The Urge to Purge

Mike Coté

Mike Coté is a writer and podcaster focusing on history, Great Power rivalry, and geopolitics. He has a Master’s degree in European history, and is working on a book about the Anglo-German economic and strategic rivalry before World War I. He writes for National Review, Providence Magazine, and The Federalist, hosts the Rational Policy podcast, and can be found on Twitter @ratlpolicy.

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57 Responses

  1. Pinky says:

    In any power vacuum, the most ruthless party is likely to win power. The US is one of the very rare cases where reasonable people rose to power. Even when a Yeltsin fills the void, there’s a Putin biding his time.Report

  2. Chris says:

    I assume you know this, but just in case:

    One is never immune from denunciation in leftist circles, as this meme humorously attests.

    That tweet was originally about the GOP. Not saying that it can’t be more widely applied, but this also gets at one of the funnier aspects of conservative condemnation about cancel culture: conservatism, especially in its religious forms, has always been a cancel culture, and will always be one.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Over the last week, there was an awful murder of Brianna Ghey, a young transwoman, and they held a vigil in Britain and, at the vigil, there was a “Say Her Name!” chant. This resulted in “Say Her Name” trending on twitter.

    Well, this turned into DISCOURSE.

    Transgender Action Block has since apologized:

    The main discussion is all about the usual stuff:

    Is it bad that this chant was used?
    Is it bad to the point where this chant should be called out?

    There are a bunch of people who thought that the answer to the latter question was “no”, no matter what the answer to the former question was and that brought us into a discussion about the whole “callout culture” thing.

    Like, the people who didn’t think that it was worth calling out started making accusations of “clout-chasing” and whatnot and that turned into the usual litany of “how dare you?” versus “How Dare You?” versus “HOW DARE YOU?!?” arguments.

    Like, the original offense, as offenses go, wasn’t *THAT* bad of an offense. But then people started defending the offense. And questioning being offended at the offense. And how dare you question my being offended versus how dare you focus on *THIS* instead of on *THAT* and how dare you question whether I can do two things at once and how dare you how dare you how dare you.

    The ice pick is right there.

    You can solve this problem if you just pick it up.

    If you don’t pick it up, the other guy will.

    Pick it up.

    Pick it up.Report

  4. Chip Daniels says:

    I made a comment here that in order to find leftist illiberalism you had to search out the crevices of minor colleges to discover an overzealous young person or cranky academic.

    To find conservative illiberalism all one needs do is read the public statements of a President or Governor or maybe the most widely seen cable pundit in America.Report

    • I’ve been to cocktail-and-homebrew parties in Portland in which well-educated, well-meaning, mostly young people jockey for medals in the Woke Olympics. If someone proclaims, “The city should house the homeless!” someone else is near-guaranteed to chime in with “Ahem, I think you meant the ‘houseless,” and thereafter dismiss the first speaker as insufficiently aware of the issue to be worthy of attention at best, and an outright enemy at worst.

      …And then wonder aloud how, even in a city as liberal as Portland, there can be conservatives on the city council (n.b., there are no conservatives on the city council, only people who are friendly to real estate developers, which is what they really mean).Report

      • Damon in reply to Burt Likko says:

        I think if I ever experienced that at a party I’d 1) just leave because I’d want to do 2 and it’s kinda a bad thing and I’d go to jail, or 2) beat all of them with a 2×4 until they whimpered like babies.

        Christ what a bunch of insufferable duchebags.Report

      • Chris in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Interesting. I’m in a city with a similar reputation for liberalism/progressivism, and while I’ve heard of this happening, I’ve never witnessed it myself, including in official meetings and social gatherings with groups from left (say, DSA) to far left (definitely not DSA).

