I feel that the primary intellectual roots of the evil come from the treatment of the postmodern Left canon as some kind of holy writ.

The total rejection of evidence, due process, any appreciation for even the value of the myth of the rule of law, and any validity to the pursuit of objective truth (it’s a statement of intellectual heresy not to put quotes around that term) is a recipe for very distorted lens for studying reality.

It also gives us this frightening Maoist structure built up by SJ in which people are divided into broad, theoretically uniform classes, this time around by race, sex, and sexual identity/preference, and declared ‘oppressors’ or ‘oppressed’ definitionally and without any regard for what might happen in the future. The social order is basically declared fixed into a semi-hierarchical web of eternally oppressed whose interests merit advancement by the collective against these other interests, the eternal oppressor.

The only provision for evolution or growth that the SJ model seems to have is to accept more theories of institutional oppression from applicant subcultures, as long as they can be called upon to toe everyone else’s line at least from time to time. SJ is really remarkable for not really seeming to show any interest in examining power structures up the line from “bourgeois red-state straight white guy” — Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and the big, big economic and geopolitical players generally. For some reason that generally remains the realm of ‘conspiracy theory.’