For the last thirty years or so, I’ve been watching people complain about the progressive capture of institutions, turning them from what they had been into instruments of progressive propaganda. Newspapers became instruments of progressive propganda before I was born, and Universities turned into it while I was a child, but it became especially noticeable perhaps thirty years ago. We’ve seen similar things with comic books and movies. And these have all declined tremendously in their cultural significance. And consistently, people have tended to reverse the order of causality there.

If you look at parasitic infestations in the real world, they’re almost never of healthy organisms. There are a few exceptions, like the wasps who paralyze caterpillars and then lay their eggs inside the caterpillar, but this is a direct attack by a larger and powerful foe. The eggs—which are the actual parasite—would have no chance without their parent attacking the caterpillar. Malarial parasites are like this too—they hitch a ride on a much larger and more powerful creature (a mosquito). But if you look at parasites to make their own way into a host, you’ll notice that by and large they can only attack weakened hosts. Fungi, for example, can only decompose dead trees, they can’t do anything with living trees.

And if you look at how progressive institutional capture goes, with some exceptions having to do with Soviet and/or Chinese funding, which act a bit more like the parasitic wasps or the mosquitoes, it’s usually quite a lot like how fungus takes over dead trees which haven’t fallen over yet. In trees, once the tree no longer has vitality left, it stops being able to heal the incredibly minor wounds caused by insects. Then funguses, which have the ability to digest the lignins which make wood strong, move in and the tree doesn’t have the strength to fight them off, so they start spreading within the tree, digesting it from the inside. Eventually, the tree no longer has the strength to stand, and so it falls. The fungi keep digesting it until it turns into dirt, and the fungi die off.

If you really look into the institutions which have been captured by progressives and worn like a skinsuit in the effort to spread progressivism, you can usually notice that the vitality left a while before. It’s often, in fact, when the organizations transitioned from an organization with a mission into an institution. The source of vitality had been the mission; once the organization no longer has the mission it becomes just a structure with nothing animating it. This is very easy to see within academic institutions. They ceased to be about the pursuit and transmission of truth somewhere around the 1700s, as Protestantism entered its late stages and turned into Modern Philosophy. This took time to work itself out. A lot of things in this world take time for their effects to be visible—if you’ve ever chopped a branch off of a tree, you’ll notice it can take days for the leaves to wilt. By the 1900s, Universities were in no small part finishing schools for the children of the rich and so they had no defenses against parasitic infestation. But because rot usually happens from the inside out, it took the rest of us a long time to notice. In many ways it was only because progressive institutional capture is so brazen and shameless that we tend to notice it. But if you look at what Universities were actually publishing, the quality has been pretty bad for a long time.

Comic books took a massive turn toward anti-heroes and away from real heroes in the 1990s. It was after a decade or two of this that we started to see social justice messaging in comic books. Movies largely lost their cultural relevance in the 1990s, and it was in the 2010s that we saw them going woke. But they lost their moral compass in the 1970s with the death of the Hays code in 1968, and we saw this working itself out in the 1970s and 1980s. It wasn’t a straight line; there was a rebellion against the nihilistic cynicism of 1970s movies in the 1980s, before largely falling back to it in the 1990s. And there were, certainly, exceptions. Star Wars was vibrant and alive with its defiantly hopeful message of life having a meaning and good being worth fighting for.

I am, of course, painting with an extremely broad brush, because I’m only trying to give an outline of something to look for in history, I’m not trying to write an actual history of any of these fields. But the general pattern in life is: mushrooms sprout in dead things, not in living ones. Though sometimes they sprout in dying things.