The Times- We need leaders to fight cultural groupthink
MELANIE PHILLIPS
We need leaders to fight cultural groupthink
The new social orthodoxies are governed by fear but the desire to resist them is growing
The Times
When the social injustice group Stop Funding Hate launched its campaign of intimidation against the fledgling TV station GB News, whose mission is to resist uniformity of thought, it got more than it had bargained for.
As the group attempted to strangle the station at birth, a number of companies such as Ikea, Vodafone, Nivea and the Swedish cider company Kopparberg pulled their advertising. The station’s founder, Andrew Neil, then threatened to turn the tables by boycotting them, for which viewers cheered him on.
Institutions are going down like ninepins in the face of this coerced cultural conformity. The Royal Academy of Arts has removed from its gift shop the work of artist Jess de Wahls after she was denounced for “transphobia”. Her crime was saying she couldn’t accept people’s “unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born”.
Companies are turning their human resources departments into inquisitions, imposing unconscious bias training and requiring Soviet-style confessions of thought and identity crime. Universities and schools are rewriting history and turning education into anti-British propaganda.
Through “cancel culture”, people are becoming social and professional pariahs for resisting any of these language-hijacking orthodoxies. They find themselves demonised and delegitimised for the crime of asserting demonstrable truths.
The extent to which this madness has taken hold is staggering. How can so many have buckled to this agenda for refashioning British and western culture through a process that was dubbed “cultural totalitarianism” back in the 1950s by the historian Jacob Talmon?
The main reason is surely terror of the consequences if they resist. Some, though, actively subscribe to the new orthodoxy; others may think they can make money from it, or that it isn’t really very important.
How can they be so shallow? The answer to that lies in what a few of us have been banging on about for several decades: the erosion of education and core values, including the substitution of subjective opinion for objective truth, and the replacement of “what is right” by “what is right for me”.
The result of this mass indoctrination is that many who now wield cultural power have no idea that anything is wrong with this degraded intellectual and moral landscape because it’s all they have ever known. But there are still millions who are aghast at what is being destroyed.
The only way of stopping this is for people to stand up and fight it. The public needs to start exercising the power of financial muscle. As the American writer John Ringo quipped: “Get woke, go broke.”
This worked at Oriel College, Oxford, whose consultation on pulling down its statue of Cecil Rhodes was hastily abandoned after furious alumni cancelled £1.5 million in donations and threatened to withdraw even more.
When the National Trust started transforming its role from honouring the past to trashing it, blacklisting properties said to be associated with colonialism and slavery, it started haemorrhaging members and its chairman was forced to resign.
Cambridge University’s vice-chancellor Professor Stephen Toope, who approved a website where students could anonymously report “micro-aggressions” by dons, was forced to retreat after tutors accused him of creating a “police state”.
Parents should remove their children from schools that attempt to turn them into propaganda parrots. In Manhattan, several parents at exclusive schools teaching their children to hate America and all white people have done precisely that. In London, why should parents of pupils at St Paul’s Girls’ School want to pay it £26,000 a year in fees to have their daughters’ teachers instructed that there are at least 150 gender identities?
Political leadership is also key. The LGBT pressure group Stonewall was making more than £3 million a year running equality training programmes for companies and public sector organisations.
However, after it recommended replacing the word “mother” with the term “person who has given birth”, and was accused of producing guidance which led to the unlawful banning of two feminist speakers over their gender-critical views, the equalities minister Liz Truss urged every government department to withdraw from the charity’s diversity champions scheme.
Welcome as this is, much more is needed. While some opponents are now making a stand, the tide is still running strongly for cultural conformity.
The pressures on individuals to be swept along with it are fearsome. Individuals resisting it are easily picked off. They urgently need defence and support.
Political and cultural leaders should denounce this agenda. They should show they won’t tolerate it in their own organisations and will stand against those that do. Such use of the bully pulpit would make refuseniks braver. Alas, though, politicians, clerics and company chairmen are either silent or falling meekly into line.
Demoralised by those who shout the loudest, they overlook the fact that millions are appalled by these developments and will flock to the banner of those who oppose them.
The fact that GB News has already demonstrated the success of fighting back is a much-needed shot in the arm. Now other leaders need to do the same.
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