Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

By Michael Knowles

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…few people who support “political correctness” invoke the phrase in earnest. More often they will do so with tongue in cheek, as if to acknowledge their own overreach. But though self-aware progressives may not always use the term with sincerity, they always seem to enforce the standards with severity.

(Knowles 2021, xv)

Chesterton’s distinction between progressives, whose business “is to go on making mistakes,” and conservatives, who exist “to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”¹

(Knowles 2021, xvi)

Political correctness (PC) is a standard of speech and behavior along leftist ideological lines. It no doubt censors certain words and actions, but then so does chivalry. All societies embrace and enforce standards. 

(Knowles 2021, xvi)

With that brief exchange in Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll prefigured political correctness, the war of words that would define our politics more than a century later. What does it matter whether we call someone who breaks the law to enter the country an “illegal alien” or an “undocumented immigrant”? What’s the difference between a Christmas tree and a “holiday tree”? Doesn’t global warming pose the same threat to our civilization regardless of whether or not we rename it “climate change” or, more recently, “the climate crisis”? Why quibble over semantics?

The difference may be semantic, but semantics matter. When people describe a distinction as “just semantics,” they mean to dismiss it as trivial. But how many of those people know what the word “semantics” means? “Semantics,” it turns out, means meaning itself. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, which exist so that we can distinguish one thing from another. 

(Knowles 2021, 1)

Humpty Dumpty had clearly read his Aristotle, the ancient philosopher who defined man as a “political animal,” more so than “any other gregarious animals” because man has the power of speech. Other beasts may have the ability to gunt or yell indications of their pleasure or pain, but only man has the power of speech “to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust.”² Man alone can tell good from evil. The ability to articulate those distinctions “makes a family and a state.” And both Humpty Dumpty and Aristotle understood that the relationship goes further: politics is speech. In statecraft, when speech fails, war ensues. If, in the words of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” speech is the practice of politics by ordinary means.³

Language changes naturally over time. A notable recent example is the word literally, which once meant the use of words in their most basic sense without recourse to metaphor but now also describes the use of words metaphorically, which is the opposite of literally. If that isn’t confusing enough, the word literal refers to letters, which are symbols and therefore the opposite of literal, and the non-literal sense of literal goes back at least a century, to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses – all of which is to say that the natural evolution of language is complicated.⁴

… Political correctness is like a man attempting to give himself a nickname. The artifice and transparency of the act make it impossible. The nickname will never stick – unless the man has the power to enforce it.

(Knowles 2021, 2)

Since words matter so much, the definition of “political correctness” itself must matter. Differing definitions of political correctness agree that it involves rejecting certain language to better conform to some political orthodoxy. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, for example, defined the term in 1997 as “conformity to a body of liberal or radical opinion on social matters, characterized by the advocacy of approved views and the rejection of language and behavior considered discriminatory or offensive.”⁵ These are all necessary features of political correctness, but they are not sufficient. Political correctness does not merely mask the harsh realities to which clear language refers; it actually contradicts the underlying meaning of words, thrusting culture through the looking glass. 

Most people recognize that language plays a role in leftist ideology. But the relationship goes further than that. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes the relationship between the politically correct lexicon Newspeak and the English socialist regime IngSoc. “Don’t you see the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” asks a member of the totalitarian party. “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is IngSoc and IngSoc is Newspeak.”⁶ The same might be said of political correctness and leftism. A man who believes he is a woman must at all times be called a “trans woman,” or better still just a “woman,” because leftist ideology demands a liberation so radical that a man can become a woman simply by saying so. Language does not merely reinforce the ideology but actually constitutes it.

Some defenders of political correctness have admitted that they use language to manipulate reality, but they maintain that their conservative opponents do the very same. The Oxford linguist Deborah Cameron made this accusation during the debates over political correctness that roiled the academy in the 1990s. According to Cameron, with the advent of political correctness, liberal “verbal hygienists” were simply pointing out “that the illusion of a common language depends on making everyone accept definitions which may be presented as neutral and universal, but which in fact represent the particular standpoint of straight white men from the most privileged social classes.”⁷ In other words, they declared value-neutral language a lie designed to enforce patriarchy and white supremacy.

Around the same time, the literary theorist Stanley Fish published There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, in which he denies the possibility of a “disinterested search for truth” and insists that traditional language is “no less politically invested” than politically correct jargon.⁸

(Knowles 2021, 3-4)

President John F. Kennedy, quoting the journalist Edward R. Murrow, famously commended Winston Churchill for having “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle” during the Second World War, and no one has ever accused Winston Churchill of being “politically correct,” as Lady Astor could attest.⁹ Statesmen and orators from Pericles to Donald Trump have wielded language to suit their purposes. No one considers Donald Trump “politically correct” either. What the critics miss is that the manner in which each side manipulates language differs.

The Right tends to manipulate language by using strong words to evoke clear images. Churchill promised, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”¹⁰ Churchill didn’t speak of “overseas contingency operations,” as Barack Obama would decades later. He told the world he would “fight” – a clear, concise Saxon word. Then he tells you exactly where he intends to fight, and then, in case you missed his point, he tells you he will “never surrender.” 

Donald Trump chose similarly blunt words, albeit perhaps less gracefully, when he announced his bid for president in 2015 by decrying illegal aliens, whom he accused of “bringing drugs,” “bringing crime,” and being “rapists.” Even his caveat – that some, he assumed, were “good people” – relied on strong, simple speech to convey his meaning.¹¹ Whether or not you liked what Trump said, you knew what he meant. 

Political correctness relies on euphemism, soft words used to sugar-coat harsh realities. We all use euphemisms some of the time as a matter of good manners. We refer to old women as “women of a certain age.” We mourn those who have “passed away” rather than those who have died. In prior ages, a lady went to “powder her nose,” and she still uses the “bathroom” or the “restroom” rather than the toilet.¹² We use euphemisms -literally, “well-speaking” or auspicious words – to be polite.¹³

In all those cases, the polite euphemism softens the reality it describes the spiritual fact of death. Women may indeed powder their noses after they’ve done whatever else they do in rooms that often include a bath and in which anyone might rest. Polite euphemisms soften the truth, but they do not lie. 

Leftists tend to manipulate language by using vague terms and jargon not just to soften but to conceal and even contradict the realities to which they refer. 

(Knowles 2021, 4-5)

The very phrase “political correctness” illustrates this intrinsic dishonesty, as “political correctness” is no more political than any other sort of speech, and it isn’t correct. The phrase came into use as a way to categorize falsehoods that ideologues believed ought to be considered true for political purposes. Much politically correct jargon follows the formula of adding an unusual adjective or adverb to a noun or adjective. The late presidential speechwriter and conservative columnist William Safire described this form as the “adverbially premodified adjectival lexical unit,” the description itself a play on PC jargon.¹⁴ Around the time Safire described this form, comedians were also mocking it endlessly, translating terms like “short” into the politically correct-sounding “vertically challenged.”

In this formula, the adjective or adverb usually serves to negate the noun or adjective it modigies. The term “politically correct” itself follows this politically correct formula by using an adverb to negate the adjective it precedes. That is, “correct” means true. But “politically correct” means not true. “Justice” means getting what one deserves without favor. The politically correct “social justice” is a form of injustice because it means getting what one does not deserve because one is favored. “Marriage” in every culture throughout history has meant the union of husbands and wives. “Same-sex marriage,” however favorably one views the concept, is not marriage. 

(Knowles 2021, 6)

Political correctness goes further than demanding fealty to a set of opinions. It promises to fundamentally transform the world. Political correctness contorts language in an attempt to remake reality along leftist lines. The Washington Times has described it as “the destructive manipulation of idealism to suit it for totalitarian purposes.”¹⁵ According to the premises of political correctness, a man can become a woman if only we all agree to call him “her.” A baby will cease to be a baby if we all just agree to call him a “fetus” or better yet – since “fetus” means “offspring” – a “clump of cells” or a “product of pregnancy.” As Hamlet declare when feigning madness, reality is nothing more than “words, words, words,” and “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”¹⁶ According to political correctness, words do not describe reality; they constitute it.

(Knowles 2021, 8)

The radical skepticism on which political correctness relies collapses under even the slightest scrutiny. Every freshman philosopher who ever declared, “There is no such thing as objective truth,” must inevitably explain how he came to regard his own statement as objectively true. But logical rigor and consistency do not much matter when it comes to political correctness, which implicitly denies the possibility of both. Even taking this radical skepticism as just another well-intentioned lie – assuming, for example, that the politically correct know deep down that a man who believes himself to be a woman is not actually a woman, but they consider it good for that individual and for society to pretend that he is – means uncovering an even more radical premise at the heart of political correctness: the evil of truth and the goodness of lies. 

Traditionally, our society has frowned on lying. We have believed that “the truth shall make you free.” The politically correct invert this understanding. They believe that the truth about the man who thinks he’s a woman will actively harm him. The truth about the baby will damage the mother who wants to rid herself of it. They consider the truth destructive and lies compassionate. For the politically correct, the lite that the man is a woman will free him from the shackles of biology. The lie that a baby isn’t human or alive will free his mother from the undesired umbilical chain that imposes responsibility upon her. If language really does constitute reality, there isn’t anything wrong with this sort of lying. If words can redefine reality, it isn’t even lying at all. 

(Knowles 2021, 9-10)

Most historians of political correctness trace it to the early 1990s, when New York Magazine ran a front-page story on the phenomenon. Writes such as Dinesh D’Souza and Roger Kimball found PC flourishing in the campus debates of the 1980s and the battle over the Western canon. William Safire and leftist academic Ruth Perry traced it to the Chinese Communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung and his American acolytes in the 1960s.¹⁷

In fact, progressives’ unnatural manipulation of language goes back further still. The spelling reformers of the early twentieth century tried to hasten society’s march toward progress by erasing inefficient flourishes and vestiges of tradition from language. The Esperantists of the late nineteenth century sought to break down barriers to global communication and identity through the contrivance of a universal second language, ironically just at the moment when the world’s traditional universal second language, Latin, fell out of favor among progressives, who derided it as “dead” even before they had succeeded in killing it. Despite progressives’ best efforts, Esperanto never caught on, and few today speak the unnaturally simplistic language. (It should come as no surprise that one of the few people ever to speak Esperanto as a child is George Soros, the most infamous and influential leftist financier of our age.¹⁸)

(Knowles 2021, 10-11)

As the Claremont Institute’s Angelo Codevilla explains, “The point of PC is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself.” For this reason, the British historian Paul Johnson defined political correctness as “liberal fascism.”

(Knowles 2021, 13)

In recent years, leftist activists have attempted to rewrite the history of this pivotal political movement, cultural Marxism, as a “conspiracy theory.” The most ambitious revisionists have added the implausible charge of “anti-semitism” to the smear. Political operatives at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) launched a censorious campaign based on this canard as early as 2003. Bill Berkowitz, a leftist activist and freelance writer for the SPLC, claimed that the term cultural Marxism was “intended to conjure up xenophobic anxieties,” in particular against “the Jews.”¹⁹ In May  2019, leftist activist and Al Jazeera columnist Paul Rosenberg took to the pages of Salon to indict “cultural Marxism” as “the grand unifying narrative for the hard, fascist, and neo-Nazi right,” comparing the concept to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which served “to inspire Hitler and his Nazis.”²⁰

The concerted effort to make the phrase “cultural Marxism” taboo underscores the central strategy of political correctness: control the words, control the culture. And the strategy worked. By 2019, mainstream information channels accepted the new definition. Wikipedia, the most popular source for general knowledge on the internet, had redefined cultural Marxism as “an anti-semitic conspiracy theory which claims that the Frankfurt School is part of a continual academic and intellectual effort to undermine and destroy Western culture.”²¹ (When one investigates the phrase “conspiracy theory,” which came into fashion in its present meaning during the late 1960s, one discovers leftists insisting that research into the origins of “conspiracy theory” itself constitutes a conspiracy theory.²²)

(Knowles 2021, 16)

Among Mussolini’s many sins and blunders, the least acknowledged and most significant may have been the dictator’s decision to imprison Antonio Gramsci – not because Gramsci didn’t deserve it, but because imprisonment afforded the Communist agitator the time and focus to write his influential Prison Notebooks. 

“For 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning,” explained the prosecutor at Gramsci’s trial in 1926.²³ With the hindsight of a century, one understands the prosecutor’s fear and sense of urgency. But given the widespread recognition of Gramsci’s genius, one fails to understand the fascist regime’s decision to permit him a pen and paper in his cell. Rather than stop Gramsci’s brain from functioning, Mussolini focused it so that it would resound throughout the ages. 

Gramsci continues to exert his influence even today, particularly on university campuses and from there throughout the broader culture. A recently deceased founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society was Joseph Buttigieg, an influential professor of English at Notre Dame whose son, Pete, sought the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2020. That a putatively “moderate” presidential candidate could boast so radical an intellectual pedigree highlights the extent to which Gramsci’s views have infiltrated the mainstream. 

In 2011 the elder Buttigieg published the first and only critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks translated into English.²⁴ The journal entries give readers a glimpse into not merely the seeds of political correctness but also the justification for the denial and deceit practiced in its name, particularly in Gramsci’s admiration of Niccolo Machiavelli, the prince of political immorality and founder of modern political science. The name Machiavelli conjures different and contradictory images to different people. He defended principality; he supported republics. He encouraged deceit in public dealing; he demanded honesty about human nature. He was an active participant in the political intrigues of his time; he was a disinterested philosopher communing with the ancients. 

