The most recent episode of @yourewrongabout, on political correctness, is a must-listen. It's a look back on the various moral panics of the 1990s surrounding speech, especially on campus, and it really underscores a few very important points. 1/ https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270 

First, as I often point out, society is unbelievably unfair (and often deeply shitty) to college students. Call them lazy, alarmist, naïve SJWs and you'll rarely get any opposition. But my job is to teach them, and I'm here to tell you they're none of those things. 2/

I'm amazed by how smart my students are. Many of them work more jobs than you do, to avoid debt you never had to contemplate. They have political opinions, but on the whole they're open-minded, eager to learn and be challenged, respectful of others, and eminently sensible. 3/

And yet, Boomers clutch their pearls (and some GenX'ers clutch their Apple watches) and dither about some guest speaker who got yelled at from the audience or some dusty-fusty prof who got feedback he didn't like, as if CIVILIZATION WERE AT STAKE. Hogwash. 4/

Some of the most valuable parts of the episode were those in which Mike and Sarah do *basic fact checking* and show that incidents like these regularly got blown way out of proportion and spread across mainstream media like wildfire, creating false impressions of crisis. 5/

(They also focus usefully on dogs that didn't bark. Do we now use terminology like "womyn" or "differently abled"? Nope. But boy, did we hear about them at the time.) 6/

All of which leads to another useful point: The supposedly-liberal mainstream media had a bottomless appetite for political-correctness stories in the 90s, but apparently zero interest in questioning or fact-checking them. 7/

If they had an agenda when it came to political correctness and free speech, that agenda was indistinguishable from promoting cultural conservatism. Which is deeply weird, when you think about it. 8/

It also suggests that today's media skepticism of wild claims about woke culture, cancel culture, etc., are long-overdue course corrections. 9/

Finally, the podcast points to the role of ideological entrepreneurs—people who made (and make) a very good living working the mass-media moral-panic grift—in flat-out *lying* about the iconic incidents that fueled the anti-PC backlash. 10/

It's a very good episode. If you lived through the period and remember a lot of this, as I do, it'll resonate and probably enrage. If you didn't, it offers valuable perspective on today's iterations of the Same Damn Thing. fin/