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I don't normally post, but why not, as I taught university social science for 7 years.
Meatrace asked, where the cultural marxists? Where is their play-book?
I was 12 years teaching: 5 in physical science and 7 in social science (anthropology) in the USA at a top-name university.
As graduate students told me, and as I encountered among my peers, there were fair number of faculty -- mostly middle-age, well-to-do, highly-educated white women -- who orbited around the topic in question, cultural marxism. I use the word "orbit" to avoid getting bogged down (or is that caught up?) in semantics. Then there are their textbooks and lecture notes, which can double as play-books. Some of them really do have startling ideas, like saying physical/biological science "knowledge" needs to be radically adjusted in order to better conform to their worldview, or that physical/biological science departments need a racial quota system to balance their enrollment. Of course, these gentile faculty members can do email, but I wouldn't want to press them to design a working bridge, accurately measure the speed of a photon, or model insulin production. Their lives are rather easy in my opinion, which affords mental laziness and verbal diarrhea (aka critical discourse). They came of age in the 1960s and are still wagging that half-century-old cultural war, with its various actors and assumptions.
Some other thoughts...
In the vain of complexity theory, conspiracy-like phenomena don't actually require secret groups of people meeting and organizing. All it takes is a fair number of people, each acting toward their own ends with some awareness and adjusting to surrounding society, to cause the emergence of widespread changes.
Have humans always panicked about collapse? That's misleading. Societies have risen and fallen, in practical terms. Romans citizens in 475 were rightly concerned, and there were a lot of policy mistakes that lead up to that. Of course, those mistakes had different names, costumes, etc. The USA today is, objectively, in a bad way in financially, at least on paper, and many hold a general impression that a surprising number of folks are intensively engaged in expensive, non-productive activities. The country has been in such spots before, and there are a number of good reasons to think we'll recover from the stumble, but as the peoples of many a prior civilization have encountered, such is hardly assured. So I'm okay with the hysteria (oops, I'm not supposed to use that word). Perhaps we forget that the set of human civil rights we enjoy today is a blip in history. I can easily imagine multiple routes to totalitarian futures.
I like many of Sissyl's posts in this thread, but I believe there is some confusing of quantity with quality of educational content. There are a lot of misinformed students. For example, just prior to the 2008 election, I gave a general anonymous survey to my largest course, which is filled with university juniors and seniors from all different disciplines. It had questions like, who are you likely voting for, what news source do you access most, how much do you follow the election, how many senators are there, and so forth. They also had a pie chart to complete. On the objective portion of the survey, with those civics questions and pie chart and such, all 116 students failed. One had a pie chart that added to 175%. Many thought military spending constituted 75% of Gross Domestic Product (and yes, I defined GDP for them). There was generally a lack of common sense, as Asphere described. And no, I don't distain my students. I wouldn't have won 2 teaching awards if I had. The students are actually quite bright with a lot of potential, but innumeracy and lack of deductive skills are obstacles. Moreover, the more they followed the election, the worse they did. A sizable segment of them scored well below statistical chance. They had various qualities in common like watching the same news source--and no, not FOX, one of the other ones. Their heads were filled with other stuff, some of it quite relevant to today's society and some it just plain wrong factually.
Eventually I left social science and now do first-hand neuroscience lab research. Recently, I encountered an interesting article about "femens". Naturally, the discussion turned to feminism. There were a lot of concerning posts, from a neuroscience point of view. For example, many posters were confusing social conformity with modesty, two qualities that are mediated by very different parts of the brain, for whatever reason. After a while, I wondered if the majority of dialog and thought for the past century or two is basically garbage, even if it's well thought out garbage, because it doesn't take even the basics of human physiology or neuroscience into account. I wondered, perhaps in the 22nd century, people will look back on the thousands of books, articles, shows created today and think of those the same way we now think of medieval bestiaries.
Time to get back to work...
