Category Archives: Political Correctness

Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

The cast of Ted, the new Seth MacFarlane live-action series based on his 2012 film and its sequel, has been announced. MacFarlane will, of course, head the list as the voice of the eponymous Ted, a foul-mouthed teddy bear brought to life by an eight-year-old boys wish. Hell be joined by Giorgia Whighamof13 Reasons Why,Max Burkholderof Parenthood, andfrequent collaborator Scott Grimes,who stars on McFarlanes Star Trek parody The Orville, and has voiced Steve Smith on American Dad! since its 2005 premiere.

MacFarlane will direct all the episodes and will share writing, showrunning, and executive producing duties with former Modern Family writer/producers Paul Corrigan and Brad Walsh.

Ted will take place in 1993, prior to the events of the previous two movies, but after Ted has come to life. Burkholder will play the 16-year-old John Bennett, portrayed by Mark Wahlberg in the 2012 film, who lives in a working-class Boston home with his family and Ted, his best friend. Ted, in his own special and none-too-wholesome way, will help John as he navigates the minefields of teenage life in early 90s Boston.

Grimes will play Matty Bennett, a blue-collar conservative working dad of the typical McFarlane mold, whos trying his best to wear the pants in the family and frequently comes into conflict with his liberal niece, Blaire Bennett, played by Whigham. Blaires political correctness makes her a foil to her Uncle Matty, and will no doubt serve as the butt of many McFarlane-Esque skewerings all too familiar to the fans of Family Guy.

The mother of the household, Sue Bennett, has yet to be cast.

Tedwill be the second series produced under MacFarlanes and his production company Fuzzy Doors $200 million deal with UCP, a division of Universal Studio Group. Fuzzy Door president Erica Huggins will executive produce alongside Alana Kleiman and Jason Clark, who produced the Ted films. The series will stream on Peacock.

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Seth McFarlane's 'Ted' Series Announces Its Main Cast - We Got This Covered

By Wallace B. Henley, Exclusive Columnist | Wednesday, April 13, 2022Unsplash/Kelly Sikkema

The question from a TV interviewer veered off-script and bolted at me from the blue: Why do you think the Russians are committing atrocities in the Ukraine? Abortion, I answered so quickly it surprised even me.

The mindless massacre of the innocent during the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been stunning. It seems that in the eyes of the killers, human life has no intrinsic value, whether a babushka a grandmother struggling to flee, or a child clinging to its parents as they run through fiery streets in search of shelter.

What kind of people commit mindless massacre? What sort of culture produced them?

The United States is not guiltless. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade legitimized abortion at a new level. Human beings objectified one another, often resulting in the devaluation of life to mere utility and convenience.

When a nations highest court sanctions a belief or behavior, it has spoken for the nation itself. In 1973, the Supreme Court stated, in the language of its ruling in Roe: We need not resolve the puzzling question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of mans knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

Thus, in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court was ambivalent about human life, and in 2022 a new Supreme Court appointee a woman was unable to say what a female is. Ironically, popular culture and its ardent supporters applauded her response while rejoicing that the new judge was a woman.

They could define what she could not. But ambiguity about life and being is worse than that. Confusion about essential identity leads to a society that cannot figure out who God is as well as who a human is and leads to a deadly ambiguity.

Uncertainty regarding gender is a matter of concern, but uncertainty about whether the being in the womb is a living human being and protected by the foundational right to life specified in the U.S. Declaration of Independence is a life and death matter.

One of the outcomes is the objectification of the person. Seeing human beings as objects of satisfaction and then obstacles blocking ones ambitions are characteristics of the abortion culture that has affected Russia and so many nations.

When life is devalued in the privacy of the womb, why should we be surprised when it is devalued in a nations public places?

Lenin and his fellow Marxists unleashed the abortion monster on Russia when they took over the country through the 1917 revolution. Abortion there grew to the extent that in some historic eras Russia has been the world leader in the number of aborted pregnancies.

During one period, 57% of pregnancies in Russia were aborted. It seemed the number of abortions would outstrip the birth rate.

Even Vladimir Putin was concerned enough to call for a reduction in abortions. A government policy there now aims to cut abortions in half by 2025 to deal with the demographic crisis.

While that goal is applauded by many, it exposes a problem: The push to slow abortion in Russia is based on pragmatics (the goal to solve the demographic problem). Unbounded abortion will not end until people are convicted in their hearts that policies sanctioning it constitute sin. But without the sense of Gods transcendence, the concept of sin is lost as well. All that is left is political correctness, enforced by self-righteous establishment elites whose legalisms are as restrictive as the religions they hate.

Russia isnt alone. Ukraine also showed up on lists of nations with the most abortions. Dr. Brian Clowes, in a 2017 Human Life International report, wrote that every one of Europes 48 nations is currently under replacement fertility levels ... Nine European nations have remained continuously below replacement since 1965.

Atrocity is an atrocity, whether in the battle-torn streets of a city under siege by a military aggressor, or a nation under siege by a worldview that struggles to define the very humanity of a child in the womb as well as identifying gender once outside the womb.

This is indeed deadly ambiguity.

The objectification of the human being is not the only characteristic of the abortion culture. Another is the loss of the secularized individual human spirit and the soul of the society of the belief in and sense of Gods transcendence and the human accountability that goes with it.

When men and women no longer revere God, they lose reverence and respect for the life He has created in the womb as well as the lives of innocents rushing to shelters amidst a fiery war.

The tragedies in Ukraine should appall us all, but not surprise us at all.

Wallace Henley is a former White House and Congressional aide. He is now a teaching pastor at Grace Church, The Woodlands, Texas. Wallace is author of more than 20 books, including God and Churchill, and his newest, Who Will Rule the Coming 'gods: The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence.

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The abortion culture and atrocity in Ukraine - The Christian Post

Today, they are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country, lamented Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking in a televised meeting with major cultural figures earlier this month. He was referring to several events involving Russian cultural figures who have voiced their support for the war being cancelled, especially in the West, since Russia invaded Ukraine.

One of those cancelled is Valery Gergiev, general director of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theater and a friend of Putins, who was present at Fridays meeting. While most of the cancelled figures are alive, a small minority of the events cancelled included pieces by deceased icons such as Tchaikovsky performances of the composers pieces were cancelled in Italy, Japan and Croatia. However, that didnt stop Putin from drawing the spotlight to it in his speech. Theyre now engaging in the cancel culture, even removing Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov from posters. Russian writers and books are now cancelled, he said.

Since its introduction into mainstream popular culture through college campuses and social media around half a decade ago, cancel culture has become a raging issue in the culture war in the West, sharply dividing conservatives and left-liberals. It has become an umbrella term that has different meanings according to who you ask but its essence remains a collective boycott and de-platforming of individuals, corporations or institutions for actions collectively deemed inappropriate or offensive.

Cancel culture itself has been called out for cancelling free speech, bullying, and a mob mentality. Depending on the offence and the extent of punishment meted out, cancel culture has been called everything from a distraction to a hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war, to Americas free speech problem.

