Charles C.W. Cooke:

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile.

Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that “neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one?

For more than a decade now, our universities, our media, our HR departments, and our celebrities have terrorized us with a bunch of vicious dogmas that, it turns out, they never believed in for a moment. In the name of “diversity” and “inclusion” and “equity” and any other abstract concept that might plausibly be recruited to the obscurantists’ side, Americans were asked to subordinate their freedom, their conversations, and their consciences to the personal preferences of a handful of unelected arbiters of taste. And then, one terrible day in October, a real barbarity was staged, and, within a few hours of the rules being applied to its apologists, the whole enterprise was revealed to be a brittle sham. Who among us could have predicted that?

It was predictable, too, for, beneath the extended game of Calvinball that is contemporary wokeism, there has never been anything more substantive than grubby self-interest. When selling their wares, the peddlers of America’s byzantine speech codes have cast themselves as the enlightened reformers of a rotten status quo. In truth, they are the precise opposite. Every tinpot dictator in human history has recognized the power that lies in the circumvention of free debate, and it is to this unlovely tradition that our contemporary censors have fallen heir. Superficially, they may appear to be the friends of the downtrodden, but, once one digs a little deeper, one discovers that the game has been rigged at all four corners, and that each and every one of the invoked terms — “harm,” “violence,” “marginalization,” “trauma,” et al. — is malleable enough to yield any outcome that is desired.

In Israel last week, we witnessed a heinous terroristic attack on one of the most relentlessly targeted groups in human history. The civilian victims were raped, mutilated, beheaded, and set on fire by a group of perpetrators that, by its own admission, does not consider its targets human and desires to extirpate their kind from the Earth. That the group that was affected by this abominable crime was not covered by the censors’ expansive protective superstructure — indeed, that, instead, that superstructure was hastily abandoned — reveals how worthless and self-serving the whole edifice was, and how cynical its designers have been. Had the progenitors of “belonging” been acting in earnest, the moment would have prompted a Dunkirk. Instead, we got a lot of hemming and hawing, followed by a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

We noticed.

Jonah Goldberg adds:

Virtually all of these ideas and causes are based upon the idea that hurting someone’s feelings or not ratifying their grievances is a form of violence or bigotry. But now, according to their heads-we-win-tails-you-lose worldview, speech that they don’t like is literal violence, and literal violence that they do like is speech.

I’ve written scores of columns on Orwellian language policing. I do it in part because I’m both offended by, and opposed to, a great deal of it. One reason I’m offended is that nearly all forms of vandalism disgust me, and a great deal of this stuff is little more than the intellectual equivalent of angry teenagers using spray paint to deface—and put their mark on—the world around them. I’m similarly repulsed by bullying, and so much of the verbal night-sticking used by the DEI industrial complex is little more than an attempt to intimidate people into licking frozen flagpoles in the playground. I’m also opposed to it because most of these language games amount to ideological warfare hiding in the Trojan Horse of civility.

And that compounds the offense because, as I’ve written many times, there is a kernel of justification for what often gets dismissed as “political correctness” or “wokism.” In an evolving and increasingly diverse society, there’s nothing wrong with abandoning some terms because they are legitimately offensive. We no longer call people who are mentally impaired “retarded.” We no longer call black people “negroes.”

We’ve stopped doing such things because standards of decency have changed. But these concessions to decency and good manners cannot justify the far more sweeping efforts by ideological enforcers to bend people and institutions to their will. So many of the linguistic contortions and distortions forced on us by these commissars have nothing to do with decency and good manners, and everything to do with trying to design social reality on their terms, to create shibboleths to protect in-groups, and to fashion verbal tiger traps to snare members of outgroups. That’s how neologisms like “Latinx” work. The term actually offends far more Latinos than it flatters, but forcing people to use it ratifies the stolen moral and cultural authority of those who insist upon it. The word doesn’t represent an effort to be inclusive of Latinos, but an effort to exclude rival elites.

I feel like a sucker, though, because all of these arguments and objections take this project seriously, when the reaction of large swaths of the left to the October 7 pogrom has laid bare the enterprise’s inherent unseriousness.

How can I listen to someone tell me we have to get rid of the term “master bedroom”—because “master” is offensive—when the same person refuses to condemn chants of “gas the Jews”? Before you—correctly!—reply that a great many progressives and woke ideologists have condemned antisemitic chants and mobs, I should add that many of those condemnations are followed by a “But …”

But you have to understand the context. But they have a point. But this. But that. 

Even if you concede large amounts of factual or theoretical territory to such minimizations and equivocations—concessions I am unwilling to make—you’re still left with the fact that such champions of nuance are making Jews feel unsafe, or capitulating to people who make Jews feel unsafe. And I don’t just mean they “feel unsafe” because they’re forced to hear horrible things—things far, far, more horrible than using such verboten phrases as “rule of thumb”—I mean they “feel unsafe” because mobs trap them in the Cooper Union library or harass them on Harvard’s campus. A couple years ago, Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center declared that you can’t say “take a stab at”—as in “take a stab at getting your term paper done on time”—because of the inherent violence of the phrase. Now the same ilk are saying that we need to respect the free speech of people celebrating the literal stabbing of Jews solely because they are Jews. It’s complicated, don’t you understand?

Before the list was withdrawn, Stanford’s Harmful Language Initiative informed us that we must have zero tolerance for terms like “blind study” because such language “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” But turning a blind eye to the people who dismembered babies and children—or the people who celebrated that dismembering—is okay, or complicated, or painfully necessary, or something-something? That’s the mark of intellectual sophistication? Screw you.

In other words, you can condemn the horrors perpetrated by Hamas all you like. And you should. But if you go on to argue that we need to make social and cultural space for those who don’t, I can’t take you remotely seriously about all of that other stuff. Watch this video from Harvard. If this kind of intimidation happened to a transgender kid, black kid, gay kid, Asian kid, or kid of virtually any other demographic, it would be grounds for immediate expulsion. It would be a national scandal. And rightly so. We’re told that praying outside an abortion clinic is fascistic, but hounding Jews on campus is what? Okay? Regrettable? Complicated?

No. It’s none of those things. It’s evil.

After the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, enormous numbers of social justice warriors celebrated and blamed the Jews for it. Even larger numbers of progressives made allowances for the people celebrating the slaughter, as if reveling in the butchering of families is just an immutable characteristic of their identity that has to be given some degree of respect.  We make classrooms handicap-accessible. So too we must make allowances for people who, for identitarian reasons, cheer when paragliders slaughter concertgoers.

The majority of campus commissars may lament the bloodlust and Jew-blaming to one extent or another, but many can’t let go of the condescending logic of multiculturalism and the twisted admiration of youthful zeal. So they tell us we have to greet such moral deformity with understanding, nuance, or even a certain degree of tolerance.

There’s ample room to criticize Israel for myriad things. There’s no doubt that many campus progressives don’t deserve to be tarred with guilt by association with what the Hamas apologists say or do. But the simple fact remains: If a decades-long project of zero-tolerance for bigotry and bullying can produce such large numbers of bigots and bullies, that project is an utter failure. The virtue-signalers cannot have a carve-out for violence against Jews—linguistic or literal—and still claim that virtue is on their side.