Silencing the Opposition: The Next Phase

There is an excellent article regarding the Leftist intellectual wasting disease of Political Correctness, and its new phase. On college campuses debate is being choked off with the phrase "Check Your Privilege". The reference, of course, is to whites, especially white males, who are presumed to have gained access due to their whiteness and maleness. The implication is that the access thus gained is illegitimate, and that the white male should JUST SHUT UP. Just being a white male is the issue, and it is a racist, sexist, classist attack taken on what is now a minority group in the USA.

McGinnis points out,

“Checking your privilege” does not impugn the logic or evidence behind any argument, but calls attention to the identity of the speaker. It is a variation on a classic fallacy–the ad hominem argument. Plato’s contentions in The Republic are not in need of reformulation because he was an aristocrat. Rousseau’s claims are not refuted because he treated his lovers and children badly."

Of course it is an attack on anyone not of the faith, the heretics who have actual points of logic rather than bumper sticker ideologies. That is what political correctness is: silencing opposing views. In other words, intellectual dictatorship due to insufficient ability to refute those views, or - more likely - not caring whether their own views are false, because they are held under emotional attachment to a self-salvation ideology: the self-elevation to messiahism and elitism.

No one should allow such intellectually cowardly PC attacks as "check your privilege" to silence them; rather it should inspire them to counterattack the PC cowards aggressively.

Says McGinnis,

"This ubiquity of “check your privilege” suggests that political correctness is now entering a second generation and gaining a second wind. While political correctness previously concentrated on race and gender, the new focus on inequality seems to have emboldened the campus left to put class back on the list of identity politics. Of course, using the phrase “check your privilege” to cut off debate on campus is not nearly as destructive as what communists did to people who were from the “wrong” class. Many children of privilege then were sent to reeducation camps to reflect or were even silenced never to speak again. But it stems from the same impulse to replace reason with power.

This new form of an old disorder also shows that despite the orthodoxy on many campuses many left-liberals remain very afraid of classical liberal and conservative dissent. Just as students who protested Condi Rice’s prospective graduation speech at Rutgers showed strength in numbers but weakness in intellectual confidence, so do those who parrot this new campus slogan. If your underlying argument is flawed, you do need a force other than logic and evidence to sustain your position. Political correctness is an admission of intellectual frailty."