The New York Times Chronicle website is kind of glitchy, but on the rare occasions when it works it allows you to chart historical trends in elite obsessions by plotting the percentage of Times articles including a particular word.

Obviously, we are currently in a 1692-in-Salem peak mania over racist and sexist witches working their evil spells.

But it’s interesting that the previous climax for witch-hunting obsession over “racism,” “racist,” “sexism,” and “sexist” was the first half of the 1990s.

I remember the 1990s pretty well. 1992 was designated the Year of the Woman in politics in order to elect a Democrat after the immense Clarence Thomas sexual harassment brouhaha of 1991. Eventually, it dawned on the media that they had conspired to elect the Sexual Harasser in Chief, Bill Clinton, and they kind of shut up about feminism for a while out of embarrassment. But then the Obama re-election campaign chose to revive feminist misanthropy in 2012 (the opportunist decision that I suspect, deep down, Obama feels most guilty about).

Obama was always going to be racist about blacks and Muslims and mixed race people, because that’s whose side he’s on. But there’s zero evidence that he’s a true believer in feminism. He can just look at Mrs. Obama. He knows he’s causing unhappiness in people’s intimate lives by promoting feminist BS.

The previous peak media obsession over racism in the first half of the 1990s was probably due to peak bad behavior by blacks during the Crack Wars. The more blacks shoot each other and burn down their own neighborhoods in riots, the more the New York Times admonishes whites over their racism.

The other aspect of the early 1990s craziness was academic: the leftist long march through the institutions of the 1960s had almost wholly triumphed by the early 1990s. On the other hand, at that point journalists still were less amenable to postmodern theory.

By now, however, we have a whole generation of journalists educated in these colleges who are totally clueless about past reality.

Interestingly, the brightest postmodernist, Slavoj Zizek, is slowly turning against the current orthodoxy.