Politically Correct Rising

Taking care of my little nephews gives me a perspective I would not otherwise have in what exactly means to be an adult.

Letting kids have their way with everything has dire consequences.

I mean, we literally do not have any adults checking the Left these days. There is a consequence to that. Every once in a while, a leftie catches a glimpse of the mess they are making and he works up the courage to say something. Jonathan Chait is the latest... Excerpt

...it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.” The stories ranged from uncomfortable (“No, where are you really from?”) to relatively innocuous (“ ‘Can you read this?’ He showed me a Japanese character on his phone”). BuzzFeed published part of her project, and it has since received more than 2 million views. This is not an anomaly.

In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” (read the whole thing)

Conservatives might rejoice in the schadenfreude, except for the problem the unaddressed PC takeover of the culture brings about. A sort of copycat effect, in that Some conservatives may exhibit PC tendencies themselves. In a way is understandable, because once PC is the norm, you either adjust to it or you are exorcised (driven to the margins) from the public square ie labeled a racist... bigot... homophobe... yadi yada.

So, no, I'm not rooting for 'casualties'.