Beyond DEI: How a Top US University Became a Marxist Factory – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

In the 20th century, communism arrived via drab uniforms, five-year plans, and gulags. Today, it arrives via soft slogans and social media campaigns. Its weapons are no longer rifles and red flags but influencer campaigns, fellowship programs, and university-backed curricula. The battlefield is the minds of the young. One of its most powerful players is the Club of Rome, with Penn State University (PSU) acting as a campus incubator.

Founded in 1968 by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish scientist Alexander King, the Club of Rome is a powerful and well-connected group that has shaped global policy for decades. It was designed to coordinate elite responses to what it framed as global crises. These crises, it’s worth noting, were — and still are — often ecological in nature and always carry real economic consequences. The group gained global recognition with its infamous 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,” which predicted societal collapse due to overpopulation and resource exhaustion.

As exposed in The Club of Rome: The Think Tank of the New World Order by John Coleman, the group is far more than a gathering of anxiety-ridden intellectuals. It functions as an elite-guided engine for global transformation, merging technocratic planning with post-Marxist doctrine. Coleman warned that the Club’s real aim was the demolition of national sovereignty, curtailing economic freedom, and reconditioning youth into compliant agents of systemic change. What was once dismissed as conspiratorial is now presented in clear language on the group’s official websites and in its “educational” materials.

Take the Club’s “Young Person’s Guidebook to Systems Change,” which is essentially a manifesto crafted to reshape how young people view capitalism, society, and themselves. The guide portrays capitalism not merely as flawed but as evil, a parasitic force sustained by contemptible concepts like independence, individualism, and meritocracy.  (RELATED: The Fall of Harvard: How America’s Oldest University Became Its Most Expensive Liability)

The authors argue that capitalism has “mastered the art of adaptation,” labeling it a chameleon that can absorb any challenge and commodify every aspect of society. Young readers are told that their “survival of the fittest” mindset is not only outdated but harmful, and that individual pursuit must be replaced by communal “we-ness,” a collectivist creed designed to override selfhood.

Then, there’s the 50 Percent, the Penn State-backed youth wing of this ideological operation. Marketed as a vehicle for youth empowerment, it is in reality a training ground for ideological uniformity. Through its flagship “Storytelling for Systems Change” fellowship, young people are taught not to question power structures but to reframe them in favor of collectivism. Fellows are equipped not with tools for critical thinking, but with pre-approved scripts that portray capitalism as the root of all modern afflictions, including inequality, climate collapse, and alienation.

The 50 Percent blurs the line between education and re-education, grooming participants to adopt systems thinking in line with elite-sanctioned goals. “Capacity-building” sessions are framed around solving complex problems, but only within an ideologically pre-defined sandbox. Even political engagement is steered through curated policy consultations, producing “knowledge” not through open inquiry, but through guided consensus. The effect is clear: impressionable students are being turned into ideological vessels. The contradiction is, for lack of a better word, staggering.

Students, some of whom pay up to $40,000 per year, are subsidizing their own ideological programming. Without capitalism, they wouldn’t be at Penn State to begin with. Yet they are taught to see it as the disease, and communist-friendly collectivism as the cure. Forget higher learning. This is higher programming.

It gets worse. The Club has a decades-long relationship with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where “The Limits to Growth” was developed in collaboration with the Systems Dynamics group. Often celebrated as a hub of scientific innovation, MIT has quietly served as one of the Club’s earliest launchpads into American academia, collaborating on everything from simulation models to sustainability workshops. That same blueprint is now being scaled to other campuses, with Penn State as a key node in the next phase of expansion.

The packaging may have changed — no longer jackboots and propaganda posters — but the objective remains the same: to remake the world by capturing the minds of its youth. And they’re succeeding.

The Club’s graduates have helped seed the degrowth movement, called for the abolition of private property, and pushed for radical policies like climate lockdowns. What seems grassroots is actually a top-down exercise, engineered, orchestrated, and marketed with the sophistication of a Fortune 500 campaign.

The result is a generation being trained to see freedom as dangerous, property as theft, and self-determination as selfishness. These aren’t values. Not American values, anyway. They’re viral ideas, memes deployed in the service of soft authoritarianism.

Today, Americans are rightly alarmed by the rise of DEI bureaucracies, pronoun mandates, and ideological loyalty oaths. But while attention is fixed on the visible surface, a deeper and arguably more dangerous current surges beneath, one that seeks not just to adjust policy but to reprogram reality itself. This is a resource-rich, highly coordinated assault on liberty. It must be confronted with the moral seriousness it deserves.

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