#institutional capture

This isn’t about tone or decorum.

It’s about power.

Controlling memory is how you control people.

The Founders didn’t debate this.

They named it.

Tyranny.

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: May 14, 2026

David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025.

A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university's football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains.

"I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager," Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat.

Then he sat through his first anti-racism class.

On the first day of "Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws," a required course for all first-year law students, Blackman listened as a transgender faculty member, Emily Spottswood, explained why the course was mandatory.

"It’s not optional," Spottswood said, because "being a lawyer is about recognizing and combating injustice."

In audio of the session obtained by the Free Beacon, Spottswood said that this "institutional message" was "baked into" the law school's "DNA," adding that, as a "trans woman," the course's focus on "combatting oppression … is meaningful to me."

Spottswood's remarks followed a presentation by Jeffrey Dodge, the law school's associate dean, and Shaakirrah Sanders, who was introduced as "the first associate Dean of anti-racism and critical pedagogy in the country." The presentation made clear that Blackman wasn't in Texas anymore; he and his classmates were now conscripts in a political "coalition" that, as Dodge put it in his talk, was dedicated to "building a more anti-racist" future.

"We are taking action to disrupt and dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress," Dodge said. "We … want to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism … as a foundation for this course."

Thus began a series of struggle sessions in which professors demanded students affirm activist talking points and ultimately drove Blackman, whose first-choice law school had been Penn State, to withdraw from the school after just one semester. (The Free Beacon reviewed Blackman's transcript.) Over the course of three 150-minute lectures, speakers described all white people as "privileged," called to "eradicate patriarchy," and asserted that the justice system is "about keeping black people in their place." One assignment said students should "consider" framing their essays around "the reality of systemic racism," implying that doing otherwise could affect a student's grade.

"Consider drawing on the instruction we provided on design thinking as a way to frame your assignment," the essay prompt read. Linked below were slides from the first session of the class, which defined "institutional anti-racism" as "acknowledg[ing] the reality of systemic racism, subordination, and oppression."

Launched in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests, the class is now raising questions about whether a public law school violated the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. Blackman withdrew from the law school after a committee convened by law school dean Danielle Conway refused to grant him an exemption from the course, which he said amounted to compelled speech. In an interview with the Free Beacon, he also noted that the course vilified white people and law enforcement and that professors assigned texts by critical race theorists without presenting an alternative perspective.

"My law degree is not worth sitting through a mandatory DEI class that spits on my entire background," said Blackman, who helped the Texas Guard deliver emergency supplies during Hurricane Beryl. "You have a lot of people who say DEI is bad, but I gave up a law career because of it."

Penn State is a land-grant university with significant ties to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.), who controls 9 of the 36 voting spots on the board of trustees. Along with the law school's strategic plan, which pledges to expand "employment opportunities for candidates who are underrepresented in the University," the course is a stark example of how DEI remains entrenched in many Democratic institutions even as the legal threats to such programs continue to grow.

The America First Policy Institute told the law school in April that the class creates "a racially hostile educational environment in violation of Title VI." And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said Penn State may have violated the First Amendment by pressuring students to "acknowledge" contested claims about white supremacy.

"That would in many cases be compelled speech," said Zach Greenberg, an attorney at FIRE, adding that the analysis would turn on whether students could question those claims without being marked down. "Even if there is not a legal case to be made, we hope that universities are open to a wide array of viewpoints when they’re teaching students."

For his part, Blackman felt pressured to toe the line. Asked to submit an essay on "systemic racism in the law," he wrote about Texas's strict drug laws—which he believed should be reformed—but framed the issue as a matter of racial justice rather than colorblind fairness.

"I added a lot of color that doesn't really stand up with my beliefs to get a passing grade," Blackman said. Penn State did not respond to a request for comment.

Blackman had been willing to put up with the readings from Paul Butler, a Georgetown University Law Center professor who argues that police are "looking for a reason to arrest" black men, and with Penn State's propensity for progressive neologisms, such as "intersectional liberal democracy." The straw that broke the camel's back was a statement from Conway, the law school's dean, condemning Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"This weekend's blanket of snow with its clean, white veneer starkly contrasts with the conflagration enveloping the rule of law," Conway wrote in a school-wide message on Jan. 26, 2026, referencing the deaths of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota earlier that month. "Our power lies in activating critical pedagogy to teach and learn about the importance of our nation’s constitutional order in real time and to voice the need for accountability and transparency to our representatives."

Blackman drafted a reply to the email, thanking Conway for her "effort to create space for reflection" but politely pushing back on her "one-sided view of deeply contested events," which he said could "undermine confidence in the school's neutrality."

"Leadership communications, as the public-facing voice of the law school, carry special weight," he wrote to a school-wide listserv. "It is not in the best interest of the law school, or our educational mission, to appear to prematurely assign blame before … an investigation is concluded and all facts are fully established."

But when Blackman attempted to send the email, he was notified that a moderator for the listserv had blocked the message.

"Your message was rejected by a moderator for these recipients," read the note from Kalene Faircloth, the law school's senior associate director of academic and student services, who did not provide a rationale for the decision.

Fed up with the blatant act of censorship, Blackman filed a petition with the provost's office demanding a "University-level audit of the Race and the Equal Protection of the Law … course and the concurrent administrative suppression of student speech."

"Evidence demonstrates that Penn State Dickinson Law has established a 'Closed Loop' of state-enforced orthodoxy," the seven-exhibit complaint read. "The Dean broadcasts the ideology (Exhibit D), the Curriculum compels students to advocate for it (Exhibit C), and Administrators censor legal dissent (Exhibit F)."

But rather than launch its own audit, Penn State punted the petition to Conway—the very dean who was the subject of the complaint. Conway, the executive director of Penn State's Antiracist Development Institute, was also the driving force behind the creation of the anti-racism class, which she credits with exposing students to "the structure that supports the nation's constitutional democracy."

"REPL allows us to teach that through the lens of enslavement and racism," she said in a press release about the course. "We use critical pedagogy to analyze how a governing system founded on a pledge of democratic ideals produces systemic inequity when legal, social, economic and civil obstacles limit liberty for those othered in society."

The 2024 press release also noted that Conway attends every session of the class.

"It was an obvious conflict of interest," Blackman said. He quoted a Latin saying, "nemo iudex in causa sua," which means "no one should be a judge in their own case."

On Feb. 26, the law school informed Blackman that he would not be excused from the class.

"We conclude that none of the remedial actions you seek to have the university take are required," law professor Jud Mathews said, writing on behalf of a committee Conway had convened. "To graduate from the law school, you will need to complete all required courses, including REPL."

That was the last straw. Blackman withdrew from the law school rather than complete the course, returning to Texas for a master's degree in business administration.

Before he left, he gave Conway one final piece of his mind.

"As a former member of law enforcement in the Great State of Texas, I abhor everything this class teaches and will no longer be even a passive participant in such a farce," Blackman wrote in an email on Feb. 27. "I am 'free to think, and speak as I wish, not as the government or law school demands.'"

The full audio recordings of two class sessions are included below.

==

This is "Emily" Spottswood, the man speaking in the beginning of the first audio recording.

You don't get to pretende to be "oppressed" when you can coerce others into mimicking your opinions with the threat of an undeserved failing grade.

When making claims about the influence of trans people, gender critical campaigners point to organisations such as Stonewall. They decry such organisations “winning” or “capturing” institutions. In this, gender criticals include lobbying such institutions to acknowledge the existence of trans children and adolescents, promote inclusive language and imagery, using the word “cis”, or suggesting the Equality Act 2010 being interpreted as intended by those who drafted it.

