Culture > Political Correctness

Time to Sweep 'Political Correctness' into the Dustbin of History

Leftists need to learn to take a joke.

J.B. Shurk | March 17, 2026

If you are old enough to remember America clearly from the 1990s forward, then you witnessed the transformation of “political correctness” in real time.

Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in ’91, Americans spoke of “political correctness” as a communist disease.  It was something that existed in those unfree countries stuck behind the Iron Curtain.  It was a way to differentiate the West’s “truths” from the Soviets’ state propaganda.  We knew about the secretly produced samizdat that was passed around in underground communities in Soviet-controlled Europe.  We knew that East German teenagers were listening to anti-communist messages on Radio Free Europe.  Some of us knew Russian émigrés whose sardonic sense of humor often took biting aim at what was “true” and what was “officially true” in the Soviet Union.  In other words, there was what people living behind the Iron Curtain knew to be correct, and there was what those people said out loud to avoid being arrested, thrown in prison, or even shot.  That was how Americans first learned about “political correctness.”

For most of the ’90s and early into the aughts, Americans referred jeeringly to “political correctness.”  Before someone told a bawdy or racist joke (or any kind of joke that played on stereotypes, more generally), it was fairly common to hear the speaker start with, “This isn’t ‘politically correct,’ but...”  It was another version of the, “Not safe for work,” warning that people get before opening up links in emails when those links might bring loud and visually inappropriate videos onto a computer screen.  Television sitcom characters even referenced “political correctness” when saying something provocative.  In the same way that Soviet citizens darkly mocked state-imposed “truths,” Americans mocked society’s unofficial “speech police” who had a way of popping up in neighborhood associations, PTA meetings, and backyard barbecues to inform gatherers when discussion of a subject had crossed some invisible line into “sensitive territory.”  This was before........

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