Looking at the issue through the prism of conservative opinion provides insights into Putins remarks and the message behind them. Right-wing groups have increasingly portrayed cancel culture as emblematic of a far-left ideological hysteria rooted in outrage culture, fuelled by groupthink and authoritarian mob justice. Donald Trump, no stranger to calls for cancellation, made it a central talking point in his presidential re-election campaign in 2020, calling his impeachment trial constitutional cancel culture and cancel culture totalitarian.

He is by no means alone. More than half the delegates at the Republican National Convention 2020 mentioned cancel culture as a menace, and conservative state governments have sought to pass legislation seeking to curb it in the US. These groups see cancel culture as an indication of mob justice by moral zealots on the far-left, colloquially called social justice warriors, who weaponise social media to punish and hurt anyone, whether comic, writer, professor or scientist, for daring to breach a moral orthodoxy under the guise of political correctness.

As the political-cultural faultlines in the West have widened, the attitude to cancel culture has become a line that now sharply divides liberals and conservatives. It is in this sense that Putin invoked the term, comparing the Wests treatment of Russian culture to Nazi Germanys burning of books. These portrayals depict the person, institution, or in this case, the country being cancelled as the victim.

Putin hinted at this in his singling out of J K Rowling, who was cancelled for her views on transgenderism a topic still very much on the fringes of the public conversation outside the West. Recently, they cancelled the childrens writer Joanne Rowling because she the author of books that have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide fell out of favour with fans of so-called gender freedoms, he said. The Moscow Times, while reporting on Putins speech, quoted former president Dmitry Medvedev describing the Wests frenzied hatred as being pushed by the US to stoke Russophobia as part of what the Kremlin calls a special military operation.

With comments on cancel culture, Putin is giving a dog-whistle to conservatives and hard-right groups in Russia and around the globe, including the West. It should be seen as an effort to put a distortionary spin on the cultural and social sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of his actions since the invasion of Ukraine, and level the same charges against the West legitimised by their own conservative leadership and intellectuals.

Further evidence of Putin borrowing from the American conservatives playbook is the overblown portrayal of the cancelling of Russia visible in his referring to Russian writers and books being cancelled as if they were boycotted en masse. These are the same exaggerated terms in which mainstream US right-wing news media such as Fox News usually portray cancel cultures image and reach.

Noam Chomsky talks about how the true meaning of socialism never really reached the common masses because the two largest propaganda machines, the US and the USSR, had both peddled distorted definitions of the term. From Donald Trumps rhetoric in the US presidential election to Putins reference to the term, political divisions around cancel culture have also reached their apogee. We must be wary of its use to spread misinformation and shift the blame for the due consequences of waging war on a sovereign country.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 13, 2022 under the title The culture front. Priyaranjan is a researcher and writer

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No, Russian artists have not been cancelled - The Indian Express

What Does It Mean To Be Indian? S N Balagangadhara and Sarika Rao. Notion Press. 2021. Pages 214. Rs 349.

This is the fourth and final part of Swarajyas conversation with S N Balagangadhara.

Q: You make a statement that there is intellectual poverty in already Islamised regions on the Indian sub-continent, in places like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir. Why do you say this?

A. I say this because it is visible, isnt it? These regions have not produced any great intellectuals in the last centuries and the environment in these regions is hostile to intellectual development. While people of Pakistan and Bangladesh do flourish and grow when they go to study in other countries, there are no noticeable native intellectuals in these regions.

In fact, India is heading in the same direction: we dont have intellectuals and we are not creating them. Irrespective of whether the decline will take the form of economic poverty or not, if things dont change, the intellectual poverty in India will reach the same level as Pakistan or Bangladesh. For instance, if things in education (both secondary and higher) do not drastically change in the next 15 years, the educational landscape in India will soon resemble that of Black Africa in the 1930s. We simply do have less and less competent teachers in our educational landscape.

Take the example of the reaction of most Indian intellectuals to the movie The Kashmir Files and the massive response of ordinary people. If the first aspect demonstrates anything, it lays bare the absolute barrenness of Indian intellectual landscape. I have not read a single reflection or review that even minimally tries to understand what people are responding to when they respond to the movie. Like everything else, this too is another occasion for moralising lectures about communalism, posturing against the imputed hatred the movie apparently propagates combined with expressions of pseudo-horror about an allegedly partial portrayal.

Very few things can move the entire population like this movie did and I am still thinking about it. And perhaps will also write on the movie. Tragedies or violence are not new, especially when they are in the news every day. So, it cannot be that the overwhelming response of people had only to do with the horrors faced by the Pandits in Kashmir or the treachery of our ruling classes (politicians, intellectuals, and media). Shortly after the movie came out, I saw it in Belgium, I remember telling my daughter that this movie would enter the national consciousness of India.

I have a feeling that one of the reasons why this movie has had the kind of impact it has is because it addresses our deeply held intuitions about our culture regarding knowledge, Saraswati, learning and the destructions wrought on it. One of the horrors we experience is to the rape of Kashimra Puravasini there and to her becoming a total alien in her hometown. (One of the first shlokas we learn as very young children goes thus: Namaste Sharade Devi, Kashimrapuravasini)

Q: Religion expands in two ways: through conversions, and then later by expanding the same ideas through a secularisation of theology. Christianity expands by de-Christianising its format And this secularisation is brought about by violence. Religion, whether it remains religion of gets secularised, is about othering someone or something Is this what you are trying to say?

A. I dont speak of othering. It is a jargon which doesnt explain anything. To treat someone as the other might be bad if they are the same as you and you dont treat them that way. For example, if one is a Christian, and Christianity says, we are all children of god, to treat some people as the other might be wrong. But if someone is different from you, your refusal to see and acknowledge that difference is wrong, isnt it?

In fact, I say that when the West looks at other cultures, it does not see them as the other. It sees and thus transforms them into a pale erring variant of itself. The other becomes another.

I do not say that Judaism and Christianity also secularise themselves through violence. The emphasis on secularising violence seems truer of Islam. The Semitic religions see Hinduism as another religion: false, to boot, but a religion, nevertheless. They see each other as the other, ie, as deficient, or defective religions (or heresies).

Q: You broadly seem to suggest that colonialism seems to have made us strangers to our own access to culture, and also that we simply have not made enough efforts to understand Western culture. Thus, we dont know how we must respond to colonial ideas when they come back to bite us without our knowledge of it. We say and speak words that display our colonial consciousness. If Western efforts to understand us through their lenses did not bring us much good, why is the reverse process, of our understanding Western culture, going to do us much good? Should we not focus on understanding ourselves first?

A. Today, the ways and means that we possess to understand ourselves, the intellectual frameworks, the concepts, the interconnections between them, the social scientific theories are all entirely built by Europeans. I have shown in my work that they are based much more on their experience of the world than on how the world is. There are any number of examples: the idea that all cultures have religion; the idea of a unique self (soul) which all human beings have; the notion that the caste system characterises Indian society, etc.

So, if we must understand ourselves, we must study the Europeans in very concrete ways. Of course, we will study and understand them as Indians. That is precisely the point. To recognise, first and foremost, that there are cultural differences between us. We must study these to understand the theories we have about human beings. To understand what we say about ourselves when we claim that we too have a religion or pontificate that one must be true to oneself, and that the caste system must be eradicated, we must study the West.

