Jonathan Haidt: The Rise of Ophobophobia

The American university is being transformed into a sacred space for the propagation of an orthodoxy of a new secular religion:

“When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.” …

Students and professors know, he adds, that “if you step out of line at all, you will be called a racist, sexist or homophobe. In fact it’s gotten so bad out there that there’s a new term—‘ophobophobia,’ which is the fear of being called x-ophobic.” …”

The new sins against political correctness are racism, sexism, nativism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny and white privilege.

You don’t want to be out of step with the “mainstream” now do you, goy?

There are other central themes of the narrative like the notion that we are a “nation of immigrants” and that “diversity is our strength.”

Where did these ideas from? Surprisingly, they were all coined by various academics and leftwing activists. They were propagated by the mass media after the Second World War which began calling itself the “mainstream.” They didn’t come from the West’s great religions or philosophers. We threw traditional morality in the garbage and replaced it with The Narrative as revealed by television.

This is how it happened with “racism” from 1935 to 1945:

American racial attitudes were transformed in that ten year window:

Imagine the realization that must have occurred to these mid-20th century media elites: because of the rise of film, television, radio and nationally circulating newspapers and magazines, they suddenly had the power to disrupt and transform organic cultures from thousands of miles away. In a matter of ten years, they had completely transformed the way White Americans thought about race.

If this could be done so easily with race, what else could the same model be applied to? Couldn’t you rewrite our sense of identity in attempt to create a “New Man”? In a nutshell, that’s how we got to where we are today as the –isms and -phobias multiplied while various cultural traditions and voices were declared to be outside the “mainstream” and were suppressed.

In order to make it work, you need a loyal opposition. That’s where respectable conservatism comes in at exactly the same time that the “mainstream” was being born.

Note: The discourse about “hate” and “hate groups” and “hate crimes” is a narrative the “mainstream” uses as a lens to describe its enemies.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
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14 Comments

  1. I am very suspect of a poll in 1946 saying Whites believed Negroes were as smart as Whites. This poll was likely done in a controlled environment in New York City or Boston. They never show WHO they contacted or WHERE the poll was taken. EVER

    Bill Clinton maintained his (((HIGH APPROVAL RATING))) by making sure areas with lots of Negroes were polled. They busted them doing this

    • That does seem extremely odd…1946 was way before civil rights and the broad acceptance of “racism” as a sin. Traditional views of race should have still been dominant, unless the data was cherry picked as you said.

      • I guarantee you it was, because in 1958 it said something like 17% of white America supported IR Marriage. So how can you justify 50% being for equality but not for intermarriage? Cherry Picked Data of course. An old Kosher trick

    • I doubt they’d have said that blacks were dumber.

      Just less educated and more impulsive.

      Even if they opposed IR marriage.

      • Still I think that 1946 poll was another example of how pollsters falsify things to make the American people think IF YOU DONT AGREE WITH ME YOURE THE PROBLEM. The pollsters are mostly Jews

  2. All it took was total media control and repeat, repeat, repeat. The articles and programs were just a vehicle for the memes. This is why they fight so hard to keep themselves in and everyone else out of the media.

    • That’s a good point, the jews do tend to repeat their lies over and over and over and over again. But no matter how often they do it there is never any ring of truth in them.

  3. Interesting. This looks like it’s heading to a point where the professors themselves are going to lose control of the Frankenstein monster they created.

    I’ve long predicted a Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario coming to pass with the Jews and their white, liberal allies. They are going to lose control of this thing. These neurotic SJW’s are soon going to be seeing their masters as racists and oppressors and turn on them.

    • Self hatred is self defeating.

      The Universities are our Berlin Wall. When we break them, the anti-White system is done.

  4. And to think all those conservative intellectuals were going to reason with people like this, Dreher comes to mind

  5. When is Trump going to defund universities that enable screamers and thugs to censor and attack free speech?

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