Taking On Political Correctness 101

In her new book, journalist/teacher/flamethrower Meghan Daum declares war on the thought police.

- Nina Burleigh

Believe it or not: some academics and writers, who wouldn’t be caught dead in Donald Trump’s MAGA hats, have started complaining about language policing and other forms of intellectual bullying on the left. So says Meghan Daum in her new book, The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, which will be published this month by Gallery Books.

Daum, 49, an author, journalist and sometimes teacher at Columbia University, has a deep distrust of dogma. Since 2016, she writes, she has distracted herself from her personal woes—divorce, the upheavals of middle age—by clicking onto social media. That’s where she witnessed angry lefties swarm individuals who expressed opinions that deviated from a rigid set of rules related to @ninaburleigh how we talk about race and gender.

She watched with growing fascination as the Trump election, a profound challenge to progressive ideals, did not bring the opposition together, but splintered it, with the movement eating its own. “Almost immediately, the resistance became not just a front line against Trumpism but its own scorching battleground,” she writes. “There was no amount of outrage that couldn’t be outdone, no wokeness woke enough. Apparently any admission of complexity was a threat to the cause. Nuance was a luxury we could no longer afford.”