Time to Lay Siege to Our Institutions: "We will never win if we play by the rules set by the elites who are undermining our country.".

• Author: Rufo, Christopher F.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

WE NEED to lay siege to our institutions. Why do I say that?--because of what has happened to our institutions since die 1960s, which saw the rise of new and radical ideologies in the U.S. that now seem commonplace; ideologies based on ideas like identity politics and cultural revolution. There is a direct line between those ideas bom 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 did not 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 in filtration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."

This march through our institutions, begun a half-century ago, has proved largely successful. Over the past two years, I have looked at the Federal bureaucracy, universities, K-12 schools, and big corporations, and what I have 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 all have seen the outrage of parents over the past couple of 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 nowwidespread voter rebellion shows that it crosses party lines.

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 have 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 the U.S. 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...