and part of it's just experience--in 2016 when students were praying, crying, and screaming in professors' faces for saying they were mature enough to handle seeing a Halloween costume (of course since they're Yalies, they'll never be able to cope with the real world) it was genuinely shocking: by 2017 the attitude was shifting a bit, because every week a bunch of 20yos were storming the offices with a list of non-negotiable demands about a subject they'd just learned about last quarter; and next year the noserings and bluehairs will be back demanding left-handedness be recognized as a disability or that toilet paper must be hung a certain way or some bloody other thing

"we're the oncoming new generation, like it or not!" didn't last long either: sure they're in the HR departments and the exploding academic administratum and others make a living saying Rome never existed on TikTok, but in the end their booby prize (heh) is Dylan Mulvaney meeting the ultimate Boomer, a chickenhawk who wrote the 1994 Crime Bill and is falling behind Trump (and wasn't he supposed to fire up the crematoria, cancel the elections, and start WWIII all by 2018? there were articles in prestige magazines by professors saying all that)

the more scabrous lefties pointed out that the candidate who freed slaves was attacked as having a "Black woman problem" by the candidate who had house slaves as First Lady of Arkansas; those shouted down over Dr. Seuss had the last laugh when the same people started howling over school libraries next year; Believe All Women got the one-two punch of Tara Reade and Amber Heard; they memory-holed non-minstrel blackface and the word "retarded" from several shows, and kiboshed the Land o'Lakes lass, and nothing changed in meatspace (in fact the litany is still "racism and sexism are worse today than they were in 1953!")

people say "it's a religion" but I'm specifically reminded of the to-do over gurus in the 70s, how they thought weird Hindu offshoots would displace Christianity itself: heck, as late as 1995 Carl Sagan was seriously worried scientists would be burned alive by New Agers, enough to put it in a book (about detecting barmy claims from trusted sources, no less); it's real fun to see Rennie Davis's brain break completely and join a cult