The 21st Century is not turning out the way we were promised.

If you are a leftist, you see the re-emergence of white nationalism as evidence that Americans and "white people" are inherently racist.

If you aren't a leftist, you see that kind of thinking as racist and think "what happened?"

Of course, let's keep an open mind on how extensive the white supremacist problem is.  In the 1920s, the KKK was 4% of the population. Today if it is 100,000 strong, that is a fraction of 1%, although still a scary number.

Perhaps the way to end racism is to end racism on all sides?

Secularism works!

Europe boldly marches forward into the 17th Century.

//I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I have to tell you that freedom of speech no longer exists in Europe.

In almost every European country in 2015, there are individuals who are in prison or doing some kind of community service or paying off a fine simply for something that they said, simply for expressing themselves.

In Scotland, birthplace of so much of the Enlightenment, a man is currently in jail for the crime of singing an offensive song.

The man is a 24-year-old fan of the largely Protestant football team Rangers. And he was recently found guilty of singing a song called “The Billy Boys”, which is an anti-Catholic song that Rangers fans have been singing for years.

Under Scotland’s Orwellian Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, he was sentenced to four months in jail for songcrimes. We’ve had thoughtcrime and speechcrime — now we have songcrime.

In Sweden, which many view as the Mecca of liberalism, the happiest, fairest nation in Europe, a man was recently released from a six-month prison sentence for producing offensive art.

His name is Dan Parks. He’s a painter. He does paintings which he says are designed to challenge political correctness and to rattle the authorities. And they can certainly be described as offensive and racist works. For this, he was sent to jail for six months at the end of last year and his artworks were destroyed by the Swedish state.//

Balkanized culture with a hierarchy determined by victim status.

Identity politics has created an army of vicious narissists.

Some time during the last decade I went to sleep and woke up in CrazyUpsideDown World.

Brendan O'Neill observes:

//This brilliantly sums up the weird priorities of the modern media: "We want to hire an LGBT editor, and we're thinking about other beats such as economics" - Luke Lewis, Buzzfeed//

It's called Totalitarian Liberalism for a reason.

Libertarians raise the alarm about the creeping totalitarianism of tolerance.

//I hate to rain on this fabulous parade, but there’s a massive problem with this happy-clappy rallying cry. And it’s this: everywhere gay marriage has been introduced it has battered freedom, not boosted it. Debate has been chilled, dissenters harried, critics tear-gassed. Love and marriage might go together like horse and carriage, but freedom and gay marriage certainly do not. The double-thinking ‘freedom to marry’ has done more to power the elbow of the state than it has to expand the liberty of men and women.
There are awkward questions the ‘freedom to marry’ folks just can’t answer. Like: if gay marriage is a liberal cause, how come it’s been attended by authoritarianism wherever it’s been introduced?

Consider France. Hundreds of thousands of French people — or ‘bigots’, as the gay-marriage lobby brands anyone who disagrees with it — marched against the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013. And they were beaten and tear-gassed by riot cops. Parisians in t-shirts celebrating traditional marriage were arrested for holding ‘unauthorised protests’. In the words of Parisian writer John Laughland, critics of gay marriage were turned into ‘ideological enemies’ of the French state. It’s a funny expansion of freedom that so violently pummels the right to protest.

Consider America. The authorities there haven’t had to whip out their truncheons because non-state mobs have policed the opponents of gay marriage on their behalf. In the words of the author Damon Linker, a supporter of gay marriage, Americans who raise even a peep of criticism of gay marriage face ‘ostracism from public life’. We saw this with the medieval hounding of Brendan Eich out of his job at Mozilla after it was revealed that — oh, the humanity! — he isn’t a massive fan of gays getting married. Linker says the gay-marriage brigade has created a menacing climate, where the aim seems to be to ‘stamp out rival visions’. Americans who fail to bow at the altar of same-sex hitching, from wedding photographers to cake-makers, are harassed and boycotted and sometimes put out of business. The ‘freedom to marry’ clearly trumps the freedom of conscience.

Consider Britain. One of the first things gay campaigners here did when they won the right to marry was demand Catholic schools be forced to teach that gay marriage is as good as straight; even though they don’t believe this. Screw you, freedom of religion. Perhaps Catholic schools should bring back ‘priest holes’ to discuss their beliefs free from the watchful stare of the gay-marriage lobby, which, in Linker’s words, demands ‘psychological acceptance’ of gay marriage from all.

