“They think we are all stupid now, too thick to look after ourselves, and so they treat us as if we were intellectually challenged children.”
Yet, he also recognizes an ulterior motive in such alarmism, since “it is perhaps also the case that because they have decided our warmer weather is caused by climate change—which I don’t doubt—everything that happens as a consequence must be bad, existentially threatening, to be deeply feared. And so a nice spell of sunshine is not to be welcomed, but is actually death, waving his big black scythe at us all, grinning like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ and telling us we should have listened.”
Ya think, Rod?
But let’s pause for a moment and go back to Liddle’s parenthetical “which I don’t doubt”—not only because it shows that even a notorious journalistic bad boy like him must make his ritual genuflection to the pieties of the day, but also because it leads him on to another, even more trenchant observation.
“This is part of the absolutist nature of our times,” he writes, “a discourse devoid of nuance and context. The obvious truth is that some effects of global warming can be quite pleasant, but one dare not say so, in case other people think you’re a denier.”
Obviously, being thought to be a “denier” is pretty high up on the list of bad things that can happen to a mainstream journalist, in Liddle’s view. Equally obviously, he isn’t wrong to think so. That kind of thing can lead to cancellation and loss of what must be a pretty comfy livelihood.
And yet he manages to say the forbidden thing in the course of saying that he daren’t say it. Clever of him.
To this poor pedagogue, the thought of being supposed a “right-wing provocateur” is as terrifying as being supposed a climate “denier” is to Liddle.
Yang notes that his frightened young protégé is actually “the sort of committed left-wing partisan who uses terms like ‘systems of oppression’ unironically and who regards ‘anti-woke’ polemicists as cynical hacks and grifters.” And yet, “he also happens to be witness to absurd school policies justified under the guise of ‘racial equity’ that are doing harm to the very kinds of students on whose ostensible behalf they are being implemented.”
What to do? If he sounds the alarm about the harm being done to his young charges by the “woke,” he might be thought to be “anti-woke” himself—clearly, too ghastly a fate to be contemplated.
Sounding the alarm anonymously may take away a little from the impact, but at least it will allow him to keep his job—which, by his own admission, involves harming young children whom, if it didn’t provide him with a living, he would prefer not to harm.
This is how the left enforces uniformity of thought on those who aspire to the intellectual and social status that the left now has in its gift to bestow upon its loyal supporters.
This must be why it never occurs to the anonymous schoolteacher to question his own certainty about “systems of oppression” or the evils of those sinister “anti-woke” grifters, just waiting for their chance to pounce on the slightest trace of self-doubt among the enlightened.
“It is a dilemma,” Yang writes, “widely shared across a range of liberal institutions in which conscientious actors see destructive practices being entrenched and immunized against critique by the same dynamics which they find powerless to resist because the specter of right-wing reaction makes any self-criticism impossible.”
Well, not impossible, just self-censored because of fear of being identified with the hated “other” whose relegation to déclassé status has been the work of the media and Hollywood for generations.
The supposed “dilemma” is no more complicated than that: The left-wing and media elite are enforcing standards of membership on their adepts and novices—as elites always do—and the latter have either to find some way of quieting their conscience or defecting to those whom, by joining the left in the first place, they have implicitly recognized as the enemy.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t help thinking that the kind of moral tension under which such people as the schoolteacher are forced to live their lives isn’t—to use one of their own favorite words—sustainable.
They must see that they’re living a lie, and yet they imagine they have no choice; they must see that it’s fear that keeps them ideologically in line with their colleagues and superiors, and yet they yield to that fear rather than say what they know to be true.
And, to return to where we started, they must also see, not only that the climate emergency that they are expected to tout on the president’s behalf is about as believable as that the Earth is on fire and we’re all going to die soon, but also that the emergency measures taken to deal with it, whatever they may be, will only be to the detriment of our own economy while making no difference to the climate, so long as China, India, and other countries don’t also adopt them.
Sooner or later, unless such disillusioned lefties are successful in suppressing their conscience completely, they must run out of ways of hiding from the truth.
If enough of them do so, it could spell the end of the left’s hegemony in our media and other cultural institutions.
Not that I expect that to happen anytime soon.
