JAMES LILEKS FISKS A CONDESCENDING DALLAS MORNING NEWS COLUMN BY A YALE HISTORIAN ON HOW TO FIGHT FASCISM. It really isn’t a fair fight:

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.

Unless they are inconvenient facts that can be cast as irrelevancies, overshadowed by whatever fierce moral urgency now characterizes the issues. If one says “men cannot have babies, and do not menstruate” on Twitter you will set upon with great fury; what may seem to you to be factual, based on biology, is regarded by some as a misconstructed understanding of a larger issue, gender, which is not subject to the same set of empirical rules.

Many people who share your view will not defend you, because they do not want to be characterized as — phobes — another piece of linguistic violence, by the way; it turns a difference of opinion into a mental illness.

If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

Question: was the deconstruction of Western modes of thinking a project of leftist intellectuals, or conservative ones? Who thought that “truth” was a figleaf for entrenched, reactionary authority?

Would you like to make the argument that Derida et al were classical liberals?

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