the figure down by ethnic groups, Caucasians are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem: 79% of them share this sentiment. Instead, it’s Asians (82%), Hispanics (87%), and American Indians (88%) most likely to oppose political correctness. 75% of African Americans oppose political correctness.
If age and race cannot predict for political correctness, then what?
Income.
83% of respondents who make under $50,000 disapprove of political correctness, while only 70% of those who make more than $100,000 disapprove.
And education.
87% without a college education think political correctness is problematic, but 66% of those with a postgraduate degree do.
Political correctness is supported and driven by a small minority of rich white university educated individuals.
The regressive-left is in essence, a fringe group, but one that has been very successful in getting ideas widely disseminated; ideas most of the population strongly disagree with. The vast majority in the Western world are having an ideology forced on them which they don’t believe in or want—by wildly out of touch, politically powerful, educated, rich people—the kinds of people who are in charge of schools, universities, news media, corporates, and political organizations. There’s a word for this.
Brainwashing.
A working class hero is something to be
New Zealand And The Lie Of Neo-liberalist Economics
My uncle Sid was a communist. Born in the UK, his childhood and teens were spent in the depression-era 1930s New Zealand. Perhaps this, or fighting in WW2 as a young man formed his political beliefs. A lasting regret is I didn’t talk to him about his past more deeply, but I suspect he would have been reluctant to share too much nitty-gritty. (Knowing his views, I used to tease him as a teenager, by pretending to be really into Neo-liberalism, and god). During the fifties and beyond, he devoted his life to workers and the trade union movement. A complex individual, he moved well amid national and small town politics, and despised rich elitists. Many leftists of this era, who risked their lives fighting fascism abroad, and class-war back home, must today be turning in their graves at the betrayal of the working class by the modern left.
An example of treachery by the fake left against the real left, and the one which had the greatest impact on my views was the election of the fourth Labour government in New Zealand in 1984. Voted in on a socialist agenda by the working classes, the David Lange led Labour party quickly threw their manifesto out the window and embarked on an extreme neo-liberalist economic agenda, which would benefit the rich, at the expense of the poor.
Rob Muldoon, the previous prime minister, had run the economy by a communist playbook—authoritarian central control, subsidies, tariffs, protection for local manufacturing—”a Government of the ordinary bloke”.
That was about to change.
Rogernomics—named after the finance minister and Milton Friedman disciple, Roger Douglas—had arrived. He began copy/pasting Friedman’s ideas as his own.
Newly formed for-profit public corporations began shedding jobs like fleas: Electricity Corporation 3,000; Coal Corporation 4,000; Forestry Corporation 5,000; New Zealand Post 8,000.
Between 1986 and 1993, the unemployment rate in New Zealand skyrocketed from 3.6% to 11%. Māori, disproportionately employed in state-managed industries, were hit hardest, with Māori unemployment soaring to 25% by 1992. A new Māori elite emerged with the sole aim of using the new system to line their own pockets. They successfully diverted Māori workers’ attention away from class politics into the dead-end of Māori nationalism.
Over the next two decades, New Zealand faced massive economic and social problems: the youth suicide rate grew sharply to the highest in the developed world; a proliferation of food banks ensued; violent and other crime increased; the number of New Zealanders living in poverty grew by 35% between 1989 and 1992; leading to a significant disintegration in health standards among the working and middle-class.
From 1984 to 1993 inflation increased to average 9% per year, New Zealand’s credit rating dropped twice, and foreign debt quadrupled.
Growing increasingly uneasy, David Lange finally stepped in, fired Roger Douglas in 1988 and attempted to moderate further reform. In response, his cabinet turned on him like rabid dogs and the Labour government came apart, with Lange resigning as Prime Minister in 1989, and the fourth Labour government suffering a staggering defeat in 1990.
New Zealand’s leap of faith into the neo-liberalist global economy led to a decade of economic hardship, and insignificant (often negative) economic growth with the miracle promised by Roger Douglas never materializing.
This period shaped me. It vividly forewarned what happens when you let out of touch zealots off their leash in the corridors of power; how the public can be brainwashed into voting against their own best interest. It showed flaws in democracy. The lie that democracy can exist in a two-party system. The greed of the wealthy. It displayed raw the lie of neo-liberalist capitalism flayed open to the bone. To function, capitalism needs an underclass to exploit—and that is the sole legacy of Roger Douglas.
