The ‘New Normal’ and the Assault on ReasonCan this assault on reason and nature last?
By Glenn Ellmers
January 15, 2022
Our political situation is so chaotic and strange right now that we can’t take anything for granted—including what is normal. So it’s often necessary to explain what may seem obvious to readers of American Greatness, but is regarded as strange or almost incomprehensible to other people.
For example, it is obvious to me, and probably to you, that today’s “progressive” agenda is actually pushing our country back to a more primitive past.
Consider some of the most urgent priorities of woke ideology:
- Reinstituting racial segregation and replacing individual rights with group rights.
- Abandoning poor and minority neighborhoods to lawlessness by defunding the police and decriminalizing many offenses.
- Eliminating opportunities for women in sports by forcing them to compete against men.
- Impoverishing working-class American citizens by enriching a global oligarchy while flooding the labor market with illegal aliens.
- Eliminating due process and the rule of law by resurrecting pre-trial detention, extra-legal punishment, and the presumption of guilt for “political enemies.”
In each case, this agenda represents a return to a less civilized, even barbaric, past. More precisely, it is the return of tyranny—the default political system for most of human history, and the constant danger lurking in the shadows of freedom, threatening to overtake those who fail to guard their liberties.
It took two millennia for Western civilization to implement the revolutionary principles of limited constitutional government, equal natural rights, and the impartial administration of justice. Now those hard-won achievements are being swept away by a fanatical ideology which, ironically, is convinced of its own moral superiority and devoted to overcoming America’s allegedly racist, unjust history. Somehow, these bizarre and regressive causes have come to define the Left, which not that long ago prided itself on standing for “liberalism.”
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What is more surprising—in fact, breathtaking—is how few Americans are being targeted with intimidation, and how many have instead become enthusiastic supporters of this new fanaticism.
Propaganda, of course, is another great tool of tyrants. But has any despotism in human history ever persuaded so many people, so easily, to accept doctrines that are obviously irrational; to change their opinions instantaneously and without question on command; to deny the evidence of their own eyes, ears, and common sense?
Let me add one more item to the list above—which is perhaps the most astounding example of successful woke indoctrination. For several centuries, at least since John Stuart Mill, the Left has defined itself by its commitment to freedom of speech. This was practically the sine qua non for calling oneself a liberal. Yet some time around 2019-20, in the historical blink of an eye, free speech was simply . . . dismissed. It became obligatory on the Left to support systematic control of our public discourse by a handful of massive tech companies, in cooperation with the government. Liberals moved as if with a single will and became enthusiastic supporters of official censorship implemented by a corporate oligarchy. And yet only a tiny handful of (excommunicated) intellectuals on the Left have dared speak against this Great Leap Backward.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/the-new-normal-and-the-assault-on-reason/
