Charlie Kirk’s recent murder is another display of the insidious nature of WOKE ideology on the college campus and its attack on Christian values and American freedom. Behind the walls of the ivory tower, colleges and universities have become Marxist training grounds for professors who package the ideology to enlist students in the cultural warfare that has severed our nation. As a college professor, my encounters with radical left colleagues left me wondering where I fit in as I saw their seductive power play out on even conservative students. Attending college, a once-honorable right of passage, now has an increasingly sinister and dangerous hook.
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Today’s secular institutions are a postmodern hotbed of critical theory seeped in diversity practices such as LGBTQ “safe spaces” and activist faculty spreading the ills of conservatism, Western thought, and institutional racism. Professors versed in critical theory are warriors for white privilege, social justice, and equity, integral to the race-based reverse discrimination of WOKE culture. These concepts are normalized and sold to students in the name of free speech and academic freedom across the university, proliferating guilt and rage. Using their authority and scholarship as a cloak, activist professors gained momentum in the late 1980s and convinced students to adopt ideologies to dismantle conservatism and Western Civilization. Radical theorists such as Paolo Freire and Michael Apple were two influential scholars who led the research and teaching on white privilege, the idea of a white-other binary of privileged whites owning the cultural capital to succeed and disenfranchised “others.” Ironically, their rigid categories fall apart when it comes to morality. To be WOKE today extends to any identity of oppression related to gender, sexuality, or any legally unprotected group. And clearly, there is no black-white thinking here.
Despite its DEI lingo, WOKE is not on a mission for equality or conciliation. BLM and Antifa driven slogans rear their ugly heads of perpetual oppression, hatred, and violence for the right. It is fair for their members to achieve their concepts of liberation and social justice, including murdering those with whom they disagree. As in the case of Charlie Kirk, the engraved antifa slogans on the bullet cases used make the point. The hostility of his murderer, like others who buy into this ideology, has its roots somewhere in challenges to “socially constructed American norms,” taught by Marxist educators for the purpose of destroying the heart of our country—capitalism and Judeo-Christian values. And classrooms are their gateway.
In typical college classrooms, students question absolute “truth” to reinterpret the meaning of social injustice. Everything they might have learned on the conservative front—faith, family, freedom is deconstructed and considered preconceived assumptions and biases. Activist professors on the front lines use social justice and free inquiry to entice students into recanting conservative values as being racist, unjust, and divisive, forming left-wing training grounds. Anti-Western research is used as a shroud of legitimacy, giving their arguments credibility. The enemy lines are made clear: “us-them,” “oppressor-oppressed,” “dominant-marginalized” language that leaves students and faculty with opposing views terrorized of recrimination and violence. And rightly so. For an ideology that touts tolerance, there is zero tolerance for opinions that differ, and to disagree with WOKE rhetoric is to fall on the other side of tolerance and inclusion, and even die.
Course substitutions for core classics are critical race and gender studies, with anti-fascist antifa courses springing up as well in catalogs. WOKE ideology has wormed its way into every subject area, disengaging students from literary goals in favor of political activism and identity grouping that legitimizes their oppression by the dominant culture. By canceling dominant culture and promising its followers liberation, the left-wing arsenal is seeped in provocative messages that aim at destroying Western culture.
At its core, the Marxification of education is a weapon of destruction, normalizing radical ideas that reproduce classrooms of deluded activists yearning for third-world tribalism. While the Trump administration and state legislatures are using financial measures and curricula reform to stop the movement from spreading, the war is still ongoing in the name of academic freedom. It is not just against a dangerous political ideology that has burrowed its way into the ivory tower, but against spiritual forces.
Parents and activists must continue to expose and fight this destructive ideology and make the right choices for their children, or it will continue to radicalize the next generation. Students must find paths of counter-cultural resistance to bravely use their voices and continue Charlie’s war cry in the arena.
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As the coordinator of graduate programs and the founding director of the office of Professional and Continuing Education at the University of South Florida, Dr. Ciotola developed and implemented cross disciplinary programs, courses, workshops, seminars and community engagement events for adult learners and the workforce that aligned with strategic plans and university initiatives.
She is an active community member serving in local charities, children’s ministries and serves as the Florida state director for Moms for America.
- Dina Ciotola: What I Learned About Marxist Radicalization in the Ivory Tower - October 22, 2025