Conservatives Must Read Marx
amgreatness.com | Feb. 13, 2021 | Mark Bauerlein

The debates are over now. The Woke brigades won’t battle your ideas. They follow the motto of that brilliant manager of men, Joseph Stalin, who reasoned quite soundly: “No man, no problem.”

The marketplace of ideas offends them—you offend them. Now, they have the power of termination. While conservatives wrote bestsellers such as The Closing of the American Mind and trounced leftist spokesmen on the cable news shows, thousands of progressives and identity politicians were claiming space in university administrations, human resources in corporate America, school boards and city councils, editorial offices, and Silicon Valley, law schools and museums and libraries, not to mention the many activist organizations that have our most distinguished liberal institutions cowed.

From those posts, usually out of the public eye, they exert their power against you. It’s economic, not cultural. When Tucker Carlson defended Trump’s Wall, his antagonists didn’t collect evidence against his words. No, they threatened his advertisers with boycotts. When Jordan Peterson refused an Ontario law mandating pronoun usage, his critics didn’t mount arguments against him. They demanded the University of Toronto fire him. Money, jobs, resources, access—that’s the target now. Academia requires that all job candidates compose a “diversity statement,” essentially a loyalty oath that imposes leftist ideology onto the hiring process. An honest conservative doesn’t survive, and that’s the point.

This was the long march through the institutions, and it’s done. An open contest of ideas needn’t happen, not when leftists control the pipelines. Why risk it when they already have the power? They are so much better at personnel than you are. They don’t have to justify what they do if everyone in the room agrees with them. No conservatives, no problem. If they deprive you of jobs, they annul your ideas. If they reject your manuscripts and cancel your TV shows and keep you out of the teaching ranks, the rising generation and mass of citizens barely know you exist.