A Libertarian in the World of Radical Feminists, the Frankfurt School, and Cultural Marxism

American university campuses have been turned into battlefields – masked men chase inconvenient lecturers with batons, far-left students boycott “patriarchy”, administrations ban “offensive to minorities” Halloween costumes of Indian warriors and Mexican musicians. The property of youth conservative groups is being destroyed, radical professors incite students to attack their colleagues, and a new “feminist” fashion of false rape accusations creates huge media scandals.

And this is just the latest phase in a long-running process – the takeover of Western institutions of higher education by a wide range of far-left professors, activists and student organizations. Part of the strategy of the so-called cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School, who injected communist ideology into topics such as environmental protection, race relations, LGBT, men's/women's rights, etc.

These things are not new.

By chance, I had the opportunity to see firsthand the power of far-left organizations in the UK while taking my first steps as a libertarian activist in 2012. My studies at the University of London and my interest in Hong Kong’s economic success led me to one of UL’s schools – SOAS, or the School of Oriental and African Studies. Started as an institution for training colonial administrators after the mid-20th century, SOAS had become one of the reddest universities in the Kingdom.

Let me describe the setting. The vast majority of the professors identify themselves as Marxists, Fanonists, third-generation feminists, post-colonialists, primitivists, etc. They study things like critical theory in economics (i.e. Marxist criticism), white man’s colonial guilt, and feminist theory in international relations. The main topics are the “failure” of capitalism, the imperialism of the Western world (the Eastern world is not mentioned), the role of patriarchy in the repression of women, gender as a social construct, the slavery imposed by globalization and trade.

It's even more interesting among students. Plenty of Leninist, Marxist, Labour, anarcho-communist clubs, the British Labour Party, several religious groups, several pseudo-unions, a strong pro-Palestinian movement, LGBT and feminist organizations. A powerful and totally left-wing controlled Student Union and, as the icing on the cake, the most unpleasant and lying conservatives you can meet on a university campus.

Resistance from within

To tell all the important details of being a libertarian on an openly far-left campus would require a much longer text, so here I will list a few examples from my little pro-market, anti-state subversion during that year in the enemy's lair:

- First of all, the very act of opposing outright nonsense during seminars and exercises. To say that imperialism is not a phenomenon in which some Western Christians enslave some Eastern non-believers, giving an example of their own country becoming part of an Islamic empire for 500 years. To openly state that feminist analysis in international relations is not a real theory explaining what is happening on the international stage. To point out the poverty created by the communism praised by your teachers.

- A second important move - to demonstrate the "reverse" racism of the university and the student council. This happened when we raised a topic for debate during the student Friday assembly (following the example of many left-wing communal movements, there was one in SOAS), related to the presence of a Black and Asian Officer on the Council and the lack of a white one.
The effect was striking after the black "officer" - originally from London - decided to tell me that I was more privileged than him because I was white.

- In third place was the creation of the Libertarian Society SOAS itself, by collecting the 16 required signatures, mostly from friends. Until then, I didn't know if I would find even one other libertarian in such an environment. Even the very creation and officialization of such a club was a shock to the university system. I still remember how the President of the Student Council spat out the pasta he was chewing as soon as he found out what kind of club I wanted to register.

-The big surprise was when I realized that there were other (hidden) libertarians. As soon as I started handing out flyers with Adam Smith around the university buildings and dormitories, trolling left-wing groups on Facebook with Thatcher, and trying to get a libertarian speaker to TEDxSOAS - futurist-anarcho-capitalists stuck on the Dark Web started to emerge from somewhere, people who liked Nozick while their professors hated him, even a lonely professor arranged a strictly conspiratorial meeting with me so that his colleagues wouldn't catch him (by that time, you already know who was creating pro-capitalist problems).

- A big clash and a lot of hate was caused when, together with another colleague, I broke the chain of the library closed by far-left trade unionists. They were standing holding hands and blocking the university (the so-called "picketing") in solidarity with the "poorly paid teachers". I told them that my grandmother had not collected money for the university for years, so we let them get in the way, and we forced our way into the building.

Even then, it was shocking to realize how powerful the left actually was, not just at SOAS, but at most British universities. The effects of this are visible to anyone who has even briefly immersed themselves in the political views of an educated Londoner.

And yet, seeing that even a single student can stir up enough of the soup by telling some painful truths. What would happen in Bulgaria if someone founded an entire organization with a similar mission? 😉

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