The City Journal has published a voluminous article on the mental suffering of the affluent class of New York and California.
They are faced with the “beastly grin” of the cultural revolution: their children in elite public schools are being brainwashed with “racial theories”.
The parents surveyed are, for the most part, right-wing liberals, but they, too, have lagged behind the evolution of democratic discourse in recent years. Now they can’t even afford to be publicly outraged about what’s going on, so they have to give interviews strictly anonymously.
Their children, from a very early age, are being ideologised as it were: taught “critical racial theory” and made to feel ashamed of their skin colour (if they are, of course, lighter in colour). Classical literature is withdrawn from the curriculum, replaced by screaming liberal pamphlets.
And children are afraid to criticize the progressive narrative that dominates their schools and pretend to conform to it. They beg their parents not to interfere with the situation as it may damage their reputation and deprive them of a chance of getting into a decent university.
In a number of schools, closed circles of “dissident” students are formed – usually led by a reasonable teacher – who secretly discuss “forbidden topics” such as criticism of feminism, but also anonymously and (if online) with cameras switched off.
When school authorities find out about it, everyone gets in trouble. A good story happened at Eton, UK, where a teacher was fired for making a video about feminism, even though schoolchildren actively stood up for him and even helped to raise money for legal action.
It’s a cautionary tale of how rich American liberals were caught up in the convulsions of their own ideology. They thought that only “redneck Trumpists” would suffer from the culture war, but life has decided otherwise. As they say, you reap what you sow.
Malek Dudakov