The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

As the new puritans gain momentum, and their power over us increases, it will become apparent that to ignore them will only guarantee their ongoing dominance. They will continue to deny biological reality and threaten you if you will not acquiesce. They will tell you that the kind of colour blindness advanced by Martin Luther King is a form of racism, rather than an exquisite goal worth pursuing. They will bully people in the name of compassion, promote division and call it progressive, and rehabilitate a new form of racism under the guise of tolerance. They will insist on fabricating realities that correspond with their emotional states and couch their nebulous theories in fustian and obfuscation. They will use inflammatory language to misrepresent your concerns, accuse you of ‘erasing’ people’s existence, or committing acts of ‘violence’ through speech. They will claim that there is no such thing as objective truth but demand that you acknowledge the truth of their ‘lived experience’. They will carry on feeding the far right by elevating identity politics and claim to be opposing fascism through their authoritarian methods. And if you dare to suggest that any of their demands should be subject to discussion or debate, they will not hesitate to brand you a bigot. When this happens, it is our responsibility to resist and restate the case for liberal values. It will be a long, uncomfortable, but necessary process, like the setting of a broken bone. Along the way, we should ...