Bonfire of the Institutions

The Threat of Institutional Capture

A friend explained recently that, as a young man in Russia, he had publicly opposed the communist regime – even featuring on foreign media. Despite his courage, today he would not publicly oppose feminism - for an Australian academic, the repercussions are too great.

A man who once defied the Soviet regime is silenced by an Australian university. Something has gone badly wrong and not just at his university. The problem has a name - Institutional Capture. And it has recognised dangers. Yet its advance has largely gone unremarked and unchecked. Let me explain.

Institutional Capture

If you have heard talk of institutional capture at all, it’s probably concerned accusations that President Trump is trying to influence or even control institutions (1, 2). This is top-down capture and it has happened many times in the past. Consequently, healthy democracies have defences – things like judicial independence, academic freedom and requirements that the Public Service be apolitical.¹

But there’s a related problem that’s little recognised – bottom-up capture.

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Bottom-up capture also involves an institution becoming a political player by compromising its neutrality. The difference is that it’s driven by those within.

Bottom-up capture was first clearly described by Marxists – notably in Antonio Gramsci’s war of position and, later, Rudi Dutschke’s long march through the institutions. Gramsci’s idea was that activists can win power by co-opting institutions like schools, media, and bureaucracy to reshape what passes as “common sense”.

Given feminism’s links to the New Left, it’s no surprise feminism² followed a parallel path.³

So how does bottom-up capture occur? It’s best understood as three phases: Entry, Consolidation and Contagion.

For Marxists, getting their people into institutions was a problem but not so for feminists. Social psychology suggests that a committed minority of, very roughly, 25% can flip a group’s consensus. (Less in some circumstances.) Since 51% of Australian adults identify as feminists, entry into organisations is rarely a problem. All it takes is someone to light the spark.

The next step, consolidation, is helped enormously by human nature. We conform. We are likely to believe the group is correct, and, even if we don’t, we are still likely to go along.

But it’s not just psychology at play. Individual pressures scale up through an organisation. Like-minded staff are hired and promoted. New roles like DEI are created. And new training courses help drag the rest along. Political scientist Yascha Mounk described the result:

And as more members of progressive institutions chose to stay silent, the cost for anyone who still insisted on speaking up grew. A vicious cycle had emerged.

There are costs when an institution drifts from its original mission into politics but they are rarely borne by those inside. For insiders, feminist alignment signals virtue, reduces reputational risk and expands bureaucratic scope.

The third phase, contagion, has actually been happening for almost half a century. Contemporary feminism grew up in universities in the 1970s and, ever since, graduates have been spreading it into their workplaces in media, law and the public service. From there it has spread further through an increasingly complex ecosystem: some organisations set beliefs, others demand alignment using standards, regulation and accreditation; others enact feminist policies; and all reinforce each other, spreading the capture ever further.

Yascha Mounk (cited earlier) noted this astonishingly quick spread - and amended Dutschke’s “long march” catchphrase into “the short march through the institutions”.

Case Studies

To better illustrate, let’s look at some particular case studies. The institutions I’ll look at are those nominated by Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge: “Scholarship … Journalism … Government … Law”. Rauch argues that these institutions must be defended since their capture can be a mortal blow to a liberal democracy. Intriguingly, Marxist scholars including Antonio Gramsci arrived at basically the same list when they considered which organisations they should target. One man’s threat is another’s opportunity.

Universities

Many learned authors have argued that universities are no longer politically neutral instead actively supporting feminism and allied identity-politics (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). But it’s still instructive to look at the forces that sustain this politicisation.

It starts with hiring and promotion where many universities in Australia and elsewhere now require diversity statements from job applicants – meaning that applicants must express support for identity politics or be excluded. Even without such formal processes, potential dissenters can still be excluded. For example, one American study found that 37% of psychology faculty admit they would discriminate against a conservative in a hiring decision.

We shouldn’t overlook Women’s Studies departments. Right from their beginnings in the 1970s, they were forthright in announcing transformation of universities as a goal.

