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Bull Hubbard's avatar

I'm glad someone with a sizeable and growing contemporary audience is relating the story of woke origins and the way neo-Marxists have been operating in plain sight for nearly sixty years. Mr. Rufo's high profile work at the New College has widened his reach, I think. Between him, James Lindsay at New Discourses, and Jordan Peterson, more people than ever are becoming aware of the lies motivating the conflicts of the last few chaotic years: race riots and the demonization of police; advancement of the trans agenda, its violation of children, and the chaos of identity that denies the body; demonization of white people under the camouflage of an allegedly abstract concept called whiteness," slandering historical figures and interpreting American history as a series of evil schemes to keep black people enslaved and subservient . . . and so forth.

The colossal blunder of assuming universities are "ivory towers" with zero impact on the wider culture and on our institutions is now glaringly apparent. Where did this dismissive notion come from in the first place? I'd say much of it comes from the deliberate creation of an intellectual mystique used to deflect critics of critical theory that goes something like, "Your criticisms can be dismissed out of hand because you're too dim to understand our arguments" (see the reaction of academics to criticisms of critical race theory for a recent example). This arrogance makes the parody "studies"of Lindsay, Boghossian and Pluckrose such a satisfying and persuasive demonstration of neo-Marxist identity conflict taken to its absurd extreme.

I look forward to reading Rufo's book in its entirety.

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Graham Cunningham's avatar

At my university in the early '70s, if you fancied yourself as hip you were 'a Maoist'. Most student 'Maoists' probably had little idea (or even interest) in what this meant. It was just groupthink; fashion following to increase your peer-group standing.

I think it is mistaken to conceive of our wokefied Western culture as mostly the product of some hard-left conspiracy. That's a cop out really because the truth is way worse than that. Most people (and especially 'highly educated' people} are intellectual sheep. They want to be liked; they want to fit in; they want to have the cache of 'having opinions' (without bothering much with the hard work needed to educate those opinions). That's how the lefty academia sheep-dip has operated for decades now and the really stupid thing is that conservatives didn't really notice until quite recently so naively obsessed were they about the illusory power of the pluralist ballot box. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers

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