Political Correctness

Boomerang kids, in-house "gender experts," cigarette revisionism, and more.

For anyone counting #MeToo casualties with a wary eye, one of 2018’s first will have stood out. On January 13, in a lengthy exposé published on a website for college-age women, a 23-year-old photographer charged comic Aziz Ansari with the crime of being a bad date. The pseudonymous “Grace”…

Quinn Norton is an engaging, funny, and stylish writer on technology and the odd communities that inhabit our digital world and make it so scary. She is also, to quote her own description, “a bisexual anarchist pacifist, prison abolitionist, & vegetarian. Currently I’m fretting about fair trade…

A story for our times: It took place, of course, on Twitter, though it was first written up in the trade publication Inside Higher Ed.

In 2017, the bar for what must be deemed politically incorrect, culturally appropriative, or just plain inappropriate was set to a new low, so low that only insects could limbo their way beneath it. What was determined to be bad in 2017? Oh, just the Rocky Horror Picture Show, nearly all Halloween…

In France, all right-thinking people know instinctively what the pensée unique is—the socially acceptable view on any subject that ensures a Parisian won’t get axed from the better dinner parties and weekends in Normandy. The Democratic party, which remains a more coherent concatenation than the…

There’s no denying it now: In the hurricane of sexual harassment scandals felling powerful men from Kevin Spacey to Matt Lauer to, now, Garrison Keillor—no one is safe. Not even women of paramount grace and accomplishment who engage in a single instance of wrongthink. Yesterday the beloved Dame…

There is nothing natural about tolerating the views of others. If someone stands, as today’s righteous say, on “the wrong side of history,” why refrain from shutting him up? Yes, Justice Holmes warned against “attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught…

Whenever the vanguard of the Race’n’Gender Left™ meets the avant-garde of post-postmodern art, hilarity ensues. So it is with Omer Fast’s August, a recent installation in Manhattan’s Chinatown. If you’re wondering why an art show called August opened in September and will close in October, trust…

In August, your humble Scrapbook noted an alarming New York magazine article about how the world of teenage novels is now rife with “culture cops, monitoring their peers across multiple platforms for violations.”

On October 1, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced that it would accept girls into membership. Beginning next year, Cub Scout programs will admit girls, with the ultimate goal of allowing girls to progress to the rank of Eagle Scout.

It was just a few weeks ago that The Scrapbook was goggling over new policies at Middlebury College regarding speakers appearing on the campus. Under the “Interim Procedures for Scheduling Events and Invited Speakers,” potentially controversial invitees have to be cleared by the school’s Threat…

In 1894 San Francisco dedicated an elaborate monument to the history of California, a vast pile of granite and bronze paid for by the estate of philanthropist James Lick. Last week San Francisco took a step toward getting rid of it.

What does it do to casually assumed theories of cultural equality if a civilization is founded on the idea that the gods require the ritualized butchering of human beings? When Mel Gibson released his twilight-of-the-Maya epic Apocalypto in 2006, some scholars of Mayan culture felt that the film’s…

In 1894 San Francisco dedicated an elaborate monument to the history of California, a vast pile of granite and bronze paid for by the estate of philanthropist James Lick. Last week San Francisco took a step toward getting rid of it.

Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his…

Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his…

What happened to ESPN?

Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…

Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…

In late August, the Los Angeles city council voted to end the city’s celebration of Columbus Day. That same week, across the continent, a furor was foaming over the fact that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was considering taking down the iconic statue of Columbus atop a pillar in the circle…

So the eminent author and social scientist Charles Murray gave a speech at Harvard last week. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy—eminent authors give speeches at distinguished universities every day of the week and sometimes even on weekends.

Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…

When we think of trendy endeavors, it’s the fashion and entertainment industries that come to mind, not anything so serious as science. But the new issue of Scientific American is out, and it’s proving yet again that the Bunsen-burner crowd is every bit as modish as the Kardashians.

Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…

Most people think that the 1st Amendment guarantees free speech. But the philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that free speech requires more than just the absence of legal strictures. The “tyranny of opinion” of the majority has the same effect as censorship enforced by law. When everyone lives…

Thanks to the success of book series such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, the young adult, or YA, fiction market has become lucrative and culturally influential. With that in mind, New York magazine recently did a feature on the bevy of online critics whose opinions can make or break authors…

It was in the mid-1980s that I first heard the term “politically correct,” from an older housemate in Berkeley. She had a couple glasses of wine in her and was on a roll, venturing some opinions that were outré by the local standards. I thought the term witty and took it for her own coinage, but in…

Strange news from Wisconsin. A student at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison has petitioned to have the name of her school changed, arguing, “The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on memorials [sic] black students. The lack of representation I…

Strange news from Wisconsin. A student at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison has petitioned to have the name of her school changed, arguing, “The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on memorials [sic] black students. The lack of representation I…

David Edelstein is one of the better-known film critics in the country. He's been a critic for decades and is currently the chief film critic for New York magazine, as well as the film critic for NPR's Fresh Air and CBS's Sunday Morning. Like everyone else in his position, he recently wrote a…

Here's an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

The 1940's pop duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside" perpetuates a predatory, patriarchal rape culture, we're to understand. The premise of the song, written Frank Loesser and made famous by Esther Williams, is that in some dark corner of a Christmas party that's winding down toward dawn, a handsome…

America's favorite Glamazonian wonder goddess didn't fit in at the United Nations. She's a powerful agent unafraid to defend the free world against encroaching evils. She gets the job done and she looks good doing it.

In preparation for an interview with Dustin Hoffman that never happened, I went to see Kung Fu Panda 3. This is something I would not have done unless I was preparing to interview the great American actor.

In preparation for an interview with Dustin Hoffman that never happened, I went to see Kung Fu Panda 3. This is something I would not have done unless I was preparing to interview the great American actor.

I began teaching at the University of Virginia at the height of the turmoil over the Vietnam War. Dissent was everywhere: There were marches on Washington and on campus. But there was always something different about the angry UVA students. For instance, upon returning from one march on Washington,…

Readers who regularly partake of our abundant offerings at weeklystandard.com will have to forgive us for shamelessly ripping off what follows from our colleague Jonathan V. Last’s online update last week of the latest p.c. doings at the Lego Group, which we thought was too piquant not to share…

In his convocation address on Monday, Northwestern University president Morton Schapiro told wide-eyed freshmen that anyone who dares oppose trigger warnings, or who belittles the pain of those microaggressed, is an "idiot" and a "lunatic."

Free speech requires the Socratic "recognition that you almost certainly don't know everything," says Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff, the founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), diagnoses a humility deficiency in the new documentary Can We Take A Joke?

Donald Trump is succeeding, we're told, because he appeals to angry voters — but that's obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America's fate under Obama, naturally you are…

In an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton defended Madeleine Albright's claim that "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help women." The comment was widely seen as an attempt to pressure women to vote for Clinton: