Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words

80% of Americans Decry Political Correctness, Saying It Has Replaced Free Speech with #SJW Crap

New poll says regardless of age, Americans have just had it with political correctness

"Participants made clear that they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them."

A new report says that 80% of Americans have just had it with Political Correctness. It was based on a nationally representative poll with 8,000 respondents, 30 one-hour interviews, and six focus groups conducted from December 2017 to September 2018, by Pew Charitable Trust. PC culture is now clearly rejected, in the wake of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and his subsequent confirmation. The report is available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a22740f/t/5bbcea6b7817f7bf7342b718/1539107467397/hidden_tribes_report-2.pdf

What is political correctness? Dave Rubin asked Ben Shapiro this question in May of 2016, referring to Donald J Trump during his campaign for president. "If you say Megan Kelly is bleeding from her, Wherever, as Trump did, it's rude, but it's not politically incorrect. If you say a wall should be built to keep out illegal immigrants, it's politically incorrect but it's not rude."

He added that Trump was both rude and politically incorrect, again this in 2016. In 2018, the main battle was the Kavanaugh Confirmation. Those on the left saw a woman who deserved to be believed, because of what she was saying. Those on the right saw an accomplished man falsely accused, and someone trying to trip up his career through allegations no reasonable person could have possibly expected him to refute (ie. that 35 years previously, when Kavanaugh was a 17 hear old boy, he had drunk too much beer and gotten fresh with a 15 year old girl named Christine Blasey).

Bill Maher was not even slightly Politically Incorrect. His views were entirely mainstream media, mainstream academia, and not in any way politically incorrect.

Kathy Griffin cutting off Donald Trump's head in a famously rude image, was not politically incorrect either.

The term political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated to PC or P.C.) is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

Since the late 1980s, the term has come to refer to avoiding language or behavior that can be seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting groups of people considered disadvantaged or discriminated against, especially groups defined by sex or race. In public discourse and the media, it is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.

The contemporary pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. This usage was popularized by a number of articles in The New York Times and other media throughout the 1990s, and was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990), and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization and multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curricula.

Commentators on the political left contend that conservatives use the concept of political correctness to downplay and divert attention from substantively discriminatory behavior against disadvantaged groups. They also argue that the political right enforces its own forms of political correctness to suppress criticism of its favored constituencies and ideologies. The term has played a major role in the United States culture war between liberals and conservatives.

 

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