Remember This Article? It Was Conservative Propaganda, and a Lot of Us Fell for It.

Last fall, an anti-PC think piece by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called The Coddling of the American Mind started making its rounds on social media. I honestly can’t tell you how many times this fabulously coiffed baby showed up in my feed because some guy whom I otherwise respected shared it, sometimes even asking me directly, “What do you think of this?”

So I read it. And I sighed a deep, existential sigh. I considered going through it, line by line, to create a detailed response to those who found its arguments persuasive, but decided to do something else with my time. Then I forgot about it for a while, but in reading Moira Weigel’s excellent history of the anti-PC movement in The Guardian today, something clicked.

Greg Lukianoff heads the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a think-tank funded by the Olin and Scaife families, right-wing oligarchs whose influence over politics and media has been compared to that of the Koch brothers, as documented in the book Dark Money.

The Coddling of the American Mind presented itself as a think piece by a pair of academics concerned with a trend they had observed at American universities, but it was in fact designed to do exactly what it did—turn people who see themselves as “reasonable,”…