What’s more, victimhood culture is already spreading beyond the universities, making the case for pessimism even stronger. Corporations and government agencies, even NASA, have begun doing their own microaggression training. In Multnomah County, Oregon, a recent contract between the county and the municipal workers union guaranteed that “the County and union won’t tolerate any form of ‘microaggression.’” And the Times recently hired Sarah Jeong to its editorial board despite her history of tweeting slurs against whites and men—things like “#CancelWhitePeople” and “White men are bullshit,” the kind of things that are common among campus activists but were not previously part of the mainstream. And while the Times did distance itself from the tweets, writers at Vox and other left-of-center outlets defended them. Ezra Klein, for example, said tweets like “#CancelWhitePeople” are simply calls for people to challenge the dominant power structure. And Zack Beauchamp says that “White men are bullshit” is a way of pointing out the existence of a power structure favoring white men.

The rise of a new moral culture may be hard to arrest. Articles and books won’t do it, but even an organization like Heterodox Academy seems to have been ineffective in its goal of increasing political diversity at universities. And maybe there’s no way it could have succeeded. John Wright discusses “the problems that inevitably accompany efforts at elevating heterodox thinking within the academy,” including the fact that liberals so greatly outnumber conservatives: “The Left virtually owns the institution and a fair number of professors in the humanities and social sciences view conservatives with open contempt.” But under these circumstances how can Heterodox Academy appeal to the Left without compromising its mission? Wright points out that at Heterodox Academy’s recent meeting in New York last summer, 25 of the 28 panelists were left–of–center. And it showed: Among other shortcomings, “there was no mention of the rise of ‘victims’ programs rooted in intersectional grievances. No mention of the impact postmodernism has had on the academy. No mention of biased research areas produced by the ideological dominance of the Left, or the fact that what now counts as research in some fields is so embarrassing that Twitter accounts mock it because faculty can’t or won’t.”