It is somewhat inevitable that language and, by extension, freedom of speech, should come to be mistrusted given that most of these recent developments are connected to the rise of an identity-orientated social justice ideology which is largely post-modernist in origin. In particular, contemporary activists have retained the postmodernist notion that reality, or at least our perception of it, is constructed predominantly through language. Michel Foucault’s belief in the interconnectivity of power and knowledge is often seen as the basis for current discourses of the ‘power structures’ that
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