Kerby Anderson examines claims that political activists and government agencies are reshaping American institutions, including immigration, policing, housing, education, and the administrative state, and presents a biblical perspective on faith, family, freedom, and civic life.
Society is defined by institutions, but unfortunately too many of those institutions have been captured by secular progressives. In this article I summarize material from Seth Barron, Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions{1} and from Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution.{2} In the discussion of the deep state, I will also refer to the material by Jason Chaffetz, They’re Coming for You,{3} with some insights about the deep state from Ned Ryan’s book, American Leviathan.{4}
Weaponization of Institutions
We heard lots of commentators talking about “weaponization” but often it is merely a means to focus on whatever someone finds annoying. The authors use this in a more specific way. Are there institutions and individuals who are using established institutions to advance their social agenda?
Leftist activists have been transforming respected institutions for their political and ideological ends. They could not achieve much success without leveraging the good reputation of those institutions. In his book, Seth Barron focuses on four institutions: citizenship, public safety, housing, and education.
Immigration is a process in America that is generally viewed in a favorable light. We are told that we are a nation of immigrants. Unfortunately, immigration has become a tool for the disruption of American political and cultural life. He argues. “Citizenship has been devalued, weaponized, and turned against the citizens of the country.”
Policing is necessary in a civil society and has usually had a high reputation among the public. But activists have worked to tie policing to the legacy of slavery. The solution, therefore, is to defund the police and allocate tax dollars to “community-based radical social service nonprofit organizations” which often have the goal of destroying Western values and society.
Owning a home is central to the American identity. Living in a home of your own with enough space and a backyard has been part of the American dream. But the Left rejects these dreams and instead has been working to verticalize housing in the form of dense complexes that are close to mass transit. And they have been using state legislatures and zoning laws to achieve their goals.
Education has been the great cultural equalizer. Students in public schools traditionally learned about the history of this nation and the values that made it great. Unfortunately, public education has been “captured by teachers’ unions, ‘educrats,’ and leftist activists who have turned schools into indoctrination camps for progressive nostrums.”{5}
Leaders of the Cultural Revolution
While we are talking about the weaponization of institutions, it is worth mentioning some of the leaders of this cultural revolution. Christopher Rufo tells their story in his book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Within the last two decades, we have seen remarkable changes in institutions. Schools adopted critical race theory, which used to only be taught in graduate-level classes. Universities divided students into oppressors and victims and forced the former to address their racial and sexual privilege. Corporations denounced the US as a “system of white supremacy” and adopted woke policies and used woke advertising to market their products.
How did this happen? To understand the changes, you need to understand the leaders of this cultural revolution. In his book, he provides the backgrounds of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Many of those names are probably not familiar to you, but I can assure you that these names have surfaced in many of the radio interviews I have done.
Many of the ideas we will discuss this week have been in the culture for some time, but they exploded onto the scene with the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. Suddenly, the themes of the 1960s surfaced in our daily news feeds and became the official ideology of colleges and corporations. Phrases like “systemic racism” and “white privilege” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were being repeated in classrooms, newsrooms, and board rooms.
Much of this began in the 1960s during the student uprisings, urban riots, and revolutionary violence. Herbert Marcuse was the father of the revolution. Angela Davis was the leader of black liberation that later came to be known as Black Lives Matter. Paulo Freire promoted Marxist ideology in education. Derrick Bell promoted critical race theory and the development of DEI.
The rhetoric may not be as revolutionary-sounding as what was chanted in the streets decades ago, but the revolutionary goal is just the same. The radical left wants to replace individual rights with group-identity-based rights. They want to suppress speech and censor any ideas contrary to their ideology.
These new revolutionaries plan to do this with what have been called a “long march through the institutions.” No longer are these revolutionaries on the outside trying to foment revolution. They are professors and administrators working to bring out a revolution from inside the institutions.
