The Year the Politically Correct Chickens Came Home to Roost
In last year’s roundup of the top stories of the year, I argued that 2014 was the year we were all drafted into the culture wars. “This is the year when we were served noticed that we won’t be allowed to stand on the sidelines, because we will not be allowed to think differently from the left.” The signature story of the year was the comet shirt guy, a mild-mannered scientist caught wearing the wrong shirt on television. That case served notice that “To be targeted by accusations of misogyny, you don’t have to be a beer-chugging ‘bro’ who spends his Spring break judging wet T-shirt contests. Now they’re coming after the geeks and yes, even the hipsters.”
Everyone is a combatant in the Great Social Justice War.
This past year saw some interesting follow-ups to that story, including a rebellion among science fiction fans, who upset the Hugo Awards in a briefly effective counterattack against political correctness, only to be repulsed when the leftist establishment decided it had to burn down the Hugos in order to save them.
But the big new development in 2015 is that the left’s culture war came back to attack the very institutions that hatched it.
Early in the year, I remarked on the irony of leftist writer Jonathan Chait whining about political correctness. He is absolutely right about the stultifying, totalitarian nature of the demands for conformity and the injustice of accusing people of racism merely for saying something you don’t like. But the system he’s complaining about is one he helped bring into existence and which he has used to smear his opponents as racists.
Read the article “The Year the Politically Correct Chickens Came Home to Roost” on thefederalist.com.
