In 1975, when the Baader-Meinhof gang stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm, killing two and torching the building, a British tabloid posed a haunting question: "So, Who's Sick?" Was it the "corrupt" society the radicals despised, or the radicals themselves, consumed by a feverish zeal? Fast-forward to 2025, and the murder of Charlie Kirk, a conservative voice, elicits not mourning but celebration from swaths of the progressive Left. Social media erupts with glee, not grief, exposing a chilling void where compassion should reside. The question of 1975 echoes louder than ever, but now we see a clearer answer: the sickness isn't just in the jeering youth, it's in the elites who have moulded them into foot soldiers for a revolution rooted in hatred.
The Orchestrated Descent
This isn't a spontaneous uprising of disaffected young people; it's a calculated project. Leftist elites, academics, media figures, and political operatives, have spent decades engineering a culture where resentment is a virtue and division a strategy. The young, adrift in a world stripped of meaning, are their perfect instruments. As Jillian Becker observed in Hitler's Children (1977), post-war German radicals, unmoored by their parents' Nazi-era complicity, turned their fury on society itself. Today's youth, dubbed "lost souls" by commentators like Richard the Fourth, are similarly orphaned, not by war but by a hollowed-out liberal order that promised freedom but delivered spiritual emptiness. Into this void, elites have poured a toxic ideology, transforming disillusionment into a weapon.
The playbook isn't new. In 1966, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution unleashed China's youth to tear down their elders, teachers, and traditions. As Jung Chang recounts in Wild Swans, Mao didn't stumble into chaos, he engineered it, weaponising envy and resentment to create "a moral wasteland, a land of hatred." This wasn't an accident; it was a deliberate tactic to fracture society for control. The echoes are unmistakable in today's West, where elites cultivate animosity under the guise of justice, turning young people into digital Red Guards armed with hashtags and outrage.
The Academic Forge
The universities are ground zero. After the violent radicalism of groups like the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof fizzled, culminating in events like the 1977 Mogadishu hijacking defeat, radicals didn't vanish; they retreated to academia. There, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe articulated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), they traded bombs for theory, crafting a new orthodoxy of "social justice" that thrives on perpetual conflict. Their goal wasn't harmony but "new antagonisms," pitting urban against rural, race against race, gender against gender. Critical theory, post-colonialism, and gender studies became tools to dismantle reason and sow discord, training students to denounce rather than debate.
Allan Bloom warned in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) that universities were abandoning truth for relativism, replacing learning with grievance. He was prophetic. Today's lecture halls churn out graduates primed to see opponents as existential threats, Nazis or fascists to be crushed, not fellow citizens to engage. The celebration of Kirk's murder on platforms like X and TikTok isn't a glitch; it's the fruit of this indoctrination, where empathy is inverted into spite, and violence is cheered as justice.
The Mechanics of Manipulation
This isn't organic. Elites have systematically programmed the young to serve as shock troops for a revolution that promises utopia, but delivers division. The Weather Underground's 1974 manifesto, Prairie Fire, called for exploiting racial and class fractures to destroy America's institutions. Its spirit lives on in modern ideologies that cast society as a battleground of oppressors versus victims, with no room for reconciliation. "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" sound noble but often function as tactics to humiliate and polarise, ensuring society remains fractured and pliable.
James Davison Hunter, who coined "culture wars," noted that when disputes become clashes over reality itself, civility collapses. This is by design. A united society resists radical change; a fragmented one bends to those who control the narrative. Elites, whether tenured professors, media moguls, or activist influencers, profit from this chaos, consolidating power by posing as arbiters of competing grievances. The young, steeped in this worldview, are dispatched to enforce it, their idealism twisted into a crusade against their own civilisation.
The Harvest of Hatred
The results are stark: digital mobs revelling in bloodshed, institutions cowering before outrage, and a public square poisoned by labels like "Nazi" hurled at anyone who dissents. This mirrors Mao's land of hatred, where cruelty was a political tool. The cheering over Kirk's death isn't just moral decay, it's the intended outcome of a system that thrives on strife. As David Horowitz, a former radical turned critic, observed, this isn't about justice but "permanent war," driven by "nihilism and hate." The young aren't the masterminds; they're the pawns, conditioned to see destruction as progress.
The question "Who's sick?" has an answer: a society that lets its youth be weaponised by elites is diseased. The young bear responsibility for their actions, but the greater guilt lies with those who engineered their rage. This revolution isn't about liberation, it's about control, using the idealism of the young to tear down the very systems that could offer them meaning. To stop it, we must reclaim education, restore reason, and rebuild a culture that values unity over division. Otherwise, the land of hatred will only grow, and the elites will keep their foot soldiers marching, to the destruction of Western civilisation.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/09/16/how-the-left-programmed-young-people-to-hate/