July 31, 2021
How Witch-Hunters Operate
By Judy Wallen
As I grew up in a California suburb that was largely colonized in the latter half of the 20th century with the hope of many upwardly mobile young families, I am often reminded by fellow Californians of my good fortune in spending those years between cradle and teenage wasteland nourished and sheltered by privilege. Up until high school, I even had the rare benefit of experiencing pre–Proposition 13 California public schools, a Golden Age of Education rivaling Athens, the Renaissance, or Haight-Ashbury's Summer of Self-Love. When I confess how I have trouble remembering what or if I learned much of anything during this utopian period, the wistfulness of the young Californian liberals turns to disappointment, disbelief, and rage. Yet cancel culture's recent occupation of our zeitgeist has given me a renewed appreciation of the advanced multi-year curriculum that I received during that time when occupants saturated the school with the insatiable primal energy of the id while adults were not looking. Almost all I really needed to know about witch-hunting I learned in middle school.
Witch-hunting is the biomimicry of junior high school at its peak Lord of the Flies. When I left my relatively uniform class stratum outside school, I found inside those hallowed walls of lower education a caste system so rigid and unforgiving that third-world dictatorships could complain of cultural appropriation. A hierarchy formed based on fickle pubescent popularity in a system of unearned privilege for the higher strata and soul-crushing oppression for the lower strata innocents, intimidated into a silence that prevented the truth from reaching both the apathetic guardians inside and the concerned ones outside. The fawning and fearful mobs were happy to join in the persecution to improve their own position in the hierarchy, as the level of freedom and safety from persecution was proportional to one's distance from the top. There was a longing for power, for the protection and thrill and decadent benefits it bestowed. The power carried its own justification, but the augmented treachery and sophistication of maturity would require justification — virtue would be enlisted to justify persecutions so devoid of virtue. Once the witch-hunting moves beyond the confines of teenage tyranny into the adult arena, what takes place is not just the Disneyland for the id but one with entrance tickets generated by the superego.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/how_witchhunters_operate.html
