It’s important to understand that the recent and sometimes violent protest marches in hundreds of American cities were made possible by a larger, and more destructive march through American society that began decades ago.
The “Long March through the Institutions” is a phrase coined by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) to describe how a society could be subverted without recourse to arms. By co-opting society’s chief institutions—schools, universities, courts, corporations, media and political parties—dedicated leftists could effect revolutionary change.
For a long time, cultural critics have spoken and written about the “Long March” in the future tense—as something that could happen if we’re not careful. But it may be time now to acknowledge that the leftist takeover of American institutions is well underway. In some segments of our culture it has, to all intents and purposes, already been accomplished.
In many ways, the current protests, riots, and takeover of city blocks merely reflects the largely successful takeover of social and political institutions over the last several decades. What is especially telling is the response of various “responsible” authorities to demands for abolishing the police, abolishing the courts, and abolishing prisons. The Mayor of Seattle opined that the takeover of part of her city was a “patriotic” act that could lead to a “summer of love.” And in the midst of looting and burning, the Mayor of New York invoked John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” and wondered aloud why we couldn’t have a world with less restrictions. At about the same time, the Minneapolis City Council was actually proposing that the police force be dismantled.
Meanwhile, media anchors and analysts responded to the ban-the-police movement with solemn nods of the head and “why-hadn’t-we-thought-of-this-before” observations.
Why hadn’t we thought of this before? Well, the truth is, most of us, during our adolescent phase, have wondered if society could get along without police and courts; and after a few minutes thought, most of us rejected it as a stupid idea.
But now the left-leaning solons of our society are giving the question serious consideration.
How much of our cultural geography have leftists gobbled up? It seems safe to say that the left already controls America’s educational establishment. Since the protests began, two university professors and one Catholic high school teacher have been fired for criticizing the radical Marxist group, Black Lives Matter.
But what leftists do in the classroom is even more damaging than who they exclude from the classroom. What they have done is to convince generations of American children to reject the land of their birth as a racist, white supremacist, and violent society—not a nation worth defending but a nation to be ashamed of. With this kind of education, it’s little wonder that so many in our society think it’s time for a revolution.
How about the media? The left has not captured all the media posts. There is still Fox News and a number of conservative websites and podcasts. By and large, though, the news media is dominated by left-liberal types who see it as their duty to take up where the schools and universities leave off.
Like many in the education industry they are more interested in shaping attitudes than in presenting facts. Their documentaries are slanted to the left, their news reports are highly selective, and they push the same false narratives that are peddled in the universities about white supremacy and institutional racism. Moreover, they can count on the educators to provide them with an audience that has been schooled to feel rather than to think critically. After all, if they were able to think critically, they would realize that if the claims of institutional racism were true, then the guilty party would be the left-liberals who control most of our society’s institutions. The big cities with the highest degree of racial tension are almost invariably run by liberal Democrats. They have Democrat mayors, Democrat city councils, Democrat judges, Democrat police commissioners, Democrat school superintendents, and Democrat-controlled teachers unions. Moreover, many of these liberal mayors, city council members, judges, and police chiefs are black. If there is such a thing as “systemic racism” in our society then white and black liberals deserve the lions-share of blame for it.
But they have been absolved of guilt. Instead, all the blame has been transferred to conservatives and, in particular, onto Republicans. Take the current frenzy to tear down statues of Confederate soldiers and to rename Army bases. It’s a good bet that the vast majority of the protesters don’t realize that the Confederate Party was made up of Southern Democrats, that the Republican Party was the anti-slavery party, that the racist Jim Crow laws were instituted by Democrats, and that the strongest opposition to Civil Rights Legislation in the 1960”s came from Congressional Democrats.
Which brings us to the next target of the left’s long march through the institutions—the Democrat Party. Now, whether the left marched through the Democrat party or the Democrat Party marched to the left is a complicated question. But it’s not one that needs to be answered here. The Democratic party is now in thrall to the left. Even the most moderate Democrats in politics today are far to the left of where John Kennedy stood in the Sixties.
One sign of the party’s solidarity with the left is its reluctance to criticize hard left groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Should the Democrats recapture the government in the 2020 election, we should expect the Long March through the institutions to rapidly accelerate as more and more concessions are made to the most radical groups on the left.
