Public opinion has steadily turned against many of the cultural and institutional priorities that came to define the post-2020 era.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 73 percent of Americans opposed considering race or ethnicity in college admissions decisions. In 2025, Rasmussen Reports and the Capitol Research Institute found that 74 percent of American parents opposed sexually explicit books in schools. That same year, another Pew survey reported that 72 percent of U.S. adults believed the heightened focus on race and racial inequality following the death of George Floyd had failed to improve the lives of black Americans. And Gallup polling shows that public support for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the workplace has likewise declined.

It seems that Americans are not as divided as popular culture otherwise suggests. Perhaps it is true that the vast majority live in the middle and agree on many fundamental issues. But have you tried openly voicing support for these common-ground issues lately, only to be smeared, belittled, and ridiculed by a vocal minority? Often appearing with a cloak of righteousness and moral authority, the vocal minority of radical ideologues and the leftist rank-and-file effectively create an alternative universe of black-and-white absolutes.

Do you not unequivocally accept the premises of systemic inequities, marginalization, and oppression? Well, you must be an ignorant racist. How dare you speak in favor of merit-based education? You are just hoarding power and privilege. Don’t want obscene books in public school libraries? You are an evil book banner! Are you questioning the constant drumbeat of social justice and racial equity in schools and workplaces? You are the enemy to all “people of color,” plus to all those who don’t accept the sex binary.

These are not imaginary quibbles. Rather, they offer a sharp glimpse into the contagious and aggressive nature of an illiberal ideology that has completely co-opted the entire American political left and, by extension, higher education.

Take the California Faculty Association (CFA), for instance. The union of “29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches who teach and provide services to the California State University system’s 485,000 students” is concerned primarily with fringe politics rather than bread-and-butter issues. Rather than representing its members in collective bargaining, CFA’s campaigns are centered around a “continued push for quality higher education to anti-racism and social justice.” Touting the organization as “a social justice union,” CFA is wholly consumed with racism:

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that does discriminate, resulting in disproportionate deaths to Black people, disproportionate economic burdens to Chicanx/Latinx people, decimation of Native/Indigenous people, and acts of violence and hatred against Asian Pacific Islander and Desi American communities, we must take this opportunity to call on our leaders to not only condemn racism and white supremacy, but to announce programs to enact systemic change.

Such programs for systemic change include: (1) Work to “address bias in student course evaluations, particularly to remedy the problems that faculty who identify as women, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color),” (2) A campaign to “provide free tuition for all Black, Native, and Indigenous students,” (3) Advocacy for “genuine” Ethnic Studies to highlight “the debilitating economic, educational, and health hardships communities of color continue to suffer due to historical and structural racism.”

A former CFA member, who identifies as a center-left liberal, blew the whistle on CFA’s growing tendency toward radicalization. The union promotes a religious regiment of three dogmatic chants at the beginning of its meetings.

First, member participants are required to recite a “Land Acknowledgment,” admitting that they are standing on the stolen land of a native tribe indigenous to the meeting location. There is no acknowledgment of a nuanced precolonial history, in which inter-tribal relations were mainly characterized by violence so brutal that cannibalism and child sacrifice were commonplace. There is no exploration of equally nuanced relationships between European settlers and native tribes. It is just a binary contrast between the bad white man and the innocent, nature-loving Indian.

The land acknowledgment is then followed by a “Reparations Chant,” demanding public actions in California—which entered the union as a free state—to address ongoing legacies of chattel slavery. (Read, “Will the California Legislature Ever Stop Trying to Overturn Proposition 209?“)

Last but not least, the regimen concludes with a “Whiteness Interruption Statement,” ostensibly intended to encourage the union’s white members to recognize and challenge their own normalization of whiteness.

In accordance with its anti-bias work in course evaluations, the whistleblower described the union’s promotion of a “cultural tax,” a racial equity tool to lessen the teaching load for marginalized and oppressed faculty members, whose marginalization and oppression are squarely determined by race. The union’s extreme leftward trajectory was enough to push away this former member, who is otherwise a lifelong Democrat.