We must understand the intellectual frameworks and their implications to understand our laws and to learn how to make laws which dont make a travesty of everything good and just. To understand ourselves, we must understand western culture. Whether we like it or not, colonialism happened, and colonial consciousness exists. The question is how we can get out of it and regain access to our experience. My research programme, Comparative Science of Cultures, formulates one way of doing it. We cannot return to a pristine past of pre-colonialism. The question facing us today is what does it mean to be Indian in the 21st century?

To know more about the methodology of this approach, which the question raises, the second and third chapter in Reconceptualizing India Studies might help. They explicate my answers and their justifications.

Q: In a country where freedom of religion is written into the constitution, how do we defend Indian/Hindu rights if you do not even define it as a religion? How can law-makers even begin to understand the difference between religion and tradition, or the need to protect majority rights that are not religious in nature?

A. This is one of the big problems in India. We have no investments in research and development in social sciences. (The UGC does massively fund ideological propaganda by calling it funding social research.) There are also no institutions (political, legal, educational, or even charitable) which are interested in stimulating novel social scientific research.

If Hinduism is not a religion and current legal frameworks are primarily structured by Semitic religions, how can non-religious traditions hope to have the protections of law? This is not just a question for Hindus, but one that is also of crucial importance to other traditions like the native American or African. What would the frameworks or even minimal formulation of law look like which is not Semitic in nature but one which makes space for traditions too?

To get an idea of enormity of the question: despite decades of experience and knowledge, even a group of gifted intellectuals will have to do four to five years of full-time research to begin answering this question. There have been barely any attempts by Hindus to try and understand themselves, their social and institutional world, and their implications. Even to this day, people think that it is a definitional problem or a semantic discussion. (According to us religion is or Abrahamic definition of religion is). Our Supreme Court routinely cites the US juridical definitions to decide about cases involving religious disputes in India.

So, to answer the question about how lawyers can understand and argue about the difference between religion and tradition, first, social scientists must develop at least the beginnings of an alternative legal framework, legal definitions, etc. Second, it is a collaborative research project with people who specialise in the comparative science of cultures, religion and constitutional law and Indian law. Third, out of such a long-term collaborative project, some tangible results like providing a skeletal legal framework for traditions which can be integrated into existing legal structures could emerge. Such a project does not exist.

Further, to understand our laws, we must look at who the lawmakers are. Could it be seriously suggested that our current crop of MPs and MLAs even understand what they are legislating? Laws are written (the way the Indian Constitution got written) by third-rate bureaucrats in capital cities: neither they nor the legislators know what they are doing.

Q: The need to defend Hindu rights (we dont even get to run our own temples) have led to a political platform broadly called Hindutva, but social justice warriors want to pit Hinduism against Hindutva and there was even a global conference called to dismantle Hindutva. What should our reasoned stand on these issues be, if Hinduism is not even a religion?

A. Those defending Hindutva and those attacking it are both using the same intellectual framework. I have spoken of it in different places, including in What does it mean to be Indian? (Page 25). If Hinduism does not exist and India has no religion, what does it mean to speak of (Hindu) religious fundamentalism? How then do we understand the phenomenon of Hindutva? (See also my preface in Cultures Differ Differently.) None of the so-called India-scholars is raising these questions.

The conference you speak of was a marginal event, organised by academically fringe groups. But it gained wide-spread recognition because of the attention given to it by the people who got attacked by it. It surprises me that the so-called right-wing, in so far as it can be considered a coherent entity, has not realised that it now embodies and implements the PR strategy of these fringe scholars: bait Hindutva if you want to gain academic approval and social recognition.

There are two problems in the way the question is asked: (1) One is that there is a need to defend Hindu rightswhich led to the political platform of Hindutva. Yet the ruling party, which is considered Hindutva, has gone much further than the Congress in the appeasement of minorities and instituting welfare schemes. (2) The suggestion is that social justice warriors want to pit Hinduism against Hindutva. But the Hindutva, whether in the form of civil organisations or as a political party, has completely bought into social justice ideology. (When people claim that the victory of the BJP in the recent elections is the result of a pro-poor policy of the government, or that BJP wants to win the elections to promote socially just policies, one is enthusiastically espousing social justice slogans. Such people are also the real social justice warriors in India.)

The growth of social justice ideology and its conflation with political correctness is relatively new in the West. But the poisonous combination of identity politics, social justice and political correctness has existed in India for decades. The reservation system which has ballooned out-of-control, the atrocities act, etc, are expressions of social justice ideology promoted and encouraged also by the current ruling party. Hindutva is doing more to promote social justice warriors than Congress and its allies ever did. And yet, academic fringe groups sell the idea (which the Right strengthens) that there is caste atrocity and minority insecurityin India under the BJP, while the current ruling party is the best defender and protector of the so-called Dalits and minority religious groups.

It might be interesting to note that the notion of social justice is of Christian (Roman Catholic) origin, best formulated by their Pope in the twentieth century.Without a Christian framework within which to understand and endorse it, the entire social justice idea dissolves into incoherence.Leo Shields, commissioned as a Lieutenant in the US army and dies fighting in France in 1945, received a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in 1941 for his dissertation on The History and Meaning of the Term Social Justice. There, he summarises it as follows:

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S N Balagangadhara Interview Part IV: There Is Intellectual Poverty In Islamised Regions; India May Be Headed The Same Way If It Does Not Watch Out. -...

But does the average Kiwi or the NZ media talk about Maori crime and violence? No. Maybe only behind closed doors. Why? Because its not politically correct.Even though almost every Kiwi has seen and/or experienced Maori violence, no one wants to talk about it because its not politically correct and no one wants to be called a racist.

This is the problem with PC culture:Instead of encouraging an honest examination of the facts, it simply takes a totalitarian attitude and censors any opinion it doesnt like which might offend and calls it racism, sexism or hate speech.

Facebook censors posts.

Google censors searches.

Twitter censors tweets.

YouTube censors videos.

Political correctness is an insidious cancer which silences people and forces them to deny reality, and it also introduces a lot of bullshit words and concepts:

Cultural appropriation.

Trigger warnings.

Safe spaces.

Manspreading.

Mansplaining.

Theres a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me. Jerry Seinfeld

Our college campuses have become places where people are afraid of ideas. They think they know the truth and everything they need to know, about race, about gender, about rape, about you name it. They dont want to hear opposing points of view. Opposing points of view just offend them. They want to be kept safe from ideas they disagree with. People today when they enter college want to leave with exactly the same ideas as when they entered. They do not want their ideas to be challenged. Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor

Obviously Im not the only one who feels this way. Millions of people do.

According to a 2016Angus Reid Institutesurvey, 76% per cent of Canadians (widely regarded as the friendliest people in the world) think political correctnesshas gone too far, as do the majority of Americans, English, Australians and New Zealanders. Theyre not wrong.

In fact, I think the main reasonshows like Family Guy and South Park are so popular is precisely because theyre so politically incorrect. I also think thats one of the main reasons Donald Trump got into the White House. People are just sick and tired of PC bullshit.

In summary: We can either have free speech or political correctness but not both.

No culture, gender, group, ideology, race, religion, tradition etc. should be off limits or protected from criticism if/when its in the wrong.

