How the Left Programmed Young People to Hate

... The murder of Charlie Kirk was barbarous enough, but what followed was more chilling still. Social media, that great theatre of contemporary sentiment, resounded with elation rather than grief...

If we return to 1975, we can discern that the spectacle is hardly without precedent. The chronicler of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall, Stefan Aust, described the psychosis that fuelled its violence as the Baader-Meinhof Complex: a toxic brew of revolutionary ideology, middle-class angst and personality cultism, in which politics fused with pathology. Terror and bloodshed were the logical expression of this worldview...

The cheering at murder and the inversion of empathy into its opposite are the symptoms of a Liberal Nihilism Complex: a syndrome in which the promises of modernity collapse into petulance and hostility, leaving only a cohort of ‘feral goblins’, mocking and howling into the abyss...

Whatever the spiritual degradation and cultural dispossession of these young minds, they are, nevertheless, instruments of history. The way they have been psychologically programmed is no quirk of fate; it has been done with intent...

... in 1966, when Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China, mobilising youth against their elders, students against teachers, children against parents. He did not stumble into chaos; he conjured it — because chaos was useful.

In Wild Swans, Jung Chang’s memoir of her family’s turmoil during the Cultural Revolution, she recounts that Mao ruled by getting people to despise one another. He understood the ugliest human instincts — envy and resentment — and knew how to weaponise them. “By nourishing the worst in people, Mao created a moral wasteland, a land of hatred.”...

In the United States, groups that emerged from 1960s student radicalism, such as the Weather Underground, adopted similar tactics... Hatred was no passing symptom; it was the weapon itself.

This was not a politics of justice but of immolation. Harmony was the enemy; hatred the accelerant.

Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) saw where it was all leading. He warned that the university was ceasing to be the guardian of truth and culture... The lecture hall, once devoted to dispassionate inquiry, became a place where conflict and division were intentionally stirred...

‘Diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ became less articles of faith than a set of tactics — no longer instruments of compromise but of humiliation, tools by which resentment was stoked and sustained. Generations of students have since been trained to denounce rather than to reason, to persecute rather than to persuade. This is Mao’s Red Guards reconstituted for a digital age...

To reiterate, this is not collateral damage. It is the design. A fractured society is a pliable society...