For minorities of every kind, who have grievances against the majority, real or imagined, leftism has a real appeal, because it basically says that, all who oppose their particular interests, are conflicted towards them or simply evil. This is what Critical Theory really teaches.
If you stand up and say a woman is defined by her biology, you’re a misogynist – yes I know, that’s an oxymoron. If you’re against gays publicly having sex in a Pride parade float, you’re a homophobe. If you don’t accept children’s story hour by transvestites and transgenders, you’re a transphobe. If you’re opposed to mass illegal immigration, you’re a xenophobe. If you oppose DEI hiring practices based on the color of skin instead of merit, you’re a racist, and it goes on and on.
You have to be silenced. There’s no discussion. You are canceled. You’re removed. Dissenting opinions cannot be permitted. No alternative is to be proposed. This is a complete repudiation of intellectual reasoning. But they don’t care because if you say that you can’t consent to their ideology, and you’re bringing evidence that discredits their beliefs, well, that simply cannot be allowed. This is what cultural totalitarianism is. If you’re denying their reality, thinking outside their prescribed intellectual boundaries, and engaging in dissenting thought, then you’re denying the age of reason. This can’t be permitted.
I would argue that we are in a new age. That we are in an age of “unreason.” That’s what leftism has unleashed, and it’s an irony because they’ve done it under the pretense of being rational and what follows from that, is the erosion of everything America stands for: individual liberty, of freedom to think, to speak, freedom to act and a complete confusion about where the limit should be drawn between what I want, and what others need, and my wish to realize my own potential. But that’s where we are.
Any discussion or argument that a conservative can rarely obtain with a person of the Left feels like an uphill battle with someone who simply quotes the lofty slogans and catchy phrases leftist intellectuals create. In such an encounter, a conservative must explain the reason and purpose of everything under the sun, and even if effectively delivered, in the view of the increasingly superficial leftist, it’s nothing more than the lies of an evil mind.
Nearly everyone today is subjected to the tireless simplicity and repetition of progressivism. Even if the latter is so much better than the former, by all objective measures (measures which leftists conveniently reject), this is usually the only choice for most people. They will consume bad economic systems like socialism, bad art like bananas taped on walls, bad music like the hip-hop dreck of Cardi B and Lizzo, bad cinema like the idiotic videos on TikTok, and bad philosophies like postmodernism—not because any of them are true, but because they are easy and ubiquitous.
When these bad ideas are adopted en masse, they will quickly destroy the good things that previous generations took so much time to create. Just as junk food ruins the body, bad ideas will ruin the whole culture. Collective ignorance is bliss for only so long before it inevitably leads to chaos.
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