Muzzled by Juan Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

voters a stark choice of identifying with one side or the other. Conservative politicians found that a lot of white working-class Americans decided to side with them in the comfort of the voting booth because of discomfort with the fast pace of social change required by political correctness.
    Members of the Right practiced ideological judo by using the ferocity of left-wing adherence to every politically correct position to mock the Left as self-righteous and given to censorship. They cast liberalism as the opposite of freedom, individual rights, and constitutional protections. University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom wrote a best-selling book,
The Closing of the American Mind
, which argued that political correctness in American schools was undermining academic freedom, intellectual debate, and overall scholarship. Bloom asked how anyone could speak or write in any course of study without fear of offending the high priests of political correctness. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was asked by CNN’s Bernie Shaw if he would want the death penalty for a man who raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis could not bring himself to say yes. It would have been a repudiation of liberal opposition to the death penalty. Conservatives pounced.
    The backlash against politically correct thinking became pronounced in the early 1990s. The
New York Times
published articles about several incidents of PC run wild. “At San Francisco State University, a black professor was reviled by students for teaching in the political science department rather than inblack studies,” according to one story. The
Times
also found instances where a Harvard student was not only rebuked by other students but punished by the school’s administration for hanging a Confederate flag out the window. At Stanford, students demanded an end to core curriculum in Western civilization and demanded a new approach called “Cultures, Ideas and Values” that the
Times
said focused on “non-European, non-white studies.”
    This coincided with long-standing efforts that had largely been initiated in the 1970s to eliminate American Indian names for sports teams. Major schools, including Marquette, Stanford, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, all changed their nicknames over this time period. Marquette, for example, changed from “the Warriors” to “the Golden Eagles.” All of this aggravated alumni and traditionalists. In this new world it was a crime to say that a person was blind. To be politically correct you had to say that person was “visually challenged.” A handicapped person was “physically challenged,” and a retarded person was only to be described as “mentally challenged.”
    It was more than just a right-wing complaint that politically correct language seemed out of control in the early nineties. People of all races, men and women, liberals and conservatives, felt that haphazard declarations of “appropriate” language as ruled by the politically correct were ever changing, making them feel guilty for saying things they didn’t know to be taboo. Writing in the
Washington Post
, journalist Jefferson Morley wrote that “for many Americans—especially a certain generation of older white males—the fact that their ideals of fair play and tolerance can be violated by implacable,self-righteous people with power is utterly novel. In a time of declining wages [for blue-collar workers], such an experience is also frightening and radicalizing.”
    Politically correct thinking became so out of fashion that President George H. W. Bush openly attacked it in a 1991 commencement address at the University of Michigan. He said politically correct thinking amounted to “bullying” and “censorship.” While the PC movement, he said, came into being “to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain