Political Correctness: Tyranny With Manners

When did being polite become mandatory, and being honest become offensive?

Politeness isn’t the problem. Forced conformity is.

Somewhere along the line, "political correctness" stopped being about decency and started becoming a straightjacket.

What began, allegedly, as a push to avoid needlessly hurting people's feelings has morphed into a rigid, self-policing culture where saying the wrong thing (even if it's true) can get you fired, banned, or publicly flayed by a digital mob armed with hashtags and zero sense of irony.

Here's the kicker; this isn't a new idea. The term "politically correct" didn't come out of California in the '90s with granola and safe spaces. It's got much older, more totalitarian roots.

It was used sarcastically among communists in early 20th-century Russia to describe someone who toed the party line regardless of truth or nuance. Nazi Germany had their own flavor of it too where ideological conformity wasn't just encouraged, it was expected, and any deviation was dangerous. Tyranny with manners. Smile while you goose-step, or else.

Today's version is cleaner, digital, and soaked in moral righteousness. But the pressure is the same: Don't question the mob. Don't ask annoying questions. Definitely don't make a joke. If someone says they're offended, you're already guilty no matter how anodyne or innocuous the joke to the majority.

Now don't twist this; I'm not advocating for being a jackass for sport. I don't think people should go around slinging slurs or being deliberately cruel. But there's a wide canyon between "being kind" and "walking on eggshells while reciting the latest approved lexicon." And we've fallen right into that canyon.

The worst part? This neutering of language isn't creating a safer or better society. It's creating a dishonest one. One where we're so busy pretending not to offend that we never actually talk about anything meaningful. Where comedians are scared to tell jokes. Where regular people feel like they need a PR department just to post online. Where kids are raised to believe that discomfort is violence.

And worst of all? Being offended has become currency!  It's weaponized virtue signaling used to cash in on someone else at the cost of their job, livelihood, reputation, future or even agency. It's not about resolution anymore and it's not about fixing anything. It's about power. About control. About outrage theater. About public floggings dressed up as progress. It's about racking up moral points while torching the people who didn't read the rulebook fast enough.

Newsflash: It's not progress.

Discomfort is where growth happens. It's where ideas clash, bad ones die, and better ones are born. When you suppress that in the name of some sanitized, conflict-free fantasy world, you don't build a better society... you build a brittle one.

And brittle things break.