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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22334 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Going after the woke =/= going after them for being anti-Israel .

I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.

I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they we probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.

The question in my mind is where you situate anti-semitism discourse relative to wokeness.

One framing of this is that the Trump admin and rightists are using anti-semitism to Judo-throw the woke, using the Woke's own narratives of protecting besieged minorities to destroy the Woke, and ultimately in the process discrediting the idea of protecting minority fee-fees and removing it from the discourse. Like Treize Khushrenada, the anti-woke will use the Woke's weapons against them, and in the process the weapons will all be destroyed and we'll have peace.

Alternatively, the anti-Woke are reifying the Woke narrative by utilizing it. We're all embedded in the narrative of protecting the feelings of minority students from the political positions of their fellow students. We're valorizing the idea that students can and should be expelled, arrested, their degrees revoked, for saying something "offensive" to a minority group. Rather than the Republicans engaging in clever Judo to reverse-flip the Woke into a bad position, rather the Woke have trapped the Republicans into fighting in their paradigm: Republicans have no engaged the Woke in their own field, where the Woke have the advantage.

We'll have to see what happens.

Third option: it's a glaring exception to an otherwise anti-woke paradigm driven by short term political considerations rather than ideology. For now a lot of Republicans don't really care about the contradiction but as time passes the status quo will be untenable and they'll have to chose between returning to the woke paradigm to defend the concept of anti-semitism or abandon it entirely

I don't think "Republicans" or "Democrats" are the right unit of analysis. The Anti-Woke are just a portion of Republicans, and the philosemitic and Woke are just portions of Democrats. The Anti-Woke see an opportunity to use the weapons developed by the Woke against them by mobilizing the normie Republicans and the Philosemitic Democrats against the Woke. There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.

The Anti-Woke see an opportunity to use the weapons developed by the Woke against them by mobilizing the normie Republicans and the Philosemitic Democrats against the Woke.

I'll believe this when I see any "Woke weapons" used other than anti-semitism.

We've seen this song and dance before with the university admins: right wingers were played into pushing against "anti-semitic Woke" administrators, the admins were fired and they were pretty much universally replaced by "Zionist Woke" instead. There was no wider victory for "anti-Woke" forces, they were simply played into fighting a battle that's basically orthogonal to their real interests.

Exactly.

None of this actually increased the rights I had in college, instead it narrows them further.

There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.

Things that have already happened are not risks. College kids already routinely suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable, and in fact such consequences have been deeply imbedded in longstanding policy. Given this reality, having these rules at least apply more fairly than they currently do is an obvious positive.

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