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Mind if I ask your source? I'm certainly well aware of SJ's extraordinary capacity for deliberate meme warfare; I would just appreciate receipts on this particular one.
The best way to convince yourself of this is to read Herbert Marcuse and see how his ideas inspired the scholarship around what is now called DEI.
I think much of One Dimensional Man is applicable, but a seminal work that is now of obvious significance is Repressive Tolerance which I encourage you to read in its entirety as well as his Essay on Liberation. You'll come back with I think the same conviction I do that SJ ideas and tactics have this New Left lineage and that they are indeed deliberate tactics rather than any emergent production.
I could go into more detail but I think it's a bit pointless to do it in extenso when the one thing that James Lindsay can be commended for is that he fairly accurately mapped out all the philosophical underpinning of this political movement. His video on Marcuse's influence I find to be broadly accurate to what I've been taught and seen for myself.
Now of course Marcuse isn't the whole of the school of Critical Theory and kritik isn't the sole influence on this movement, but it is the main source of their political tactics, hence their focus on language and control of the frame rather than more traditional Marxist struggles.
If you want to trace this influence closer to DEI itself, you can look for yourself throughout the scholarship of the 80s and 90s. For Equity's origin as a linguistic weapon, you'll be able to find its genesis in all the papers that discuss the "dilemma of difference".
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