Few people are familiar with Critical Theory and its related doctrines, yet these ideas today drive government policies and shape public attitudes. Capitalism is oppressive. Private property rights cause environmental destruction. Prosperity causes climate change. The most serious threat to the West is not China or Russia but its visceral disgust with itself. A growing proportion of people— in universities, the media, politics and corporate structures — now reject the premises upon which their own thriving societies are built.

Indoctrination works. Hear something often enough from people in authority and you begin to believe it. In the decades following its birth at the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory and its variations made an inexorable march through universities ,influencing such disparate disciplines as sociology, literary criticism and linguistics, infiltrating professional schools like teachers’ colleges and law schools, and dominating “grievance studies” such as women’s studies, gender studies and media studies. The final conquest is now in progress inside science, technology, engineering and medical faculties.

Generations of graduates, taught to believe in Critical Theory rather than how to think critically about it, now populate governments, corporate boards, human resource departments, courts, media outlets, teachers’ unions, school boards and classrooms. Critical Theory is embedded in elementary school curricula. Children carry the guilt and resentment of living in a society that they are taught is fundamentally unjust. No coup is more effective than one committed by a people against itself. Evidence of the ascendancy of these new doctrines is everywhere. To reason, to rely on evidence, to seek consistency, and to insist that individuals have ownership of their own lives are (now) features of an oppressive culture.