Many of the richest people in the world live in California. The “tech giants” of Silicon Valley have not only made billions of dollars for themselves, the wealth they have created has benefited billions of other people in their state, their country, the world.

Had they been living under socialism, they could not have become rich and could not have created wealth.

Yet almost to a man and woman they vote for their state to be governed by socialists.

So do most Californians.

Under the socialist state government and city councils, great cities – most notoriously Los Angeles and San Francisco – have become filthy stinking disease-ridden high-crime shitholes.

San Francisco in 2019

Productive citizens are heavily taxed to provide the means to support the unproductive street-dwellers; so thousands of tax-payers are leaving the state to escape from the government most of them voted for, while more and more vagabonds, drug-addicts, lunatics, illegal aliens and criminals pour in from everywhere.

You can see what the result must be. Only the rulers, led by Nicolás Maduro Gavin Newsom, cannot see it. Or perhaps it’s what they passionately desire.

Now the governing socialists, to make sure that new generations will continue to vote for a life-style characterized by filth, disease, ignorance, dependence, misery and death, are planning their indoctrination with ever more outrageous dogma.

Parents beware!

Dr. Susan Berry writes at Breitbart:

The California Education Department’s model Ethnic Studies Curriculum plans to teach children capitalism is a “system of power” and “oppression”, equal to “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, and “racism”. 

The model curriculum … defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States”. …

It relies on language the radical left now considers essential to achieve its political goals.

Get ready for spadesful of gobbledygook.

For example, the introduction of the document uses the term “hxrstory”, instead of “history”, in keeping with the gender ideology that states “womxn” must not be defined in terms of their relation to men.

According to the model curriculum, “Ethnic studies is xdisciplinary”, and its writers add:

Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations, even within and beyond the various names and categories associated with our identities. People do not fit neatly into boxes, and identity is complex.

Complex, eh? So it seems, and getting more so by the minute!

One of the recommended methods of teaching the Ethnic Studies model curriculum to K-12 students is through “democratizing the classroom”.

“Ethnic Studies educators democratize their classrooms by creating a learning environment where both students and teachers are equal active participants in the co-constructing knowledge,” the writers state, enabling “students to be recognized and valued as knowledge producers alongside their educators, while simultaneously placing an emphasis on the development of democratic values and collegiality.”

The writers of the Ethnic Studies model curriculum say their goal is to:

… equip all students with the skills and knowledge to think critically about the world around them and to tell their own stories, empower students to be engaged socially and politically, enable students to develop a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion, and aids in the eradication of bigotry, hate, and racism.

Williamson Evers, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, writes in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal that the California document –

… includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools.

And –

It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do.

Most of the role models are murderers and terrorists:

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever”. Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform”. The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

This goes to a hell deeper than Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, Maduroism.

This is revolutionary anarchism. 

Is it likely or unlikely that the Democratic Party, if it were to gain full federal legislative and executive power with both houses of Congress and the presidency, would follow where California leads?

*

The proposed Californian curriculum is also blatantly and unashamedly anti-Semitic.

We summarize part of an article by Jonathan Tobin:

The model ethnic-studies curriculum by the Californian board of education proposes a course of study about Arabs that views the Palestinian war on Israel from the point of view of those who wish to destroy it. Jews are depicted as bloodthirsty villains victimizing Palestinians. The curriculum does not soft-pedal its bias against Jews. Israel is depicted as a colonial settler state whose creation was a “disaster”, and those who fight against it, including figures who are open about their anti-Semitism, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), activist Linda Sarsour and the late academic Edward Said, as heroes and role models to be emulated. The curriculum is a product not merely of the successful efforts of a handful of influential anti-Israel academics, but of the “intersectional” – ie. racist – ideology of the Left that spawned them.

John Stossel’s video assures us that the US is far from holding the record among the countries of the world for mass shootings, despite the allegation – propagated by its internal political enemies who long to disarm the citizens – that it does:

France is dissolving into chaos under the leadership of President Emmanuel Macron, an authoritarian when dealing with the suffering of the indigenous people of his country, but a submissive indulgent weakling when he has to deal with violent Antifa mobs and the ever-growing hordes of Muslim invaders.

Professor Guy Millière describes it at Gatestone:

France today is a country adrift. Unrest and lawlessness continue to gain ground. Disorder has become part of daily life. Polls show that a large majority reject President Macron. They seem to hate his arrogance and be inclined not to forgive him. They seem to resent his contempt for the poor; the way he crushed the “yellow vest” movement …

The “yellow vests” seem finally to have stopped demonstrating and given up: too many were maimed or hurt. Their discontent, however, is still there. It seems waiting to explode again.

The French police appear ferocious when dealing with peaceful protesters, but barely able to prevent groups such as “Antifa” from causing violence. Therefore, now at the end of each demonstration, “Antifa” show up. The French police seem particularly cautious when having to deal with young Arabs and illegal migrants. …

President Macron looks like an authoritarian leader when he faces the disgruntled poor. He never says he is sorry for those who have lost an eye or a hand or suffered irreversible brain damage from extreme police brutality. Instead, he asked the French parliament to pass a law that almost completely abolishes the right to protest [and] the presumption of innocence and that allows the arrest of anyone, anywhere, even without cause. The law was passed.

In June, the French parliament passed another law, severely punishing anyone who says or writes something that might contain “hate speech”. The law is so vague that an American legal scholar, Jonathan Turley, felt compelled to react. “France has now become one of the biggest international threats to freedom of speech“, he wrote.

Macron does not appear authoritarian, however, with violent anarchists. When facing young Arabs and illegal migrants, he looks positively weak. …

Macron knows that the partition of France already exists. Most Arabs and Africans live in no-go zones, apart from the rest of the population, where they accept the presence of non-Arabs and non-Africans less and less. They do not define themselves as French, except when they say that France will belong to them. Reports show that most seem filled with a deep rejection of France and Western civilization. An increasing number seem to place their religion above their citizenship; many seem radicalized and ready to fight.

Macron seems not to want to fight. Instead, he has chosen to appease them. He is single-mindedly pursuing his plans to institutionalize Islam in France.

Three months ago, the Muslim Association for Islam of France (AMIF) was created. One branch will handle the cultural expansion of Islam and take charge of “the fight against anti-Muslim racism”. Another branch will be responsible for programs that train imams and build mosques. This autumn, a “Council of Imams of France” will be established. The main leaders of the AMIF are (or were until recently) members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement designated as a terrorist organization in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – but not in France.

Macron is aware of the demographic data. They show that the Muslim population in France will grow significantly in the coming years. (The economist Charles Gave wrote recently that by 2057, France will have a Muslim majority). Macron can see that it will soon be impossible for anyone to be elected President without relying on the Muslim vote, so he acts accordingly. …

The French economy is not creating jobs. Poverty remains extremely high: 14% of the population earn less than 855 euros ($950) a month.

The educational system is crumbling. An increasing percentage of students graduate from high school without knowing how to write a sentence free of errors that make incomprehensible anything they write. …

The main concern of Macron and the French government … is climate change. Although the amount of France’s carbon dioxide emissions is infinitesimal (less than 1% of the global total), combatting “human-induced climate change” appears Macron’s absolute priority.

A Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, age 16, – nevertheless the guru of the “fight for the climate” in Europe – was recently invited to the French National Assembly by members of parliament who support Macron.

Of that autistic and intensely irritating kid, Andrew Bolt wrote in the Australian paper the Herald Sun:

Thunberg … is one of the most astonishing Messianic figures in world history — and I don’t mean that in a good way.

I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru.

Which created a storm of fury among climatistas and psychobabblers – and generally, the Left – everywhere. (So much so, that his article has been made inaccessible by Google. If you follow the link to the source of our quotation, you will not be able to read the whole article; the Herald Sun’s link fails.)

Guy Millière continues:

She delivered a speech, promising that the “irreversible destruction” of the planet will begin very soon. She added that political leaders “are not mature enough” and need lessons from children. MPs who support Macron applauded warmly. She received a Prize of Freedom, just created, which will be given each year to people “fighting for the values ​​of those who landed in Normandy in 1944 to liberate Europe”. It is probably reasonable to assume that not one of those who landed in Normandy in 1944 thought he was fighting to save the climate. Such minor details, however, seem beyond Macron and the parliamentarians who support him.

Macron and the French government also seem unconcerned that Jews – driven by the rise of anti-Semitism, and understandably worried about court decisions infused with the spirit of submission to violent Islam – continue to flee from France.

