Many ask me why I am so confident that we have finally reached a turning point in the process of pushing back the progressive content worlds on campus. As a historian, I try to look at past cases, and try to compare patterns of action in the present and try to project them onto the future and from them try to extract a pattern of action.
The saying "history tends to repeat itself" is very relevant and we see it every day. The images we see from campuses in America are a process that was painstakingly built on more than 200 campuses across the United States that has already seeped for years into the administration and lecturers and in recent years to students. Through Qatari money in Sisyphean ant work, with a lot of tolerance that eventually managed to connect to a powerful machine called TikTok, the narrative managed to gain control and take root on American campuses.
Part of my doctoral work was to examine how an evangelical movement grew in the 1970s, which is – if you will – a kind of almost artificial phenomenon, which of course relies on many vectors and a Twitter format cannot concentrate or serve as a substitute for 220 pages, but I do want to try to address one significant segment: the phenomenon of pushing back the permissiveness of the 1960s.
The evangelical movement grew as a phenomenon against the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s in America and promoted Christian family values, as described by Kristin Kobes Du Mez in her book: "From the 1960s onward, evangelicals showed a commitment to the term 'law and order.' What began as a response to hippies, antiwar activists, free spirits, and urban minorities grew into a movement..."
In the 1970s we witness a mass movement of people seeking refuge among conservatism and terms that swing the pendulum back to the opposite side of the permissive 1960s. The movement is so dramatic, and sweeps up so many tens of millions, that it earned the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines in 1976. This period we are living in, in which the picture of life on American campuses has become distorted, has reached a point where it demands the involvement of much larger forces and an inward look at the need to fix and re-divide into political camps ahead of the 2028 elections.
I'm not saying everything will change overnight, but I can estimate with a very high degree of probability that the backlash is already here and that the idea itself of kicking out the red-green alliance was realized in the period between the current election and the next. We are already seeing activity at the level of the government, Congress, the public, and the media. They are already recalculating the trajectory with the understanding that the event has already spiraled out of control, and to see pictures of students holding a Hezbollah flag is completely illogical, and that's not the reason parents pay $80,000 a year.
Originally published on the author's X account, found here.
