The attack began under the cover of gender fairness. This was a tactical move. In liberal arts institutions, more than half the students are female, and women are well represented among the faculty. Anyone opposing these efforts would have to face colleagues and fellow students within a college’s closed environment, what someone—I forget who—called “mini North Koreas.”39
Professors started penalizing students for using the standard he as a gender-neutral indicator in academic papers. Administrators who might have told professors to cut it out would have been vilified. Students who protested the cleansing of the language were mocked—and if they were in humanities classes, in which grades are awarded based on subjective criteria, they were penalized.40
At the time, letting the classroom standard become he/she or even the grammatically incorrect they seemed like a small concession. Ignore the fact—which the left regularly does—that according to the English language’s Germanic roots, he is a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral pronoun. But a little he/she was not enough for the left. Once its foot soldiers had tasted the joys of bullying, the Politically Correct Army wanted more. So the quest became to find causes they could champion, causes that would give them power but not make them the new top-dog target. The left knows that by shaming any existing structure, they have a theoretical high road with no real responsibility. That is the major, inherent flaw in leftist hysteria. It revs up passions without actually doing anything constructive, within the system, to help those they allegedly care about. In the recent uproar over DACA, all you heard was illegal aliens screaming about rights they do not possess. That is what the left does. And that is why the hysteria evaporates because, again, there is no real, actionable structure.
Political correctness soon began influencing curricula. In 1988, a year after Jesse Jackson led five hundred students in chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go,”41 Stanford University eliminated a required freshman course in Western civilization and replaced it with the purposely vague, Marxist-based “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” This new curriculum featured courses such as “Forging Revolutionary Selves,” and “Our Bodies, Our Sheep, Our Cosmos, Ourselves,”42 which focused on Navajo Indians. Thirty years later, Stanford would accept a Muslim student whose application “essay” on what mattered to him consisted only of the phrase “#BlackLivesMatter” typed one hundred times.43 In other words, a hysterical protest reduced to type, without thought.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservative authors attempted to sound an alarm against the culture of victimization and the dilution of the Western canon that was infiltrating academia. Liberals accused them of promoting a culture war, all the while blind to the irony that, in making their own accusations, they were waging just that sort of war against the traditional American thought. Literature was a particular target. During those years, leftists didn’t just advocate the jettisoning of classic literature and essential history, they lost a sense of modern history as well. They never got the pathetic joke they had hatched. During the 1950s and 1960s, college students fought for integration. In the 1980s, in the name of preserving multiculturalism, dorms were set aside for exclusive ethnic or academic experiences—at students’ request.
By 1990, in a cowardly preemptive strike that has become standard operating procedure today, college faculties had begun discussing political correctness in regard to what should and shouldn’t be taught and what could or couldn’t be talked about. This is how cool intellectualism on the left translates to hysteria among everyone else. The public still wasn’t fully aware of what was going on until 1991, when President George H. W. Bush noted that political correctness “replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits.”44 Bush’s speech did as much as anything else to cement the phrase as a pejorative among conservatives.
Later in the decade, education took a backseat at schools—yes, you read that correctly—when students were petitioning to have Ebonics, a supposed “black dialect” of American English, accepted as a valid alternative language.45 In other words, the inversion of axe for ask, rather than be corrected, was going to be embraced. Twenty years later, we see the idiocy of that in our daily concourse.
At the same time, increasingly segregated “studies” majors exploded. These majors had their beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, when students first demanded black and women’s studies majors. Okay, that was a legitimate request. Like mental Cheerios, it was part of a nutritional intellectual diet. However, by the end of the 1990s, a college student could spend—some of us would say “waste”—four years immersed in ethnic, sexual, geographic, or other studies, while giving short shrift to the works that had defined social, cultural, and intellectual norms for centuries. It is one thing to teach, say, black authors. It is another to do so to the exclusion of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Jane Austen as though they simply do not matter—or that the very act of excluding them somehow demonstrates moral courage and intellectual enlightenment. The academic process, which by definition should involve having one’s ideas challenged and expanded, had been supplanted by self-righteousness certainty about what was good or necessary. Students stopped thinking of faculty as educators and started thinking of them as servants. At forty thousand dollars a year, they reasoned, shouldn’t the customer always be right? And God help the white male professor who dared to stand up for classical education.