The Administrative State
Information is power. Data is power. When government has massive amounts of data, they also have incredible power. It is the power to control behavior. It is the power to shape the views of the electorate and the values of the next generation.
Consider that in the last few decades, government has passed the Patriot Act, established the FISA court (United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), and expanded NSA (National Security Agency) warrantless surveillance programs. In every case, we were told it was being done to keep us safer.
Bureaucrats can use and abuse that power because our government has given them more power than the Constitution allows. And the problem has been made worse because new technology (such as artificial intelligence) has enabled what some have described as “weapons of mass detection.” It can quickly find citizens who have not complied with the latest trends and woke ideas.
Our government is obsessed with collecting vast amounts of information. Countless Americans have been censored, debanked, and prosecuted by government officials who have collected information about them and their political perspectives.
In my booklet on A Biblical View on the Deep State, I explain that this term describes a parallel system of government that sometimes operates outside of official channels. This so-called “fourth branch of government” is referred to as a deep state or the administrative state. In his book, Ned Ryan refers to it as the American Leviathan.
Over the last few months, we have seen how this weaponization of intelligence works. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a significant report documenting numerous ways the Biden administration weaponized several aspects of the federal government.{6}
The Justice Department documented the previous administration’s weaponization of the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act) against pro-life individuals and organizations. They also discovered that “the Biden DOJ (Department of Justice) routinely colluded with pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation.” {7}
There has also been testimony at the National Religious Liberty Commission hearings about the various ways in which government (federal, state, and local) shows significant hostility toward Christian Americans. The report not only documents these abuses but sets up a Task Force dedicated to eradicating Anti-Christian bias.{8}
When the government collects information, bureaucrats use it in a variety of ways. But there is another side to the data collection. The weaponization of intelligence makes government surveillance much easier. Many in the deep state collect and weaponize private information.
The Power of the Deep State
In his first term, President Trump discovered the power of the federal bureaucracy. Winning the 2016 election and winning the 2024 election may have been significant, but it didn’t change the makeup of the federal bureaucracy.
The deep state can also depend on progressive non-profit organizations and social media platforms to collect even more data. Even though the government is technically limited in some of the data it can collect, that’s not a problem. The federal government can merely collect it by purchasing data from several of these private sector data brokers.
After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he released the “Twitter Files.” We learned of the insidious connection between social media and the federal government. And with the advance of artificial intelligence along with facial recognition, the government can learn virtually anything it wants to know about any citizen.
Many individuals have been debanked because their views or businesses contradicted the views and values of the administration. For example, Dr. Joseph Mercola lost his business and personal account because of his statements about the Covid vaccine. Marc Andreesen (founder of Netscape) told Joe Rogan in an interview that he knew of 30 tech company founders who had been debanked in the past four years.{9}
Of course, President Trump and his family have been debanked. Charles Gasparino documented the many successful attempts to debank Donald Trump after he left office. Pressure from regulators was all that was necessary to force the former president to find other banks for his business.{10}
There is also the power of the IRS. During the 2012 election, I covered numerous stories about conservative groups who waited months to receive their tax-exempt status or never received that status. The reason: they had “Tea Party” in their name. In many cases, the IRS demanded disclosure of their donors and other confidential information.
More recently, the IRS denied tax-exempt status to the group Christians Engaged. In particular, the IRS ruled against the Christian organization because it affirmed “the sanctity of life, the definition of marriage, and biblical justice.”{11}
Fortunately, the ruling was reversed due to pressure from members of Congress and our (Point of View) radio broadcast. But consider that thousands of Christian churches also have those views. If those beliefs were supposedly enough to disqualify a Christian organization, those same beliefs could be used to remove the tax-exempt status of those churches.
Biblical Perspective
The Bible teaches that God has ordained key institutions. Christians cannot allow these leftist activists to take over these divinely ordained institutions.
The first institution is the government, which is ordained by God (Romans 13:1–7) and is ultimately under God’s control. We are commanded to obey governmental authorities (Romans 13:1–4, 1 Peter 2:13-14).
