Authoritarians will do just about anything to get and keep power. One of their tactics is to manipulate the language so people can’t understand what is going on. The Nazis were masters of that, deriding all those who opposed them with various slurs. Jewish scientists were dismissed as peddling “Jew Physics,” and liberal Jewish economists were said to advocate “Jewish economics.” There was no need to think about what they were saying because they were simply bad people.
That mode of mind control is back on American college campuses, as Drexel University professor Stan Ridgley observes in today’s Martin Center article.
He writes, “Newspeak develops wherever a totalist ideology emerges — it is, in fact, a necessary characteristic of the ideology. Such battles for language dominance are ongoing all the time, and the chief locus for these battles is the university campus, that petri dish of leftist ideologies.”
Indeed so. We now have large numbers of “educators” who indoctrinate young minds and fend off any and all criticism with the contemporary equivalent of Nazi tropes, often some variant of “white privilege.”
Ridgley describes these people:
These are the advocates for “social-justice education,” along with the elevation of myth, storytelling, narrative, and magical thinking to a par with science. Advocates of “other ways of knowing“and “indigeneity,” who exalt anti-scientific enterprises, share common characteristics (such as an inability to publish genuine research) and have obtained new academic life by their adoption of the critical-racialist oeuvre of paranoia, hyper-narcissism, pseudo-science, and magical thinking that would take us back to a pre-medieval world of superstition, sorcery, and shamans.
Unfortunately, many Americans are so poorly educated that they’re unable to see through the logical fallacies employed by these pseudo-intellectuals. Most college students are putty in their hands.