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Americas culture wars have evolved greatly from the central issues of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as legalizing same-sex marriage, or what standards of decency hip-hop artists or cable-television shows should adhere to. Now the very concept of higher education its purpose, how its institutions prepare our countrys young adults, and what exactly is being taught in the classroom has taken center stage.

Americans opinions about the current state of higher education, according to a new Pew poll released earlier this week, reveal a stark partisan divide over whether our nations colleges perform a positive societal function. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now believe Americas institutions of higher learning have a negative effect on the country, whereas 72 percent of Democrats say the effect is positive.

Given the profusion of what now seem like weekly horror stories about the way conservative students and professors (or really anyone who dares to express an independent thought) are treated on campus, its no surprise that so many on the right are beginning to question the impact colleges and universities are having on American society.

For over half a century, conservatives have more or less accepted the fact that leftists control the classrooms. The clich of a son or daughter coming back for the holidays armed with all sorts of ideas collected from a freshman sociology seminar typically ends with a polite smile or headshake from the parents and another tuition check. At least, parents could tell themselves, the kids were learning something. Families tolerated the political biases of college professors and administrators because there was an implicit understanding that students would be challenged and educated, whether directly or indirectly, in areas that would eventually prepare them for life as engaged citizens and productive members of the labor force.

Not anymore.

The college experience seems more and more like a four-year vacation at a country club than a serious intellectual journey. I hesitate even to describe college courses as exercises in brainwashing, because the term implies a sort of rigor. A ritzy liberal-arts college presents something more like a perverse interpretation of Karl Marxs vision of a fully Communist society, where students can indoor rock-climb in the morning, enjoy a freshly prepared vegan meal at lunch, pontificate about gender without referencing the required reading later that afternoon, and still make time to drink heavily and indulge in soft drugs at night.

All of that sounds quite lovely on its face, but its no surprise that so many conservatives are deeply disturbed by how much colleges have changed in their lifetime. Considering how far academic standards have eroded on campuses, its difficult to justify the undergraduate degree as a necessary vehicle to the middle and upper-middle class. Its even harder to justify American colleges and universities as a positive societal force instead of just an extremely expensive four-year ritual required in order for an individual to be rewarded with the keys to cosmopolitan society and all the avocado-toast-filled brunches anyone could ask for.

The common refrain from the left that conservatives reject higher education out of a preference for ignorance or a fear of dangerous ideas couldnt be farther from the truth. Conservatives dont defend the Western canon because they think understanding it will make students believe that lower corporate tax rates are one of the best ways to grow the economy, but because we deem it important to understand the Wests intellectual underpinnings so that we can best defend and (yes) criticize it.

Its disappointing but not necessarily surprising that so many self-identified liberals have few gripes about the direction higher education is taking. In the age of Trump, liberals have adopted a bunker mentality and view college campuses as a steadfast safe space at a time when their own political party seems temporarily impotent against historic GOP gains.

As the student-debt bubble grows, I suspect many liberals will begin to regret their indifference to these changes. While 55 percent of Americans still view colleges and universities positively, this number seems awfully slim considering the prominent role higher education plays in the modern economy and as a class signifier. Moreover, the urbanrural cultural divide will only increase in intensity as more individuals realize that one of the main roots of liberals arrogance their prized education is nothing more than a sham.

In ten or 15 years, when Millennials are still mailing checks to Sallie Mae, it wont just be Republicans who ask: What did I get out of this?

READ MORE: The Next Right-Wing Populist Will Win by Attacking American Higher Education New Englands Hallowed Halls, Crumbling A Big Reason for the Rising Cost and Falling Quality of College

Joe Simonson writes about politics and culture.

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Higher Education: Good or Bad? - National Review

The veneration of Mr. Putin helps explain why revelations about Russias involvement in the election including recent reports that members of Mr. Trumps inner circle set up a meeting at which they expected a representative of the Russian government to give them incriminating information about Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trumps reluctance to acknowledge it, have barely penetrated the consciousness of the presidents conservative base.