A second institution is the church (Hebrews 12:18–24; 1 Peter 2:9–10). Jesus taught that the government should work in harmony with the church and should recognize its sovereignty in spiritual matters (Matthew 22:21).
A third institution is the family (Ephesians 5:22–32, 1 Peter 3:1–7). The family is an institution under God and His authority (Genesis 1:26–28, 2:20–25). A related institution is education. Children are not the wards of the state, but belong to God (Psalm 127:3) and are given to parents as a gift from God. Parents are to teach their children (Deuteronomy 4:9) and may also entrust them to tutors (Galatians 4:2).
In my booklet on A Biblical View of Borders and Deportation, I talk about the importance of borders and boundaries. We cannot have open borders and cannot allow uncontrolled immigration to this country.
The Bible teaches that God established the boundaries for the nation of Israel: “I will set your border from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates” (Exodus 23:31). The Bible also warns the Jewish leaders, “You shall not move your neighbor’s landmark, which the men of old have set” (Deuteronomy 19:14). And again, “Do not move an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless” (Proverbs 23:10-11).
In Acts 17:26, we read that God set boundaries for the lands of the nations: “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”
Education must also be done with the consent of parents. Ephesians 6:4 says, “Parents, do not exasperate your children: instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it.” We should also be teaching wisdom to our children (Psalm 111:10, Proverbs 9:10).
We have allowed these leftist activists to weaponize these institutions against biblical values of faith, family, and freedom. Christians are called to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-16). It is time for all of us to challenge the weaponization of our institutions.
Notes
1. Seth Barron, Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions, FL: Humanix Books, 2026.
2. Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, NY: HarperCollins, 2023
3. Jason Chaffetz, They’re Coming for You, NY: Broadside Books, 2025.
4. Ned Ryan, American Leviathan, NY: Encounter Books, 2024.
5. Seth Barron, nypost.com/2026/05/02/opinion/the-left-weaponizes-everything-and-its-rotting-our-infrastructure/
6.House Oversight Committee, “Restoring America Through Oversight: A 2025 Year in Review,” December 2025, oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Oversight-End-of-Year-2025.pdf.
7. US Department of Justice, “Justice Department Reveals the Biden Administration’s Weaponization of Federal Law Against Pro-Life Americans,” April 14, 2026.
8. US Department of Justice, “Task Force Publishes Report on Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias and Restoring Religious Liberty,” April 30, 2026.
9. Kerby Anderson, “Debanking,” pointofview.net/viewpoints/debanking-3/.
10. Charles Gasparino, “Inside the Enormous Effort to Debank Trump,” New York Post, August 9, 2025, nypost.com/2025/08/09/business/gasparino-inside-the-enormous-biden-effort-to-debank-trump-after-jan-6/.
11. Kerby Anderson, “IRS and Churches,” pointofview.net/viewpoints/irs-and-churches/
©2026 Probe Ministries
Kerby Anderson
Kerby Anderson is president of Probe Ministries International. He holds masters degrees from Yale University (science) and from Georgetown University (government). He is the author of several books, including Christian Ethics in Plain Language, Genetic Engineering, Origin Science, Signs of Warning, Signs of Hope and Making the Most of Your Money in Tough Times. His new series with Harvest House Publishers includes: A Biblical Point of View on Islam, A Biblical Point of View on Homosexuality, A Biblical Point of View on Intelligent Design and A Biblical Point of View on Spiritual Warfare. He is the host of "Point of View" (USA Radio Network) heard on 360 radio outlets nationwide as well as on the Internet (www.pointofview.net) and shortwave. He is also a regular guest on "Prime Time America" (Moody Broadcasting Network) and "Fire Away" (American Family Radio). He produces a daily syndicated radio commentary and writes editorials that have appeared in papers such as the Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury, and the Houston Post.
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