I'm having trouble, honestly, because of the source WND: http://go.wnd.com/aboutwnd/
No idea how much of what Haney is saying is true. Have seen how "facts" and statistics can be manipulated. Open to learning more, but don't plan to buy Haney's book.

They're a critically endangered species and it's only a matter of time before they become Extinct in the Wild (if they aren't already).

The questions raised are worth discussing regardless of source. (IMHO one of the problems is that "Political Correctness" has replaced Proper Manners - which were, at least in theory, a way of treating people, all people, with respect.)

As I read more about WND, began to think this is about religion. Bachman, etc. using "Sharia law" fears, to build on the need to "save" Christianity in the USA.

Think these people also believe the country is a "Christian" one, and that our Constitution is also based on "Christianity" - the fear of "Sharia law" is a huge part of what Haney is trying to emphasize, not just terrorism, but that the USA will be "taken over" by "Sharia Law." He really focuses on this at the end.

My feeling has always been that political correctness is grounded in the critiques of dominant social structures that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, whereby cultural theorists concluded that language has the ability to shape thought, and was used, in essence, to control behavior. Foucault, Said, Derrida, and many others all remark on this capacity, particularly when pondering questions of why the people submit to power and why revolutions/social movements fail to bring about lasting positive change.

In that sense, political correctness is deployed by "liberals" (I'm using that term very loosely here) in order to shape language and control behavior. Saying certain words or believing certain things becomes forbidden, and therefore you aren't supposed to do it, which was intended to help eliminate racism, sexism, etc. The problem, as you noted, is that it simply drove these beliefs underground. Being unable to discuss these ideas publicly in established (albeit offensive) terms meant that individuals could never learn from others or engage in the conversations that might prompt them to consider questioning their own beliefs. Racists, for example, congregated around other racists, developed a kind of linguistic shorthand and code words for their beliefs (ex: law and order) to avoid public shaming, and largely created their own social bubbles in which they could express their perceived sense of social "oppression" to one another.

As we saw during the primary, political correctness is now deployed as a weapon by the neoliberal state. Centered around identity politics, it silences unpopular opinions that threaten the status quo through shaming and can be deployed by anyone for any reason, regardless of whether or not there is truth to such claims, because we have all been taught that you never want to be called a racist, sexist, or xenophobe, so you should stop whatever you are doing and fall back into line if anyone ever accuses you of being one. I think that's more of what you're getting at in your essay. It's also worth noting that at this point, conservatives have learned to just ignore it altogether, hence Trump's continued insistence that the Democrats are attacking him for being a bigot when he's just telling the "truth." People have used political correctness to cry wolf so many times about every little thing that it has dulled any effectiveness that such critiques once had. Now that an actual racist, misogynistic xenophobe has appeared in the body politic and risen to the top of the Republican Party, it no longer works.

the sense of manners or attitudes that are considered outside the realm of acceptable public behavior, not because they are a nuisance or violate culturally arbitrary sexual morals, but because they represent a real threat to the social fabric, often through the explicit exclusion of one or another class of individuals who might as well be designated by dice roll as by whatever other irrelevant feature distinguishes them.

The term "Politically Correct" began as an in-joke amongst those on the left, partly self-mockery, partly other-mockery of the more rhetorically obsessive types -- see youtube for the scene from Life of Brian where the People's Front of Judea discuss Stan/Loretta's right to have a baby.

However, the re-engagement of the "far" left in politics and public discourse brought with it a disinclination to sit in a room where an elected official felt comfortable referring to her own constituents (or anyone else's) as niggers. Long before the coining of "mansplaining", women on the left made it clear that they were not willing to sit in a room where men made various and sundry derogatory and/or lewd remarks as part of official public deliberations, as if such remarks were indeed valid contributions to those deliberations. That is what lies at the core of "political correctness" -- an assertion that if you want to belong to the official, functional polity, you are damned fucking well going to treat your fellow citizens with basic respect, and you are going to use language that presumes implicitly that your fellow citizens are born your moral and ethical equals; and if you refuse to do so, you will be driven from the official, functional polity, because if the deliberations themselves are permitted to employ language that conceptually subjugates a class of citizen, then those deliberations will have a built-in bias towards enacting that subjugation as policy.