Mr. Putin is no arch-villain in this understanding of America-Russian relations. Rather, he personifies many of the qualities and attitudes that conservatives have desired in a president: a respect for traditional Christian values, a swelling nationalist pride and an aggressive posture toward foreign adversaries.

In this view, the Russian president is a brilliant tactician, a slayer of murderous Islamic extremists and not incidentally, a leader who outmaneuvered and emasculated President Barack Obama on the world stage. And because of that, almost any other transgression seems forgivable.

There are conservatives here who maybe read into Russia things they wish were true in the United States, said Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. And they imagine Russia and Putin as the kind of strong, traditional conservative leader whom they wish they had in the United States. To these conservatives, she added, Russia is the true defender of Christian values. We are decadent.

Mr. Trumps opponents have tried repeatedly to make an issue of the mutual admiration between him and the Russian president, anticipating that Republicans would not tolerate any whiff of sympathy from one of their own toward the leader of what Ronald Reagan called the evil empire. But Mr. Trump has never had to wait long for conservatives to leap to his defense and often Mr. Putins as well.

My guess is that Trump voters would say: Hey, you know what? I kind of like the fact that Putins endorsed Trump, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in December 2015. At least Putins killing terrorists. At least Putins made an enemy out of ISIS. We dont seem to be able to do that.

After Mr. Trump was elected and evidence of Russian hacking had started to accumulate, the praise for Mr. Putin from the right continued. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News host who once said Mr. Trump had considered naming her as his press secretary, said that she wished Mr. Putin could be president of the United States for just 48 hours. That way, as she put it, Americans dont have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group thats murderous and horrific like ISIS.

In dismissing the threat from Russia, Mr. Trump and many conservatives now, ironically, echo Mr. Obama, who in 2012 brushed off the warnings of Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent, that Russia was the United States No. 1 geopolitical foe.

The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, Mr. Obama scoffed during a debate with Mr. Romney, a quip that some Democrats now regret.

It would be difficult to overstate how large the Soviet Union once loomed in the Republican Partys foreign policy through four decades of the Cold War. Its dissolution softened attitudes toward Russia, but some Republicans are still baffled by Mr. Trumps friendly overtures.

Its like being raised in a church and someone says, Actually, no, youre a Buddhist, said Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mr. Romney. The role of the Republican Party has been to tell the truth about what Russia and the Soviet Union was, not what it was pretending to be, he added. Now some conservatives have gotten into the lets give Russia the benefit of the doubt business.

The unflattering comparisons with Mr. Obama became personal in 2014 after Mr. Putin invaded Crimea, an act of aggression that was widely condemned by the United States and its allies but praised as a display of brawn and guts by many on the right.

Sarah Palin, for one, questioned Mr. Obamas potency and added that no one had any such doubts about Mr. Putin. People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil, she told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Hes looking like a real man, Mr. Limbaugh declared approvingly in 2014.

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, which has tracked the conservative medias depiction of the Russian president, described Mr. Putin as taking on a Paul Bunyan-esque persona among this audience.

Mr. Putins mystique for conservatives resembles in many ways the image that Mr. Trump has cultivated for himself.

Both are go-it-alone nationalists who value strength and decisiveness over thoughtful deliberation. Both have dedicated themselves to defending Christians and their faith Mr. Trump through his religious freedom initiatives and Mr. Putin through his strengthening of ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. Both have condemned Christian persecution in the Middle East. Both have taken a more forgiving view of human rights abuses.

This is consistent with a nationalist, populist, authoritarian point of view, said William Kristol, the editor at large of the conservative Weekly Standard. That view, he added, would ridicule the promotion of human rights and democracy as globalism, or criticize occasionally deferring to allies when you want to keep them on board as weak, or mock worrying about public opinion in allied nations as nave.