The truth doesnt need defending. Wrong is wrong. No matter who says or does it.

You maybe forced to speak in a politically correct way in your school or in your workplace, but dont let the PC thought police or SJWs censor your thinking, and tell you what you can and cant think or whats appropriate.

If youre thinking: I want to live in a world with free speech but not hate speech, let me ask you something:If normal words like: boy, girl, man, woman, ladies, gentleman, mother, father etc. are now considered offensive and politically incorrect what words are going to be offensive next?

Where do we draw the line?

SJWs are some of the biggest hypocrites on earth:

They want to be heard but they dont want to listen.

They talk about tolerance and respect yet they have zero tolerance or respect for anyone that disagrees with them.

They demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, yet they have no problem yelling, screaming, swearing, protesting, rioting, destroying property and committing acts of violence etc. the moment they dont get their own way.

Why should a small group of constantly unhappy people who love to bitch and moan and complain about everything, be able to tell the rest of the world what they can and cant say?

To the constantly offended I say this:

Who cares if youre offended? Fuck your feelings. Get over yourself.

Just because youre offended that doesnt mean youre right.

Ive heard it said:Id rather be correct than politically correct

And:Being politically correct doesnt make you correct

I agree.

OK, lets lighten things up a bit

If everyoneisthinking alike thensomebody isntthinking. George S. Patton

Groupthinkis a psychological phenomenon that occurs within agroup of peoplein which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctionaldecision-makingoutcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision withoutcritical evaluationof alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences. Wikipedia

In other words: Groupthink is when people in a group seek consensus and unanimity, even if it results in an irrational decision being made.

Groupthink is a major problem. You see it everywhere: In schools, social circles, the corporate world, the military, and especially in political parties and religions.

Its amazing how common Groupthink and conformity is:

Soloman Aschs Conformity Experiments in 1951 people will deny their own eyes:

How do you avoid Groupthink?

Stop thinking what everyone thinks.

Stop believing what everyone believes.

Think for yourself. You have a brain so use it.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, its time to pause and reflect. Mark Twain

Its better to walk alone, than with the crowd going in the wrong direction. Diane Grant

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

Think for yourself. Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy). Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns. When youre just starting out, people will tell you youre wrong. After youve blown past them, theyll tell you youre crazy. A few years after that, theyll (privately) ask you to mentor them. Steve Pavlina

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of race or gender alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Christopher Hitchens

Similar to Groupthink is tribalism, which is when people have loyalty to their country, culture, gender, group, political party, race, religion etc. above all else no matter what.

You see this all the time.

Catholic priests covering up the molestation and sexual abuse of children when its done by other priests.

Church (tribe) first morals second.

Christians, Jews, Muslims etc. standing up for people in their religion even when they know theyre in the wrong simply because they belong to the same religion.

Women standing up for other women in an argument with a man even when they know theyre in the wrong simply because theyre women.

Their allegiance is to the tribe not to the truth.

Tribalism is an us vs them, we are the good guys and they are the bad guys mentality. Its a primitive shit brained black and whitetype of thinking that only leads to conflict, fighting, racism, sexism, prejudice and war.

Ill be honest, personally Ive never really understood tribalism.

My loyalty is to the truth. To the facts. To whats right. To what I consider the best.

I wouldnt take the side of my family, friends, girlfriend, parents etc. if I thought they were in the wrong and Im an extremely loyal person. That doesnt mean that I would take the side of the stranger anddisagree with them in publicif I thought they would lose face, but it does mean that I would definitely say to my friend/girlfriend/parent etc. in private that I thought the other person was right.

Tribalism seems to be far too common in American politics and race relations. There are far too many people sticking up for their own gender, race, religion, political party etc. even when they know theyre wrong simply because that person, party, group etc. is part of their tribe.

Sam Harris perfectly sums up the problems with tribalism and identity politics in this video:

The bottom line is:

You will either have an allegiance to your tribe or to the truth. You cannot have both.

You maybe part of a tribe (almost everyone is) but dont let the tribe do your thinking for you, and dont take the side of your tribe over the truth.

Think for yourself.

I think tribalism is a mental prisonand pride of identity coupled with arrogance is one of the leading factors that limit ones ability to abandon it. Duop Chak Wuol

I think the biggest threat to America is tribalism. I think that tribalism has broken out on the left and the right. People dont seem to care about the truth anymore, they seem to care about whether it helps my side or it helps your side, and that is really, really, dangerous, because then we can no longer have a conversation. If we cant agree on a common basis of facts, we cant have a conversation in the first place, if youre just going to assume that Im evil on the basis of my political perspective, then we cant have a conversation. Ben Shapiro

The Bandwagon effect

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one. Charles Mackay,Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

You should also be aware of the bandwagon effect.

The bandwagon effect in a nutshell:

The more people do something the more other people will do it too.

Its why people will stand in line for a crowded restaurant instead of going to an empty one.

Its why if everyone is talking about a movie, well likely check it out too.

The bandwagon effect is the reason for stock market and housing bubbles and trends.

Most people arent leaders theyre followers.

Most people are sheep they love to conform and fit in.

Most people have adesire to keep up with the Joneses

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out.

The bandwagon effect can (and is) used against you

Advertisers and marketers will often try to convince you to buy their product by trying to make you believe that everyone else has their product, or that people are lining up to buy it, and you should too. This is known as social proof.

Clickbait bloggers and journalists try to get us to read their articles by telling us that Twitter is angry (Translation: 5 people complained about something)

Dont follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you. Margaret Thatcher

Most people arent happy.

Most people arent smart.

Most people arent successful.

Most people are examples of what not to do.

Following the crowd kills your creativity, because youre forced to dumb yourself down in order to fit in, in order to do what everyone else is doing.

Its better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction. Gandhi

The dumbest reasonin the world tobuy a stock is because its going up. Warren Buffett

The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before. Albert Einstein

Footnote:

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The Problem with Political Correctness Life Lessons

Sep 10th 2018

by JULIA SYMONS

This essay is the winner of The Economists Open Future essay competition in the category of Open Society, responding to the question: Has political correctness gone too far? The winner is Julia Symons, 25 years old, from Australia.

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Drunk on virtue. Thus did Lionel Shriver, an American author, damn a commitment made by the British arm of Penguin Random House, a publisher, that its new hires and the books it acquires reflect UK society by 2025. A conscious effort to ensure diversity is, says Ms Shriver, wholly incompatible with the publishers raison dtre of acquiring and publishing good works of literature. If an agent were to receive a manuscript from a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter it would be published, even if its quality were execrable, warned Ms Shriver.

Her screed suggests that the unthinking application of political correctness (PC), in this case in the form of a diversity target, will threaten liberal, Western culture and produce small-minded individuals. Like some of Ms Shrivers previous interventions on this topic, this one was met with outrage online, with thousands of tweets and column-inches devoted to criticising the author.

Welcome to the culture wars. Welcome to political correctness gone too far.

The notion that political correctness has gone mad is familiar to anyone who follows even vaguely any aspect of modern political or cultural life. The phrase, ostensibly referring to language or action that is designed to avoid offence or harm to protected groups, has become a sharp criticism. It is synonymous with a sort of cultural McCarthyism, usually committed by the left.

