Christian schools that are more focused on their religious mission often asked families of applicants to discuss their family’s religious life and vision, as a way of ascertaining the seriousness of the applicant’s religious commitment. This is understandable if the school wishes to select for students who can be counted on to support the school’s reason for being.

A reader sends me this screenshot of an application for The Brearley School, an elite girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

This is the social elite’s Statement of Faith! John McWhorter called all of this five years ago, in his great Daily Beast piece on the religion of antiracism.

By the way, this, from the Brearley website, shows you how much it costs to send your daughter there:

Brearley is very woke. From the website:

I wonder if these privileged young ladies of the Upper East Side are ever asked to commit to “active introspection” about how their families’ ways of life impacts poor white children living in upstate New York trailer parks. Haha! Actually, I don’t wonder that at all. I know how they feel about the children of the Deplorables. Culture war is class war. 

Take that point seriously. This is not just something for us to laugh at. These children being indoctrinated into this ideology are the ruling class. In Live Not By Lies, I talk about why ordinary people have to pay serious attention to this stuff:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

More:

“In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it,” says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. “All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn’t agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.”

The even worse catastrophe of World War II strengthened the case for communism. Having endured the agonies of Nazi occupation, many Central Europeans were desperate to believe in something that would guarantee them a bright future. One Czech survivor of the Nazi death camps later wrote that she joined the Communist Party because she mistakenly assumed that it was the polar opposite of Nazism.

When local communists seized power, backed by Soviet might, there was not much left within the exhausted populations with which to resist.

Writes historian Anne Applebaum, “And so, the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their soul to become informers but rather succumbed to the constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure.”

There’s a lot more of this in the book, which you can pre-order here for September 29 release.

The point is that these children of the ruling class, indoctrinated from their young years with the ideology of antiracism, will be determining the course of our country.

I just got off the phone with Chris Rufo, the young independent investigative journalist who recently scored a big victory by releasing documents proving that the Sandia National Laboratories were conducting hateful anti-white training. The Trump administration, acting on this information, banned Critical Race Theory training in federal agencies. I’m going to post the transcript of our interview soon, but I can tell you that Rufo said to me that people have no idea how thoroughly the ideological left has captured institutions, even of the federal government. You’re not going to see any of this reported in the mainstream media, because the media are totally on the side of the ideologues.