Trump is Flushing the Expert Class Down the Toilet

posted by Brian C. Joondeph at American Thinker 

President-elect Donald Trump is taking a media break from being called a fascist or Nazi to the latest criticism of filling his cabinet positions with those not deemed to be “experts” by the self-proclaimed “expert class” of government.

Who defines “expert”? Simple: those deemed experts by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or administrative class embeds. In other words, it is a circle-jerk of self-professed experts insisting they are the only true experts. Confirmation bias anyone?

Reuters bemoans Trump’s approach of going outside the “expert class”, who have gotten so much wrong over the years, instead favoring those with practical experience. “U.S. President-elect Donald Trump chose loyalists with little experience for several key cabinet positions.”

A member of the defense “expert class.”

Let’s start with intelligence and Trump's decision to nominate former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. As NBC News reports, almost 100 former national security officials signed a letter “urging the Senate to ‘carefully evaluate’ whether Gabbard is ‘equipped’ for the position, which requires Senate confirmation.”

Do you remember the last time a group of “security officials" or "experts" signed a letter? This occurred just before the 2020 election when the “expert class” sought to leverage their influence and credibility to interfere in a presidential election.

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Yet the DOJ knew the laptop was real in early 2020, many months before the “experts” released their letter. This is the “expert class” in action.

Why is the expert class upset with Gabbard? Among other things, she's anti-war, which is bad for business for the expert consultant class in Washington, but what they claim is that she had the gall to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017. So what? That was in her job description as a member of Congress. “She served on the House Armed Services Committee for all four terms from 2013 to 2021.”

Was it a problem when other members of Congress met with Assad? Apparently not. NBC News reported, “Pelosi shrugs off Bush’s criticism, meets Assad.” How about a U.S. Senator? The Wall Street Journal reported: “Sen. John Kerry met with Syrian President Bashar Assad.”

If Congressional “experts” like Adam Kinzinger or Lindsay Graham met with foreign leaders instead of constantly calling for war against them, the world would be more peaceful, and American defense costs would be lower.

Next is healthcare with the “expert class” offering their expertise:

More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

The letter, obtained by the New York Times, marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice, according to Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine, who helped draft the letter. The group tries to stay out of politics whenever possible, he said.

Their beef is that Kennedy “has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee.” No kidding. That’s why America elected Trump and why he nominated Kennedy. That’s democracy. The threat to democracy is when the self-proclaimed “experts” overrule the people's will.

Do scientists avoid politics? Please. Climate change and COVID are two examples of scientists prioritizing political science over the real science.

The COVID-19 mask “expert”:

These “experts” are partially responsible for an American health crisis. They are the pot calling the kettle black. Dr. Casey Means offers dismal American health stats brought to us by the “expert class.”

74% of American adults are dealing with overweight or obesity.

Close to 40% of children are overweight or obese.

52% of American adults have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.

30% of teens have prediabetes (this was 11% in 2002).

1 in 36 children are on the autism spectrum (up from 1 in 150 in the year 2000). This number is 1 in 22 in California.

34% of young adults have a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder.

Incidence of early-onset cancers have increased by 79% in recent years.

Nearly one in two Americans is predicted to get cancer in their lifetimes (41.6% chance). This is the first year America is estimated to have over 2 million new cases of cancer.

18% of teens have fatty liver disease.

Early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s disease have tripled since 2013.

The US has the highest infant and maternal mortality rate of all high income countries, despite spending the most.

Life expectancy is seeing a sustained decline in the United States driven by COVID, chronic liver disease, heart disease, and suicide.

See more here.

There is much more from the medical “expert class.” Let’s revisit COVID and the experts' rules and mandates. The six-foot social distancing guideline pushed by CDC experts was “arbitrary.” COVID likely emerged from a Wuhan lab, not a wet market, as the experts told us.

The “expert class” gave us these two gems:  

Due to inadequate COVID-19 relief oversight, government experts lost $200 billion in taxpayer dollars, and fraudsters stole an additional $191 billion.

Mask mandates and lockdowns recommended by experts were not based on science and caused more harm than good. The COVID vaccine did not stop the spread or transmission of the virus, as the experts promised us.

Vaccine mandates pushed by the experts caused more harm than good, while the experts trashed natural immunity and safe therapeutics.

The experts did not base school closures on science but on demands from teachers’ unions.

Let’s shift from health to defense.

Pete Hegseth has two Ivy League degrees, 20 years of military combat experience, and medals, including the Bronze Star and Combat Infantry Badge. Yet to the expert class, he “lacks experience” and is “wildly unqualified.” 

So says the experts in the media and at the Pentagon. The Pentagon “experts” failed their 7th audit in a row, but Hegseth is unqualified. Those same experts dragged America into a losing 20-year Middle East war based on fabricated Saddam Hussein WMDs.

These experts botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Expert Secretary of State Tony Blinken told Congress that “No one anticipated” the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. But Pete Hegseth is “totally unqualified.” O.K. ...

Hegseth is such a rube that the U.S. Military Academy had to lie to left-wing ProPublica, saying that he was never accepted into West Point until he produced his acceptance letter. I wouldn’t want to be part of the West Point leadership team when they have a new boss named Pete in the Pentagon.

America’s experts have spent hundreds of billions in Ukraine, achieving nothing except enriching the military-industrial complex and sacrificing half a million Ukrainians, all while bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. The military experts didn’t foresee Benghazi and did nothing to stop it as it unfolded, and Americans died.

The experts overlooked the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the jihadi rebel overthrow of the Syrian government, removing a dictator while gambling that the replacement won’t be far worse, as seen in Iraq and Libya.

President Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, a member in good standing of the “expert class,” confidently declared, one week before the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” How’s that “expert” prognostication playing out?

If I, as a surgeon, were wrong that often, I would be sued into oblivion. Yet these “experts” get book deals and promotions.

But Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard are “inexperienced and unqualified.”

What has the expert class gotten right? That might be a much shorter list than the long tally of their failures.

Last year, the “expert class” provided America with open borders, costing$150 billion in illegal alien expenses. They left us with a $36 trillion national debt, with interest payments now exceeding $1 trillion annually. Those figures show no signs of slowing, let alone stopping or reversing.

The last bit of expertise comes from the Pentagon.

Mysterious drones are flying over New Jersey and other states. The Department of Defense's “experts” don’t know what the drones are, but they are quite certain they pose no threat. How does that work?

This is what the medical experts informed us about young athletes dropping dead left and right. They had no idea why, but they were quite certain that the deaths were entirely unrelated to COVID vaccines.

Now, drones are flying over Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. But don’t worry, the “experts” are on this.

We have EINOs, “experts in name only,” throwing stones at Trump’s nominees while living in their glass houses of failure after failure. It’s time for a different approach. That’s why Donald Trump was elected last month, and his nominees are an extension of his election.

William F. Buckley, Jr. had it right about the “expert class”: “I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

Time to flush the “expert class” down the toilet.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- Dec 17

 

The Destruction of the Government’s Credibility

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

Right now, swarms of drones on the eastern seaboard are captivating Americans each night.  Spotted in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Maryland, the flying pests often appear near military installations and other national security hotspots.  While everyday Americans share videos of the crafts on social media, they are not being dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” or “kooks.”  The interlopers hovering in America’s skies have equally intrigued politicians, law enforcement officers, and news reporters.

What is most interesting about this event (barring the emergence of little green men from the aerial vehicles before this essay’s publication) is the public’s general disregard for the federal government’s “official” explanation.  National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has dismissed thousands of sightings as overreactions to “manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully.”  Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists, “We haven’t seen anything unusual.  We know of no threat.”  Meanwhile, millions of Americans who have either witnessed the drones firsthand or watched recordings of their flights online are spurning the government’s response as horse manure–laden propaganda.  

