Sunday, July 28, 2019

Wokerati, or the Lunacy of the Left

As a leftist, I often find myself hanging my head in shame at the idiocy and decidedly il-liberal tenets of political correctness. I've been railing against p.c. lunacy for over 35 years, every chance I get, not that I make much headway with my lefty brothers-in-arms (oh, lord, I just used a "gendered" expression -- oh, the horror!).

The wokerati stand firmly against the entire history of liberalism, with their insistence on "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" and "sensitivity" and "cultural appropriation" and the whole raft of language-policing bullshit. They don't believe in freedom of speech. They don't believe in the First Amendment at all. They are little modern-day counterparts to the Maoists and Stalinists of old. They would be perfectly happy with struggle sessions (if they even know what those were, ahistorical as these people are).

They are, in short, frighteningly similiar to the far-right loons they love to decry. Hell, I decry them, too. But decrying two sides of the same coin doesn't give me much hope for the future, especially since these woke ones don't recognize their rightwing mirror images.

So several weeks ago, I wrote the first of what I imagine will be many such op-eds on this topic for my hometown newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. Here's the first part of it, with link to the whole thing:

Oh, dear. I have just discovered that I’m supposed to be offended. Furthermore, apparently I should have been taking offense for most of my life. Who knew? 
You see, I’m a first-generation Italian-American. I have dark hair, dark eyes, and skin that tans after 10 minutes in the sun. All my life, people have asked me what nationality I am — how quaint, such an old-fashioned word — or where I’m from.

Read the whole thing here