How can thousands of students paint signs saying, “From the River to the Sea,” a slogan clearly advocating the return of all of the Jewish state to Palestinians? How do they defend ethnic cleansing? They don’t even try, often because they’re ignorant about what they’re supporting. In fact, a survey found that a majority of those chanting that slogan couldn’t name the river or the sea at issue. And a full 60 percent reduced their support for the slogan when they were informed that it was a call for the genocide of the Jews.12 Ignorance is bliss, until it’s not.
In November 2023, the House of Representatives censured Democrat Rashida Tlaib of Michigan for using the slogan, even as she denied its plain meaning. Tlaib has lived her whole life in Michigan, attending public school and a state college, presumably learning to accept propaganda without thinking much about it along the way.
Mind-killing is the destruction of the individual mind and sense of self with conditioning with identity politics, perpetual victimhood, hate and envy, nurtured with fear and racism. Every argument the extremist left makes is meant to facilitate brainwashing people into accepting the vile notion that other human beings are less than human or “irredeemably” evil because of the color of their skin or some other personal characteristic. This is how genocide is triggered, and it is the fuel that has fed the American university system for over half a century.
Watching thousands of people marching in support of a bloodthirsty terrorist group foaming at the mouth with a hatred of Jews was a frightening spectacle, but it wasn’t organic or inexplicable. It was the result of teaching, stoking, and encouraging the cancer of racism and hate by Marxist theorists, professors, community “activists,” teachers’ unions, and the leftist public education establishment, including the Department of Education. How best to help metastasize the woke cancer? By mandating the scourge of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” throughout the education system at every level.
When the curtain was pulled back on the shocking extent of Jew-hatred on American college campuses in the aftermath of the Hamas attack in Israel, one former college DEI director bluntly blamed the woke scheme for driving antisemitism on campuses.
“The blatant antisemitism on college campuses13 has shocked millions of Americans over the past week and a half. But not me,” wrote Tabia Lee, former DEI director at De Anza College in Silicon Valley. “I saw antisemitism on a weekly basis in my two years as a faculty ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ director. In fact, I can safely say that toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people.”14
Lee continued, “Some campus leaders and colleagues repeatedly told me I shouldn’t raise issues about Jewish inclusion or antisemitism. I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are ‘white oppressors’ and our job as faculty and staff members was to ‘decenter whiteness.’ I was astounded, but I shouldn’t have been. At its worst, DEI is built on the unshakable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.”15
All of this is designed to frighten people and then use that fear to gain power, not just here but everywhere it’s implemented. It’s meant to make Israelis literally surrender, and Western civilization surrender its values and moral authority through silence, due to the shock and fear of witnessing unspeakable and inhuman atrocities. The intent of DEI is to divide people into two groups: the oppressed and the oppressor, and those who are trained to be afraid of speaking and those who are trained to be afraid of hearing. That this produced a hatred of Jews and fear in Jews is one of the foundational goals of the leftist powers that be.
Understanding the method to the madness doesn’t make it any less alarming, but it does help us remain intellectually nimble enough to confront and defeat this cancerous tumor in education threatening the very survival of our country and Western civilization itself.
Anti-Parent Arrogance
Parents are a serious impediment to the goals of leftist activists, as their parallel agenda of crushing the American family by destroying the bond between parents and children is of utmost importance.
The revelation of the Marxist anti-parent arrogance of the left was dramatically illustrated in September 2021 by Terry McAuliffe, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former governor of Virginia seeking reelection. In a debate with Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”16
With their candidate saying the quiet part out loud, the Democrats watched the Republicans turn the foot-in-mouth comment into an ad blasting McAuliffe, as Youngkin made preserving parental rights in education a centerpiece of his campaign.17 Virginia voters elected Youngkin because moms and dads, unsurprisingly, had no intention of coparenting with the government.
McAuliffe’s toxic view about the supremacy of teacher rights over parental rights is a foundational belief of the left. The powerful National Education Association, a three-million-member teacher union with a long record of funding Democratic political candidates,18 echoed this view in a tweet in November 2022 that said: “Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and thrive.”19
Are we supposed to believe that teachers love their students more than parents love their own children? And believe parents are clueless when it comes to knowing what their children should be taught in school? The answer is yes. We are expected to believe it because the progressives, informed by their own leftist indoctrination and contempt for the average person, believe it.
What’s really concerning is that once the attitude that government and its agents (school administrators and teachers) know better than parents what’s best for children, the next logical step is to take children from parents to ensure they get a thorough indoctrination in government “reeducation centers.” As already noted, it has happened and, horribly, is still happening.
Amnesty International—hardly a right-wing group—and many other human rights groups have reported that China has imprisoned more than one million Muslim Uighurs (a minority ethnic group) as part of a genocide designed to wipe out Uighurs as a distinct population. In addition to forced sterilizations to reduce the number of Uighur births, the BBC reported in 2021 that according to Amnesty International, “China has forcibly separated Uighur families by taking young children into state orphanages . . . without the consent of their families” for “re-education” to mold them into obedient followers of the Chinese communist regime.20
The Associated Press reported in October 2022 that invading Russian forces waging war against Ukraine “have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that their parents didn’t want them, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship,” in addition to offering them “patriotic education” to turn them into loyal Russian subjects. The Ukrainian government said nearly eight thousand children have been deported this way.21
Think this sort of forced removal of children from their homes to indoctrinate them with new beliefs could never happen in the United States? It already has. Hundreds of thousands of Native American children were forcibly (or sometimes voluntarily) taken from their families and sent to federal Indian Boarding Schools22 between 1819 and 1969 for an assimilation and reeducation program to wipe out their cultures, religions, and languages. Parents and children were traumatized, and some children were physically and sexually abused.23, 24 This was an example of Big Government ignoring parental rights and using its power and the weapon of fear to crush the individual and make an entire group of people submit to government orders.
Parental rights are a serious and existential issue because for as long as human beings have existed, mothers and fathers have been responsible for raising their children, serving as their moral arbiters and protectors. This is instinctual behavior. Most parents, however, don’t have the time to homeschool their children, so they delegate the important tasks to teachers and schools (and prepay for that system through taxes), just as they delegate providing health care for their children to doctors.
But parents don’t give decision-making authority about the care of their children’s minds and bodies to teachers at the schoolhouse door, any more than they give medical decision-making power to doctors when children enter the exam room or hospital. This is why McAuliffe’s claim that parents should butt out and leave it to teachers and school officials to chart the course of the education of their children struck such a nerve and helped cost him the election.
Parents Smeared as Domestic Terrorists
As elementary school Marxist curriculum became exposed courtesy of the pandemic lockdowns, parents around the country began exercising their First Amendment rights under the Constitution and showing up at school board meetings in 2021. They were protesting and challenging the substitution of indoctrination for education in schools, as well as long school shutdowns during the pandemic.
This engagement by local parents prompted the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to actually seek Big Government intervention to crush the protests. The association sent a letter to President Joe Biden warning that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might amount to “domestic terrorism.”25 The letter actually suggested using the Patriot Act against parents who dared to become involved with the education of their own children.
In what must be one of the fastest turnarounds in federal government history, a short five days later, Attorney General Merrick Garland promptly issued a memo ordering the FBI, the Justice Department Criminal Division, and US attorneys around the nation to investigate the concerned parents due to “criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”26
Yet, true to one of my main warnings throughout this book, none of this was organic but instead the result of a request by the Biden administration, which apparently wanted an excuse to both terrify American parents into silence and harass and arrest those who would not comply.
