America: the Land of Opportunity

Calling America ‘Land of Opportunity’ Is a ‘Microaggression’ Says University of California

Well, if America is NOT the land of opportunity, why are all these illegals here, anyway? All universities have gone completely stupid? Or only in California?

Prof On Leave For Criticizing PC Culture

'All Hell Broke Loose': NYU Prof Suing School After Being 'Coerced' Into Paid Leave for Criticizing PC Culture

More details here:

‘Deplorable’ NYU professor sues colleagues for defamation

Pinker on Political Correctness and Withheld Truth

Would that this be true:

Succinct Analysis: Political Correctness and Postmodernism

Jordan Peterson

Intelligent Design of Cursing in Brighton

Frak! Has Your Mother Sold Her Mangle?
Language—even profanity—evolves faster than it can be regulated

"What the fine law enforcement agents of Brighton are failing to consider, however, is that language is a Hayekian spontaneous order. That means language changes and evolves faster than it can be regulated."

Teens can roll their own cuss words faster than Old People can get 'em smoked.

But... It's OK if THEY Do It, Right?

Unless it's on camera; then you have to virtue-signal like crazy.

OMG: NAACP leader uses F-word to apologize for using T-word after N-word meeting

"The NAACP’s mission of political correctness and equality careened off the rails this week when a local president complimented a TV reporters breasts during an interview.

Don Harris, the president of the Maricopa County Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had just finished an event at Tempe Union High School District to discuss an incident at the school in which several girls wore black t-shirts bearing the letters “N-I-*-*-E-R” on them.

The outrage was instantaneous.

“The six students in question pulled ranks to spell out NI**ER on their own, smiling gleefully to pose for an Instagram picture. Their punishment was 5-days suspension,” a petition demanding their expulsion reads, EAGnews reports.

“This hurtful use of a racial slur is a complete disregard for the dignity of the black community in Arizona and across the nation and the punishment does not fit the total ignorance and cruelty of the crime.”

Harris was on hand to accept apologizes and demand action.

But after the meeting, while participants were speaking with the media, he was caught on camera saying Channel 12 reporter Monique Griego had “nice tits.”"

More at the SITE.

Remember Rotherham

Rotherham rapes were covered up by Political Correct cowardice which feared charges of racism. Those who cowered in fear rather than summon the courage to help those girls should be charged as accomplices to rape/assault.

Prosecutors Detail Rotherham Rapists' Hellish Abuse

As I recall there were some 1400 girls who were raped/assaulted in this true RAPE CULTURE, which was aided and abetted by PC terror of Islamic backlash.

The Sin of "Covert Injustice"

Today's meaning of "covert injustice" refers to race. With the successful overthrow of the top leaders at U MO, other colleges are trying the same thing: rid their administration of non-PC individuals, to be replaced with new blood which will "guarantee" the emotional safety of the fragile individuals who cannot "feel safe" in an atmosphere of intellectual diversity.

Race protests scattered around U.S. campuses after Missouri resignations

Class war is ramping up, having tasted first blood of important individuals.

Jonathan Chait, on Political Correctness

Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?

Chait is no friend of conservatism, as witnessed by these recent contributions: a post titled “Sorry, ObamaCare Denialists, You’re Insane,” and one titled “Why Climate-Science Denialism Should Disqualify Anyone From Holding Office.”. Yet he apparently has had his brain shaken into working position, and his statements regarding Political Correctness ring with observable validity.

"Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others. The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities, many of them virtual ones centered on social media, and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals".

In the recent University of Missouri shake up, the PC crowd was joined by agitators who were at Ferguson, and local professors who wished to operate in secrecy. These operators have demonstrated that the PC totalitarians have more power than many might think. PC definitely is a denial of pluralism in the same sense that Leninism and Maoism were (and are).

"The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)"

It's very good that there is a growing cognition of the connection between PC and Marxism, not just in the Class Warfare sense, but also in the revolutionary sense. The upheaval at U MO was a small revolution by the Marxist/PC revolutionary crowd.

"That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it."

After seven years of an Alinsky president and governing agencies, Chait should know better. The Left is identical with PC; it is tautological with totalitarianism and suppression of dissent. There will be no outcry of "unfair" from the Left on any revolutionary activity by students, or on any behavior by any actors from one of their Victimhood Classes. All actions by the "aggrieved" are fair game in the Marxist eyes of the Left.

