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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Okay, once you've stopped laughing- not running the risk of Trump (and possibly Vance) continuing to gut their funding and harass them with lawsuits for as long as they can?

Indeed. But that will have to be sustained for a while. If the next President just reverts all of that, then a few years is easy enough to get through for most institutions. That's my point. It has to be a sea change from parents on up. Academia is a symptom not a cause.

It has to be a sea change from parents on up. Academia is a symptom not a cause.

Where do you think the parents got their views from?

You must be anticipating I'd say... their parents? To be a little less glib, parents and family.

Blue Tribe people make Blue Tribe institutions. Which is the chicken and which the egg?

Blue Tribe people make Blue Tribe institutions. Which is the chicken and which the egg?

A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children, with parents having very little to say about it outside of "it's just a couple crazy kids on college campuses".

These ideas flow up, actually. Tumblr bullshit infects the students who spread it around campus and the professors may let them because they’re sympathetic but they also don’t have the power to stop them- this is a one star resort for unsupervised teenagers, not a strictly disciplined educational institution.

Right this is exactly my experience (though nowadays it's Tik-Tok not Tumblr). These kids come in already complaining about Israel and with pro-Palestine flags and what not. I or my colleagues didn't teach them that. Which is not to say that some of my colleagues don't share those sympathies somewhat (though obviously varies on Jewishness level) but it's more acts of omission than commission in my experience.

The students with those ideas coming in got them from their prior teachers, who got them from a previous generation of leftist academics.

As per hydro who is I believe right wing, that is not my experience.

I think people heavily overestimate what people get from teachers and the like compared to family and nowadays social media.

Just look at the terminology. Cisheteronormativity. Anticarceralism. Cultural appropriation. Decolonisation. These are not words that Tumblr users, teens or their families create. Teens create words like "yeet" and Tumblr creates words like "otherkin".

I don't think high school teachers were sitting kids down and giving them college level sociology lectures directly. I think outside of school hours terminally online grad students were flexing their wordcel power level on Tumblr among impressionable teen girls, from whom it spread via a few more steps to clickbait columnists and their incestuous codependence with pre-Elon Twitter.

By the time the teens who were on Tumblr got to college they were fully marinated in progressive sociology shibboleths, only without any of the independent thought and critical analysis that university is supposed to encourage.

Academia was always the source, kids were just an influential and early stage vector with low intellectual immunity, especially for the kind of memes that can impart righteous social power to teenage girls (although the claims to righteousness were largely a mask and a multiplier for the underlying social power, without which the memeset would have languished in the obscurity of academia and the post grad blogosphere).

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