Many more scholarly books have investigated Machiavelli’s true character and aims. For our purposes it suffices to understand how Gamsci viewed the man and, through him, the relationship between political philosophy and politics – theory and practice. Gramsci read in Machiavelli “a ‘philosophy of praxis’ or a ‘neo-humanism,’ in that he does not recognize either immanent or transcendent elements (or the metaphysical kind) but only the concrete action of men who because of their own historical needs work on and transform reality” (emphasis mine).²⁵ For Gramsci, Machiavelli was no dispassionate political scientist but a man of action. 

(Knowles 2021, 18-19)

In the little-read Discourse or Dialogue about Our Language, Machiavelli compares the infiltration of an opponent’s language with the military tactics used by ancient Rome to control foreign territories and armies. By “cultural hegemony,” Gramsci understood, as did Machiavelli, that society may be overcome not solely by force but also by internal subversion. A crafty revolutionary may find more success by transforming a society’s traditions, institutions, and most of all its language than by picking a fight out in the open. 

According to stereotype, the absentminded professor can tell you everything about his abstract theories, but he knows nothing of the practical world. Intellectuals, ideologues, and radicals may excite one another with their utopian visions, but their lack of common sense precludes them from persuading common people. No revolution can succeed if it opposes common sense. Therefore, the clever revolutionary must transform the common sense to accord with this vision. 

(Knowles 2021, 19-20)

Gramsci encountered the same dilemma his disciples face today: no matter how confident they are in the ability of their radical theories to improve the lot of the common man, the common man never seems to like those theories. In fact, the common man tends to enjoy his own customs, language, and way of life. This contentment must therefore constitute a “false consciousness” that cannot be overcome save by “raising awareness,” a popular phrase derived from Gramsci. To raise the awareness of the people, to transform the common sense, one must subtly uproot and replant their culture. “Every revolution,” he wrote, “has been preceded by an intense labor of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst the masses of men.”²⁶ Thus the revolutionary must take up two goals simultaneously: to criticize and to educate.

A group of Marzist academics took up the task in the 1920s, first in Germany and later in the United States. Initially called the Institute for Marxism and later the Institute for Social Research, the group came to be known simply as the Frankfurt School, after the university that lent the scholars institutional credibility.²⁷ The Frankfurt School developed the social philosophy of Critical Theory, which over the past century has come to dominate not just college campuses in the United States but primary and secondary education as well. These educational institutions have offered an incubator to protect the nourish Critical Theory even after the fall of the Berlin Wall relegated orthodox Marcists to their own ash heap of history. 

(Knowles 2021, 20-21)

Critical thinking in the sense of objective analysis hardly exists on university campuses today. But the sort of thinking proposed by Critical Theory dominates. And just what is the theory? Simple: to criticize.

The Frankfurt School theorists varied in interest, approach, and even ideology. “What united them,” according to Max Horkheimer, an influential early director of the Frankfurt School, “was the critical approach to existing society.”²⁸ Some modern critics of Critical Theory portray the Frankfurt School as a monolithic movement with a substantive message, but this analysis fails to give the devils their due. Concrete systems amy be criticized, as the critical theorists well knew. The Frankfurt School never left itself open to the sort of attack it leveled at others. The strength of Critical Theory came not from any philosophical coherence but rather from its position, in Jay’s words, “as a gadfly on other systems.”²⁹

(Knowles 2021, 21-22)

Critical Theory entered the world through the unholy matrimony of Marx and Freud. At its most basic tactical level, the Frankfurt School, especially Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, sought to reconcile sex and socialism. The Frankfurt School took its cues from Marx, who denied the classical conception of human nature as fixed and permanent.³⁰ Instead, he considered it to be socially constructed and therefore fluid. “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual,” wrote Marx in Theses on Feuerbach. “In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”³¹ From this understanding of human nature, or rather the lack thereof, Gramsci derived the necessity of cultural hegemony. Fromm, Marcuse, and other neo-Marxists deduced from it the revolutionary importance of sex. 

(Knowles 2021, 22)

In 1948, George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty–Four, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian government’s use of thought control to maintain power. The inversion of the year in which he wrote prefigured the future inversion of standards that has come to pass, off the page. Orwell imagined a world under universal surveillance and perpetual historical revision. As his protagonist Winston Smith explains, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”³²

The Black Lives Matter riots of 202, which targeted and destroyed countless historical monuments throughout the United States, put Winston’s words into action. The rioters wrought their violence in the name of “social justice” and “woke” politics, new jargon for the same old scourge of political correctness. The rioters took their cues from the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which cast the United States as hopelessly unjust on the false premise that the Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery. 

Although academic historians from across the political spectrum refuted this central lie, the Times persisted, and the revisionist series went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.³³ The 1619 Project sought not to reexamine American history but to rewrite it as a pretext for re-founding the country. When the political philosopher Charles Kesler called the nationwide violence of 2020 the “1619 Project riots,” the project’s author Nikole Hannah–Jones welcomed the moniker as “an honor” and thanked him. ³⁴

Beyond historical revision, Orwell’s regime also employs perpetual, arbitrary war and technology such as the “telescreen,” an innovation that eerily refigured our own ubiquitous broadcasting devices. But more than anything else, Big Brother’s government relies on the control of language to maintain power. “Newspeak,” the novel’s most direct prophesy of political correctness, controls its subjects’ minds by changing and limiting their lexicon. Through this curtailing of language, “thought-crime” – that is, dissent from party orthodoxy – becomes impossible. 

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” explains Syme, the party apparatchik in charge of compiling the new dictionary. “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. … The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak.”³⁵ The ruling Ingsoc regime, short for English socialism, considered language control no mere instrument of its power but rather the totality of it.³⁶

Orwell’s warnings about the dangers English socialism posed to language and free thought raise more questions than answers in light of the author’s own political identity: Orwell himself was an English Socialist. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” Orwell explained.³⁷ When conservatives invoke Orwell in their arguments against socialism, leftists point out Orwell’s own confusing political views. The key to understanding how Orwell could inveigh against “Ingsoc” and Newspeak while simultaneously siding with the Ingsocs and the Newspeak while simultaneously siding with the Ingsocs and the Newspeakers of his day lies in the final four words of his statement: “as I understand it.”

(Knowles 2021, 31-33)

But the new speech code did not spring out of a vacuum. Rather, it developed specifically to undermine and overthrow existing norms. By inventing and enforcing new jargon, political correctness prohibits older terms and the moral attitudes they imply. For instance, the politically correct term “homeless” and the more recent and euphemistic “unhoused” necessarily displace the more traditional terms “burn” and “tramp.”³⁸ In defining vagrants by their material circumstances, the terms “homeless” and “unhoused” deny that such people might bear any responsibility for their condition. The terms “bum” and “tramp” suggest that the vagrants’ situation might be a consequence of their own choices and behavior, a possibility now deemed politically incorrect. 

Many bums are junkies, a term that has long since given way to the politically correct formulation “addict” or the even more recent “person with a substance use disorder,” as former president Barack Obama’s drug czar once suggested.³⁹ Drunkards and druggies make poor choices and live with the consequences, but victims of the “disorder” or “disease” of drug use cannot be held responsible for their miserable state. By its speech codes, political correctness removes responsibility and therefore the possibility of any coherent moral code. Under political correctness, saying the right thing supplants doing the right thing. 

Political correctness denies oddity. Civilization has traditionally considered it unusual for men to masquerade as women. Political correctness calls such men “transgender,” a perfectly reasonable alternative to those who are “cisgender” and identify with their actual sex. “Homosexual” behavior is considered no more unusual than “heterosexuality,” despite its relative rarity in society. In refusing to acknowledge any trait or behavior as deviating from the norm, political correctness denies any norms at all. 

Beyond mainstreaming the unusual, this denial of established standards prohibits traditional moral opprobrium. The lexical shift from “bum” to “unhoused” necessarily implies a moral shift from ne’er-do-well to victim. It removes the stigma from living on the street and suggests that the sidewalk denizen bears no responsibility for his lodging or lack thereof.

(Knowles 2021, 35-36)

When the liberal scholar Stanley Fish declares “there’s no such thing as free speech,” he has a point. “‘Free speech’ is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance,” he asserts. “We give our preferred verbal behaviors that name when we can, when we have the power to do so, because in the rhetoric of American life, the label ‘free speech’ is the one you want your favorites to wear.”⁴⁰

Plenty of speech has fallen outside the purview of the First Amendment over the course of American history, including libel, threats, sedition, fraud, obscenity, and “fighting words,” among other categories. ⁴¹Although many self-described conservatives today defend pornography on First Amendment grounds, a federal court sentenced a prominent pornographer to prison for obscenity as recently as 2008.⁴² Even John Milton, perhaps the best known defender of free speech in the English language, explicitly endorsed censorship of certain ideas in his most famous treatise on the subject, Areopagitica.

“I mean not tolerated Popery,” wrote Milton, by which he meant Catholicism, “and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpated … that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.”⁴³ Even liberals have their limits.

(Knowles 2021, 37-38)

“Free speech” carries a different meaning in America than it does in Western Europe or anywhere else in the world. The American Constitution and legal tradition offer broader protections for political speech, in particular, than do other nations. But the United States, like all nations, has standards of speech, and it has always enforced them. 

In a self-governing republic, speech is politics, and politics is speech. As the realm of politics requires limits, so too must the realm of speech. By failing to acknowledge this practical reality, the so-called “free speech purists’ give the game away to politically correct censors, whose immediate object is not even the establishment of new standards but merely the abolition of the old. 

(Knowles 2021, 38-39)

Specificity holds the key to escaping this rigged semantic game. If “free speech” does not mean and has never meant that one may say literally whatever one pleases without consequence, then what precisely does it mean? Here again we may benefit by learning from our ideological opponents. Stanley Fish asserted, “Speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict.”⁴⁴ Political correctness has narrowed the range of thought, as Orwell’s Syme predicts. But it has also overturned the conception of the good that public thought and speech aim to uphold. 

Whereas our civilization has traditionally pursued justice – that is, giving to each what he deserves without favor – political correctness exalts “social justice,” or giving to each what he does not deserve because he is favored. While our civilization traditionally esteemed accomplishment, political correctness rewards grievance and victimhood. Whereas our civilization traditionally cherished its cultural inheritance, political correctness maligns that inheritance and demands reparations. 

(Knowles 2021, 39)

Vladimir Nabokov introduced the phrase “politically incorrect” in its present meaning in his 1947 novel Bend Sinister about an imaginary totalitarian regime. “Some organizations used to be pretty bad and are forbidden today,” reports the state-controlled press, “but nevertheless it is better for a man to have belonged to a politically incorrect organization than not to have belonged to any organization at all.”⁴⁵ Nabokov meant “politically incorrect” as we mean it today: that is, deviating from party orthodoxy. 

(Knowles 2021, 42)

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” wrote Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” which examines the relationship between linguistic perversion and political orthodoxy. “A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”⁴⁶ Political correctness has succeeded because even its opponents fall victim to its allure. 

(Knowles 2021, 42-43)

Fascism once had a narrower definition. Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, defined the term with the help of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile in 1832. Fascism, according to Mussolini and Gentile, rejects individualism, economic liberalism, egalitarianism, pacifism, Christianity, and “Marxian socialism.” It supports one entity above all others: the state. 

“The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State. Instead of directing the game and guiding the material and moral progress of the community, the liberal State restricts its activities to recording results. The Fascist State is wide awake and has a will of its own. For this reason it can be described as ‘ethical.’”⁴⁷

Neither conservatives nor leftists in the twenty-first century meet the definition of fascism, which is an ideology unto itself. Yet the Left flings the term at the Right, and the Right foolishly hurls it right back at the Left, accepting “fascism” as the ultimate political evil, the very premise leftists sought to establish in the first place. Both sides excitedly condemn fascism, a phantom villain that dies with Mussolini on the streets of Milan. Meanwhile, the extant evil of Marxian socialism, openly embraced by the Left’s most influential activist groups and vast swaths of the Democrat Party, gets off the hook and spreads. 

Political correctness thrives by turning opponents into unwitting supporters. It exhibits what the essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “anti-fragility,” the quality of not merely resisting but actually becoming stronger through shock and challenge.⁴⁸ The more we argue against it, the more we accept its terms – its very substance – into our language, thought, and culture. 

(Knowles 2021, 43-44)

Neither the phrase “political correctness” nor any of its derivations appears in the famous Communist tract. But the word “correct” appears 110 times. The translators preferred “correct” to “right,” which they rarely used in the sense of “justified” or “acceptable,” perhaps for fear of associating rightness with the Right.⁴⁹ Whatever the reason, the odd and persistent use of “correct” caught the attention of Western radicals, who adopted the phrase and the ideology it described. 

(Knowles 2021, 45)

Politics in its most basic sense does not refer merely to “the government” or the various bureaucratic entities that govern us, as right-wing ideologues often assume. Politics more broadly means how we all get along together. It derives from the ancient Greek word polis, which refers to the entire city-state. Conservatives may prefer a broad private sphere, but such a private realm cannot exist without the support of a stable public sphere in which citizens broadly agree on the premises of the state. 

In other words, the separation between public and private life requires some measure of political consensus. 

(Knowles 2021, 46)

“Traduttore, traditore,” goes an Italian idiom, which translates to “translator, traitor,” though it sounds better in the original – proving the point. The expression captures the ultimate impossibility of translation. No matter how skillful the translator, any translation from one language into another transforms the text because the source and target languages differ in sound and culture.

(Knowles 2021, 48)

Political correctness is itself a process of translation, betraying culture through language that reorders the culture’s standards. As we have seen, politically correct wordsmiths pretend that the term “justice-involved person” is a synonym for “criminal.” Both terms refer to the same people – that is, people caught committing crimes – but they imply entirely different moral frameworks. The translation distorts and betrays the original meaning. 

