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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26820 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.

On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.

On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.

If the situation in the Ivies is anything like my experience of Oxbridge, students who are going to grow up as pillars of the establishment have always LARPed as anti-establishment rebels on campus, and "Free Palestine" has been the hardy perennial of anti-establishment left issues since I was in primary school. The views of the pro-establishment left in the US on the I-P conflict have not materially changed during this time, despite the modern pro-establishment left incorporating a generation of kids who went on Free Palestine marches for campus-left clout as undergraduates 20-40 years ago. There is a lot of media coverage indicating that the average non-Arab attendee at the pro-Palestine protests doesn't understand the conflict and is just showing up in order to support the Current Thing - this is an example of social copying, not successful indoctrination.

That's a fairly reasonable explanation, but there's been a ton of things that started out as "a thing dumb college kids are doing" and ended up in the wider world. Some take longer than others.

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