Like I keep saying, all the right-wing screaming about snowflakes and safe spaces is, as is usual for the modern conservative, nothing but pure projection.
As to the OP question, it may be a perception magnified by an increased inside-the-bubble publicity to anecdotes to that effect thanks to the social media and Alt-news environment. Conservative parents will see in their FB/Twitter/Whatever feeds an increased traffic of claims of this happening, whether truly reflective of anything real or not in either nature or scale.
Very highly probable. Especially if by the time you head out you are in “defensive” mode already.
I think you hit on it, which is that in a nation of 330 million people, any side can harvest enough news stories to feel oppressed. Conservatives can gather and compile any number of anecdotes and then present them in such a way that conservative consumers of such news would sense a nonstop barrage of persecution.
In that case, the ‘what’s changed’ is the rise of social media that allows such stories to be passed around and widely spread.
PS. @Velocity, what’s your icon? I’ve been wondering for ages.
It’s a half-Israeli, half-Kurdistan flag. I only meant it to be temporary but have kept it for a few months now; might change it.
In general, conservative ideas are usually simply un-cool. (Cool doesn’t necessarily mean right or wrong, but just more persuasive or alluring.)
Being anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, sexually restrictive, anti-change is never going to be as cool as being pro all those things. In addition, most celebrities, pop stars or social influencers lean liberal, and command a sizable audience.
Yeah, when I decide whether I want to trample all over marginalized minorities or not, my number one concern is how cool I’ll look doing it 
Kurdistan! No wonder I couldn’t find it. Seems very random, does it mean something?
Yeah, but why are some ideas more cool than others? Just because of who supports them?
It shows support for people who have conflict with Arab countries in the Middle East. I will not speculate as to Velocity’s motivation in selecting this avatar in this thread, but as an Israeli American I don’t appreciate my homeland being used to score cheap political points and have rolled my eyes every time I’ve seen that image.
Even if puddleglum’s “conservative fears” are based on false assumptions, they are still accurate descriptions of her fears. I don’t share these particular fears but I do encounter people who share them.
If I recall, the topic is about whether the fears have changed, not whether they are reasonable.
~Max
You may want to cross Northern Ireland off your holiday list…
But puddleglum didn’t phrase her response as her “fears”. She phrased it as things that (she believes) were/are actually happening:
If she clarifies that she meant it as a statement of subjective fears rather than as what she believes to be reality, I’ll withdraw the “strawman caricature” remark. If she really thinks professors have been deliberately converting students for political reasons, my original response stands.
Northern Ireland isn’t my homeland so if you’d like to use it to score cheap political points I won’t stop you!
The two sides like to fly Israeli and Palestinian flags there, so if you don’t like seeing it…
I don’t know why, they’re all crazy.
Ah, gotcha! Yeah that’s pretty odd, lol.
With a side-dish of ultracon media magnifying it for those who may have missed it in their feed, I might comment. But yes,used to be the boogeyman was seduction or indoctrination; if now there’s fear of that their kids will be outright harmed as opposed to merely preached at, that does look like a recent development thanks to the multiplier effect of the algorithms.
(Mind you, on the specific side of religious conservatives the whole inexplicable narrative of an ever-intensifying persecution has been rolling along since before today’s college class’ parents were in grade school. So who knows if they would be there at this point anyway.)
Thanks for the small hijack about @Velocity’s icon. Which, ref @Babale, is not in any sense specific to this thread and has been in use for a couple months now.
I had recognized it was two flags, one being Israeli, but had no luck finding the other. I’d been meaning to ask, but a suitable opening hadn’t presented itself.
Seems pretty explicable to me. As society’s secular values have increasingly diverged from religious ones, religious values are increasingly seen as immoral by the wider society. And people viewed as immoral are not generally treated too nicely by the community.
Lol, me too. That’s why I asked.
You vastly overstate your case here. It’s more accurately described as a subset of behaviors, specifically the attempt to use religious beliefs to defend discriminatory practices and policies and other real-world harms, that are seen as (and, in fact, are) immoral. The broader sweep of religiously-rooted values are otherwise seen as neutral.
It’s instructive to compare the American model to Europe, where I’ve been living for several years. Religion here is basically a background theme; governments are largely secular, and church-going is on the wane. But secular people and authorities do not negatively judge religious people and values.
There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them based in hard-learned history, but one immediate factor is that religious people here are not activist assholes trying to use their holy books as hammers to drive nails of belief into other people’s lives.
I can assure you we do negatively judge those we view as immoral.
In many cases there is no conflict between values and we can live and let live. But that is not always the case.