        I don’t know about in Portland, but Austin’s left has, for the most part (with the obvious exception of a certain Maoist group that has occasionally garnered national attention), developed a culture of “calling in” rather than “calling out.” It’s not perfect, and there are people who stray from it, because we’re all human, but I find it more tolerant and open to dialogue than pretty much any other part of the political spectrum I’ve spent time in (except, maybe, that weird, tiny corner of libertarianism where people are almost ridiculously friendly; a corner of libertarianism that, it should be noted, finds contemporary American conservatism horrifying for the most part).Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Certainly true, if only because you can find a person like that at any party in any city, in any era.
        More patriotic than thou, more Christian, more sophisticated, more enlightened, more hip or more radical.

        But the consequences are not symmetrical.

        Progressive illiberalism gets a professor shunned from cool parties.

        Conservative illiberalism gets parents arrested for allowing their 13 year old son to wear makeup.Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          Besides that, the dynamic I see is this:

          Internet dude: This game or comic is so awesome and amazing.

          Left twitter: This game is not so awesome and amazing because the creators are bigots towards X and playing this game further enriches them and the game or comic or whatever incorporates their bigoted views on X in this way and here are some examples.

          Internet dude: Why are you making me feel bad? Why?

          Lots of middle-aged dudes are incredibly thin-skinned.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            It seems especially absurd given the asymmetrical stakes, where people writing mean tweets is presented as a perfect 10.0 score on the Oppression Olympics, but a teacher being arrested for giving a student a book on Roberto Clemente is well, just one of those things.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to Chip Daniels says:

              Exhibit 3,287:
              Florida Teacher Is Fired for Posting Viral Video of Empty Classroom Bookshelves

              https://jezebel.com/florida-teacher-is-fired-for-posting-viral-video-of-emp-1850130894

              The district confirmed that they purged him solely because he caused embarrassment to governor.

              But yeah, let’s keep wanking about overzealous students somewhere.Report

              • Damon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Sure……couldn’t be this could it? From the link.

                “it was determined that he had violated social media and cell phone policies of his employer. Therefore, ESS determined these policy violations made it necessary to part ways with this individual.””

                Hell, every company I’ve ever worked for have a training doc on just such things…Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Damon says:

                As in most repressive countries, the social media policy in Florida is that any post which causes discomfort or embarrassment for the ruling party must be punished.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I’ll ask my kid if her library shelves are still empty.

                She says “no”. She hasn’t noticed any change in the number of books from last year to this year.

                Now that’s South Florida so there’s that.

                Edit: “In discussion between the district and ESS regarding this individual’s misrepresentation of the books available to students in the school’s library…”

                So that statement might be a thing.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                All books in Florida schools are forbidden unless they have been approved by government censors.

                Her shelves must have been stocked with books bearing the imprimatur of the government censor.

                Here’s a list of books which are forbidden for children to read in Florida:
                https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/02/07/heres-a-list-of-books-banned-under-review-in-central-florida-schools/Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Her shelves must have been stocked with books bearing the imprimatur of the government censor.

                Or those photos of empty shelves weren’t examples of banning and are bad behavior for the guy who took the photo.

                Librarian takes all the books off the shelves to move the shelves or dust.

                Teacher took a photo and tweeted “look at the gov banning books”.

                Your link lists 40 or so books. The typical library book shelf has FAR more than that and the library itself will have one hundred thousand.

                If we count virtual (and we should, my kid says that’s a popular option in her school and I hear it being pushed by teachers every time I go), then the library has… 36 million or something.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                The law makes it a felony to give students any book not on the approved list.

                But the approved list wasn’t given first, and the rules are so vague that teachers erred on the side of caution and removed all books until they could be assured they wouldn’t be prosecuted.

                We have video of the district telling teachers to cover or remove books if they are unsure of their content.
                We have multiple stories of teachers removing books in fear.

                And ultimately, the state admitted that the firing of this teacher was done because of the embarrassment.

                The list of censored books is over 170 so far, and as the case of the Roberto Clemente book show, the rules are arbitrary and vague, but essentially anything which causes a conservative white person discomfort is forbidden.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                You’d think that these censorious idiots would realize what they look like to people who have read history books before.