Who can blame them?  Something’s going on.  Maybe amateur pilots are pulling a prank.  Maybe Russia, Iran, or China wants us chasing our tails.  Perhaps Putin is reminding war hawks in D.C. that expanded missile strikes into mainland Russia come with a price.  Or maybe Joe Biden and his Deep State handlers are keeping Americans distracted from the nauseating stench of White House pardons, unchecked inflation, and the growing prospect of WWIII.  While disparaging the drone sightings as a form of public hysteria, Mayorkas took the opportunity to push for greater government authority over drone operations in the United States.  So perhaps the whole thing is just another Intelligence Community psy-op meant to scare Americans sufficiently (à la COVID) to justify new government powers.

A similarly revealing public reaction has come over the last few years with regard to Congress’s increased interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — unexplained sightings including crafts formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  After spending most of the last century dismissing UAP as hoaxes, meteorological events, classified military programs, or mass delusions, members of Congress are now openly investigating whether some faction of the U.S. government (think Deep State) has long covered up evidence of — or even contact with — extraterrestrial beings.  

One might think that public statements from former members of the military and broader Intelligence Community attesting to extraterrestrial visitation, contact, and even decades-long black budget appropriations dedicated to reverse-engineering alien technology would herald the most important news story of the twenty-first century.  Instead, the American people have largely given the bombshell reports a collective shrug.  Why aren’t they transfixed by the paradigm-shattering revelations before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence?  Why aren’t they demanding answers from the White House?  Why aren’t they at least busting out their old X-Files paraphernalia and screaming on social media, “I want to believe”?

I think the answer is that nobody trusts what the highest-ranking members of the U.S. government have to say.  As the public’s horrified reaction to Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 suggests, had President Franklin D. Roosevelt used one of his “fireside chats” to tell Americans that extraterrestrial entities are among us, the American people would have surely believed him.  If the U.S. Army had told Americans in 1947 that it had recovered alien remains and technology near Roswell, New Mexico, most people would have accepted the announcement as astonishingly true.  Eighty years later, neither the White House nor the Pentagon is seen as trustworthy.

A lot has happened over the last century.  Historical researchers have collected enough documentary evidence to suggest that Roosevelt and others had advanced knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  A majority of Americans believe that the CIA likely played some role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Costly wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, and much of the Middle East have caused Americans to doubt the U.S. government’s official reasons for war, its prosecution of ongoing conflicts, and its capacity for truthfully reporting international events.  

For half a century, Congress and successive presidents have promised to secure America’s borders and end the dangers and financial costs associated with illegal immigration.  Nevertheless, during Joe Biden’s presidency, illegal immigration has reached unprecedented levels.  If you’re a lifelong Democrat, you most likely believe that President Nixon deserved not only removal from office, but also imprisonment for his alleged crimes.  If you’re a lifelong Republican who has watched how Democrats use lawfare to take down political opponents, President Nixon’s resignation probably looks, in hindsight, a lot like a Deep State plot to remove a man who had just won a landslide political mandate to curtail congressional spending and shackle parts of the administrative state.  

In the background of all these sordid events (and many others) that chipped away at Americans’ trust in government are the exponential growth of the unelected bureaucracy, the unchecked authority of the private Federal Reserve System to print dollars and manipulate markets, and the increasingly obvious collusion between the corporate news media and the Deep State.  If Americans no longer believe what the U.S. government has to say, that’s because the federal government has spent the last century lying to, undermining, endangering, and betraying American citizens.

It’s important to pause and consider this appalling fact: in most cases, it is a crime for Americans to lie to government officials, but government officials may generally lie to the public with impunity.  Anyone who has seen a criminal interrogation or any kind of negotiation involving agents of the United States is familiar with the government’s loose relationship with the truth.  Anyone who watched James Comey and John Brennan substantiate Hillary Clinton’s Russia collusion hoax knows that the FBI and CIA have no problem lying to the American people.  Anyone who witnessed fifty-one “Intelligence experts” falsely labeling Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop “Russian disinformation” knows that the Deep State has no qualms about defrauding the public and subverting democratic elections.  If regular Americans lied to the American government the way government agents regularly lie to the American people, they would be serving decades in prison.  Instead, liars such as Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Strzok, Weissmann, McCord, and other co-conspirators get book deals and lifetime sinecures from taxpayer-subsidized think-tanks.

