The instruction manual of today’s academia.

The new dark age of silencing: The news outlet The College Fix today released a new database it calls the Campus Cancel Culture Database, listing all the stories that it has covered in the past decade of blacklisting and censorship on college campuses.

To see the complete list, go here. They plan to update it regularly. As Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix writes,

At some point, I lost count of how many incidents [of blacklisting] we’ve documented. Earlier this year, however, we began to compile them systematically — and today The College Fix releases the Campus Cancel Culture Database. The detailed repository of information lists more than 650 successful cancellations. They include everything from statues hauled off campuses to renamed buildings to memory-holed mascots. The database also cites more than 750 attempted cancellations.

We define cancel culture as any effort by people or groups to identify someone or something as offensive or unacceptable and seek in some way to censor or punish the transgressor or item.

It includes professors who have been suspended or lost their jobs for saying or researching something unpopular, student groups attacked or barred for their conservative, pro-life or libertarian views, and guest speakers shouted down or disinvited.

Overall, the database documents the terrible state of academic thought in the United States. Across the country college administrators, teachers, and students have teamed up to silence any ideas or opinions they do not like, with the bulk of the attacks going against conservatives and the traditions and concepts of western civilization. Not only have people been fired and blackballed, even discussing openly the history of our nation has become verboten. You must either condemn the American dream as racist white supremacy, or you must shut up.

This list makes a much more complete supplement to the full list of my own blacklist columns. Though I have been covering the intolerance in all fields, I have only been doing it now regularly for about nine months. The College Fix database might focus only on academia, but the list covers a decade of oppression. The two are thus complementary, with one group of hate-mongers feeding the other.

On the database’s introductory page is a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 that best describes this intolerant cancel culture:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

When Orwell wrote the book in the late 1940s it was meant as a warning against oppression. The goal of the power-hungry is to keep everyone ignorant, so that everyone becomes dependent on their edicts. Orwell wanted the public to understand this, so that it could counter that effort towards censorship and silencing.

In America today, academia and the left instead use Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual. They now agree with the dictators in that novel, and wish to destroy all knowledge, except the information they dole out. And sadly, Americans today seem accepting of this effort, and too often actually work to help it along.

And even if we wish to oppose it, we are trapped by incompetent and treacherous politicians on both the local and national levels, many of whom claim to want to defend freedom and the American heritage, but do nothing to cut the funding of the very universities they finance that are at the forefront of this anti-American blacklist culture.

The political class, especially on the right, has been entirely useless. What good have they done to stem this tide of oppression? Nothing. At best they are mere quislings, cowards too afraid to stand up for what they believe in. At worst, they are dishonest traitors working to stab ordinary free Americans in the back.

Either way, America is dying. It will take a brutal effort, with much pain, to get us back from the brink of totalitarianism. Whether today’s freedom-loving Americans are willing to accept the pain necessary to fix things however remains a very open question.