It is important to recognize that Bill Maher’s HBO show, “Real Time,” is the successor to a similar show called “Politically Incorrect,” which went on the air in 1993. For three decades, in other words, Maher has been inveighing directly or indirectly against “political correctness,” what he perceives as overly sensitive demands to moderate public conversations.
Yet here we all are, 30 years later. “Politically correct,” already stale back then, has become “woke,” but it’s the same fight.
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On his show last week, Maher hosted a comrade-in-arms in his existential forever war: Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
After an effusive, hagiographic introduction, the topic turned to what the pair call “the woke mind virus.” That’s Musk’s preferred pejorative for what he frames as a left-wing assault on the First Amendment: people asking to be identified by particular pronouns, for example, or private-sector limits on misinformation.
“It’s fairly recent,” Maher said of his opponent of three decades. “How did it start? And why?”
“I was trying to figure out where it’s coming from,” Musk replied. “I think it’s actually been a long time brewing, in that I think it’s been going on for a while.” Maybe 30-plus years?
“The amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize,” Musk continued.
Musk has said this before. In March, he stated on Twitter that “[p]arents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges.” On that occasion, there was a specific trigger: Stanford University law school students were protesting their dean in connection with an appearance by a conservative judge.
How this might constitute a “Soviet level of indoctrination” isn’t clear. But it’s not really meant to. It’s Musk using this incident as a peg to elevate this idea he has embraced. This happens a lot, including on Maher’s show: Anecdotal things happen and are presented as evidence of a pattern. In this case, that pattern is the indoctrination of college students by (presumably) left-wing professors or teachers.
As I wrote at the time, there’s no real evidence that young people who attend college are having their political views changed as a function of classroom instruction or educator influence.
College-educated Americans tend to vote more heavily Democratic than other Americans, a trend that has gained steam over time. But it’s hard to disentangle that from other factors that might play a role, such as the inherent presentation of varying worldviews at college — worldviews experienced in class, in the dorms and in the surrounding, often urban, communities.
Probably the most important shift that has occurred in recent decades is that younger Americans are more likely to be Asian, Black or Hispanic. All age groups have grown more accepting of LGBTQ Americans over time, but younger Americans are the most accepting — and the most likely to identify as LGBTQ.
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So if we’re using “woke mind virus” as a disparaging way to refer to calls for increased consideration of issues and terminology centered on non-White and LGBTQ people, there’s a more obvious explanation than “students are being hypnotized by their Contemporary Studies prof”: More students fall into categories affected by that new consideration.
If you are not a young person, not someone who is LGBTQ or Asian, Black or Hispanic — if you are, instead, an older White person such as Musk or Maher or most of the members of the Republican Party — this might not occur to you.
Since young people are usually in or more recently out of school, you simply assume it’s the schools that are doing this. It’s not that your rhetoric and your decades-long focus on casting the decrease in the percentage of White Americans (however accurate that measurement) as inherently threatening doesn’t play well with non-White young people; it’s that they are being convinced by their civic teachers that George Washington was bad, and that’s inspiring them to vote for John Fetterman.
So how do you respond? Well, if you have the money — or even if you don’t have the money, apparently — you buy Twitter and create your vision of “free speech.” If you are a legislator at the state level, you try to uproot these purported indoctrination mechanisms at the source.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), for example, has been very active on this front, treating diversity staffers at colleges as primary targets for elimination and taking over the leadership of a state liberal arts school. In other states, legislatures have explored options for making it easier to remove tenured professors from their positions. Catch a professor talking about critical race theory? Start the complaint process.
In North Carolina, for example, the legislature is considering a bill that would remove tenure and put state university faculty on shorter-term contracts. Those contracts would be robust but not ironclad — and a far cry from tenure. DeSantis signed a bill last year that introduced tenure review every five years, claiming that tenure “created more of an intellectual orthodoxy.”
It’s easy to visualize a slippery slope here. Without tenure protections, schools in those states become less appealing to top-tier educators. Perceptions of the quality of education that those schools offer might decline — or actually decline, a detriment to in-state students. There will be less incentive for students to stick around to seek long-term positions with those universities.
Colleges and universities provide something other than income to states: They also provide economic advantages. School employees and students pour a lot of money into local economies directly, but they also generally boost gross domestic product in the surrounding region. California is an economic powerhouse in no small part because of Silicon Valley; Silicon Valley is a powerhouse in no small part because it is the home of Stanford University.
It’s certainly possible that universities that retract tenure protections will not see sharp negative effects over the near or medium term. (To draw an analogy: Twitter still runs, if far differently and less appealingly, than it used to.) But legislators are putting these local engines at risk largely because they think that, along with economic output, they are generating liberal woke-ists. Because people such as Musk and Maher are insisting that’s happening.
