Mediaboss Marketing

Excellent podcast. These sort of nuanced conversations feel like a distant memory nowadays.

I was born in 1990, and was in the last months of high school as the 2008 primaries were happening. For many of my formative years, Fox News seemed like *the* representation of the right. It made it feel as though the American right wing was populated by completely crazy people like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. The right was a party of racists, idiots, anti-intellectuals and conspiracy theorists, or so I thought. Thus began my own slide to the left.

As an adult I'm happy to find more center-right perspectives, and really look forward to reading the Dispatch and the Bulwark every day.

This is completely my own perspective, but I wonder how much the sharp left lean that universities have taken is a result of that anti-intellectual streak the right has had for a while. Like, perhaps over time it has created some sort of cultural expectation.

I know some younger friends still in their late teens, who lean both right and left, through video game communities that I'm in. The ones who lean left often talk as if they *have* to go to university, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense for their desired career path. Like, they feel as if they want to be an artist, for example, they have to go get an art degree (bad idea btw) or they are somehow lesser than their peers.

On the other hand, it feels like the teenagers who lean right have no interest in higher education whatsoever. Like, they've read Jordan Peterson and seem to believe that they'll somehow make 90k a year for tiding their bedrooms (exaggerating, but you get the idea). To them, it's almost like this... lifestyle/aesthetic, where you wear a suit and tie, do your hair up well, and act rude toward the 'libs', then success will be handed to you when it's your turn or something. As if they're just trying to emulate Ben Shapiro, without any sort of critical thought process behind it.

They have very little interest in classic small-government conservatism, and I don't think I've ever heard any one of them express opposition to abortion (which was THE issue I'd stay up late discussing with my conservative friends when I was in college, along with gay marriage). And they just kind of... end up where they end up. Working retail, doing side jobs.

This is starting to have a trickle down effect as well. I work as a software developer, and our company culture has a distinct left lean. It's not that we don't want to hire people based on political views, but we just don't get that many applicants who hold conservative views.

I would love to get universities back to the confluence of ideas that it was when I attended, but with current cultural trends I wonder how feasible it is.

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Blue Pill or Red Pill - The Dispatch