"You cannot know my pain", they shriek at "the privileged". Those words are the justifications for any and all oppression of those not in their class. Will the internal noncongruencies bring them down? We are told that homosexuals cannot know the pain of the blacks; that blacks cannot know the pain of white lesbians; that white lesbians cannot know the pain of black XY transsexuals who "feel" that "today I am a white lesbian".

It doesn't appear that the lack of sanity, which would stop cis-normal folk from such outrageous behaviors, will stop the growing trend toward Marxist PC identity. And even if it might, there are the professional Marxist activists who are omnipresent and ready to exacerbate anything whatsoever into full blown revolutionary destruction of the sane people who become unfortunate victims in these attacks.

Quote of the Week: "Reality With The Bark Off..."

“His [Trump's] discourse is deliberately provocative, but he’s refreshing to a lot of people because he talks about reality with the bark off, and people are sick to death of the language of political correctness.”
Robert Lieber, a government professor at Georgetown University

MORE: Can't Make This Up

UWM says 'politically correct' is no longer politically correct

The phrase 'politically correct' is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The university’s 'Just Words' campaign aims to 'raise awareness of microaggressions and their impact.'

These microaggressions include the words: 'lame,' 'thug,' 'trash,' and 'third world.'

But hate tweets about Jews and Republicans are "IN":

"Interestingly enough, while the university’s Inclusive Excellence Center has labeled several common-use adjectives harmful, the man running the campaign, Warren Scherer, the director of the university’s Inclusive Excellence Center, has taken to Twitter to express his displeasure with Republican presidential candidates in a non-inclusive manner.

Scherer tweeted “fuck every fiber of your being” to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and also accused him of “pandering to Republican Jews.” Scherer, who identifies himself as an UWM employee on his twitter profile, also accused presidential candidate Rand Paul of courting “rich Jews.”"

One must have the proper enemies: Jews, Republicans, Jews, oil companies, Jews, Israel, did I mention Jews? That's all Politically Correct... oops I said the censored words... I feel like lame, third world trash... oops again.

Sexism in Space

Send aliens modern messages of Earth's equality and diversity, say scientists

The UK entrants to a Breakthrough Initiative competition agree on one thing: any missive to extraterrestrials must be an up-to-date portrayal of humankind

"Messages sent into space to tell extraterrestrials about the nature of humankind should be updated to reflect gender equality and the diversity of life on Earth, scientists say.

At a conference in Leeds this week, a group of British astronomers and philosophers who form the UK research network for SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - agreed to enter a competition organised by the Breakthrough Initiative to devise a message to send out to space on behalf of the world to whoever might be listening.

However, discussing the likely content of the message at the British Science Festival in Bradford on Thursday, the need to revise our previous portrayals of life on Earth was raised.

Jill Stuart, an expert in space policy at the London School of Economics, pointed to the plaque that was placed on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, launched in 1972. Intended to convey the origin of the craft and to impart information about the inhabitants of Earth, Stuart observed that to modern eyes the pictorial message presents some issues. .

“The plaque shows a man raising his hand in a very manly fashion while a woman stands behind him, appearing all meek and submissive,” she said. “We really need to rethink that with any messages we are sending out now. Attitudes have changed so much in just 40 years.”

The plaque also clearly portrays the human figures as white, and Stuart added: “I would be uncomfortable with sending out any images or messages that include Western-dominated material.”

The assessment of the 1972 plaque is obtuse, and could only have come from a deeply prejudiced mind. However, it gets sillier:

"The message, which would be beamed out on a powerful but currently unused frequency, could take the form of text, sounds, mathematical formulae or pictures. “But what we don’t know is if any aliens out there have eyes, so pictures might not work,” Sandberg said."

So. Eyes "evolved" several different times here on earth, but cannot be expected in aliens? How about brains?

Well, ignoring that, then, I think the plaque should show an angry but victorious woman standing with one foot on a prone white man and the other foot on a prone white woman. That might help the aliens understand why the earth is no longer populated with any life above the complexity of sponges deep in ocean volcanic vents by the time they get here. Oh yeah: her skin tone should be checkered to indicate diversity, and she should have a visibly fake penis, maybe off to the side with an arrow pointing to show where it attaches.

That brings it all up-to-date, as of last month. Who knows what it should have as images next month.

PC = Pathological Cognition

To appreciate the following, it has to be read in full; I'll just give the source.