                Are there any censorious idiots who were on the right side of history according to the history books?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                It is certainly possible that the internet hysteria is correct and my kid’s first hand direct eyeball view of things is wrong.

                However imho books and learning to read is pretty important. I doubt I’m alone in that view. The parents aren’t getting tar and feathers ready for the governor because the kids aren’t telling us the books are gone.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                This is the passive aggressive game the left plays and which increasingly discredits it’s institutional authority: Let’s pretend we’re in mortal danger, then take the most aggressively bad approach and blame it on others.

                The law doesn’t do what you say it does. It allows for parents to have a full accounting of titles in the library and assigned texts. It then specifies a process whereby parents can challenge books. Which the school board has to review and respond — it doesn’t have to remove, it just hast to review that the book in question is appropriate. The law also provides for compliance training on what’s appropriate and stipulates that only these certified ‘media specialists’ may add books to the library. It further requires that all decisions must be made public – removals and keeps.

                Further, the responsibility for compliance lies first with the Principal and then ultimately with the Board for each district. There’s nothing in there about Teachers or Librarians being on the hook for a bad book.

                It’s standard Compliance Law issues – what does compliance look like and how do we make sure that people are educated on what compliance is; especially when compliance requires acts of judgement and grey areas. Standard stuff we all deal with in our day jobs too.

                Sure, arguments can be made at the margins about what is appropriate for educational materials (especially through Grade 3 which is specifically called out in the bill)… but that’s perfectly appropriate debate/fight to have. You just have to be prepared to lose to parents who really do think a lot of the material is inappropriate. And certainly there will be times when a Principal makes a bad judgement call; that’s partly the point of publishing the lists school by school, district by district. Is there a consensus? Are there marginal decisions that with further training and refinement of the compliance rules people might agree where the appropriate line/age might be?

                Mostly I’m seeing caterwauling of people caught with their pants down; of people who thought they ‘owned’ this space and no one would ever look.

                Here’s a link to the bill process that passed in March 2022 and effective July 2022.

                https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1467/?Tab=BillHistoryReport

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Are nonvetted books allowed, yes or no?

                The books listed as banned, is that correct or erroneous?

                What is the penalty for a teacher giving children a nonvetted book?Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                * Yes. After July 2022, books can be added to libraries only by certified media specialists (basically people who’ve taken the compliance certification training).
                * Erroneous as framed. Those books were removed when challenged. My understanding is that it could even vary from district to district.
                * Teachers teach the curriculum that is approved. If they are teaching non-curriculum books, then they would be subject to whatever penalties would be appropriate. There’s nothing in the bill that stipulates what that would be. What happens now when teachers teach things they shouldn’t?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Marchmaine says:

                All you’re doing it re-writing my statements but using softer euphemisms.

                You agree, that teachers are no longer trusted to select books, but instead the books must pass by a board of government censors who have the final say.

                We agree the books were removed and if not approved by the government censors, will remain banned.

                As for the “penalties”, there is a memo from the Florida State Department of Education saying that the new law treats violations the same as distributing pornography, i.e., a felony.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                With these rules, those pictures of empty shelves were staged.

                “Approved going forward” isn’t even close to “remove every book in the library and wait for approval”.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Chip, here’s a clip that was making the rounds yesterday:

                This is merely the same argument. Why do teachers think they know enough to pick books?

                We’re talking about people who have been *TRAINED* to pick books being in charge of picking books! Treating these credentials as meaningless is exactly what the right-wingers you decry as hypocritical!Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.

                Instead of posting other people’s tweets, try making an argument.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                My argument is that there are people who have been trained to pick out books and have been certified.

                And there are people who have not been trained to pick out books and have not been certified.

                And the people who have been certified should be the ones in charge of picking out books and not the amateurs (no matter how enthusiastic they are).

                These are our *CHILDREN*, Chip.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                If you want to argue that, then that leads us to ask “what is the pedagogy of the book selectors?”

                What is their metric for selecting this book or rejecting that?

                Would it be useful for us to post their own comments, explaining their thinking?

