Political correctness (PC) is a movement whose roots are in Marxist-Leninism and the Communist Revolution in Russia in 1917. According to this dogma, speech is said to be “politically correct” when it conforms to the dictates of the party. In its original setting and use, “the party” referred to the Community Party, the only political party in the former Soviet Union. Political correctness is a political-cultural orthodoxy. Under Communism, politically incorrect speech brought punishment by the state. Writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) were arrested by the KGB and shipped to prison camps merely for dissenting from this orthodoxy. William Deresiewicz defines it as “the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.”¹ It is not, as he notes “the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets.” It began to gain a foothold just as Modernity was morphing into Late or Liquid (Z. Baumann) Modernity, the subjectivist phase of Modernity. It was facilitated by the Western academic fascination with Desconstructionism, wherein most everything (including sexuality) is to be considered a mere social construct to be “deconstructed.” This was a war against sense experience, against history, against norms, against nature and, to borrow a phrase, “nature’s God.” As “Postmodernism” (or radical subjectivism) swept through the university, rendering authors mute (what do they know?) and empowering “reader response” (wherein the reader may make a text to say whatever he will) in the 1980s, near the end of the Cold War (though few knew it was the end), just before the Soviet Union would collapse and the Berlin Wall would be taken down, the ideology that fueled political, cultural, and social oppression during the Soviet Union was gaining momentum in the West. By the mid-1990s a debate was already raging in the academy whether political correctness was real or a fever dream of paranoid conservatives. Today, 25 years later, it can hardly be doubted that political correctness is real. Critical [fill in the blank] theorists abound and their books are best sellers. It is now considered politically incorrect to acknowledge that political correctness exists. It does and here are some resources to help you navigate the maze.

Podcasts

• Heidelcast 69: Stella Morabito On Political Correctness
• Heidelcast 93: The LGBT Movement And Free Speech
• Heidelcast 94: The LGBT Movement And Free Speech (pt 2)
• With Presbycast On Cancel Culture And Calvinist Pirates
• Heidelcast 144: Calls On Confessions, Covid-19, Chick-Fil-A, Christ and Culture, And More
• Office Hours: Carl Trueman Explains Why The World Seems So Upside Down

