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I'm just trying to describe what a regular normie who scrolls social media and just gossips about these things and tries to keep up, tries to not be cringe and left behind. They don't feel like they seek out American influences. They just talk about what's in front of them, what's in the media etc. And even if they read the local news portal with local editors in the local language, journalists are social media addicts and look up to the prestigious NYT, NPR etc. across the pond, and want to be cool like them, and they are also lazy and it's easy to write about what's up with the celebrities and the latest culture war controversies etc. Similarly they just listen to Taylor Swift because it's popular on Spotify, it's popular with peers, it's on the radio etc. Not because she is American. It never entered their deliberation.
You can't simply forcefully spread just anything. It has to fit into the framework of what the current generation was taught as children and young adults. Wokeness was laundered / whitewashed as just being a decent human being, and basically just 90s race blindness as the foot in the door, and once you pluck all the DEI/representation fruits from that framing, they introduce well actually it's equity and not equality, and the rest of it. They don't start with struggle sessions and Evergreen State's "get in the canoe" spiels. If you start with extreme stuff, people call bullshit and you can't really suppress dissent that way. But if it starts innocuous, and just like what you were taught as kids about not being racist, giving everyone a fair chance, not relying on snap judgments, looking beyond surface things and judging people on their character etc, then all the initial things are obvious. It's the same way that Scientology doesn't immediately start with Xenu but with practical psychological life coaching advice.
Or for homosexuality/trans it starts as live and let live, adults should be able to have the kind of sex they want without stigma, not overtly discriminating, etc and then it becomes about presenting it as an equal footing, teaching kindergarteners that two dad and two mums are just as normal as one dad and one mum, and that it's brave to change from your "assigned" gender and that gender is a spectrum with Barbie and GI Joe on the ends of it and everyone else a form of inbetween etc.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a distributed system, the useful pawns on the ground who do the first stages are not even necessarily aware of all the subversive critical theory behind all this, and they will deny they are motivated by that at all. But when you go up the chain you do see that they have seminar like this, and all those meetings with "point of personal privilege" cards and whatnot.
The more conscious ones are probably Western European university administrators who copy stuff like diversity seminars, Pride Month, anti-sexual harassment workshops, female preferential hiring and promotion (if illegal, then going as far as they can plausibly deniably, but everyone knowing it informally), renaming buildings and lecture halls with "problematic" namesakes etc. They do look at American prestigious world-class universities and adopt everything, the aesthetics, the web design, the social media strategy, etc. etc., even starting to adopt the junior professor and tenure track structure these days as opposed to the classical European professorship paths. But I don't think they would deny this, American academia is looked up to, it's not part of the "America" that intelligent, cultured Europeans are supposed to look down on. That's the uneducated Trump-voting, gas guzzler driving pollution-unconscious, climate denier racist America.
But they won't deny or be bewildered by someone pointing out they are influenced by American culture. They'll nod along and probably say we should invest into local stuff so we're not relying on Americans so much. I've had exactly this conversation countless times.
You'd be surprised how much you can get away with. Whatever you're pushing through, most people won't hear about. Of the ones that do, the majority won't care. Of the ones that care, the majority will be afraid to say anything, because saying something will make them sound like AfD/Orban/Farage/Trump, and the ones that do say something can simply be fired and ostracized to serve as a warning for others.
Even if we go with "race blindness was a pre-requisite for DEI", that just shows that these things have to be spread gradually, not that they can't be spread top-down.
This the part I'm denying. It's not. It's all spread top-down by governments, corporations, and NGOs, who regularly get together and discuss hiw to get around local popular pushback.
Like I said, European leftists believe wokeness will never became a thing in Europe, precisely because they were applying the kind of analysis you're doing here. They assumed spread is organic, and so no organic resonance anywhere around them, so they concluded it will not arrive in Europe anytime soon.
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