Plain Talk About Political Correctness

Today’s world can be quite a confusing place. It was only short decades ago that everyone woke up in the morning and knew exactly who and what they were. If you were lucky enough to wake up in the U.S.A., you stood a pretty good chance of being better off than you were the day before. You also knew right from wrong, and what it meant to be a good citizen. You knew what you admired in your leaders and what to expect when you voted for them.

You knew all these things because people spoke often of them in plain language, unafraid of any subject, because they were confident that their right to speak freely was protected by the U.S. Constitution. And you darn well knew what was in that noble document, as your parents and teachers drilled its contents into you and impressed upon you the tremendous sacrifices of those who fought to establish and protect it.

And among those rights was that of worshiping your God in public, mindful of the right of others to worship theirs, but not fearful that the practice of your religion would make you the target of hateful and unjust accusations of those who believe in nothing. And even though the Constitution forbids the adoption of a state religion, the Judeo-Christian ethos with its Ten Commandments served as a blueprint for our laws and a backbone for our national morality.

Today, the Constitution is often looked upon the same way as Christian worship; mostly an outdated concept that at best requires lip service in order to gain the support of those who still revere it. Kind of like the boorish uncle you have to put up with until he kicks the bucket and leaves you all of his cash.

The thing is, that those who disdain the Ten Commandments and the Constitution as archaic instruments of coercion, are themselves constantly trying to shape our national behavior, but in a manner which is most inconsistent with our constitutional republic. The method of choice instead is political correctness--a truly disgusting and disingenuous term, since the political viewpoints deemed '‘correct’' are exclusively left wing.

Much has been made of the way in which political correctness has put the nation in danger as demonstrated by the Fort Hood shootings, and this is most certainly true. But the real danger is not limited to physical peril; the greatest casualty is truth, for the goal of the politically correct is to speak in a way so as to avoid being offensive, which is an impossibility in the real world.

Take racism for instance. We are constantly lectured that, no matter what we do in this nation, we will be forever stained as a racist country, and that white Americans must be perpetually held responsible for the actions of those who lived centuries before most of our relatives even came to these shores. To debate the illogic and injustice of this premise is deemed wholly politically incorrect and therefore inadmissible in public circles. Yet, it would be interesting to ask leftists to name a country they revere for its past history in reference to slavery and maybe also genocide.

Yet, this one-sided debate continues unabated, as in this charming piece by the UK Guardian’s Tom Tomasky brazenly titled, “Hate Obama? You May Not Be a Racist. But You Will Be White.” Oozing with racism as its title implies, it is crammed with condescendingly PC statements like, “I do think it's fair to say that, at this point in U.S. history, most individuals aren't racist, at least in any blatant way. Most white people, especially from middle age down, may have a black friend or two, or at least co-workers with whom they get along fine.”

The fact is that Barack Obama could never have been elected without a great number of votes from white Americans who were willing to elect him despite his utter lack of experience. Let’s face it, Obama’s foremost qualification was that he’d bring something different to the presidency; he is black. What else can explain the losses of John Kerry and Al Gore, who served up the same liberal bologna but on extremely white bread? That they at least had more extensive executive and legislative experience than Obama only further illustrates the point.

If we really want to talk honestly about racial voting, we’d be asking how few blacks voted for John McCain and why that was. Of course, the answer we’d get would be that Obama’s agenda is more in line with the interests of blacks. Try that statement the other way around and you’ll be called a racist faster than a speeding bullet. Political correctness is nothing if not a great separator which lays the blame for the plight of a few on the many, whether justifiable or not.

But it is Mr. Tomasky’s final word on racism--an almost perfect distillation of what our president has been touting all over the globe--that really lays out in detail the difference between PC-ers and the rest of the country: “Americans resist overstatement because we want to reassure ourselves we're a good country at heart. But history has more often proved on this topic that we're not. We'd do well not to forget that.”

Well, I would recommend that Mr. Tomasky and the rest of his ilk open a few history books written before the advent of Political Correctness to see just how wrong he is. The fact is that millions of Americans have given their lives to abolish slavery and tyranny, both here and around the world, and liberated millions more of all races and creeds.

But these arguments fall silently on the deaf ears of those who have manipulated our national discourse to include only what they want to hear and have heard. Political correctness prevents the use of that which is really needed to heal whatever racial divides remain in this country: pure, unadulterated truth.

Political correctness is a way of changing the rules of the game in mid-play by stealing the language. It is similar to the attempt to change the rules of the game in mid-play by doing away with price structure. In other words, if you could substitute a new paradigm (read Marxism in theory and cronyism in practice) for the law of supply and demand you have certainly changed the game. Similarly, if you can marginalize the Constitution you have changed the rules of the game in mid-play.

If you can contrive to steal the language you have stolen the culture. If you have the language and the culture, you soon will have political control. We conservatives deplore incidences of political correctness but we rarely see that seemingly isolated eruptions of political correctness are part of a greater whole; one is reluctant to say part of a greater "conspiracy" but it is certainly part of a greater consensus on the part of leftists who consciously seek political power by distorting the language and perverting the culture. They have professors who write papers telling other professors and elected Democrats what words to use and what words to avoid. Every day the White House and the Democrat National Committee put out talking points in an effort to dominate the debate by stealing the language. We forget the object of all this is raw political power.

Political correctness is also an unfortunate expression because it is misleading. First, because it involves the theft of culture and language, there is nothing " correct” about it. Far from being correct, political correctness is actually quite sinister. It is sinister because it seeks to undermine the very support beams upon which we rest our political system and our culture. Political correctness actually targets those institutions which support our culture and seeks to vitiate them. It acts in stealth, the ultimate goal is never revealed.

