That Atlantic article is pretty clear that they don't know the cause ("It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfull

That Atlantic article is pretty clear that they don't know the cause ("It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years.") They've got a bunch of speculations, that children aren't allowed to play outside or whatever. But even those weak speculations don't lend themselves to the thesis that children were indoctrinated: no part of being told not to play outside means that you emerge programmed to oppose free speech. The further extrapolations don't hold up too strongly - if the younger generation is trained, as the article says, to believe that the older generation will keep them safe from a scary world, why is it the younger generation that is taking the lead in censorship? Why is the liberal professor mentioned at the beginning of the article scared of his liberal students? The article says that increasing reports of mental health issues from students "has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them," but again, doesn't that mean that it's the students driving that change, and the university faculty and administrators figuring out how to adapt? If anything, the article tends to support the case that they're not indoctrinated. It mentions that students grew up as teenagers on Facebook, "sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts," which - again - is self-driven by this group, not forced on them by anyone. (And also, who would be indoctrinating them? The same liberal professors that are scared of their liberal students?)