Wondering Why Free Speech Is Under Attack? Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers Has The Answer…

If the social justice left was honest (I’ll pause to let you chuckle about that), this kind of symposium would be sponsored by mainstream academics and be discussed on college campuses, where this has become a huge problem. But if such a thing were possible, we wouldn’t need to have this discussion in the first place.

Kind of a bizarre catch-22. But apparently the concept of “free speech” is now a partisan issue in America. Never thought that would happen, but here we are.

Commentary Magazine recently published a series of articles from scholars and commentators on the threat to free speech in America. One of our favorite people, Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers (famous for her “Factual Feminist” videos, among other awesome common sense analyses), was among those who contributed to the symposium. And, as always, her take on the subject is phenomenal.

You can read the whole thing here, but here are some highlights.

She starts out by talking about an incident where Heather MacDonald was shut down by leftist protesters and the college president condemned the protesters’ actions. The protesters fired back a letter accusing the president of being racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted – yeah, you know the drill by now –

Twenty-five students shot back a response: “Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist . . . classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.”

Some blame the new campus intolerance on hypersensitive, over-trophied millennials. But the students who signed that letter don’t appear to be fragile. Nor do those who recently shut down lectures at Berkeley, Middlebury, DePaul, and Cal State LA. What they are is impassioned. And their passion is driven by a theory known as intersectionality.

So, it’s not necessarily that these are “special snowflakes” being coddled and pampered by college administrators or given “safe spaces.” In Dr. Sommers’s view, the ideology of intersectionality is giving these students motivation to shut down anyone they don’t agree with.

Suddenly, the name that I’ve been using to describe these whiners –  “The Cult of Social Justice” – has become even more appropriate.

In case you need a definition of “intersectionality,” Dr. Sommers has you covered –

Intersectionality is a neo-Marxist doctrine that views racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and all forms of “oppression” as interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Together these “isms” form a complex arrangement of advantages and burdens. A white woman is disadvantaged by her gender but advantaged by her race. A Latino is burdened by his ethnicity but privileged by his gender. According to intersectionality, American society is a “matrix of domination,” with affluent white males in control. Not only do they enjoy most of the advantages, they also determine what counts as “truth” and “knowledge.”

It’s a glorified checklist, basically. How many “oppression points” you can score, based on your gender, race, sexuality, etc. The most categories you can check off, the more oppressed you are, the more victimized you are, the more the Cult of Social Justice loves you.

And if there’s one thing that today’s college kids want, it’s to be loved by the Cult of Social Justice.

Silencing speech and forbidding debate is not an unfortunate by-product of intersectionality—it is a primary goal. How else do you dismantle a lethal system of oppression? As the protesting students at Claremont McKenna explained in their letter: “Free speech . . . has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry.” To the student activists, thinkers like Heather MacDonald and Charles Murray are agents of the dominant narrative, and their speech is “a form of violence.”

It is hard to know how our institutions of higher learning will find their way back to academic freedom, open inquiry, and mutual understanding. But as long as intersectional theory goes unchallenged, campus fanaticism will intensify.

That last line – “as long as intersectional theory goes unchallenged, campus fanaticism will intensify” – is the crux of the argument. And it’s also part of why we Chicks do what we do. We mock and make fun of the idiots who engage in identity politics. The people who think that the only aspect about them that’s worth anything is their skin color or sexuality or which of the 58 gender flavors they claim to identify as.

The saddest part of all this is how ingrained these ideas have become into people. If you so much as suggest that they aren’t victims of some made-up patriarchy, they act like you just told them the moon is made of green cheese. Worse than that – they call you names and verbally beat you down to the point where it’s not even worth trying to reason with them anymore (I had this happen with a friend of mine not too long ago – I wasn’t even looking to make a political point or any kind of point at all. Just some innocent comment I made set her off about homophobes and bigots and that was the end of that conversation).

If the only way these ideas can be widely accepted is if any dissenting opinion is shut down, there’s not much value in those ideas. We’ve said it time and again. Feelings are not facts. Emotions are not reality. But try telling that to a bunch of cultists who are happily drinking the socially poisonous Kool-Aid.

You’d have been luck talking to a brick wall.