The Coddling of the American Mind

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

This is a technically correct blow to the government-driven campus culture. But the problem is not technical at its base. The problem is ideological: cultural Marxism, when in control, will not relent to mere logic, not even the logic which reveals the destruction which is the natural consequence of Marxist Classism. The ideology is rooted in the pathology of the Marxist Class Warriors, now in control of both government and education systems. That they inflict cognitive pathology on others is of no concern to the Politically Correct - Social Marxist if the result is conversion to Social Justice Warriors.

Why The Republicans Lost Me, A Long Time Ago

GOP elites plot to purge Trump

"In the Cleveland debate, Donald Trump refused to commit to support whomever the Republican Party nominates in 2016.

Trump would be wise to maintain his freedom of action.

For there is a plot afoot in the Washington Post Conservative Club to purge Trump from the Republican Party before the primaries begin.

“A political party has a right to … secure its borders,” asserts the Post’s George Will, “a duty to exclude interlopers.” Will wants The Donald “excommunicated” and locked out of all GOP debates until he kneels and takes a loyalty oath to the nominee.

“Marginalizing Trump” carries no risk of “alienating a substantial Republican cohort,” Will assures us, for these “Trumpites” are neither Republicans nor conservatives. Better off without such trash.

The Post’s Michael Gerson says “establishment Republicans” must “make clear that [Trump] has moved beyond the boundaries of serious and civil discourse.” He loathes the Trumpites as much as Will.

Trump’s followers are “xenophobic,” Gerson tells CNN. They have a “resentment of outsiders, of Mexico, of China, and immigrants. That’s more like a European right-wing party, a UKIP or a National Front in France. Republicans can’t incorporate that.”

But if the GOP has no room for Trump’s followers, it has no future. For there simply aren’t that many chamber-of-commerce and country-club Republicans."

These boneheads are nothing but Democrat-lites. They are, in my opinion, despicable false flag PC Leftists who mouth the correct narrative of these Leftist times: "it's xenophobic to want to have protected borders".

The GOP needs to die, completely and irrevocably. A new party needs to form without these cretins.

Where's The Outrage?

For consistency, it should be considered Speciesist not to condemn this and threaten the lion with the same vituperation and death threats as were aimed at the dentist.

Cecil the lion's cub killed by rival male
Death of one of Cecil's eight cubs has raised fears for his remaining offspring, which could also be targeted by the large predatory male lion

"One of Cecil the lion's cubs has reportedly been killed by a rival male who was trying to mate with his mother.

Cecil, a 13-year-old lion who was beloved by visitors and park rangers at his home in Zimbabwe, was killed last month by an American dentist on a hunting trip.

The death of one of Cecil's eight cubs has raised fears for his remaining offspring, which could also be targeted by the large predatory male lion.

Wildlife guides warn that Cecil's pride has only a five per cent chance of survival after several solitary male lions were spotted prowling near their abandoned den in Hwange National Park, according to the Sunday Mirror.

A source told the Mirror: “One of the eight cubs was killed by a male lion after Cecil was killed.

“Lions practise infanticide – the male looking to take over and mate with the three lionesses would have crushed the cub’s skull as he looked to stake his claim."

The lionesses had tried to protect the cubs but can't fend off the advances of large male lions for long, the source said."

Aren't we all just animals? What would Darwin say?

[Sarcasm Alert: Go To Your Safe Place Immediately]

The Coming (And Hilarious) Democrat Implosion

"Yes, if she wants to keep ahold of her base and any chance of winning, Her Highness {Hillary] is going to have to try to decipher the ever-changing cryptography of leftist priorities. Do black lives matter more than brown ones? How about if someone has a limp … is that worth a couple extra points on the oppression scale? And what about LGBTQ lives – how much do they matter with respect to Pacific-Islanders lives? And is the acronym “LGBTQ” even enough, or is she unforgivably forgetting several more letters representing other oppressed classes of esoteric gender identity contortionists and exotic sexual practitioners?

But turning on Team Social Justice Fascism means turning off the normals. Hillary wanted to be reaching out to regular Americans and now she has to kiss up to millennial twerps with 500,000 Twitter followers who babble about “privilege.” Regular Americans are going to be super excited to hear how they are morally deficient solely because their great-great-great grandfather hailed from Stuttgart.