And then there are external forces like Athena SWAN. Most Australian universities subscribe to this organisation in return for accreditation if they follow feminist policies including discriminatory hiring and promotion, and a commitment to “structural and cultural changes”. In effect, Athena SWAN accredits that the university is captured and universities actively pursue that accreditation.

Or the Australian Research Council (ARC) - the largest source of funding for non-medical research in Australia. While the ARC also discriminates, the more relevant issue is their generous funding for identity politics advocacy by academic activists.

The last external force I’ll describe is Our Watch. This government-funded organisation is ostensibly part of the domestic violence sector but it aims to achieve “social, cultural and structural and systemic change” via bottom-up capture. Universities are a priority sector with a tailored strategy as change agents.

All these pressures push towards political alignment and action.

Source: Our Watch.

One result is declining academic standards, as rigour is abandoned in favour of doctrine. As one philosopher lamented, even science and philosophy become “only politics in disguise”. And in politically sensitive fields like domestic violence research, the triumph of doctrine is complete (1, 2, 3).

I began this essay by introducing a lecturer who fears to speak out about feminism – another result of capture. And he is right to be fearful. In recent months, two Australian academics have been publicly sacked for opposing feminism - James Nuzzo and Fiona Girkin. And it’s not confined to Australia. In the US, academics are four times more likely to self-censor today than they were in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism. A frightening one third of students think it acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker. And the violent protests at the University of Sydney to stop screening of the documentary The Red Pill show feminist intolerance isn’t limited to the US.

So those books I referred to earlier are clearly right to say that universities have drifted into politics and we can see how that happened. But they also make clear the story doesn’t stop there. As Pluckrose and Lindsay say in Cynical Theories:

what happens in the university doesn’t stay in the university

Media

Among the things that don’t stay in the university are journalism students. They arrive in newsrooms after perhaps the most relentlessly left-wing education of any profession, including exposure to feminist journalism which explicitly rejects objectivity and neutrality in reporting (1, 2, 3, 4).

Other organisations reinforce the political alignment. For one, Our Watch (mentioned earlier) lists media as one of its five priority targets and runs training for journalists and others in media.

The United Nations is also involved via an interlocking network of organisations including UN Women, UNESCO and the Global Media Monitoring Project all pressing government and journalists to “challenge the patriarchal nature of media”.

One result of all these forces is that journalists (especially younger journalists) increasingly reject balanced reporting as mere “bothsidesism”.

To better understand how we got there, I’d like to choose a case study.

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A commitment to impartiality and objectivity is a fundamental principle separating journalism from activism.

So says the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and I strongly agree. As it happens, the ABC has a particular responsibility to meet these standards: first, because it is publicly funded and, second, because legislation demands it. So how are they doing?

More conservative media has long been reporting on ABC bias:

• “ABC under fire after accusations of bias and conflicts regarding women’s rights issues” says Australia Channel;

• “Utterly biased ABC airs completely unbalanced series on gender in politics” says The Australian; and

• “ABC’s gender bias laid bare for all to see” and “Why does the ABC hate men so much?” says the Daily Telegraph.

Why such strong criticism? Because the ABC has chosen a side. Not so long ago, the ABC presented views from both sides - even on issues like family law. Those days are gone and the only views presented on feminist issues today seem to come from feminist activists.

The spin doesn’t end there. The ABC reports on females as victims, whereas males become “victims” in scare quotes. Feminist activists are presented as “experts” while genuinely expert males aren’t recognised as such. Female suffering is personalised to maximise empathy, male deaths reduced to mere statistics. And tragedies only seem to matter if the dead include women and children.

Stories focus on feminist tropes including “patriarchy” and “toxic masculinity”. In the year to date⁴ there have been 20 articles on women’s rights versus none on men’s rights; 20 mentioning feminism versus none mentioning men’s rights, egalitarianism or men’s issues; and 14 mentioning misogyny versus none on misandry. The ABC’s list of news topics also displays the bias – topics include Women’s Rights, Feminism and DEI but men’s rights and egalitarianism are nowhere to be found.

