The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter.

  They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough... The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

-Maureen Dowd

The movement has wound its way down through American history taking the form of narrow-minded intolerance. When something disturbs their settled views today, as always, Puritans try to stamp it out. If it means burning it at the stake, grab the matches.

-Harry Bulkeley

The left has always had a puritan streak, but what is fairly new is the extent to which it has abandoned libertarianism, leaving the right to take up the cudgels on behalf of free speech and other individual rights.

-Toby Young

Progressive Puritans...

  The Puritans divided humans into the saved and the damned, the saints and the sinners. The woke faith does the same, classifying people as either oppressors (white) or victims (nonwhite).

   The new faith’s adherents view themselves as the “elect,” redeemed, as it were, by a predestined grace. They are convinced they possess a higher truth, and are committed to imposing it on others.

   Like their Puritan forebears, the woke faith’s adherents believe that heretics — whose false doctrine imperils the larger community — must be rooted out. Dissenters must be humiliated, shunned and branded with Hester Prynne’s scarlet “A” of shame.

   Yet the new faith does offer a way for white Americans and other sinners to find salvation. To join the righteous, they must confess their sins — “check their privilege” — beg forgiveness, do penance and vow to become an “ally” of the oppressed.

   Today, a Puritan-inspired witch-hunt mentality is ablaze all around us, bent on destroying the reputations and livelihoods of those who show the slightest hesitation to profess true doctrine. “Bigot and hater” are the new “witch and wizard,” as commentator Mary Eberstadt has observed.

The left doesn't have buckles on their shoes but their minds are just as buckled down as their ancestors'. It's tough to know what the woke Puritans demand that we think because orthodoxy can change to heresy in a Tweet.

  Throughout the centuries their answer has always been the same - do what we say and keep your mouth shut.

-Harry Bulkeley