And that whole War on Women thing is going to fall a little flat now that Hillary’s allies got caught on tape swilling cabernet and giggling about their war crimes. Despite what those in her little circle of abortionophilics think, normal people are disgusted and appalled at the thought of a tax parasite organization supplementing its government subsidies by dismembering babies and auctioning off the chunks. "

Unless there are actually sufficient "normal people" remaining, Hillary will win anyway; it's her turn in the hierarchic ascension. Maybe after her it will be Caitlyn's turn to be the first XY-quasi-woman president.

And there is this:

'Have you been sexually harassed by Bill Clinton?'

I wonder why WaPo hasn't covered this? They're probably in their safe place, I guess.

[Link Fixed].

More: Truth That May Not Be Spoken

Senate GOP leaders slam Cruz for calling McConnell a liar

"WASHINGTON The Senate’s Republican leadership rhetorically took Sen. Ted Cruz to the woodshed Sunday for calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar last week on the chamber’s floor.

Cruz was unbowed, firing back soon after leaving the Senate floor and accusing Senate Republican leaders of marching in lockstep with Senate Democrats on such things as funding the Affordable Care Act, funding Planned Parenthood and refusing to tie an Iran nuclear deal to Iran’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

“They operate as a team, expanding Washington and undermining the liberty of the people,” the Texas Republican said of Senate Democratic and Republican leaders.

“We’ve just seen something extraordinary on the Senate floor. The American people elected a Republican majority believing that a Republican majority would be somehow different from a Democratic majority in the United States Senate. Unfortunately, the way the current Senate operates, there is one party, the Washington party.”

The admonishment of the 2016 Republican presidential candidate came as a prelude to a series of votes that advanced language to revive the Export-Import Bank, moved the chamber closer towards passing a highway funding bill, and once again rejected a measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The Senate opened the rare Sunday session in a highly unusual manner: with a warning.

“The chair reminds all senators of the following paragraph from Rule 19 of the Standing Rules of the Senate … ‘No senator in debate shall directly or indirectly by any form of words impute to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator,’” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chamber’s president pro tempore, sternly read.

That was a response to Cruz, who last Friday accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,of lying about whether he made a deal to have the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank attached to a highway legislation that senators must pass by this coming Friday.

“What we just saw today was an absolute demonstration that not only what he told every Republican senator, but what he told the press over and over and over again, was simply a lie,” Cruz said in the fiery speech Friday. “We know now that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment, that he is willing to say things that he knows are false."

One who is proven to produce lies is a liar. This is obvious truth; it cannot be said. Why? Because establishment Republicans no longer accept truth as a valuable commodity - being Democrat-lite is their worldview.

Establishment Republicans Go Dirty On Trump

Rick Perry compares Trump to cancer

I was cautiously in favor of Perry, based on the success of Texas in the face of the disasters of Blue Model states. No more. When this sort of nasty, virulent attack on a non-Democrat comes out, then the establishment nature of the attacker comes into focus. Trump, it appears, is too honest in stating his opinions: establishment politicians don't do that and DO NOT LIKE that. My opinion is that we don't need anymore politicians who protect the establishment. We need someone to protect the USA and its people. Whether Trump would do that is not clear. But at least he says what he thinks, outside the rigid boudaries of political establishment protocol. That's bound to be iconoclastic, and very interesting to watch. If Trump needed donations, I would donate just to keep the entertainment coming.

White Racism... Against Whites

HuffPo Blogger Describes ‘The Pain Of Realizing I’m White’

"University of Pennsylvania Professor Ali Michael described “the pain of realizing I’m White” in a blog published Tuesday by The Huffington Post’s Black Voices entitled “I Sometimes Don’t Want to Be White Either.”

Michael describes Rachel Dolezal as a “fascinating case study in White racial identity development” and empathizes with the former NAACP leader deceptively pretending to be a black woman.

Dolezal is an example of the “immersion/emersion stage,” Michael notes, where “White people, having learned extensively about the realities of racism, and the ugly history of White supremacy in the U.S., ‘immerse’ themselves in trying to figure out how to be White in our society, and ‘emerge’ with a new relationship to Whiteness.”

“Only in the case of Dolezal,” she said, “her way of dealing with the pain of the reality of racism, was to deny her own Whiteness and to become Black.”

“She’s not alone,” Michael added, explaining that she experienced her own“Rachel Dolezal phase.”

“There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants,” she wrote. “I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”

She “lived with a Black family,” wore head wraps and shaved her head while studying abroad in South Africa to “take on Africanness,” as Dolezal has. She says she swore off White authors and ”learned from “Black authors” that “the job of White people lies with teaching other White people, seeing ourselves clearly, owning our role in oppression.”

