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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Instead, how it works is that it is a hothouse of ideas that are strange and controversial to an ordinary man on the street, but all these ideas are completely mainstream and mandatory inside the hothouse.

Recently, I was in a third-rate city with nothing to do, and it was pouring rain, so I ended up in a contemporary art museum.

Much of what was inside was "subversive political art" of a very boring variety, pushing a specific political narrative. And it just so happens to be the same narrative that is pushed by nearly all our elite cultural leaders.

Which means, of course, that this subversive contemporary art is not in any way subversive. It's just top-down propaganda, masquerading as subversion. Counterculture, whether art or academia, has been entirely coopted at this point. It might as well not even exist.

Exactly. We now have a couple of generations of "subversive conformism" - where the culture behaves as if it still were 1960s and there were some "establishment" they are fighting, but they are not fighting any establishment actually, because they have been the establishment for decades now and has (mostly successfully) suppressed everybody who dissented from them. That's why they need constructs like "systemic racism" and "patriarchy" to maintain the image of rebelling against an overwhelming force, while actually being one.