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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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… the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

I think that this is a reasonable characterization, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re demanding right-wing commissars to shoot the left-wing commissars. It’s commissars all the way down. As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the conservative movement and how its idea of the relationship between private organizations and the state has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. (That’s not to say that the Trump coalition is identical with the conservative movement, of course.) We’ll see if those thoughts ever become solid enough for an effortpost.

Aside from the obvious, there are two big differences between this and the civil rights era that make it much harder to do anything: First, the activists are in favor of the discrimination. Second, the people doing the discriminating won't admit they're doing it.

Agreeing with @Skibboleth - I don't think the exact nature of the Danegeld being requested is the point - the question is whether paying the Danegeld delivers any relief from the Dane or not.

If Harvard's read of what happened to Columbia (I don't understand the detail of the deal, but I assume Harvard do) is that they caved and the Trump admin immediately came back for more then they the only demands they should concede are to do things they wanted to do anyway but couldn't for internal politics reasons.

There's reporting that Colombia basically internally started messaging that nothing would change despite the deal. IE, that they weren't actually conceding to the Trump demands, and that business would continue as before.

That sort of messaging is a lie in at least one direction- either that the Colombia administration was lying to the Federal government, or that it was lying to the people it was telling nothing would change for. I could believe the later, but would understand why people would believe the former.

We tried not having commissars. It doesn't work. It's a power vacuum ready and waiting for one side's commissars to move in. And nature abhors a vacuum.

Liberalism is a unstable pipe dream. The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. Someone's ideology is going to rule. All you can do is decide which side you'd rather see in charge and support it.

As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.

This is deeply the most important question in conservative thought!

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