The admiration of Putin is part of that story, Mr. Kristol said.

Beyond foreign policy, some conservatives saw Mr. Putin as a committed warrior in the culture wars they were losing at home. In Russia Mr. Putin led a crackdown on gay rights by taking such steps as criminalizing behavior that could be seen as promoting anything other than heterosexual relationships. This has earned him praise from leaders of the Christian right like Franklin Graham, who said in 2014 that Russia was doing more than the United States to protect its children.

Writing in 2013, Pat Buchanan, the commentator whose anti-establishment, conservative presidential campaigns in the 1990s emphasized such social issues, described Mr. Putin as a natural ally.

In the culture war for mankinds future, is he one of us? Mr. Buchanan wrote, quickly answering his own question. He is seeking to redefine the Us vs. Them world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent West.

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Reverence for Putin on the Right Buys Trump Cover - New York Times

Over the last few years, a cottage industry has emerged attempting to explain the ascendancy of a new style of far-right politics characterized by a countercultural sensibility and trafficking heavily in memefied versions of the sort of overt racism and sexism long thought to have been banished from the civilized world an intellectual and political movement that has come to be known as the alt-right. While a number of entries into this genre have attempted to uncover the alt-rights deep ideological roots, Angela Nagles newly published book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right makes the alt-right into something both more recent and familiar a spawn of the internet, as well as a bastard child of the counterculture.

As her subtitle suggests, Nagles book places the alt-right within a broader context of the online culture wars of the 2000s and 2010s, from which a number of contemporary political currents emerged. Although the alt-right draws somewhat eclectically on European reactionary philosophy and the work of older white nationalists like Jared Taylor, it is, Nagle argues, in many ways a thorough product of the 21st century. Much of the movements sensibility, characterized by a taste for anonymous and often abusive pranksterism wrapped in dense layers of self-protective irony, originated in 4chans anarchic /pol/ and /b/ forums, while many of its characteristic ideas about gender intense anti-feminism; a disillusioned view of sex; and a preoccupation with male sexual hierarchies were ported over from Manosphere hangouts such as r/TheRedPill and Return of Kings, themselves offshoots of mid-2000s pick-up-artist culture. Nagle also distinguishes between the alt-right proper open white-nationalists like Richard Spencer as well as mostly anonymous 4chan and Twitter users and the alt-light, a rogues gallery of trolls and media manipulators such as Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos, who act as the movements bridge to the mainstream while attempting, usually unconvincingly, to play down its hard edges.

Of course, to say that the alt-right is a recent creation is not to say it is sui generis. In terms of explicit intellectual influences, Nagle points to Nietzsche, the Italian fascist Julius Evola, and French New Right theorist Alain de Benoist, among others. But her book is a welcome rejoinder to the common-enough notion that the alt-right has merely repackaged old or discredited ideas about race and masculinity in a newer, edgier form. There is some of that, especially in the revival of intellectual anti-Semitism, yet Nagle is also sensitive to the fact that not only are the alt-rights outward cultural signifiers of recent origin, so too are many of the particular social pathologies that have contributed to its rise, including social isolation, millennials perpetually extended adolescence, the Darwinian dating world fostered by Tinder, and a general lack of meaning in life. (Nagle doesnt make this explicit, but it is no surprise that many of the alt-rights favorite thinkers tend to denigrate materialism and advocate a return to the transcendent and spiritual.)

Nagles origin story here will be familiar to people who have followed the alt-right Rosie Gray, David Auerbach, and others have long pinpointed its debt to chan and Reddit culture. Yet more than most writers on this issue, Nagles account of the alt-right puts a heavy emphasis on the extent to which it emerged alongside, and defined itself in opposition to, an analogous left-wing subculture that over the last five years came to exert a powerful influence in online political discourse. This subculture, which Nagle calls Tumblr liberalism but whose members are better known by the pejorative term social justice warriors, developed on Tumblr, social media, and in certain sections of the academy before spilling out into the mainstream during the late Obama years, thanks in part to signal boosts from websites like Salon, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed. Nagles book is as much a polemic against the unforced errors committed by this brand of left politics as it is an assault on the new right, which, for the unconverted at any rate, tends to discredit itself.

