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This is a very strong counterpoint, and I definitely understand that my point here is not going to be very compelling to the stereotypical Motte user working at a Bay Area Tech company where they are only exposed to the excesses on the left.
Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).
I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.
Conversely, trying to discuss anything with right, for example on this forum, generally means dealing with many unjustified personal attacks from people very explicitly not on board with individualism and meritocracy. Discussing with the right is useful to do to keep my perspective broad enough, but it is far, far more unpleasant.
I live in a red state, and I work for an enormous faceless company. We have our HR zampolits imported from the mothership.
I've seen red state "censorship", which usually involves a governor preventing some state employees from saying something. This is an entirely different scale of problem compared to all the major tech companies conspiring to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, which likely caused the election to flip. This is an entirely different scale from the HR departments of all major corporations making sure everything you say is AWFL-approved. or you get fired.
Perhaps you don't remember 2020. I do. I remember that you could set a building on fire and that was free speech, but if you said the virus came from a lab that was violence and you got fired. I remember the outdoor mask mandates, the tech companies conspiring to get their candidate elected, and DEI struggle sessions. Like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, I got "redpilled" as the cool kids say.
The DSA types (but not the Democratic Party, I stress), are a direct threat to my ability keep my job, my children's ability to get an education and get a job, and my ability to speak and live freely.
The right? Sometimes they tweet stupid stuff.
I'll care about them when they run the HR departments, the university admissions, and the other gatekeepers of middle-class life. I'll care about them when they set my downtown on fire.
Perhaps you were around the the last few techbro-adjacent normies, and even then you had to play elaborate taboo games.
Not my experience at all, but the DSA-types I (used to) have in my social circle tend to be young, white, female, and single - usually girlfriends/sisters/etc. of my friends. They're shrill, unreasonable, and emotional, and like everyone else I avoid them for my own safety and the safety of my family. Ironically for the white supremacists here, the wokest people I know are all white, and the most reasonable Democrats I know are your usual "Normie Middle Class Black Guy" you find in this part of the country. Hell, I'm technically "LatinX" (ugh) and before 2020 I was a Normie Democrat myself.
I was told "it's just a few kids in college", "it's just the HR department keeping the lawsuits away", and then 2020 happened and we let HR, the health bureaucracy, and universities run the country for a bit, and like everyone else, I got redpilled.
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Name these orthogonal excesses and the parts of the country that are prone to them.
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