The good news is that Rockwell’s mother, appalled by what the college experience had done to her daughter, hired a deprogrammer to reverse the damage that had been done by the indoctrination. It worked, and now both women are telling their stories in an effort to warn other families that this isn’t something that happens to other people—it can happen to anyone.
Annabella Rockwell’s parents are lucky in that their business success allowed them to use extraordinary measures to come to the aid of their daughter, whose joy for life and happiness had been undone by miserable and malevolent leftists in control of a college. The first step for all parents is recognizing that what is happening is not normal, organic, or beneficial, and that it must be confronted. Most Americans, especially the families of those being indoctrinated, are themselves manipulated into surrendering to what is happening. This is why the anti-parent agenda exists: because leftists know that parental involvement ruins their entire scheme.
Smug Ignorance and Small Minds
It doesn’t take a Lenin, Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot to engineer and advocate for parents to be banished from their children’s lives in favor of more glorious and masterful party apparatchiks. It is the especially small-minded who are attracted to the left’s cultic program of authoritarian control.
Smugly ignorant politicians seem to believe they are morally superior to those not in public office and slouch toward tyranny whenever the opportunity presents itself. Their compulsion to indulge their conceit eventually reveals the banal contempt they feel for Americans in general and parents in particular.
Remind yourself: for some reason, so-called progressives (the favored euphemism for both economic Marxists and cultural Marxists) see parents as at least a problem for realizing their agenda, if not an outright enemy. Remember to ask: Why is that? What is it they are so obsessed with that it requires removing children from their parents’ sphere of influence?
Case in point about small minds: Democratic US representative Eric Swalwell of California was one of the biggest boosters of the now disproven conspiracy theory that President Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Marc Thiessen at the Washington Post noted at the time, “During the Mueller probe, Swalwell repeatedly claimed without a shred of evidence that Trump not only colluded with Russia but also that he was an ‘agent’ of Russian intelligence. . . . Swalwell used his position as a member of the House Intelligence Committee to suggest that he had seen evidence the rest of us could not that Trump was a Russian operative—when we now know no such evidence existed.”38
Not surprisingly, that same bad judgment and moral vertigo also drives Swalwell to be bothered by the idea that American parents expect to be in charge of their children’s education.
When Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tweeted that, “We are putting parents back in charge of their kids’ education,” Swalwell tweeted back: “Please tell me what I’m missing here. What are we doing next? Putting patients in charge of their own surgeries? Clients in charge of their own trials? When did we stop trusting experts? This is so stupid.”39
Jonathan Turley—a professor at George Washington University Law School, an attorney, and a legal scholar—obliged Swalwell and explained exactly what he was missing. “These were curious analogies to draw since patients and clients are in charge of the key decisions in their surgeries and trials. What Rep. Swalwell is missing is called informed consent,” Turley said. “What is most striking about Swalwell’s reference to patients and clients is that, under his educational approach, parents have far more say in a wart removal or a parking ticket challenge than the education of their children. If anything, his analogies support the call for greater parental knowledge and consent.”40
Parents play a crucial role in their child’s education, and their opinions should be taken into account. The only reasons not to are always suspect. Remember, the ultimate goal is not to censor people directly. It is to scare everyone into increasingly censoring themselves, until they stop thinking freely their own thoughts.
The Woke Takeover
The woke takeover of American schools and colleges has reached an irrational level. Teachers, administrators, and school governing board members in elementary, secondary, and higher education now fear being denounced and losing their jobs for addressing a student by the wrong pronoun or saying anything that could possibly be labeled a so-called “microaggression.” They also fear allowing students to have a free and candid exchange of ideas and to speak up in defense of (horrors!) traditional values and conservative ideas. Students are treated as if, and ergo taught that they are, confused infants who could melt at any time by being “triggered” by something they find disturbing.
The left wants “safe spaces” on school campuses, meaning they want campuses sealed off from any ideas that are not part of woke dogma. This, of course, reinforces the lie that any idea that challenges or deviates from the approved framework is itself dangerous. Rather than using schools to allow students to expand their minds—which was the original and imperative mission of the education system—the left wants to use indoctrination and fear to close student minds to the “wrong” ideas, meaning ideas that do not conform or pay allegiance to the leftist narrative, or that could provoke and inspire free thinking and even outright rejection of brainwashing itself.