Language changes naturally over time, but the shift from “criminal” to “justice-involved person” did not come about through natural linguistic development. Rather, leftist academics, political activists, and bureaucrats contrived the new term, and left-wing journalists parroted it.⁵⁰ The two terms reflect two different cultures: one in which people have moral agency, another in which they do not. Criminals break the law and deserve punishment. “Justice-involved persons” are passive characters; if active at all, they sound as though they pursue justice. And only a cruiel society would publish someone for pursuing justice. 

If culture worked precisely as the radicals would have it, this process of translation would remake the world, and that would be the end of it. But while new jargon may shift attitudes for a time, a countervailing force cuts against it: the “euphemism treadmill.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker identified and named this concept in his 2003 book, The Blank Slate. “Linguists are familiar with the phenomenon, which may be called the euphemism treadmill,” Pinker wrote. “People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations, and so on.”⁵¹ A pretty word can conceal a harsh fact for only so long; eventually, the harshness of the reality will pollute the beauty of the word. 

The simplest example of the euphemism treadmill may be “simpleton,” an offensive word by today’s standards that was introduced into public discourse in 1846 by S.G. Howe, a well-intentioned physician who meant no disrespect.⁵² Two years after coining “simpleton,” Dr. Howe founded the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Youth – not to be confused with nearby Harvard.⁵³ “Feeble-minded,” from the Latin flebilis, “lamentabled,” was not an insult but rather a clinical descriptor for slow folk. When society deemed those terms too harsh, scientists replaced them with “moron,” coined by psychologist Henry Goddard from the Greek word moros, “dull.”⁵⁴ Other euphemisms such as “retarded” (from the Latin for “slow”) and imbecile (“weak”) in turn replaced “moron” and “idiot,” and the process continues. No matter which term society chooses, the word inevitably attains a negative connotation because it refers to a condition that most people consider lamentable. 

“The euphemism treadmill,” Pinker explains, “shows that concepts, not words, are primary in people’s minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not for long.”⁵⁵ Pinker contends that reality reasserts itself in the end, which offers some consolation to conservatives. But does he place too much faith in the inevitable triumph of reason in human affairs?

Concepts may weigh more heavily in people’s minds over time, but they cannot be dispositive. New jargon may be colored over time by the concept to which it refers, but it does not therefore follow that the concept derives no long-term benefit from the euphemism. 

(Knowles 2021, 49-50)

The euphemism treadmill underscores two other features of political correctness: irony and inconsistency. To continue with the previous example, consider the term “queer,” which dates back to the sixteenth century and originally meant “strange.” In the nineteenth century, the word became a slur for homosexuals, and this meaning persisted well into the twentieth century.⁵⁶ In 1968, the conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr. memorably lost his temper and warned leftist public intellectual Gore Vidal, “Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your God-damned face, and you’ll stay plastered,” much to the delight of Vidal, who at that point won the debate.⁵⁷ 

Today the slur that delighted Vidal delights the practitioner of political correctness for a different reason. By the late twentieth century, homosexuals had appropriated the term for themselves and begun to use it with pride. But at the same time the older, derogatory sense persisted, at least for some people. So universities can dedicate whole departments to “queer studies,” but when the conservative comedian Steven Crowder refers to a homosexual journalist who goes by the screen name “Gy Wonk” as a “queer”, YouTube cuts off his income.⁵⁸

Political correctness holds that the meaning of words differs depending on who utters them, the clearest example of this phenomenon being “the n-word.” The “n-word” has two senses: one derogatory (hard “r”), another affectionate (soft “r”). Politeness has exorcised the former from common use; political correctness has simultaneously encouraged and banned the latter use, depending on the identity of the speaker. Black people may use the erm all they like, notably in rap music, and proponents of political correctness will cheer them on for appropriating and redefining a slur. But white people may not sing along to those rap songs, or the PC police will condemn them for racism. According to the enforcers of political correctness, the meaning of the word changes not with semantic context but with the skin color of the speaker. 

(Knowles 2021, 51)

While it may seem inconsistent, this cynical censorship – enforcing the rules only on some people and, even then, only some of the time – follows from the radicals’ political premises. If nature is fixed and objective, then the identity of a speaker cannot change the meaning of words because the reality to which the words refer exists apart from the speaker; if nature is perfectible and evolves, the identity of a speaker can change the meaning of words because there is nothing separate and enduring to which  words refer. 

Woodrow Wilson, the most consciously progressive president in the history of the United States, explained the irreconcilable difference between these two political frameworks by way of scientific example. The Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution, Wilson contended, established constitutional government because they lived under the sway of Isaac Newton, who believed that eternal and fixed laws governed nature. But not, Wilson explained, we live in the age of Charles Darwin, who has demonstrated that nature is never fixed but always “evolving,” and therefore our politics must acknowledge this discovery, ditch the old fixed rules, and “evolve.” ⁵⁹

Under Newton, politics must acknowledge the imperfectability of nature and strike a prudent balance of power. James Madison described this system and its logic in Federalist 51:

“What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government  would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”⁶⁰

Under Darwin, this separation of powers and system of checks and balances could only hamper progress, which requires a great concentration of energy if we hope to “evolve.”

(Knowles 2021, 52-53)

In Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky described irony as “the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”⁶¹ Pride, he observes, causes people to hide their intentions behind sarcasm, a form of verbal irony. 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle cast sarcasm in even darker terms. “Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil,” he confessed, “for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.”⁶² Sarcasm, like the Devil, only accuses; it offers nothing positive. 

Cultures on the rise know what they believe, and they possess the confidence to defend those beliefs; decadent societies retreat into irony and criticism. Medieval Europe repelled invaders and set out under the Cross of St. George to reconquer lost lands; decadent modern Europe opens its borders to those same hostile powers because it lost its faith long ago and now detests its own past triumphs.

(Knowles 2021, 56)

So much for “the tolerant Left.” That phrase has become a punch line, first among conservatives, who accuse the Left of hypocrisy for praising tolerance while censoring dissent, but later also among liberals, who deem conservatives “intolerant” and therefore undeserving of tolerance. Both sides have a point. The Left is intolerant, but the Right oversimplifies and consequently misunderstands what tolerance means.

When opponents of “cancel culture” demand that we “cancel cancel culture,” they do not contradict themselves. Neither did Chesterton when he observed that “there is a thought that stops thought” and that “that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”⁶³ Similarly, leftists observe that there is a tolerance that undermines tolerance, and that sort of tolerance must not be tolerated. Tolerance means the bearing of hardship, an intrinsically limited concept, as man can only bear so much before he breaks his ability to bear anything at all. 

(Knowles 2021, 60)

The “totalitarian” democracy of the United States, Marcuse complained, had destroyed critical thought and obliterated “the difference between true and false, information and indoctrination, right and wrong.”⁶⁴ Here Marcuse conceals the radicalism of his proposal behind euphemism, but hints of his partisan ends creep out. What precisely distinguishes “information” from “indoctrination”? Both words simply mean teaching.⁶⁵ The former entered English in the early fourteenth century with the meaning “to train or instruct in some specific object”; the latter appeared in the 1620s with the meaning “to teach.”⁶⁶ Marcuse simply considers some teaching good – namely, his own – and other teaching bad. Rather than discerning between truth and falsehood or right and wrong as those terms have traditionally been understood, Marcuse appears more concerned with the distinction between “politically correct” and “politically incorrect.” 

Pure tolerance would permit all views into the public square and allow people to make up their own minds. But according to Marcuse, the people, having been educated – or rather “indoctrinated” – in the propaganda” of America’s “totalitarian” society, lack the liberty of mind to distinguish between true and false ideas. “To enable them to become autonomous, to find by themselves what is true and what is false for man in the existing society,” he asserts, “they would have to be freed from the prevailing indoctrination (which is no longer recognized as indoctrination).”

(Knowles 2021, 62-63)

When progressives refer to “the right side of history” or claim that “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,” they are invoking the same alleged historical process. The Coen Brothers pilloried this conception of history and Herbert Marcuse himself in their 2016 comedy, Hail, Caesar! George Clooney’s trailer-made-character, movie star Barid Whitlock, spends an evening with a secret Communist study group led by Professor Marcuse, who indoctrinates him in his theories. When Whitlock returns to the film studio, he gushes to his boss about the radical professor. 

(Knowles 2021, 64)

The most excitable radicals claim that conservative speech not only makes them feel unsafe but even physically harms them. In 2017, Lisa Feldman Barrett proclaimed in the New York Times that, while sticks and stones may break our bones, words can also hurt us. “Scientifically speaking,” she warned, “it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter you brain – even kill neurons – and shorten your life.”⁶⁷

Barrett, like Marx and his acolytes before her, invokes “science” to suggest that one may not reasonably disagree with her. We may quibble over politics or philosophy, she implies, but “science” is a settled matter.⁶⁸ One wonders how long the New York Times would remain in print under a Republican administration should Barrett’s proposed banning of noxious language pass into law. Perhaps for that reason, most mainstream leftist censorship advocates have offered more modest arguments for curtailing conservative speech.

During the campus uprisings of 2017 and 2018, left-wing opinion columnists invoked the most banal cliche in the censorship toolkit: that no one has the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The line derives from the 1919 Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, in which the justices unanimously upheld convictions under the Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing flyers opposing the draft in World War I. One suspects the Left might hesitate to invoke this principle if they understood the political context in which it arose. 

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defended the Court’s abridgment of free speech on the grounds that the flyers created a “clear and present danger” by hampering the government’s efforts to recruit soldiers for the war. “The most stringent protection of free speech,” the justice insisted, “would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”⁶⁹ But Holmes appears to have changed his mind later that year when he dissented in Abrams v. United States, arguing that the distribution of flyers opposing the government’s interference in the Russian Revolution did not violate the Espionage Act. And in 1969, the Court partially overturned the Schenck decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, the lazy phrase has persisted in our discourse. 

(Knowles 2021, 65-66)

Until the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Texas v. Johnson, which created or recognized, according to one’s point of view, the constitutional right to burn the American flag, the law could prohibit desecration of venerated objects. Now courts hold that the First Amendment protects flag-burning.⁷¹ And yet in 2019, an Iowa judge sentenced thirty-year-old Adolfo Martinez to fifteen years in prison for the “hate crime” of stealing and burning a rainbow flag, which symbolizes colorful sexual desires.⁷² So in fact, the government still outlaws desecration of venerated objects; it’s just that the objects of variation are different. 

“Previously neutral, value-free, formal aspects of learning and teaching now become, on their own grounds and in their own right, political,” – a process Marcuse encouraged as “radical criticism throughout” and “intellectual subversion.”⁷³ In the past, though partisans disagreed on much, all waved the same American flag, which symbolized the nation founded on the belief that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”⁷⁴ Today the American flag has become a partisan symbol. Left-wing athletes and even elected Democrats disrespect the star-spangled banner; conservative politicians hug and kiss it on the campaign trail.⁷⁵ Where once school-children learned the arguments that our Founding Fathers set forth at the constitutional convention, today they study the subversive calumny of the 1619 Project.⁷⁶

While heretofore-innocuous objects become politicized, previously political objects exit the public square. The burning of an American flag, once condemned by all, now constitutes legitimate political speech; moral opprobrium for aberrant sexual acts, once almost universally held, now suggests a menage of “phobias” unfit for civilized society. Our prejudices have not disappeared; they have merely changed. 

Our prejudice regarding the word “prejudice” illustrates this shift. Today the term connotes injustice and irrationality, but until recently the word meant no more than a received opinion, the sentiments and instincts that pass through a culture without the aid of philosophic and scientific abstraction. Prejudices shape all cultures at all times whether the acculturated admit it or not, and coherent conservatives once celebrated that fact. 

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries established a common prejudice against prejudice, which the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke mocked in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”⁷⁷

Men are not walking, talking syllogisms. Only a fool would attempt to translate every impulse, passion, and preference he feels into the cold language of reason. Those radicals who vanquish their natural prejudices simply clear a space for new prejudices, a political reality Marcuse well understood. His description of prejudice reads as a mirror image of Burke’s; he decries exactly what the Irish statesman celebrated:

“The avenues of entrance are closed to the meaning of words and ideas other than the established one – established by the publicity of the powers that be, and verified in their practices. Other words can be spoken and heard, other ideas can be expressed, but, at the massive scale of the conservative majority (outside such enclaves as the intelligentsia), they are immediately “evaluated” (i.e. automatically understood) in terms of the public language – a language which determines “a prion” the direction in which the thought process moves. Thus the process of reflection ends where it started: in the given conditions and relations.”⁷⁸

Ironically, Marcuse’s lament makes a fine argument for just prejudice, if only conservatives could bring themselves to take it seriously. The conservative prejudices and established institutions of Marcuse’s day inoculated society against the poisonous ideology that he and his fellow-travelers peddled. Since then, however, radicals have succeeded at shifting those prejudices through a war of position that gave them control of every established institution. 

(Knowles 2021, 67-69)

No less a liberal than John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, admitted limits on tolerance. Locke begins by praising toleration as “the chief characteristic mark of the true Church … so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” But soon enough, like his elder contemporary Milton, Locke questions whether Catholics ought to be afforded the same toleration. “That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince,” Locke clarifies, referring one presumes to the pope. Much like twenty-first century Democrats, Locke was willing to tolerate Catholics only if the dogma lived not so loudly within them. 

But beyond Catholics, the great philosopher of toleration reserved his most trenchant intolerance for atheists. “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God,” Locke declared. For starters, “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist,” who rejects the moral order. “The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all” that one might cherish in society, and the atheists have none but themselves to blame, since “those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.”⁷⁹ Our notions of tolerance rely upon Christianity; one cannot coherently demand the former while rejecting the latter.