Worse, these ideas trickled down to high schools, to junior high schools, to elementary schools so that we now have what are effectively gay studies to seven-year-olds. This is not an exaggeration. In 2016, California became the first state to make LGBT rights an official part of their required curriculum for children beginning in the second grade.46
In the decades since they first set out to destroy our educational system, the left has delighted in coming up with new means of oppressing free speech. Consider “safe spaces,” where political correctness warriors could hide without molestation or contrary ideas… after they smashed windows or burned cars because something offended them. I would make the analogy that it’s like the Gypsy girl Esmeralda seeking sanctuary in church in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame—but I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before hunchbacks, churches, and victimized women are banished from literature. Yet think of how absolutely counterintuitive safe spaces are. When you designate an area of a campus—an institution of learning and supposedly free thinking—a safe space, you are de facto announcing not only that the world beyond the ivied walls is unsafe, but that the rest of the campus itself is also unsafe. The solution? Join AntiFA or some other anarchistic group and make America a safe space for all Marxists.
Here’s the real kicker, though. When students are denied their safe spaces, they cry. They’re doing a lot of crying these days. Pretty much anything can set them off, including unconscious, unintended, and ultimately unreal “microaggressions,” such as calling a meeting and having only white people show up—which is an actual example of a microaggression cited by a University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign study.47 Yes, that is considered a microaggression although it’s unclear who in the room is actually being aggressed against. By this definition, a yoga class can violate tenets of political correctness, since white people doing yoga is cultural appropriation,48 just as serving Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches without the authentic bread is.49 Guess what: college student have protested both.
The absurdity does not even stop there. In September 2017, a black woman shopping at a Texas Hobby Lobby became offended, and went online to say so, about a raw-cotton display at the store. Here is what she posted on social media:
This decor is WRONG on SO many levels. There is nothing decorative about raw cotton.… A commodity which was gained at the expense of African-American slaves. A little sensitivity goes a long way. PLEASE REMOVE THIS “decor.”50
This is real. The ellipses are original—nothing was omitted from what she posted. A woman actually expected the world to bend to her hysterical
will. She seems to think that people should self-censor for fear of offending every possible person who could be offended for any conceivable reason, even when those reasons, like this one, are absurd.
The madness of attacks on American institutions such as the Bill of Rights, which high school kids have adopted from their older siblings, is in ascension. We’ve discussed how safe spaces are a barely disguised attack on the First Amendment. Now comes the kiddie crusade focusing on the Second Amendment.
The attacks are being led by a teenage agitator who is seeking to do what left-wing youth movements have done before him—strip the means of defense from citizens and patriots, leaving them unable to defend themselves against propaganda, politically correct thought, and when ultimately necessary, “reeducation.” For those unable or unwilling to be reeducated, there can be only one end result: prison.
This demagogue’s targets are National Rifle Association members and other legal gun owners.51 As high school students often do, they are convinced they have better knowledge, that by exercising “gun control”—which make no mistake, is their code word for gun elimination—they will save countless children.
There is a reason why the word sophomore literally means “wise fool.” The sophomoric bully is using tear-jerking sympathy to whip sympathy—appropriate sympathy, for the victims of the mentally ill school-shooting butchers—into the ultimate mass hysteria, the surrender of a right established nearly 230 years ago. Disarming a population to maintain control is nothing new: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Castro brothers, Muammar Quaddafi, Idi Amin, and Pot’s Khmer Rouge all understood it. King George III, from whom we won independence by keeping our guns in defiance of royal order, certainly understood it. Maybe if this spawn of Marx spent less time walking out of classes and more time learning in them, he would understand it, too.
Or maybe he already does. Do I think this bullying fanatic knows what he is doing? Yes, and he is probably laughing at all of us. He and his sister have gone as far as to create armbands with peace symbols on them, armbands to be worn while marching in formation during school walkouts and other forms of sanctioned civil disobedience that educators and parents have been browbeaten and shamed into condoning.
This little corporal—and those of you who know history know what despot I mean—mixed the signs of hatred from the left in his speeches and actions. He can’t just be satisfied with armbands that evoke the Hitler Youth: When he gives speeches, he holds his fist up in the militant Black Power salute. And all the while he seeks to destroy rights in the name of “public good” and “keeping our children safe.” Won’t someone think of the children, he asks?
I think of the children. The legions who have come before him: the original Hitler Youth, the youngest of the Red Army soldiers during World War II, the United Kingdom Home Guard, the child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, the adolescent beheaders of ISIS, various children in armed youth gangs and death squads throughout Africa and South America… and the United States. I think of them all. While many of them were abused by adults into participating, every once in a while a truly “special” child emerges, one who fully embraces a path to either fame, power, or a chance to vent his childish rage.
And time and again we enable them. We allow emotions and fear of disapproval or denunciation from children to overrule rational thought. And we all suffer for it.