Kobili Traore, the man who murdered Sarah Halimi [an elderly Jewish widow] in 2017 while chanting suras from the Qur’an and shouting that the Jews are Sheitan (Arabic for “Satan”) was found not guilty. Traore had apparently smoked cannabis before the murder, so the judges decided that he was not responsible for his acts. Traore will soon be released from prison; what happens if he smokes cannabis again?

A few weeks after the murder of Halimi, three members of a Jewish family were assaulted, tortured and held hostage in their home by a group of five men who said that “Jews have money” and “Jews must pay”. The men were arrested; all were Muslim. The judge who indicted them announced that their actions were “not anti-Semitic”.

On July 25, 2019 when the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Haifa was competing in Strasbourg, the French government limited the number of Israeli supporters in the stadium to 600, not one more. A thousand had bought plane tickets to come to France to attend the match. The French government also banned the waving of Israeli flags at the game or anywhere in the city. Nonetheless, in the name of “free speech”, the French Department of the Interior permitted anti-Israeli demonstrations in front of the stadium, and Palestinian flags and banners saying “Death to Israel” were there. …

And yet, despite all that …

Although Macron is widely unpopular and widely hated, he will probably use the same slogans as in 2017: that he is the last bastion of hope against “chaos” and “fascism”. He has a strong chance of being elected again. [Even though] anyone who reads the political program of the National Rally can see that [his most serious rival] Marine Le Pen is not a fascist. Also, anyone who looks at the situation in France may wonder if France has not already begun to sink into chaos.

And France is not an exception to most of the other countries of Western Europe.

The sad situation that reigns in France is not all that different from that in many other European countries.

Down, down goes Europe into chaos – and the tyranny of the most oppressive of all extant religions.

The best journalist in the world tells the real history of “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”: how a desert brigand became an immeasurably rich king.

(Starting with a hideous picture of the murderous monarch and one of his innumerable progeny, too virtuous to drink alcohol; but wait for Mark Steyn’s delightful bar background, an impressive display of mostly unbroached liquor bottles.)

https://youtu.be/K-fpVLVywy8 

Boko: book – book learning = Western education.

Haram: not halal – unlawful – forbidden.

Gathering strength in the minds of Progressives is the idea that records of the past should be destroyed. The past was dominated by white men and everything they did was unjust, oppressive, bad.

All relics of their unjust world, archives, archaeological sites, statuary, murals, works of art in museums and galleries, above all libraries as collections of books open to everyone, must go.

(Yes, inventions of theirs that are useful to “minorities” can remain. If you are non-white – which is to say in the word à la mode, “diverse” – and Progressive, you have a right to those. A better claim, in fact, than whites do. Because.)

The idea has been made explicit, as Daniel Greenfield points out:

The Library Journal recently retweeted the accusation that, “Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence” and all the books by white people “are physically taking up space in our libraries”.  …

We can’t have that. Away with all books by white people!

And the schools must stop teaching literacy – even to the small extent that they do at present.

Why have libraries at all?

The obvious answer is that they employ librarians. And they provide internet access to homeless people and teach English to day laborers. They offer spaces for visitors to study the slogans on all their posters. That’s the anti-library future of the library. A space with few books and many screens. A community organizing hub that occasionally happens to have a few books tucked away somewhere. 

By “diverse” – ie. non-white – authors (with Progressive credentials) only.

Not too many though.

Well, there aren’t too many. And there’ll be lots of space for them when all books by whites have been removed. Anyway, reading is to be discouraged.

To put it simply, reading is racist.

It’s US versus THEM, and this is what THEY are doing to destroy us.

Must we despair?

The Left and Islam are at present in alliance against … the West, our civilization, the US, the rule of law, democracy, capitalism … in a word – liberty.

In that, the two ideologies are alike. And both are authoritarian, both demand strict obedience, both strive for domination.

But their prescriptions for government, laws, morals, life-styles are in direct opposition to each other. So the alliance cannot last.

When they clash, which they must, which of the two will prevail? Which is stronger?

A skirmish between them has broken out over a course of study in a school in Birmingham, England. The Leftists want the children to be taught that homosexuality is normal and good. But Muslim parents are angrily protesting that homosexuality is not normal, not good, really very bad, and the teaching – officially designated “LGBT awareness” and “relationship education” – is wrong and must be permanently abandoned. Right now there is a stand-off and neither side can be said to be winning.

However, a surprising event on the world stage indicates that the winner, the super-bully, is likely to be … Communism.

Daniel Greenfield reports and comments at Front Page:

The war of letters began when 22 countries penned a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs and “other Muslim and minorities communities”. 

