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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Your general point is lost on many people. I was talking to my boomer mom about Kanye getting blacklisted for alleged anti-Semitism and her response was basically "I don't see why him getting punished is a big deal, everyone knows the Jews run Hollywood and finance, but everyone also knows it's just not something you're supposed to say in polite company because it's un-PC, so he's an idiot." Except that a lot of my fellow millennials seem to thinking that Jewish overrepresentation is an evil conspiracy theory spread by evil people (I would know, I was one of them). Same goes for the "days of rage" in the 70s.

What "everyone knows" in one generation is often seen as "false" by later generations if it's not allowed to be discussed. I ran into the same things when speaking to Chinese people about the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square. The older folks who were around for those events had nuanced opinions, even the nationalists, while younger people either believe that it "wasn't really that bad, certainly nowhere near as bad as Western propaganda makes it out to be" or they have no opinion at all.

Enforced silence on a topic can be more effective than enforced orthodoxy, since it's so much more subtle.