Tumblr liberalism, as Nagle calls it, had a number of strange outward markers, including hyperconstructionist gender politics, a fixation on pop culture, and a penchant for the public call-out. It became most famous, however, for something with the evocative name of crybullying, or, in Nagles words, a culture of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others within their political milieu. Nagle gives a number of examples of crybullying in action, many of which will be familiar to those who spend a lot of time reading about politics online. Perhaps the most indicative example, although it isnt mentioned by Nagle, was the cringeworthy Jacobinghazi scandal, in which Megan Erickson, a female editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin, was hounded for being a rape apologist (an accusation that made it into Newsweek) after defending one of her authors from the baseless charge of having mocked another writers rape threats.

Like the alt-right, this brand of leftism was primarily a creature of the Internet and social media, with its most vocal supporters and critics concentrated among the young, the college-educated, and those working in the media and the academy a small but influential population that exerts a heavy influence on the shape of online discourse. Originally, this worked to make certain pathological tendencies seem more widespread than they actually were sectarian fights that a generation ago would have been fought out in the offices of small magazines were now out in the open for all to see. But once the pattern of destructive behavior had been established, the alt-right, realizing the propaganda value of such left-wing hysteria, did what it could to amplify it, as seen with Milo Yiannopouloss Dangerous Faggot campus-speaking tour and the riots it provoked in Berkeley.

Nagle, of course, is herself on the political left, and Kill All Normies reflects her frustrations with intra-left political disputes of the last five years, which have tended to pit identitarians against a more explicitly socialist left. At one level, Nagle suggests that there was a symbiosis between the social-justice left and the alt-right: The lefts tendency to focus on racial and sexual identity while explicitly demonizing privileged groups notably straight white men may have pushed members of these groups into the arms of the alt-right, while the stronger the alt-right became, the more it confirmed the social-justice left in the belief that its critics, even those on the left, were either Nazis or Nazis useful idiots. But aside from such direct symbiosis, Nagle suspects rightly in my view that the real damage of the Tumblrization of left-politics may have been to spur a brain drain from the left, as people fled from a political brand increasingly associated with hysteria, witch-hunting, and intolerance of dissent. She writes in her conclusion that the lefts embarrassing and toxic online politics have made it a laughing stock for a whole new generation a dynamic typified by the recent student protests at Evergreen State, which, to outsiders at least, look totally insane.

Nagles criticisms of the left are harsh and will no doubt anger some, but they will also find grateful readers, especially in segments of the left where frustration with the Tumblr liberals has been bubbling under the surface for some time now. Yet aside from her account of the online culture wars, there is another, deeper line of argument running through Kill All Normies that is both more radical and more conservative than most critics seem to have noticed. In addition to tracing the alt-rights conservative and reactionary predecessors, Nagle makes an intriguing connection between its nihilistic, transgressive sensibility and the antinomian creed of aestheticized revolt characteristic of the modernist avant-garde and, more importantly, the New Left counterculture that arose in the 1960s, and which still exerts a heavy influence on contemporary thought.

Building on Joy Press and Simon Reynoldss work in The Sex Revolts, Nagle traces this sensibility from its roots in the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche to its explosion in the youth movements of the 1960s, noting how the basic form of revolt transgression against the dominant morality for its own sake stays the same even as the nominally left or right political content changes depending on the morality it rebels against. When the dominant morality was that of the white Christian America of the 1950s or even the moral majority of the 1970s, transgression assumed a progressive air. Yet in the last two decades or so, the moral code preached by the commanding heights of American culture has been a sort of neutered Baby Boomer liberalism, one that champions multicultural tolerance, a soft, health-conscious hedonism, and the entrepreneurial spirit a marriage between 60s social progressivism and the conservative economic turn of the 70s and 80s. Many of the values of the alt-right, including its ethno-nationalism, slacker shitposting ethic, and antipathy to the sexual revolution are best understood as negations of this progressive status quo.