So far, I’ve discussed the more obvious examples of institutional capitulations to the left—the schools, the media, the Democratic party. But there are other institution’s which, though they are generally thought to be conservative in nature, have been steadily drifting leftward.
In recent years the left has been marching through the corporate world at a fast clip. When students who had been indoctrinated by leftist professors entered the corporate world, they brought their ideology with them. The fact that many corporations now refer to their corporate headquarters as a “campus” suggests just how far the university mentality has entered the world of big business. On the corporate campus, one sees the same obsessions that plague the college campus: the deference to diversity, the restrictive speech codes, and the virtue signaling.
In the wake of the protests and rioting, corporate virtue signaling is more pronounced than ever. For proof, go to the home page of your insurance company or your bank, and you’ll likely be greeted with a message to the effect that though our country is plagued with structural racism—[insert the name of your financial institution here]—is committed to working for equal opportunity for all. Does that mean that auto insurers will give the same low rates to people who live in neighborhoods where auto theft and accidents abound as they give to people who live in safe, leafy suburbs? Probably not. But it makes for good copy.
But this kind of virtue signaling is mild compared to corporations that are actively supporting militant groups. In a recent piece for Catholic World Report, Professor Ronald Jelinek reports on some of them:
Big companies like Intel, Twitter, Nike, WarnerMedia, Nordstrom, Ben & Jerry’s, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Amazon, Twitch, Paramount, Starz and Hulu are publicly embracing Black Lives Matter. . . Some are answering the call with large donations—Cisco has pledge $5 million to Black Lives Matter and its affiliates. Others like Airbnb and DropBox are donating $500,000 to the cause.
Meanwhile, Seattle-based Starbucks will allow its employees to wear “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts, and it has even ordered a supply of new branded shirts that will include the phrase.
Back in the 1950s sociologists discovered that a new type of homo sapiens—the “Organization Man”—had been created by corporate culture. In the popular imagination, the “organization men” dressed in gray flannel suits, maintained lifelong loyalty to their company, and all thought alike.
But the organization men of the 50s are as nothing compared to the organization men that now staff the offices of corporate America. The dress code is more relaxed, but the atmosphere is more conformist than ever. In the 50s, one was expected to show loyalty to the company brand, but in the 2020s one is expected to show complete loyalty to the company’s leftist/socialist/transgendered/ “woke” philosophy. Or else one is fired, shunned by former associates, and unlikely to ever find future employment in the corporate world.
The left’s march through the corporate world is not yet complete, but it has, so far, been a surprisingly quick and easy march. And there has been little resistance.
The military? Ever since the Army-McCarthy hearings, anyone who suggested that the military was infiltrated by communists was considered to be a—what’s the word?—oh yes, a “McCarthyite”. While it seems safe to say that the Pentagon is not run from Moscow, high ranking military officers are, as a rule, more liberal than most people think. Barack Obama conducted a purge of Army brass when he was president, and replaced them with officers of a more liberal bent. We can assume that many of his appointments are still in place today.
Under Obama, the military became a lifestyle laboratory. A woman was put in charge of Marine basic training; the Pentagon held a gay pride event; the Air Force Academy built a Stonehenge-like worship center to accommodate pagans, druids, witches, and wiccans; and an apparently unvetted transgender soldier was placed in a position where he was able to leak nearly three quarters of a million sensitive military and diplomatic documents.
Some of Obama’s liberal-minded crew seem to have made their way into the Trump administration in its early days. After Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was sidelined, he was replaced as National Security Advisor by General H.R.Mc Master. In appearance, McMaster looked like the second coming of General Patton, but in reality, he was cut from the same ideological cloth as Obama. Once ensconced in the National Security Council, McMaster conducted a purge of his own. He fired at least a half dozen highly accomplished conservatives from top level positions at the NSC, and replaced them with more politically correct types. One of the replacements was Mustafa Javed Ali, a man whose previous position was that of Diversity Outreach Coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Was Javed Ali qualified to assume the position of Senior Director of Counter-Terrorism for the National Security Council? To even ask the question would have been deeply offensive.