The letter in defense of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang was signed by France, Germany, Canada, Sweden and 18 other, mostly Western and European, countries.

The case of the missing Muslim signatories was solved when the People’s Republic of China fired back with its own letter signed by 37 countries.

This letter in defense of China’s crackdown on Islam was signed by 16 Muslim countries.

While some of the Muslim signatories were drawn from African countries, the letter was also signed by ambassadors for the leading Arab governments including Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Kuwait. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, also signed on.

While Western governments wailed about Muslim human rights in China, the leading Sunni nations of the world signed off on a letter praising “China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights”.

(At which point Greenfield interjects with sardonic disgust: “Mandatory abortions, organ harvesting and the mass murder of millions are remarkable achievements.”)

… The world’s top Muslim governments … explicitly defended China’s crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.

“Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers,” the letter reads. …

The People’s Republic of China’s idea of de-radicalization measures had allegedly included forcing Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, a ban on beards, hijabs and the name Mohammed.

Even Qatar, whose Al Jazeera propaganda outlet has broadcast claims of Islamist oppression in Xinjiang, was finally forced to sign on to a letter that effectively disavowed what its own media has been saying.

The Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic minority, its Islamists had sought to set up a separatist Turkic Islamic state, and the Islamist regime in Turkey had been vocal about their cause. Erdogan, the Islamist thug running Turkey, had in the past accused China of genocide. This year, the spokesman for Turkey’s foreign ministry had described China’s crackdown on Islamists as a “great cause of shame for humanity”. The spokesman had accused China of engaging in torture and brainwashing in concentration camps.

But then Erdogan, the most aggressive national exponent of Islamist causes in the region, visited China, and declared, “It is a fact that the peoples of China’s Xinjiang region live happily in China’s development and prosperity.” Then he told critics to keep quiet to avoid spoiling Turkey’s relationship with the PRC.

The People’s Republic of China had attained the complicity of the world’s most vocal Turkish nationalist in its crackdown on Turkic nationalism and won the support of the tyrant who had transformed Turkey from a secular democracy into an Islamist banana republic for its enforced secularization of Muslims.

It’s hard to imagine a greater diplomatic triumph.

Finally, the letters humiliated the United States, which had not signed on to either one, but, despite providing protection and billions of dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, has been repeatedly attacked for its limited counterterrorism efforts which fall far short of anything that the PRC has done.

Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have long been thorns in America’s side, backing Islamic terrorists abroad, funding subversion within the United States, and criticizing our counterterrorism.

What does China have that we don’t? …

China was able to get not only Muslim countries, but the worldwide sponsors of Islamism, to sign on to its letter because they understood that crossing the PRC would carry a serious economic price.

The United States hands out foreign aid and trade agreements to countries no matter what they do. …

In the United States, cutting off foreign aid to a country, no matter how awful, is nearly impossible. The worse a country treats us, the harder we work to win that country over with extensive outreach. …

The People’s Republic of China doesn’t view insults and threats as an incentive for outreach. Instead it uses its economic clout to reward or punish countries based on how those countries treat it. …

American diplomacy has a fantastic track record of failure. The only thing it ever really seems to succeed at is giving away money and abandoning our national interests to pursue meaningless global goals. …

The PRC does not dedicate its diplomacy to saving the planet, ending all wars, or any of the delusional nonsense that occupies American diplomats in between expensive lunches and pointless conferences. Its diplomacy is a blunt instrument meant to achieve simple ends. And, that makes it far more effective.

The war of letters demonstrated that China could recruit 16 Muslim countries to endorse forcing Muslims to eat pork, while Western countries couldn’t get even one to sign on in opposition. …

America spends a great deal of time worrying about being loved. Our diplomacy is meant to convince the world to love us. China does not need to be loved. It never apologizes for its strength.

We should stop apologizing for our strength. And start putting our national interests first.

Which is the strongest principle and fixed goal of our president – and for that goal and principle (along with all his others) the Left furiously condemns him.

Man-made global warming?

Malcolm Roberts sizes up the lie:

(Hat-tip to Cogito)

It is sober, serious, strict, stern, grim, hard, austere.

The great short-story writer Joseph Epstein wrote earlier this year at Claremont Review of Books (CRB) on The Menace of Political Correctness:

Political correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. … But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

It is a vast Company, centuries old. It was largely responsible for the sentimental policies that weakened Rome and spread Christianity.