As “political correctness” has been since before President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Yet here we all are, 30 years later. “Politically correct,” already stale back then, has become “woke,” but it’s the same fight.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
On his show last week, Maher hosted a comrade-in-arms in his existential forever war: Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
After an effusive, hagiographic introduction, the topic turned to what the pair call “the woke mind virus.” That’s Musk’s preferred pejorative for what he frames as a left-wing assault on the First Amendment: people asking to be identified by particular pronouns, for example, or private-sector limits on misinformation.
“It’s fairly recent,” Maher said of his opponent of three decades. “How did it start? And why?”
“I was trying to figure out where it’s coming from,” Musk replied. “I think it’s actually been a long time brewing, in that I think it’s been going on for a while.” Maybe 30-plus years?
“The amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize,” Musk continued.
Musk has said this before. In March, he stated on Twitter that “[p]arents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges.” On that occasion, there was a specific trigger: Stanford University law school students were protesting their dean in connection with an appearance by a conservative judge.
How this might constitute a “Soviet level of indoctrination” isn’t clear. But it’s not really meant to. It’s Musk using this incident as a peg to elevate this idea he has embraced. This happens a lot, including on Maher’s show: Anecdotal things happen and are presented as evidence of a pattern. In this case, that pattern is the indoctrination of college students by (presumably) left-wing professors or teachers.
As I wrote at the time, there’s no real evidence that young people who attend college are having their political views changed as a function of classroom instruction or educator influence.
College-educated Americans tend to vote more heavily Democratic than other Americans, a trend that has gained steam over time. But it’s hard to disentangle that from other factors that might play a role, such as the inherent presentation of varying worldviews at college — worldviews experienced in class, in the dorms and in the surrounding, often urban, communities.
Probably the most important shift that has occurred in recent decades is that younger Americans are more likely to be Asian, Black or Hispanic. All age groups have grown more accepting of LGBTQ Americans over time, but younger Americans are the most accepting — and the most likely to identify as LGBTQ.
ADVERTISING
So if we’re using “woke mind virus” as a disparaging way to refer to calls for increased consideration of issues and terminology centered on non-White and LGBTQ people, there’s a more obvious explanation than “students are being hypnotized by their Contemporary Studies prof”: More students fall into categories affected by that new consideration.
If you are not a young person, not someone who is LGBTQ or Asian, Black or Hispanic — if you are, instead, an older White person such as Musk or Maher or most of the members of the Republican Party — this might not occur to you.
Since young people are usually in or more recently out of school, you simply assume it’s the schools that are doing this. It’s not that your rhetoric and your decades-long focus on casting the decrease in the percentage of White Americans (however accurate that measurement) as inherently threatening doesn’t play well with non-White young people; it’s that they are being convinced by their civic teachers that George Washington was bad, and that’s inspiring them to vote for John Fetterman.
So how do you respond? Well, if you have the money — or even if you don’t have the money, apparently — you buy Twitter and create your vision of “free speech.” If you are a legislator at the state level, you try to uproot these purported indoctrination mechanisms at the source.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), for example, has been very active on this front, treating diversity staffers at colleges as primary targets for elimination and taking over the leadership of a state liberal arts school. In other states, legislatures have explored options for making it easier to remove tenured professors from their positions. Catch a professor talking about critical race theory? Start the complaint process.
In North Carolina, for example, the legislature is considering a bill that would remove tenure and put state university faculty on shorter-term contracts. Those contracts would be robust but not ironclad — and a far cry from tenure. DeSantis signed a bill last year that introduced tenure review every five years, claiming that tenure “created more of an intellectual orthodoxy.”
It’s easy to visualize a slippery slope here. Without tenure protections, schools in those states become less appealing to top-tier educators. Perceptions of the quality of education that those schools offer might decline — or actually decline, a detriment to in-state students. There will be less incentive for students to stick around to seek long-term positions with those universities.
Colleges and universities provide something other than income to states: They also provide economic advantages. School employees and students pour a lot of money into local economies directly, but they also generally boost gross domestic product in the surrounding region. California is an economic powerhouse in no small part because of Silicon Valley; Silicon Valley is a powerhouse in no small part because it is the home of Stanford University.
It’s certainly possible that universities that retract tenure protections will not see sharp negative effects over the near or medium term. (To draw an analogy: Twitter still runs, if far differently and less appealingly, than it used to.) But legislators are putting these local engines at risk largely because they think that, along with economic output, they are generating liberal woke-ists. Because people such as Musk and Maher are insisting that’s happening.
As “political correctness” has been since before President Bill Clinton’s administration.
