The prolific Michael Walsh  has just released a book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, in which he sheds light on the background of political correctness, which I imagine most of our readers find as offensive as I do.  He traces, to the Frankfurt School (an outgrowth of Karl Marx's works), speech codes and other efforts – which defy reason and foreclose dissent to the leftist cultural monopoly – to compel concurrence with things "our culture used to recognize as antithetical to a moral society." 

Walsh explains that the leftists' work was "grounded on an ideology that demanded ... for philosophical reasons, an unremitting assault on Western values and institutions, including Christianity, the family, conventional sexual morality, nationalistic patriotism, and adherence in general to any institution or set of beliefs that blocked the path of revolution."  In his words, the Frankfurt School "hated the old narrative of a confident, muscular Christian West."  In its place, they created what he calls "the anti-Narrative," which makes us begin to question our own history.

With Hitler's rise to power and World War II, the Frankfurt School leaders went into exile here and found a home in American universities, particularly Columbia University.

The Free Beacon reviews the book at some length. 

Highlighting Herbert Marcuse, one of the leaders, Walsh pinpoints why the left turns reason upside-down and assumes a cloak of moral superiority to its detractors in order to deny those who take a different view all the civil rights the Constitution guarantees:

With his typical double-speak, for example, Marcuse argued in  A Critique of Pure Tolerance that true tolerance requires intolerance. While “no government can be expected to foster its own subversion,” Marcuse writes, “a subversive majority” could topple a democracy with “apparently undemocratic means”:

"They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion…Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."

Putting this in straight talk, Marcuse advocated freedom for me but not for thee.  And there can be no doubt that on college campuses, in government, and in the media, we find reflections of this view.

The book would doubtless be a valuable aid when dealing with alumni groups begging for money, college sophomores home for the holidays, and those of your neighbors who still swear by the New York Times.