Not content to subject only their students to woke brainwashing, some schools are even demanding reeducation for parents as well. For example, as the New York Post reported in October 2022, at least five New York City private schools that charge about $60,000 per year in tuition “are pushing woke training on parents in Soviet-like efforts to keep their kids on message.” The schools call on parents to undergo “training in anti-racism” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and some require parents to write an essay and sign a pledge promising to support these woke values in their homes.41
With their demand for absolute viewpoint conformity, the schools might as well put a notice on their websites saying conservative parents need not bother applying for their children to attend. Or maybe the schools can next require parents to place listening devices in their homes so the Thought Police can monitor their conversations with their children to make sure there are no deviations from the woke script.
The problem is so serious that it led former Trump administration secretary of state Mike Pompeo to say in an interview in November 2022 that “the most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers president] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call.” Pompeo added: “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s union, and the filth they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”42
In her response to Pompeo’s spot-on remarks, Weingarten perfectly illustrated exactly why the leftist education mob is inculcating our children with the scourge of identity politics. Instead of addressing Pompeo’s critique and the concerns across the country about her malfeasance and the destruction of the American education system, Weingarten accused Pompeo of bigotry.
The British newspaper the Guardian reported: “Weingarten, who has been president of the AFT since 2008, [said] she thought Pompeo was attacking her because she is ‘Jewish, gay, teacher and union.’ ‘It’s all of the above,’ Weingarten said. ‘It’s an anti–public school strategy. The antisemitic tropes are there. The anti-gay tropes are there. It’s anti-union. It’s anti-teacher. It’s all of the above. But the effect is it really hurts what teachers are trying to do to help kids every single day.’”43
So Pompeo is supposedly a bigot and wants to hurt children. The End. Discussion Over. Commence with the Cancellation.
This is the only strategy the left has ever known. It is global, it is as old as the hills, and it is becoming the sole focus of the public education system in our nation. Weingarten’s response is the epitome of the gaslighting that leftists have always relied on because they cannot survive being confronted on the details of the issues. Their goal relies on the shutting down of debate and critique, and the pursuit of censorship in the name of “safety.” Ironically, safety is supposedly only possible when the public has been conditioned to live in fear of, well, everything.
In the twenty-first century, identity politics as a vehicle for control and annihilation through fear has become refined and especially dangerous due to the left’s control of the bureaucratic state, the legacy media, Big Tech, and the education system. The only way the left survives is to make sure students churned out by woke schools are brainwashed into believing this madness. Students may not be functionally literate,44 but they sure know how to destroy someone by accusing them of being racist, sexist, or whichever of the many phobic iterations that have been concocted.
Enough Is Enough
The indoctrination doesn’t start in the Ivy League. The left wants their mind-killed soldiers ready by the time they get to college. At the very latest, elementary school is where the conditioning begins.
One father in New York City decided enough was enough and removed his daughter from an elementary school that was subjecting his nine-year-old to CRT. “Little children don’t need to feel bad about the color of their skin. That’s what they’re teaching them, to feel bad about who they are. Schools are supposed to be teaching you confidence,” said Harvey Goldman in an interview with Fox News.45 He added that most parents and teachers are “scared to say something.” When he confronted school administrators, he said they told him there was nothing he could do about the curriculum. If he didn’t like it, he could withdraw his daughter from the school. And that’s just what he did.
