Woke Ideology and Foreign Money are Corrupting Education

Education, particularly a college degree, has long been a ticket to the middle class and upward mobility in America. Unfortunately, our schools and universities have also been proselytizing ideologies that represent an existential threat to U.S. security and longevity. It is only now with the eruption of support for the terrorist group Hamas across cities and college campuses that many are awakening to the crisis.

The education system is now the central means by which the radical political Left marches through our institutions on its way to indoctrinating generations into a form of cultural self-loathing masquerading as enlightenment. For over fifty years, good people looked the other way while teachers, and especially college professors, increasingly rooted their pedagogy in anti-Western propaganda, including that our heritage is rooted in racism, exploitation, xenophobia, misogyny, and oppression. 

Malign foreign influences are also at play as outlined in a recent report led by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism. The study found that approximately $13 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funds had been received by over 100 colleges across the U.S. from 2014 to 2019. Roughly $3 billion was received from Qatar, a known sponsor of radical Islamism and home to Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and $1.2 billion from China. The report highlighted a strong correlation between institutions that took the funding and intolerance on campus towards open inquiry, free speech, and Jews.

All of this produces an anti-Western grievance culture among young Americans that blends seamlessly with the radical Islamists whose rage is also aimed against the West in general and Jews in particular. It’s why seventh century barbarism unleashed on Oct. 7^th against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is defended on college campuses, and why TikTok users embrace Osama bin Laden’s diatribe against America. And so today, climate change extremists, transgender activists and BLM protestors embrace, as social justice, the pro-Hamas narrative, and falsely see both Israelis and Americans as oppressors living on stolen land.

The classroom must be liberated from the Left and its foreign allies by teaching citizenship and history in the classic Western tradition at all levels of education. We must stop apologizing for America’s very existence and more forcefully reject the blame and shame tactics of the Left. No country can defend itself and its future if its people believe the nation’s founding principles are indefensible as enshrined in such programs as the 1619 Project which falsely teaches children the revolutionary war was waged to preserve slavery. To the contrary, our kids should know the birth of our republic was among the single most important acts in the development of human freedom.

It’s not enough to move your child to a private school or home school. All the children left behind to be indoctrinated by the Left will be your neighbor, co-worker, boss, congressman, etc.  As such, school board elections are as important as those for Congress, and sending your child or donating to a university dominated by the Left’s influence is self-defeating. Fortunately, many donors have recently cut off funding to Ivy League colleges for their coddling of antisemitism, which now goes hand-in-hand with the growing scourge of anti-white racism.

Efforts to reform education will necessitate an end to the academy’s war on men, which has declared that masculinity is toxic. No civilization can survive with weak men as manifested by the fact that roughly 80% of 17 to 24 year olds in the U.S. are currently unfit for military service. Meanwhile, many who are qualified have been thrown out over refusing the Covid-19 vaccine or won’t serve due to the Pentagon’s lunge to the Left, leaving much of the armed forces understaffed.

America is not above reproach but past transgressions such as slavery, apartheid, and lack of women’s rights were not created here and should not be used to embrace anti-meritocratic and divisive “diversity” policies or to silence support for our country by casting its defense as an embrace of bigotry. The former will eventually create a society that cannot properly function due to ever decreasing standards of performance, and the latter view of history ignores our nation’s heavy price and critical role in eradicating those failures, from ending slavery to emancipating women.

Those who wish to conserve the American experiment must heed Ronald Reagan’s warning that freedom is always one generation away from extinction since it is not passed to our children through the blood stream. We must teach them or risk losing it forever.