At the extremes, they catastrophise about perceiving a trans or gender diverse person in any gendered public or private space or anywhere near children and young people. Part of their strategy is to claim that the trans rights movement is very successful in taking control of institutions, framed as a type of conspiracy theory.

“I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic [trans rights] movement, that has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society,” said JK Rowling. “I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless, so I’m afraid I stand with the women who are fighting to be heard against threats of loss of livelihood and threats to their safety.”

[...]

Through talking to multiple former EHRC employees, Trans Safety Network was able to establish that Kishwer Falkner, appointed as EHRC chair in December 2020, made opposing trans rights an early priority in her role and has disrupted the working norms of the organisation to the point that many people, committed to improving equalities in the UK, have left the EHRC.

“I think she just Googled things, to be honest,” said Sam*, a senior staff member, who despaired at the material they were urged by Falkner to include in their work. “She’d send articles asking ‘why haven’t you considered this?’ and it wouldn’t come even close to meeting the threshold for what we would think of as evidence.”

“1990 marks a curious time when the Left in the United States has no political significance but considerable educational influence, no power to affect immediate events but considerable authority to shape the minds of the young. Having lost the class war in the factories and the fields, the American Left continues the battle for cultural hegemony in the classroom.”

By: NPOV

Published: Jan 20. 2026

This investigation is fully available to free subscribers. Paid subscribers can scroll to the end for primary-source documentation, including representative Wikipedia diffs and links.

While Iranian security forces have killed up to 20,000 protestors since December 2025—with the real toll feared much higher—another battle is being fought in the digital realm. As internet blackouts prevent Iranians from documenting their own repression, pro-regime editors are working to control how these events, and Iranian history more broadly, are recorded on Wikipedia.

The dual strategy is deliberate. Kinetic violence silences dissent at home. Digital propaganda shapes the narrative abroad. Together, they form what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “vindication jihad”—a soft war in the information space designed to rewrite reality itself.

An investigation into Wikipedia editing patterns reveals a years-long, coordinated campaign to sanitize the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. According to a 2024 Times investigation, entries have been systematically edited to downgrade Iranian atrocities. Key details about the regime’s 1988 mass executions—including that victims were women and children murdered extrajudicially, and that current senior officials were involved in the death commissions—were deleted. Information about Iranian official Hamid Nouri’s 2022 sentencing to life imprisonment in Sweden for war crimes has disappeared. References to the 2018 expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania for their alleged involvement in a bomb plot against dissidents have been scrubbed.

This matters beyond Wikipedia. When AI systems like ChatGPT are queried about Iranian leaders or events, they often draw from these compromised articles. The propaganda doesn’t stay contained—it flows downstream into the broader information ecosystem that millions rely on daily.

The regime’s reach extends beyond digital propaganda. MI5 and police have disrupted at least 15 plots to kidnap or kill Iranian dissidents in the UK since 2022. When activists like Vahid Beheshti, who has been on hunger strike pressuring the UK government to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, attempted to establish a Wikipedia page, the text was repeatedly removed. His wife told The Times: “We believed it was the Iranian cyber army.”

The Mechanics of Memory Manipulation

The operation exploits Wikipedia’s consensus-based structure through sophisticated tactics. Chief among them is what NPOV calls “abrasive deletion”—making small edits over time that gradually erode entire sections. In one edit, context disappears. Two weeks later, someone comes along and deletes the now-contextless information as irrelevant. When anonymous users are challenged, they justify removals by citing the need for “trimming” or claiming material is “trivial”—language that makes the erosion appear like routine maintenance rather than coordinated manipulation.

Source reliability becomes another front in the battle. On the 2017-2018 Iranian Protests page, for instance, editors—including Mhhossein, a prolific pro-regime editor—deleted entire paragraphs about poor conditions in Iran, their reasoning being that the source, Iran News Wire, a dissident outlet, wasn’t deemed reliable enough. The deletion happened in August 2018, months after the protests had ended in January—a kind of ideological mop-up operation that sanitized the historical record once the world had stopped paying attention.

