The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Opinion

Best of Right Opinion

• Jonah Goldberg: Criticism of Michelle Wolf, Kanye West Shows Our Coalition Instinct
• Walter Williams: Colleges: Anti-Diversity and Pro-Exclusion
• Terence Jeffrey: Liberate America From Public Schools
• Tony Perkins: May Day for Planned Parenthood
• Michelle Malkin: The ‘Uncle Tom’ Card Is Dead

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Jonah Goldberg: “Last year, John Tooby, a founder of evolutionary psychology, was asked by the website Edge.org what scientific concept should be more widely known. He argued for something called the ‘coalition instinct.’ In our natural environment, humans form coalitions. Coalitions are slightly different from tribes, families or nations in that those are all groups we are involuntarily born into. Coalitions are the teams we join. ‘Coalitions,’ Tooby explained, ‘are sets of individuals interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity.’ The coalition instinct is a bundle of ‘programs’ that ‘enable us and induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from, factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose and attack coalitions.’ … Because coalitions are formed to protect the interests of their members, we have a remarkable ability to forgive behavior when it is done by our teammates and condemn similar behavior when it is done by members of a rival coalition. ‘This,’ Tooby said, ‘is why group beliefs are free to be so weird.’ … Some on the Left now denounce free speech solely because it is a threat to their power. Many Trump supporters wave off his rhetorical grotesqueries because ‘he fights!’ Rather than simple blindness to our hypocritical violations of standards, we’re declaring war on the standards themselves. If this trend continues, we may get less hypocrisy and more open war between coalitions.”