AMAC Exclusive
Earlier this month, in the span of less than a week, two California teachers were removed from their posts for openly attempting to indoctrinate their students in radical liberal ideology. Gabriel Gipe, an AP government teacher at a California high school, was caught on camera explicitly stating that his goal was to turn his students into “revolutionaries.” Meanwhile, Kristin Pitzen recorded herself gleefully declaring that she removed the American flag from her sixth-grade classroom and made her students say the Pledge of Allegiance to a Gay Pride Flag. Both of these incidents come on the heels of another case where a teacher was removed for calling her students’ parents “dumb” for being Trump supporters, going on to say that Trump “sucks” and is “a literal moron.”
As the novelist and James Bond creator Ian Fleming once wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” While “enemy” may not be quite the right word for the fight we are in now, the pattern does prompt the question: After decades of targeting young people just as they leave their homes and enter college campuses, why have progressives suddenly begun indoctrinating younger and younger Americans?
For one thing, the former students of radical college professors have graduated and become educators themselves, taking over teaching colleges, school boards, and leadership positions in K-12 education. We are witnessing the consequences of a fully-radicalized generation ascending to positions of authority. In addition, the mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement may have made left-wing educators feel they no longer had to keep their indoctrination mission under-wraps. Finally, the media has made a concerted effort in recent years to raise the profiles of activist children, paving the way for the idea that inculcating young people with leftist ideology was not just normal, but laudable.
Progressives may also be looking to target even younger potential voters in anticipation of changes to the electorate. As AMAC Newsline has previously reported, momentum is building among Congressional Democrats to allow people as young as 16 to vote – a move that would be all the more advantageous to Democrats if they can turn teenagers into “revolutionaries” before they learn how to drive.
Arguably the most ubiquitous example of the radicalization of our youth is the celebrity status of Greta Thunberg, a creation of the media. The child activist’s 2019 speech to the U.N. was noted, not for the revelations of her speech, but how young she was at the time she delivered it; a mere 16 years old. That same year, her Time magazine Person of the Year accolade aggressively emphasized “the power of youth.” This was an open call, encouraging younger and younger children to become left-wing activists, something that in more sane times in our history would have been considered wildly inappropriate.
Another example of this phenomenon is the March for Our Lives, led by the leftist child David Hogg, which became a central force in the movement to ban firearms in the United States.
As AMAC Newsline has covered extensively, by far the most unsettling and widespread attempt to co-opt the minds of America’s youth has come in the form of the Critical Race Theory-inspired curriculum now being pushed in K-12 schools across the country. A school in Virginia, for example, posted a video attacking cops for making spaces “less safe” for other students, while celebrating the Black Lives Matter protests that actually made spaces less safe for students. The school claimed this was an accident and not reflective of their educational standards; however, similar messages are central to the school’s curriculum.
In one of the most shocking examples of radical indoctrination, grade school students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in California are actively being taught to rank themselves based on their “power and privilege.” According to documents provided by parents and a whistleblower in the school, students began their math class with a lesson on “social identities.” They create “an identity map, listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics.” With this information, the teacher then informs the third-graders that “the students live in a ‘dominant culture’ of ‘white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s],’ who, according to the lesson, ‘created and maintained’ this culture in order “to hold power and stay in power.”
Educational plans like this are being implemented for children as young as two years old.
Meanwhile, statistics show that American students are falling behind their global peers in core subjects like math and reading. With a central focus on Critical Race Theory, it appears that the fundamentals of education are being outright ignored if not actively dismissed. By denying these children a strong foundation in mathematics, science, history, and other core studies, progressive-minded teachers and school boards are effectively denying their students opportunities to succeed and thrive in the real world. As they fall behind year after year, they will likely never achieve the educational milestones necessary to realize their own American Dreams.
A nation’s children are the pride and hope of its people. Since the founding, Americans have worked hard to make their country the greatest in the world precisely because they hope to one day leave their children a better place to call home. Now, progressives are trying to weaponize the country’s youth against America’s traditional principles, employing them as the foot soldiers in their crusade against American institutions. Conservatives would be wise to recognize and stamp out this threat before it is too late, lest the schools that they pay for become nothing more than re-education camps for leftist causes.