During the past decade, and especially this year, those in positions of influence have tried to change the narrative through which society understands itself.

There is an insidious crusade afoot aiming at controlling what the public sees, hears, thinks and believes. This project, which seeks hegemony in various Western cultures, is no less pervasive and thoroughgoing than previous attempts at thought control by totalitarian and theocratic regimes. But since this campaign to control the narrative has no name, and does not promote an explicit ideology, its significance tends to be underestimated, even by those who oppose the many attempts to police language and thought.

A new identity-obsessed, anti-humanist and anti-civilisational narrative has taken hold. We are increasingly encouraged to change our language, adopt hitherto unknown words, and accept deeply questionable claims. This campaign has been so successful because its opponents have failed to grasp its significance. Typically, the demands of extreme identitarians are dismissed as either of no significance or as a joke. Take one example that emerged last week.

A group of 16 scientists – from such prestigious universities as Cambridge and Oxford – wrote a letter to the journal Nature denouncing its use of the term ‘quantum supremacy’. This was on the grounds that it conveys racist and colonialist ideas. They said that, in their view, ‘supremacy’ has ‘overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with “white supremacy”’, and demanded that the term be replaced by ‘quantum advantage’.

It is of course tempting to dismiss this as a silly gesture by self-important scientists with too much time on their hands. And that is precisely how many people responded to this ludicrous letter. But its authors are not alone in thinking as they do. In August, a team at the Human Interface Technology lab in New Zealand asserted that it was problematic that most robots were manufactured out of white plastic, since it smacked of imperialism and white supremacy.

Here we can see how white supremacy has been redefined, turned from a distinct and vicious political ideology into a kind of original sin possessed by all those born with light skin. This is ridiculous, of course, but the impact of this nonsense is no joke. This redefined notion of white supremacy is now an integral feature of a certain cultural narrative, one that is designed not only to pathologise white people, but also to discredit some of the important legacies of human civilisation.

In the United States, there is a growing industry of consultants who advise organisations about how to rid themselves of their supposed ‘white-supremacy culture’. According to these zealots, some of the attitudes and behaviours associated with white-supremacy culture include ‘individualism’, ‘a sense of urgency’ and ‘perfectionism’. In other words, those who take their work too seriously may be tainted by white supremacy. Thinking logically is basically thinking white.

The transformation of white supremacy into an all-purpose term of abuse, and the rapid acceptance of this by the private and public sectors, is a remarkable development. And it has been forged out of the policing of speech, culture and thought. Increasingly, the project of controlling the narrative is directed towards regulating what you can watch, hear, read and think. And this doesn’t just revolve around issues of race.

In some instances, the policing of culture can rely on the police themselves. Earlier this year, Harry Miller, a docker from Humberside, was contacted by the police after he retweeted a trans-sceptical limerick on Twitter. The officer informed him that ‘we need to check your thinking’. Though Miller was informed that he had not committed a crime, he was told that his retweet would be recorded as a ‘hate incident’ and his social-media account would be monitored. Thought has literally become a police matter.

The task of controlling the narrative is by no means monopolised by the police, of course. The new narratives are mediated through a variety of institutions and gatekeepers. ‘Sensitivity readers’ are now employed by publishing houses and other institutions to ensure that the language used by authors does not violate the norms and values of the cultural elites. In a different world, these sensitivity readers would have been called censors. But in an era when the new narrative is characteristically opaque and euphemistic, the term censor is replaced by that of sensitivity reader.