In this context, it’s worrisome that in the midst of a nationwide insurrection, a number of current and retired high-ranking officers chose to take a very public stand against President Donald Trump. It’s not that the generals didn’t have a point about the wisdom of Army intervention in domestic affairs, but that their own intervention appears to have been a coordinated and deliberate attempt to undermine the authority of the president during a time of national crisis.
If nothing else, the generals failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Arguably, the rioting, burning and looting in more than one hundred American cities had created a situation that was as serious, if not more serious, than those past instances where presidents had ordered military intervention to restore order.
Early on, the George Floyd protests had been hijacked by well-organized neo-Marxist groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter. While other protestors were protesting Floyd’s death, these radical elements were protesting the very existence of the American form of government. It’s not clear if all of our military leaders have grasped that distinction.
I’m not suggesting that the military has been co-opted by the left. But we shouldn’t assume that they can’t be. At a time when virtue is equated with fighting for social justice, America’s warrior class is under increasing pressure to establish its social warrior credentials. We, therefore, should assume that the military is a prime target of the long marchers of the left. The left is aiming for a coup, and history suggests that the most successful coups are engineered by groups that manage to win the military or elements in the military over to their side.
The current chaos in the streets can be seen as a spontaneous outburst of pent-up anger, or it can be seen as the result of a long campaign to engender anger by cultivating narratives of bigotry and victimhood. Over the years, the campaigners have been quite successful in winning the sympathy and support of many of our society’s crucial institutions. Hopefully, there is still time for courageous people within these institutions to come to their senses and realize that they are being used.
The Church, by the way, is one of the institutions that the long marchers have targeted for takeover. Judging by the enthusiastic embrace of Black Lives Matter on the part of some Church leaders, the marchers are making progress. But that is a subject for another article.
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God bless Mr. Kirkpatrick and CWR for publishing this and may our Lord preserve them from being cancelled by the SJWs.
Kilpatrick writes that “in recent years the left has been marching through the corporate world at a fast clip.”
CASE IN POINT: In 2015 corporate America “bored”-rooms pontificated for the oxymoronic gay “marriage.” As reported/rewarded by the media, they tutored the U.S. Supreme Court with AMICUS BRIEFS—from AT&T, Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and even the San Francisco Giants, and nearly four hundred (400!) other photo-copy businesses that butted-in to the most spastic courtroom deliberation and FATWA in human history.
The marketed rationale: STOCK MARKET numbers might benefit marginally from spending patterns! Under the corporate Profit Motive (cross-dressed as the “prophet motive”), the dormant niche in national spending (GNP)—absent court-validation of homosexual “households”—was estimated at “over [only?] one billion dollars per year.”
Multiplied thirty-fold, the MINUSCULE MARKET NICHE (a whole billion dollars!) is only one-tenth of one percent [imagine 00.1%!] of the annual federal budget. And now at twenty-seven trillion dollars, the national debt is twenty-thousand (imagine 27,000!) times as great.
The MOST VIRAL CORPORATE DAMAGE imposed by Academic-Industrial Complex is the coupling of Leftist ideology with a digital universe (e.g., STEM?)—both of these AT THE EXPENSE OF ERASED CORE REQUIREMENTS in the liberal arts—and our lost ability to at least imagine what we know.
Decimal point positioning (so to speak) matters. Our value-neutral, digital (anti-analogue) and “data-driven” mindset is a perfect incubator for a pandemic, post-moral, slogan-consuming, non-binary and gender-theory “society.”
Since the early 1900’s John Dewey and progressive ideology has been infesting academia.The results of this “Long March” is very apparent today in what’s left of the fabric of our society.Not to mention our Constitution.A recent SCOTUS vote
has turned Common Sense and Morality on its head.Promoted and shepherded along by our two most recent so called Conservative Judges put on the Court.They just want to be so “loved” by the left.Christ and his LOVE for them wasn’t enough.So her we are today.Communism was looking for a vehicle to drive a stake through Americas heart! They found it in the democrat party.
I’ve long noticed that many white liberals tend to secretly harbor racist views. And I’ve suspected that their branding of conservatives as racist is nothing more than their own psychological projections.