Wearing his mistakes, David Lange would later say: “I want to thank those people whose lives were wrecked by us. They had been taught for years they had the right to an endless treadmill of prosperity and assurance, and we did them. People over sixty hate me. They hate me because I was the symbol of what caused that assurance of support and security to be shattered. That is something that has always been part of my burden.”
The left betrayed the working class; it has done so throughout politics worldwide. The left not only became an enemy of the working class—it is today an enemy of reason.
My Uncle Sid was a leftist and a communist, but he didn’t make me one. Roger Douglas and Milton Friedman did.
Marx & Me
Karl Marx argued that the capitalist bourgeoisie mercilessly exploit the working class or proletariat. The work carried out by the workers creates great wealth for a capitalist elite. The products made in the factory (the material outcome of the workers’ labour) are sold for more than the value of the labour itself, i.e. more than the workers’ wages. In this way, the capitalist who controls the process of production, makes a profit. The worker doesn’t benefit from this added value and cannot gain advantage from the fruits of their own labour.
Inequality and exploitation is built into capitalism, not as a result, but as a necessary component.
Marx predicted the continued expansion of and exploitation of the working class, would create enough resentment to cause the proletariat to revolt and lead a revolution. This final struggle would lead to the overthrow of capitalism.
This was naïve, because to achieve it, the proletariat need to see their chains and unite to break them. The bourgeoisie realize this and have been doing their damnedest to divide people ever since.
Re-reading Das Kapital, many of Marx’s ideas appear archaic. Much of his focus on industrialization and the plight of the factory worker has been made void by technology. Like capitalism, communism is also silent on the environment and erroneously relies upon unlimited resources for growth. Much better economic philosophies have emerged which take into account the needs of the modern world—particularly resource preservation—and particularly Jacque Fresco’s resource based economy. At its heart, though, the underpinning of Marxist theory, an economy with central planning, remains a much more solid idea than reliance on the whims of the free-market—itself a misnomer.
Jacque Fresco, the industrial designer who envisioned an alternative society where money would be eliminated and resources distributed equitably
Is Political Correctness The Creation Of The 1%?
The benefit of any PC-driven issue to corporate business is evident, at even the most perfunctory glance. Take labeling the promotion of health and diet as “Fat shaming.” (Weight Watchers can no longer even use the word 'weight' in its name). Who benefits? The obese men and women who are “protected” to suffer diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke, depression, falling one after another into early graves? Or the McDonalds, KFCs, and other shit food producers who market death as readily as cigarette companies—while insurance companies and the corporate giants of the medical establishment mop up the results by price gouging victims. The largest study of hospitalized U.S. COVID-19 patients, found that 77% of the nearly 17,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were overweight (29%) or obese (48%). Health doesn’t pay, while promoting obesity as body beautiful is good business.
The perception of how most of the population feel about political correctness is so widely off the mark it should probably make us rethink some of our other basic assumptions about the reasons it’s being propagated.
The obvious question is—again—who is benefiting?
A cursory glance on any day at mainstream media will find not news, but an agenda written not by true journalists, but skilled propagandists.
Fifteen billionaires own America’s news media companies, including Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post), Stanley Hubbard (ABC and NBC), and Ted Turner (CNN). The pampered rich. Jeff Bezos is worth $200 billion. The wealth of the world’s richest people climbed 27.5% to $10.2trn from April to July 2020, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS. The number of billionaires hit 2,189—a new high—up from 2,158 in 2017.
Mark Zuckerberg is worth 92.9 billion. He owns the world’s largest publishing company: Facebook, which claims to be a public forum akin to a town square, but continues to censor and ban (often moderate mainstream) views which oppose political correctness.
What’s the connection?
Divide and rule (divide et impera), is the method of maintaining power by pitching differing groups against each other to control a society—who might otherwise collectively offer resistance. If the operation is to force the division of identity politics promoted by the regressive-left on the proletariat, then political correctness is the scalpel.
Regressive-leftists, whether they believe in what they’re preaching or not, are being sold and on selling a lie. Political correctness isn’t helping the underprivileged, it’s benefiting the rich elite and distracting from the real issue:
And that is likely, its purpose.
Without economic equality for all, there can never be social or political equality for anyone.
Political Correctness Loses Elections
Political correctness has triggered a losing streak for left-leaning parties in a string of elections across the globe. USA. UK. Poland. Czech Republic. It’s led to a rise of right-leaning parties like AFD in Germany. And it will continue to do so.