In its modern iteration, it pops up in a couple of different forms. First, there is the use of the word snowflake to criticise younger generationsthose more likely to be in favour of affirmative action and gender-neutral bathrooms, for instance, who are perceived as thin-skinned and less resilient than their forebears. The second invocation of PC gone mad is freedom of speech: specifically the idea that the use and enforcement of politically correct language will endanger it and by extension freedom of thought.

Regardless of how it is labelled, its underlying idea is the same: that measures to increase tolerance threaten the liberal, Enlightenment values that have forged the West. Self-styled opponents of political correctness and proponents of free speech may find themselves (mis)quoting Voltaire: I disapprove what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

When framed like this, it seems utterly reasonable to think that political correctness has the potential to be a menace. Moreover, some aspects of tolerance culture, particularly the actions of studentswho frequently draw the ire of such culture warriorsare, in many cases, cloying and precious.

Britains National Union of Students, and campus politics generally, is rife with such examples: at one conference, it urged its delegates to use the jazz hands motion to express their appreciation, lest the noises made by clapping trigger other delegates. Meanwhile Facebook, in its own efforts at tolerance, has made a list of 71 genders from which its users may choose to identify, including genderqueer neutrois and bi-gender. This is farcical and arguably trivialises the very real struggles that transgender individuals face.

However, some easily-dismissed examples aside, the notion that political correctness has gone too far is absurd. That a man who boasts gleefully about grabbing women by their genitals, mocks disabled reporters and stereotypes Muslims as terrorists and Mexicans as rapists was able to become the leader of the free world should disabuse anyone of that notion. Indeed those who invoke political correctness often use it for more cynical means. It is a smoke screen for regressivism.

Let us return to Ms Shrivers argument. It is untethered from reality. If a gay transgender Caribbean primary school dropout were able to gain a book deal with such ease, then where are all of the books by such people? Worse yet, the dichotomy she draws between demographic diversity on the one hand and worthwhile literature on the other implies that writers who are not white and heterosexual produce inferior literature. Moreover, Ms Shriver seems not to have considered that drawing upon the full spectrum of the human experience, particularly by seeking out voices and stories that have been hitherto silenced or under-represented, can only enrich our literature.

It is an illiberal argument masquerading as the opposite. This is common whenever the term political correctness is bandied about. Another example comes from Australias pugilistic former prime minister, Tony Abbott. During that countrys 2017 plebiscite on marriage equality, Mr Abbotta devout Catholic, social conservative and ardent No campaignerurged the Australian public: If you're worried about...freedom of speech, vote no [to single-sex marriage.] If you don't like political correctness, vote no because voting no will help to stop political correctness in its tracks.

By wilfully conflating several unrelated issues, Abbott managed to frame depriving same-sex couples of the right to marry (and of the rights that accompany it) as a bold and defiant declaration of freedom. That stopping political correctness was, for him, not only synonymous with but contingent upon the continued subjugation of certain minorities, indicates the illiberalism in which anti-PC reactionaries are steeped.

Not only is political correctness invoked to reinforce prejudices, it is often simplistic and reductive. A 22% increase in knife-crime in England and Wales, largely concentrated in London, has seen alarmist headlines about Londons murder rate eclipsing that of New Yorks (true only if one squints hard enough at very particular statistics.) The reasons for this are complicated, but largely to do with significant cuts to the police (whose numbers have fallen by nearly 20% since 2010) and also other social services: in the absence of youth services and clubs, for example, children are more vulnerable to recruitment from gangs. Many experts, including Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick, see this through the lens of public health, in which strategies for prevention are needed, not just enforcement.

For opponents of political correctness this is another consequence of political correctness run amokand another convenient excuse to attack the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. During her tenure as Home Secretary, Theresa May (hardly a bleeding heart) rightfully placed significant restrictions on the use of the policing tactic known as stop and search, which disproportionately targeted ethnic minorities. There was no evidence that it reduced crime in any statistically significant way. However, the reactionaries ploughed on, impervious to facts, with right-wing media outlets such as the Sun and the Daily Telegraph calling for the return of stop-and-search to restore order on London streets.

These phenomenainvoking political correctness as a fig-leaf for naked prejudice, and in spite of evidence to the contraryfind their most troubling embodiment in political figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Mr Trump once stated that the problem [America] has is being politically correct, and sees himself as a corrective to that. Mr Farage, too, sees himself as a crusader against political correctness.

Both consider themselves to be taking back their respective countries from a varied cast of bogeymen: among them elitists, social justice warriors, Muslims and immigrants. Both seem to want to undermine the very institutions that preserve our rights and liberties.

At best, the notion of political correctness having gone too far is intellectually dishonest; a fallacy similar to a straw-man argument or an ad hominem attack. At worst, it serves as a rallying cry to cover up the excesses of the most illiberal in our society.

__________

Julia Symons is an MSc candidate in Global Health at the London School of Economics.

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Has political correctness gone too far? | The Economist

Rewind to August 2015: Then-candidate Donald Trump is on stage in Cleveland at the first Republican presidential debate.

"I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct," Trump tells the moderator, Fox News' Megyn Kelly. "I've been challenged by so many people and I don't, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time, either."

Now president-elect, Trump has denounced "political correctness" many, many, times since his campaign began. At a rally a year ago in South Carolina, he called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." He told a cheering crowd that his statement on the subject was "very, very salient, very important and probably not politically correct."

Politically correct. Political correctness. Using the biggest bully pulpit there is, Trump has wielded the phrase and its variants like a club some days and a shield on others. And he's hardly alone.

Since as far back as 1793, when the term appeared in a U.S. Supreme Court decision about the boundaries of federal jurisdiction, "politically correct" has had an array of definitions. It has been used to describe what is politically wise, and it has been employed as ironic self-mockery. The phrase has driven contentious debates in which free speech and free choice are pitted against civility and inclusion. But it hasn't just changed meaning, it has changed targets. What the November election has made clear is that these words, especially when they're related to matters of multiculturalism and diversity, carry consequences.

Fairleigh Dickinson University and the Pew Research Center released two polls in the past year, each finding that, like Trump, a majority of Americans thought people were too easily offended and that "political correctness" was one of the country's biggest problems. But what exactly is it?

People of all political stripes have used the phrase with varying, even contradictory meanings. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used it to simply describe the correct (and incorrect) way to do politics when he said that he would enact policies "not because they are politically correct, but because they are right." Washington Post reporter Caitlin Gibson cited the quote in a January story headlined, "How 'politically correct' went from compliment to insult." In academic debates this year, people have used the words to dismiss the validity of those who advocate for "safe spaces" on college campuses and trigger warnings in classrooms.

The author Lionel Shriver riled up literary circles this fall with a controversial speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival. Some called her intolerant and out of touch. Then others accused Shriver's critics of being too politically correct, another way of saying "hypersensitive."

Comedian Bill Maher, whose aptly named TV show Politically Incorrect ran for nearly a decade, regularly skewers American politics and assails "political correctness" with commentary and satire on Real Time with Bill Maher, his HBO talk show. In a contentious piece for the Hollywood Reporter in February in which he announced his support for Sen. Bernie Sanders, Maher said Americans "have been choking on political correctness and overly careful politicians for the last generation or two and are sick of it." In that essay, Maher used the phrase as a synonym for cultural cowardice.