Books, Quotations, And Essays

1. Dreher, Rod. Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. New York: Sentinel, 2020.
2. McDermott, Gerald R, ed. Race and Covenant: Recovering the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Acton Institute, 2020.
3. Pluckrose, Helen, and James A Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity-And Why This Harms Everybody. Firsted. Durham, North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020.
4. Rauch, Jonathan. Kindly Inquistors: The New Attack on Free Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 2013.
5. Trueman, Carl R.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020.
6. Walsh, Michael. The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. New York: Encounter Books, 2017.
7. Pruitt: A Plea To The PCA To Avoid The Both The Meat And The Bones Of Critical Theory
8. The New McCarthyism
9. So You Say You Want A Revolution?
10. Wokeness Is A New Religion (In A World That Is Already Quite Religious)
11. The Smart Set Think That The Cancelled Had It Coming
12. Katz: I Survived Attempted Cancelation
13. Machen’s Antidote To Political Correctness
14. Ritual Defamation: A Rite Of Political Correctness
15. Political Correctness Crushes The Individual
16. Political Correctness At Work
17. Political Correctness At UCLA
18. On Pushing Back Against Political Correctness
19. The Purpose Of Political Correctness Is To Humiliate
20. What Political Correctness Unintentionally Reveals
21. Political Correctness Uses Social Vilification To Silence Dissent
22. Political Correctness Serves Only The Centralization Of Power
23. On What Political Correctness Really Is
24. The Cruelty Of Political Correctness
25. Doris Lessing On The Habits Of Mind Inherent In Political Correctness
26. Nature, Gender, Rage, The Emperor’s Clothes, And Evangelical Docetism
27. Stella Morabito: The Significance Of Mobs
28. Wokeness Is A New Religion (In A World That Is Already Quite Religious)
29. What Patty Hearst’s Kidnapping Tells Us About The Rise Of Woke Culture
30. Stella Morabito: Emotional Manipulation Is Baked Into The Revolution
31. The Tyranny Of The New State-Religion: Incoherence
32. The Late-Modern Oppression Olympics In Biblical Perspective
33. The World Was Made To Be Known And You Were Made To Know It
34. Grammar Guerilla: Conversations, Discussions, And Arguments
35. Grammar Guerrilla: Punctuation Is Not Mean Spirited. Full Stop.
36. S-T-O-P Means Stop (or Does it?)
37. What I Learned In English Lit About Civil Liberties
38. Morabito: Soft Show Trials
39. The Illiberality Of Cancel Culture Is Terrifying
40. The Illiberalism of The Late Modern Academy
41. Follow The Money: Robin DiAngelo Cashes In On Guilt
42. Cato Institute Poll: Cancel Culture Exists
43. McWhorter On Cancel Culture
44. How To Resist Cancel Culture
45. Pinker: Cancel Culture Is Orwellian
46. More On Cancel Culture
47. Cancel Culture
48. Bari Weiss Hounded From New York Times: “Unlawful Discrimination…Hostile Work Environment”
49. Campus Rage Is A Sacrament Of A New Religion
50. The Corrosive Consequences Of Speech Codes
51. A California Court Defends Free Speech And Religious Freedom
52. The LGBT War On Free Thought And Speech
53. Taking The Temperature Of Free Speech
54. From The Campus To The Culture: The Potential Death Of Free Speech
55. A Win For Free Speech
56. Canadian Speech Tribunals In Our Future?
57. Ezra Levant Speaks Up For Free Speech
58. Religious Freedom Watch: Chilling Protected Religious Speech In The Military
59. Socialism: The Utopia That Ends In Misery
60. Before Political Correctness
61. They Will Help You Overcome Facts
62. Supreme Court In 1957: Academic Freedom Is Self-Evident
63. A Rational Alternative To “Safe Spaces” On Campus
64. Alito On The Consequences Of The New Orthodoxy
65. Logicide And The Death Of Freedom
66. The Infantilization Of American University Students
67. Science Versus Groupthink
68. Utopia Always Morphs To Dystopia
69. A Quiet But Radical Transformation Of The College Campus
70. Whose Moral Panic, Which Censorious Moralism?
71. Weiss: American Tolerant Pluralism Under Siege
72. And Now For Something Completely Different: More Speech Suppression
73. Free Speech Matters: BigSocMedia Bans New York Post Article
74. Critical Theory Seeks To Suppress Dissent In America
75. College Student Newspaper Founded By William F. Buckley Fires Student For Criticizing The Defund Police Movement
76. Critical Theory Is Not Neutral
77. Trueman On A Source Of Political Correctness, Critical Theory, Screaming Yale Undergrads, And The Impulse To Destroy The Past
78. Critical Theory Is Not Neutral
79. Luther Delivered Us From The Doctrine Of Purgatory But Critical Theory Will Have It Reinstated
80. “It is difficult To Imagine A Ruling More Hostile To Free Speech”
81. Another Sign Of The Collapse Of Liberal Education
82. The Apotheosis And The Emperor’s New Clothes
83. Critical Theory Is Not Critical Enough
84. Defined By Our Theology, Not Critical Theory

Antifa Et Alia

1. Andy Ngo, Jonathan Turley, Et Al Testify Before Congress On Antifa
2. Who Funds Antifa?
3. Demons In The Digital Age
4. Antifa: An Emerging Threat To Civil Liberties And Peaceful Dialogue
5. What Is Really Going On? Watch This Video
6. 11 Antifa Members Indicted in San Diego For Violence

Related Resources

• Resources On The Social Gospel And Social Justice
• Resources On Social Justice And Racism

NOTES

1. William Deresiewicz, “On Political Correctness: Power, class, and the new campus religion,” The American Scholar Spring, 2017,