In the US, Hillary Clinton essentially lost the election because she couldn’t string the words ‘Islamic’ and ‘terrorism’ together. Trump could. As a result, he got to place three justices on the supreme court, and today even a woman’s right to an abortion is at risk. An all-or-nothing gamble from the regressive-left is leading to nothing.
After Thatcher and Blair et al., the UK was long overdue the socialist overhaul promised by Jeremy Corbyn—a policy platform which included the nationalization of vital infrastructure including power generation (sold off to money-making corporations in the 1980s). The result would have been cheaper essential services, and in time, perhaps, a better, more equal society. But poisoned by political correctness, which included Corbyn ally Naz Shah telling Rotherham victims sexually abused by Muslim grooming gangs to shut up “for the good of diversity,” Corbyn’s party became, rightfully so, unvoteable. Even bumbling idiots with right-to-no policy platform like BoJo have become preferable to the working classes than a vote for a party tainted by political correctness.
This unpalatable loony left agenda has become a roadblock to necessary socialist economic reform, and worse, action on climate change and nature preservation. Electing right-leaning governments has meant action on climate change has been set back years. Years we don’t have.
Worse, regressive-leftists do not learn that they stand for all the things the left should be against, for all the things voters are against. They don’t learn and keep losing. The left is not only losing elections, it’s losing the culture war, and as an unfortunate side effect, the planet and the people they purport to represent suffer.
Wildlife populations have fallen by over two-thirds in less than fifty years, according to a report by the WWF, and this catastrophic decline displays no sign of slowing.
“We are wrecking our world—the one place we call home—risking our health, security and survival here on Earth,” says Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF. “Nature is sending us a desperate SOS and time is running out.”
Right-leaning parties simply don’t care about the environmental catastrophes capitalism has unleased, and left-leaning ones, even if by some miracle they are elected, focus attention on fringe issues, incidental to the life of the planet.
Democrat candidate Elizabeth Warren said that she would only appoint a Secretary of Education that a 9-year-old trans youth would interview and approve of. “I’m going to have a Secretary of Education that this young trans person interviews on my behalf, and only if this person believes that our Secretary or Secretary of Education nominee is absolutely committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone will that person actually be advanced to be Secretary of Education,” Warren said, equaling the craziness of right-wing groups like QAnon.
The regressive-left is blindly focused on issues where the battles have largely been won, at the expense of the big picture and political correctness at the expense of reason is alienating liberal, middle-of-the road people. It’s a losing formula with voters. It’s why Trump and his ilk stand an excellent chance of continually winning.
It seems all a politician needs to do to win is to stand up from the herd and proclaim: “Fuck political correctness.”
This is exactly what left-leaning parties need to do.
Continues below...
The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of 'spillover' or 'trickle' – without using the name – as the only solution to societal problems.
Traits Regressive-leftists Share With Fascism
Fascism is on the rise, but it’s predominantly occurring on the left, echoing the witch trials of the middle ages, the French revolution inquisition and communist show trials… repeating history… but not only that… becoming the very evil that true leftists should despise. While regressive-leftists’ sole argument with anyone who disagrees with them defaults to shouting “Nazi”, the regressive-left flirt with the thuggish fascism that is ANTIFA. CNN and BBC label these black-clad thugs reminiscent of the brown shirts as the good guys because they say they’re left-wing, but aren’t. Proponents of cancel culture act in the same way as the NKVD or SS, ruthlessly silencing free speech by threatening opponents’ livelihoods and lives. Like the followers of Hitler and Lenin, swallowers of regressive-leftism have not questioned what they’re being force fed or turning into. No critical analysis of what exactly this ideology they’re blindly following is or where it’s headed.
Witness American travel YouTuber Peter Santenello’s treatment by Black Lives Matter protestors in Vermont when he dares to stride naively into a conversation about BLM. Questions result in being called a “Nazi skinhead” (presumably because he shaves his head, as do most sensible men dealing with hair loss), stalked and intimidated by a thug. Contrast this with ‘dangerous/oppressive’ countries like Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia where Santenello was welcomed on his travels by people free to talk and happy to share their beliefs and cultures. Many he spoke to in Vermont were unwilling to voice their thoughts on camera, meaning that in America, the land of the free, everyday people are in fear of honestly voicing opinions. BLM mirrors right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, both textbook examples of non-inclusive movements that continue to sow seeds of hate and division—exactly what the human race doesn’t need.
