Kids no longer have permission to be heterodox without having to commit to it as their public identity.

A quick note on Jim Geraghty’s excellent Morning Jolt about Malcolm Gladwell’s repentance for what he now acknowledges to be his hypocrisy during an earlier era of enforced ideological conformity. Back in 2022, at the height of the maximally claustrophobic, panopticon “Peak Woke” era, Gladwell chaired a conference panel on transgender athletes that (predictably) included transgender panelists who bullied an entire room full of polite liberals — Gladwell included — into accepting fundamentally absurd arguments like, “You have to let us win.”

Gladwell regrets it now, and he’s not alone, as a whole sector of center-left pundits and thinkers are taking this brief thaw in the Stalinist edifice of progressive politics to register their dissatisfaction with being required to pretend that men are women — at least when it comes to competitive athletics. (When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, one imagines these reservations will be stowed in a convenient memory hole.) But I was most taken by this line in Jim’s piece, and for slightly different reasons:

If 90 percent of the public feels a certain way, but only 5 percent are willing to say so, doesn’t that seem like a formula for consequential bad decisions? Particularly if you believe in “the wisdom of crowds.”

Are there other current issues where 90 percent of the public feels a certain way, but only 5 percent are willing to say so, for fear of social ostracization and dire professional consequences? If so, wouldn’t we all be better off if we all said what we thought? Or is the ideological spectrum now so large, and the Overton Window now so wide open, that if we did, we’d all be horrified by what our fellow citizens actually thought?

Well, that really depends on who’s reading this piece, now, doesn’t it? But Jim is onto something when he references the artificially stopped valves that the media (and progressive activists, and academics, etc.) have screwed down on an entire generation of Americans, leading to all sorts of mutations under pressure — into far darker corners than any seriously contemplated in my youth.

One theme I’ve been hammering on this week is the “hidden world” of politics: the less visible and poorly understood, but hugely important, forces shaping our current political discourse and its future. And thus I would like to direct your attention to what an entire generation of young conservatives has secretly suffered on their way to the present moment. Imagine what it took to make a college-aged kid openly right-wing in 2025 and what kind of social and/or professional risk it posed. Think about the pressure Malcolm Gladwell confessed to facing — as a “made man,” in a room as toothless as a denture convention — and now multiply it a hundredfold when contemplating how a normal kid might have felt in the same situation.

I had a telling exchange earlier this week with a younger colleague, when we were discussing the experience of campus conservatives in 2025. With my typical old man bluster, I said “Oh, I remember what it was like, I can totally relate.” And with a gently disbelieving smile, she shook her head and responded, “Well . . . really now? Can you?”

I totally deserved it. It was an amusingly humbling moment — a healthy reminder that us Olds often make the mistake of projecting our own experiences, from a much earlier era, onto a new generation. And indeed, it’s true — as a college kid during that strange, liminal 1998–2003 phase of history, my “come at me, bro” conservatism was treated as an acceptable (even curiously charming) quirk among a student population that largely could not have cared less about politics.

Nowadays they’d probably burn me in a wicker man on my school’s upper quad were I to try that sort of stunt. Kids no longer have permission to be heterodox without having to commit to it as their public identity throughout their young lives, with little room to develop their ideas in contention with those who disagree — because the price of disagreement is now usually social death.

And so an entire generation of right-wingers has grown up almost out of sight from the ones they will eventually replace. They are compelled to retreat to the shadows, to safer spaces — not in the “snowflake” sense of that term but in the very real sense of safety from cancellation. And in loose chat among friends, all manner of stranger intellectual conversations begin to bloom, this time with the bond that comes from sharing a sense of oppression and a list of proscribed conversational topics. It will be an interesting intellectual harvest, if nothing else.