The Staasi-like anonymous system for reporting of sins against race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., at the College of William and Mary that Stanley Kurtz has posted on at the Corner, and the program of ideological re-education at the University of Delaware that John has posted on below indicate that we are entering a new and truly ominous phase of political correctness. The W&M arrangement is wholly hideous, but especially alarming is the directive that if a person is not sure if a PC sin has been committed in a certain instance, he should tell the commissars anyway and they will decide. You would think if you weren’t sure, it couldn’t be that important, but this is truly Big Brother territory now, complete with the surrender of individual judgment and discernment. In the Delaware case, especially chilling are the one-on-one sessions that students will have with the RAs, those highly trained experts in psychology and the human soul. I’m kidding of course. RA’s are students who have themselves been thoroughly reprogrammed by the PC comintern above.
Once again, I can’t help recalling the complacency of so many conservatives in the face of what has been happening on college campuses, as well as the unwillingness of so many liberals to join in the fight because they didn’t want to be identified with the few conservatives who did (and maybe also because they couldn’t admit that this was what their liberalism has led us to–they would prefer to think that the real threat is from conservatism).
From what I hear, these coercive PC attitudes have thoroughly permeated the workplace too. And parents are dealing with them in their children’s grade schools and high schools. A mother with a grade school child told me that when another child used an insulting epithet for homosexual, instead of the incident being handled quickly an quietly, the entire school was turned upside down for a full program of re-education. A couple of decades of this and you can remake a society. “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Freedom as the natural desire of all mankind? Maybe. Feedom as the natural entitlement of all mankind? No. The habits of freedom must be attained and maintained, and we are not proving up to the task.