The following commentary, by Mr. Christopher F. Rufo, a higher educated man than myself, is from a speech he gave at Hillsdale College. Hillsdale describes itself as a small classical Christian college in southern Michigan. Mr. Rufo’s speech is an excellent example of what I’ve been writing about in an attempt to nudge folks beyond going to the feet of a political ideology and settling there. Building their abodes in that place and not venturing any further.
Intellectualism and focusing on the matters of this world, especially the world of political ideologies distracts. Strokes egos. And from most of what I read or hear? There is little or no place for God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Word of God in all these words, speeches, lectures, seminars, conferences, articles, commentaries, sermons, books, radio programs — you name the medium.
Some folks from my age group will remember a cartoon series in the 1960s titled “Mr. Magoo.” About a man who lacked good vision and mistakenly walked his way through his daily life.
Most of the people today remind me of Mr. Magoo. Only having the poor vision of going to the altar of American politics, or leftist political ideologies in the world, going to Lenin, Marx, communism and socialism and radicalism and stopping there.
Everything that occurs in our time, everything that has ever happened there is a Biblical example for us. And we ought to turn to those and lay a foundation, a sound foundation of not being so consumed in all the leftist, communist, socialist, progressive discourse which really only amounts to repetitive babel. A word merry-go-round that never stops and the loud music being pumped out by it is only annoying and distracting.
Yes, at this time in American history ALMOST EVERY INSTITUTION, the overwhelming majority of them have been infiltrated, turned, and corrupted. Not by liberalism, Marxism, or socialism, or any specific political ideology of man though to read or listen to almost anyone, including almost every professed Christian pastor, preacher, writer, speaker, teacher, or leader you wouldn’t know such is not the case.
Can we, will we turn to the Holy Bible and see how EVERYTHING is in control by God? And how in everything God is at work? And while this might cause some short-circuiting of the neurons and a shaking of the head in wonder, know that while God does not create evil, God has no part in sin or evil, God does CONTROL evil in His wisdom that is beyond any person’s comprehension — though most here think they know as much, or better than God. Think about this. Pause and think about this fact. If it were not a fact then why all the words from professed Christians pertaining almost exclusively to earthly matters, political matters, and not seeing or directing people to all things have a spiritual foundation. Of either good or evil. And nothing is devoid or separate from this fact.
Let’s briefly look at a historical, Biblical example of two cultures, two nations consumed in evil, corruption, led by idol worship, and every sin and evil under the sun. Led by evil kings that abandoned the One True God and worshipped themselves and everything else other than God the Creator.
The kingdom of Judah. And the kingdom of Babylon. In the time of the prophet Habakkuk.
How could God use a kingdom eviler than Judah to judge Judah? It doesn’t seem right to the modern-day mind, does it? Well, it didn’t seem logical to the prophet Habakkuk either. But man’s so-called wisdom and knowledge, man’s understanding are laughable and nothing compared to the wisdom and knowledge of God!
Habakkuk’s Complaint
O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted.
The LORD’s Answer
“Look among the nations, and see;
wonder and be astounded.
For I am doing a work in your days
that you would not believe if told.
For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans,
that bitter and hasty nation,
who march through the breadth of the earth,
to seize dwellings not their own.
They are dreaded and fearsome;
their justice and dignity go forth from themselves.
Their horses are swifter than leopards,
more fierce than the evening wolves;
their horsemen press proudly on.
Their horsemen come from afar;
they fly like an eagle swift to devour.
They all come for violence,
all their faces forward.
They gather captives like sand.
At kings they scoff,
and at rulers they laugh.
They laugh at every fortress,
for they pile up earth and take it.
Then they sweep by like the wind and go on,
guilty men, whose own might is their god!”
Habakkuk 1:2-11 — English Standard Version
God has no part in ANY sin or evil — but God does and will CONTROL evil to bring about His eternal plan. This is something those that ARE darkness and IN darkness don’t see or understand, and sadly, many professed Christians do not see or understand. Because by their words and actions they seem to believe they are in control, they can bring about the kingdom of God on earth, that most ills and problems can be remedied at the voting machine or by human beings in human government.
I wonder if these have spent any time in the Word of God at all!?