Why is this alleged freedom so feverishly embraced by politicians who can’t spell the word freedom? There’s David Cameron, demolisher of press freedom; French officials, so allergic to liberty that they won’t let Muslim women wear what they want; Obama, Christendom’s spymaster-in-general. What draws such freedom-fearing rulers to the ‘freedom to marry’? It’s simple: gay marriage has diddly-squat to do with freedom. Rather, this new institution, invented from pure cloth by tiny numbers of sharp-suited lawyers and agitators, is better seen as a Trojan horse for the enforcement of a new morality, one which calls into question the old virtues of lifelong commitment and familial sovereignty and replaces them with the flightiness and flexibility more commonly associated with gay relationships. ‘Gay marriage’ is the lick of paint modern society gives to its own discomfort with the traditional family set-up and its desire to dismantle, or at least dent, that set-up in favour of pushing new, post-traditional, state-defined hook-ups.//

Perhaps when voting is merely a symbol, everyone can vote about nothing.

Brendan O'Neill asks "Is Democracy Dying."

//The most curious thing about the era we live in is that the democratic franchise is expanding while the content of democracy is shrinking. So the right to vote is spreading while the issues we are asked to vote on are becoming narrower and narrower. In fact, we live in an era of frantic enfranchisement - the political class wants to give the vote to pretty much everyone. There’s a serious discussion going on in the Labour Party about whether to give the vote to 16-year-olds, which, to my mind, would utterly infantilise the democratic process. Of course, 16-year-olds had the vote in the Scottish referendum, which I think is a sign of things to come. Some want to give the vote to prisoners. Some Brussels bureaucrats are obsessed with giving the vote to prisoners. Some leftists also think it would be a great idea to let prisoners vote. These people really should brush up on the arguments of the Chartists, those great democrats, who recognised that allowing prisoners to vote would make a mockery of democracy.//

Gay marriage, the importance of elites and social conformity.

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked writes:

With gay marriage turned into ‘a kind of common sense’, opposing it became more difficult, potentially even threatening one’s social and moral standing. The ‘common sense’ of gay marriage has been turned into something like a dogma of gay marriage, in a very subtle way. So the very act of debating gay marriage has been implicitly demonised, since in the words of one observer, ‘The fact that there is a debate over whether to deny a group of people their civil rights is unacceptable’. Here, through further linking gay marriage to the old civil-rights movement, even discussion itself can be branded ‘unacceptable’.

Others say there should be no ‘acknowledgment of subtleties and cultural differences’ on gay marriage, since ‘there is a right answer’ on this issue. Those who insist on possessing ‘cultural differences’ on gay marriage – or even worse, opposing it – feel the fury of campaigners. A chicken restaurant in America was boycotted after its owner criticised gay marriage, while voters in American referendums who have said no to gay marriage have been called every name under the Sun by the respectable political and media classes: ‘ill-informed’, ‘deceived’, ‘plain ignorant’, ‘knuckle draggers’. This has the effect of beating down critical questioning. Gay marriage supporters actually boast of using moral pressure over political debate to win people’s acquiescence. Scientific American magazine recently discussed the apparently brilliant way that social media is being used to influence people’s ‘attitudes and behaviour’ on gay marriage. Everyone is ‘susceptible to the powers of peer pressure’, it said, so constantly saying favourable things about gay marriage on social-media websites can be a way of ‘send[ing] out a message about what’s acceptable, appropriate and… well, normal’. That is – never mind convincing someone with reason; just heavy-handedly let them know it’s normal to support gay marriage, and thus presumably abnormal to oppose it.

This is how conformism is forged and enforced today: elites devise an idea or campaign, far away from what one gay-marriage proponent calls ‘the tyranny of the majority’; that idea or campaign gets disingenuously depicted as something that protesters and campaigners demanded and actually put pressure on the elites to come up with; and through a process of debate-demonisation and pathologisation of dissent, through the treatment of acceptance as normal and criticism as abnormal, the idea or campaign is spread more widely through society. Eventually, in the words of Caldwell, even those who are unsure about gay marriage ‘quell their natural misgivings’. Indeed, when I interviewed the British pop star Dappy recently, and asked him if he supported gay marriage, he said: ‘I want to say no… but I get so much stick already. So say “yes”. Definitely say “yes”.’ How many other people are saying ‘yes’ not because they believe in gay marriage, but because they don’t want, in Caldwell’s words, to be thought of as ‘losers’ who have failed to ‘emulate their betters’?

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted ‘betters’ have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect. It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live. Through a combination of the weakness of belief in traditional marriage and the insidiousness of the campaign for gay marriage, we have ended up with something that reflects brilliantly John Stuart Mill’s description of how critical thinking can cave into the despotism of conformism, so that ‘peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of conformism] have no nature to follow’.