IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post Discovers World War II-Era Survey, Cancels the Greatest Generation.

Fox News noted, however, that there seemed to be an ulterior motive in the presentation of this “uncensored” material. “Critics took to social media to blast The Post’s framing of the surveys, with some questioning the desire to view people in the 1940s through a 21st-century lens, and others suggesting that there was now an ongoing effort to cancel the grandparents of some Americans.” Nick Timothy, a columnist for the UK’s Telegraph, tweeted: “Next you’ll be telling me William Wilberforce wasn’t in the Parliamentary LGBTQ society, and Gandhi didn’t support Black Lives Matter. Historical figures lived with different social and moral norms. This is not news, or a novel academic discovery.”

Indeed. It is noteworthy also that the Post saw fit to highlight, out of 65,000 pages of surveys, racist and sexist remarks, rather than material that might have provided insight into the challenges that the men who won World War II faced and the difficulties they overcame. The Post’s article, and apparently the entire Virginia Tech project, if its focus is reflected accurately in the article, is akin to the pulling down of statues that has become a fad all over the country. The Left wants Americans to be ashamed of our history. Washington? Jefferson? Not statesmen, not men of courage, not key framers of the most successful republic and freest society the world has ever known, but just racist slaveowners, to be repudiated and abhorred, not respected or celebrated. Lincoln? He didn’t free the slaves; that’s the “white savior complex.” He, too, must be rejected as a racist, paternalist white supremacist. The Greatest Generation? Yes, they fought and won World War II and came home and made the United States the greatest power on earth, but you see, they did not hold woke attitudes.

In accordance with the prophesy:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As I’ve noted before, our elites are now promoting the kind of history one would impose on a conquered nation, to break its people’s spirit.

UPDATE (From Ed): As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”

The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.

What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.

And plenty of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” as well. “It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’”

(Updated and bumped.)

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Does this mean Antifa is officially racist now? Woke Journalists Compare Antifa Riots to D-Day Landings.