So, to review: "Politically correct" means politically wise or invalid or hypersensitive or cowardice.

Ruth Perry, a professor of literature at MIT, has written about the moment she thinks the phrase took a turn toward its most common contemporary usage: a rebuttal to the ideals or practice of diversity. That history, she says, starts in the 1960s, when Black Power advocates, along with what she called the New Left movement, used "politically incorrect" to mean people were out of step with the movement's orthodoxy. Perry, who founded MIT's women's studies program, wrote a widely cited 1992 essay in The Women's Review of Books to make the case that the phrase had been co-opted by political conservatives.

At the time, people were battling over language that seemed to serve as proxy for deeper disagreements about how Americans should handle ideas of equality and equity. Mixed in with debates about whether or not "manhole cover" should include the word "man," were more divisive arguments about whether things like affirmative action and multiculturalism were destroying liberal education.

In her essay, Perry talked about the countless times she had come across articles, op-eds and books that used the phrase "politically correct" to assail people like her. It was a phrase she and her friends, all civil rights activists, used all the time, but not the way it was being used in her readings.

"The attack on the 'politically correct,' " Perry wrote, "in the universities is an attack on the theory and practice of affirmative actiona legacy of the sixties and seventiesdefined as the recruitment to an institution of students and faculty who do not conform to what has always constituted the population of academic institutions: usually white, middle-class, straight, male."

It was our shorthand, and it was always used ironically. ... So that you would say, 'I know it's not politically correct, but I'm going to go get a hamburger anyway,' or, 'I know it's not politically correct, but I shave my legs.'

Ruth Perry

The emerging definition was "confusing to us, me and my buddies," Perry said in a recent interview. "It was our shorthand, and it was always used ironically. It was always used as a joke. It was, I think, one of the ways we distinguished ourselves as the New Left from the Old Left. It was about not being dogmatic. So that you would say, 'I know it's not politically correct, but I'm going to go get a hamburger anyway,' or, 'I know it's not politically correct, but I shave my legs.' "

But the meaning had already started to shift to the right.

In 1987, conservative philosopher Allan Bloom wrote the book The Closing of the American Mind, which a New York Times writer described as having "wildfire success." In the book, he railed against the so-called "open minds" in academia that he said had instead offered students narrow, liberal perspectives. To make his case, he pointed to the Black Power movement:

"The Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movementleaving aside both its excesses and its very understandable emphasis on self-respect and refusal to beg for acceptancehad at its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. ....

"The upshot of all this for the education of young Americans is that they know much less about American history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one of the few things that they used to come to college with that had something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas."

Bloom, who died in 1992, is cited regularly by conservative academics and writers. While he didn't use the phrase "political correctness," his writing stoked the view that people were overly concerned with multiculturalism and diversity at the expense of rigorous education and free thinking.

In a 1991 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, then-president George H.W. Bush took note of the conversation that was preoccupying the country.

"The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land," he said. "And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones."

Perry said that she and her colleagues "all believed in consensus and discussion and so on, so we used the term to signify an idealistic belief in something, but the inability of the frail flesh to actually manage always to live up to it. And that's how we used it."

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, said that language is being manipulated for political purposes all the time by the left and the right. But liberals, he suggested in an interview, are more concerned with being politically right than being factually correct. Conservatives, he said, prefer to "say whatever you want and let it fall where it is, and we'll make the argument as it is."

"Now," Hanson said, "the left has destroyed the idea of absolute truth and legitimate ends. ... I think it's really dangerous what the left has done. They've created this effort to distort reality through vocabulary and they thought their agenda was enhanced by it."

It is the case that words are weapons in political discourse, and they always have been.

Vincent Hutchings

Today, "politically correct" is being used as a "kind of linguistic jujitsu" to disable an opponent's diversity argument, said Vincent Hutchings, a professor of American politics at the University of Michigan. "It is the case that words are weapons in political discourse, and they always have been," Hutchings said.

Trump has blamed "political correctness" for the Orlando shootings, for NBC's decision in 2015 to sever its ties with him over the speech announcing his candidacy, and for a Scottish university's decision to strip him of an honorary degree.

Last month, the writer and academic Moira Weigel wrote for The Guardian that Trump hasn't just rejected "political correctness"; he has reveled in being incorrect.

"Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but Trump's mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage."

So, to review again: "Politically correct" means cowardly and courageous; invalid or hypersensitive; in step with the orthodoxy; distortion and linguistic jujitsu.

The writer Lindy West offers a way out of this semantic loop: People who think the phrase is used to demonize things like social justice and diversity should drop it altogether and call things what they are.

For years, she said in an interview, "I've had to write the same piece about how being 'politically correct' is good. Letting terms just sit there and calcify and normalize just makes it more difficult to dismantle those concepts that ... language props up."

A tweet recently captured her view about the decades-long debate in fewer than 140 characters:

See the original post here:

'Politically Correct': The Phrase Has Gone From Wisdom To ...

by Bob Russell, 2022

(Mar. 25, 2022) I remember in my younger days in the 1960s and 1970s, when everything had to be done by quotas so blacks could be represented in everything according to their proportion of the population. This led to much discrimination against whites in job placement as well as in other areas. I very nearly lost a job opportunity because I am white. My aptitude test scores were well above the black applicant but skin color was the most important factor considered after the racial unrest scam that came after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were signed into law. As it turned out, my being a veteran put the test scores back into play and I got the job based on the aptitude tests.

Today blacks make up about 12% of the population, but 90% of the commercials I see on television are either all or majority black and every mixed-race couple is black man-white woman. When a white man is shown he is less than typical, usually pot-bellied and a dork. I wonder why there is such a push to portray families and white men this way. I have nothing against anyone based on skin color, as I was brought up in a very diverse area where whites, blacks, American Indians, Asians, and every other group interacted quite a lot. I grew up just outside the slum area of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and spent many years playing baseball with and against the poorest and most ethnically diverse of residents. There were never any problems because we all looked at content of character, not skin color.

As a member of Army Special Forces I served with a variety of people. The A team I was on had one black, one American Indian, and two Hispanics among the 12 of us, and one was of Greek or Turkish descent. We never paid any attention to ethnicity because we were all American soldiers, patriots who believed in our way of life, had to depend on each other every minute of every day, and we all bled red when wounded. We were simply Americans, non-hyphenated American soldiers who needed each other in times of battle.

Today the satanic liberal elitists want We the People separated by ethnicity and at each others throats to keep us divided so we cant effectively oppose the tyranny they are forcing on us daily. The Black Lives Matter idiots dont care about black lives or they would be screaming about the number of blacks being murdered by other blacks in cities run by race-baiting, racist devildemocommiecrats. BLM is a scam designed to enrich the organizers instead of helping poor inner-city residents. BLM head patrice cullors has spent a little under $5 million of the funds buying several lavish houses in predominantly white areas while local groups havent received any money at all to help them. Some local organizers have openly criticized the use of funds collected by cullors and her cohort in the scam.