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Love God? Really? Truly one of His? A true disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ? Then why all the concern, all the worry, all the going to the feet of politics and pitching your tent there and crying continually about the reasons things are as they are is because of leftist political ideologies, or a certain politician or man, or the outcome of an election? And not crying out daily the words within the Word of God to folks instead? Or, at least if writing or speaking, or preaching or teaching rather than only do so in a worldy manner show people how everything happening has a Biblical correlation. There is nothing new under the sun. And while God does not create evil or have any part in evil or sin, God does control evil to fulfill His purpose and work. There is a vast difference.
Lay siege to the institutions?
Have evil men and women lay siege and merely replace existing evil men and women? To what gain? Availing what? As if any human being has ever had or been the answer, the remedy, the solution to what ails all men, women, and children on earth!
How about laying siege to the inerrant living Word of God!?
How about focusing on the only truly fully man that was on earth that was also fully truly God? The Lord Jesus Christ as THEE only possible answer, remedy, or solution for all that ails every man, woman, and child on earth?
Not trendy enough? Hip enough? Won’t put backsides in the pews? Or get books sold? Radio syndication? Won’t pay for that nice vacation home or the fourth car?
Too bad.
Until and unless the focus shifts from this world, from America, from American politics, from putting trust and faith in manmade entities or documents or institutions changes, and the focus is placed on God, on the Lord Jesus Christ, on the Holy Spirit, on the whole Word of God there will be no understanding for the person hellbent on thinking it’s all about politics and those stinking lefties and commies and if only this or that had happened in that election instead of what did…
THAT individual is wandering foolishly in a fog. In a snare set by this world. And that individual is lost.
I only hope and pray each person such as that can be found and find their way out of that trap, that place holding them hostage as prey for the world, and finally put their faith and trust, all their belief in God, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit and pull down their tents, their cities built at the feet of politics and move to finally see, speak, write, and preach the true reasons behind everything that is happening. What has really occurred within the institutions, and why.
And it isn’t because of leftists, or Democrats, progressive politics, or Marxism or socialism — it’s all and only because of evil gaining in the spiritual war due to the idleness, complacency, the being otherwise occupied, being ignorant in the Word, disobedience to God and loving the world more by so-called righteous folks professing to be God’s people. Just as the Israelites did. Repeatedly. Just as the kingdom of Judah did.
No different.
There is no new thing under the sun.
Not even in America!
Lay siege to the institutions?
Lay siege to the Word of God! Lay siege to a fervent and humble prayer life! Lay siege to evil!
And pull up stakes and pull down the tent at the feet of politics and all the leftists this and that — which have become an idol to far too many. It really has. Time is precious. No time to waste. Let each of us begin to use the time the Good Lord blesses us to better use than all the political bable.
Why? Because doing so is much more pleasing to Satan than it is to God. Satan loves people to be distracted from God, from Christ, from the Holy Spirit, from the Word of God, from praying and dwelling on glorifying God and living to please the Lord. And when a person is consumed by nationalism, politics, the matters of this world more than glorifying God and living in the Word to please the Lord? Well, it makes that Old Dragon very pleased.
Do you imagine it also is pleasing to God? To Christ? To the Holy Spirit?
Godlessness in the Last Days
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:1-9,16-17 — English Standard Version
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
Romans 1:21-22 — English Standard Version
Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Sunday, July 10th, 2022
Laying Siege to the Institutions
By Christopher F. Rufo, Founder and Director, Battlefront
Reprinted from Imprimis
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency at Hillsdale as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.
Why do I say that we need to lay siege to our institutions? Because of what has happened to our institutions since the 1960s.
The 1960s saw the rise of new and radical ideologies in America that now seem commonplace—ideologies based on ideas like identity politics and cultural revolution. There is a direct line between those ideas born in the ’60s and the public policies being adopted today in leftist-run cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.
The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ’60s. By the mid-1970s, radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground had faded from prominence. But the leftist dreamers didn’t give up. Abandoning hope of a Russian-style revolution, they settled on a more sophisticated strategy—waging a revolution not of the proletariat, but of the elites, and specifically of the knowledge elites. It would proceed not by taking over the means of production, but by taking control of education and culture—a strategy that German Marxist Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in the 1960s, called “the long march through the institutions.”
This idea is traceable to Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the 1930s of “capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
This march through our institutions, begun a half-century ago, has now proved largely successful. Over the past two years, I’ve looked at the federal bureaucracy, the universities, K-12 schools, and big corporations. And what I’ve found is that the revolutionary ideas of the ’60s have been repackaged, repurposed, and injected into American life at the institutional level.