For Nagle, this is not a coincidence but rather the logical culmination of elevating transgressive revolt to the status of a value in itself. (Not coincidentally, given the alt-rights misogyny, moral conformity is often gendered as feminine a sort of overbearing mother against which real men must rebel.) Channeling Christopher Lasch, she writes that for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.

This gets to another unity that Nagle sees between the descendants of the New Left and the alt-right, the latter coming to look, in her telling, like a heretical sect of the former. Amoral transgression, after all, is always an expression of a certain form of elitism; an aversion to the rules and tastes of the herd that, as Nagle argued in a 2016 essay for The Baffler, bridges our partisan divide. Right-wing message-board subcultures, with their hatred of normies and basic bitches, are radicalizing albeit with a much different political valence a contempt for normality inherited from the champions of Piss Christ.

Kill All Normies is an important book, albeit one whose conclusions are likely to prove unflattering and potentially unpopular. In it, the alt-right emerges as something not quite as alien as many would like to think. Rather, it is a bastardized version of the cultural currents that most of the books likely readers myself included participate in and valorize. And although there may be no easy way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into stabbings in Portland, riots in Berkeley, and Trump in the White House the books indictment of our elitist culture wars does point toward an inevitable, if slightly horrifying conclusion: Perhaps the normies arent so bad after all.

The site is reportedly closer to running out of funds than many expected.

The domino effect is hard to watch.

Then I dont need a jacket.

Itll hit stores next year.

The FCC and Congress have a lot of reading to do.

Conclusion? No collusion.

Angela Nagles Kill All Normies is among the best examinations of the origins of the alt-right.

No matter how much politicians and law enforcement might wish for it, a compromise on encryption cant happen.

Amazon is considering allowing third-party app developers access to your voice queries to Alexa.

Donald Trump Jr. and the Kremlin are at the heart of todays burgeoning Twitter meme.

AlphaBay, an online bazaar for drugs and other contraband, disappeared over a week ago and took millions of dollars with it.

Talking with New Yorks attorney general about net neutrality and what his office has seen while investigating broadband providers.

Thats one way to tell your neighbor what you think of them.

The company initially tested the ads with users in Thailand and Australia.

Five minutes and 25 seconds of chill vibes.

Some of the incentives were as high as $400,000.

My new sous-vide circulator comes with an internet connection, which is convenient both for me and for any teenage hackers creating a botnet.

Nobody should be able to work a knife that fast.

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The Unflattering Familiarity of the Alt-Right in Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies - New York Magazine

Speaking to Salman Rushdie at a recent PEN World Festival event in New York, controversial Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan asked how the celebrated author continued to write after facing life-or-death persecution (a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini) over his 1988 work The Satanic Verses.

Although Rabinyan has never had a price on her head, the Israeli government censored her novel All the Rivers, a Palestinian-Israeli love story, when it was published in Hebrew in 2014, making her a punching bag for right-wing zealots in the country.

"You have to learn how to think, 'Fuck them,'" Rushdie told her.

With her book just released in English (Penguin/Random House), she's trying to learn to care less and to put the past behind her. But it's hard to shake the shock of being at the center of one of Israel's biggest arts scandals, a symbol of the internecine culture wars between right and left.

"It was so delicate [that there seemed to be] no chance that it would be controversial," she thought while she wrote the novel, in part a tribute to Palestinian artist Hasan Hourani, who drowned in 2003 sometime after their love affair in New York City. "It's such a sweet memory of love. Sweetened by the forbidden color we were both very young," Rabinyan tells Rolling Stone of the romance.