(Knowles 2021, 71-72)

“A man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too,” averred the feminist activist Toni Cade in her 1970 anthology, The Black Woman.⁸⁰ Nabokov may have coined “politically incorrect” in print, but Ruth Perry identifies Cade’s remark as the first instance of “politically correct” in its present meaning.⁸¹ Sexual politics powered the expansion of political correctness beyond niche ideological circles and into the broader public sphere during the ensuing decade.⁸² Feminists sought to overthrow a culture they decried as patriarchal by making language fickle, which itself required a fundamental restructuring of the political order. 

(Knowles 2021, 74)

In 1985 – a bygone, halcyon era when the New York Times still retained at least the pretense of sense and humor – the Gray Lady suggested the term “woperdaughter” as a politically correct substitute for “woman,” which gave offense for its reliance on the word “man,” and “wo-person,” which gave offense for its reliance on the word “son.”⁸³ The paper mocked humorless feminists – forgive the superfluity – who opted for “wimmin,” “womyn,” and “womin” to avoid the dread three-letter word. 

Amid all the ridiculous misspellings, one might almost forget that “man” is a gender-neutral term, referring not just to members of the male sex but also to humanity as a whole. No less an authority on the English language than the King James Bible uses the word in this way: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”⁸⁴ 

Feminists set out to abolish the separation between personal and political life, and nothing can be more personal than the words that form one’s thought and speech. The feminist linguist Deborah Cameron explains the strategy. “Meaning works by contrast: the words you choose acquire force from an implicit comparison with the ones you could have chosen, but did not,” she observes. “By coining alternatives to traditional usage, therefore, the radicals have effectively politicised all the terms.”⁸⁵ The mere existence of politically correct jargon, ridiculous though it may be, charges traditional language with heightened political significance. 

“Wimmin” never quite caught on. But other politically correct feminist formulations have taken hold. The coinage of “chairwoman” and “chairperson” unseated the traditional, gender-neutral “chairman” because of its perceived political incorrectness. Often “chairpersons” go by the bizarre abbreviation “chair,” as though they were pieces of furniture rather than the people who sit on them. Now to refer to oneself as a person rather than a seat connotes a political worldview. 

Christopher Hitchens, a left-wing opponent of political correctness, observed, “The real tendency of PC is not to inculcate respect for the marvelous variety of humanity but to reduce each group into subgroups and finally to atoms, so that everyone is on their guard against everyone else.”⁸⁶ Political correctness breaks the unconscious bonds and traditions that protect private life from the intrusions of ideological engineering. 

(Knowles 2021, 79-80)

The word “mothering” entered the English language sometime in the early fifteenth century, more than half a millennium before “parenting” began to replace it.⁸⁷ References to a child’s “parent or guardian” have almost entirely supplanted references to mothers and fathers in official documents and even polite conversation, much as the sterile terms “partner” and “significant other” have replaced “husband” and “wife” in a society that shuns normativity. Liberals may argue that “parenting” offers a neutral alternative to an outdated, sexist term. But that neutrality is illusory, as “parenting” carries just as many social implications as the traditional word it supplanted. 

“Motherhood” implies that women have a special role in raising a child, a role for which they are better suited than men. “Parenting” suggests that no particular distinction exists between mothers and fathers – or men and women, for that matter. A culture that talks about “mothering” and “fathering” will more likely preserve the family than one that preaches “parenting,” which might be undertaken by single women, single men, same-sex couples, mixed-sex throuples, or a commune.

(Knowles 2021, 83-84)

Deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and many other pretentious academic movements proliferated throughout the academy during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, all to the same political purpose. They sought to undermine the philosophical and cultural basis of Western civilization. 

In 1976, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida summed up the maddening technique of deconstruction in six words: “There is nothing outside the text.”⁸⁸ Derrida’s critics and admirers have long debated the precise meaning of his cryptic statement, translated from the French (“il n’y a pas de hors-texte”).⁸⁹ Since rehashing these debates threatens even greater danger to brain cells than does his philosophy, the safest way to understand Derrida’s meaning is by observing the consequences of his writing on the Western mind, now atrophied by generations of argyle-bargle to the point of denying objective truth itself. 

No one denies that social and historical context can help a reader to interpret a text. But the deconstructionists’ obsession with context to the exclusion of absolute truth and objective knowledge has had the ironic effect of depriving great works of their proper context. The querile focus of the “decolonizers” on Shakespeare’s genetics and genitals obscures the objective beauty of his poetry and profundity of his observations about human nature. 

(Knowles 2021, 89)

Shakespeare’s works and the King James Bible have shaped the English-speaking peoples more than any other texts. A cursory glance at the Gettysburg Address or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural reveals the extent to which those great worlds educated America’s greatest orator, Abraham Lincoln. Shakespeare and the KJV in no small part wrought the Western mind. 

(Knowles 2021, 90)

The revolutionaries understand the importance of language to culture, hence their focus on literary criticism within the university and on politically correct speech among the broader public. Once entrenched, these “critical studies” expanded their scope into virtually every academic discipline, from history to hard science.

Leonard Jeffries, the founding chairman of the Black Studies department at the City College of New York, provides a typically absurd glimpse into this sort of pseudo-scholarship. Beginning in 1972 and continuing throughout his two-decade tenure in the classrooms of CUNY, Jeffries expounded on his theory that Africans constitute a superior race of “sun people,” in contrast to whites, who make up the inferior race of “ice people.”⁹⁰ The black “sun people,” he explained, possess “core spiritual values,” unlike the materialistic “ice people,” who objectify everything they see – most notably the “sun people,” through slavery – because “the ecology of the cave is different than the ecology of the riverbank.”⁹¹ Readers who have followed the argument thus far might consider seeing a psychologist. 

In the summer of 2020 television personality Nick Cannon regurgitated Jeffires theories for a new generation. During an episode of his podcast Cannon’s Class, the actor argued that “melanated people” possess compassion and souls, unlike white people, who “are actually closer to animals” and “are actually the true savages” because they lack “the power of the sun.” This pigment deficiency means that “the only way that they can act is evil,” he explained. “They have to rob, steal, rape, kill … in order to survive.”⁹² Jeffries couldn’t have said it better himself. 

After decades of spouting this bilious nonsense, Jeffries crossed a line on July 20, 1991, during a two-hour-long speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Culture Festival in which he blamed “rich Jews” for controlling Hollywood and financing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The New York Times and the Washington Post both rightly denounced him.⁹³ But what took so long? As the Post reported at the time, “Jeffries’ race-baiting harangues have been a familiar part of CUNY life for years, [and] this has not prevented him from gaining both tenure and the chairmanship of his department, not to mention a following at City College as, in the Times’ description, ‘a popular, flamboyant lecturer.’”⁹⁴ Jeffries festered at City College for two decades on the grounds that his dismissal would threaten “academic freedom.”

(Knowles 2021, 91-92)

Contrary to the popular and meaningless mantra that educators ought to “teach students how to think, not what to think,” education necessarily teaches certain facts to the exclusion or outright contradiction of others. The slogan actually disproves itself, as it tells people what to think about education. 

When a teacher informs his students that two plus two make four rather than five, he teaches them what to think; the students’ grasp of basic arithmetic, in turn, teaches them how to think about more complex problems. The principle extends beyond mathematics. When a teacher in ethics or religion tells his students that it is wrong to steal or that it is wrong to commit murder, he teaches them what to think, and these lessons teach students how to think about other moral issues. 

(Knowles 2021, 96)

“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” Hannah-Jones wrote, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”⁹⁵ Hannah-Jones, who majored in history and “African-American Studies,” may have overheard this canard as she steeped in the School of Resentment during her undergraduate years, but the claim has no basis in reality. Hanlon’s razor impels us never to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But whether through honesty or ignorance, the 1619 Project began with a lie.⁹⁶ 

Not even left-wing historians could abide the deceit. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz drafted a letter, signed by academic historians from around the country, and sent it to the editors and publisher of the Times.⁹⁷ The historians established their leftist credentials by beginning the letter with praise for the project. “We applaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” they professed. “Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service,” they continued. But finally they came to their objection: the Project got the central facts wrong. 

“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing,’” the historians explained. “They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism.”⁹⁸ If the naive historians were looking for either, they had come to the wrong place, but they nevertheless offered their correction, which merits quotation at length:

“On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue.’ This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding – yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”

Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham Liincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederisk Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.”⁹⁹

(Knowles 2021, 97-98)

When did America begin? The first permanent English settlers arrived at Jamestown in 1607. The first slave ship landed at Point Comfort in 1619. The Pilgrims first set foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620. An unknown soldier fired the shot heard round the world in 1775. The Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1789, the Constitution became the law of the land. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War and with it “a new birth of freedom.”¹⁰⁰ In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which the politically incorrect historian Christopher Caldwell has called America’s second constitution.¹⁰¹

For much of our history, Americans traced their roots to Plymouth rather than Jamestown, even though the Mayflower sailed more than a decade after the southern settlers reached Virginia. The Pilgrims’ religious zeal, work ethic, and focus on the family better “framed” the national spirit than the all-male Jamestown settlers’ hapless quest for wealth, which ended in starvation and even cannibalism before mail-order brides arrived to repopulate the colony.¹⁰²

Many Americans find their Founding in 1776, glossing over the century and a half of English settlement that preceded the signing of the Declaration. Now radicals have attempted to re-found the Founding in 1619, ignoring every virtue in American history to focus solely on the sin of slavery. Their first try failed on the facts, but in the long run they may yet succeed, as fact succumbs to framing. 

Conservative have attempted to refute the 1619 Project on almost exclusively factual grounds. Here again they have refused to learn from their radical opponents, who understand that attitude trumps even facts in the narration of history. If conservatives will not listen to their opponents, they might at least read their own philosophers, such as Edmund Burke, who observed, “In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.” All well and good, but what happens when ideologues abuse that great volume for their own political ends? “It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons … and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving, dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury,” wrote Burke, whose comments could serve as a review of the 1619 Project.¹⁰³ 

Facts matter, but the same set of facts can evoke any number of different attitudes. The radical activist Howard Zinn played fast and loose with the facts in his notorious polemic A People’s History of the United States, but his lies have caused less damage than his attitude, which recast America as a dark and devilish morass rather than a shining city upon a hill. He highlighted our nation’s vices and ignored her virtues. According to Zinn, America exists authentically only in her sins. 

Two national narrative have emerged from this great, unrolled volume of history. The conservative version affirms America’s basic goodness and acknowledges her shortcomings with humility – both the national humility of our forefathers, who considered themselves sinners in the hands of an angry God, and also the personal humility expected of heirs to a great fortune given us by those selfsame forefathers. The “politically correct” history of the United States differs from the conservative version not so much in the facts it acknowledges as in its attitude toward the nation. The politically correct narrative approaches our national scandals with wrath and pride, delightedly condemning our ancestors and boasting of the radicals’ own righteousness. Conservatives tend to arm themselves with facts in the battle against leftist “feelings.” Facts matter, but feelings dictate where those facts find themselves in the historical narrative. 

(Knowles 2021, 99-100)

Lest one conclude that race plays the decisive factor in these hoaxes, the many false claims of rape that have bedeviled college campuses in recent years as well bear recounting. Left-wing activists have popularized the claim that one in five women will be raped during their undergraduate years.¹⁰⁴ Some radicals inflate the statistic to one in four.¹⁰⁵ If those numbers were true, women would face greater danger on the picturesque green of Harvard Yard than they do in the back alleys of Botswana. 

No reasonable person could believe those statistics, least of all the purported victims, many of whom “had not realized they had been raped” until left-wing activists informed them of their victimhood.¹⁰⁶ The origin of the “one in five” statistic lies in a thirteen-question survey designed by the social scientist Mary Koss for Kent State University students in 1976. The first twelve questions addressed various sexual acts with different degrees of ambiguity. The thirteenth asked bluntly, “Have you ever been raped?” According to Koss, many respondents got the last question wrong. 

Koss then revised and re-administered the survey to six thousand university students across thirty-two campuses in the United States. She determined that 27 percent of respondents – more than one in four – had suffered rape since the age of fourteen. But only 55 percent of those clinically classified victims agreed with Koss’s assessment.¹⁰⁷

A more recent survey by the Association of American Universities arrived at the one-in-four statistic through the explicit use of political correctness: the social scientists administering the survey simply redefined the terms. The surveyors found that 11 percent of femal undergraduate respondents had suffered rape or sodomy according to the legal definitions of those terms, but that number soared to 23 percent when measured by the vaguer category of “sexual assault,” which might include any unwanted “grabbing, groping or rubbing against the other in a sexual way, even if the touching is over the other’s clothes.”¹⁰⁸ But this broad definition robs the statistic of all meaning. One cannot compare an unwanted pinch – however unpleasant, immoral, and even illegal – to rape. 

(Knowles 2021, 106)

The DOJ found a victimization rate of 7.6 among 1,000 non-students and 6.1 among 1,000 students. In both cases, the Justice Department data show victimization rates more than an order of magnitude lower than the ideological surveys suggest.¹⁰⁹ Harvard is not more dangerous for women than Botswana. It isn’t more dangerous for women than the surrounding neighborhoods of Boston. In fact, it is much safer, as everyone knows intuitively. Yet the popular fantasy of epidemic campus rape persists, encouraged by regular, high-profile hoaxes. 

