Woke up and drink the Kool-Aid

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Apparently, Daniel Patrick Moynihan got it backward when he said everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.

The late senator’s axiom expressed a principle that until a few days ago cemented the wall between news and commentary at decent newspapers. We’ve labored under a delusion that it’s vital to protect reporting from encroachments by ideologies, whether of owners, senior editors, or individual writers. Our first duty was, we thought, to inform readers, tell them what was really going on, and only secondarily to persuade them to a particular point of view.

But that is no longer the case, as a fiasco at the New York Times over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton has made clear. It’s news that threatens opinion, not the other way around.

The New York Times newsroom, righteously inflamed by urban protests against the police, revolted after its bosses allowed Cotton to advocate the forceful restoration of order on vandals and marauders. The paper’s rampant young staff went for the jugular, claiming that giving a platform to an opinion that happens to be shared by 58% of the public endangered black employees.

Editorial page editor James Bennet was forced out. Senior management groveled to those who had previously been their underlings and said the article did not meet the Gray Lady’s exacting standards. And then they established a new dispensation encouraging staff to stab each other in the back if an opinion article upsets them — or even gives them the “slightest pause.”

So, everyone is not entitled to their own opinion. The only ones that may be printed are those approved by news reporters, whose job is ostensibly to collect facts. Toe the line, or you’ll be canceled.

The contrary, traditional view has been under threat for a long time. It’s two decades since panelists discussing climate change rudely asked an acquaintance of mine why he’d been invited and looked at him uncomprehendingly when he answered, “For diversity, I suppose.” The only diversity they understood was on race, not opinion.

Our ailing culture has, sadly, moved a lot farther in the wrong direction since then. We live in a radically intolerant epoch in which, on a wide range of subjects, only certain prescribed views may be expressed without inviting punishment. The most sensitive subjects are related to race, class, or gender, the ideological sledgehammers used by acolytes of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to smash Western civilization. Their cardinal obsessions have spread like stains and now cover just about anything the woke avant-garde says they do. You may adopt their views voluntarily or under compulsion, but adopt them you will. Otherwise, you’re a racist or a -phobe of some sort.

It’s chilling to see people forced to accept what they know is rubbish. But watching them willingly embrace fraudulent ideologies and wallowing in their own humiliation is almost worse. Creepy scenes are being played out across America of people dropping to their knees in ritual submission to confess their complicity in systemic racism. It’s like the sheep in Animal Farm falsely accusing themselves of peeing in the water trough. In the Washington suburb where I live, a crowd of perhaps 1,000 white people, mostly kneeling with their hands held up in surrender, recently intoned the words of a young man leading them with a microphone: “I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible and do everything in my power to educate my community. I will love my black neighbors the same as my white ones.” The sentiments are fine, but the manner of their inculcation is appalling.

It was the religious incantation of a new cult. Yes, the worshippers drank the Kool-Aid of their own volition, but those who don’t will have the poison poured down their throats will-he, nill-he.

In the land of the free.

It is time for America to reject the pursuit of doctrinal uniformity. Time to defy the Minneapolis mob chanting “shame” at Mayor Jacob Frey because he wouldn’t submit to one final grovel and agree to eliminate the city’s police force.

There is no appeasing or avoiding today’s militants. You may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you, and they’re coming after your country. It’s past time for good, decent people to reject the corrosive new catechism and fight back. This is meant to be not only the land of the free, remember, but also the home of the brave.

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