In the last few years, I have gotten at least 200 emails from loving parents who are crushed because their kids went to college and decided that their parents were oppressors whose politics (usually not conservative—usually normal, non-leftist-wacko Democrats) made them toxic. After a lot of fighting during the four years of school, their adult children now refuse relationships with them.
In addition, parents whose kids are approaching college age have been emailing me to request advice for several years now. They read my tweets, back when I was active on Twitter—my Twitter account still exists and I read the news there without ever tweeting, but I was once addicted to it—about how intense the Woke brainwashing efforts were, and how hard it was not to give in to it. They emailed me because they were desperate to know how to help their kid not fall for it.
Parents are right to be worried. I had a based therapist helping me, or I would have absolutely, 100%, there is no doubt in my mind, fallen for all of it. That should be a humiliating admission, but it isn’t.
Maoist re-education camps are in fact quite good at achieving their objectives.
I have written about how hard it is—even for me—not to slip into the reductionist thinking that today’s universities inculcate, how the first notion that jumps to mind when a man is rude, or even just awkward, is always an idea put there by a professor. And here are some thoughts about why the marginalization narrative is so easy for colleges to brainwash kids into. It is profoundly tempting: it sets up a scenario for everyone except heterosexual white guys such that if they fail, it’s not their fault, but if they succeed, they’re a superhero. It took a great therapist challenging these notions regularly—like asking me if I really think men conspire with each other to keep women who share their interests as far away as possible—to help me question these narratives and not fall totally under their sway. Even so, the brainwashing did damage and I still have to work to root these ideas out. I recently wrote about how deeply the brainwashing entrenched negative ideas about men that a difficult childhood gave me, and how it even gave some of those ideas to people with no similar histories:
