StewMama- Radically Moderate

This explains our current The Science moment so well.

They need our help. Now more than ever. Bring the California refugees home.

🚨 NOW: The Trump administration is launching a Super Intelligence site that will let Americans change their last name after marriage in ONE SINGLE FORM — which usually requires HOURS or DAYS to fix every government document "You'll be able to change your name right on the platform." "This would've taken weeks, multiple filings, different agency websites, if you even knew where to start." This is perfect! Saving Americans' time is INVALUABLE

Well, this is sad and terrible: “Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S.” “Psychologists say young adults’ definition of harmful parental behavior is changing.” They “consider ordinary conflict to be much worse than it once was” and “have a much broader definition than their elders of psychological harm.” “Many now view repeated criticism, strong disagreements and other painful relationship conflicts as abusive.” “In their minds, they see themselves as more enlightened and therefore more justified to cut off for more reasons.”

"I even think that it’s really wrong for parents to ever try to push reading before 5," says Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at UCLA. (1/n)

Yeah this is accurate

Everyone should read @Tyler_A_Harper’s extraordinary Atlantic cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” It is one of the best accounts yet of how bad American campuses became between roughly 2015 and 2025, peaking from 2020 to 2023. It was a disaster for academic freedom, free speech, and higher education’s credibility. It also helped destroy trust in shared facts, because people stopped believing that our supposed referees would scrutinize claims that fit their own ideology as aggressively as claims from the other side. Now there is a concerted effort to pretend either that none of this happened, or that it was merely a strange youthful indiscretion we can laugh off, much as people tried to do with the first great age of political correctness. We must not let them wish it away. If you experienced the quasi-religious groupthink that overtook institutions supposedly devoted to inquiry, write about it. Record what happened, what people were afraid to say, and why. Otherwise, this period will be rewritten by many of the same people who defended the status quo while casting themselves as brave underdogs. Looking at you, @rottenindenmark, among others. Doing PR work for a $1 trillion industry is not exactly fighting for social justice. I also have always seen this through a class lens. Elite higher education is a gigantic industry that disproportionately benefits people who are already well-off. Yes, people like me can get through it and have our lives transformed. But we are a small part of the story. There is an older intellectual history here. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse confronted a frustrating problem: the working class often failed to behave as intellectuals expected and an awful lot of working people hated intellectuals. Ordinary Americans liked their country, distrusted elites, and seemed perfectly capable of living without philosopher-kings directing them. The solution was an newideology that allowed highly educated elites to regard working-class people with contempt while still seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed. That became academia’s problem when universities built departments, bureaucracies, hiring systems, and professional cultures that treated deeply contestable political doctrines as moral dogma. You can see the results throughout Tyler’s story: classism, utter contempt for locals, exaggerated self-importance, ordinary disputes transformed into battles of good and evil, and politicized administrators remarkably skilled at weaponizing elite ideology against their own institutions. Tyler’s piece is both testimony and warning. There are excellent university presidents trying to right the ship, but too many faculty organizations and professional associations still seem to believe the ideology was never the problem—it simply wasn’t imposed consistently enough. We need to document what happened and build institutions less vulnerable to another episode like it. Because this was never some weird, isolated campus disaster. It spread into journalism, science, philanthropy, corporations, K–12 education, government, and politics. It damaged the credibility of the institutions we depend on to tell us what is true. A society that loses faith in its knowledge-producing institutions eventually loses something more important than the reputation of its universities: its ability to see the world as it is.

I try to keep an open mind about new ideas and opinions, but this take on parents and children is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Douthat’s response is perfect:

All Americans want is our elections to be as secure as a Communist’s grocery store. That’s it.

An important, must read, side-by-side comparison of Mao’s communism and the Democratic Socialist platform. To summarize, the DSA is a grave threat to our democracy.

Here ya go.

God Bless America

Americans will look you dead in the eye and tell you California and New York are just as different as Germany and France because they say pop instead of soda and have different fast food chains or something.

When I was in my 20’s I was on a TV show. When Karen Bass was in her 20’s, she was training in terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare with communists in Cuba. Back when the LA Times was still in LA, and used to tell the truth…

It wasn't just me. It was everyone I worked with. I stopped waiting tables in 2019. What do you think people did before DoorDash?