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So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.
Right. Well, if my kids are going to become woke Maoist third worldists, then I can't really stop them, nor do I have any desire to. The whole point of being anti-woke is that people should be free to think for themselves. If I set limits on what my kids are allowed to think, then I'm no better than the wokeists.
I think the influence of external propaganda on political belief formation is not quite as big as is generally supposed anyway. Many years ago I stumbled on /r/shitredditsays when it was relatively new. The whole concept of "SJWs" was quite new and I was like, hey this seems kinda fun, I could get into this. You get to call other people racists and sexists and then feel morally superior to them. You're doing a good thing AND earning social credit in the process. That seems like a great deal. I imagine that's how most people initially get involved in social justice.
So I genuinely tried to be a leftist and integrate myself into the community for like a month, but I just couldn't do it. I was too viscerally disgusted by the behavior I saw there and I quickly turned on them. I tried to make myself believe in the content I was reading, but I couldn't. There was something about it that intrinsically disagreed with me.
I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?
Your guess is correct.
Heritability of political ideology goes up as a person becomes more informed about politics.
Basically, normie teenager who only gets her news from Instagram will follow whatever her friends/the algorithm decides, even if she has the genes of a conservative.
But her identical twin sister who starts reading more broadly will see her own innate beliefs/preferences manifested in what she reads. The more informed she becomes, the greater the pressure to align her beliefs with what feels instinctively right to her.
This could be true. I don't even necessarily disagree with it. The question however, is what life altering decisions that can't be taken back will "normie teenager" get talked into by the relentless tide of propaganda?
I know you’re worried about trans, but at least for the moment drugs and promiscuity are still the main ways teenagers wreck their own lives.
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It's hard to think of content that arouses in the anti-woke right the sense of a priori absolute evil that Tate does to the feminist left. Maybe MAP advocacy? Children-targeted sissy hypno?
Sure, righties "hate" BreadTube, but it's not quite the same hate.
When I listen to clips like these from Diane Ehrensaft or Johanna Olson-Kennedy I absolutely get a sense that The Adversary is in the room.
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The entire trans memeplex. Cheerios ads featuring miscegenation. Razor ads that are perceived as anti male. Christmas ads that are insufficiently religious.
But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.
Vaush and Tate are comparable poles of youth-targeted far-left and far-right influencerism, but the chud dad reacts to Vaush with a contemptuous snort, not like the /r/parenting folks above.
My parents weren’t even that religious and they would’ve sent me to Bible camp(or something like it; possibly a summer on a farm with a fundamentalist family) for trans stuff. Possibly for gay stuff, too.
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If I thought my child was actually being influenced by trans-influencers, there is no limit to the drastic action I might take, and many on my side feel the same way. Ideally, I would be able to get them off of it just by explaining how dumb and wrong the influencers are, but if that was not enough, and I had to remove them from a peer and school and institutional situation that really had the tentacles wrapped around my child, God grant me the courage to do any action necessary, including selling my house and moving to a different state.
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I do think there’s something to the “right and left have switched polarities” theory. The people who go the hardest for wokeness today would have been the strictest Christian moralists if they were alive in the 1600s.
I am anti-disapproving-schoolmarm. Back in the 90s and 2000s that means Focus on the Family style religious right. Fretting about sex in movies, bad music and the evils of DND.
Nowadays the culturally dominant disapprovers are progressives. Fretting about Tate and Jordan Peterson and making it a felony to deface a rainbow crosswalk by putting scooter tiremarks on it.
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You must have had very different experiences of Evangelical parents than my friends had growing up. The question of "worldly" things which were a bad influence infected all questions of music, books, movies, friendships.
I can attest to the same, a LOT of media was disallowed due to my evangelical parentage. But I think most people answering this question do not think of evangelicals first, especially since they don't seem to be as numerous as they were 20 years ago. How many parents are banning Spongebob in 2024?
Damn, that makes me think that I will be compared to the evangelicals if I keep my kids from watching modern Blues Clues due to the pride parade segment they showed several years ago. There's a secular basis for my restrictions, damnit!
I think the most logical comparison is probably the right wing Boogeyman of online groomers, turning your kid gay or trans.
The Evangelical treatment of knowledge about homosexuality as inherently seductive towards homosexuality has been widely examined and derided already.
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I remember when this forum discussed Cuties, and there was no shortage of right-wingers who aired out their righteous seething fury about it.
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