by Michael Rectenwald
Mises.org
Signs of incipient totalitarianism impulses have been evident since the rise of political correctness.1 Yet, warnings from those who saw the character of contemporary “social justice” went largely unheeded. Nevertheless, even before degenerating into “wokeness,” social justice bore the seeds of civilizational decline and the simultaneous rise of social and political tyranny. The weaponization of mostly feigned fragility by snowflake totalitarians has been marshaled to abrogate the rights of those deemed offensive, injurious, and even “dangerous.” It also has evinced “paralogistic discourse,” or “[d]iscourse that is out of touch with reality, involving illogical, fallacious, unwarranted premises and conclusions.”2 Such thinking is characteristic of societal hysteria.3 This weaponization escalated, germinating “cancel culture,” the buds from which neo-Stalinist purges have since blossomed.