“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” — Thomas Sowell, “Random Thoughts,” Jewish World Review, 5/24/00

“We will teach our children to cherish and adore their country, so that they can build its future.” — President Donald Trump, “Salute to America,” whitehouse.gov, 7/4/20

I believe the fundamental problem we face in America can be boiled down to the one thing we lost, which has given birth to all of this left-wing insanity: our education system. We’ve lost the teachers. Which is why American schools are the petri dishes of leftism.

Not all teachers, of course. But as a political force, in the aggregate, public school teachers are the biggest secret enemy or weapon we face, because they’ve essentially got mind control over your kids. They have the opportunity to turn students against their parents and against everything they’ve been raised to believe. Kids are being poisoned into thinking that their very upbringing is promoting systemic racism, bias, homophobia, anti-lgbtq attitudes, and all the other gobbledygook that gets tossed into this perverse left-wing melting pot.

This has been going on for over 40 years, and we conservatives weren’t even there to counter it. Where were we? We were writing policy papers at think tanks. We were raising money via conservative cruises, telling each other how we were the intellectual link to the primacy of conservatism. We weren’t even on the playing field when this country was being assaulted in the classroom.

Don’t assume this indoctrination starts in high school or college. As reported by The Atlantic, San Francisco kindergarten teacher Robert Sautter “is committed to telling his students ‘the truth about everything’ including the Columbus legacy” of injustice. Sautter received a Teaching Tolerance award for “culturally responsive teaching” from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center. In the twisted world of extreme leftism, you’re never too young to be brainwashed into hating America.

So it’s no surprise the National Association of Scholars found that only 17 percent of eighth graders were proficient in U.S. history. That’s because being taught our nation’s past through the dirty lens of leftist propaganda — America is evil and needs to be dismantled — corrupts students’ brains:

LEFTIST ACTIVISTS

• “Virginia kindergarten students will learn about institutional racism alongside the alphabet, according to a new curriculum created for the upcoming school year. Loudoun County is adding ‘social justice’ to the mission of teaching elementary school students reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Washington, D.C., suburb — the richest county in the country — has teamed up with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s [splc] education arm Teaching Tolerance to develop its new curriculum. The proposed lesson plan will restructure history and social studies classes to emphasize slavery as fundamental to American society for students from kindergarten to the fifth grade.” — “Virginia Mandates Slavery Lessons for Kindergarteners,” at The Washington Free Beacon, 7/19/20
• “The young people protesting and rioting across Wisconsin this summer are anything but an untrained mob. From their rhetoric to their organization to their street tactics … it might not surprise you to know that public schools play a central role in this activist education. However, the scale of this effort will shock you. It’s happening in schools all across [Wisconsin], but nowhere is it more obvious than in Milwaukee Public Schools. The district proudly documents its regular adult-supported student protests. During the 2019-2020 school year, there were at least five distinct protest events in Milwaukee… In each [of the participating Wisconsin] districts, less than half of the student body is proficient in English and Math.” — “Questionable Curriculum: Schools Walk Out on Education,” compilation of teacher-sponsored student protests, including elementary kids training how to march with handmade signs, MacIver News Service, 7/2/20
• “The social justice movement sweeping the country is forcing the K-12 education system to take a hard look at how it treats students of color… [T]he EdWeek Research Center conducted a survey June 17-18 of 1,150 teachers, principals, and district leaders. It found that most educators [83 percent] support the Black Lives Matter movement…” — Education Week, 6/25/20
• “School will be a very different place next year. Classes will be less full. Desks will be rigorously sterilized. And, if the education establishment has its way, teachers will be aggressively ‘woke.’” — Max Eden, detailing the hard-left turn in the curricula awaiting students returning to school after lockdown, in City Journal, 6/19/20
• “The educational system in this county is inherently racist. White-settler colonialism is the fundamentally racist, classist, and hegemonic framework of education in the U.S. This ideology gave birth to the anti-black narrative that is baked into the foundation of the nation. What teachers should learn from the death of George Floyd is that all educators are complicit in sustaining the system responsible for his death. If you as a teacher have not committed to doing the work of understanding your internal racism, implicit bias, and prejudice, you are complicit in the deaths of black people, and people of color broadly, across the nation. If you are not committed to the work of being actively anti-racist, you are complicit in validating the physical and spiritual murders of black men, women, and children daily. If you espouse the ideology of color-blindness and champion the myth of meritocracy, you are complicit in the vilification and denigration of black people in this country.” — Shannon R. Waite, clinical assistant professor of educational leadership at Fordham University, “Classroom Q & A” in Education Week, 6/7/20
• “Educators: what are you burning? Your white-centered curriculum? The Amy Cooper next door? Your anti-black behavior policies? The school’s racist policies? Your racist ass principal? The funding for the police in schools vs. counselors? what are you burning???!!?!?!?!?” — Lorena German, Austin, TX teacher, chair of the Committee on Anti-Racism for the National Council on the Teaching of English, during riots in Democrat cities, on Twitter, 5/30/20
• “Mathematical theory and application is rooted in the ancient histories of people and empires of color.” — “K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework,” where “Who gets to say if an answer is right?” is categorized under “power and oppression,” Seattle Public Schools, 8/20/19
• “Among English teachers, there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans, with the proportion being even more one-sided among health teachers, with 99 Democrats for every one Republican. While there are slightly more Republicans among math and science teachers, among high school teachers overall, there are 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans.” — Pacific Research Institute, 4/3/19
• “For decades, education schools have been notorious as agitprop factories… You’ll find yourself swimming in an ocean of hard-left ideology: ‘critical theory’ that says there is no truth, only power; ‘intersectionality’ that says you’re not allowed to be right about anything unless you’re right (that is, left) about everything… The central concept in the ideology that rules education schools, with an iron fist, is that real pedagogy means the liberation of the oppressed… With that as a starting point, the actual teaching part goes out the window, and it’s off to the races with every nutty political fad that comes along.” — Greg Forster, “Who Teaches the Teachers?” in Perspective magazine, 4/20/18

