By George, The "Progressive" Means of Self-Aggrandizement Haven't Changed At All

I'm very fond of the following George Orwell quotation. Though it was written many decades ago, it remains cutting edge in its ability to skewer the progressive agenda and its use of political correctness to shut down the marketplace of ideas (so that the only ideas on offer there are its own):

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

• "The Freedom of the Press", unused preface to Animal Farm (1945), published in Times Literary Supplement (15 September 1972)

The same observations, more or less, are being made in today's FrontPage Magazine by Bruce Thornton (my bolds):

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the New York Times endorsed Hillary on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Having helped put an incompetent and malignant token black in the White House, the Times is now eager to install a token woman, no matter how lacking in skill and achievements. But still astonishing is the editors’ claim that Hillary is “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.” Such preposterous praise recalls the presidential historian who claimed that Obama is the most intelligent candidate for president ever––the same genius who thinks there is an “intercontinental railroad” and an “Austrian language.” As I’ve learned during 40 years of observing affirmative action in the university, when progressives are serving the gods of diversity and leftist ideology, reality doesn’t matter, and hectoring claims of achievement substitute for the real thing. Like a poem, the diversity “mascot,” as Thomas Sowell puts it, doesn’t have to do anything but exist.