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you don't have to end this with "I'm a conservative." you made that quite clear when you pointed to a racist being rightly chastised for likening the violently oppressed people of the Gaza strip to vicious dogs as an example of campuses "stifling the free exchange of ideas."

You seem to be under the impression that folks like matt walsh are causing an image problem for the conservative movement. You are wrong. What they are doing is shining a spotlight on your side's actual problem: your ideas are at best bad, and at worst outright evil. Consider getting better ones?

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The problem with conservative academic thought is that almost all of it is the product of white supremacist grift mills that pay people to write articles and pay other people to read them. Almost none of it is a genuine product of study and reflection. Instead it is the output of paid shill, and is such dreck that no one will read or listen to it without a financial incentive.

Cancel culture is the turning of a one-way conversation into a two-way conversation and the manifestation of cancel culture that most offends conservatives is telling people who suck, that they suck.

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The problem with the "restraint and civility" argument for conservatives on college campuses is that it ignores the asymmetry of the current situation.

Shields and Dunn were far too optimistic in their assessment of how feasible it is to be a conservative professor today. The far-left movement that's ascendant on campuses today wants conservatives on campus rooted out, defamed, and destroyed. The purges and roadblocks are ongoing, from the DEI statement litmus tests for hiring (alongside plenty of other discriminatory behind-the-scenes behavior) to the recently proposed California Community College and recently passed UMass-Boston hiring and promotion frameworks that mandate require rigid ideological conformity on campus in teaching, research, and service. There is no reasonable path for conservatives to respond to this; you are "causing harm" with your words and not showing sufficient dedication to "anti-racism" in your actions if you evince an iota of non-conformity, and those will soon be grounds for termination (they already are for exclusion in hiring).

Yes, there is a large "moderate middle" of center-left professors who do worry a bit about the excesses of the radical crowd, but it's clear that most will not stand up to the radicals who run the faculty committees, plot with students to take down recalcitrant colleagues, and browbeat the admins (or become them). Conservative academics who used to brush aside the excesses of the left on campus have been changing their tune in the last year or two.

I too wish that conservatives could contribute to a robust intellectual atmosphere on campus by appealing to the better angels of human nature and having real debates and discussions rather than pure provocation. That would, indeed, be a better approach. But I fear that such debate is impossible to have anymore on an increasing number of campuses if you value your job.

I don't think provocations and FoxNews-style theatrics by the students will help much either, but at least such actions might goad otherwise clueless GOP politicians into taking campus reform more seriously and, dare we hope, effectively address the worst excesses through legislation and regulation (yes, this is unlikely, but a forlorn hope is better than none).

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True, right-wing collectivists are also against freedom

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Every single person or group mentioned here is a grifter looking to make a few bucks (lots of bucks, really) off outrage. Ben Shapiro, YAF, etc. All grifters and don't have our best interests in mind, but rather have their own. I'm not going to defend them. However, I'm not going to lump them in the category of "populist" either, as almost everyone who's interested in these subjects knows how they are grifters.

I will say this though, it is hilarious. Mainstream conservatism has a lot of grifters too, as does liberalism. It's inevitable. The key is to try to avoid these people as much as possible. The grouper gang pointed this stuff out, but they got labeled evil and racists or whatever. And the gatekeeper grifter class likes it that way.

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