UNIONS FIRST, STUDENTS LAST

• “North Carolina Teachers’ Union Demands Benefits for Illegal Immigrants Before Returning To School.” — The Daily Wire, on the Durham Association of Educators union call for universal healthcare, moratoriums on rent and mortgage, and direct income support regardless of immigration status, 7/18/20
• “I think we are closer right now to a national teacher strike than we have ever been in this country.” — Jessica Salfia, West Virginia high school English teacher and participant in the “Red for Ed” strike two years ago, now upset that teachers might have to go back to work as schools reopen, in New York magazine, 7/17/20
• “L.A. Teachers Union: Give us $250 Million, or Keep Schools Closed.” — California Globe, 7/15/20
• “A major Los Angeles teachers union said … the reopening of schools should be conditioned upon the passage of Medicare-for-All… The utla [United Teachers Los Angeles] called for … California to implement both a wealth tax on unrealized capital gains for the state’s billionaires, and surtaxes on state residents that earn over $1 million a year. The utla … called for the Los Angeles police to be defunded … [and] for a moratorium on new charter schools…” — The Daily Caller, 7/13/20
• “Teachers unions spent $30 million on federal elections alone in 2016 — virtually all of it on Democrats. It’s about more than the money they give, however. [Teachers] organize, campaign, and march for liberal causes.” — National Review, 7/7/20
• “Teachers’ Union Demonstration Draws Hundreds Downtown to Urge cps [Chicago Public Schools] to Pull Cops From Schools.” — Chicago Sun-Times, 6/24/20
• “[T]eachers are continuing to walk out of their classrooms. Labor strife spiked last year as teachers in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington state, and West Virginia took to the streets to protest. Now, just as Denver teachers returned to their classrooms after a nine-day strike, teachers in West Virginia once again went on strike as did their counterparts in Oakland, CA… Teachers are pushing back against education reform policies like charter schools and performance-based pay. They’re also fighting for social-justice initiatives, like sanctuary protections for undocumented students.” — “Teacher Activism Persists in U.S.,” Education Week, 2/26/19