The question is: are these regressive-leftists really the people we want determining our values? Is this the society we want Western society to become?
Banning Books
Nazis banned the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald for being degenerate. The same narrow-mindedness resides in those who can’t see past racial language, or misogyny, to the broader artistic values of classic literature such as: To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, or The Little House on the Prairie, Tropic of Capricorn, Spy In The House Of Love, or Bukowski’s Women.
Art cannot be silenced, controlled, white-washed, co-opted, or censored. The purpose of art is by reflecting a unique world view, to make people think anew, to bring about transformation. Viewing a painting, reading a novel or watching a film should leave you changed by the experience. Everything must, be allowed and no subject matter off bounds. That’s the role of an artist. Pushing invisible lines. Nabokov’s Lolita was branded pornographic when it was first published. It wasn’t. When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was de-facto banned by Muslim death threats in 1989, the correct response for artists, governments and peoples was to stand united and declare Western society explicitly different to totalitarian states, safe havens for free expression, places artists create whatever the hell they want. That is wasn’t, is the reason Islamists felt at liberty to cowardly murder Western filmmakers, artists, writers and school teachers in the decades since.
In 2020 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced “representation and inclusion” standards for Oscars eligibility in the Best Picture category. Quotas. So to be in the running for best film, it must include a person of color, a LGBT character or other minority in the cast and/or production team. Tokenism in the extreme, and the antithesis of art—forcing creators to tick boxes if they want their work recognized, rather than the freedom for the story and the writers to dictate character. Creators like Andrei Tarkovsky, Miloš Forman and Milan Kundera fled to the West fifty years ago during the Cold War to escape Eastern Bloc creative restrictions. As artists, they did not want to and could not tow the state party line. Where now for free art?
I don’t want to read censored books or view offence-free art. Offence-free, commercialized art has led to an era of insipid music, books, and movies which are actively making people dumber and dumber.
When you restrict art, you restrict the freedom of living.
Erosion of Free Speech
In the 1960s, protests at the University of California, Berkeley demanded free speech after decades of conservative repression. Decades after hard-won victories by their parents and grandparents, students seem content to throw away their rights without questioning the ramifications.
Disinvitation of speakers and shouting down professors would make National Socialists proud.
“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist,” Frederick Douglass said in 1860, adding that “slavery cannot tolerate five years of free speech.”
Or George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Prohibition Of Dissent
Hans and Sophie Scholl’s White Rose group is often held up as a shining example of intellectual resistance in the Third Reich. Like Nazism, the regressive-left has become a non-intellectual movement led by gullible and ignorant people who refuse to partake in rational discourse, just like the judges at the trial of the White Rose leaders. Debate is instantly shut down and reduced to ad hominem attacks based on politically correct groupthink.
Scientology. Neo-liberalism. The KKK. Mormonism. QAnon. Americans have a long history of coming up with stupid ideas and then spreading them worldwide. It was American academics in the gender and race studies fields who created political correctness, indoctrinated their students and encouraged them to take these ridiculous ideas out into the real world, and today the movement is led by non-thinkers. If you know what a regressive-leftist’s ideas are on one topic, you’ll know what they think on all topics, because they have been programmed to follow an ideology, not think independently. To think, after all, leads to dissent. Political correctness is affecting people’s ability to think critically on a whole range of issues. The prioritization of freedom from offence over free speech not only poses a threat to open inquiry, it’s making students stupid.
When you restrict art, you restrict the freedom of living.
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.
"The horrific history of exterminating books, sometimes exterminating the authors at the same time, is as much a part of current history as it was of earlier times,"—Haig Bosmajian
The Good Old Days When “Far-Right” Was Far-Right
Dare to disagree with the regressive-left or fail to tow the party line and you’ll quickly be mislabeled as far-right, as have Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Lauren Southern, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. None of whom are far-right, most of whom have spoken against the far-right, many have been attacked by the far-right.
I grew up in an era when far-right meant far-right. Try Terre’Blanch. By 2020 you don’t have to have espouse right-wing ideas to be right-wing. Anyone and everyone qualifies. There’s a certain level of madness in that alone.
