You had to be a target of critical social justice to truly understand how insidious it is.
When I say “critical social justice,” I mean the new identity politics — the whole freight train, from intersectionality to queer theory to radical feminism to critical race theory — which has been going full throttle for years and left no room for questioning or dissent.
As a newspaper editor, I first began to see this fever in 2017 during the #MeToo movement, when activists started attacking the writers I then managed on the opinions pages.
The first writers they targeted were not even conservatives. They were cultural liberals — women who pushed back against the extreme fringe of #MeToo.
“Targeted” hardly begins to describe what happened to them. People tried to silence them. Tried to stop them from ever writing again on the issue. Even campaigned to get one of them fired.
After 2020, similar activists came after me and my opinions.
So, it is heartening to now see people on the left — in fact, the vanguard of the American left — begin to aggressively retreat from the identity politics they had long........