Leftism is a discipline of doublethink, and nowhere is that more apparent than its approach to morality.  Moral relativism is the name of the game, until the ethic in question imperils the fragile architecture of the left's inconsistent and collective mind.  For many of the academicians at the American Historical Association, intellectual honesty and discourse make you the chief among sinners.

Six days ago, James H. Sweet, president of the AHA, published a written piece in the association's editorial titled "Is History History?" — and the ensuing fallout was described by one journalist as suicide.

In the column, Sweet expounded upon his initial question and detailed his analysis that politics and personal ideologies are now lenses through which the historical discipline is viewed, particularly when it comes to the 1619 Project.  According to Sweet, with a diminishing number of historians studying the premodern era, they often develop the belief that the only history that "matters" is that which is read "through the prism of contemporary social justice issues[.]"  His assessment provided the reader with a  logical and thought-provoking perspective in support of his claim, and the Marxist mob became unhinged.

Under a Twitter thread started by Cate Denial, a female professor at Knox College, leftist activist historians "flood[ed]" social media "with profanity-laced attacks on Sweet's race and gender as well as calls for his resignation," while Denial urged her colleagues to badger the AHA Executive Board in pursuit of cancel culture consequences.

Unironically, none of Sweet's critics was able to offer an intellectual rebuttal to his claims — the attacks were purely ad hominem.  That's not surprising, though, because the 1619 Project is explicitly a "journalistic" endeavor.  Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, even publicly recognized the nature of the project's content to "shield it from scholarly criticism by historians."  Objectivists (as historians ought to be) can't attack her work if she acknowledges it's not meant to be history.

Without fail, simple truth elicits vitriolic and illogical responses from leftists — the behavior of Denial and her kind shored up beliefs that academia is filled with hardened fascists.  Free speech and the marketplace of discourse cannot be tolerated, and dissidents must be beaten down — at the moment figuratively, but if we've learned anything from real history (perhaps Germany in the 1930s), we know it doesn't stop there.

I wonder how many of these academicians once designated President Trump as the fascist.

Image: Baptiste ROUSSEL, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized for compatibility)