Gotta love Brendan O’Neill’s Don’t Even Think About Cancelling Blazing Saddles. “Trigger warnings and mini-lectures are an unsightly carbuncle on the world of art and letters. Cancel them.”

But Paladin thinks we’re way past triggers and mini-lectures.  Free thinkers are waging a rearguard action against Virtue Thugs who beat you into Baking the Cake—while the world of arts and letters is consumed with the puritanical search and destroy mission of anyone and everyone suspected of “Thoughtcrime.”

Take the case of the Detroit Lez Baker, who’ll never, ever, ever have to pay a legal or personal price for her beliefs. She’s been targeted by a crank called David Gordon Church Militant  designated by the SPLC a “hate group”, for one of those live-by-your-own-rules tit-for-tat showpieces that never really seem to alter the equation.

You can click through to Gay Rainbow is the Mark of the Beast if you want to get a flavor of David Gordon’s beliefs.  Frankly, despite a lawsuit threat, the worst this Christian fundamentalistis most likely going to do is pray at her. He’s not going to burn down her place or rampage through her neighborhood. Does he really have 200k followers on Facebook?

Who knows? Who cares?

Paladin has no intention of converting to Catholicism, but more importantly—doubts he’ll ever be forced to. Yet he gives a devout Christian big credit if the Christian really does practice turning the other cheek. Looking at you, Gordon.

On the other hand, there is a force on the march in America that won’t leave you alone. And won’t even consider turning the other cheek. And face it, the rest of us are in a state of terrified retreat.

For years, the radical left has sought to whip the three-ring circus of ideas into near silence. We are living Darkness at Noon. See if you can follow the Conor Friedersdorf piece in The Atlantic – for years Conor thought the Alt-right were the raciest, racist, racists but then drilled down into the bowels of Gotham’s concerned lefty parents at a school/zoom and discovered a woman wetting her bloomers over a white parent (Wrocklage) holding a neighbor’s brown kid on his lap. This story has received some well-deserved ridicule, but not one fraction of what it deserves.  Or what it signifies by way of portents of doom:

“Several members (sic) took exception to three things that Wrocklage did during the June 11 meeting: (1) Using a whiteboard, he noted that the four members who want to end screening all send their own kids to screened schools. (2) Three hours and eight minutes into the meeting, when another member characterized screening as “structural racism,” he rejected that characterization by flippantly interjecting, “My living room is integrated right now.” (3) About six minutes later, during an unrelated conversation among other council members about whether the NYPD or the Department of Education should employ school security, Wrocklage briefly held a Black baby on his lap, partly offscreen.

(Author: note the Capitalization of “Black”)

The baby, Jamir, is the nephew of Wrocklage’s close friend, Myesha Moore, who later explained in a YouTube video that their daughters are best friends, they are often in each other’s home, and she initially placed the child on Wrocklage’s lap in order to free up her hands. The baby’s appearance seemed unremarkable to me, especially with the Zoom screen split into 20 tiny squares, so that no one loomed large. See for yourself how unobtrusive the moment was.”

Yet the woke radical, relentless Thought Policewoman, Shino Tanikawa, will pursue the racist Wrocklage and his ilk into perdition: “I see no peaceful or constructive path forward for our Council so long as you remain in the leadership position and are resistant to this work (eradicating your inherent biological genetic systemic racism),” adding, “I am willing and ready to help you find a path to become anti-racist but I cannot make you want this. You have to do that part.”

Note, the words “no peaceful” . . .

WARNING—don’t let the virtuous Shino near matches or gasoline. How revealing when she says, “I don’t want to spend a lot of one-on-one time with somebody who denies my reality . . .”  She lives in a ridiculously small world, yet one which controls a vast amount of territory beyond her grasp. Another group member declares their purpose: “to remedy the disproportionate outcomes we see . . .”  The only way to guarantee outcomes is to instill fear of wrong outcome via expression.  At this, our self-appointed Committees for Public Safety have no peer.

What is acceptable to say in public has been reduced to a silent nod and scuttle away from possible conflict. Hardly anyone dares put a Trump sticker on their car in the tony village where I live, as our local Hate Has No Home Here Thought Police would key it. And feel morally justified in doing so.  That’s reality.

Featured photo is Arthur Koestler‘s “Darkness at Noon” and is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 .