The Culture War Isn't About Language, Right?

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The culture war is about language. It's also why the movement has been so successful because it uses progressive sounding terminology. Most people think, yeah, I mean, I'm on board with social justice, who wouldn't be? And it's that strategy of using kind of Trojan horse strategy where you you smuggle through regressive ideas, using progressive language. That's exactly what's happening here. We are dealing with an illiberal regressive movement. They call themselves progressives, but they're the opposite. You know, as I say in the book, they have mistaken progress for change. They're changing things, but not making things better. They're making things worse. The damage that

Shermer and Doyle discuss: terminology of: PC, identity politics, woken, social justice, antifa, BLM, TERF, intersectionality • Critical Social Justice as a witch craze • Satanic Panic (1980s) • Recovered Memory Movement (1990s) • How widespread is the problem: minor skirmishes on social media or mainstream? • Hill-Harris 2021 poll: 32% voters ID as woke and 31% said they don’t know what the term means • new puritanism as a secular religion • Whiteness and White fragility • Implicit Association Test • Postmodernism • Neo-Marxism • Cancel Culture • hate speech • J.K. Rowling • pluralistic ignorance.

Andrew Doyle is a writer, satirist and political commentator. He regularly appears on television to discuss current affairs, and is a panelist on the BBC’s Moral Maze. He has written for a number of publications, including the Telegraph, Sun, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Standpoint, Spectator, and Sunday Times. He is the creator of satirical character Titania McGrath, under whose name he has written two books: Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, both published by Little, Brown. Titania McGrath has over half a million followers on Twitter. He was formerly a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, and a lecturer at Oxford University where he completed his doctorate. His previous book was Free Speech and Why it Matters. His new book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.