Conservatives have been complaining about the Godlessness and dangerous pinko leftism of public schools and universities for decades. Here's one sample of such opinion from 1948 that could easily be updated today and published in some right-leaning outlet. The source is....
Gerald LK Smith's rabidly antisemitic, Christian Nationalist magazine, The Cross and the Flag. You'll note the other articles that appear around this screed about "communist teachers."
The article on Jim Crow, you'll not be surprised to learn, argued that it only made good sense, and the only people who would tell you otherwise are Northern elitist intellectual communists.
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"WILL YOU BE FREE TO CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS IN THE FUTURE?" Not if the Communists and their liberal handmaidens get their way.
--1957 handbill printed and distributed by the Allen Bradley Company.
One of the problems, of course, is "academic freedom" being abused by Communists who hate Christianity and America and capitalism.
"They're trying to abolish Christmas!"
--Louisiana Citizens' Council, 1955
This 1991 WaPo profile of Dinesh D’Souza is a useful reminder that this anti-PC charlatan was beloved by the American right (and a good number of reactionary centrists and leftists) at one time. Many of us, however, saw through his schtick from the start. washingtonpost.com/archive/lifest…
Tom Wolfe. The next Bill Buckley.
For the historians out there, a Genoese reference.
This cri de coeur reminded me of something else I read recently about the existential threat that political correctness poses to our system of Higher Ed. These passages were written in...
...October 1991 by Dinesh D'Souza in Commentary Magazine. 30 years ago. I'm a middle aged professor, and I had just graduated from college the last time we went through this.
Whenever conservatives complain about "woke-ism," it's always useful to see what exactly they are trying to protect from its supposed abuses. In this case, the "brave, free thinking" being defended here is eugenics/scientific racism, which has been debunked repeatedly.
What most conservatives call "woke-ism," non-reactionary academics would call "having and enforcing a basic level of professional standards for evidence and argumentation." It's not "woke" for a biology department to refuse to host a talk by a creationist.
Just like the "Plandemic" hoaxers claimed to be speaking "truths that THEY don't want you to hear," our modern day eugenicists and climate deniers and creationists and [fill in the blanks] try to claim public space for their discredited buffoonery in the same way.
Listening to some Father Coughlin radio shows from the late 1930s, as one does on a Sunday night, and was reminded that his general line on Nazism was "it's the consequence of Communism, and Communism was the fault of the Jews." archive.org/details/Father…
Coughlin, like most US fascists, was putatively "against" the Nazis. He claimed to dislike the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. But then he would turn around to say "but I totally understand why Germans would want to destroy those godless Communists who are mostly Jews."
This excerpt from the show entitled "Jews Support Communism" pretty much sums it up. Anti-semites like Coughlin ALWAYS say they are not against "all Jews," just the "bad ones who are Communists." And by "communists" these antisemites just mean "to my left."
In 1991 I was teaching at the International School in Jakarta, Indonesia. A group of American parents who were about to send their kids to college in the US asked me to do a session (as a recent college grad) about the "scourge of Political Correctness" in the US.
They'd read about it in that Newsweek or somewhere else & were terrified that their children were going to be put in a gulag or brainwashed when they went to college. Those "kids" are now in their mid-40s and, you're not going to believe this, but they're fine. They're all fine.
Don't remember what exactly I said at that session 29 years ago, but it was basically this. "The fact that students of color on historically white campuses don't want to have racial epithets yelled at them while they're trying to get an education is not the end of civilization."