The Goldman family’s experience is not an outlier. In New York City, an underground network of parents is working to expose and fight the increasingly woke culture in city grade schools. The New York Post reported on the growing movement and spoke with Bion Bartning, a father “who is Mexican and Yaqui [an Indian tribe] on one side and Jewish on the other, [and] said he was especially dismayed by how [schools] across the country force kids to label themselves based on their skin color. Sometimes kids are even given a palette and made to choose the color that best fits their skin, he said. ‘I don’t fit into any of those race buckets,’ Bartning told the Post. ‘I think it is wrong to be teaching kids these socially constructed race categories. It’s a destructive ideology, teaching children to be pessimistic and full of grievance rather than being optimistic and full of gratitude. It goes against all the values I was raised with, and there are many out there who feel as I do. This is a movement with a lot of people.’”46
Another New York parent described what one private school was teaching children in the name of CRT. “The fourth graders learned about astronauts and inventors—but only black ones. They no longer learn about Thomas Edison. The math curriculum is a joke; they’ve dumbed it down. No more birthday celebrations are allowed and no holidays are allowed. They did away with Columbus Day but now they celebrate the end of Ramadan and the Chinese Lunar Year.”47
Parents of children in several New England private schools formed a protest group in 2021 called Parents United after they were shocked to learn their children were “being taught what to think, rather than how,” said cofounder Ashley Jacobs. She said some students were told never to use gender-specific language and were told to reconsider their own gender identity. Jacobs said schools didn’t allow students to express unwoke views, so students were afraid to say anything in class because they might get in trouble or offend someone. Parents said schools were spending too much time on ideological issues and not enough time on academics.48
In another example, Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights and Education bill into law in March 2022 to bar discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms. The law also requires that any presentation of the topics to students in older grades be “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” What a concept! This is so commonsensical it’s hard to believe it became controversial. Yet woke radicals became apoplectic over the Florida legislation, falsely labeling it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Taking their cue, the media went into hysterics.49
The good news is that the coordinated Outrage Theatre hasn’t stopped other states from following Florida’s commonsense lead on the most basic parental rights. Alabama enacted its version of the Florida law in April 2022, and similar bills were introduced in at least twenty other state legislatures.50
Chapter 5 Destroying Individualism
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU1
One of the most disturbing aspects of wokeism is its condemnation of the concept of the individual in favor of the concept of group identity. The American ideal has always been for each of us to be treated as an individual and to advance based on our abilities and hard work. This was the foundation of the American Dream.
But socialism and communism subsume the individual to Big Government in the name of supposedly advancing the greater societal good when in fact the complete opposite is the result. While capitalism encourages individual initiative, innovations, entrepreneurship, and the accumulation of wealth, Marxism looks on rewarding these qualities as selfishness. The Marxist view is at the core of wokeism, and it is being force-fed to millions of children in school today.
In woke schools, children are no longer being taught to look at themselves and others as individuals, but as members of particular racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and other groups. What is the practical effect? Imagine this: Sally is ten years old and white, so she is taught under Critical Race Theory that she is part of the oppressor class, benefits from white privilege, holds white bias, and must atone for the sins of past generations, leaving her upset and confused. Her friend Mary is also ten years old and is black, so she is taught under Critical Race Theory that she is oppressed and victimized by systemic racism that pervades every aspect of life, leaving her upset that people of Sally’s race are working against her ability to succeed. The ten-year-old girls had always looked at each other as individuals, each unique in her own way but with many things in common that were more important than their difference in skin color. Yet through CRT, they are to view each other through a racial lens.
CRT’s obsession with racial differences encourages group stereotyping and prejudice, made worse by calls for “equity”—meaning that group advancement and equal outcomes, rather than individual achievement and equal opportunity, have become the new standard of fairness.
This focus on group identity flies in the face of the hopes of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who told an estimated 250,000 people2 at his famous speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”3 That’s what our fictional Sally and Mary want—and it’s the dream of equality we should all share.
Equality and equity are not the same. The former should be revered. The latter, reviled. Equality is anathema to the left because, by relying on individualism, it fosters tolerance and respect. Equity, on the other hand, demands an erasure of the individual and elevates only the faceless group. Seeing other people as complete and unique individual human beings facilitates empathy by reminding us of the humanity in each person. It’s the power of seeing a person as a member of the human race as opposed to a generic representative of a particular group identity.
That’s exactly the problem for the left. If you train people to see only groups and foster hate between those groups, eventually one of those groups will demand the elimination of the others. Critical Race Theory, and all Marxist critical theories, essentially train people to see people unlike themselves as subhuman, normalizing the resentment and eventual hatred of outgroups as oppressors.