(Knowles 2021, 107-108)

These academic debates over history, literature, and language reverberated far beyond the campus walls. Education Secretary William Bennett deplored the curriculum change as “a proposal to drop the West.”¹¹⁰ In 1987, the ame year Jackson led his march against Western Civ, the philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind,  an unexpected bestseller that tracked the decay of the modern university. Bloom subtitled his book, How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Despite the dry subject and ponderous subtitle, the book sold over a million copies.¹¹¹ The public understood that something in the nation’s psyche had snapped.

Bloom saw in the new campus culture the central paradox of political correctness: the pursuit of “openness” had closed people’s minds. “Openness – and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings – is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger,” Bloom wrote. Whereas in the past American education had aimed at excellence, scholarship, and the cultivation of the knowledge and virtues necessary to liberty – that is, the liberal arts – by the mid-to-late-twentieth century it valued “openness” above all else.

Allan Bloom understood the radicals to believe that “the study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism.” We must therefore liberate ourselves, not only from false opinion, but from opinion itself. As Bloom saw it, the reformes’ “point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”¹¹² The American mind had become so open that its brain had fallen out. 

(Knowles 2021, 112-113)

In Bloom’s words, the education of openness “is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything.”¹¹³ But no man really can be open to everything – least of all the reformers. Education requires judgment, and popularity contests do not determine truth. Pedagogy is neither an open nor a democratic process. 

When one decides that two plus two equals four, he closes off his mind from the possibility that two plus two might equal five. One may read the King James Bible and agree, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!” Or one may read Hamlet’s rewriting of that psalm and agree that the earth and sky appear “no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”¹¹⁴ Each vision precludes the other. Even Hamlet’s assertion, when feigning madness, that his reading amounted to no more than “words, words, words” – a forerunner of the genuinely mad, politically correct radicals’ relativism – constitutes a judgement. Radical openness collapses into the claim that no meaning exists at all, and therefore it excludes the possibility that any meaning does exist. 

(Knowles 2021, 113-114)

The Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” popularized by the Second Wave feminists of the 1970s, may have proven perverse in practice, but it began with a true principle: men must be forced to be free. We come into this world helpless slaves to our appetites. If we persist in thoughtless pursuit of our lusts and desires, we descend into licentiousness; if we educate ourselves and tame our appetites through training in virtue, we attain liberty. A free politics requires free people. But free people reject the radical’s politics. So the radicals redefined liberal education. 

The reformers began by conflating licentiousness, the permission to do as one pleases, with liberty, which is the right to do what one ought. Today few appreciate the difference between these polar opposites, but the men who built our country considered the distinction essential to self-government. .

(Knowles 2021, 114-115)

“Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” declared George Washington in his farewell address.¹¹⁵ Benjamin Franklin observed, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”¹¹⁶ Thomas Jefferson, our nation’s third president and, more important in his eyes, the founder of the University of Virginia, warned, “Without virtue, happiness cannot be. This then is the scope of all academical emulation.”¹¹⁷ Jefferson took education seriously. Unfortunately the academy forgot his wise admonition, and by the latter half of the twentieth century the radicals had succeeded at replacing standards of virtue with a culture of licentiousness masquerading as liberty in the name of openness.

(Knowles 2021, 115)

In 2016, the right-wing Proud Boys began to describe themselves as “Western chauvinists” to counter a pervasive, politically correct narrative that blamed the West for all the world’s ills. But “chauvinism” is by definition excessive. The term, which refers to an outsize love of one’s country, comes from the legendary French soldier Nicolas Chauvin, who enlisted at age eighteen and was horrifically disfigured by seventeen wounds. Napoleon himself presented Chauvin with the Sabre of Honor, and the soldier’s ceaseless devotion to Napoleon is said to have earned him widespread derision in France after the Bourbon Restoration. 

Gavin McInnes, the conservative comedian and Proud Boys founder, no doubt suggested the name with tongue in cheek. But while it contradicts the radicals’ explicit premise that Western civilization is evil, the descriptor unwittingly grants them their secondary premise: that the West’s defenders must be excessive and unreasonable. Political correctness wins either way. 

A third option exists. … Reason, tradition, and filial piety all serve as a proper grounding for love of country, particularly when that country is the United States. 

(Knowles 2021, 130-131)

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated appeals court judge Clarence Thomas to replace the outgoing justice, Thurgood Marshall. Both were black, but the similarities between Thomas and Marshall ran only skin-deep. The two judges held diametrically opposed views of the Constitution. Marshall advocated judicial activism and considered the Constitution a “living document” that epowers judges to push the nation toward progress even if that means ignoring or contradicting the plain text and meaning of the framers.¹¹⁸ Thomas held the then-minority opinion that the Constitution is a legal text that lacks organs and arteries but has meaning, which can be known through judicious study of what its words meant when it was ratified. 

(Knowles 2021, 131-132)

Exploiting sex scandals for political gain has a long history in America. The practice goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers and Alexander Hamilton’s extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds, which his political opponents used against him in 1797.¹¹⁹ Had the Anita Hill hearings focused on an ordinary affair, they would merit little mention in American political history. A “sex scandal” did not upend Clarence Thomas’s confirmation process. Given all of the hubbub, one almost forgets that Hill never claimed to have engaged in any sexual act with Thomas. Rather, Hill claimed Thomas had committed the vague offense of “sexual harassment,” a term coined less than two decades before. The Anita Hill hearings transformed American politics not through their use of sex as a political cudgel but through the new sexual standards by which Thomas was judged. 

Anita Hill had no evidence to support her claims beyond statements from a couple of colleges, who were contradicted by numerous other women who had worked for Thomas. Hill’s telephone records and employment history undermined her suggestion that Thomas had victimized her, and multiple colleagues called her a liar. Thomas never raped, molested, or even engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with Hill, nor did she ever suggest he did. 

(Knowles 2021, 134-135)

The Court found that abortion fell among the “matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy”  that “are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”¹²⁰ But the conception of abortion as a personal matter misses the entire point of the debate, which asks whether the law may prohibit the killing of babies in the womb. Abortion is a political, not just a personal matter because it involves the right to end an innocent human life and even the right to outlaw that particular type of murder. Only by radically redefining standards of justice can abortion transform from a political to a personal matter, and the radicals achieved precisely that redefinition when they declared that “the personal is political,” which the Courts then codified into constitutional law. 

But the Court did not stop at abolishing the right of the people to pass their own laws regarding abortion. The judiciary took this elevation of the personal over the political further by declaring the right of the individual to redefine reality itself. “At the heart of liberty,” wrote Justice Kennedy, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”¹²¹ Kennedy – along with Justices O’Connor and Souter, who signed onto this nonsense – appears to have mistaken the Supreme Court of the United States for a freshman-year philosophy class or a smoky, undergrad bull session, but his sophomoric slam poetry enshrined in jurisprudence a radical subjectivism that would accelerate the erosion of traditional standards. 

The justices’ frivolous philosophical musings never made any sense. No one has the right to define his own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe” or “of the mystery of human life.” One may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but academic standards bar that fanciful notion from biology classrooms, at least for now. One may believe that red traffic lights mean “go,” but police officers have every right to insist on their own concept of the light’s meaning and to give the driver a ticket. One may believe that babies are human beings, but our regime rejects that view in favor of its own “concept of existence.” In fact, the justices did just that only one sentence prior to the infamous “sweet mystery of life” passage when they declared that the Fourteenth Amendment somehow confers a right to abortion.

(Knowles 2021, 135-136)

…the truth of an assertion does not depend upon its voluntary acceptance. Just because the state compels a particular belief, it does not necessarily follow that the belief is false. The state compels schoolchildren to believe that two plus two make four. It even compels them to accept unprovable axioms, such as the equivalence of A plus B and B plus A. Such beliefs are mathematically true whether the state compels belief in them or not. The state imposes on citizens the principle that murder is wrong, but that principle would be morally true whether the state enforced murder laws or not. The method by which one comes to understand reality does not change reality itself. 

One doubts that the justices gave much thought to the rigor of their arguments – particularly in the case of Anthony Kennedy, who contradicted his own illogic almost a quarter-century later in Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to “same-sex marriage” by redefining marriage from the bench. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality,” Kennedy wrote. The justice never quite explained how “intimacy” and “spirituality” constitute “freedoms,” and his long-married colleague Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the notion that marriage expands such freedoms in his dissent. “Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality (whatever that means) were freedoms?” asked Scalia. “And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.” Expression is sure enough a freedom, Scalia admitted, but he disagreed with the notion that marriage expands that freedom. “Anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.”¹²² Scalia dispelled the Court’s opinion with humor because Kennedy’s argument was a joke. 

(Knowles 2021, 137-138)

Practitioners of PC demand we all use faddish jargon when discussing race, sex, geography, and even science so as not to give offense. But then those demure dictators of diction talk like sailors on television, in print, and in the public square during topless “slut walks,” bawdy “pride parades,” and marches featuring “pussy harts.” During the politically correct 1990s, cultural gatekeepers relaxed standards of decency, culminating at the end of the decade in Mark Harmon’s uttering the word “shit” for the first time on network television during an episode of Chicago Hope. The animated series South Park later parodied this watershed moment by mentioning “shit” 162 times in a single episode, with an additional 38 written instances of the word, bringing the total number of mentions to an even 200. 

(Knowles 2021, 141)

Likewise, leftists who conflate political correctness with politeness hide how impolitely they have behaved since “the Left” was born during the French Revolution. In 1789, the National Assembly divided delegates by seating conservative supporters of the king to the assembly-president’s right and radical supporters of the Revolution to the president’s left. The Baron de Gauville explains how the division happened. “We began to recognize each other,” he recalls. “Those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp.”¹²³

… Historically, conservatives have been neither “free speech purists” nor the sole censors of offensive speech, and leftists have been neither purely “liberal” nor the only speech police. Like all people at all times, both camps recognize taboos, which differ according to their respective views of the world. Light up a cigarette or, worse, a cigar at an outdoor cafe, and watch leftists recoil in horror. After decades of public-service campaigns to “raise awareness” about the dangers of tobacco, the American crop has become politically incorrect. Since New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg banned indoor smoking in 2002 and then outdoor smoking in 2011, the bans have spread throughout the nation and the world.¹²⁴ For the Left, tobacco has become taboo.

Yet at the same time, wacky tobacky has entered the mainstream. In 1996, California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana, and over the ensuing two decades most other U.S. states followed suit.¹²⁵ In 2012, Colorado and Washington legalized recreational use of the Devil’s lettuce, and multiple states have passed measures of varying ambition to legalize sin spinach every year since. Conservatives have tended, at least until recently, to consider marijuana taboo,m but the Left has deemed it politically correct. 

(Knowles 2021, 143)

Polynesians did not invent taboos, but they coined the term and introduced it into our language.¹²⁶ The British explorer James Cook first heard the word on a trip to Tonga in 1777. “When a thing is forbidden to be eaten, or made use of, they say that it is taboo,” wrote Cook, though the meaning extends beyond mere dietary restrictions. Cook described it as “a word of an extensive signification.”¹²⁷

Cook’s friend Omai, whom he met in Tahiti and who later gained fame as the second Polynesian to visit Europe, described the subtler complexity of taboo. For instance, “if the king should happen to go into a house belonging to a subject, that house would be taboo, and could never more be inhabited by the owner.” This standard made royal visits something of a double-edged sword. To avoid evicting too many of his subjects, the king established particular houses along travel routes for his reception. Veneration as well as repulsion marked taboo, and the two could blur together, as in the case of human sacrifices, known as tangata taboo. The prohibitions of taboo pertained to the regal as well as the common, the sacred as well as the profane.

(Knowles 2021, 144)

Taboos make clear what a culture worships and what it abhors. They set a culture apart and bind it together. As the Jewish writer Ahad Ha’am once observed, “More than the Jewish people have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.”¹²⁸ Taboos differ among groups and even within groups as they take on new identities.

In 1972, George Carlin uttered the “seven words you can never say on television”: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.¹²⁹ Today, those words have all made it on air, and most have become commonplace.¹³⁰ Now there remains just one unutterable word in American English: “the n-word.”

The “n-word” wasn’t always “the n-word.” It once was simply and offensively “nigger,” a racial slur for black Americans. Epithets abound for all races: white “crackers,” Italian “guineas,” Irish “micks,” Hispanic “spics”, Asian “gooks,” and so on. But unlike other racial epithets, the “n-word” may not be said aloud. There is no Irish “m-word” or Asian “g-word.” But there is an n-word, and one had better not say it even in the context of condemnation.

The “n-word” became “the n-word” during the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson, the double murderer who evaded justice by exploiting the debates over race and political correctness that raged during the 1990s. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense lawyers, which included Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowita, Robert Shapiro, and Robert Kardashian, sought to introduce as evidence several instances in which Mark Fuhrman, one of the first investigators at the crime scene, was said to have used the “n-word.” Christopher Darden, the black deputy district attorney prosecuting the case, decried the Simpson team’s stunt. “If you allow Mr. Cochran to use this word and play the race card,” warned Darden, “The direction and focus of the case changes: it is a race case now.”¹³¹ And so it was. 

At one point, as Cochran defended Simpson’s interracial marriage to Nicole Brown, the double murderer theatrically wiped tears from his eyes. One suspects Simpson welled up less for the woman he had slain than for his ineptitude at hiding the evidence. 

Judge Lance Ito lamented, “This is the one remaining unresolved problem of our society, and for those of us who grew up in the ‘60s and had hoped this was going to go away, it’s a big disappointment.”¹³² Judge Ito seemed to have missed some of the other social problems plaguing American society in the ‘90s – AIDS, crack, nuclear proliferation, and the hole in the ozone layer, to name just a few – but he understood that racial tensions still lingered, offering ample opportunity for cynics and radicals to achieve their professional and political ends. 