Hypocritically, of course, the left does not care if anyone on the right feels unsafe. For instance, many people are made uncomfortable by explicit sexual discussions. Leftists love this discomfort and they demand the world confront sexuality on their terms, which means acknowledging more than the standard two genders and three types of sex—heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. These days, leftist public sexual nomenclature includes GBLTTQQPIA—gay, bisexual, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, queer, questioning, pansexual, intersex, asexual—and doubtless a few more terms that will emerge between the time I write this and when the book comes out. And that’s before we get into whether someone is bigender, cisgender, genderqueer, or heteronormative. God protect the poor student or teacher or kindergartner who uses the wrong word to describe someone, or assumes that a female wearing a dress identifies as female. For all they know, this individual is a female who identifies as male who is exploring whether he should identify as female. That sounds as idiotic as it is, but political correctness at that level of absurdity actually exists.
Don’t bother learning what these words mean. For one thing, they will probably change before long. For another, they aren’t used to clarify or illuminate. They are codes that separate those in the know—like some secret Masonic coded hand gesture—from those who really don’t care and would be just as happy for everything to stay behind closed doors. The terms are used so the speaker can feel that he, she, whatever possesses superior knowledge.
Sadly, the people raised in this environment of moral superiority, exclusion, and entitlement during the first decade of the twenty-first century have moved into the “real” world. As they have, a number of professions have changed to reflect their thinking. Newsrooms, bastions of the left, have abandoned the pretense of gathering and presenting facts and have become forums for crusades and bombast. Human resource professionals (no longer the Personnel Department, of course), who once focused on hiring the best talent and making sure payrolls were met, have begun spending time rooting out anything that might be a “trigger” to employees who had never faced a viewpoint they couldn’t shout down. In fields such as climatology, geology, and medicine, a practitioner’s failure to embrace leftist doctrine can result in being ostracized or even job loss, whether through removal or resignation due to hostile work environment—hostile to conservatives, which means human resource departments rarely get involved. Military religious leaders can have their careers derailed if they refuse to perform gay marriages, no matter how bravely or heroically they had previously served.
We have had to accept chairperson for chairman, firefighter for fireman, postal carrier for postman, and—okay. Those are relatively painless, but only as language. The madness doesn’t stop there, however. Hollywood studios are now adding “inclusion riders” to their contracts. Unlike the brave Freedom Riders of the 1960s, these riders promote a new form of racist, antiwhite hate in which producers promise to go out of their way to hire women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ “community,” and the disabled. Failing to do so, the studios agree to contribute to scholarship funds for those groups. By the way: There is nothing about senior citizens in that rider. It’s still okay for the young, the so-called inclusionists to send experienced, highly qualified older folks out to graze.
Political madness has put us all in physical danger by changing the requirements necessary for firefighters. Can’t carry someone a minimum distance, or complete an exercise involving pulling down a ceiling quickly enough? Not a problem—fire departments are changing the job’s physical requirements to avoid lawsuits. And what about Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, and other universities having decided, now, to replace ancient, hallowed language like upperclassman and freshman with “first-year students” and “upper-level students.” Were they concerned that women would be utterly at sea being called a “freshman”? Prep schools like Canterbury, in Connecticut, have moved from headmaster to “head of school.” What was wrong with having a headmaster or a headmistress? At least then you’d know how to properly address your letter or email. Because we surely need more land mines in our politically correct communications. Early in this process of sanitizing our language, the term Indian was replaced with Native American. The anthropological record is pretty clear. There were no “native” Americans. Everybody, except the Pleistocene animals, came here from somewhere else, from the south and from the land bridge that used to connect Asia with Alaska. What it is, of course, is a form of built-in apology for genocide and for Columbus’s misunderstanding of who he had encountered—neither of which makes any linguistic sense. That word Indian took on a secondary meaning more than half a mille
nnium ago.
There’s more. Political correctness knows no bounds and no shame. In 2009, as many of you know, a Muslim army psychiatrist at Fort Hood in Texas went on a shooting spree, killing thirteen and wounding thirty-two others. Colleagues had noted erratic behavior from him for years.52 He was a loner, and he had been written up for doing substandard work. Furthermore, the army knew of communication between him and a religious leader who had been named a security threat by the National Security Agency. But he wasn’t watched more closely specifically because he is a Muslim and nobody wanted to be chastised by the PC police. They had been told, time and again, that political correctness required them to be religion-blind… and that included a religion whose adherents are actively killing infidels. And it got more abhorrent. Refusing to call it what it was, Islamic-inspired extremism, the Obama administration called it “workplace violence.” That was an insult to the military, to the American people, and most of all to the victims. Not that our politically correct president cared.
In the name of political correctness, any level of bad behavior can be excused, if it is cloaked in the protective armor of heightened racial or cultural sensitivity. Diversity training materials teach that requiring people to show up on time may not fit into their culture, so this behavior should be accommodated instead of corrected.
In 2018, corporate America is seeing in full, grotesque flowering what we have been discussing, what took root in academia during the preceding decades. The student snowflakes who have been brainwashed into politically correct thinking are now flexing their muscles now that they are older people—I’m not going to say adults—in the business world.
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