HOWARD ZINN ACOLYTES

• “If you’re old enough to remember the Soviet Union, you’ve probably wondered why so many young people today seem attracted to socialism. One influence is Howard Zinn, who published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, the year before the first Millennials were born. The book ‘continues to be assigned in countless college and high-school courses, but its commercial sales have remained strong as well,’ the Chronicle of Higher Education reported… It kept selling after Zinn died in 2010: The Zinn Education Project [zep] website now claims more than two million sales.” — “Reclaiming History from Howard Zinn,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/17/19
• “Zinn explained, he preferred ‘to tell the story [of Columbus] … from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees’ — in other words, from the perspective of victims. But that was a lie. Zinn was writing American history from the viewpoint of a Communist. Zinn was almost certainly a member of the cpusa (Communist Party usa) in the 1940s and 1950s. Like other Communists, he gave up official membership in order to infiltrate higher education…” — Mary Grabar, author of the 2019 book Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, at American Greatness, 7/10/20
• “Howard Zinn rode to fame and fortune on the ‘untold story’ of Christopher Columbus — a shocking [false] tale of severed hands, raped women, and gentle, enslaved people worked to death to slake the white Europeans’ lust for gold. Today … Zinn’s narrative about the genocidal discoverer of America has captured our education system and popular culture… Zinn is the inspiration behind the current campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day.’” — Debunking Howard Zinn, 2019
• “Through the nonprofit Zinn Education Project — a collaborative effort with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change — Zinn’s book and dozens of spinoff books … that provide evidence of a corrupt U.S. regime are distributed in schools across the country. According to a September 2018 zep website post, ‘Close to 84,000 teachers have signed up to access’ zep’s history lessons… zep sends organizers to give workshops to librarians and teachers on such topics as the labor movement, the environment and climate change, ‘Islamophobia,’ and ‘General Approaches to Teaching People’s History’ (with full or partial costs borne by the schools!).” — Debunking Howard Zinn, 2019

TEXTBOOK POISON

• “In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole all he could see.” — James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Taught Me: Everything Your American History Book Got Wrong
• “[T]o deemphasize [Columbus’s] genocide … is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves … to justify what was done.” — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
• “The Taino [tribe] are generous and intelligent people… Columbus will kidnap some and take them to Europe as trophies of his voyage. He will help turn many of them into slaves. Soon all the Arawak-speaking tribes will be dead — killed by European weapons, slavery, and diseases… It was a nasty way to begin in a new land.” — Joy Hakim, A History of US: The First Americans: Prehistory-1600
• “Beyond acts of individual cruelty, the Spanish disrupted the Native ecosystem and culture… Diseases new to the Americans played a huge role, including swine flu, probably carried by pigs that Columbus brought to Haiti on his second voyage in 1493.” — James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Taught Me
• “There was another problem: arrogance (which means thinking you are better than others). In the 17th century arrogance was often tied to religion … that arrogance would become racism. Some whites believed themselves better than all Indians. Some whites believed themselves better than all blacks… There were bigots and racists in early America, and they made trouble.” — Joy Hakim, A History of US: From Colonies to Country: 1735-1791
• “Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and … [were] the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies…” — James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Taught Me
• “Conveniently left out of our Founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones,“America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One,” 1619 Project. Now the error-ridden 1619 Project is in demand as a school curriculum.
• “When it came time to write a Constitution for our nation, it was the slave-owning Virginians who wrote most about freedom.” — Joy Hakim, A History of US: From Colonies to Country: 1735-1791
• “It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers… [T]his nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, 1619 Project
• “The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation — all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.” — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
• “There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.” — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
• “Anti-black racism runs in the very dna of this country…” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, 1619 Project

It’s long past time to wrest control of education out of the hands of Blame-America-First progressives. It is a crime how many egregious lies teachers tell about our country in the classroom. As President Trump correctly observed at Mt. Rushmore, on 7/3/20:

The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions … Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies — all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.

This has to be pushed back. The left has shown how devastatingly effective getting hold of the education system can be. Now it’s our turn — to reach back in and re-grab education, and start teaching the whole American truth.

Cartoon by permission of Tom Stiglich and Creators Syndicate, Inc.