You are not being massacred, and the 'war' is mostly based on willing misunderstanding, misattribution and the popular extolling of anger preachers.
In 'culture wars' we have to have some way of allocating sets to 'the top schools', and it could be just 'SAT', family connections, entrance exam, race, class, etc.. Some groups feel slots should be allocated base on race, some feel otherwise. That one is actually a little bit complicated because although SATs do provide some basis of objective rigour, it's probably the most easily 'gamed' thing and to the extent it's 'gamed' it has little meaning. Do we really want to limit top uni entrance to the 0.1% of HS students spend all of their time preparing for 'A Big Test'? That might be a little bit counterproductive ... but then that 'test' was also one of the more objective metrics.
So it's complicated and a ripe area for 'culture war'.
Doesn't work that way.
Every student probably wants to go to Harvard, demand is unlimited. If they lowered the standards for example, there would be more applicants.
The number of applicants varies by all sorts of factors. Students probably have started applying to far more schools than otherwise. There are more total uni students, even if the number of seats across america has grown commensurate, the number of applications to Harvard will still go up.
Finally, Harvard probably wouldn't be Harvard if it were 10x bigger, moreover, they have no obligation to do so. They can do as they please, there are tons of good schools in America.
This is not the issue we face with selectivity and race/class/gender, that's a lot harder and it's a problem they cannot avoid.
In "cultural war", this would correspond to one side trying to keep moving their positions forward. The either side either puts up a fight or they don't.
In that case, you don't need literal shooting and trenches. You can talk of wealth redistribution, where "we'll take from A and give to B" is an attack on A. It doesn't involve guns immediately (though it will if A doesn't "voluntarily" give up the goods), but it's useful as an analogy. What the commenters seem to imply is that, if A does not fight back (again, not literally with guns, but politically), they'll be massacred (again, not literally), their interests will not be considered at all.