claiming that “a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame to a great university.” A year later, Nixon attacked university activism as “elitist” and “morally relativist.”

A model of this thought pattern, one which ends inevitably in the normalization of extremely problematic views, is author Sam Harris’s 2017 reanimation of the IQ race wars that began with the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994. That book’s authors, psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, argue that intelligence

This is the dirty secret about freedom of speech; rather than being an ideal, it is a litmus test of a society’s prejudices.

Derek Black, the son of a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), said in a 2018 NPR interview that “the fundamental belief that drove my dad, drove my parents and my family, over decades . . . was that race was the defining feature of humanity and that people were only happy if they could live in a society that was only this one biologically

“Never before has the black race of Central Africa,” he said, “from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. . . . It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering

The origin of the term political correctness is benign. In the US Supreme Court in the late eighteenth century, it implied a social convention of language, of elite propriety in expression both for accuracy and good manners. When deciding on whether an individual can sue a state, the chief justice stated that the language protocol of plaintiff

A malignant thread has been running through Anglo-American history, and it is made of myths. These are not myths that animate believers into a shared sense of camaraderie and direction. They are myths that divide and instill a sense of superiority over others. Nations are susceptible to these impulses when going through times of instability, when

This direct honesty about white racial loyalty is helpful in understanding how minorities, just by existing, are blamed for the bad behavior of white people. Alas, such honesty is rare.

Instead of speaking truth to power, the media class speaks power’s truth.