The atheist commentator Pat Condell, in the video posted above, has laid into the culture of un-free speech currently dominating British universities. He railed at the progressive puritan bigots who demand that none of their leftist nostrums are challenged, even by facts and evidence.

Mr Condell described modern British universities as no longer being places where a person is educated and taught to think, but places where the only thing that goes on is a form of ‘valet parking of the mind’. He criticised the culture of ‘safe spaces’ in universities which as we alll know only applies to those with approved opinions whereas those who believe in greater democracy in Europe, or who put the case for Israel or which challenge progressive left-wingery are considered as legitimate targets to be silenced, harassed or ‘no platformed’.

He’s right, in little more than fifty years, our universities in the hands of the Left have gone from places where people went to have their minds opened to places where students are lobotomised and propagandised. This is something that we should be deeply ashamed of, and a situation and culture that urgently needs to be changed.

However, it needs to be said that it is not just in our once grand seats of learning that this sort of intellectual authoritarianism has taken hold, it’s everywhere and in almost any institution that you can name.

If you work for the public sector and hold socially conservative views based on Christian or Jewish teaching then you may find that your career prospects are either truncated or destroyed. If you pick up a newspaper or watch broadcast news, then you will find that both progressive Lefitsm and its handmaiden, the mob of the emotionally incontinent and permanently offended have made journalists and newspaper proprietors nervous and timid. Libraries have in some areas purged their shelves of books that may offend the thin skinned or those who kick off violently whenever their ideology is challenged.

Even religions (apart from the one associated with beards, rape and murder of course) are not safe from the reach of the Politically Correct destroyers of free speech. If you are sceptical about the idea that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’, and you are attend a Methodist, Baptist or Anglican church or you are a member of a Reform or Liberal Synagogue, then you will most likely find yourself, because of your views ‘no platformed’ at lighting speed. You will find yourself made into an outcast by what could reasonably be described as ‘idiots in dog collars’. The stupid and foolish desire by some Christians and Jews for a form of ‘entente cordiale’ with the very ideology that wishes to wipe them out, has pushed self-preservation, intellectual and theological honesty and indeed common sense under the bus.

Political Correctness, started out as a laudable desire to be fair to those who in the past may well have been treated like dirt by mainstream society, but it has metastazised into a grotesque and self-replicating ideology that driven out so much that was good. It has driven out intellectual curiousity, honesty, open debate, and evidence based thinking and has replaced these virtues with a culture of fear of speaking up and much worse a fear of speaking the truth, when the truth makes those who follow political correctness feel ‘uncomfortable’, or ‘offended’.

Pat Condell is right about the disaster that political correctness has wrought on our universities, but it should never be forgotten that this damnable ideology has not just afflicted our institutions of higher and further education, but has spread its tentacles into so many other areas as well.

British institutions have morphed into nations of lies and in this nation of lies, the man or woman who tells the truth is considered as a traitor to be hounded, excluded and demonised. If humanity is to grow then we need to purge the false deity of political correctness from our adminstrative systems, our religions and our institutions. A culture built on lies, such as political correctness is, cannot build, it can only destroy and degrade.

Link

More from Pat Condell

http://patcondell.com/