Michael hated her own “Whiteness,” but admitted she “disliked the Whiteness of other White people more.”

“I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too,” she stressed.

Dolezal proved a “good warning,”Michael wrote.

“Dolezal’s actions are a potential pitfall for any White people on the journey towards recognizing the truth of what it means to be White,” she wrote in conclusion “But we cannot not be White. And we cannot undo what Whiteness has done. We can only start from where we are and who we are.”

Michael’s ludicrous irrationality now passes for enlightened thought at a mainstream American website, the Huffington Post, and a major American university."

Hating who you are and your ancestors is mental illness. How many university professors are actually insane, one wonders. And how many of them want to pass that insanity on to others, so that they must share the professors' insanity? Fortunately, this one hates her own progeny (potential, that is), to the point that she won't breed - and that is to everyone's benefit.

Because this insanity is endemic to the Stalinist political correctness of the self-anointed moral police which try to enforce anti-morality through "social justice", the insanity is being widely adopted by virtue of cultural cowardice, through fear of retribution - retribution by the insane visited upon the sane. Stalinism in the hands of the insane (who are currently in charge) will necessarily require an unfortunate amount of counter force to stop it.

Excerpts From An Interesting Essay

Political Correctness Is Devouring Itself

I never thought that actually saying all of this would ever be necessary. Apparently government schools and universities are stocked with people who got no education themselves, but are now "educating" for a living... which translated means cranking out adults who are perpetual juveniles, emotionally confused and fragile as grandma's tea cups.

"Go into the modern university and you won’t hear much about Mill or Milton or the millions around the world who have had to learn the hard way why freedom of speech matters. Instead, you will be fed philosophers far less rigorous than Feinberg. The New Zealander Jeremy Waldron, an Oxford professor from the American university system, which churns out authoritarian philosophers the way Ford churns out cars, suggests speech that attacks the dignity of others should be banned. Stanley Fish of New York dispenses with any pretence that we should respect universal human rights, and descends into power-worship and thuggery. “The only way to fight hate speech is to recognise it as the speech of your enemy,” he says. “And what you do in response to the speech of your enemy is not prescribe a medication for it but attempt to stamp it out.” Take a breath and think about his assumptions. This is the tyrannical language of an illiberal intelligentsia so lost in complacency it thinks it no longer needs the rights it once championed.We don’t care if we are being consistent, it says. We have the power to censor now and we will use it.

Few contemporary theorists grasp that people oppose censorship not because they respect the words of the speaker but because they fear the power of the censor. It is astonishing that professed liberals, of all people, could have torn up the old limits, when they couldn’t answer the obvious next question: who decides what is offensive?

**********

In Britain the state is showing that real power does not and has never been in the hands of over-confident intellectuals. It is telling academics to report on campus Islamists, even when they are not engaged in violence. “Thank you very much,” the politicians seem to be saying to the illiberal philosophers, the organisers of blacklists, and the intellectuals who dismissed free speech as an illusion. “If you say you can ban speakers even though they are not provoking violence, we can demand that you spy on Islamist students, even though they are not violent either.”

All of a sudden and with a blackly comic haste, British academics are scrambling to rediscover the virtue of freedom of speech, a liberty they spent a generation denigrating. All of a sudden. And much too late.

No, no, no, the liberals protest. We never wanted to spy and censor on behalf of the powerful, but on behalf of the powerless. But again how are they to judge the loss of dignity that can justify criminal penalties? Perhaps the vehemence of the offence taken is the decisive factor. Maybe if the offended can prove that they are shocked beyond measure, they would provide legitimate grounds to censor. If so, we must give in to Islamists, who feel the hurt of blasphemy so keenly they will murder anyone they deem to have blasphemed. Many have given in and bowed to a blasphemy code enforced at gunpoint. If they were being consistent, they would have to back down if Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Scientologists, Satanists and atheists followed suit and started murdering the authors of unpleasant depictions of their beliefs. If conservatives could prove that the discussion of left-wing ideas incited pain, or left-wingers could say the same about right-wing ideas, they would presumably have to take the logical step of deciding that political argument was offensive too.

Identity politics and the demands for freedom from offence it breeds create a Hobbesian world where everyone can demand the censorship of everyone else. There is no better proof of this than the fate of the politically correct themselves.