“It’s the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,” Darden impressed upon the judge. “There’s a mountain of evidence pointing to this man’s guilt, but when you mention that word to this jury, or any African-American, it blinds people. It’ll blind the jury, It’ll blind the truth. They won’t be able to discern what’s true and what’s not,” he explained.¹³³ The case, tried in the wake of the racially charged Rodney King trial, hinged less on Simpson’s guilt than on the racial resentments that O.J.’s “dream team” inflamed. The strategy worked. 

(Knowles 2021, 145-146)

No one denies the ugliness of the “n-word” or suggests its inclusion in polite society. But the elevation of racial over religious and cultural taboos reflects a reordering of social priorities that redounds to the benefit, not of black Americans or any other racial group, but of leftist radicals. By emphasizing the physical to the exclusion of the metaphysical, as Ta-Nehisi Coates does when he waxed poetic over “black bodies” rather than black souls or whole black people, the radicals reorder cultural priorities and invert society. This inversion extends far beyond racial, sexual, and scatological swear words. By changing taboos, radicals reorient the entire moral order, up to and especially the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. 

(Knowles 2021, 147)

From a public relations perspective, pride poses some problems. It is not just one of the seven deadly sins but in fact the deadliest of the sins. Saints Thomas Aquinas and Gregory the Great held pride to be “the queen of vices.”¹³⁴ A politically incorrect friend once observed that today it has become “the vice of queens.” But pride as a poltical movement has extended far beyond sexual rights. 

If homosexuals sought mere acceptance for their preferences or behaviors, why organize under the banner of the deadliest sin, pride? Why not organize a “Gay Acceptance Month” or “Gay Non-Judgment Month”? Even some lesser sin might suffice: “Gay Wrath Month,”  perhaps, or “Gay Gluttony Month.” Greed, sloth, envy, even lust – any would offer a more palatable basis for acceptance than pride. 

As with all politically correct revisions, it helps to recall the word’s original definition before examining how radicals have redefined it. Pride is the excessive love of one’s own excellence. We sometimes use “pride” as an imprecise synonym for other concepts, as when Lee Greenwood sings that he is “proud to be an American” when he really means that he loves his country – an admirable quality more akin to filial piety than to hubris. Love of country can become excessive, at which point patriotism transforms into chauvinism or jingoism. But pride is another matter altogether. 

Pride insists on our own perfection just the way we are. Our culture already teems with the politics of pride. Social ills seem always to stem from others – from “society” – never from ourselves. But the utopian Left believes we can overcome society, progressing toward and ultimately reaching perfection, if only we give the radicals just a little more time, power, and money. Whittaker Chambers pointed out that communism was not a novel ideology. “It is not new,” wrote Chambers. “It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” Chambers called communism “the great alternative faith of mankind … the vision of Man without God.”¹³⁵ It comes as no surprise, then, that adherents of that alternative faith should make pride, the original sin of mankind, their paramount virtue. 

In 1963, John F. Kennedy showed the world that Chambers’s description of communism might apply to leftism more broadly. During an address to the Irish parliament, the president invoked the socialist play-wright George Bernard Shaw. Kennedy frequently quoted great and popular writers, but because he rarely took the time to read those writers, he often got the quotes wrong. “George Bernard Shaw … summed up an approach to life,” the president recalled, “other people, he said, ‘see things and say, Why? But I dream things that never were, and I say, Why not?’” For once Kennedy quoted a line of literature more or less correctly, but by failing to understand its context he unwittingly cast his views in a sinister light.  

The line comes from Shaw’s play In the Beginning: B.C. 4004, the first of his five-play Back to Methuselah cycle. Specifically, it comes from the mouth of the Serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. “I tell you I am very subtle,” the Serpent begins. “When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”¹³⁶ Kennedy hoped to inspire his audience with a line Shaw put in the mouth of the Devil, a question that the playwright imagined had caused the fall of man. 

Robert F. Kennedy picked up the line from his brother and repeated it during his own ill-fated presidential run in 1968, and Edward Kennedy quoted it at Robert’s funeral.¹³⁷ Countless liberals and leftists have recited the line since. To their credit, most people who have invoked the line as an inspiration likely have no idea of its origins, and even those who do understand its context may mean perfectly well. 

(Knowles 2021, 148-150)

The utopia described by Chambers, Shaw, and American progressive politicians does not exist. Though many people believe the word “utopia” means an ideal place, it actually means “nowhere”, deriving from the Greek ou (“not”) and topos (“place”).¹³⁸ Saint Thomas More coined the term in 1516 as the title of his book about an imaginary island with the perfect political system, which has led many to conflate utopia with eutopia, or “good place.”¹³⁹

Pride has a personal dimension… But it also has a political dimension, according to which human beings can overcome the imperfections of the world and even human nature through our own efforts and ingenuity. Conservatives take a humbler view of politics; we accept the fallenness of man. 

The conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott summed up this more modest approach. “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect,” Oakeshott explained, before arriving at his punchline: conservatives prefer “present laughter to utopian bliss.”¹⁴⁰ Conservatives see a great deal of good in the imperfect world, which we cautiously hope to improve, always remembering that our own nature partakes of that imperfection, while leftists rage at the fallen world, which they seek to replace with the paradise that they feel we all deserve and that they believe they can effect through their own subtlety and cleverness.

(Knowles 2021, 150-151)

Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most enduring left-wing fixture of our age, expressed her fellow travelers’ affinity for wrath in 2018 when she declared, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”¹⁴¹ Despite her impressive academic credentials – or perhaps because of them – Hillary seemed not to understand the meaning of civility, the formal politeness that exists to mediate relations between citizens with divergent interests and views in a body politic. But Clinton was not alone in her incivility. 

After the establishment media declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, before a single state certified the vote, prominent leftists called for the creation of enemy lists to punish anyone who had in any way supported President Donald Trump. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked, “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?”¹⁴² AOC left vague her reasoning as to why Trump supporters would want to “down-play or deny their complicity in the future,” but CNN’s Jake Tapper made her meaning clearer. “I truly sympathize with those dealing with losing – it’s not easy,” Tapper began with characteristic condescension, “but at a certain point one has to think not only about what’s best for the nation (peaceful transfer of power) but how any future employers might see your character defined during adversity.”¹⁴³ Were Tapper more forthright, he might have spoken with the bluntness of the mobster who simultaneously warns and threatens, “That’s a nice business you’ve got there. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”

(Knowles 2021, 152-153)

In the centuries following the Protestant Revolution, the celebration of the Nativity on December 25 became the subject of anti-Catholic polemics, which charged that the Church had selected the date because it coincided with various pagan feasts, including celebrations of Saturn, the Unconquered Sun, and Mithras. History, however, does not back up the polemicists’ claims. The Chronography of 354 offers the earliest mention of any pagan celebration on December 25. But the calendar also mentions Christmas on that day; thus, no evidence exists to suggest that the pagan festivals predated Christian celebration of the Nativity.¹⁴⁴

Saturnalia, established centuries before the Incarnation, does not quite coincide with Christmas. The Romans originally celebrated Saturn on December 17, and even the feast’s expansion to an entire week took the festivities only up through December 23. Moreover, no early Christian source mentions any connection between Christmas and the pagan feasts.¹⁴⁵ In fact, the dating of Christ’s birth appears to derive not from the date of any pagan feast, but rather from the date of his death. 

Around the turn of the third century, Tertullian dated the Crucifixion to March 25.¹⁴⁶ Other early Christian writers, notably Saint Hippolytus of Rome, stated that the world itself had been created on March 25, a perfect link between Creator and creation.¹⁴⁷ Given the ancient belief that a divine life comprised an exact number of years, Christ’s conception would have occurred on the same date precisely nine months before Christmas.¹⁴⁸ The anonymous fourth-century Christian work On Solstices and Equinoxes defends this view, as does Saint Augustine, who wrote in his treatise On the Trinity, “For He is believed to have been conceived on the 35th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried. …”¹⁴⁹

This theory regarding the dating of Christmas also helps to explain the discrepancy between the West and the East, where Christians celebrate the Nativity on January 6. The fourth-century Greek bishop Epiphanius of Salamis dated Christ’s conception at April 6, precisely nine months before Eastern Christmas celebrations.¹⁵⁰

(Knowles 2021, 161-162)

There will never be a firm “wall of separation between church and state,” pace Jefferson, because all laws invoke a moral order, and any moral order relies upon religious tenets. “Cult” and “culture” derive from the same root word; what a culture prohibits and encourages reveals what the culture worships. Contrary to Jefferson’s more eccentric rationalist musings, church and state have proven inseparable in all societies throughout history. Jefferson himself made this point explicit in the Declaration of Independence, which posits that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”¹⁵¹ Jefferson may have demurred from choosing favorites among Congregationalists, Quakers, and Catholics, but he justified the American Revolution on a specific understanding of his Creator, without whom the country could not exist.

When Jefferson fails to prove the secularists’ case, they often turn to John Adams, who they claim once wrote that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”¹⁵² In fact, Adams did not write that phrase, though he did affix his name to it. The American diplomat and Jeffersonian republican Joel Barlow authored those words in the Treaty of Tripoli, which Adams signed in 1796.¹⁵³ For centuries Muslim pirates had preyed on Western sailors off the Barbary coast, stealing their cargoes and selling the survivors into slavery.¹⁵⁴ According to William Eaton, the American Consul General to Tunis, “The Christians who would be on good terms with [the Muslims] must fight well or pay well.” The fledgling United States did not look forward to either option, and the pirates’ ultimatum may explain America’s eagerness to deny the nation’s Christian founding in the treaty.¹⁵⁵ 

When they were not attempting to placate Muslim pirates, our Founding Fathers spoke more favorably of Christianity and its role in American public life. Whatever he signed onto in the Treaty of Tripoli, John Adams considered America to be a Christian nation. In an 1813 letter Jefferson, Adams affirmed, “The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite. … And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all thse Sects were United.” He believed “the general Principles of Christianity” to be “as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God,” and considered the “Principles of Liberty” that England’s Christian heritage had fostered to be “as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.”¹⁵⁶ Adams did not forward his correspondence with Jefferson to the Barbary pirates. 

(Knowles 2021, 167-168)

For decades, politically correct cultural revolutionaries have evaded the task of justifying their radical plans by asking concerned conservatives, “Who cares?” The radicals care, or else they wouldn’t spend so much time and energy attempting to overturn long-standing traditions. If the politically correct renamers really believe that these semantic distinctions between Christmad and “holiday” trees mean nothing, then why not keep the traditional and precise term? The politically correct wordsmiths are the aggressing party in the cultural war, and they have the gall to call the rest of us obstreperous because we refuse to acquiesce to their inversions of our culture. The radicals know full well the power of apparently minor semantic shifts to transform culture; that is why they tried to banish Christmas trees from public squares around the country.

(Knowles 2021, 170)

But is Christmas really just one holiday among many? According to Gallup polling, a full 93 percent of Americans reported celebrating Christmas in 2019, down slightly from the 96 percent who celebrated Christmas in 1994, but more or less consistent with historical levels.¹⁵⁷ By comparison, just 1.8 percent of Americans describe their religion as “Jewish,” and an additional 0.4 percent consider themselves irreligious Jews, meaning that a whopping 97.8 percent of Americans have no religious or cultural connection to Hanukkah whatsoever.¹⁵⁸ Moreover, Jews who do celebrate Hanukkah consider it a minor holiday compared to major feasts such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot.¹⁵⁹

A similar percentage of Americans celebrate Kwanzaa, an ideological holiday invented by Maulana Karenga, ne Ronald Everett, in 1966. At the time Karenga was serving as chairman of the Black Studies department at California State University, Long Beach, and he created the holiday as a vehicle to promote black nationalism and socialism, both of which he enshrined among Kwanzaa’s “seven principles,” along with other then-fashionable ideological ends.¹⁶⁰ 

Five years later, Karenga was forced to celebrate Kwanzaa inside a prison cell after his criminal conviction for imprisoning and torturing two women.¹⁶¹ Deborah Jones, one of Karenga’s victims, described being “worshipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove” her clothes.¹⁶² Gail Davis, another victim, endured a hot soldering iron in her mouth and on her face before Kernga placed detergent and running hoses in the women’s mouths and hit them on the head with a toaster.¹⁶³ Perhaps the unsavory association helps to explain why Kwanzaa never took off. 

Likewise, though cultural excesses might suggest otherwise, less than 0.3 percent of Americans identify as “pagan,” raising doubts as to whether The Gap really needed to include “Solstice” among seasonal holidays on par with Christmas.¹⁶⁴ But without the unobserved pagan feast, the minor Jewish holiday, and the socialist contrivance, all the remains to celebrate in December is Christmas, which the politically correct cannot permit. So by the 2010s, the cultural revolutionaries had returned to unnamed “holidays” as their substitute term. 

(Knowles 2021, 171-172)

Deliberately obtuse agitators sometimes argue that a true defender of free speech would defend these interruptions. If a public speaker has a right to address his audience, they argue, so too do hecklers have the right to drown him out with their own speech. In fact these interruptions amount to a heckler’s veto. According to its legal definition, the “heckler’s veto” describes the government’s unconstitutional prohibition of certain speech for fear that it might incite a violent reaction.¹⁶⁵ In colloquial use, the term refers to any incident in which hecklers use their speech to drown out that of another.¹⁶⁶ Just as Chesterton called for stopping “the thought that stops thought,” so too American defenders of free speech have long called for stopping speech that stops the American free speech tradition. 