It’s equally important to recognize that the U.S. military defines the American mind as part of the “cognitive battlespace.”  In its Information Operations against the American people, the Pentagon is not interested in “winning hearts and minds” through reasoned argument and persuasion.  It is interested in using propaganda and psychological warfare to manipulate brains and dominate public opinion.  For decades, information warfare specialists perfected these techniques abroad; now they have unleashed them here at home.  

The military’s civilian counterparts in the U.S. government have been happy to add these weapons to their domestic arsenal.  As one researcher assessing the federal government’s growing censorship complex concluded, the Biden administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to “develop Orwellian surveillance and propaganda strategies” and “create methods and tools to restrict speech online.”  Just as the British Foreign Office set up a propaganda unit in 2014 to paint Putin and Russia as evil, U.S. non-governmental organizations (often CIA fronts) have been pushing the same narratives in an attempt to justify economic hardship and future war.  It is far easier to convince citizens to embrace government censorship if they are first psychologically conditioned to believe that COVID “misinformation” and Russian “disinformation” are existential threats.

How spectacularly have government-sanctioned lies damaged the nation?  Americans see strange lights in the sky and don’t know what (or whom) to believe.  Who can blame them?

We're Going to See This Happen More With Some School Shootings, Aren't We?

posted by Matt Vespa at Townhall 

It was senseless. It was evil, and now the media and the police are about to make some of these tragedies even more of a circus.

Yesterday, in Madison, Wisconsin, a teenage shooter shot and killed two people at Abundant Life Christian School. She injured six others before committing suicide. And yet, the gender of the shooter was not revealed until an unnecessary game of “Guess Who” was launched after Police Chief Shon Barnes refused to disclose that detail. We’re going to see this more often, aren’t we? These types of shootings don’t fit the liberal narrative.

It was already bad enough with the pillow-smothering that occurs when the suspect and the firearm they use in the crime don’t match. The liberal media needs a white guy with an AR-15 to make some hay and use against Republicans.

The shooter in Madison is allegedly 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow. She isn’t transgender, her alleged boyfriend shared her six-page manifesto (which is unhinged), and she used a 9mm handgun to commit this crime.

Here I will include some screenshots of the manifesto.

I am very hesitate to post the whole thing not because the content is graphic in any way but I am worried it will violate the terms of service, and am not intending to do that.

This is page one and page two in full. pic.twitter.com/WjLG3rluyP

— pagliacci the hated 🌝 (@Slatzism) December 16, 2024

A female, handgun, and a looney toon manifesto where she drops the n-word is for sure going to send this story into the furnace. The gender of the shooter and the weapon already marked it for the liberal media memory hole, but one that sports about how sex with blacks makes you one of them, etc., etc., it’s going to be out of the cycle soon. It’s a psychotic mixture of radical feminism and Ku Klux Klan talk. 

This isn't the only school shooting like this, either: the Nashville shooter, who was transgender, had a manifesto, but that’s been blocked from being disclosed to the public. 

But not all recent shootings are entirely a gender-based thing. With the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, we’ve learned more about him over the past 10 days than we ever did about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin who shot Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. 

The media game of suspect and gun not fitting their narrative is tragically over, and we’ve entered a new politically correct nonsensical dimension, where, at times, the gender of the suspect might not be disclosed for whatever reason, leading to mayhem on social media and further distrust of the media and law enforcement officials. 

The gender of the shooter is an innocuous detail. It’s a simple fact, and the irony is that the refusal to disclose it, which was always silly, to avoid conspiracy theory-peddling or politicization potentially has done just that, to say nothing that the media shouldn’t be shying away from this story because they can’t use it as political ammunition against conservatives. But you know that already.

This game was fun to play as a kid, not for guessing the suspect of mass casualty events:

Conrad Black - Trump Begets a Resurrection of Common Sense

 That’s something to celebrate given how close America came to careering through the guardrails of its constitutional democracy.

As the Christmas holidays and the year end approach, I respectfully take it upon myself to recommend that thoughtful Americans reflect upon how close the United States came in recent years to roaring through and over the guardrails of its constitutional democracy like a derailed express train.

