And Progressives / Socialists worship Government to bring a “Heaven on Earth” and they have their orthodoxy and liturgy to which there is no dissent including that there can not be anything else before it. Yeah, I wanna believe that the former Soviet Union, the early Communist China, Viet Nam, Venezuela and of course, North Korea are EXACTLY what the Workers’ Paradise was supposed to look like. Those on the Political Correctness college campuses all over the US may now believing in a religion all of their own (a self-flagellation type)? From a post at Instapundit, three sections of a “behind a paywall” post at the WSJ: JONATHAN HAIDT ON THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF CAMPUS RAGE:
Emphasis mine – and the money line is in the last ‘graph:
When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.
“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”
However, the “evil” is not about the tradition Christian sense of goodness and sin, but around political discourse (again, Conservatives think Progressives are misguided; Progressives believe Conservatives are EVIL). And like any fundamentalist religion, well, these folks act like Westboro Baptist church members.
These believers are transforming the campus from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”
This next bit is obvious to we on the outside but I’m betting that those on campus (and those that support them off-campus) won’t get it at all:
Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi.
How did we get here, and what can be done? On the first question, Mr. Haidt points to a braided set of causes. There’s the rise in political polarization, which is related to the relatively recent “political purification of the universities.” While the academy has leaned left since at least the 1920s, Mr. Haidt says “it was always just a lean.” Beginning in the early 1990s, as the professors of the Greatest Generation retired, it became a full-on tilt.
“Now there are no more conservative voices on the faculty or administration,” he says, exaggerating only a little. Heterodox Academy cites research showing that the ratio of left to right professors in 1995 was 2 to 1. Now it is 5 to 1. The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation.
And as I have blogged before, everything that used to be good is now bad, that which used held up as virtuous is now torn down. Inside out, upside down. But you know, people hated the Puritans then and the Westboro Baptists now simply because people hate being harangued. I’ve been called just about every name in the book – simply because I have differing political and moral views. As we saw with the TEA Party movement, a lot of us didn’t take well to that treatment. The Trump supporters, as we saw lately, are more adamant that this treatment won’t stand:
“People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always, ‘[Expletive] you!’ ”
Remember, using the language like the above is not the only answer. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #5 works even better:
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)
(H/T: The Blaze)
