Following the regional elections in Andalusia, there has been much talk again about the far-right's attempts to seize power. One of the tactics to achieve this – not only in Spain but also in other countries like the United States or our neighbor France – consists of trying to dominate the media, the more massive the better, with the aim of influencing society's beliefs or the collective imagination. This tactic is part of the “cultural war,” which seeks to impose a hegemonic way of thinking. Societies are plural, and the free expression of differences in political, ideological, religious positions, etc., is a symptom of democratic health. It is revealing, however, that lately it is the anti-democratic right that invokes freedom of expression as a weapon in this “war,” while when it is in power, what it does is eliminate all dissident discourse.In France, a scandal occurred a few weeks ago in the cultural sphere that is still causing a great deal of uproar. The circumstance that caused it seems trivial: the Algerian writer of French expression Boualem Sansal (a candidate for the Nobel Prize for years), who had been imprisoned for months for political reasons in his country and was released thanks to international pressure, decided to change publishers. So far, everything suggests that this is a personal and not at all reprehensible decision, but the problem is that the publishing house Grasset, which will publish his next book —a chronicle of his stay in prison, with the ambition of a bestseller”— is in the hands of the Bolloré group. The founder and owner of this holding company, which includes several well-known periodicals and television channels such as Canal+, is the millionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has openly declared himself in favor of leading a "civilizing project" based on the ideals of the far-right and the most rancid Catholicism.

We have spoken before about the erosion of the moral prestige of intellectuals. It's not that they have become immoral (there are exceptions, of course); it's that the majority of society has stopped believing in anything transcendental, anything particularly well-argued, or anything that transcends the mediocrity of the commonplace (there are exceptions, too, now).

In a new stretch, Donald Trump has proposed canceling university grants, including Harvard, the oldest university in the country, in an attempt to reverse the "ideology" he considers hostile to his surprising political ideals. woke.