Useful idiots: Why college activists are acting as unpaid interns for a dead Soviet empire

Published August 31, 2026 8:00am ET



If you walk into the quad of any elite Western university today, you will be deafened by a very specific vocabulary. You will hear endless lectures on “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “from the river to the sea,” “imperialist implants,” and “indigenous resistance.” The students and tenured professors chanting these slogans are convinced they have uncovered a profound moral truth, imagining themselves as the vanguard of global justice.

In reality, they are reciting the half-century-old psychological warfare drafted in Moscow.

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