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Following Akilah Hughe's sputtering disbelief that she could not get away with doing & saying whatever she wanted to/about Carl Benjamin makes sense only if you grew up in the 90s when the current cultural revolution really started picking up steam. That's when most of us first
heard the phrase "invisible backpack of privilege" which became "white privilege" as the overton window shifted and directly targeting certain groups became acceptable. My generation attended college during a time when professors teaching courses unrelated to economics or
sociology would turn their course into one on communism, social justice, trans activism & used their platform & access to impressionable young people to rant about Bush Jr. (and now Trump) as professors before them ranted about Nixon & Reagan. You can't advocate candidates in
church but somehow you can do it in a college classroom setting. Since your professor seems like the smartest person you've ever met & tells you very different things than your parents, whose authority you may still resent by that age, they become a sort of replacement parent
& seemingly all-knowing guide introducing you to a new world of radical political thought which, for all you know, is the only alternative to what your parents believe as it's presented absent any other competing models. To you it's just "what smart people believe".
These professors give you the implicit mantle of authority to go out and attack people who believe differently, strongly implying they represent the elite of some kind of alternative underground revolutionary power structure equal to or greater than the government, courts, police
This makes you feel special. Enlightened and powerful. A soldier in a war between good and evil, armed with all the knowledge you need to make fools out of people you've been convinced only believe differently because they're stupid and evil.
This is how you get 20 year olds with anime hair who don't know how to swap a tire or prepare their own meals commanding you to "educate yourself" when you don't know one of their shibboleths. Because to them, the education they received is the only legitimate knowledge, & the
only valid intellectualism is far left intellectualism. Nothing else belongs under the umbrella of what constitutes education to them, the irony being that it is in fact indoctrination, so what they should say is "indoctrinate yourself", having promised themselves your agreement
before they even met you, as if it's your duty to have already read the same books they have & been led to the same conclusions, as if there's no other books & no other conclusions one might reach. Human decency to them means "received the same socializing & indoctrination I did"
Now we have a whole generation of indoctrinated people with their own language they expect you to already know, who have been led to believe they have the divine right to spare or destroy you, because they believe they will be the new authorities following the revolution they've
been led to believe is imminent. The only kind of person they've been trained to argue with is a full blown nazi strawman, so everybody who disagrees has to be wedged into that archetype, or they don't know how to proceed. That's why they seemingly believe hurling accusations
like racism, misogyny, ableism & white supremacy at anybody they wish to destroy will automatically ensure victory over that person. Because in their mind, they have the same authority as the police & court system behind them. They assume complicity from the same government they
simultaneously believe is institutionally racist. When this doesn't work, it leaves them flummoxed & scared because the weapon they tried to bring down on their opponent turned out to be made of nothing more than thin air. Like witches trying to curse you, or evangelicals
praying for storms to destroy your state only for a hurricane to destroy theirs.
Incidentally The God Delusion radicalized me in precisely the same way when I was that age & apologize to anybody who had to deal with my insufferable autistic ass during those years