But I don’t think this is the main [or only] cause for why liberal run, large metropolitan police departments [and government in general] have some many problems. The main reason, I believe, is that liberals have a very low standard for government. Conservatives, on the other hand, hold government to a higher level of accountability.
White educated liberals don’t live in poor Black neighborhoods or attend poor Black churches. White educated liberals are able to delude themselves they are not racists because they are not members of the KKK. Blacks know the difference. When given an opportunity, blacks also move to the White educated liberals neighborhoods. There are few blacks in the White educated liberals neighborhoods or in the White educated liberals churches . Why? Well…..? Um….. What was the question?????
White educated liberals who work are not self-employed, and don’t do manual labor, are left to work in the fields of education, government, etc. which is the largest employer in 25 states in America and are subject to the Civil Rights Acts and thus are regularly monitored for his/her behaviors regarding race and identity ideologies. EEO violations would cause that person to lose his/her job. This is true be it Black rights or regarding same sex identity ideologies, all can get the person fired. So decades of state, city, county, and federal jobs being the largest employer in half of the states (Walmart is the 2nd largest employer in the US in 24 states), have brought us the identity policies we have today, an odd form of slavery. Like a slave, one tells the master one thing, but secretly harbors other emotions and thoughts. Eventually this slave culture of identity ideologies that run the work place in 25 states will result in the rebellion of?????? Yes, the White educated liberal. Hum….
Rome fell from within because it became a society no one wanted to maintain. Is anyone surprised that the first to rebel are not the African Americans, but the white educated liberals who are the majority of the demonstrators? They have spent decades in their government jobs learning how to take a knee. They are actually quite good at it.
I agree that liberals are racists, or probably more “class-ists”–the inner city black community is easily identifiable, but there are plenty of white “trailer park trash” out there they hold in complete contempt.
As for holding government to a low standard, again, true I suppose but really I think they are simply power mongers who like to play games with the lives of “lesser” people.
I would agree. Joe Biden’s “You ain’t black” gaffe to “Charlamagne the God” speaks volume to your point.
I can attest that the military flag officers are mostly amoral conformists and sex revolution enthusiasts…whatever signal they need to send to get the fat paycheck and the shiny car and full-time driver.
After the Clinton-Obama purges, the US military flags have nearly ZERO regard for God-fearing Christians and Jews.
This was signaled by their co-traveller Robert Kagan some 10 years ago, when he wrote an op-Ed stating that the US foreign policy and military needed “a new pagan ethos.”
They are outright PAGANS. Literally, the new Roman Army.
I appreciate that Professor Kirkpatrick raised the possibility of a military coup. When the lockdowns started, I realized that we were much closer to one than most people would be willing to admit. What I didn’t realize was that the military was peppered with leftists; I actually thought that a military government might actually bring back some common sense back to life compared to what we have experienced recently, but that is apparently a pipe dream.
WHERE WERE THE CHURCH LEADERS WHEN ALL THIS WAS TAKING PLACE , BACK IN THE 50’S AND 60’S ????
I BLAME THEM ALL FOR NOT BEING THE BELL RINGERS TO ALERT US ALL OF THE TAKE OVER (COMMUNISTS )PROGREIVE, DEMOCRATS …..
Where were they? The pastors were being threatened with the loss of their tax-free status if they preached politics from the pulpit.
I am afraid we have lost our country if Mr Trump is not re-elected we surely will see the complete loss of our country The forces of Satan have certainly done their deeds the only thing left is Will are catholic religion we destroyed by car country house God help us
This is a solid, common sense approach to what we are currently seeing in both the US and UK. Here in Britain BLM has been the darling of the media ever since it appeared, with its marches a couple of weeks back being repeatedly described as “largely peaceful” even in the face of around 62 police falling victim to violence. When less violent anti-BLM counter-protesters appeared last Saturday, however, these people were denounced by the press and politicians as being “far right”…despite the far right in the UK having been utterly marginal to the point of irrelevance ever since the collapse and fragmentation of the British National Party in the 2000s. Inside the police force itself there appears to be marked division and direct handling of police officers to effectively endorse the movement – officers have been instructed to consider kneeling to BLM (some of them have) and police have repeatedly failed to intervene in the defacement of landmarks etc. Anyone who cares to look at the BLM manifesto (and even listen to its proponents) will see this is a far-left/postmodern outfit that is in fact openly racist itself, albeit it towards people of European descent. A good question though is why and indeed how it is apparently tolerated by the establishment, and whether this really is about “racial injustice” (it’s not) or intentionally creating divisions in our societies in order to justify the imposition of a political program that is openly postmodernist in nature.