The playbook includes two main tactics that work in tandem, a tactic that appears when coordinated groups act as voting blocs on article “Talk Pages,” outvoting individual editors trying to add verified facts. Authorship dominance allows single editors or small groups to maintain control over 80-90% of an article’s text, camping on pages and reverting any challenges. Anonymous users carry out numerous edits—citing needs for “trimming” or claiming material is “trivial”—making it impossible to determine their motivation, though the pattern of deletions is clear.

A Wikipedia arbitration case has documented editors citing state media outlets like irdiplomacy.ir as sources. The so-called “Gang of 40”—editors working Israel-Palestine topics from a pro-Iranian regime perspective—controls over 90% of dozens of articles.

The Gatekeepers

Two editors exemplify the scope of pro-Iran editing: Mhhossein and Iskandar323.

Mhhossein functions as a historical gatekeeper. He has edited the Ali Khamenei page 217 times—more than any other user—removing information about Iran’s nuclear program and protests. He is the top contributor on Assassinations of Iranian Nuclear Scientists, 1981 Iranian PM’s office bombing, and Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Mhhossein validated state media sources while deleting information from dissident outlets—including the Iran News Wire deletions from the 2017-2018 protests page months after the events themselves had ended. In total: 2,228 pages edited over 11,000 times.

Iskandar323 operates as a battleground editor focused on active conflicts alongside his edits on past events, editing on the 1988 mass executions as recently as 18 January. Last week, we reported on Wikipedia’s ongoing procedure to site ban him—one of the platform’s most severe punishments—following years of systematic narrative manipulation. Three days after the October 7 atrocities, Iskandar removed thousands of words about human rights abuses, replacing them with a single paragraph. He deleted information about Jewish immigration to Israel, claiming Western expulsion was only relevant to “Jewish History.” He authored 71% of the article on Fascism in the United States, adding multiple images linking American officials to fascist politicians. His reach: 16,000 pages across more than 49,000 edits over more than 12 years.

Three days after the October 7 atrocities, Iskandar removed thousands of words about human rights abuses, replacing them with a single paragraph.

The Live Battleground

Since protests erupted in December 2025, Wikipedia’s 2025-2026 Iranian Protests page has drawn from over 400 sources. Authorship remains relatively distributed—no single editor controls more than 8% (as of time of writing).

But the Talk Page reveals the pressure campaign in real-time. Some argue that calling the Iranian government a “regime” violates neutrality, despite most sources using that term. One editor claims Reza Pahlavi, a prominent opposition figure, shouldn’t be mentioned as notable.

User SwedishDutch disputed reported casualty figures, claiming that two sources that have provided critical coverage of the regime—Sunday Times and Iran International—were unreliable. The SwedishDutch account had been created just two hours previously and has since been deleted.

For now, the page remains well-sourced. But the pattern established in previous cases is clear: once protests fade from headlines—once internet blackouts prevent real-time documentation and bodies are quietly buried—coordinated editors move in to reshape the historical record.

This is what authoritarian information warfare looks like in 2026. There’s violence in the streets to silence dissent in real time. Then come the internet blackouts, preventing real-time documentation and cutting off the flow of evidence to the outside world. And once the immediate crisis fades from international attention—once bodies are quietly buried and the news cycle moves on—the propaganda operation moves in to systematically rewrite what happened. The Islamic Republic isn’t just killing protesters. It’s erasing the evidence that they existed at all.

Wikipedia’s open editing model was designed to democratize knowledge. On Iran-related topics, it has become another battlefield where the most persistent and coordinated voices can overwrite truth. The encyclopedia that millions trust has become, in these corners, an extension of the regime’s propaganda apparatus.

The edit histories are public. The question is what Wikipedia—and the platforms that rely on it—will do about it.