(Knowles 2021, 176)

The word “gender” dates back to the early fourteenth century, when it referred to kinds and classes of people and things. By the end of that century, it acquired a primarily grammatical use, referring to male and female nouns, pronouns, and adjectives.¹⁶⁷ For example, la pizza is a feminine noun in Italian, and il gelato is masculine, and neither fact implies that the slice or ice cream has genitals for toppings. “Gender” retained this grammatical sense almost exclusively for the next six centuries, until 1963, when feminists began to use the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as “a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.”¹⁶⁸ Sex, they claimed, may be innate, but gender was “socially constructed.” And what society had constructed, society could “deconstruct” as well. 

(Knowles 2021, 178-179)

The sufferers’ feelings about their “gender” or weight exist only in their minds, and society cannot question them, even if their subjective sense contradicts observable reality.¹⁶⁹ This radical subjectivism at the heart of intersectionality, woke ideology, and gender theory abolishes the possibility of disinterested debate by recasting any disagreement with people who can claim to suffer as “erasing their lived experience.” Descartes inaugurated this philosophy when he declared, “I think; therefore, I am”; politically correct radicals perfected it by asserting, “I suffer; therefore, I am.”¹⁷⁰

When a gender ideologue claims that a man is truly a woman trapped inside a male body, he implies that one’s “true self” has nothing to do with the one’s body. The self, according to this conception, is purely metaphysical; the physical world has no bearing on it at all. A man may possess all the bodily attributes of a man, down to his very chromosomes, but if he feels “on some deeper level” like a woman then in fact he is a woman according to gender ideology.

To its credit, this ideology rejects the shallow materialism that became fashionable during the twentieth century. “New atheists” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, prominent in the mid-2000s, may have been the last gasp of the sophomoric materialist philosophy. Even the liberal vanguard no longer insists that all our loves, hopes, joys, and everything else that matters most to us in life are illusory. Instead, by the 2010s, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. Matter no longer mattered at all. The physical world became the illusion; the realm of ideas, preference, and desire constituted the ultimate reality.

The allegedly scientific discoveries of gender ideology constitute no more than the latest latest iteration of gnostic dualism, an ancient heresy that has cropped up in the West every few centuries. It first arose int he first century after Christ, flourished during the fourth century as Manichaeism, and enjoyed a revival between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries under the name of Albigensianism.¹⁷¹ In all its forms, gnosticism asserts the evil of the physical world, the good of the spiritual world, and the necessity of secret knowledge for salvation. The term derives from the ancient Greek word for knowledge, which may explain why this heresy has appealed from its inception to self-styled intellectuals. 

(Knowles 2021, 182-183)

If man and woman do not exist as real sexual categories – if “gender” is a mere “social construct” – then the logic behind “gay rights” falls apart. Conversely, if men really are men, and women really are women, and men cannot become women by simply declaring that they are, then the logic behind “transgenderism” collapses. Yet political correctness demands that we hold both contradictory views at the same time. 

The same contradiction crops up between feminism, which portrays men as oppressors hindering women’s liberation, and transgenderism, which empowers men to redefine femininity and even to become women themselves. During the 1970s, proponents of political correctness took the side of the feminists. By the 2010s, politically correct radicals began to condemn feminists such as J.K. Rowling who refuse to embrace gender ideology, castigating them as “trans-exclusive radical feminists” or simply “TERFs.”¹⁷²

(Knowles 2021, 184)

This traditional understanding of body and soul derives from Christianity and from ancient pagan thinkers such as Aristotle, whom Saint Thomas Aquinas is said to have “baptized” through his writings.¹⁷³ The terms “conservative,” “traditional,” and “Christian” may not be synonymous, but they overlap substantially in the same way that terms such as “radical,” “politically correct,” “secular,” and “leftist” relate to one another. 

(Knowles 2021, 185)

Education once existed to correct delusions and disordered desires; through political correctness, it has come to encourage those fantasies and destructive appetites. 

(Knowles 2021, 188)

The preamble to the Constitution offers important insight into how liberty relates to the constitutional project. The framers, writing as “we, the people,” articulate six reasons for establishing the government: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”¹⁷⁴ Though many readers on both the left and right have read this final purpose simply as “liberty”, the actual goal is the blessings derived from liberty. According to the Constitution, liberty plays a key role in the regime, but that role is instrumental rather than an end in itself.

James Madison explains this instrumentality in The Federalist. “Justice is the end of government,” wrote Madison. “It is the end of civil society. It has ever been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”¹⁷⁵ Civil society requires liberty, but it seeks justice. And just who defines justice? The present-day “conservative” defenders of Drag Queen Story Hour seem to suggest that no one has the right to define justice. What one man calls justice another might consider injustice. Therefore, they insist, we must throw up our hands and hold our tongues, lest the radicals prohibit the rituals and institutions that we ourselves cherish. 

… If people cannot discern between good and bad, then free government is not possible, as all government requires a conception of truth and justice. Our forebears understood that our moral intuition, rational faculties, and received opinion bearing the wisdom of the ages allow us to pursue justice and establish a society ordered toward human flourishing. If we cannot count on our conscience and reason – and on the wisdom of our forebears – we cannot claim the ability to govern ourselves. 

(Knowles 2021, 190)

The WHO validated the role of herd immunity in suppressing the coronavirus by noting in the spring of 2020 that “the threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear.”¹⁷⁶ 

But calls for more modest regulations in pursuit of herd immunity threatened the radicals’ plans for cultural transformation, which benefited from the massive transfer of wealth and power brought about by the lockdowns. So by late November, the World Health Organization simply changed the definition of the key medical term. Herd immunity, the WHO now insisted, “is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not only did the WHO erase its references to infection; it went further to claim that “herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.”¹⁷⁷ The public health organization neglected to mention what groundbreaking discovery had led them to redefine the long-standing epidemiological concept because the shift had been semantic, rather than scientific. 

Conservative skeptics of these “experts” noted the change, and the WHO failed to muster any scientific explanation to justify it. So in the final days of 2020, the World Health Organization un-discovered its new conception of herd immunity, which it redefined once more as “the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” But this time the public health organization included political advice, noting that “WHO supports achieving ‘herd immunity’ through vaccination” and that “herd immunity against COVID-19 should be achieved by protecting people through vaccination, not by exposing them to the pathogen that causes the disease.”¹⁷⁸

(Knowles 2021, 196-197)

In early days of the epidemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci had one clear message for the public: stop wearing masks. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” he insisted in March 2020. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfection protection that people think it is.” Further, according to Fauci, masking did not just fail to stop the spread of the virtus; it actively damaged public health.

“Often, there are unintended consequences,” he warned. “People keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face.”¹⁷⁹ Fauci had led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.¹⁸⁰ He had worked with the broader National Institutes of Health for more than fifty years and advised every U.S. president since Ronal Reagan. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, from 1983-2002 Dr. Fauci was the thirteenth-most-cited scientist int he world across all disciplines among nearly three million authors.¹⁸¹ When Dr. Fauci told the nation not to wear masks, the people listened. 

(Knowles 2021, 199)

By definition “public health” involves both science and politics. The word “public” means “political,” as politics as simply the way we all get along together in public rather than private life.¹⁸² Fauci receives his paycheck from a governmental agency; he has reported to politicians up to and including the president of the United States. His job entails mandating how hundreds of millions of people behave, all the way down to the minutiae of how they dress and celebrate holidays. Few people in American history have ever possessed such political power. 

But Fauci shares the progressive understanding of politics, which trades democratic deliberation for scientific expertise and redefines political decision-making as “science.” According to this view, citizens no longer have the right to debate eternal questions and persuade their fellow countrymen. Instead, “science” has progressed to the point that “data” and “expertise” can solve those stubborn problems once and for all. The “scientists” know what “works.”

But in order for something to “work,” it must have a purpose. A lawnmower “works” when it cuts grass. A lock “works” when it prevents intruders from getting in. Neither can “work” unless someone first determines that we ought to cut the grass or keep out intruders. Likewise, public policy can only “work” when it achieves predetermined goals. According to the old constitutional standard, we the people have the right and responsibility to determine those goals through deliberation and persuasion. According to the new progressive standard, we the people have the obligation to defer to “scientific experts,” who dictate not merely how to achieve specific policy goals but often which goals to pursue in the first place. 

(Knowles 2021, 201-202)

Experts in public health, national security, and economics, to say nothing of constitutional law, criminal justice, political philosophy, and any other number of fields may all have disagreed with one another over how to handle the pandemic. We elect politicians to consider all of these various concerns and to exercise their judgement in forming public policy among competing priorities. Politicians are supposed to be expert at politics. We the people express our trust in these experts at the ballot box, and when they fail us, we put our trust in other politicians.

(Knowles 2021, 202-203)

The Left’s abuse of scientific credentials to effect political ends long predates the coronavirus pandemic, going back at least to the earliest days of “global warming,” then known as “global cooling.” “Get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to comes,” warned the Washington Post in a front-page report titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age” on January 11, 1970. “That’s the long-long-range weather forecast being given out by ‘climatologists,’ the people who study very long-term world weather trends.”¹⁸³ The Post saw fit to surround the word “climatologists” in quotation marks because so few readers would have recognized the emerging field in the 1970s. Half a century later, as “climatologists” have exerted more and more influence in public life, that particular breed of expert may enjoy greater recognition than any other, reflecting a shift not merely in scientific research but also in politics. 

“Science: Another Ice Age?” asked Time magazine on November 13, 1972.¹⁸⁴ Newsweek covered “the cooling world” on April 28, 1975.¹⁸⁵ Other outlets joined the frenzy. Global warming alarmists sometimes dismiss the “global cooling” scare as a media contrivance at odds with the scientific views at the time.¹⁸⁶ But one need only read Newsweek’s reporting on the subject to dismiss the dismissal. Quoting several prominent scientists, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Academy of Sciences, Newsweek painted a bleak picture of earth’s future. “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions,” the magazine admitted. “But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”¹⁸⁷ Four decades later, malnourishment hit an all-time low even as the world population doubled.¹⁸⁸ 

The mistaken scientists made political demands along with their scientific predications. “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects,” Newsweek reported. The scientists proposed “stockpiling food” and “introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies” as well as more ambitious solutions such as “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot,” which would have proved an awkward fix decades later when scientists reversed their judgement and identified melting ice caps themselves as an irrefutable harbinger of the end times.¹⁸⁹

Fortunately, citizens of the 1970s had the good sense to ignore the scientists’ hysterical warnings, which sometimes differed over cause but always foretold the same effects: famine and death. In addition to predictions of apocalyptically inclement weather, scientists of that era warned that “overpopulation” would strain the earth’s resources and cause mass starvation. The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, by declaring, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Lest any optimists hold out hope that agricultural advances might solve the impending famines, Ehrlich continued, “At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” The dead-certain scientific expert explained that mankind had only one hope to preserve life: stop it from occurring in the first place.

“We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” Ehrlich demanded, decrying “the cancer of population growth,” which he insisted “must be cut out.”¹⁹⁰ As a rule, people who describe newborn babies as a “cancer” tend to have a distorted vision of the world. But prominent leftists, whose vision had already been similarly distorted, lapped up Ehrlich’s expertise. Johnny Carson invited him on The Tonight Show, after which The Population Bomb shot up the bestseller lists.¹⁹¹

India’s leftist prime minister Indira Gandhi enforced policies that required sterilization in order to access water, electricity, ration cards, and medical care.¹⁹² Communist China embraced the “one-child policy,” which led to upwards of 100 million forced abortions and sterilizations.¹⁹³ Despite these atrocities, the world population continued to grow, but world hunger declined.¹⁹⁴

Ehrlich had been perfectly wrong. Not only had his doomsday prophecy failed to materialize, but the greatest cause of mass death in the subsequent decades was the coerced abortions that his book spurred. Yet Ehrlich never paid a price for his fatally false predictions. He continued to teach at Stanford.¹⁹⁵ Prestigious institutions continued to laud him with honors.¹⁹⁶ And Ehrlich remained unrepentant, never failing to warn of “overpopulation” as he continued his crusade against human life.¹⁹⁷

(Knowles 2021, 203-205)

In 2019. During his second bid for president, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders called for similar measures in poor countries. “Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact,” claimed an audience member at CNN’s climate change town hall. “Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?” she asked, introducing a new degree of hysteria to the allegedly scientific issue that began as “global cooling” before reversing into “global warming,” then morphing into “climate change,” and finally attaining the dramatic epithet “catastrophe.”¹⁹⁸

(Knowles 2021, 206)

The sudden popularity of the phrase “scientific consensus” shows how thoroughly political correctness has inverted intellectual life. The phrase rarely if ever appeared in literature, scientific or otherwise, before the 1970s. After a brief dip in popularity during the Reagan era, its use skyrocketed during the 19990s and 2000s.¹⁹⁹ The new phrase reflected a new, politically correct understanding of both politics and science. Politics, once conducted through republican government and consensus, increasingly outsourced rule to purportedly apolitical experts. Meanwhile scientific inquiry, once undertaken by clinical experts, began to rely on popular support for legitimacy.