Strip away the appearance of a solid ideology, and you see the contradications. The tendency of the modern liberal-left to excuse radical Islam is supported by the politically correct belief that liberals should support a religion of the disadvantaged. In the name of liberalism, they fail to fight a creed that is sexist, racist, homophobic and, in its extreme forms, genocidal and totalitarian. Their political correctness has turned their principles inside out, and led them to abandon their beliefs in female and homosexual equality.

But the difficulties in pretending there are no conflicts between groups are as nothing compared to the pretence that there are no conflicts within them. Michael Ezra, a friend who is researching the growth of the illiberal intelligentsia, says that he is constantly reminded of Trotsky’s warning about the Bolshevik party’s claim that it represented the working class. A rapid descent follows, Trotsky said: “The organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.” Or in the case of feminist identity politics the people with the loudest voices substitute themselves for an entire gender.

***********

We have gone from the principle that only speech that incites crime can be banned to the principle that speech that incites gross offence can be banned to the principle that speech that provokes discomfort can be banned. This is not so much a slippery slope as a precipitous drop.

Many want to take the plunge. A few weeks ago, 130 intellectuals wrote to the Observer to make the classic case for freedom of speech. They said that feminists critical of the sex industry and of some demands made by trans activists were being banned because the prevailing consensus was that the mere “presence of anyone said to hold those views is a threat to a protected minority group’s safety. You do not have to agree with the views that are being silenced to find these tactics illiberal and undemocratic.”

Who could possibly object to that, I thought.

Just about everyone, it turned out. Hundreds of other intellectuals replied in the next issue of the Observer. They made the counterfeit claim that being “no-platformed” by student groups was not an attack on free speech. They went on to confuse support for free speech with support for the speaker—the tactic of every grand dictator and little Hitler in history—and implied that standing up for open debate meant the letter’s signatories were indeed “transphobes” and “whorephobes”. Extreme though their reaction was, it was nothing when set against the reaction of online activists.

The indomitable gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell is a hard man to frighten. He has fought homophobic vigilantes and Robert Mugabe’s security guards. But even Tatchell was unnerved by the 4,000 abusive Twitter messages he received for putting his name to the Observer letter. His abusers denounced him as a “homo”, “foreigner”, “misogynist”, “paedophile” and “nutter”. One correspondent informed him that “I would like to tweet about your murder you fucking parasite.” So much for the safety of those who seek to challenge “safe spaces”.

*********

Electoral calculation ought to stop left-wingers allowing conservatives to own the inspiring idea of freedom of speech. If they could only see how they appear to others, they would understand that the people they are trying to convert tend to suspect those who would tell them what to say and how to say it. Many who should be open to radical arguments will turn away because they associate the Left with the silencing of contrary views and the imposition of orthodoxy. Above all, left-wingers need to grasp that speech codes and blacklists do not produce social change but a hypocritical observance of conventional pieties.
If they doubt it, they should look at how the willingness of governments and corporations to make the minor concession of following PC language rules in no way stops them from slashing public services or exploiting workers. They should see what is wrong with a country where you can get away with any amount of cruelty as long as you don’t use “inappropriate” language. If they examine history, they would realise the dangers they face. The first wave of political correctness came in the early 1990s, when the American Left was on its knees after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and triumph of capitalism. So risible was its condition, its chosen candidate for the US presidency was Bill Clinton, a shifty politician of no fixed conviction who had been pretty much been bought by Wall Street. With no possibility of changing the world, campus radicals retreated into themselves and decided to change the university instead.

Now they are in retreat again. Despite the Crash, the Occupy movement has fizzled out, and the American Left’s apparent candidate is Hillary Clinton, a shifty politician of no fixed conviction, who has been pretty much bought by Wall Street. And with today’s retreat come all the 1990s’ problems of speaking in private PC codes, which are as alien to ordinary voters as Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U English. With the retreat comes the pathetic insistence on reforming language rather than reforming society, and the old seductive delusion that you can censor your way to a better tomorrow.

The rest of the population should worry about the future too. The politicians, bureaucrats, chief police officers and corporate leaders of tomorrow are at universities which teach that free debate and persuasion by argument are ideas so dangerous they must be banned as a threat to health and safety. Unless we challenge them in the most robust manner imaginable, whatever kind of country they grow up to preside over is unlikely to be a free one."

Go to the LINK for the full essay, or just to give the author a hit.