“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.

Thus spake a Los Angeles prep school parent in anonymous discussion with journalist Bari Weiss, who recently made waves in the cancel-culture pond with a public resignation from the New York Times due to the ascendance of woke-mob rule therein. Weiss shared this quote in an eye-opening but unsurprising discussion of how identity ideology has come to dominate elite secondary education, parents’ desires notwithstanding, and parents’ views cowed into silence by the threat of cancellation.

“[W]orse than being called a murderer” caught my eye, since I recently blogged about how it took allegations of sexual harassment, rather than the implementation and coverup of pandemic policies that killed thousands, to turn many on the Left against NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The parents’ fear is echoed in the children. Kids are reluctant to voice opinions, even “correct” ones, lest they be permanently stigmatized for some transgression or divergence from an ever-more-strict orthodoxy.

And I mean permanently. Consider how a young journalist, Alexi McCammond, is facing career destruction over a couple tweets her 17 year old self made, that was deep-mined out of oblivion by someone with too much free time and too much entitled arrogance. It’s hard enough to be a teenager, to navigate puberty, hormones, and the social minefield of high school, without piling on a perpetual existential dread of life-destruction from a single misstep (including stuff that’s OK today but may be declared “racist” a quarter century from now). First advice to kids: Stay the [redacted] off Twitter!

I’ve noted before how all this resembles Stalin’s Russia, where one wrong word (almost entirely arbitrary in determination) or errant gesture could put you into “enemy of the State” status in the blink of an eye. That this equivalent of the Great Terror is being carried out not by the State but by a tiny minority of cultural elites is being used as an excuse to dismiss all comparisons, no matter how apt. Our re-education camps are no less obligatory, however, since they are now our schools (with our most elite ones being the most “re-educatory” of all).

It is twisted beyond comprehension that socialism, which murdered a hundred million people last century (or perhaps twice that many – nobody really knows and the murderers weren’t about to confess their butcher’s bill) is undergoing a renaissance in America, and that capitalism, which has done more by far to elevate humanity from its natural state of poverty and misery, is now deemed so racist that high school kids are afraid to call themselves capitalists.

And it should shock the conscience that murder is less of affront to those who’ve decided they must reshape our society than violations of the woke creed are. For, as we are seeing with the wave of scandals washing over Cuomo – you can kill a couple thousand elderly and people will shrug it away if your politics are correct, but allegations of sexist piggery are a Tappan Zee bridge too far.

• About the Author

About Peter Venetoklis

I am twice-retired, a former rocket engineer and a former small business owner. At the very least, it makes for interesting party conversation. I'm also a life-long libertarian, I engage in an expanse of entertainments, and I squabble for sport.

Nowadays, I spend a good bit of my time arguing politics and editing this website.

If you'd like to help keep the site ad-free, please support us on Patreon.