Traditional Democrats’ disdain for fringe leftism is not just confined to union politics. Previously, California’s new math framework, which rejects math as a “neutral discipline” and seeks to raise students’ “sociopolitical consciousness,” encountered mass opposition. Many Democrats, including tech industry experts and scientists, joined the opposition. Democrats and liberals also participated in a movement to oppose an ethnic studies model curriculum that is closely rooted in “critical race theory.”

In 2023, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. In the book, the two argue that the Democratic Party had alienated a large portion of its base—namely, the industrial working class and new immigrants—by moving sharply left on many policy issues. Teixeira and Judis, both Democrats, wanted to appeal to common sense and common ground within their own party. Their message, however, appears to have resonated mainly with a narrow class of high-information academics, policy practitioners, and advocates—particularly in places like California. But the problem there is that the overarching system feature of one-party rule has crowded out moderates’ call for common sense. Elsewhere, the left marches on unabated and unchecked, threatening to swallow and absorb dissent from both conservatives and liberals, one classroom and one community at a time.

In traditionally conservative areas, the left’s march through the institutions is particularly subtle, yet decisive, because the perpetrators are homegrown radicals who blend in seamlessly and occupy influential positions under the cover of nice Christians and harmless next-door neighbors.

For example, in my deep-south county of residence, which voted for Trump at over 70 percent in the last election, dozens of sexually explicit books have repeatedly appeared in a public-school library under the “watchful” eyes of a conservative-majority administration and school board. The leadership claimed it was an innocent mistake, noting that some book-recommending entity said the books are “age-appropriate.” When challenged, however, the librarian refused to remove the books from the database and simply moved them to a closet.

Surely, the persistence of obscene content in a few library books is a small problem compared to the much larger issue of ideological capture, even in a small red town. Turns out the same school library houses no literature from any known conservative author. Classics like Democracy in America are also nowhere to be found. To add insult to injury, searching the keyword “conservative” in the database brings up a book titled Cemetery Boy. Here is a brief description of it: “Yadriel, a trans boy, summons the angry spirit of his high school’s bad boy, and agrees to help him learn how he died, thereby proving himself a brujo, not a bruja, to his conservative family.”

When confronted with the overwhelming evidence, the librarian doubled down: “I must affirm and protect children who identify as LQBTQIA+. If their parents find out, they’d be dead.” This thinking for the kids with my own righteousness mentality, typical of the modern left, is a bigger and far more salient problem than the curation of specific book titles that may or may not be checked out at a particular time. It shows a hell-bent intent to capture, indoctrinate, and pervert young minds. This same librarian has won accolades such as the “Media Specialist of the Year” from the school system, which has a nominally conservative superintendent hired by the conservative board.

One may ask: how does an educational institution in a sleepy rural town become hijacked by the American blend of Marxist gender ideology? As Saul Alinsky once instructed his fellow radicals, “True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”

The far left’s infiltration of American education is a painful reality that any serious reformer must contend with. An analysis of 437,783 political contributions, conducted by the Educational Freedom Institute, found that 68 percent of donations from K-12 teachers and 93 percent of contributions from college and university professors went to Democratic candidates or committees. While, on the whole, K–12 teachers are more to the right than their college counterparts, K–12 librarian positions are overwhelmingly held by Democrats.

According to a Cato Institute analysis, “librarians who donate to Democrats outnumber those who give to Republicans roughly 9 to 1.” (Read, “Sneaking Anti-Semitism and DEI? University Libraries Host Fugitives”). The same analysis showed that more schools in Trump-won counties held leftist books such as Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and Between the World and Me than held any conservative title, such as Woke Racism and Cynical Theories. This decisive ideological slant in school libraries—the de facto heartbeat of any school—makes viewpoint diversity impossible.

On the flipside, the bias shows an urgency to confront the demonization of common-sense positions held by conservatives and classical liberals alike. Illiberal Marxism has taken over the public square to marginalize the middle, where most Americans live, and it is time to call the radicals out.

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