Cracks in the foundation
Arguing over the campaign to get rid of Claudine Gay:
[T]he fallout at one of the nation’s elite universities is also illuminating the ways in which the political right is increasingly targeting education, with deliberate efforts to “take on” elite schools by stripping them of federal student loan money and undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and a parallel movement to undo K–12 education with laws that limit the teaching of history or ban books and classroom libraries.
The trouble here is that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs aren’t an unmistakable good even to people who aren’t on the political right. The lunacy that bubbles and festers around “trans rights” has made a lot of lefty jargon suspect even to many lefties. Like the word “inclusion” for instance – which means things like “including” men in everything that belongs to women, if those men say they are women. That kind of verbal manipulation tends to provoke suspicion of all progressive jargon, because how can we be confident it’s not all that stupid?
Like I said about Science-Based Medicine, if you stand there and say “male people can be women in every sense of the word, and anyone who doesn’t agree is a bigoted Nazi who might as well be a creationist” then why would anyone believe ANYTHING else you say?
Exactly this. It’s frustrating to me how unthinkingly accepting so many of my lefty friends are of the trans and “inclusion”. They don’t know much, aren’t activists, and just go about their everyday lives and simply assume that absolutely anything and everything associated with LGB(T) is a social good. When I describe to them ways in which much of it is not, they are shocked, but more often than not do not change their position, simply saying “well, it’s not my issue, really”.