Epstein sees plainly what devastation it is busybodying to bring about now, with its current “be nice” project.

We quote part of his article (and recommend the reading of all of it):

[W]ith the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them.

The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

Political correctness meanwhile became the new national etiquette, at least among the self-acclaimed cognoscenti, or as they came to think of themselves, the “woke”—a word meaning those awake and responsive to the important social and political questions and issues of the day. In universities and in public life generally one violated this etiquette at one’s peril. A violation could be as trivial as telling the wrong joke, not being sufficiently inclusive (inclusivity, like diversity, would soon become one of the P.C. shibboleths) in one’s speech or writing, or being insensitive about observing the new dispensation on proper pronoun usage. …

Political correctness contravenes the US Consitution:

Under political correctness the First Amendment calling for free speech somehow didn’t apply, for lots of speech was now clearly out of bounds and entire subjects disallowed. Nor did political correctness have anything like a statute of limitations. One could be held responsible, and thereby punished, for what were deemed violations of the political correctness code committed half a century ago and longer—well before there was such a code. Aided by the internet’s social media, the surveillance exerted by political correctness became total, the impulse of political correctness itself totalitarian. …

If political correctness had stopped at the request for civil behavior, there would have been no difficulty in acceding to it. If homosexual men wish to be called “gay,” if blacks wish to be called “African-American,” if women prefer “Ms.” over “Mrs.” and “Miss,” there would be no problem whatsoever. But the program inherent in political correctness has evolved into something much more ambitious than that. In its current phase, it is revolutionary, seeking a utopia of complete fairness in all institutions—educational, cultural, political—which in its advocates’ interpretation means utter equality for all, excluding only those who violate political correctness’s underlying assumptions and well-known restrictions. …

The least perceived differences between individuals and groups, whether inherent or acquired through upbringing, are for now to be ignored in order that they may ultimately be eradicated. Political correctness doesn’t allow leeway for differences in intelligence, talent, or strength. Not equal opportunities but equal outcomes are its monomaniacal goal, and it is not overly concerned about the punishing means required to achieve it.

Under political correctness, righteous indignation and tender sensibilities must be protected. Hence the politically correct have no compunction in removing statues of figures from the Confederacy from their long inhabited public places. Nor must the young be put to undue stress in the classroom. So trigger warnings have been installed in universities alerting students to courses that may contain material painful to them. If minority students wished to remain exclusively among themselves—thus all but killing the once grand ideal of integration in American life—this, too, could be arranged by setting up separate dormitories and dining rooms, clubs and extracurricular activities for their use. A tenet of political correctness is that students must above all feel safe.

Along with rewriting the past and protecting the young from the harsh realities of life, the political correctness program emphasizes diversity, which has become one of the great desiderata of the contemporary university, itself the hearth and home of political correctness. … Admissions offices are instructed to accept fixed percentages of incoming students on the bases of race, national origin, and gender, replacing the old quotas once in place against Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Provosts and deans are hired to ensure this diversity is enacted. Schools without such staff or without the right ethnic mix are in danger of having federal funds denied them, for by now, such has been the spread of political correctness through the culture, that the federal bureaucracy is in on the game.

But President Trump has has threatened to cut off funding from colleges that stifle free speech.

In the contest for scholarships, prizes, and honorary awards, political correctness holds the cards, and deals from an unapologetically stacked deck. A good gauge of this is the list of any recent year’s honorary degrees bestowed by universities. The roster of recipients is sure to include at least one African American and more than one woman. Not to do so is to risk being called racist, misogynist, and to have one’s school judged egregiously behind the times. White male commencement speakers, no matter how impressive their scientific, artistic, or scholarly accomplishments, are rarer than honest politicians. Under the reign of political correctness, all other things being equal, which they rarely are, African Americans, women, and other presumably oppressed minority group members are naturally chosen over drab white males for professorships, administrative posts, scholarships, and other university appointments.

As for literary prizes, from the Nobel Prize on down, juries for such awards now feel that the time has come to give their prizes to women, or African Americans, or poets from Greenland, for one rarely any longer has the sense that the truly best writers are being honored. I once remarked in print, in the Times Literary Supplement, that the Pulitzer Prize usually goes to one of two types: those who don’t need it and those who don’t deserve it. When some years ago Katharine Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for her rather weepy poor-little-rich-girl autobiography, the critic Hilton Kramer remarked that she was awarded it on both grounds. …

The university has long been the institution where utopias go to die. After World War I, socialism’s chief home was the university. (Dig round a university’s History or an English Department today and you might still discover a Marxist napping in his office.) Of course the youth rebellion of the 1960s found its home in the university. All these may now seem passing fancies, but political correctness figures to have a longer, and more significant, life than any of them, for it has affected not merely the institution of the university but the wider culture of the country.

