Whatever misgivings we might have about leftist overreach must always be tempered by the more consequential concerns about the injustices and misuses of power those movements are working to face down. It’s precisely this unfeeling misappropriation of outrage that permeates Harris’s rhetorical repertoire. Over the course of several years, he has used his sizable platform not to advocate for equality and fair treatment for those less fortunate, but to rail against the activist left. Given the right’s inexorable slide into authoritarianism, idiocracy, and wealth and justice inequality, there is simply no excuse for pretending social justice activism is the central problem of our time.

Well said. I recently said the same thing on my Patheos blog about Jordan Peterson’s anti-SJW scaremongering. A couple of Peterson’s fans showed up and fixated on “being fined for speech,” obviously much more troubled by the prospect of an anti-discrimination statute intended to protect transpeople than by the violence, discrimination and marginalization that the law was enacted to prevent.

I couldn’t agree more with your analysis of Sam Harris’s narcissism and intellectual dishonesty. I notice that no matter what subject he’s describing—whether it’s Israel, the Evergreen College brouhaha, or Murray’s work—, he uses the exact same terms to frame it: a “politically correct moral panic” in which wrong-headed liberal types reject evidence that doesn’t fit their ideological biases.

I’m glad to have found this blog. Your posts are extremely well-written.