my college students are all terrified of saying the wrong thing and being cancelled. they hate liberals and liberal discourse. they feel like they are constantly policed, discourse-wise. and they're all communist-leaning, not conservatives. we have a real problem !!!!

unfortunately conservatives have captured this very real problem and made it about "pc culture". i argued that it was mostly about internalized surveillance and "gentrification of the mind" with the help of the works of @sarahschulman3

they were receptive to that. but the longer we pretend that this discourse policing is not a real thing, the more people will become reactionaries because they feel like they can't be them full selves in any 'left leaning' spaces

until this class i thought i was maybe internet poisoned and thus thought it was a bigger issue than it was, but the class was very passionate and concerned about it, and the vast majority of them are not internet discourse people!

this is at a continuing education program at a state school. these are not privileged people who just want license to be racist lol.

i always think about a line in a naomi klein book (i forget which one): the time when this identity-based discourse policing became really popular, the 1990s, was also the time of the largest consolidation of wealth and corporate power in the US. these things are not unrelated.

i also think this is a very different problem than popular fascists being protested on college campuses. there are two separate issues going on and we need to separate them!

in case u think i’m a hypocrite here is 2 tweets expanding on my book and this thread https://twitter.com/_pem_pem/status/1390274611330392064?s=20