In 1989, the United States defeated the Soviet Union in the 35-year-old Cold War of ideology and geopolitics but lost the peace when its elite universities continued their institutional promotion of State-based dominance in human governance over America’s Constitution-based system, which is responsible only to the People. President Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton professor before he entered politics, advocated for the government to be run by ‘experts’ free of control by elected representatives. The Administrative State evolved, manned by elite university graduates and academics whose careers cycled between university and government posts.
University professors, often with federal grants to support and implement their new research, have centralized power in Washington while diminishing the Constitutionally granted powers to the States. The command economies they created sought to control every phase of a citizen’s life, from ‘cradle to grave’. When this ‘fundamental transformation’ was completed, as promised by President-elect Obama just before his election in 2008, America’s welfare State and Soviet Communism would be birds of a feather flocking together in kumbaya universal peace.
When that did not happen, the academic elites took their ideologies to the public through new programs such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI). These programs exchange mediocrity for merit and divide our population into victims and oppressors. These concepts, contrary to the vision of our founders, migrated from university to university, to their students, to the media, into the cultural arts and major corporations, and into the political mainstream.
In the late 1800s, Harvard removed religious affirmation from its ‘Veritas’ motto and replaced its meaning with scientific truth. Free exercise of religion, granted in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, became reinterpreted to be ‘but within the limitations of the law’. Many other universities bearing religious backgrounds faced similar secular fates.
The depth to which elite universities have embraced Cold War ideology was exposed on October 7, 2023, when students and activists around the globe sponsored campus anti-Semitic protests in support of the Hamas terrorists. They justified their positions by claiming that Palestinians were the victims of Israeli occupation and oppression. They failed to acknowledge the murder of 1,200 Israelis.
Eighteen-year-old Charlie Kirk, without an elite degree but with a vast reservoir of common sense, courage, and Biblical faith, rode directly into the heart of the Cold War counterrevolutionaries,
naively thinking he could change the hearts and minds of those students living in a closed culture that excluded contrarian views.
Kirk challenged their students to defend the untruths they were being taught and were being implemented in Washington. To the authoritarian concept that religious thought should be replaced by atheism or science, Kirk argued that Christ-centered Christian faith better met the human desire for obtaining meaning in their lives. To Kirk, the State is not a suitable substitute for families in nurturing children to adulthood. Within Kirk’s belief system, obedience and servitude to an all-powerful State are not equivalent to love of one’s free country.
This week, President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly, challenging Western nations to quit allowing immigration and the high cost of green energy from destroying their civilization. He charged that the United Nations had abandoned its charter and had instead become an obstacle to peace, prosperity, and human rights.
These past few days, Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk have reminded us that we have allowed the start of a new Cold War internationally and the growth of its authoritarian ideology deep within our culture. Both men opposed those whose evil ambitions were to subvert our nation’s Founding principles and crush our American culture. Both men faced assassination attempts to silence them.
Thousands in Phoenix mourned Charlie Kirk’s death on Sunday, and the bullet aimed to kill Donald Trump missed him last year by less than an inch.
TW3
September 25, 2025
John Whitmore Jenkins
