I’ve been around for not the longest here, but a while, and have seen a lot of stupid things go on in this country. I think prior to this, the most egregious display of pure lunacy was with the circa Bush-era religious right - the fundamentalist Christians. But what I’m seeing now takes the cake, and I never imagined that would happen.
It used to be near-impossible to criticize that group, because you were politically and culturally just not allowed to, for reasons of timidity and sensitivity. All the while, the movement retained and gained political ground using that — able to handwave facts, data to the contrary, and even non-emotional takes. That’s certainly not how they are viewed now.
So on the one hand, that gives me hope for the eventual rejection of this iteration of pure lunacy too, although God knows how long that will take. But when I wonder what finally allowed effective criticism and the dismantling of the evangelical fundamentalist right, what cracked those political and cultural walls, I think it was 9/11.
When faced with such a terrible, horrible act in the name of fundamentalist religion (whether it was more politically or religiously motivated is moot by now), people like Dawkins and the New Atheists were emboldened to launch critical assaults on it in the following decade, and had the definitive event to point to in the face of the prevailing sensitivity.
So on the other hand, it worries me that it will only take another comparably lethal and tragic event enacted by who could be representative of the left, to really reverse the virulence and similar non-critical propagation of BLM and IDpol, and their political and cultural immunity from criticism.
Based on what we have seen, in this thread but well beyond it, I am entirely comfortable believing that those on the far left are capable and willing to perform such an act out of belief in the good of their cause. There are extremely similar to an evangelical, religious, fundamentalist militant, and are well equipped with the necessary dogma along with a confused (inverted, really) ethical orientation.