Any person of ethnicity, gay, and trans person, or woman, who disagrees with any detail of leftism is an Uncle Tom or secret misogynist/homophobe/islamaphobe: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Rebecca Hargraves, Dave Rubin, Martina Markota, Candace Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos, Kanye West, Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, Blaire White, Cassie Jaye, Lauren Southern, Karen Straughan, Christina Hoff Sommers, Brandon Tatum, Laci Green, J. K. Rowling.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, run by white elitists, put Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a victim of female genital mutilation) and Maajid Nawaz (an ex-Muslim extremist) on a list of anti-Muslim extremists because they openly discuss problems within their own community. Nawaz sued, and in June 2018, the SPLC apologized and paid $3.375 million in compensation.
I don’t think we should organise a society around the sensibilities of the most easily upset people because then you have a very neurotic society.
The freedom to have inoffensive speech is no freedom at all.
The Madness Of Offence
In 2020 Professor Greg Patton of USC’s Marshall School of Business was teaching a communications class via Zoom call. An online video recording of the call shows Patton discussing the use of pauses while speaking and giving an example of how Chinese speakers use filler words.
“In China, the common word is ‘that’—that, that, that, that,” he said in the video, before using the equivalent Chinese term nei ge several times to demonstrate.
A complaint (almost certainly written by wealthy white students) was sent to the school administration, saying the term sounded like the N-word and that Patton had “offended all of the black members of our class.”
The Black China Caucus, an American organization that empowers and amplifies black voices in China, sprang to Patton’s defense. “The BCC is shocked by how USC mishandled this situation,” the organization posted. “Not only would a quick Mandarin lesson reveal that “nèi ge” is a common pronoun, but USC’s reaction cheapens and degrades substantive conversations surrounding real (diversity, equity and inclusion) challenges on college campuses!”
To take offence at something which isn’t offensive, like a language other than your own, is the height of both arrogance—and dare I say it, racism. Little princes and princesses are sitting around looking for ways to be offended, or more likely to be offended for someone else. The fact is the working classes are a lot less racist than the regressive-left claim, while the rich white elitists of the regressive-left are a lot more racist than they think. Like Borderline Personality Disorder political correctness has become a mental illness where reality is driven by emotion, not facts.
I’m offended, therefore I am.
The best way to increase tolerance to offence is to increase the amount of offense, in speech, writing, and art. In that way, people can build up resistance, like they do with disease. Protection and mollycoddling is leading to an unintellectual, frail and weak society that will ultimately perish.
“It’s really about trying to erase and cancel American history and cast everything in the past as being irredeemably racist and hateful,” Trump said is a speech at Mount Rushmore: “Cancel culture is this left-wing fascist, totalitarian ideology and they want a ground zero. They want to destroy everything about America, everything that is good and start from the beginning to create God knows what. I think they’re all about destruction.”
To prove him right, Wisconsin Black Student Union President Nalah McWhorter said the BSU wants the complete removal of the Abraham Lincoln statue at the university, declaring the statue anti-Black and anti-Native.
To believe that you are intellectually on higher moral ground than Abraham Lincoln, the man who presided over victory in the Civil War, and ended slavery in the United States in the process, must have involved wild mental gymnastics and ill-placed, self-affirming parenting.
“I just think he did, you know, some good things… the bad things that he’s done definitely outweighs them,” McWhorter said, failing to offer anything of substance either way.
Not the same eloquence as: “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” huh?
This kind of “virtue signaling” can and has been studied. While research abounds that virtue signalers are, essentially, phonies and showoffs—individuals who adopt opinions solely to garner praise and show everyone just how good they are, a new study links virtue signaling to “Dark Triad” traits. Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the paper—from University of British Columbia researchers—found narcissists, psychopaths, and manipulators are more likely to engage in virtue signaling. The next social justice warrior you see on Twitter—may have motivations beyond approval and sympathy, they may very well be suffering a pathological personality disorder.
In the UK, the country at the pinnacle of PC madness, police have recorded 120,000 cases of ‘non-crime’ hate speech—despite accepting none are illegal. Citizens are regularly visited by police and quizzed over social media posts, even though no law has been broken. When Harry Miller, a former police officer, was investigated over ‘transphobic tweets’, he asked why the officer kept calling the person who had made the complaint a ‘victim’, when it had been established no crime had been committed, he was told ‘that’s just how it works’.
Yes, in the UK, police are investigating non-crimes, while real crimes like burglaries, muggings and rapes go unsolved. And if this language isn’t Orwellian enough, I don’t know what is.
But why has something, like political correctness, which may have begun with good intention, turned so evil and twisted?