                Or maybe look at the lists of books and see a pattern?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                “what is the pedagogy of the book selectors?”

                Do we want to allow questioning pedagogies?

                I’m pretty sure that we fought pretty hard against questioning them.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                This is why the ‘narrative’ approach to politics is just plain bad and lazy.

                * Yes, this is not how public education works. Teachers are employees of the district; the district sets the standards for education. Whatever authority a teacher might have to make choices within that framework is 100% delegated and not ‘by right’.

                * The Boards of Education make curriculum decisions as delegated by the Parents via the laws of the state. You can call it censorship or you can call it making Education Curriculum decisions. Same thing everywhere and always.

                * Books removed are removed is a tautology. I read nothing in the bill that would prohibit a book being removed and then reviewed and then returned. In fact, in several of the lists you (and others have posted) most books were *not* removed even though parents ‘objected’ to them and many were *not* pulled and listed as under further review. That’s what a normal functioning system should look like.

                * I link to the actual law and you bring me ‘stories about memos’ . I’m happy to read the memo, but my hunch at the moment is that distributing pornography will be treated like distributing pornography. Don’t distribute pornography and pretend it’s ‘educational’.

                This is why you have to build a bizarre narrative that Schools never act as schools and that Teachers function more like Divine Oracles rather than employees subject to Curricula and Compliance.

                As I say, you and anyone else are free to argue the margins, but mostly what I’m seeing will receive majority support from Parents. So you don’t focus on the margins but some bizarre theory of education that doesn’t exist.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Marchmaine says:

                But you’ve already conceded the most damning point, which is that the goal of the law is to strip teachers and school administrators of control of curriculum and give that power to a minority of parents.

                Your argument is not with me, but with the parents and administrators who are removing the books.

                They have told us explicitly what they find objectionable, which is anything that makes white straight Christians uncomfortable.

                Argue with them, not me.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I don’t know what to tell you, but Teachers and School Administrators have what I’ve said they have: Delegated Authority. They don’t have it by right, they have it as delegated by Law – which also provides for direct Public and Parental participation and oversight.

                Here’s the link to Duval county which was in the news. Most of the books that were *reviewed* are unrestricted/open shelf and the second largest category is restricted by parental consent then age.

                Hardly a minority parents forcing administrators to remove all books they deem objectionable.

                e.g. Someone objected to Catch-22 and this is the entry for it:

                2008-09 Catch 22 Joseph Heller Open Checkout Sexual escapades, Profanity, Rape, Murder

                In the first 5 pages, two books were removed.

                Basically sunshine laws for Public Education are good. You can take some sort of Teachers as unaccountable specialists teaching unreviewable arcana to children to the Election cycle but be prepared for overwhelming support for Teachers as delegated employees – especially once you get out of a narrative bubble of erroneous framing.

                https://dcps.duvalschools.org/Page/29424Report

              • InMD in reply to Marchmaine says:

                We’re in a strange place with the same people arguing for both a very hard free speech absolutism for public school personnel with respect to even the youngest children, such that even anodyne curation for age appropriateness is deemed suspect, while also warning about the extreme danger to safety posed by the same approach when it comes to adults, be they undergrads at university or your proverbial redneck uncle on social media. I’m more suspicious of the actual intent of what DeSantis is doing than others may be but it isn’t hard to see how ass backwards this whole thing is. Nothing is too radical for the 6 year olds but assigning the classics results in weeping sophomores in the quad and all the rest.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

                No, no one of any significance is arguing for “very hard free speech absolutism”.

                These conversations always go sideways when people retreat to that kind of abstraction.

                Yes, adults must choose books for children. Everyone involved in this agrees on that.
                And yes, some books are inappropriate for different ages, everyone agrees to that.

                What is different here is that the open, stated goals of the DeSantis side is hostility to LGBTQ themes and any talk of racism that makes them uncomfortable.

