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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I am quite familiar with UVU. A few pieces of context: UVU has been growing like a weed the last decade especially. It was a vocational/community college for a while and semi-recently became a more full fledged university. There’s still a lot of non-traditional and part time students still, partly by design. They also benefitted from demographics and location - the only other big college is BYU in the area and the general area (not just Provo-Orem metropolitan area but also surrounding sprawl like Lehi’s “Silicon Slopes”) is pretty dense and otherwise you need to go up to Salt Lake City for the U. This means lots of new buildings and lots of new administrators and such. It’s Utah so it’s red, but not overwhelmingly so as you might expect; maybe 60-40 in the district in question.

All of this to say that Utah also doesn’t have much political violence to start with, and given the layout and history of UVU, it doesn’t surprise me that tracking down the shooter will be a little challenging, and it also doesn’t surprise me that security wasn’t super duper tight. They said the older guy wasn’t the shooter - but an older guy in campus isn’t too weird to start with.