i certainly hope you people are not saying that trump is better than any president you ever had because that would be a lie. trump has caused nothing but division and hatred especially toward China (God Bless China And Her People). trump supports anything that he loves and from what i have been reading and listening to he loves anything evil. i pity all who support him and his regime. Seems to me its the Democrats who are really making a difference in some areas. even some republicans are turning Democrat as trump has totally destroyed the republican party and america.
Yes, because Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama were paragons of virtue compared to Trump. Read your history. Democrats fought to maintain the institution of slavery and wrote and passed every Jim Crow law in the country. They forcibly sterilized 70 thousand people based on principles of eugenics. And let’s not forget that FDR and a Democrat congress imprisoned 160,000 people just because they were Japanese. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Snort. ” trump has caused nothing but division and hatred especially toward China (God Bless China And Her People).”
And the Chinese government’s shameful actions with regard to the Wuhan Coronavirus have nothing to do with Americans’ (and most of the rest of the world’s) extremely low opinion of it, I suppose? God help the Chinese people, stuck with a government that oppresses the Church (not to mention other religions), and which unleashed the coronavirus on the world while lying about it.
” trump supports anything that he loves and from what i have been reading and listening to he loves anything evil.”
You might want to widen your reading. Like the part of the Catechism about calumny.
“i pity all who support him and his regime.”
It’s called the United States government, of which he was duly elected the President. So you “pity” those who support the legal government of the US.
Meanwhile, Jennifer, let me introduce you to the concept of the “capital letter,” which is used for proper nouns and at the beginning of sentences, but not six times in a sentence that requires only two.
Jennifer, thank you for your reply. You are an objective confirmation of everything that was written in this article. Almost completely fact free and full of judgmental emotional opinion.
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From what I’ve seen most establishment Republicans are largely creatures of the elite classes. They are often incapable of taking positions that place them in serious conflict with the media or the elite classes. I think that it is called rent-seeking. They usually threaten nothing more serious than making something a campaign issue.
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Say what you will about Trump, he has kept more campaign promises than any Republican president in recent memory. His achievements in the face of the adversity that he has faced shows how hollow and empty many of the establishment Republicans are. A lot of his unpopularity comes from having successfully called his opponent’s bluff. By Washington DC insider practices he should have folded and accepted the Washington DC politicized media’s views. The change that he brings threatens too many of the establishment elites cushy rent-seeking arraignments. Too many people in Washington DC have made a good living by selling out the American people, particularly members of the blue collar and working classes. The Trump deplorables.
Trump stood UP to communist Russia and the CCP. Sadly for you, the indoctrination has taken hold on you. You believe what you are told, not what you’ve gathered through investigating and critical thinking.
That would require you to open your mind to other news sources. For example, his many accomplishments are listed on the White House website. It’s only 50 pages long..
But you will live in a state of denial as the communists in Congress enable the criminals, from Obama all the way down to the newest illegal.
This piece is an invaluable tally of all the freedoms we have already lost over the past 60 or 70 years.
Thanks to Prof. Kilpatrick for having the courage to speak the truth.
And thanks to CWR for having the courage to publish it.
Excellent article. One minor point–I believe it was Rudi Dutschke who coined the term “the Long March through the Institutions” as part of his descriptive gloss on Gramsci’s Cultural Marxism. The phrase well summarizes Gramsci’s thesis. It would also be interesting to hear your thoughts on Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, which also gives insight into what we are seeing unfold on campuses and beyond.
You are correct about Rudi Dutschke.
Given that the phrase “repressive tolerance” is an oxymoron, it also is a piece of hypocrisy. However, the idea of tolerance really shouldn’t apply to faith and morality. Errors and the spreaders of errors shouldn’t be tolerated. That is partly how the “long march through the institutions” has been possible.