                An example would be that a kindergarten book showing a mommy and daddy is considered by DeSantis to be appropriate, while a book showing two daddies is inappropriate.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:

                Good news! They’ve removed the word “fat” from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

                Augustus Gloop is now referred to as “enormous”.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to InMD says:

                One can be suspicious that RDS saw a pretty big gap between what ‘Educational Professionals’ see as their mission and what Parents see as that mission. And that’s why he passed the sunshine laws which also included a Parental Bill of Rights. Covid led to some changes in the parent/school relationship that is still being played out.

                On the other hand, if the Ship of Education is so huge that only the drydock of Covid afforded one an opportunity to knock off some barnacles? Then start scraping.Report

              • InMD in reply to Marchmaine says:

                I think the gap he identified is very much a real thing. The question that remains open is whether the Republican party we all know and love can resist the temptation to fill it with some shadow version of Christianity and/or conservative agitprop. It’s still far from clear to me that the anti-woke crusaders of the GOP actually understand the concerns they’ve happened to tap into, and there’s a million voices in right wing echo chambers ready to affirm all of their worst instincts.

                I mean, the core problem really is the influence of left illiberalism. So the question is, can a conservative party actually correct policy in a (small-l) liberal direction? I’m not so sure, but I suppose we will find out.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

                can a conservative party actually correct policy in a (small-l) liberal direction?

                With much wailing about how it was going to empower rapists from Blue, Trump’s Education Sec did away with the whole “no due process thing”.

                If Biden has made any moves to bring it back I haven’t heard.

                Similarly we might have the Supremes dismantle Affirmative Action’s outcome race quotas that discriminate against the Asians.

                All we need is a bunch of the Jan 6 people in jail and a Billion dollar judgement on Fox and we’re pretty close to done.Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Of the 2 or 3 things where I thought Trump’s policy represented an improvement that would be one. However the rubber really meets the road on this stuff at the state and local level. The question is whether the GOP actually has a governing philosophy on public education, or is it just an opportunistic capitalization of unforced errors by progressives? Remember, Chris Rufo works for the people who thought biology classes in public schools should ‘teach the controversy’ between evolution and intelligent design.

                Race based affirmative action in higher ed is one of those constitutional issues thats been on borrowed time for 20 years. I won’t mourn its likely demise but I’m not sure it fits the bill.

                Obviously I would love nothing more if Fox takes it on the chin and for everyone duly convinced for criminality on 1/6, but not sure that’s related either, nor something that could reasonably be viewed as a change by the Republicans. It’s the Biden DOJ that’s doing the prosecutions for 1/6 and the Fox News thing is really comeuppance for harms against private parties.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

                The GOP is a bag of cats and education is mostly a local thing.

                As much as I’d like to get rid of all magic thinking in education and indeed all of society, we’re centuries away from that.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Why are all these stories Duval County? Either their school officials are really conservative or they’re really liberal and overdoing everything to make a point.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

                Blues outnumber Reds there according to wiki. However my expectation is we’re looking at reporting being Blue.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          Progressive illiberalism gets a professor shunned from cool parties.

          The hundreds (thousands?) of male college students charged with sex crimes with no acceptable outcome other than “guilty” are on illiberalism’s ticket too.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Burt Likko says:

        In my 42 years of life, more than 20 of which were spent at a liberal to left undergrad, in deepest blue progressive Brooklyn, and then in San Francisco*, I have never in mt life seen people jocky or compete for the woke Olympics or oppression Olympics. I have never seen or heard the kind of tone policing which seems to reduce so many people (especially dudes of middle age) to quake in fear.

        I have a theory, and it is mine, that a lot of these conversations regarding the woke vs. not woke only make sense if you are chronically online and/or exist in the Fox News Cinematic Universe because when I hear right-leaning people state their views on how they think us urban liberals speak and act on a daily basis, it makes me wonder if I am living in a different reality. This includes right-leaning people here.