Once upon a time, Australians referred affectionately to the ABC as “Auntie”. She could be a bit strait-laced but she was reliable and we had some shared history. Today’s ABC has dyed her hair blue and is given to shrieking threateningly at the neighbours about toxic masculinity. Sigh.

Law

One legal commentator summed up the law today as “a rigidly enforced progressive orthodoxy that starts at university”. Feminist legal academics don’t disagree that there’s enforced alignment - they just see it as a good thing. Hence there are courses with a clear feminist focus like feminist legal theory and gender and law. But it’s not just course content. The pervasive anti-male culture on today’s campuses also makes feminism prestigious (e.g. 1, 2, 3) – signalling virtue and empathy.

The result is that much of the legal profession has chosen sides. And an ecosystem of organisations influences legislation and reinforces feminist beliefs.

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A disproportionate number of lawyers are female and a disproportionate number of them work in the government legal sector. Perhaps that’s why so many law reform commissions push feminist policies - often justifying them, not with evidence, but with anecdotes dressed up as “lived experience” (e.g. 1, 2, 3). Even the most powerful of all, the Australian Law Reform Commission, has subscribed to extraordinary claims from feminist academic Michael Johnson that there is systemic “patriarchal terrorism”. Or the Victorian Law Reform Commission which pushes feminist tropes that have been comprehensively disproven many times.⁵

Apart from influencing legislation, activist lawyers also force their beliefs on other lawyers. Lawyers must keep their knowledge up to date through continuing professional development – training in law, ethics and practical skills. But that requirement is increasingly used to smuggle in feminist indoctrination e.g. by the Queensland Law Society and the Australian Bar Association. According to one lawyer the result is “compulsory re-education camps sponsored by various Bar councils and law societies”. Consequently, she said, “Ideology is not merely rampant but compulsory.”

And judges are targets for a barrage of indoctrination from the Sex Discrimination Commission, the National Judicial College of Australia (1, 2), the Family Court and the NSW Judicial Commission. That last was described by one NSW politician as “retraining police and judicial officers to only pursue male offenders”.

Judges are also influenced by bench books. Though not well known to the public, these “Cheat Sheets” have a huge impact on judicial decisions and are becoming increasingly politicised. For example, the NSW Equality before the Law Bench Book has a long list of groups who should receive equality before the law – women, trans, disabled, aboriginals etc. Almost every group in fact except males, boys and men. Or consider the National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book which pushes beliefs like “the patriarchy” along with other destructive views.

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The end result of all this isn’t really contested. Feminists are proud to say their ideology has “been incorporated across the board”. In criminal law, “to even publicly suggest such things as a presumption of innocence for all … is to risk criticism, abuse and ostracism”. In family law, one ex-judge conceded his colleagues are forced to “bend the knee and give recognition to these political declarations [of feminism]” and make decisions “in accordance with the invariably feminist ideology“.

And the problem doesn’t stop in the courtroom, as one lawyer said:

The great aim of the Australian legal profession is now too often to use the law to win political victories they could never win at an election.

The law hasn’t just been captured, it’s been weaponised.

Public Service

The Australian Public Service (APS) is committed by law to uphold certain values, the first being:

Impartial: The APS is apolitical…

Their role is to carry out policies, not to decide them. If they aren’t impartial, the chain of accountability that runs from citizen to elected representative to bureaucracy is undermined. So, if, for example, the public service throws in its lot with one side in gender politics, that is a major problem. Guess what…

The politicisation of the APS started with the predecessor of today’s Office for Women which still aims to make the APS “consider gender throughout its work”. Accordingly, the head of the APS confirms their objectives include:

To embed gender equality and inclusion in all that we do.

And he’s not just talking about the stationery orders. He means everything up to and including belief in the patriarchy.

And we’ve already seen how politics spreads out from Our Watch, the Australian Research Council and Law Reform Commissions. But there are many others besides including the Human Rights Commission and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (1, 2, 3).

The result, according to one senior ex-public servant, is that policy is increasingly created by the APS to further their own ends and parliament’s role is merely to respond to their calls for new legislation.

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As a case study of APS capture, I will focus on federal statistics agencies – partly as an exemplar but also because they are of special importance.

In The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch argues that these bodies are critical because a healthy liberal democracy needs accurate information - without it, we cannot understand the problems we face or the solutions we need. So, are these agencies producing information or indoctrination? Let’s focus on the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), once respected but now the subject of some remarkable revelations.

There have been signs of politicisation of the AIFS – a tendency to merely recite feminist dogma, even on the patriarchy. But when, in October, they appeared before a Senate committee, worse came to light.

First, it emerged that they “had misrepresented data on the prevalence of false sexual assault allegations”. Moreover, other researchers had pointed out the problem more than 50 times before AIFS eventually removed the report.

Worse still, when they were charged by government to produce a literature review on coercive control including controversies, they excluded all research that didn’t support a feminist narrative.

But the real bombshell concerned a report on intimate partner violence. The report attracted huge attention with the claim that “one in three men report using intimate partner violence”. In fact, relatively few men had been violent – AIFS had counted trivia like feeling “anxious” as violence. But the real scandal was that they had manipulated the data by excluding hundreds of men who were victims of violence – without admitting their manipulation in the paper. If those responses hadn’t been removed, the finding would have been “one in three men are victims of intimate partner violence”. And that would never do.

Predictably, there have been no consequences.

Conclusion

None of this is secret. Anyone with experience of universities, mainstream media, the law or the public service will sense they have chosen a side.

And few would deny it. Instead, feminists speak proudly of their impact on institutions - proud they have worked from the inside to steer them towards feminist goals. Unshakeable conviction in their rightness makes institutional capture seem a small price to pay. If the shortest path to what they want is through these institutions, that’s the path they take.

But it is a problem. It’s a problem if we can’t trust information from our media, our academics or our statistics agencies. Because, without that, we cannot know the problems we face or how to solve them.

And it’s a problem if policies are enacted by tilting the scales of justice or by public servants bending the machinery of state to their own ends. Because that severs the vital link from voters to policy.

And the problems compound. Universities, media and agencies generate skewed evidence; commissions and public servants turn it into policy; and the public service funds the next round.

That is why these institutions matter so much - they are the structures by which a free people knows itself, governs itself, and restrains power. And that is why they’ve been singled out, both by those who would defend them and those who would capture them. If one falls, democracy is damaged. If all four fall, democracy is a hollow shell. And across the Anglosphere and much of Europe, the same pattern is emerging.

We have sleepwalked into a parlous state. It is time to open our eyes to the danger.

1. There are blind spots. Since 1995 there has been a push for top-down capture framed as “gender mainstreaming”. The push is global and Australia has proudly taken centre stage, joined by Canada, United Kingdom and Spain as well as the European Union and, most especially, the United Nations. Proponents say gender mainstreaming incorporates gender into politics and decision making within the bureaucracy. Critics say it empowers ideologues who then exclude counterbalancing views. Frequently, the result is mission drift – organisations compromise their original purpose to focus instead on feminist policies. Though it’s an extreme example, consider that the policy that led to the World Food Program withholding food from starving men was “guided by… the principles of the United Nations policy and strategy on gender mainstreaming” – a horrifying example of mission drift away from helping (all) people towards only caring for the in-group.

2. I’ve tried to keep a tight focus on feminism in my essays – largely excluding other sections of identity politics. But intersectional feminism has blurred the boundaries – especially when, as here, I consider organisational matters rather than theory. Bear with me if my focus appears to blur a little.

3. The connection from Marxist theory to feminist practice is sometimes overstated. In reality, it seems that few feminist activists are even aware of these Marxist theories. There is also some relevant feminist theory – especially feminist institutionalism - but, again, it seems to have had little practical impact.

4. 16 March 2026

5. For example, their claim that “men’s violence is most often an attempt to dominate and control”. This claim was originally advanced by Johnson without evidence and, when later tested, was disproven.