According to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by a parents’ group called Parents Defending Education,27 “Education Secretary Miguel Cardona solicited the much-criticized letter from the National School Boards Association that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists, according to an email exchange reviewed by Fox News. The email exchange indicates Cardona was more involved with the letter’s creation than previously known,” reported the network.28
This was not the first revelation of collusion between the Biden administration and the NSBA. Previous emails indicated additional correspondence between the two for weeks before the letter to Biden was sent.29, 30
In the meantime, the ensuing exposure and outrage had an impact. The NSBA retracted its missive and apologized, admitting there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”31 Despite this, in September 2023, two years after the original issuance of the memo, Attorney General Garland continued to refuse to rescind his directive targeting parents, saying “there’s nothing to rescind.”32 Yet, according to whistleblowers, “the FBI opened investigations in every region of the country and relating to all types of educational settings.”33
Schools Aren’t What They Used to Be
Since schools today bear little resemblance to the ones many of us attended in the twentieth century, parental rights are particularly important. For most of American history, students were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, civics, American history, science, and other essential subjects and skills—along with, as famed anthropologist Margaret Mead put it, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”34 With some exceptions in liberal enclaves, parents didn’t have to worry about teachers on the loony left trying to radicalize their children.
The anti-individualist wokeism virus is in the process of consuming a great deal of our critical education infrastructure. The fact that this even has to be discussed is shocking. How did we get here? The left understands that indoctrinating children is key to fulfilling its agenda. That’s because American parents have long raised children beholden to the values of a free people and country, and this is kryptonite to the barbaric and ruinous notions of Marxism. Gaining control of public education is a key Marxist objective, and that goal has been achieved with astounding success.
The schools of decades past did what they were supposed to do. They educated generations of students who made America the richest, most powerful, most prosperous, and greatest nation in the world. Unfortunately, schools have now been transformed by political correctness on steroids.
Now, rather than giving children the skills they need to succeed in their careers and as responsible citizens, woke schools waste enormous amounts of valuable class time on politically correct propaganda. Every fact-free hour of classroom and homework time devoted to stoking despair over gender identity, systemic racism, sexist oppression, police brutality, and capitalism is an hour taken away from learning about core school subjects.
One thing woke education does accomplish, however, is to create depressed, paranoid, angry, and fearful young people brainwashed into believing that America is a lost cause and her people are horrible and irredeemable bigots. This creates fear of the world, people in general, and parents in particular. The left works feverishly to instill envy and paranoia in young people to guarantee they’ll grow up to be leftists themselves, perpetuating the Marxist virus.
Consider the case of Annabella Rockwell, at first thrilled to be accepted at Mount Holyoke College, a women’s college in Massachusetts currently charging nearly $60,000 per year in tuition and fees. But like so many others, her dream turned into an indoctrination nightmare after she enrolled in 2011.
The New York Post described35 Rockwell as having lived a charmed teenage life as the heiress of a pharmaceutical fortune. Before college, she had already lived abroad and competed as a figure skater. Describing herself as “open-minded,” but having been raised in a “traditional” home, when it was time to go to college, she chose Mount Holyoke. “I was so excited about going to this renowned, respected school in Massachusetts,” she told the Post. “I literally arrived there bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was just so happy.”36 Normally, the story would end there as another happy college tale. But not these days.
Rockwell described an environment resembling classic indoctrination impacting her own worldview so severely that she had to undergo deprogramming. She was lectured about “the patriarchy” working against her and was told that oppression, while not always apparent, was constant, ruining her life, and must be fought.37
“I left school [in 2015] very anxious, very nervous, very depressed and sad. I saw everything through the lens of oppression and bias and victimhood,” Rockwell told the Post. “I came to the school as someone who saw everyone equally. I left looking for injustice wherever I could and automatically assuming that all white men were sexist. My thoughts were no longer my own.”
Rockwell’s relationship with her mother collapsed because she was convinced by professors to think of her parents as a problem and family as something to reject. “The professors encouraged alienation [from parents] and even offered their homes to stay in. They’d say, like, don’t go see them, come stay with us for the holiday. Most of my classmates believed all this stuff, too. If you didn’t you were ostracized,” she explained to the newspaper.