==

By: Ingrid Jacques

Published: Apr 20, 2026

The Hamas terrorist attack set in motion much of this self-reflection. Indeed, Jewish students at Yale have claimed harassment and the Trump Education Department opened an investigation last year.

A new report from Yale University sheds light on declining public trust in higher education – and the responsibility universities must take for what’s happened.

That’s a start. And the report holds lessons far beyond the Yale campus. 

In recent years, it’s become impossible to ignore the antisemitism, lack of free speech and ideological conformity at many of our leading educational institutions. 

Throw in the fact that inflation-adjusted tuition has roughly doubled at four-year public and private schools in the past 30 years, and it’s easy to see why more Americans are second-guessing whether heading off to college is the sound investment it once seemed.

The Yale report, released April 10, is the result of a year-long effort by a committee of 10 professors to examine this decline in trust and offer some solutions. The report was commissioned by Yale President Maurie McInnis last April. 

“Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do – and, ideally, doing it well,” the committee wrote. 

Apparently, universities haven't delivered.

Trust in higher ed has plummeted in the past decade. Why?

The report cites a Gallup poll that shows just how sharply trust in higher ed has fallen in the past 10 years. 

In 2024, confidence in these institutions had dropped to a record low of 36% – down from 57% a decade ago, when those surveyed said they had “a great deal or “quite a lot” of trust in higher education. https://www.usatodaynetworkservice.com/tangstatic/html/usat/sf-q1a2z3584c02f3.min.html

The Yale committee also looked at a 2025 Pew Research Center survey that found 70% of Americans say higher education is heading in the wrong direction.

The committee identified three primary factors behind this decline in trust in the report:

"The first involves the soaring price of higher education in the United States, along with the perception that college, graduate, and professional school are no longer worth the money and sacrifice they demand. 

"The second focuses on the college admissions system – specifically, the question of who gets in and why. 

"The third includes an array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. We also found important problems related to trust within the university itself, including concerns that grade inflation, new technologies, and bureaucratic expansion have undermined the university’s academic mission."

Many of these issues have received significant attention across U.S. universities, especially starting in 2025, when President Donald Trump prioritized trying to end antisemitism on campus, as well as targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs that directly led to animus against Jewish students and created costly bureaucratic bloat. 

The Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding from schools that don’t fall in line, and this has led to some major changes on some campuses – at least in the interim. 

The reckoning is long overdue.

Oct. 7 brought many glaring issues to light 

The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, set in motion much of this self-reflection at American universities. 

While the Yale report doesn't spend much time directly on antisemitism, saying the university experienced "less long-term friction than some of its peer institutions," it acknowledges the campus "has not been immune from pressures toward conformity, intimidation, and social shaming that have affected the rest of higher education."

Indeed, Jewish students at Yale have claimed harassment and the Trump Education Department opened an investigation last year into alleged antisemitism.

On campuses all over the country – from Harvard to Stanford – Americans have witnessed a very disturbing sight: Many students celebrated the attack on Israeli civilians and supported the terrorists who wreaked such devastation. 

College presidents were subsequently woefully prepared to defend what their campuses were doing to protect Jewish students, many of whom were afraid at that time. 

In December 2023, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik went viral when the New York Republican grilled the presidents of three top universities, including Harvard. She outright asked them whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their schools' code of conduct. And their lackluster responses led to the resignation of two of those presidents, and subsequently several more. 

Stefanik has a new book, “Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities,” detailing what’s gone wrong in higher ed and what remains to be done. 

“It’s not just about antisemitism,” Stefanik recently told Jewish Insider, in an interview about her book. “This is broader higher education reform. … That was the canary in the coal mine issue that brought up so many broader issues that were wrong with higher education.” 

The new Yale report seems to agree, and argues for a return to higher education’s most basic purpose. 

“Universities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge,” it states. “In one form or another, Yale has affirmed this mission for centuries. Staying true to that fundamental purpose, while remaining open to productive change, will be essential for building public trust in the years ahead.”