I find it very interesting that black conservatives are vilified by the race hustlers just as much as I am because they dont bow to massa and stay on the plantation. The true racists in American society are the liberals who vilify everyone who challenges them. Larry Elder, a black conservative who ran against liberal tyrant gavin newsom in California in the recall election, was heavily vilified by the Pravda/Goebbels fake news propagandists as the black face of white supremacy because he dared oppose the racists in control of the government and their narrative. Every black who stands on Martin Luther Kings idea of judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is considered to be less than human by liberals. During the 2020 campaign joe dementia said, If you vote for President Trump rather than me you aint black. If a conservative said that, the liberal propagandists heads would have exploded and that would be all they talked about for weeks, but since it was a very racist devildemocommiecrat it was totally ignored by the propagandists in the lamestream media.

The way liberals treat conservative blacks shows they are not the inclusive people they claim to be. Skin color isnt the important thing to them; ideology is. A black conservative is just as hated by liberals as a white conservative.

The satanic left demands what they call equity, which is far from equality. Equality calls for equal opportunity but equity calls for a rigged outcome that suits the satanic left. Until We the People get control of the government we are going to see the satanic left in America continue to drive the nation into the oblivion of tyranny, resulting in the nation becoming a mere puppet state of the satanic new world order global dictatorship they have such an insatiable lust to establish.

Sadly, both political parties have more interest in personal wealth and power than in what is in the best interests of We the People. There are a few republicans who honor their oath of office and represent We the People but they are too few and are kept on the outside by the gop establishment, including the rnc, mitch mcconnell, kevin mccarthy and their minions in both houses of Congress.

As long as the deep state can keep We the People focused away from their despotic and TREASONOUS plans they can do whatever they want until they have the totalitarian control they want. They have used the pandemic scam to the maximum advantage to keep people off-balance and distracted from their evil plans of subjugating all of us under their tyrannical thumbs.

Fortunately citizens, even many who have been their minions for years, are tiring of the nonsense and beginning to wake up. The convoy which made its way to Washington, D.C. received a great deal of support from people along the route. People are rallying to a group actively opposing unconstitutional mandates from corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. The worst nightmare of the corrupt left is a citizenry united against tyranny and people have tired of the agenda/narrative and are beginning to fight back, uniting against the divisive tactics of the political ruling class and their propagandists. People are now taking a hard look at the tactics of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the push to get everyone vaccinated with untested and unproven vaccines to the exclusion of treatments that have been used for decades and proven effective. The long-used treatments are much cheaper than the vaccines that big pharma and the establishment are pushing. I have seen reports that nine executives of big pharma have become billionaires since covid hit and have retired. I dont trust the too cozy relationship between the pharma companies and the politicians and bureaucrats who demand everyone accept the vaccines without question. I WILL NOT, under any circumstances, take their poison into my body. I have been exposed to the virus several times but have yet to have any symptoms of having contracted it. The people pushing the follow the science narrative dont follow the science nor obey the mandates they impose on citizens, nor do they have anything to say about the millions of illegal-alien invaders who have flooded across the border in the last year. It is Do as I say, not as I do and Rules for thee but not for me.

If the political ruling class, the bureaucrats, and the Pravda/Goebbels fake news propagandists really cared about health they would actually follow the science rather than impose selective arbitrary dictates. Elementary school children are almost totally immune from the virus but mask mandates have been imposed on them in areas run by devildemocommiecrats where parents are told they have no right to question restrictions imposed on their children, have been labeled as domestic terrorists and hounded by the federal Gestapo for daring to speak out in defense of civil and human rights being violated by the ruling class.

I submit this in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, in faith, with the responsibility given to me by Almighty God to honor His work and not let it die from neglect.

See the article here:

Political Correctness Run Amok - The Post & Email

Bill Maher

Friday night means its time forReal Time with Bill Maher. So should late-night TV fans expect to see a new episode?

Like the rest of late-night, Bill Maher has spent the past few weeks covering the war in Ukraine and the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. In typical Maher fashion, hes made headlines for his perspective.

Theres no reason to expect anything different on Friday. There will be a brand new episode ofReal Time with Bill Maher.

Maher will undoubtedly touch on the newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Jackson, Russias attacks in Ukraine, and more. He may even weigh in on his fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and his run-in with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

First up, Bill Maher interviews David Mamet. It will be the playwright and authors second visit toReal Time.

Mamets latest book isRecessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. Maher loves defending free speech and mocking wokeness along with political correctness. He and Mamet should see eye-to-eye.

Then, its time for the panel. Both guests have appeared onReal Time with Bill Maherin the past.

Nancy MacLean is a Duke University historian and author. Her bookDemocracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for Americahits on many of the criticisms of the modern GOP.

David Leonhardt is a journalist and the columnist behind The Morning newsletter fromThe New York Times. In recent weeks, hes been covering the debate over masks and their impact on the countrys public health.

Real Time with Bill Maherairs tonight at 10:00 p.m. ET on HBO. Fans can use #RTOvertime to submit a question for the panel for the Overtime segment.

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Is Real Time with Bill Maher new tonight, April 8? - Last Night On

In politics, framing is the attempt to alter reality by selecting words, slogans and tropes that convince the public to see the other side in a certain negative way. As Robert Entman explains, Toframeis toselect some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendationfor the item described.

Framing is choosing the language, the words, the tropes that will produce the most lasting image in the minds of voters.

Everybody frames everybody with whom they disagree. Evangelicals frame progressives as demons; progressives frame evangelicals as dummies.

Google Democrats as devils, and the web blows up. Headlines scream: Its Almost Official: The Democrats Are the Party of the Devil; The Democratic Party is Satanic, Literally!; Devilfor theDemocrats?; Its all in the details;Its official: theDemocratsare the party of theDevil; The Democrats Are Evil; Democrats Have Become the Partyof Satan. A cursory search produced more than 50 articles insisting that Democrats are devils.

The arguments of the Democrats are devils trope are working. Here are representative samples of the bombarding of the public with the major trope:

Evangelicals, on the other hand, have been framed by liberals as dupes, dummies, backward hillbillies, rednecks, racists and ignorant. The primary pathos of liberal persuasion is shaming. Civil virtue has shamed evangelicals for not supporting gay marriage or feminism.

Shame is a primary liberal pedagogy. Since framing is an attempt at persuasion, it always intensifies what is perceived as the weakness of evangelicals and exaggerates those perceived weaknesses to the maximum.

Shame is a primary liberal pedagogy.

American historian David Blight says, Liberals sometimes invite scorn with their devotion to diversity training and insistence on fighting over words rather than genuine inequality.

Evangelicals, in other words, have reasons for deeming progressives as elitist and hypocritical. In the court of public opinion, perhaps it is hard to discern if liberal framing of evangelicals has stuck.

George Lakoff, in The Political Mind, says progressives have been framed by conservative rhetoric that is deeply emotional and has powerful appeal for voters. Polls show that Americans support Roe v. Wade by large margins. But in conservative framing, abortion is still the go-to issue to show that Democrats and progressive Christians are undermining morality.

Likewise, 70% of Americans support same-sex marriage and 67% of Americans believe in evolution. Even 68% of Republicans support alternative energy development. Yet Republicans continue to win elections by opposing the issues that the majority of the nation supports. The frame job has worked.