The goal of political correctness is to level American culture, to reduce the role of elite culture, slowly eliminating merit and intellectual authority as the main standards in the country’s culture. If one were to argue that the result of applying the criteria of political correctness is a general dumbing down of learning, or choosing to value artistic productions on a political rather than an aesthetic basis, an advocate of political correctness would likely respond that this isn’t necessarily true, but even if it were, it would be worth it. A great flattening equality is the goal of political correctness. This is what makes it revolutionary.

What’s in it for the more strident advocates, or at least for those who are not themselves members of victim groups? Nothing so mercenary as profit, nor so obvious as direct power, but something perhaps grander than money or power—the assurance of their own splendid virtue.

The role of virtue in politics or any social movement ought never to be underestimated. Outside the corridors of power, the feeling of righteousness, both on the Left and on the Right, is behind much political sentiment. The word “virtucrat” describes those whose sense of themselves is motivated by the feeling of their own superior public morality. Those who subscribe wholeheartedly to political correctness, especially those who have no direct stake in the game, do so because they feel doing so is right and just—and expressing these feelings makes them feel damned fine about themselves.

What they may not realize is the deep cultural implications of political correctness. The New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books currently review an overwhelming number of novels by women and African-American writers. In recent years much of the fiction published by the New Yorker also seems to be by women or by Asian writers. By publishing him extensively in its pages the Atlantic has made a prominent figure of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writings—asking for reparations for slavery days, worrying about his young son’s growing up in what he assumes to be an obviously and thoroughly racist country—are heavy contributions to the victimology of our time. The market for writing of this kind, by turns angry and sad, appealing above all to the guilt of its readers, is there, one imagines, because it makes those who publish it feel they are on the side of social justice, decency, righteousness—and thereby feel good about themselves. Virtue rides high again.

Consider the movies. Roughly half the movies up for Oscars this past year were, essentially, political correctness movies. …

Political correctness comes at no direct cost to those who endorse it. The cost is ultimately to the culture, which in so many ways is sadly diminished.

Political correctness meshes nicely, too, with the phenomenon known as identity politics, which has dominated the Democratic Party in recent decades. Identity politics entails groupings of people—chiefly minorities—by their victim status, whether race, sex, sexual orientation, or religion. Behind identity politics is the demand for equal rights, always with the supposition that they do not already exist and the added presumption that no progress toward this goal has genuinely been made, so that it is assumed that vast numbers of whites stand implacably opposed to black equality and men to equality for women, while homophobes are everywhere blocking acceptance for gays, and on and on. Under identity politics, sides are chosen up as in a sandlot baseball game: Victims versus Victimizers, the Woke versus the Deplorables. No one has to be told on whose side in this game virtue lies. …

As for humor, while one might have thought political correctness itself supplies an ample target, comedians have tended to shy away from it, lest they, too, be put out of business by public censure. Under the reign of political correctness, one is allowed not a single mistake. … One of the hallmarks of the politically correct, of course, is a grave and abiding humorlessness.

The role of political correctness in politics has also greatly expanded. … The hearings over the Supreme Court candidacy of Brett Kavanaugh were little more than trial by political correctness. …

One can only hope that political correctness will go so far as to make evident its absurdity … Until then there is nothing to do but to wait things out, in the hope that the deep illogic of political correctness and its widespread perniciousness, like that of Prohibition and other programs of enforced virtue that have gone before, will indubitably reveal itself for the grievous mistake it is.

Will it? And will it then be abandoned?

If so, you can bet on its immediate replacement with some other enforced oppressive virtue to sadden human hearts and in the dark to bind us.

Brilliant Stephen Miller, speech-writer and adviser to President Trump, eloquently and accurately puts mischievous Left-leaning Chris Wallace right, when Wallace tries to defend the “hate America” message of the four Congress women known as “the Squad”, by analogizing what they have said with things President Trump has said that are in fact the absolute opposite.

The four – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley – are “stoking racial divisions”; the president most certainly is not.