        The only place I see the language right-leaning types complain about is on twitter and even there it is quickly countered. Recently a 2019 tweet came up from a journalist named Kassy Cho. She wrote something like “Friendly reminder. You are only allowed to celebrate Lunar New Year if you live in a country where it is celebrated and/or invited to do so by someone who celebrates Lunar New Year.” A man named Andy Wang immediately responded with “Friendly reminder. I invite everyone to celebrate Lunar New Year.”

        I’ve seen the friendly reminder kind of aggressive language in more than one circumstance on progressive twitter and progressive twitter can egg each other on in radicalism but it really does not spill out into real life in my experience. Twitter is the perfect place for people to be paper tigers. Surely you have encountered opposing counsel who are much more reasonable on the phone than they are in e-mail and in on paper.

        But as much as I write that twitter is not real life, people who fret about the woke coming for them are too chronically online to admit that. So you have a bunch of middle-aged guys (usually) who are deeply upset that young women (usually) think their favorite movies, books, whatever are “problematic” and this makes them feel bad. No one can admit that while a lot of ink has spilled over Rowling’s transphobia, much of it is online factions talking past each other. I know plenty of liberal parents. I do not know one that said his or her kid is prohibited from things HP because of Rowling’s transphobia but the quaking fear from middle aged dudes continues about being “cancelled”Report

        • Pinky in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          If you’ve never met the insufferable progressive at the party…Report

          • Michael Cain in reply to Pinky says:

            Is this where I talk about how my people, the applied mathematicians, are held up to ridicule? I have never been able to watch The Big Bang Theory. If someone walked into a network with a proposal for a comedy where the whole premise is to make fun of the characters based on stereotypes of Blacks, women, gays, paraplegics, or people with mental disabilities, the insufferable progressives would be climbing the walls to protest it.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          “I have a theory, and it is mine, that a lot of these conversations regarding the woke vs. not woke only make sense if you are chronically online ”

          ok boomerReport

      • Slade the Leveller in reply to Burt Likko says:

        This kind of thing has to be how the English word “whatever” was coined.Report

  5. Burt Likko says:

    This is not a new story. It is a recaptiulation of a story which has been repeated over and over, again and again, for a long time.

    He who becomes an apostate is worse than the infidel, who never held the true faith at all.

    He who preaches heresy is worse than the apostate, who at least is honest about having left the true faith.

    He who fails to preach orthodoxy zealously is worse than the heretic, who at least understands the importance of the true faith as proven by his corruption of it.

    As others have pointed out, the real error made in the OP is not describing the phenomenon, which is quite real. It is in characterizing this phenomenon as somehow unique to left-wing politics. It may be and often is found in right-wing politics (since when did Liz Cheney stop being conservative?), religion (EVERYONE should have expected the Spanish Inquisition), any group activity of any orientation.

    Joseph McCarthy was a conservative and an anti-communist, and isn’t this article really about a variation on McCarthyism?Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Burt Likko says:

      The point is not that is unique to expressions of progressive ideology, but that it isn’t, and this is because modern progressive ideology is little more than Puritan theology with the word “GOD” crossed out.Report

  6. Dark Matter says:

    The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me.

    This sums up the problem right there.

    The movement needs an enemy. If the most racist person in the area is seriously anti-racist, then that doesn’t matter, he’ll do. If you need to pick someone at random you can do that too.

    This whole “needing an enemy” thing shows up all over the place, it means the organization doesn’t have a reason to justify it’s existence/our-attention.

    Edit: And we can also use this as a weapon against our political rivals. One leader removes another with an accusation.Report

  7. Rufus F. says:

    We will have to wait and see how our own version of this timeless tale ends.

    Spoiler alert: it’s actually very unlikely an American professor is going to get Trotskied by their TA.Report

  8. Steve Casburn says:

    If this is the sort of thing that truly bothers the OP, then one way he could fight back against it in the real world is to attend his next local GOP meeting and give a passionate defense of Liz Cheney if her name comes up.

    Physician, heal thyself.Report

  9. I’m surprised the more orthodox don’t have a catchy nickname for the deviationists. Maybe call them Revolutionaries In. Name Only?Report