New York City Mayor Eric Adams made some extraordinary remarks this week. “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I'm not going to wait until it's done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it,” he said in the wake of the recent violence at Columbia University. But according to Adams, this is not an isolated episode. “This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children.”
These comments are extraordinary not because of their uniqueness; conservatives have been sounding these alarms for many years. They’re extraordinary because they came from the liberal mayor of America's largest city. Adams’s comments could only be eclipsed by admitting that all of this radicalization is coming from within his own political party.
Radicalization takes many forms, the most visible of late being the pro-terrorist social contagion spreading across the nation’s college campuses. People can have disagreements over foreign policy but that’s not what’s happening right now. Instead, we’re hearing student calls for intifada, chants of ‘Death to America,’ and ‘From the river to the sea,’ and various anti-Semitic threats and epithets.
An editor for The Palestine Chronicle called these campus militants “brave,” and described their violence as “awe-inspiring.” The efforts of police to quell violent protests and arrest criminal protestors have been denounced by the Foreign Ministry of Iran, the world’s largest exporter of terrorism. Hamas itself and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, are supporting this chaos.
This anti-American furor has merged with an Islamist agenda and it’s metastasizing from one campus to another. But radicalization doesn’t end with teaching college students that supporting international terrorism is a good thing. Children are being taught to hate people - mostly white people - through critical race theory. Suddenly, medicine is racist. Mathematics is racist. Roads are racist. The list goes on and foments more race hatred.
This radicalization of children also includes efforts to destroy the Judeo-Christian roots of American society and culture. Satanists are establishing after school clubs for kids in public schools. Some schools are teaching Paganism, not as part of an advanced curriculum focused on classical Greek literature or ancient civilizations, but to children in second grade.
Transgender ideology has poisoned the minds of countless young people who are lied to and led to believe delusions that they have the power to change their sex. While Great Britain is finally awakening to the perils of this radicalization, the Biden administration is going in the opposite direction, further promoting transgender ideology while threatening people of faith if they don’t affirm it.
There are other forms of radicalization happening and as Mayor Adams noted, it is indeed a global problem. That’s because these and other forms of agitation were memorialized in the international strategy of the Soviet Union. It was laid out in detail 40 years ago by former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in 1970. The radicalization Adams laments in New York City today was described by Bezmenov in this lengthy and eye-opening interview from 1984.
The assault on American children today also mirrors China’s Cultural Revolution, in which dictator Mao Tse-Tung orchestrated the destruction of what he called The Four Olds - old customs, culture, ideas and habits. The American Left’s incessant promotion of race hatred, global intifada, and denial of the basic tenets of biological and genetic science serve this purpose well. Mao is long dead but militant domestic ideologues are keeping his ideas alive and well.
Leftists like to ridicule conservatives, people of faith and supporters of classical American virtues for recognizing these forms of radicalization, and they get all the support they need from the establishment media. But when the liberal Democrat mayor of the biggest city in America notices, it’s a bit more difficult for the Left to criticize those who say, ‘I agree with Eric Adams.’
The nation finds itself at a critical inflection point. We’re on the cusp of learning whether the Democratic Party of the 21st century is one of nominal American values or held captive by the Radical Left promoting and implementing a Marxian agenda. If it is the latter, we ought not be surprised. As summarized in the Marxist newspaper Labor’s Champion, “Alliance with the liberals and the Democratic Party is the essence of the election tactics of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) and has been since the 1940’s (sic).” Sad to say, they appear to be succeeding.
It took guts for Mayor Adams to call out the terroristic radicalization of American youth. If he can muster the pluck to denounce the race hatred of CRT, the promotion of atheism and the horrors of transgender ideology to which children are exposed, he could write a new chapter of profiles in courage.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member