When Matt Taibbi is on fire, nobody blazes hotter. This column is thermite. It’s about how everybody used to laugh at right-wing knotheads and busybodies — but now, the left is the same thing, only a million times worse, because they run the country and the culture. Excerpts:

The old Republican right’s idea of “humor” was its usual diatribes against Bad People, only with puns thrown in (are you ready for “OxyClinton”?). As a result the Fox effort at countering the Daily Show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour — a string of agonizing “burns” on Bush-haters and Hillary — remains the worst-rated show in the history of television, according to Metacritic. The irony gap eventually spelled doom for that group of Republicans, as Trump drove a truck through it in 2016. However, it’s possible they just weren’t as committed to the concept as current counterparts.

He has just described The New Yorker in the Trump era: it’s the liberal 1/2 Hour News Hour, in print. I didn’t think anything could make New Yorker cartoons unfunny. Trump did. He broke them. More Taibbi, talking about the stupid Smithsonian “whiteness” chart I wrote about last week:

The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White Peopleparodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking” are white values?).

The exhibit was inspired by white corporate consultants with Education degrees like Judith Katz and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who themselves echo the work of more consultants with Ed degrees like Glenn Singleton of Courageous Conversations. Per the New York Times, Courageous Conversations even teaches that “written communication over other forms” and “mechanical time” (i.e. clock time) are tools by which “whiteness undercuts Black kids.”

The notion that such bugbears as as time, data, and the written word are racist has caught fire across the United States in the last few weeks, igniting calls for an end to virtually every form of quantitative evaluation in hiring and admissions, including many that were designed specifically to combat racism.

More:

What to make of the campaign to end blind auditions for musical positions, which the New York Philharmonic began holding in the early seventies in response to complaints of discrimination?

Before blind auditions, women made up less than 6 percent of orchestras; today they’re half of the New York Philharmonic. But because the change did not achieve similar results with Black and Hispanic musicians, the blind audition must now be “altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” This completes a decades-long circle where the left/liberal project went from working feverishly to expunge racial stereotypes in an effort to level the playing field, to denouncing itself for ever having done so.

He’s just getting wound up. Taibbi writes, “The Smithsonian story is essentially the same tale of bubble-thinking run amok as the infamous “Museum of Creation” exhibit showing Adam and Eve partying with dinosaurs, only featuring opposite politics.” And he points out — importantly! — that the liberal press didn’t care about any of this until right-wingers started making fun of it. Here’s the dagger in the ribs:

Once, the right couldn’t see or comment upon its own absurdities, and instead spent most of its time whining about being frozen out of the media at the exact moment its messaging was becoming hegemonic, e.g. when we weren’t even able to watch a football game without someone trying to shove Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Miller onscreen. Now the left has adopted the same traits (the NBA restart played on a “Black Lives Matter”-emblazoned court is going to make those old Monday Night Football broadcasts seem chill), with a major difference: it has the bureaucratic juice to shut down mass media efforts to ridicule its thinking. These are the same pontificating, stereotyping busybodies Republicans used to be, only this time, they’re winning the culture war.

Read the whole thing — and subscribe to Taibbi’s Substack (five dollars per month) to get access to all his work. In this piece, he wonders why no institutional leaders have the guts to stand up to this illiberal, racist garbage. As well he should wonder.

Taibbi also points out (let me repeat) that these leftists are every bit as shrill and as bullying as that jerky Rush Limbaugh obsessive relative who would never miss an opportunity to hector you about politics at family gatherings, and couldn’t let anything go. Except the left today is not just the rude cousin you could walk away from. It’s running everything — and it can get you fired.

Why are so many people so eager to give up their liberty? Are they that desperate for meaning and purpose? Here, from Live Not By Lies, is a partial answer:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre- totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake
of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle— were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

So it is with these woke mobsters today, and the gutless institutional leaders who won’t stand up to them. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “antiracism,” or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth.

Why is it that it takes a wise-ass journalist writing not for a magazine, but on his own Substack, to point this out so vividly and convincingly, while none of the presidents of our great universities, and few if any writers or broadcasters for our mainstream news sources, will say so?