Call it the James Comey-Andrew Weissmann-Merrick Garland-Marc Elias school of fervent and illegal agitation for America as a one-party socialist state, inundated with the teeming masses of the world but governed always from the elitist left inflated with sanctimony while hyperactively dishonest and hypocritical.

The Clintons and Obamas and Bidens are severely implicated in the horrifying sequence of outrages to the Constitution that seem to have been terminated by last month’s presidential election. They knew and approved the assembly of the pastiche of anti-Trump defamations and fabrications and the representation of it as professional intelligence of Donald Trump’s contacts with the Russian government and collaboration with that government in the 2016 election, all of which was inserted into the press as the work of professional intelligence-gatherers not requiring corroboration.

The persons mentioned and their kindred spirits sanctioned the criminalization of policy and partisan differences, the launch of amphibious invasions of the homes of a former president and some of his supporters on grounds known to be spurious by those who commissioned and authorized them, and a series of rabidly partisan and unfounded impeachments and indictments.

They were parties to what appears from the decline by four million ballots cast in 2024 compared to 2020 despite the increase in the country’s population by seven million and an unprecedented effort to get out the vote last month, to have been a dubious 2020 election result. They assisted in maintaining the locked-arm solidarity of the entire national political press in treating any question of the legitimacy of the 2020 election result, which was marred by concerns about potentially harvested and unverifiable mail-in ballots, as an unpatriotic and deliberate lie.

These were the champions of oppressive wokeness, official and public lawlessness, discriminatory diversity and inclusion, the green terror, the persecution of religiously minded people and concerned parents, and the self-flagellatory nonsense about “systemic racism”  — this in the country that has made the greatest effort in history to raise up a formerly oppressed minority to complete equality. In the ineluctable genius of the American system, all of this was evoked to a practicing electorate of approximately 154 million Americans, a decisive plurality of whom have renounced all of it.

The more respectable political commentators who loaned some credibility to the unutterable nonsense that President Trump was a Russian intelligence asset or gangster who would abolish American elections, have retreated, some of them ingeniously and even stylishly, but almost none with the humility and self-rebuke that the danger and the dishonesty that their shameful partisanship, mendacity, and rank unprofessionalism, naïveté, and malice morally impel.

The country appreciates what it did in rejecting all of this and placing its trust in a man about whom it had some legitimate misgivings, and the forces of demented hostility to the returning president have effectively collapsed. Some of his enemies have shifted course with unknowable levels of sincerity, some have been struck dumb and have fallen into a merciful quietism.

The political and social atmosphere, though, is shifting every day towards moderation, increasing tolerance, and the resurrection of common sense. American public life was at a dangerous impasse only two months ago. Now optimism is in the air and there is evident relief in the world that America is emerging from a crisis of national self-consciousness.

Not all sensible individuals are suffused with confidence in the incoming regime, but all sensible people who wish America well are relieved that the crisis of a possible breakdown in constitutional government is swiftly passing. America would not have ceased to be a great power; but it could have lost any claim to being the moral leader and chief exemplar of democracy in the world.   

There was much fear of violence and skullduggery in the 2024 presidential election, but there was no violence and no serious allegations of vote-counting fraud, and the vintage Democratic effort to win a senatorial election (in Pennsylvania), by judge-shopping and seeking the acceptance of inadmissible ballots, was rejected by an appeal court and failed.

The American system, much more than any individual candidate, has triumphed again. The whole country, and the entire West, which has felt the instability created by the Biden vacuum, can celebrate that.

https://www.nysun.com/article/trump-begets-a-resurrection-of-common-sense

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The House is Right: Communism Has No Place in American Schools

By Ian Oxnevad, 

CounterCurrent: Week of 12/16/24

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the-house-is-right-communism-has-no-place-in-american-schools

 Some ideas should be entertained and then shown the door. Not every idea that is entertained as a guest should stay for dinner, let alone become a roommate. When it comes to Marxism and its various aliases in education, the idea has not only overstayed its welcome but has gone on to become a landlord of intellectual life in American education. This past week, the House of Representatives passed the Communism in Teaching Act, a first step to evict Marxism from the schoolhouse. By eliminating less-than-neutral teaching of Communism from American schools, we re-establish educational sovereignty and begin to repair the country’s moral compass.

