...Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” calls for some astonishingly autocratic policies. It would establish a federal Department of Anti-racism with veto power over any local, state, or federal policies considered racially inequitable by its bureaucrats.... It would also “investigate private racist policies” and “monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas … empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”
...Their very language of group conflict and oppression is of course taken directly from Marxism. And there is a harsh intemperance and lack of proportionality in the behavior of today’s social-justice warriors.... There is a growing fanaticism in which gray arguments and toleration for opposing points of view disappear.
If politics is the methodical organization of resentments, identity politics runs on the methodical organization of rage....
There is a soaring tendency to personalize disagreements. Protesters now regularly descend on the homes of people they disagree with. They hound them in restaurants....
Character assassination and purges — also hallmarks of a totalitarian temptation — are on the rise....
Intellectual standardization of the mass media is another hint of totalist currents....
...Orwell described how totalitarian movements dictate what ideas and language will be deemed socially acceptable. He referred to this as groupthink. Ideological movements feel deeply threatened by mavericks who violate their groupthink, and so persecute them....
Another indicator of the totalitarian temptations within today’s identity politics is the surging reality of violence....
A generation ago, “Power and Purity” author Mark Mitchell has noted, many people “were wringing their hands over the ‘moral relativism’ of the young. Today, moral relativism is not the problem. ... If you listen to the rhetoric of the social-justice warriors, you hear not the easygoing platitudes of the relativist but the hard-edged assertions of the absolutist....