The bottom line being -- you had a bunch of men talking about the women as if the women weren't there, because for several hundred years of western culture the women hadn't been there. And you had a bunch of white people talking about not-white people as if the not-white people were another species, intellectually and morally and ethically inferior, and making decisions in the context of that rhetoric. And at a point beginning right around the election of Reagan, the women and the non-white people reached a level of participation that permitted them to say, You can't talk about us like that anymore.

Personally, I don't have a problem with that. Why the fuck should anyone be taken seriously, and given a seat at the grown-ups' table, if they explicitly and expressly employ language whose purpose is to subjugate particular classes of their fellow citizens? Demanding politeness on pain of exile is the milder remedy -- the more extreme, personally unpalatable, but in my mind entirely justifiable remedy when boldly and unashamedly confronted by someone who explicitly wants to subjugate you is to beat that person to death. If anyone disagrees, I would be interested to hear why, because as far as I'm concerned, if an individual is ruled to be outside of the social contract, that individual owes nothing -- not even the most basic consideration of humanity -- to those doing the ruling.

With all that said, I also believe that PC has "gone too far". I thought it was ludicrous that James Watt was driven out of office, not for being a religious kook dedicated to using up the earth before Jesus comes back, but for using the phrase, "a woman, a black, two Jews and a cripple." I believe it is extremely problematic when we allow our social sensibilities to overrule reality. It is a problem that we can talk about differences between the members of an advantaged category and the members of a disadvantaged category, only when the difference in question represents a "superiority" on the part of the disadvantaged category, or an advantage for the advantaged category, or a disadvantage for the disadvantaged category. Male privilege is real, but that doesn't mean there aren't tens of thousands of graves in kentucky and west virginia whose occupants' Y chromosome specifically privileged them to have their bodies literally broken and buried before reaching late middle age. I'm far more interested in what separates the 99% from the 1%, than in what separates 30% of the 99% from the other 69% of the 99%.
It is a problem when we allow our egalitarian ideals to banish from consideration and deliberation truths of biology. If I tell you that transgendered people are for the most part born that way, a result of a combination of genetics and the embryonic environment, you will probably agree with me, without rancor -- at least, if you're familiar with the science. On the other hand, if I tell you that really, really smart people are born that way; that most are recognizably smarter than other people by the time they are 2 years old, and that thus far we know of absolutely nothing that can bridge that gap -- that can take someone without the basic genetic/embryonic advantages of high intelligence and transform that person's cognition into something equivalent (or even comparable) to what goes on in the minds of really, really smart people; well, if I tell you that, what I'm most likely to get is an argument that the kind of intelligence I'm talking about doesn't really even exist, isn't as a concept even particularly meaningful, but to whatever extent it is meaningful it is malleable and not inherited. Regardless of such denial -- which is rooted in political correctness -- the truth of my assertion is almost trivially obvious to almost anyone who has ever had two or more children, and for that matter, to almost anyone who has ever interacted with anyone who is somewhere on the other end of that scale. It is also trivially obvious to almost all those who are themselves really, really smart, especially if they have either run into the wall of somebody else's cognitive limit, or indeed, the wall of their own cognitive limit.

Etc.

When you do say something about the poor cat, I hope you will include the real story!

SC is a thought experiment designed to show the absurdity of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the equations of Quantum Mechanics. The "either alive or dead" part is one way of interpreting the equations when there several possible outcomes but the actual outcome has not been measured. In the Copenhagen interpretation of the equations, neither outcome has actually happened, but they are both true simultaneously until someone observes them.

Shroedinger thought this was silly and asked what constituted an observer. Humans had of course been granted this status, and atoms had not, but what about something in between? Hence the cat.

There is a related thought experiment called Wigner's Friend, which asks whether a human observer can collapse their own alive-dead superposition. The rabbit hole is deep now, so I'll just finish by saying that there are a number of other competing Interpretations. Personally I prefer Transactional, but Many-Worlds is also popular.

(This has nothing to do with your essay, but I was reading a popular science magazine this morning that got it wrong and it was bugging me!)