ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Recent news proves beyond any doubt that most of our nation’s leaders have lost any ability to think clearly and consistently. It also exposes the Big Lie — the fact that members of the elite class really never believed any of their previous posturing about human rights, personal freedom and the dignity of every human being. Their call for diversity and inclusion was simply sleight-of-hand.

It’s now quite obvious that their chants for equality and justice, for openness and tolerance, and their claims of being the party of “every man” and the champions of the Great Society, were clearly nothing but a ruse. With every news cycle it appears that those so proud of their progressive wisdom never really meant any of this and, even more telling: It is increasingly clear that they don’t even care that we know it.

Consider just a few headlines:

Rep. Maxine Waters persists in encouraging politically liberal restaurant owners to refuse to provide service and food to conservative patrons while at the same time the entire leadership of Ms. Waters’ party doubles down on its demands that all conservatives should be required, by law, to provide food and service (i.e. bake a cake) for any non-conservative who aligns himself with Ms. Waters’ politics and party.

On MSNBC, Candace Owens, a conservative black woman, is lectured about “tone” by Michael Eric Dyson, a liberal black man, who then calls Ms. Owens a “little girl.” One has to wonder if Mr. Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown University, will next be modeling his exemplary “tone” by calling black men who disagree with him “boys.”

In California, the land that legislates “tolerance” as its highest good, an advertising company is forced — under “serious threat” — to remove numerous billboards from across the entire Los Angeles area because the billboards showed evangelist and pastor Greg Laurie holding a black book presumed to be a Bible. This threat was all done by those who proudly wave their banners and placards of “love trumps hate,” “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “tolerance.”

At the University of Virginia and Harvard University, places many consider to be our cultural bastions of open inquiry, robust debate and the free exchange of ideas, faculty resigned recently and thousands of students protested to exclude from campus those with whom they disagreed. Academic freedom, it now seems, should be “free” of any ideas coming from those with different political, social and religious views. Acceptable ideas, we are told, are now the purview of those who decide what’s acceptable.

Meanwhile, as The Washington Post and the International Monetary Fund report, Venezuela’s inflation rate will top 1 million percent (yes, 1 million percent), as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez champion socialism and government largesse as the solution to all that ails us.

Not to be outdone in the race to prove Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and the Prophet Isaiah right, failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis said last week she supports abortion — i.e. the killing of small children — because her Harvard Law School education taught her “empathy and understanding.” One might wonder what millions of dead boys and girls butchered at the hands of the industry Ms. Davis supports think of her definition of “empathy and understanding.”

Archbishop Charles Chaput once said, “Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, and then it seeks to silence good.”

Dorothy L. Sayers added, “In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair…the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, summed it up: “It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”

It becomes more apparent in each day’s news that the left’s plea for “tolerance” was never serious. How could it become such a shrill cry of intolerance almost overnight if they actually ever meant it? When someone shows his or her impatience with other people who aren’t as progressive as them and when they flaunt their arrogance and condescension for all ideas other than their own, they are proving the “inadequacy of their education.”

They may have gone to Harvard Law School or they may work at the University of Virginia, but that education clearly did not “breed much humility.” They think they know some things, but do they know anything that really matters? Over and over their double-speak shows they have information but no ethics, knowledge but no morality, technology but no truth. Satiated with facts, they have no faith — except in themselves. They are the final measure. They are the gods. They need not be tolerant of anyone who doesn’t worship them.

Welcome to utopia. It’s 1984 and all will be “free,” they tell us — as long as we are ready to give up our freedom.

• Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is the author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).