In the fall of 2020, I taught a course at an independent high school in Boulder, Colorado , on persuasive essay writing. It won’t stun anyone familiar with the town, affectionately known by locals as the People’s Republic of Boulder, that I was the only openly non-progressive in the entire school, teacher or student. If there were any other non-progressives in the building, they wisely kept it to themselves.

This was in the aftermath of the summer of 2020, when anything short of total submission to progressive ideology was taken as a declaration of deplorability. If you weren’t actively “anti-racist” in a very particular way as defined by a very particular type of academic, you were considered one of the moral monsters populating “the wrong side of history.”

It was in this environment of extreme uniformity that I was tasked with teaching seniors the subtle art of persuasion through argument. We forget now how quickly civil discourse fell out of fashion among liberals at the time. A trio of psychologically traumatic events, the Trump presidency, George Floyd’s death, and the COVID-19 outbreak, had convinced them that the........

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