Since the concept of political correctness became well-known in the late 1980s, it’s typically been thought of as a left-wing phenomenon, but some liberals claim that conservatives have their own version of it. In a Thursday Salon article, Steve Almond alleged that right-wing PC is “a relentless blaring Persecution Complex” which manifests as “a mindset that reframes its paranoid aggressions as legitimate and necessary forms of self-defense.”
“The conservative PC movement is what allows gun-toting madmen to see themselves as religious martyrs when they gun down human beings whose ‘crime’ is that they provide reproductive health services to poor women,” declared Almond. “At its extreme, it’s what prompts men like Timothy McVeigh to perpetrate acts of mass murder in response to the ‘tyranny’ of the U.S. Government.”
For Almond, a milder flareup of right-wing PC is the “manufactured controversy” about Facebook’s political bias: “It is the Orwellian raison d’etre of the conservative PC movement to obscure [the] distinction [between] the evidential and sourced reporting of newspapers such as The New York Times and…the partisan hackery of the Daily Caller. Think of it as moral relativism, Karl Rove style.”
Almond recommended that Facebook seize the occasion to announce that it won’t run items such as “fever dreams about Benghazi” or “phony disputes about global climate change.” For what it’s worth, he dismisses the conservative movement as a “fancy brand name created by the for-profit conservative media to describe the corporate-sponsored manipulation of economically aggrieved white citizens.”
Almond may be best known for his 2014 book in which he discussed being a former NFL fan who’d come to believe that football “fosters…a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia.”