By: vittorio

Published: Jan 17, 2026

Bill Ackman quote tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years.

Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.

Good question. Most answers I've seen are either tribal ("women are emotional") or surface-level ("social media bad"). Neither traces the actual mechanism.

Let me try.

First, notice what Wanye pointed out:

We've been told for a decade that men are "radicalizing to the right" and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.

The story we are told is exactly inverted from reality. And when female leftward movement does get discussed, it's framed as progress: "women becoming more educated, more independent, more enlightened"

They'll tell you the graph shows enlightenment and progress. Wrong.

The graph shows is capture.

This Isn't Just America

Before getting into mechanism, something important: this pattern isn't only American. It's global.

The Financial Times documented it last year The gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.

This matters because it rules out explanations specific to American politics. It's not Title IX policy. It's not #MeToo. It's not the specific culture war of US campuses. Something bigger is happening, something that rolled out globally at roughly the same time.

South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption.

Whatever is causing this, it's not American. The machine is global.

The Substrate

Start with the biological hardware.

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can't hunt pregnant. You can't fight nursing. Survival required the tribe's acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as serious threat.

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

(Male status still mattered enormously for reproduction, low-status men had it rough. But men could recover from temporary exclusion in ways that were harder for pregnant or nursing women.)

This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt's work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren't huge but they're consistent across every culture studied.

Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.

But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.

The Machine

Now look at what we built.

Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it's everyone you've ever met plus a world of strangers watching.

And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 but was college-only until 2006. The iPhone launched June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.

Look at the graph again. Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008. The curve steepens through the 2010s as smartphones became universal and platforms became more sophisticated. Women are by nature more liberal, but the radicalization coincides with the rise in smartphones adoption.

The machine turned on and the capture began.

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

This machine wasn't designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

Add a feedback loop: women complain more than men. Scroll any platform and it looks like women are suffering more. Institutions respond to this because visible distress creates liability, PR risk and regulatory pressure. In addition, women are weaker and inevitably seen as the victim in most scenarios. The institutional response is to make environments "safer". Which means removing conflict. Which means censoring disagreement. Which means the consensus strengthens.

The counterarguments get removed or deplatformed and the loop closes.

The Institutions

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

FIRE's campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn't unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.

Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it's socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.

Then they graduate into female-dominated fields: HR, media, education, healthcare, non-profits, where the monoculture continues. From 18 to 35, many women never encounter sustained disagreement from people they respect. The feedback loop never breaks.

Men took different paths. Trades. Engineering. Finance. Military. Fields where results matter more than consensus. Fields where disagreement is tolerated or even rewarded. The monoculture didn't capture them because they weren't in the institutions being captured. (mostly because they were kicked out of them, but that's a different piece)

The Economics

Marriage collapsed. This probably matters more than people think.

Single women vote more left than married women. This is consistent across decades of exit polls. Part of this is likely economic: single women interact with government more as provider of services, married women interact with government more as taker of taxes. The incentives point different directions.

The marriage gap in voting is one of the most consistent predictors. And marriage rates have collapsed precisely during the period of divergence.

Men saw marriage collapse differently. Family courts. Child support. Alimony. The rational response was skepticism of expanding state power.

Same phenomenon, different positions in it, different political responses.

The Algorithms

Algorithms optimize for engagement. Engagement means emotional response. Time on platform. Clicks. Shares. Comments.

Women respond more strongly to emotional content on average, they are more empathetic, they can be more easily manipulated with sad stories. That higher neuroticism again, higher sensitivity to negative stimuli. The machine learned this. It fed them content calibrated to their response patterns. Fear. Outrage. Moral panic. Stories about danger and injustice and threat and wars and "victims".

Men got different feeds because they responded to different triggers. The algorithm doesn't really have a gender agenda. It has an engagement agenda. But engagement looks different by demographic, so the feeds diverged.