Freedom of speech which was not erroneously regarded as a right in this country until 1931 (SCOTUS), is actually not an unrestricted/inalienable natural right. Lies are never to be tolerated, but even the truth can’t always be spoken (e.g. detraction or back biting). What is an inalienable natural right is the right to truth.
William Kilpatrick pretty much upends everything, all the standard cultural and ideological signposts: left is right, right is left, civil right movements are Marxist, schools, universities, are leftist, government and institutions are being taken over also by leftists, he pretty much outdoes the anti-Commie witch hunter, Senator McCarthy of the early 1950’s in smelling arrant radical leftism in America. He is wrong, of course.
Shame on printing such retrograde propaganda. It gives comfort to Trump, indubitably. And it cheapens the Catholic World Report.
A curious reading of the essay. Assuming you actually read it.
Well I would give Mr. Trump some comfort if I could. I think he’s had a very rough time.
🙂
Sen.Joseph McCarthy certainly had his issues but he turned out to have been right about some things. We didn’t know that until the KGB files were released or whatever process allowed classified information to be accessed after the Soviet Union fell apart. Even conspiracy theories have a grain or more of truth.
Kathryn,
I know it’s not applicable to everyone who identifies as a liberal, it’s unfair to stereotype people, but just to mention that some of the affluent folks I know of that persuasion live in 99% white communities. Which is their business of course, but their interactions with folks of different races or incomes is minimal. The sort of bubble they live in allows for little social mixing with working class people. And as you say, they can be disdainful.
To be fair, we each live in some sort of bubble but wealth can make one terribly out of touch. That can apply to conservatives as well.
That’s what brought us Trump I think. Only God can read the president’s heart and know his intentions but at least he paid attention to working class people and hasn’t shown them disrespect. That goes a long way where I live.
Campaign for radical social transformation perpetuated by the amorally amorphous, conformist collective, egalitarian existence, freedom for all, humanity liberating, ideologically hegemonic, neo marxist, politically correct, indoctrination movement!
Jeremia 5:
21 “Now listen to this, stupid, brainless people who have eyes and do not see, who have ears and do not hear! 22 Have you no fear of God?
It is so truthful. Thank you Dr. Kirkpatrick. Coming from the ME, I appreciate every word you have written.
During 2008 American election primary, we were having a conversation about the U.S. elections with a university professor and his wife. Their opinion was Obama is wonderful and he is the new John Kennedy. Suffice it to say, we had no success in explaining how wrong they are on both counts.
Looking at the current situation in the U.S and reading this article, it is sad to see how ignorant they were and most probably still are.
As a true blue Baby Boomer, age 73, and a graduate of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and beyond, and all that history and observation and learning – – – political, social, religious, emotional, experiential – – – I am SO pleased/relieved that Mr. Kilpatrick has finally, clearly and concisely NAILED IT. The reality of MY experience, MY thoughts, MY convictions.
A couple years ago one of my friends and I were commenting, “We do not recognize our society any more”. That was about the time SCOTUS ruled on homosexual relationships. Talk about trashing an institution!
I also want to recommend two books that outline the downward moral spiral we have freely allowed: “Adam And Eve After The Pill”, and “Making Gay OK”.
Excellent (and enlightening!) reading.
God bless you, my friends.
Things look almost hopeless, but remember that what is impossible for men is possible with God. Whatever else you may do to stand for the Truth and counter evil, make prayer, fasting, and repentance priorities, and pray the Rosary every day, as our Blessed Mother has asked us. God’s Will will be done, and it is not ours to know what will happen. We should try to prevent the further decay of our country, but even if the USA should completely fall, remember that Christ has already won the victory over sin and death. Let us stand with Him and follow Him. May we by our lives help others to turn to Him, also.
Excellent article except for one point: The Southern States were not the “Confederate Party”. They were the Confederate States of America. They were (and are) a NATION, not a POLITICAL PARTY.
Very good article and I agree with everything except this; “protests” in the streets are not just from anger. These are children who are getting PAID by Soros and the deep state. These kids are most definitely indoctrinated.