Illiberal ‘progressives’ should lose their “God complex” and stop trying to shut down freedom of speech and expression, a columnist has said.
Writing for The Sunday Telegraph, Zoe Strimpel said she was recently castigated by a colleague and two “extremely right-on” PhD students after she criticised ‘gender awareness’ workshops designed “to boost our handling of transgender issues”.
When she stated she did not feel such workshops would improve her work, and that she would decline to attend, she was met with “serious disagreement and a passionate defence of such workshops being mandatory”.
Policing thoughts
Strimpel noted that “the evermore powerful PC militia” are increasingly policing people’s thoughts.
She said: “Righteous ‘progressives’ now wield astonishing cultural and moral power”.
She added that the rise of workplace and university ‘awareness’ workshops shows they won’t be satisfied until everyone’s thinking is in line with their own: “Those who don’t fall into line will be forced”.
Threats
The columnist highlighted instances of threatening behaviour in North America, where some people are protesting against the screening of a documentary about the socially conservative university professor Jordan Peterson.
She said cinemas in Toronto and Brooklyn had to cancel screenings after threats from “those who declare Peterson morally impure”.
A church in Oregon planning to screen the film was told: “We cannot allow fascism to continue to rise and will not tolerate its presence in our city… As much as we joke about it, we really don’t want to have to bring out the guillotine to fix society.”
’Bully-boy progressives’
Strimpel concluded: “There is altogether too much weight being thrown around by bully-boy progressives convinced they know everything.
“They must learn, and learn soon, that the rest of us are not only capable of coming to our own conclusions, but we are also entitled to do so without their threats.”