The "noble savage" rewrite of the Indians, demonizing settlers, cowboys, and explorers
This was simultaneous with, and fundamentally the same as, the academic rejection of (all the people and things that get called) postmodernism—which conservatives still blame for our troubles—as pathologically white, patriarchal, colonial, etc.
By the time I went to a very prestigious college in the not late '90s, the systematic anti-thinking that came to be called "wokeness" was metastatic. The broad European intellectual tradition that encompasses liberalism, Marxism, Derrida/Deleuze/Foucault, etc., was upheld only by a few old men who were comfortable being called racist and sexist.
The Closing of the American Mind came out in
1987, and it was a postmortem.
The nerdy urge to find
cause in books is a noble white trait, but nobody who rules us knows any of that shit (especially not the ones who pretend to, like Thiel). They know
each other, they know demographics, and they hate you. There's nothing philosophical about it.