Most Americans are shocked to discover this. We’ve all seen the outrage of parents over the past two years as they learned that their young children were being divided according to their skin color and deemed oppressed or oppressors in public school classrooms. Parents began expressing their outrage against critical race theory not only in school board meetings, but at the polls. This made big news in last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, and the demographic of the now-widespread voter rebellion shows that it crosses party lines.
The Case of the Disney Company
There has been a similar response following the more recent revelations about the Walt Disney Company—a company founded 99 years ago and associated in the public mind with wholesome family entertainment.
I’ve been reporting on Disney for more than a year, and I have good sources inside the company. I broke a story last year about Disney forcing employees to engage in a critical race theory training program that denounced America as fundamentally racist, had its white employees complete a “white privilege checklist,” and included exercises on “decolonizing” bookshelves.
Disney’s first reaction was to deflect. In response to accusations of racism, the company issued a press release denying the charge. Incredibly, it offered as proof the fact that it had produced the movie Black Panther—a kind of corporate variation on “I’m not racist, some of my best friends are black.” This ridiculous response suggests that Disney executives were caught totally off guard. The elites who run our institutions, after all, are not accustomed to being challenged.
Disney eventually deleted information on the controversial training program from its internal website. But all things remaining the same, the program will resurface. This wasn’t, after all, a case of well-intentioned people making a mistake. Leftist ideologies are now baked into the structures of these institutions.
A much bigger controversy began when the Disney Company waded into a political fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis had signed a bill, passed by the state legislature, that prohibited teaching about gender ideology, sexual orientation, and sexuality in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade classrooms. Despite the fact that its opponents gave this bill an intentionally misleading name—the “Don’t Say Gay” bill—it is supported, depending on the questions used by pollsters, by between 60 and 80 percent of Floridians.
Acting against its own apparent business interest, Disney—the most famous children’s entertainment corporation in history—came out publicly in opposition to this bill banning discussions of gender identity in elementary classrooms prior to the fourth grade. In an official statement, it declared that the company’s goal was “for this law to be repealed . . . or struck down in the courts.”
Shortly thereafter, my sources at Disney leaked a video to me of an hour-and-40-minute company-wide meeting about the controversy. And what did the video reveal? In a series of unedited clips that I released on social media, an executive producer at Disney said that she had been inserting what she called a “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s programming, targeting kids as young as two years old, and had experienced no pushback. A production coordinator said that he had created a tracking program to make sure that the company was including enough transgender, non-binary, and asexual characters. The president of Disney’s general entertainment content referenced a Disney initiative declaring that “50 percent of regular and recurring characters across Disney General Entertainment will come from underrepresented groups.” And a diversity and inclusion manager talked about the company’s new policy of doing away with the terms “ladies and gentlemen” and “boys and girls” at Disney theme parks.
These discussions weren’t taking place in an Ivy League faculty lounge, but among high-level executives at Walt Disney. Americans were shocked, and rightfully so. The unmistakable gist of the video was that Disney was secretly trying to change, in a fundamental way, how children think about sexuality by engineering a narrative based on gender ideology.
Disney executives had marched into this controversy beating their chests, talking trash to Governor DeSantis, and committing the company to the overthrow of the bill protecting young children. But the leaked videos quickly generated over 100 million media impressions, and with public opinion heavily on the other side—not only in Florida, but nationwide—Disney was pummeled. People started canceling their subscriptions to Disney’s streaming service, canceling planned trips to Disney theme parks, canceling Disney cruises, and thinking twice about letting their children watch Disney movies.
Elected officials noticed, too. The Florida legislature and Governor DeSantis have already revoked the special governance and tax status Disney has enjoyed since the 1960s. Disney’s stock value plummeted nearly $50 billion in less than two months. And now Members of Congress are asking why Disney deserves automatic copyright extensions on things like Mickey Mouse—copyrights that customarily have a 28-year limit. If Congress lets Disney’s various copyrights expire next year, it will cost Disney additional multiple billions of dollars.