But the Israeli government didn't see it that way. Benjamin Netyanyahu's conservative regime has increasingly taken to meddle in non-state matters; its cultural minister, Miri Regev, has said she wants to overthrow the liberal, secular European elite, denying public funding to any projects that don't support her Zionist values.

Upon the book's release, Rabinyan woke up one morning to find herself on the cover of every newspaper in her country. "The education system does not need to promote values that are against the values of the country," Education Minister Naftali Bennett said of her decision to remove the book from the country's compulsory high school reading list in order "to preserve the identity and heritage of the students. Intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threaten individual identity."

International media camped out on her doorstep in Tel Aviv. Rabinyan got spat on at her local minimart. Literati like David Grossman, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua threw their support behind her, fearful of the fate of the arts.

Book sales skyrocketed.

It all overwhelmed her. Rabinyan, now 44, found early fame when she published her first novel, Persian Brides, at 22 in 1995. She had no idea that All the Rivers would cause such a stir.

And to the American reader, it might be similarly perplexing. This Romeo and Juliet tale opens in post-9/11 Manhattan, with a chance meeting between two Middle Easterners: 29-year-old Israeli Liat and Hilmi, a Palestinian painter two years her junior. The two bond over being expats, hating the brutal winter, missing their families and the sweet smell of jasmine back home. While their past and backgrounds color almost all their interactions, this is not a political novel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That's why the censure took Rabinyan by surprise. "[It wasn't] provocative, or trying to inflame conservative thought," she says, pointing out that Liat never really considers a long-term relationship with Hilmi because of her own deep-rooted prejudices. In fact, when the book first came out, Rabinyan got flak from the left because they thought it went too easy on Israelis. Only months later, when the Education Ministry banned it (the government denies the term, only admitting they removed it from the curriculum) did Rabinyan begin to understand their problem.

"Why the hostility?" she wonders now. "The same reason witches were hunted in medieval times. They were practicing magic. Literature is our magic. Our potion is identification, this ability to step out of your own skin and your own realities to ... to sink into an identity that is foreign to you, to wear the gaze of the other." Her book's crime, she muses, is that it presented Palestinians with empathy. "In Israel today, to prove your patriotism, you need to carry only one perspective. Otherwise it's considered disloyal."

Rabinyan says what happened to her should serve as a warning in the U.S.. "Israel has never had been so tribal, so fundamentalist, so chauvinist, so isolated, so self-righteous. This is the spirit of our times walls and barriers and buffers and obsessing about your national identity being preserved, the fear of letting in outside influences; I can see it happening in America," she says.

But the author also has trenchant advice for Americans struggling to cope in the Trump's era where, on her current book tour, she sees how our own culture wars are tearing us apart, just like in her homeland."First, take a deep breath," she suggests. "Acknowledge there's going to be some time of alienation, that the people who govern, who decide your future and the next generation's don't reflect any of your common values, what you consider to be American." She counsels patience and community not devastation. "[That's] a privilege you cannot indulge in or you will be defeated."

She continues, "We have to engage with the other side, the one that you're so hostile to, and is so annoying to you, the obstacle to everything you aspire [to]."

Now, she adds, it's more important than ever for artists to continue to create.

"This is the only thing that literature can do: it makes us humanistic creatures," she says. "People know this intuitively, they know that empathy is the cure."

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The rest is here:
Banned Israeli Author Warns Americans: It Could Happen Here - RollingStone.com

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Bolshoi Ballet Swept Up in Russia's Cultural Debate Wall Street Journal (subscription) MOSCOWIt was supposed to be the hottest ticket of Moscow's theater season: A ballet based on the life of legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Instead, critics say it has become a casualty of Russia's culture wars. Days before a scheduled Tuesday premiere ... and more »

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Bolshoi Ballet Swept Up in Russia's Cultural Debate - Wall Street Journal (subscription)