Women are not told that part of the purpose of the feminist movement is to destroy the nuclear family because the nuclear family is the building block for the whole culture. If the culture disintegrates, the game is immediately changed as society disintegrates. Women are told that we are redressing of their grievances and breaking the glass ceiling. Men are not told that the attack on them, disguised as a reaction to "the authoritarian personality" is a further effort to destabilize society by destroying the family. Believers are not told that the assaults against any expression of faith in the public square is an attempt to discredit religion and with it one of the firmest support beams of the culture. Patriots are not told that the actions which disparage the flag are fully intended to discredit patriotism itself because the nationstate is the cumulative expression of the institutions which go to make up our culture. In each instance we are encouraged to view the matter as an isolated instance of injustice which needs to be corrected against the institutions named.

We are always diverted from connecting the dots.

Political correctness is a misleadingly benign name for a very sinister objective. The objective is to strip away all of the impediments to the final conquest of socialism. This actually is a conscious objective which is the fruit of The Frankfurt School which was founded by a Soros-like millionaire in 1923 in Germany to facilitate the conquest of Germany by the Bolshevik Revolution. Affiliated with Frankfurt University, these intellectuals were charged with the task of determining why the revolution failed in Germany and to do something to make it succeed. These communist intellectuals concluded that it was the building blocks of society such as the family, the church, the state which prevented the desired triumph of socialism. The solution? Contrive new ways of speaking, fashion a new language, change the culture, destroy our institutions, change the rules in mid-play, and usher in the triumph of communism.

These communist intellectuals concluded that it was the building blocks of society such as the family, the church, the state which prevented the desired triumph of socialism.

nathanbedford, I always enjoy your posts.

So?...What should conservatives do to counteract the machinations of the Marxists?

As I have posted many times, conservative private schools ( that strengthen the nuclear family, faith, and respect for the Constitution and free markets) **MUST** be part of the conservative strategy to counteract pernicious Marxism.

Marxism is our nation's MOST serious and immediate threat, yet conservatives consistently fail to understand this. They are hacking away at the trees ( for example: Illegal alien amnesty or health care) while failing realizing that they are surrounded by the forest of Marxism!.

Marxism is indeed our most serious threat, and government K-12 schools are their most powerful weapon! If the Marxists understand that children are their most important target, then we as conservatives MUST also focus on **CHILDREN**!!!

Conservatives MUST set up private education foundations that would award grants to conservative teachers willing to open tuition-free private one room school houses. The foundations would certify the teacher, approve the curriculum, test the students, and run community wide sports teams and arts programs. If women can run day care centers out of their homes, why not one room schools?

Simultaneously conservatives MUST work to SHUT DOWN every government K-12 school in the nation! Simply by attending, children learn that it is OK for the government to take money from their neighbor to pay for something their parents want for FREE. Do this for 1 to 3 generations and these citizens will willingly vote for the Federal Reserve, the IRS, FDR's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society, and now Obama!

If our nation's colleges and universities were filled to the brim with young adults fully capable of defending their faith and our nation's founding principles, their Marxist professors would wither before them! In less than a decade these young people would reconquer the cultural landscape.

While I do not favor giving away free education ( except to the deserving poor) we must do this initially. Why? Answer: Because that is the tuition charged by our price-fixed government schools. We must, at least at the beginning, match the government school price. But...Even if conservative private education were tuition free, children do know the difference between the acceptance of charity and taxes collected under the threat of police action. Charity inspires gratitude. Socialism engenders feelings of entitlement and envy.

Finally,....We must give up the idea that churches will rise up and attend to the educational needs of their children! Why? Answer: There are too many government school employees and those who benefit indirectly from the government schools sitting in the pews! Few ministers are willing to bite the hand that puts money in the collection plate.

Have you noticed Limbaugh tiptoeing up to the edge of the subject when he is heard to say words to the effect, "Obama is destroying the economy on purpose." I have noticed that Glenn Beck often refers to Cloward and Pivin. They want to connect the dots and they want to claim a conspiracy at least on the part of the administration but they know that if they do they will be marginalized.

But you're right political correctness has reduced us to talk radio together with Fox and the Internet where this political correctness can be exposed for the cultural Marxism it is. I can remember writing posts before the election to the effect that we could not hope to see any help from any institution apart from those just named to mount opposition to Obama's anticipated rush into Marxism. So effective has political correctness been in this country that there is no other viable institution that we can look to the buck the trend. As you point out, our religious institutions are largely given over to this virus. Academia from K. through PhD is hopeless and worse than hopeless, it is affirmatively spreading the pollen on behalf of political correctness.

I think that school vouchers would be one of the most effective tools against political correctness but I think that they have been thwarted by a combination of teachers unions' affirmative opposition and the passive opposition of whites who fear the integration which vouchers imply.

I think there is a possibility that we could fight back in the area of the arts. We see that YouTube offers a guerrilla theater for conservatives and an effective and inexpensive way to expose political correctness. Technology is tearing away at the monopoly which controls the gates in favor of political correctness.

It will be interesting to see how the culture breaks if there is a truly severe economic reversal. I cannot predict whether it will be a retrenchment toward conservatism or a collapse into servile dependency. We may be faced with some sort of terrorist strike in the homeland which could change the equation as well. My point is that it is easy now to project a linear future and say that political correctness looks unstoppable and destined to become the dominant philosophy but we know that Providence does not order affairs in a linear fashion and no one can tell what the next surprise will bring.

Finally, I would like to say that I wrote my reply with just your question in mind and I tried to write it for someone who is a lurker and probably regards himself to be an independent rather than a conservative who comes to Free Republic to browse. I think we should try to engage those who visit us to sample the waters with a coherent and comprehensive treatment which attempts to connect the dots.

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