The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

Boghossian and Lindsay also caution against the tendency to intuit motive: ‘If you must make an assumption about your partner’s intentions, make only one: their intentions are better than you think’.

For the new puritans, nothing need be explained or rationalised, because objective truth has become subordinated to ‘lived experience’.

Philip K. Dick, who said that ‘the basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words’.

Critical Race Theory thereby offers us an alternative vision of society, one that is pessimistic, regressive and opposed to material reality.

any claim of systemic racism should be the beginning of a conversation, not the end.

The ideology of Critical Social Justice has never caught on in poorer communities, because those who are facing authentic hardship have little patience for the exaggerated, manufactured or imagined grievances of the privileged.

To close oneself off to the possibility of alternative opinions, and only to see the world through the lens of confirmation bias, is a form of intellectual death.

There is little point in attempting to reason with zealots who have abandoned reason in favour of insults and mindless platitudes, and who only assume the worst of anyone who dares to disagree.

self-censorship rather than state censorship represents the most direct threat to the intellectual health of contemporary society.