Anne Applebaum Laments

Across the internet and even the blogosphere people are talking about Anne Applebaum’s comprehensive essay about cancel culture. In it she chronicles the massive disruptions caused by the apparently new totalitarian tendency to punish people for thought crimes. The punishment does not involve the legal system, but it is extra-judicial and means trying to call out miscreants and bigots, to destroy their lives, to ostracize them, to reject them from both polite and impolite society.

Her purpose, if I may read into her article, is ultimately to exonerate the leftist bullies and thugs who are leading the charge against wrong think. And yet, she fails to remark that this cultural aberration began with the #MeToo movement.

And, however much she wants to exonerate the proponents of critical race theory-- by her lights they have not been promoting violence--the that theory's prevalence grew out of the George Floyd riots, and, dare we say, insurrection that lasted for months last year and that caused billions in damage. 

Thanks to that insurrectionary moment, destroying someone’s life for having used a racially charged epithet in a context where it was certainly not designed or intended to harm became acceptable behavior.

As for the historical antecedents of such totalitarian horrors, Applebaum is wrong to open her essay with the case of Hester Prynne, she of scarlet letter fame. The reason is simple. Prynne was certainly ostracized, not for wrong think, but for adultery. Whereas most of the cases Applebaum evokes involve accusations that may or may not have been provable, the Prynne case involves the demonstrable fact that she gave birth out of wedlock. Prynne struck a blow against something that Puritans held sacred, that is, love marriage, but she was not accused of indulging in wrong think.

As for a culture where people are assumed to be guilty before claims against them are investigated, the source lies in a 2011 Obama administration Education Department directive, to the effect that those who make accusations of sexual harassment or abuse are to be believed, without the accused being allowed any right to due process. In the past it was called lynching.

Again, Applebaum ignored this salient point, one that was overturned by the big bad Trump administration. Yet, if you want to see a politically motivated suspension of the right to due process, you can look at the Obama administration. 

Among those who were most likely to be accused where white males, especially the kind who would be more likely to vote Republican.

The totalitarian impulse on display here does not, despite what she says, involve social codes. It involves groupthink, an effort to brainwash the populace in right think. A minimal understanding of the early days of the Maoist takeover of China shows us that brainwashing was the order of the day, not so much in order to impose new rules of social commerce or new table manners, as with imposing a set of beliefs on an unwilling populace. Read Robert Jay Lifton’s excellent study of Maoist brainwashing in, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. 

It is less involved with behavior than with inquisitorial witch hunts where people are assumed to be heretics, and thus are going to be brought before a tribunal where they will be presumed guilty. Once they are presumed to be guilty, inquisitors will take the least shred of evidence to be determinant of the fact that they are really guilty. In rank defiance to our own judicial system, witches had to prove that they were innocent. The ruling authorities did not have to prove them to be guilty. As you doubtless know, in Europe, one way to see if a witch was really guilty was to throw her into a river, to see if she drowned. If she did, she was pronounced innocent.

So, we are not really dealing with social codes, like good table manners or proper grammar. We are dealing with an attempt to impose a system of beliefs on the populace, to deprive them of their freedom to think. After all, the current debate about transgenderism forces everyone to accept that a man who believes himself to be a woman is really a woman. It is less about social codes than about destroying the empirical and evidentiary thinking, the better to make everyone apt to accept propaganda as truth.

In today’s America, for example, white people are often assumed to be racists. They are assumed to be hiding their racist sentiments, at times, even from themselves. The proof for white racism lies in black underachievement. If you do not believe me, ask an evidently moronic professor named Ibram X. Kendi. Or else, you can ask another dimwitted propagandist, by name of Robin DiAngelo,

By Kendi’s lights, and they are not right wing, the existence of unacknowledged racism is the ultimate explanation for black underperformance. 

The reason for the inquisitorial witch hunt for signs of unconscious racial bias is not very difficult to ascertain. All of the time and effort that America has put into redressing racial grievances and overcoming past racist practice has not produced a society where blacks are equally represented at all levels of society. If legislation and bureaucratic edicts have failed to produce the desired, and largely unrealistic result, the cause must be lying hidden in people’s minds, in their unconscious, unacknowledged racism

Similarly, if feminism has given rise to some appalling conditions for women, the fault cannot be feminism itself, and its consistent effort to antagonize men. The fault must lie in sexist thought, in thought crimes, in sins, acknowledged and unacknowledged. The solution, imposed by our leftist zealots, is more thought reform, more brainwashing, and, dare we add, even more therapy.