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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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It absolutely is, and the response to it has left me feeling rather ambivalent and frustrated.

I oppose any kind of intervention like this. At the same time, I have been listening to voices on the left, even outside the US, objecting that this is like Russia, autocratic, despotic, McCarthyite, the government imposing an ideology, unconstitutional, violating the very principles of the American experiment, and so on.

And all I can think is - boy, I'm sure glad that the American government wasn't making ideological demands of universities in the name of diversity before this. Can you imagine how horrifying that would have been? Lucky nothing like that has ever happened before!

What the Trump administration is doing is bad, and pretty indefensible. However, it is only a fraction of what his opponents have been shamelessly doing for decades. 'Viewpoint diversity', while a good ideal in the abstract, cannot be imposed like this without horribly undermining the very purpose of a university as an educational and research institution. But the exact same things are true of racial diversity, gender diversity, and so on. May we at least hope that this will cause people to react against the entire notion of imposed diversity requirements?

Well, we may hope anything. But I doubt anything will happen. No one of significance is going to notice the hypocrisy. The right will keep on saying "it's okay for us to do it because they did it first", and the left will keep on saying "this is nothing like what we did how dare you even compare them", and principles will remain alien to this entire discourse.

When Arnaud Amalric said 'Kill them all, God will know his own', there was a recognition that at least some people in the city were good Christians and not heretics. It's an olive branch from the Red Tribe to have at least some tokens within the institutions to have them not recognized as partisan enemies: a university full of gay race communists has no Reds within it and can be attacked without regret or pause.

Well, congratulations, academia: you drove out all the witches, and now Trumpemort is here to destroy you. Universities have lost tax-free exemptions and their endowment because of racial prejudice before: certainly the universities have uncontroversially engaged in such as the Asian lawsuits have revealed. If they're not even capable of denouncing their own radicals then what are they good for? As Pol Pot wisely said: 'to keep you is no benefit: to destroy you is no loss.'

Perhaps a steel man could be that if humans of different races are interchangeable then race-based quotas let you spread academic caress between races without affecting the serious business of thinking that goes into them. Whereas viewpoint quotas affect the actual business of the academy. But I don’t see how to square that view with ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘lived experience’.