Dumber and dumber.

Texas A&M brought a robot to a culture war to scan syllabi for “gender ideology.” Their censorship AI flagged Plato’s Symposium, a 2,400-year-old dialogue where the phrase “platonic love” comes from.

The administrators wouldn’t overrule their dumb robot. They told the professor to censor the classics and delete Plato or be reassigned to teaching MAGA hat tricks.

This is the whole story.

Texas spent years building a political brand around defending the classics of “Western civilization” against woke academics who don’t teach the classics anymore.

Then they built an enforcement robot to kill liberalism. The robot instead killed Plato because the robot can’t tell the difference between woke training and the foundational text of Western philosophy.

Neither can they.

That’s the deepest cut here. The “classical education” thing was all hat and never any cattle. Cultural signaling for people who never read books. Hillsdale markets their Great Books programs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation runs “Western Civilization Summits.” The political network meant to save the classics built the robot that red-flagged the Symposium, just because Aristophanes’ speech from thousands of years ago mentioned a third gender.

They are not hypocrites, because that requires knowing what you claim to value. These are cargo cultists. Their cowboy affectations, the “defend Western civ” rhetoric, the Great Books branding… all of it just big empty hats.

Tribal markers, without commitments.

The rattlesnake just ate itself.