For decades alarmists have defended their prophecies of earth’s imminent destruction by noting that “97 percent of scientists” agree with their doomsday views. NASA makes this claim almost verbatim in the first sentence of an article titled, “Scientific Consensus: Earth’s Climate is Warning.” The space agency asserts, “Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”²⁰⁰

As the conservative Heartland Institute observed in its 2015 analysis Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming, NASA cited four surveys to arrive at the famous 97 percent figure, but a closer look at those reports reveals that the alleged consensus rests on shaky scientific ground. The space agency cites historian Naomi Oreskes, who in turn cites abstracts of scientific papers, many of which either begin with the premise of catastrophic, man-made global warming or else mention it only in passing.²⁰¹

NASA then cites John Cook, a professor of “cognitive science” better known for his blogs than his scholarly publications, who claims to have discovered 97.1 percent agreement on catastrophic warming among scientists.²⁰² But a paper published in Science & Education debunked that statistic, finding instead that just 1 percent of papers addressing that issue 0.3 of papers consulted overall endorsed that hypothesis.²⁰³ 

A third study, by Maggie Zimmerman, consisted of a two-minute online survey sent to ten thousand random scientists, three thousand of whom responded. Zimmerman ignored responses from scientists whose fields of study might lead them to conclude that the sun, rather than industry, had caused the warming.²⁰⁴ A fourth study, from William Anderegg presumes that all scientists who had not explicitly refuted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had thereby endorsed the body’s extreme conclusions.²⁰⁵

Regardless of how and why the mercury in the thermometer rises or falls, alarmist and skeptic alike must admit the political nature of the debate, which from the beginning has revolved around appeals to popular consensus by governmental bodies, who always seem to reach the same policy conclusions no matter what the data show. 

(Knowles 2021, 208-209)

A free people may welcome the advice of specialists, but we must also consider other, non- “scientific” factors, including the effects of a given policy on the economy, national security, popular culture, civil rights, social relations, and myriad other facets of our republic. Even if “climate change” really could destroy the world by 2013, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims, or even by 2021, as Britain’s Prince Charles has claimed, “science” remains the handmaiden of philosophy, and in a free republic the people must set the nation’s course.²⁰⁶

(Knowles 2021, 210)

The U.S. Constitution once limited government power through a complex system of checks and balances. James Madison described the difficulty with thich he and his fellow framers had constructed that system in The Federalist. “You must first enable the government to control the governed,” he explained, “and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”²⁰⁷ But progressives of the early twentieth century upended the old system and abolished many of its limits in a concerted effort to unleash the government’s ability to effect “progress.”²⁰⁸

At the same time, radicals recognized that cultural factors such as art, ritual, and language imposed limits on “progress” just as surely as laws and constitutions. So they levied a “war of position” to infiltrate and transform the institutions that shape culture.²⁰⁹ This “long march through the institutions” required a campaign of “ruthless criticism” to crack the conservative “cultural hegemony” that impeded the progressives’ designs.

(Knowles 2021, 221-222)

First and foremost, conservatives must ditch the tired slogans that they have parroted for decades. There has never been any such thing as absolute “free speech,” and conservatives’ delusions to the contrary have afforded radicals the opportunity to dismantle the traditional moral order that conservatives purport to uphold. 

… Any substantive conservative vision must begin with an acknowledgement of moral conscience, which is a judgement of reason whereby we recognize the moral quality of concrete acts. This acknowledgement requires the further recognition that good, evil, virtue, and vice are not mere sentiments or superstitions but eternal realities. We can know this fact through the application of right reason and by the light of revelation, neither of which conservatives can afford to forgo in crafting a political vision, no matter how implausible radicals make both guides to action out to be. 

(Knowles 2021, 230)

For too long, conservatives have taken Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics is downstream of culture” as an excuse to disengage from the political process and squander the power that voters sometimes give them. Culture does indeed influence politics, as Breitbart observed and this book has detailed at length. But politics likewise influences culture, as even the most ardent disciple of the Breitbart Doctrine will admit if you ask him whether the Great Society programs of the 1960s affected crime and family structure among black Americans.²¹⁰

(Knowles 2021, 233)

Standards are not an end unto themselves. The aim of the standards matter too. 

Both men and beasts make sounds. The latter can make only noise, but the former is capable of speech, a distinction that separates and elevates him above the rest of creation. This capacity for speech makes man the political animal. We use language to convey what we understand about the world and how we want to live in it. The process of persuasion and education that ensues from that act of speech constitutes politics. If we are to master our political future, we must not merely demand the right to speak; more important, we must have something to say. 

(Knowles 2021, 235-236)

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References

Knowles, Michael. 2021. Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. N.p.: Skyhorse Publishing.

ISBN 978-1-68451-082-5

1.  G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: The Illustrated London News, 1923-1925 (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 1990), 33.
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2.  Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/polititcs.I.one.html.
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3.  Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and trans. Peter Paret (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989).
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4.  Alex Watson, “Literally Ok: A Defense,” Wall Street International, April 28, 2017, wsimag.com/culture/25065-literally-ok.
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5.  Elizabeth Knowles and Julia Elliott, “Political Correctness,” The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 
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6.  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel. (London: Penguin Books, 1967). 
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7.  Deborah Cameron, “Words, Words, Words” in The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, ed. Sarah Dunant (London: Virago Press, 1994), 31. 
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8.  Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech … and It’s a Good Thing Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 
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9.  Gary Shapiro, “How Churchill Mobilized the English Language” New York Sun, June 12, 2012, http://www.nysun.com/new-york/how-churchill-mobilized-the-english-language/87862/; Rob Williams, “My Dear you Are Ugly, but Tomorrow I shall be Sober and You will Still be Ugly’: Winston Churchill Tops Poll of History’s Funniest Insults,” Independent, October 14, 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/my-dear-you-are-ugly-tomorrow-i-shall-be-sober-and-you-will-still-be-ugly-winston-churchill-tops-poll-history-s-funniest-insults-8878622.html. 
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10.  Winston Churchill, “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” The International Churchill Society, April 13, 2017, winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight0on-the-beaches/. 
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11.  Amber Phillips, “Analysis: ‘They’re Rapists.’ President Trump’s Campaign Launch Speech Two Years Later, Annotated,” Washington Post, April 28, 2019, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/theyre-rapists-presidents-trump-campaign-launch-speech-two-years-later-annotated/. 
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12.  Today, we can no longer suppose that ladies even have their own restrooms in which to powder their noses, as we will come to see. ↩︎
13.  “Euphemism,” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/euphemism.
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14.  William Safire, “On Language; Linguistically Correct,” New York Times, May 5, 1991, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1991/05/05/846891.html.
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15.  “A Little History of ‘Politically Correct’: The Soviets Invented It and the University Tolerate It,” Washington Times, November 15, 2015, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/15/editorial-a-little-history-of-politically-correct/. 
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16.  William Shakespeare, the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Gutenberg Project, November 1998, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1524/1524-h/1524-h.htm.
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17.  Deborah Cameron, “Words, Words, Words” in The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, ed. Sarah Dunant (London: Virago Press, 1994); Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A  History of Semantics and Culture (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
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18.  Renato Corsetti, “A Mother Tongue Mostly Spoken by Fathers,” Language Problems & Language Planning 20, no. 3 (1996): 263-73, https://ww.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/1996/00000020/00000003/art00004.
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19.  Bill Berkowits, “‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On,” Southern Poverty Law Center, August 15, 2003, http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching. ↩︎
20.  Paul Rosenberg, “A User’s Guide to ‘Cultural Marxism’: Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory, Reloaded,” Salon, May 6, 2019, http://www.salon.com/2019/05/05/a-users-guide-to-cultural-marxism-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory-reloaded/.
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21.  “Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory.
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22.  Michael Butter, “There’s a Conspiracy Theory That the CIA Invented the Term ‘Conspiracy Theory’ – Here’s Why,” The Conversation, November 25, 2020, the conversation.com/theres-a-conspiracy-theory-that-the-cia-invented-the-term-conspiracy-theory-heres-why-132117.
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23.  F.B., “The Strange Afterlife of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks,” Economist, November 7, 2017, http://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/11/07/the-strange-afterlife-of-antonio-gramscis-prison-notebooks.
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24.  Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Josph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 
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25.  Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). ↩︎
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27. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2008). 
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28. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2008). 
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29. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2008). 
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30.  Jay, The Dialectical Imagination.
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31.  Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marxists International Archive, http://www.marcists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.
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32.  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, (London: Penguin Books, 1967). 
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33.  Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020, http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/. 
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34.  Virginia Allen, “NY Times Mum on ‘1619’ Creator Calling ‘1619 Riots’ Moniker an ‘Honor’,” The Daily Signal, June 24, 2020, http://www.dailysignal.com/2020/06/22/new-york-times-mum-on-1619-project-creator-calling-1619-riots-moniker-an-honor/. ↩︎
35.  Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 
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36.  Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.I.one.html, I.I253a
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37.  George Orwell, “Why I Write,” The Orwell Foundation, May 14, 2019, http://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/.
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41.  Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, Supreme Court of the United States, March 9, 1942. ↩︎
42.  Susannah Breslin, “Adult Director Max Hardcore Released from Prison,” Forbes, February 19, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2011/07/21/adult-director-max-hardcore-released-from-prison-2/#745a3aa343e0. ↩︎
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44.  Fish, There’s No such Thing as Free Speech.
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45.  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Nabokov, Bend Sinister (Saint Petersburg, Russia: Severo-Zapad, 1993).
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46.  George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell’s Library, December 29, 2019, http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit. 
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47.  Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1936.
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48.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2016). 
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49.  Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao (Woodbridge, Virginia: Universal-Award House, 1971). 
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52.  Rejani Thudalikunnil Gopalan, Developmental Challenges and Societal Issues for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2020). ↩︎
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54.  James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
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55.  Pinker, The Blank Slate.
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56.  “Queer,” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/queer.
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57.  Michael Lind, “Buckley vs. Vidal: The Real Story,” Politico, August 24, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/buckley-vs-vidal-the-real-story-121673.
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58.  “Queer Studies,” Wesleyan University, http://www.wesleyan.edu/queerstudies/; Henry Farrell, “Analysis: A Conservative YouTube Star Just Lost His Income Stream for Homophobic Slurs,” Washington Post, June 6, 2019, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/06/conservative-youtube-sstar-just-lost-his-income-stream-homophobic-slurs-heres-what-happened-why/.
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61.  Feodor Dustoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Project Gutenberg, September 13, 2008, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600-h/600-h.htm. ↩︎
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63.  G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Project Gutenberg, September 26, 2005, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130.html.
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65.  “Inform,” Index, Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/inform#etymonline_v_6458; “Indoctrinate,” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/indoctrinate.
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66.   “Inform,” Index, Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/inform#etymonline_v_6458; “Indoctrinate,” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/indoctrinate.
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68.  John Holloway, “The Tradition of Scientific Marxism,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/john-holloway/article.htm. ↩︎
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70.  Abrams v. U.S., Supreme Court of the United States, November 10, 1919; Brandenburg v. Ohio, Supreme Court of the United States, June 8, 1969.
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71.  Texas v. Johnson, Supreme Court of the United States, June 21, 1989. 
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72.  Jason Clayworth, “Lesbian Attorney Was Biased, Argued the Man Sentenced to 16 Years for Burnign Gay Pride Flag,” Des Moines Register, January 19, 2020, http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/invertigations/2020/01/15/lesbian-attorney-biased-man-sentenced-16-years-burning-gay-pride-flag-argued/4444888002/.
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73.  Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance.”
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78.  Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance.” ↩︎
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82.   Deborah Cameron, “Words, Words, Words” in The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, ed. Sarah Dunant (London: Virago Press, 1994).
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84.  Genesis 1:27.
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85.   Deborah Cameron, “Words, Words, Words” in The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, ed. Sarah Dunant (London: Virago Press, 1994).
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86.  Christopher Hitchens, “The Fraying of America: A Review of Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes” in The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, ed. Sarah Dunant (London: Virago, 1995), 133-44.
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97.  Adam Serwer, “The Fight over the 1619 Project is Not about the Facts,” The Atlantic, January 21, 2020, … . 
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98.  “We Respond to the Historians WHo Critiqued the 1619 Project,” New York Times, December 20, 2019, … . 
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99.  “We Respond to the Historians WHo Critiqued the 1619 Project,” New York Times, December 20, 2019, … . 
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112.  Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 
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139.  “Utopia,” Dictionary.com, … . 
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186.  “The Global Cooling Myth,” Real Climate, January 14, 2005, … . 
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189.   “The Cooling World,” Newsweek. 
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192.   Charles C. Mann, “The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation,” Smithsonian Magazine, January/February 2018, … . ↩︎
193.  “How China’s One-Child Policy Led to Forced Abortions, 30 Million Bachelors,” NPR, February 1, 2016, … . ↩︎
194.  Naam, “Hunger Is at an All-Time Low.” ↩︎
195.  “Paul Ehrlich,” Stanford Profiles, September 15, 2015, … . 
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196.  “Professor Paul R. Ehrlich,” The Royal Society, April 22, 2012, … . 
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197.  “The Population Bomb 50 Years Later: A Conversation with Paul Ehrlich,” Climate One, May 5, 2018, … . 
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198.  “Bernie Sanders in Climate Change ‘Population Control’ Uproar,” BBC, September 5, 2019, … . 
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199.  “Scientific Consensus,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, … . 
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200.  “Scientific Consensus: Earth’s Climate Is Warming,” NASA, … . 
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201.  Craig D. Idso, et al., “Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus,” 2nd ed., The Heartland Institute, 2016, … . 
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202.  John Cook (@johnfocook), “In our study finding 97.1% consensus on human-caused global warming in abstracts, we addressed this exact issue by inviting the authors of the papers to categorize their own research based on the full paper. Result? 97.2% consensus,” Twitter, … . ↩︎
203.  Idso, et al., “Why Scientists Disagree.” ↩︎
204.   Idso, et al., “Why Scientists Disagree.” ↩︎
205.  Idso, et al., “Why Scientists Disagree.” ↩︎
206.  Timothy Leary, Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (Atlantic, 1989). 
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207.  James Madison, Federalist 51. ↩︎
208.  Woodrow Wilson, “What Is Progress,” Teaching American History, 1913, … . ↩︎
209.  Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigeg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 
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210.  Thomas Sowell, “Blame the Welfare State, Not Racism, for Poor Blacks’ Problems,” Penn Live, January 5, 2019, … . 
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