Doing further research into Disney’s track record regarding children and sexual predators, by the way, I discovered that the company has a notorious pattern, going back over a decade, of having a significant number of its employees arrested for child sex crimes such as child pornography, child exploitation, and child rape. And although a company can’t be held responsible for everything its employees do on their own time, I was able to find two cases of Disney complicity. In the first, Disney authorities allegedly told a Disney security guard to keep her mouth shut when she discovered that a Disney employee was molesting a young boy on a Disney cruise ship. This allowed the employee to evade arrest, after which Disney flew him back home to India so he couldn’t be held accountable. In the other case, I found that the cruise trade association of which Disney is a member had opposed and then helped water down legislation that would have required Disney and other cruise lines to report sexual abuse on their cruise ships in a timely manner.
In summary, Disney’s record on the issue of children and sexuality casts doubt on its claim to moral authority.
***
The lesson I’ve drawn from reporting on institutions that promote ideologies such as critical race theory and radical gender theory is that they have been captured at the structural level and can’t be reformed from within. So the solution is not a long counter-march through the institutions. You can’t replace bad directors of diversity, equity, and inclusion with good ones. The ideology is baked in. That’s why I call for a siege strategy.
This means, first, that you have to be aggressive. You have to fight on terms that you define. In responding to opponents of the Florida bill, for instance, don’t argue against “teaching diversity and inclusion,” but against sexualizing young children. And don’t pull your punches. We will never win if we play by the rules set by the elites who are undermining our country. We can be polite and lose every battle or we can be impolite and actually deliver results for the great majority of Americans who are fighting for their small businesses, fighting for their jobs, fighting for their families.
Second, you have to mobilize popular support. This requires ripping the veil off of what our institutions are doing through real investigation and reporting so that Americans can make informed choices. We live in an information society, and if we don’t get the truth out, we will never gain traction against the narratives being constantly refashioned and pushed by the Left.
Less than two years ago, an infinitesimal number of Americans knew about critical race theory. Through investigation and reporting, we’ve brought that number up to 75 percent. The public now opposes critical race theory by a two-to-one margin, and it is being hounded out of schools and other places. This kind of action is a model for dealing with every ideology and institution that is undermining the public good and America’s future.
Remember that institutions don’t choose these ideologies democratically—they don’t ask people or employees to vote for them. They impose them by fiat, through bureaucratic, not democratic rule. So it isn’t surprising that the institutions lose big when we force their agendas into the political arena. What politician or campaign manager in their right mind would ignore an issue that is supported by a two-to-one margin? So-called conservative politicians who do ignore such issues—or who oppose bringing them up out of a false sense of decorum—aren’t on the people’s and the country’s side.
With public institutions like K-12 education, another crucial step is to decentralize them. It is centralization and bureaucratization that makes it possible for a minority of activists to take control and impose their ideologies. Decentralizing means reducing federal and state controls in favor of local control—and it ultimately means something like universal school choice, placing power in parents’ hands. Too many parents today have no escape mechanism from substandard schools controlled by leftist ideologues. Universal school choice—meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools—would fix that.
Conservatives have for too long been resistant to attacking the credibility of our institutions. Trust in institutions is a natural conservative tendency. But conservatives need to stop focusing on abstract concepts and open their eyes. Our institutions are dragging our country in a disastrous direction, actively undermining all that makes America great.
To some extent, the institutions are now destroying their own credibility. Look at the public health bureaucracy and teachers’ unions, which acted in concert to shut down schools and keep children needlessly masked—and for far too long. As a result, there has been an explosion in homeschooling, as well as in the number of alternative K-12 schools such as the ones Hillsdale College is helping to launch around the country. What is needed is to build alternative or parallel institutions and businesses in all areas. There is no reason, for example, why plenty of high production value children’s entertainment can’t be produced outside the ideological confines of the Walt Disney Company.
In conclusion, we make a mistake in thinking about politics simply in terms of a Left versus Right dynamic. That dynamic is significant, but where the opportunity really lies today is focusing on a top versus bottom dynamic. An elite class, representing a small number of people with influence in the knowledge-based institutions, are acting in their own interest and against the interest of the vast majority of the American people—those who are still attached to the idea that America is a force for good and who think, to take just one example, that young children should be protected from the imposition of radical gender ideology.
In terms of the top versus bottom dynamic, the choice today is between the American Revolution of 1776 and the leftist revolution of the 1960s. The first offers a continued unfolding of America’s founding principles of freedom and equality. The second ends up in nihilism and demoralization, just as the Weather Underground ended up in a bombed-out basement in Greenwich Village in the 1970s.
Even those of us who are temperamentally predisposed to defense must recognize that offense—laying siege to the institutions—is what is now demanded.
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