Sullivan: The Price Of Orthodoxies

While I often find his commentaries somewhat unbalanced to my ears, nevertheless worth reading as he is frank about his previous orthodoxies but perhaps less so with his current ones. Nevertheless, a good column:

…I think it’s the accumulated frustration at these things that has led to the new outburst of attention. Musk’s rescue of Twitter from woke control and censorship has allowed the story to gain new oxygen. Trump’s re-election and the collapse of woke credibility (if not power) has disinhibited many. The “racist” accusations have lost their power to silence dissenters, as the consequences of that silence have played out. 

And this is a good thing for two reasons.

The first is that we haven’t had real accountability at the top for any of these atrocities. No one in the police or local government has faced legal consequences for their enabling of the gang-rapes. Many have gone on to have new careers in government. Just as the entire Catholic hierarchy escaped any legal punishment for their crimes of negligence and complicity in child abuse, so too did Dick Cheney and George W Bush bust open the Geneva Conventions only to be protected by Obama. One of the key architects of the torture regime, Gina Haspel, even became CIA director.

The second is that in all these cases, the victims were among the least powerful in the world: dark-skinned prisoners accused of terrorism, young boys whose word was usually dismissed in favor of the priest’s, and white, uncouth girls of the British underclass. I also cannot stop thinking of the countless gay and lesbian children with gender dysphoria who have been recklessly experimented on these past several years, fed lies by their doctors, and abandoned by gay and lesbian adults: all to sustain the orthodoxy of critical queer and gender theory. And you know full well that none of these cowards and quislings will ever be held to account. 

So let it rip. Expose it all. After all, 76 percent of the British public want the new, more focused inquiry that Starmer just denied them: 91 percent of Reform voters, 84 percent of Tories, 71 percent of Liberal Democrats, and 65 percent of Labour voters. And don’t balk at legal prosecution of the enablers. It takes time to absorb horror, and hold it properly to account. 

Orthodoxies are not without their legitimate uses. We need them to make sense of the world at times. But they need to be held loosely, and be capable of adjusting to new facts. When they become ways to deny reality, to exculpate criminals, to censor dissent, and to take the souls and bodies of the least of our fellow humans, we need to re-examine them too. Before they consume more victims.

Source: The Price Of Orthodoxies