I recently came across a curious piece of news regarding the radicalization of UK universities: even some Arab countries have warned their citizens not to send their children to certain Western universities lest they become radicalized. Outlets such as The Times, Fox News, The Times of India, and others reported in January 2026 that the UAE had curtailed subsidies for students at UK universities for fear the Muslim Brotherhood would brainwash them.
The Times of Israel quoted JD Vance, who labeled this an “absolutely insane headline” and posted on X that “Some of our best Muslim allies in the Gulf think the Islamist indoctrination in certain parts of the West is too dangerous.”
The Jewish Chronicle reported that “Emirati political scientist … Abdulkhaleq Abdulla said that the Gulf state had, on multiple occasions, raised concerns that Emirati students studying in the UK could be exposed to Muslim Brotherhood-aligned groups.”
Aayan Hirsi Ali famously warned against the subversion of the West by the “twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam.” She discussed the notorious lecture by KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov, titled “Psychological Warfare, Subversion, and the Control of Society,” which listed four stages of the subversion process: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization:
Demoralization … requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation. The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself….Destabilization is the next phase. This process is considerably shorter, taking anywhere between five months to two years. With demoralization now reaching its full maturity, society is increasingly paralyzed by harsh domestic turmoil across all sectors.… Society turns inward, leading to fear, isolationism, and the decline of the nation-state itself, leading to crisis…. Finally, says Bezmenov, a subverted society enters the normalization stage, which is when the subversive regime takes over, installing its ideology as the law of the land. By then, the enemy has totally conquered the target society — without ever firing a shot.
Jason Hill provides a chilling diagnosis:
Thirty-three years ago, when I entered college, left-wing ideologies dominated American universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. But one still could get a fair, balanced education by consulting traditional canonical texts that countered the dogma. Free speech was alive on college campuses. There were hisses and boos, of course, but for the most part, hearing perspectives different from your own was considered essential to your education. Few of us lived in our own curated silos.Today, after 22 years of being a college professor, and having traveled much of America to lecture, I am sad to say the situation is not the same. The core principles and foundations that keep the United States intact, that provide our citizens with their civic personalities and national identities, are being annihilated. The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.
Due to a favorable political climate and the efforts of pro-American and pro-Western individuals and institutions, the situation in the United States is somewhat less dire than in other Western countries, but the battle is far from over. Just as Bezmenov’s demoralization stage took decades, so will the reversal of the ideologies that are destroying the West. We have no choice but to keep “fighting the good fight.”
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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