The latest example of the crazy politically correct orthodoxy rampaging through the West—this time involving a child in America as the main perpetrator—is the topic of Theodore Dalrymple’s Quadrant piece.

Even if we were to learn that the story were fake news, it would bring us little comfort because it was plausible enough for us to have believed it. There is little doubt that children, even the most privileged, are being bred up to easy moral outrage about complex and difficult social matters before they can even think, which is why, perhaps, a child of nine or ten can spell correctly the word offensive but not write (or we are willing and able to believe that it can).