Whereas once American Christians lived in the Methodist frame, the Baptist frame, the Episcopal frame, the Catholic frame, the Lutheran frame, or the Presbyterian frame, now conservatives have framed progressives as non-Christians. This has nothing to do with the affirmation of all these mainline Christians of the Apostles Creed. They are framed as non-Christian because of their positions on abortion, marriage and gender.

Now conservatives have framed progressives as non-Christians.

The valedictorian of the progressive Christians are devils class is Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas. Jeffress has framed all Democrats with the charge of paganism: Well, apparently the god they worship is the pagan god of the Old Testament Moloch, who allowed for child sacrifice. The god of the Bible doesnt sanction the killing of millions and millions of children in the womb, I think the god they are worshiping is the god of their own imagination.

Jeffress has called Democrats a godless party and said the God (Democrats) talk about is not the God of the Bible. It is the God of their imagination a God who loves abortion and hates Israel, whereas the true God that most Jews and Christians are familiar with is a God who hates abortion and loves Israel.

No one likes to be shamed, but shame is the primary product of the liberal frame job. Eve Sedgwick asks: Can anyone suppose that well ever figure out what happened around political correctness if we dont see it as, among other things, a highly politicized chain reaction of shame dynamics?

Political correctness becomes a pedagogy, a sweeping masterwork of shame designed to rip residual structures of degradation from speech.

Evangelicals often are confused when people lose jobs because of the use of politically incorrect language. They think they are making jokes, but when shamed by the new civil virtues of acceptance and diversity, they fight back. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example, when they believe theyre just having a little fun making fun.

The evangelical angst revolves into a mantra: I feel unfree. It would be cavalier to deny these are legitimate feelings. Evangelicals feel they are being denied freedom of speech.

In the court of public opinion, the evangelical trope seems to stick to progressives; the progressive trope doesnt stick to evangelicals as well.

Democrats and progressives have been framed, and the jury has returned the verdict and found them guilty as charged not on the evidence but on the emotional appeals of the conservative testimonials.

Democrats and progressives have been framed, and the jury has returned the verdict and found them guilty as charged not on the evidence but on the emotional appeals of the conservative testimonials.

In Will Campbells novella, Cecelias Sin, a group of Anabaptists face execution for their faith. The night before their anticipated arrest, they discuss that the authorities claimed they were communists. Goris tries to help Peter understand that it doesnt matter that the charge of communism is false. But they believe we are communist, Goris said. And that is enough. If they think we are seditious, we are seditious. That is what sedition is. It is what they say it is.

No progress can be made in understanding the conservative appeal until we grasp that its about emotional arguments. Facts, truth, reality, policies evaporate like morning dew; emotions of rage, outrage and moral indignation stick like Velcro. The right-wing mantra possesses contagious feelings.

People catch feelings as easily as the common cold. Affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear. Feelings not only spread, they stick, according to Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

When these ancient feelings were attacked by a new civic virtue that promoted diversity, acceptance and a new ethical consciousness, conservative thoughts were dislodged and became unstuck. What has followed has been a furious denial of culpability.

The old evangelical paradigm, like a giant white egg, developed cracks and fractures, and panic ensued. The new pedagogy of antiracism, gender emancipation, queer emancipation, new horizons of political enfranchisement turned evangelicals into rebellious students unwilling to be taught by others. Confronted by new ethical paradigms designed to make persons more hospitable, more open, more sensitive, more thoughtful, more moral, evangelicals reverted to the old paradigms and attempted to patch the fractures and cracks.

Perhaps this explains the desperate attempts to revise American history and oppose science in the classroom. The epistemic foundations of evangelical faith are coming loose. Instead of claiming that evangelicals are resentful, Lawrence Grossberg says we should examine the terror of the humiliation of being a victim. One avoids the humiliation of loss and victimage by humiliating the other, by diminishing their status and capacity, destroying their sense of pride, reducing them to a lower state of being. Therefore, evangelicals have intensified attacks on gays, women, transgender persons, immigrants, scientists, historians, liberals. They have framed everyone as devils and demons.

The evangelical feeling machine delivers a constant flow of emotional frames.

The evangelical feeling machine delivers a constant flow of emotional frames. Like a chocolate fountain at a wedding reception, evangelical emotions pour forth to the public feelings, feelings and more feelings. What underscores evangelical argument is emotion.

Progressives, on the other hand, mistrust emotion and at times make fun of emotional arguments as if Aristotle didnt insist on its persuasive power. Progressives can come across as austere, thick-minded, stubborn and insistent on not exhibiting feelings. In place of emotional frames, progressives tend to use intellectual, scholarly, elitist frames.

Progressives are seen as the ones taking away the nation, taking away morals, history and the future. Conservatives insist they are the ones aligned with freedom and rights. They claim they are protecting the nation. Evangelicals feel justified in these claims when they think progressives are no longer taking the Bible seriously. Progressives would be better served by attempting to understand the evangelical frames.

What can progressives do? Perhaps the first move would be to stop playing the frame game. Instead of depicting evangelicals as enemies, return to seeking any possible common ground. Failing to find such an ideal place to stand, at least surrender the language of framing that labels evangelicals as dummies and rednecks.

Admit that conservatives have successfully won the framing war and progressives have failed. Then, develop and articulate a moral vision for the future of democracy. Instead of embracing conservative frames, progressives must construct their own frames. Stop pretending that conservative, evangelical morality is anything other than self-righteous moralism. Insist that the civic morality of acceptance comes far closer to the practice of Jesus than that of evangelicals. Defend democracys anchor institutions. And maintain professional ethics while refusing to buy the lie of the devil that Gods work can be accomplished with the devils means.

Admit that conservatives have successfully won the framing war and progressives have failed.

Progressives should stop trying to use conservative frames and instead use their own language: empathy, compassion, truth, hope, justice, grace, mercy, righteousness. Stop being afraid of emotional arguments. Frame arguments with legitimate emotional appeals. Always speak from moral vision. Progressive policies follow from the morality of empathy and hospitality.

Instead of dismissing evangelical arguments, do a deep dive into the abyss and learn to understand the power of the frame job that has turned progressives into devils. Be able to explain why conservatives believe what they believe without making fun of what they believe.

The great challenge for progressives is to keep the arguments from spiraling out of control into hateful, resentful emptiness. Kenneth Burke argues: The process of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.

If evangelicals would speak of progressives as misguided instead of as devils, perhaps a small crack would occur in the door to make possible renewed conversations with one another.

It is time to break out of the cycle of framing, blaming and judging.

Rodney W. Kennedycurrently serves as interim pastor of Emmanuel Freiden Federated Church in Schenectady, N.Y., and as preaching instructor Palmer Theological Seminary. He is the author of nine books, including the newly releasedThe Immaculate Mistake,about how evangelical Christians gave birth to Donald Trump.

Related articles:

Progressives have a problem telling their story | Analysis by Rodney Kennedy

The Trump Card: How white evangelicals are being played| by Joel Bowman Sr.

Understanding the evangelical civil war| Analysis by Alan Bean

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The futility of framing one another as progressives and evangelicals, devils and dummies - Baptist News Global