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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements, but agree with the left more than the right overall, and with a deep-seated distaste for Trump.

Then they have chosen their side, and are correctly considered collaborators.

If everyone in academia is in fact a true believer in wokeism, then by definition cancel culture in academia would be a nonissue: there would be no wrongthink for cancel mobs to punish, and no free speech would be infringed.

Those who cancel are perfectly happy to go after those who are only perceived to commit wrongthink, or to change the definition of wrongthink to catch those who were formerly right-thinkers, and thus to even cancel true believers.

Attacking cancel culture in academia is only a worthy endeavor if you presuppose that there are, in fact, people currently forced to mouth insincere diversity statements that you want to rescue.

As I said above, certainly not. If cancel culture has already pushed out everyone who is not a true believer, or I can't rescue those who have not been pushed out, it is still good to destroy cancel culture in academia as a step in either re-populating academia with non-wokes, or destroying academia in its entirety so the wokes cannot use whatever power and influence academia has to cause trouble in other areas.

An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.

No, it doesn't. If there's one oppressed person per 1000 in academia, and they are hurt as much as the 1000 by some measure, this is what's called collateral damage. No one is required to use a perfectly precise weapon.

Say I, a closet conservative in academia, happen to believe he will fail, hard, with, say, >80% confidence. Wouldn't it be idiotic of me to throw off the mask now? You say craven, I say survival instincts.

Trump, however, must act as if he will succeed. And if he does, they were craven.

Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?

A phrase I associate mostly with the dissident right/neo-Nazis, actually. But keeping your head down when you're totally outclassed may be merely prudent. Keeping your head down when you have a chance at success is cowardly.