\n<\/p>\n
Right now, people are arguing about whether cancel culture is back and this time coming from the right. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t too long ago the right was criticizing the left for canceling people. Now the right is doing the same thing.\u201d \u201cOn social media, people who\u2019ve criticized Kirk are being called out, their names and photos widely circulated.\u201d \u201cPeople say: Oh, people have a right to say things. Well, actually, they don\u2019t necessarily have a right to say things.\u201d And it certainly looks like the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and other controversies do represent a kind of conservative revenge for the great woke cancellations of 2020 and 2021. But I really think that you need to understand the conservative cultural strategy right now much more in terms of institutions than celebrity individuals. Long before the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Trump White House saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try and push America\u2019s cultural institutions, movie studios, TV networks meaningfully to the right. \u201cThey care more about identity politics. They care more about diversity, equity and inclusion.\u201d \u201cWe want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner.\u201d And it saw that opportunity because it realized in part that a lot of people inside those institutions actually agreed with part of the conservative critique, that they had swung too far to the left, that they had lost some of the public\u2019s trust and that they needed some kind of course correction. So if you follow the Trump administration\u2019s culture war strategy, you\u2019ll see that at its most successful, it\u2019s actually providing TV executives and college presidents with an excuse, a prodding to make changes that they might want to make already. But of course, Trump being Trump, this coexists with attempts at illiberal micromanagement and, predictably, attempts to just get cultural institutions to kiss up to the president himself. \u201cPresident Trump has signed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times \u2014\u2014\u201d \u201cA $10 billion libel lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal\u2019s parent company \u2014\u2014\u201d \u201cAll they do is hit Trump. That\u2019s all they do.\u201d This week, I want to talk about the most significant of these efforts, more important even than the late-night TV wars. And that\u2019s the administration\u2019s attempts to change elite academia, to change the way big universities admit students and hire faculty to change the way they handle free speech debates, the Israel-Palestine issue, foreign student visas and admissions, and much more. My guest this week, May Mailman, is the perfect person to discuss the Trump White House\u2019s higher education strategy, because she\u2019s been the person in charge of it. So I just want to start with a very, very big picture question. Tell me, what is wrong with the American university. Yeah, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s every university. But I would say in general, you\u2019ve got a lot of different problems. And the biggest one that comes for me is a culture of victimhood, a glorification of victimhood. Maybe I call it Meghan Markle syndrome as well, where the greatest good, the greatest height that you can be is a victim. So I think that\u2019s one thing. And I think then pieces of it trickle down to racism in admissions, racism in hiring, hiring people to do things based on their identity rather than their ability. But I think at the end of the day, it all boils down to a glorification of victimhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Right now, people are arguing about whether cancel culture is back and this time coming from the right. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t too long ago the right was criticizing the left for canceling people. Now the right is doing the same thing.\u201d \u201cOn social media, people who\u2019ve criticized Kirk are being called out, their names and photos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1471,4667,440,1092,71,489],"class_list":{"0":"post-23876","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-begins","9":"tag-cultural","10":"tag-opinion","11":"tag-push","12":"tag-trumps","13":"tag-universities"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}