America has become a land of institutional cowards. I don’t mean you, average joe, dragging your aching body out of bed in the morning, facing brutal traffic or dreadful weather, to get on with the job of keeping America running. That takes guts. I don’t mean you, our guardians against mayhem - military or first responders - defending the community. You put your lives on the line every day. I do mean the far too many leaders of our institutions and businesses who haven’t the courage to do what’s right. Cowards, these privileged leaders are.

Leading up to Christmas, corporate cowardice finally jumped the shark: Microsoft posted an icon of Santa’s fur fringed crimson hat in their visual studio. A single person complained - just one: Santa means religion he whined. Stop promoting Santa, stop promoting religion. Obsequious Microsoft complied. The icon vanished. It didn’t matter that fourth century Nicolas of Myra spent his life taking care of the poor and sick. It didn’t matter that honoring this great man’s humanity is always appropriate. It didn’t matter that the nation loves Santa. St. Nick must go. And go he did, banished from Microsoft – banished by corporate cowards.

This corporate kowtowing to complaint has become all too common. Even when submission profoundly violates their own corporate culture, expedience is the first resort of timid executives. Witness Chick-fil-A bowing to the complaints of LGBT mobs to cease supporting the Salvation Army. This is just one example of many.

Demonstrators protest the opening of a Chick fil A restaurant in Toronto

YouTube screen grab

Many corporations fear lawfare. Lawfare is the undeserved threat of a lawsuit. Lawfare is pure extortion. Pay up, obey us, or we will sue. This is a favorite tool of race hustlers. Corporate leaders, cowards that they often are, usually find it easier and cheaper to cave. That is why the tactic is so successful. Only on rare occasions will corporations fight and, not surprisingly, win.

Academia is not immune. The ivory tower is assaulted by savages invoking the heckler’s veto. No longer is there freedom of thought, freedom of speech, or even freedom of laughter in many ivied establishments. Worse, these vicious mobs are often allied with fifth column faculty members and administrators. The remaining still civilized academics wring their hands and look away. Nothing can be done, they must think.

Then there is the Church. The Congregation of the Faithful continues to be what it has been for two millennia. But the leadership has become corrupt and is hiding in cowardice. The focus has been on the Roman Catholic Church, but other denominations have suffered too, though not so well publicized. Certainly, this scandal has touched the lives of many. Boys of my parish were wounded by a predatory priest. Our cardinal simply transferred the scoundrel to a distant parish after his crimes became manifest.

We are finding that institutions and establishments at all levels of our society are riddled with craven potentates. This shameful behavior has created a virulent and dangerous sickness in response: cowardice breeds bullies.

Mature organizations are, by their nature, cautious, preservative, conservative. Their risk taking, fast growth, days have long since ended. Such established institutions naturally gravitate to the easiest solution to any problem. As we have seen, this leaves them vulnerable to bullying. The American Left discovered this institutional vulnerability during the tumultuous decade of the sixties with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, with civil rights marches, and with antiwar demonstrations. During the subsequent decades the Left, with growing practical experience, gradually developed this discovery into powerful new tactics intended to destabilize institutions and society as a whole.

Mob intimidation, such as was common in the sixties, is now used with greater sophistication. Mob bullying traditionally has been a male tactic, though women also use it nowadays. A life changing “attitude adjustment” will almost certainly be required to quench mob violence. I can envision exiling the miscreants to a distant Aleutian island for a time.

In the last few years we have experienced the reemergence of female political bullies – something common a century ago. Boys and girls really are different and the way they bully is different, as well. Girls bully passive-aggressively. They go after feelings. They act to shame their victims. The Left has discovered how to effectively employ this feminine tactic. In its most basic form it is political correctness. PC started on the left as a satire. It soon morphed into an enforceable injunction to avoid emotionally hurting people. Feelings must be protected at all cost.

Feelings are entirely a subjective phenomenon. The tactical genius of the Left has been to establish the pretense that feelings are objective and are therefore the responsibility of all. This is in accord with Marxist theory that society as a whole is responsible for individual behavior. This gives the left a potent weapon: nothing must be done to upset the feelings of an emotionally fragile individual. Microagressions are forbidden.

We now have something fundamentally new to politics: The victim has become the master. This is a complete inversion of normal affairs. We have arrived at the point where any disturbed individual can hold hostage the whole society.

We see this inversion in many different arenas. But it is most noticeable in the increasing ascendance of the effeminate LGBT community. LGBT is a very small fraction of society. Yet, with the sponsorship of the Left, a militant faction of that community has bullied its way into political and social dominance. That new oppressive dominance upends the stability of our society.

Recently, the very smallest subset of the LGBT community – the self-defined transgender people – have completely taken over parts of public policy. It is bizarre that men can compete in women’s athletics and reap all the awards. Yet now it is so, enforced in some places by law. It is bizarre that men must carry maternity insurance. It is bizarre that tampons must be available in men’s bathrooms. These are examples of the profound societal distortions that result from an attempt to protect the feelings of a tiny number of mentally disturbed individuals.

OK so what do we do with bullies? In the school yard the effective tactic for a boy is to beat the crap out of the bully. Girls are different, girls use social exclusion. They freeze a bully out. Unlike the Left we can’t use violence, so the boys’ solution is a non-starter. That doesn’t matter since the essence of political correctness is feminine in nature. The right tactic is to shame the bullies into oblivion.

That is already happening. We have chosen a president who laughs at the silliness of the Left and its social inversions. Trump shows the way. He long ago learned that bullies are also cowards. Continuing down his path will soon enough upend topsy-turvy political correctness: Resist with laughter. Resist with the truth. Be patient, the tide has already turned. Keep in mind that when things get really bad people get fed up. When people are sufficiently fed up they change things for the better. That’s called democracy.