The Dream of a Civil Rights Crusader

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The jangling discords of identity politics are said to be pulling us into another civil war, this one cultural instead of martial. With discordance arising from these many identities competing for power and influence that have brought out the worst demons of our nature, it is prudent to recall the dream of a civil rights crusader from an earlier century, abraham lincoln. Speaking to southerners who had already seceded from the union and formed the confederate states of america, the great emancipator implored here, i am quoting lincoln, we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it, must not break our bonds

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.