The End Of The Enlightenment?

Woke progressives and Critical Race Theory proponents reject the idea of tolerance expressed by George Washington in his 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.

"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."

In the late 18th century, President Washington's view of tolerance as not something bestowed by a dominant group, or individual, the kind of tolerance easily revocable upon the discretion of the dominant group or individual, but rather as something we owed to each other as equals, was distinctly American.  Bestowed "tolerance" was the concept used in the rest of the world, and is still the governing concept in many countries today.  In other "tolerant" societies of the time, the Jewish Community would be considered supplicants; in Washington's they were equals.

The social justice left and the white nationalist right are just different sides of the same coin - both view race (and in some instances gender) as the sole defining aspect of society - their only difference being who ends up on top at the end.  To accomplish this they must be the sole dispensers of tolerance.  Their vision takes us down the road to an authoritarian world, with them as the dictators of tolerance.  Listen to them very carefully, when they use the word tolerance or concepts that sound similar because what they really mean is the willingness to be tolerant of only that of which they approve.

[UPDATE] After posting this I came across a video by two comedians which says the same thing in a more entertaining way.


In a society of more than 300 million people with different backgrounds, education, aspirations, skills, desires, and ideas the only way to operate a country based on those ideas to is forcibly squash dissent.

As President Calvin Coolidge noted in his July 4, 1926 address on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, commenting on the truths of its preamble:  

If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

The current moment poses a great risk to America.  We see the streets, much of our public discourse, and many institutions now under the sway of reactionaries who would take us backwards, to the days before the Enlightenment, to an era where each group has a pre-ordained and set role in a well-established hierarchy, with each group pitted against each other in order to allow the rulers to maintain control.  A world devoid of a sense of common humanity, designed to thwart the ability of people to cooperate and work together at their own initiative without the prior approval of their rulers, with an intimidated citizenry living in fear they might say the wrong thing and branded as heretics.