The past week should have been clarifying for Americans who have been inundated over the past few years by a melange of buzzwords whose meanings were unfamiliar, but vaguely virtuous-sounding.

Words like “equity” and “social justice,” of course. But also words like “decolonize,” which is a key component of the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” movement.

"Microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage and yet violence against Jews seems to have found a place of tolerance on campus," says Marc Rowan, chair of @Wharton's board of advisors. "It's unfortunately the environment we live in on campus." pic.twitter.com/yWqr0Meslz

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 12, 2023

Middle America has been uneasy, but generally felt unthreatened by the movement people lump together as “woke,” under which DEI, BLM, CRT, and alphabet ideology all are (rightfully) lumped. This movement is unified by a commitment to the cultural Marxist concept of “intersectionality,” which substitutes for Marxism’s “proletariate” a mishmash of “victim” groups whose revolt will destroy Western society.

Almost all of our elite institutions have been captured by this ideology. Christopher Rufo, in his excellent book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, outlines how this ideological capture happened. For my purposes, I just want to briefly explore what this means.

EXCLUSIVE: Harvard paid this nonbinary Latinx professor to "decolonize Harvard." That means working to abolish the university as a "Eurocentric institution," to "destroy racist monuments," and to "prioritiz[e] the survival of colonized people above other interests."… pic.twitter.com/oupo9YsICI

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 13, 2023

The answer is simple: they want us gone, just as Marxist revolutionaries wanted all representatives of the regimes they displaced gone. Their goal is to kill, enslave, reeducate, or simply intimidate both the leaders and the average citizens of Western countries.

A large number of student protest groups have now used this image. Paragliders like these were used to massacre innocent people in Israel.

The image comes from the National Students for Justice in Palestine's "Day of Resistance Toolkit"—itself a highly disturbing document. 1/ pic.twitter.com/IbGzTCti7X

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) October 13, 2023

It doesn’t take a massive amount of dot-connecting to see this. As with prior revolutionary movements, very little is hidden in the agenda of the current Marxists in Antifa, BLM, the DEI advocates, or alphabet ideologists. They should from the rooftops what they are doing, and are utterly unashamed of either their goals or their tactics. As shocked as everybody is by the open embrace of barbarity on our streets and our campuses over the past week, they shouldn’t be. What we are seeing is exactly what the activists have been saying for decades.

When the Left speaks of “decolonizing,” they mean you. Or haven’t you noticed that the Americas were colonized by Europeans centuries ago, and in the view of Muslims much of Europe was colonized during the “Reconquista” when the Moors were driven out? The rest of Europe is, in their view, ready to be colonized by the rightful inheritors of the future.

Rufo, in an essay in City Journal, focuses on Harvard’s embrace of anti-Westernism:

One needs only to browse the current Harvard course catalog to see how deeply the rhetoric of “decolonization” has been embedded. One course, “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization,” draws on critical ethnic studies, a subfield of critical race theory, and promises to promote “Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous radicalism”—that is, left-wing ethnopolitics for everyone except whites and Jews. The goal, according to the course description, is to “discuss how BIPOC communities forged cross-racial, internationalist solidarities to rebel against global white supremacy.”

Another course, “Colonialism and its Postcolonial/Decolonial Afterlives,” features readings of Lenin and Frantz Fanon, the latter of whom argued that “violence is a cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex” and “restores his self-respect.” The rest of the course description is a repetition of slogans from the old Third World revolutionary fronts, promising to “explore the relationship between empire and the rise of industrial capitalism, the significance of race, class, and gender in colonial extraction, and the modes of violence on which it was founded.” The solution? The usual metaphors: “refusal,” “resistance,” “postcoloniality,” and “decoloniality.”

What might these terms mean? To answer that question, we can turn to a Harvard-funded program called “Decolonize Harvard.” In 2021, Harvard’s Derek Bok Center hired Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, a visiting assistant professor of Latinx Studies who uses “he/they” pseudo-pronouns, to lead an initiative about “decolonizing” the university. The premise was simple: administrators, faculty, and students, Montalvo said in his recorded lectures, must “understand and frame Harvard as a settler-colonial, genocidal, and Eurocentric institution” built on the “foundational violence” of white Europeans.

The solution, Montalvo said, was to engage in a “decolonizing process” that embeds critical theory, ethno-political struggle, and left-wing pedagogy throughout the university. After this process is completed, Montalvo speculated, “Harvard and the settler university [may] cease to be recognizable as Harvard as such.” The goal could be, ontologically and epistemologically speaking, “to abolish the university” altogether.

When BLM speaks of “systemic racism” and “White Supremacy culture” and the need to eliminate it, they mean eliminate you and me, because Whites are in their view inherently racists. Antiracism is not about equality, but about supremacy. Ask Kendi himself about whether Whites can be anything but racist.

BLM has been very clear about whose side they are on, and it isn’t civilization.

"I salute Hamas. A job well done. When I heard the news, I smiled!"

Philly crowd roars and applauds.

Are you ready for what’s coming?

pic.twitter.com/IyjgTJPnl4

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 12, 2023

Westerners are rightly sensitive to our failures to always live up to our values and often look with shame at historical events–some recent–that violate our moral principles. Since the Enlightenment, the belief in universal human rights has come to exemplify the West, and our commitment to those ideals defines us.

Unique in the world, the United States is defined by these values alone; there is no common bloodline, long history, or centuries-old national identity that unites our nation of immigrants. What unites us is Liberalism as expressed in the Constitution. That makes America uniquely vulnerable to an anti-Liberal ideology, as there is nothing to fall back on for a unifying identity. Liberalism is our civic religion.

Our elite institutions are, as I have said before, enemies in our midst. Cultural Marxism which is “woke” ideology has been working to destroy Liberalism and “decolonize” the West, and we now see the results. The woke have been telling us what they mean, and have been using our Liberal ideology against us. Our guilt at failing to always meet our professed ideals has made us vulnerable to a movement that rejects those ideals utterly.

Because of our idealism, we havy let the enemy inside the gates.

Protestors around the country have repeated the slogan "resistance is justified when people are occupied." This was a theme at the UNC-Chapel Hill protest yesterday. 9/https://t.co/TzkBysZWpQ

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) October 13, 2023

Israel is the perfect target for this ideology, but it isn’t its ultimate target.

The target is the entire West, and that means you and me. As with Nazism and Communism, this ideology presents an existential threat to Liberalism, and that means our society and our freedom.

We have gotten a demonstration of what the Left means when it chants “By any means necessary.” You have seen the means they mean, and they are brutal.

The threat is very real, and the process of “decolonization” is well on its way to winning. Our elite institutions are already captured, and our streets are populated by people who want to see our civilization destroyed. And they are achieving that goal.

Look at this clown and the others in his replies. So-called “Israel” is a settler colony that was invented and only continues to exist through terrorism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and ongoing incremental genocide. To support “Israel” is to support white supremacist terror. https://t.co/MFXYIqbXvn

— Mohammad Jehad Ahmad محمد جهاد (@MoMisteries) October 15, 2023

The Democrat Party has aligned with this group of radicals, although most Democrats are not radicals themselves. They simply want to own the cultural and economic means of production. Of course, in World War I the Germans didn’t agree with Lenin when they shipped him off to decapitate the Russian polity, although they certainly came to regret helping birth the Soviet Union.

The leaders of the French Revolution, too, allied themselves with the most radical members of their society, and lost their heads over that mistake.

Will decent liberals wake up and reject the radical Left? Perhaps. But don’t hold your breath.