Women ended up in information environments optimized for emotional activation. Men found alternatives: podcasts, forums, cars, wars, manosphere etc.

The Ideology

Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.

Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.

Now they're 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here's the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous. You'd have to admit you wasted your fertile years on a lie. That the women who ignored the ideology and married young were right. That your mother was right.

I think this is why you see so little defection. Not because the ideology is true, but because the psychological cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying. Easier to double down. Easier to believe the problem is that society hasn't changed enough yet.

The Other Capture

I should be honest about something: men weren't immune to capture. They were captured differently.

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn't "believe this or face social death." It was "here's an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real."

Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.

The male line on that graph staying flat through 2020 isn't necessarily health. It might just be a different kind of sickness, men checking out instead of being pulled in. Or it may be that everyone and everything moved more left and women moved lefter.

The Line Is Moving Now

Here's the update: the male line isn't flat anymore.

Post-2024 data shows young men shifting right. Recent surveys all show the same thing. Young men are now actively moving more conservative.

My read: women got captured first because they were more susceptible to consensus pressure. The capture was fast (2007-2020). Men resisted longer because they were less susceptible and less embedded in captured institutions. But as the gap became visible and culturally salient, as "men are the problem" became explicit mainstream messaging, as men started being excluded from society because of lies, as masculinity, or the very thing that makes men men became toxic, men had to start counter-aligning.

The passivity is converting into opposition. The withdrawal is becoming active rejection.

This doesn't mean men are now "correct" or "free". It might just mean they're being captured by a different machine, one optimized for male grievance instead of female consensus. Andrew Tate didn't emerge from nowhere. Neither did the manosphere. Those are capture systems too, just targeting different psychological vulnerabilities.

The graph is now two lines diverging in opposite directions. Two different machines pulling two different demographics toward two different failure modes.

Some people will say this is just education: women go to college more, college makes you liberal, simple as that. There's something to this. But it doesn't explain why the gap widened so sharply post-2007, or why it's happening in countries with very different education systems.

Some will say it's economic: young men are struggling, resentment makes you conservative. Also partially true. But male economic struggles predate the recent rightward shift, and the female leftward move happened during a period of rising female economic success.

Some will point to cultural figures: Tate for men, Taylor Swift for women. But these are symptoms, not causes. They filled niches the machines created. They didn't create the machines.

The multi-causal model fits better: biological substrate (differential sensitivity to consensus) + technological trigger (smartphones, algorithmic feeds) + institutional amplification (captured universities, female-dominated fields) + economic incentives (marriage collapse, state dependency) + ideological lock-in (sunk costs, social punishment for defection).

No single cause. A system of interlocking causes that happened to affect one gender faster and harder than the other.

So What

If this model is right, some predictions follow.

The gap should be smaller in countries with later smartphone adoption or lower social media penetration. (This seems true: the divergence is less extreme in parts of Eastern Europe and much of Africa, though South Korea is a major exception due to other factors.)

The gap should narrow among women who have children, since parenthood breaks the institutional feedback loop and introduces competing priorities. (Exit polls consistently show this: mothers vote more conservative than childless women.)

The gap should continue widening until the machines are disrupted or the generations age out of them.

Here's the part I don't know how to solve: these systems are self-reinforcing. The institutions aren't going to reform themselves. The algorithms aren't going to stop optimizing. The ideology isn't going to admit failure. The male counter-capture isn't going to produce healthy outcomes either.

Some women will escape. The ones who have children often do since reality is a powerful solvent for ideology. The ones who build lives outside institutional capture sometimes do.

Some men will stop withdrawing or stop rage-scrolling. The ones who find something worth building. The ones who get tired of the simulation.

But the systems will keep running on everyone else.

The Question

Bill asked why.

The answer isn't "women are emotional" and it isn't "social media bad." The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

We're watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

I don't know how this ends. I don't think anyone does. I don't think it will.