Communism is one of those “big ideas” that confronts the core philosophy of the American founding and remains incompatible with it. Since 1776, America’s ideas of individual liberty, limited government, and natural rights have defended against entire worldviews just as the country has faced military threats from abroad and within. For the nation to succeed, the original thirteen colonies had to overcome the centuries-old notions of the Divine Right of Kings. The idea of natural liberty had to overcome the Confederacy’s justifications for slavery, just as foreign policy interests aligned with the founding’s assertions to justify America’s entrance into World War II. Alongside the religious fundamentalism of Islamism, Communism has remained a most formidable and threatening idea to America both at home and abroad. Unfortunately, Communism’s historical horrors are whitewashed in American schools, where Marxism remains an underpinning philosophy.

Just as Communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe in 1989, the New York Times published an article titled “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges.” The article documented the strength of Marxism in higher education and its adaptation—especially in light of the ideology’s economic failures in Europe. At the time, UCLA history professor Johnathan Weiner nicely foreshadowed what was to come in education when he declared, “Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race—this is where the exciting debates are.” Back in 1989, the New York Times called Marxism’s shift from economics to social issues a mutation. What began in colleges and universities ultimately reached the K-12 system.

In higher education, the success of the Marxist mutation is remarkable. This month, after the CEO of a health insurance company, United Healthcare, was shot by a gunman with an animus toward “corporate America,” professors lauded the violence. Julia Alekseyeva, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and self-avowed “socialist and ardent antifascist,” praised the killing on social media. Marxist professors have influenced leftwing movements, education professionals, and high politics. Bill Ayers, the University of Illinois education professor who helped found the Weather Underground, helped raise the future progressive San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin. The college campus chaos that has animated universities since 2020 is evidence of the left’s ideological success. Little surprise then that many of our K-12 teachers walk the path for a Marxist-Leninist future with professors like these!

Who teaches your kids matters. Primary and secondary school students spend roughly 1,000 hours a year in class. Maya Phillips, a survivor of Soviet Communism and now a school board member of the San Deigo County Unified School District, described her dismay at the prevalence of rebranded Soviet-style propaganda in California’s new “Ethnic Studies” curriculum. Phillips notes that new “liberated” ethnic studies curricula that place students into matrices of “oppressor and oppressed,” demonize capitalism, portray Zionism as racist, and discuss apocalyptic “class struggle” as if teaching from an old Soviet education playbook.

The fact that this kind of teaching is prevalent in America’s largest state is bad enough. However, Marxist teaching is not confined to California—it’s nationwide. In Colorado, the Colorado Education Association (CEA), which includes 39,000 teachers, voted to condemn “capitalism” and called for economic “equity.” The language of the CEA’s resolution is familiar, as it stated that the group:

Believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.

This is a problem. How can public schools be entrusted with educating our students when supposed educators see oppression everywhere, generally view half of America as “fascist” for being Republican or questioning Marxist ideas, and ignore the horrors of Communism’s past and present?

Again, Marxism isn’t just for the teachers in blue states, but red ones such as Utah and Nebraska. The Chinese Communist Party has jumped into the fray through “Confucius Classrooms” programs that have reached over 170,000 American students in 34 states. Stepping back and surveying America’s education landscape, it is apparent that policymakers and society alike have abandoned America’s classrooms. Thankfully, a small change is on the way.

Strong citizens who cherish liberty start out as strong children learning liberty in the classroom. Empowering strong citizens requires learning about the evil Communism represents. This new bill, sponsored by Maria Salazar (R-FL) and modeled after the Never Again Act addressing Holocaust education, passed with wide bipartisan support. The curriculum would form around materials produced by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and outline Communism’s incompatibility with American ideals.

Policymakers may be waking up to the fact that America’s biggest threats are not just abroad but within our classrooms.

---

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Politico Horrified Defense Nominee Hegseth Might Make Military Schools ‘Patriotic’

Politico is fear-mongering over claims Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, will make military schools “patriotic.”

Logan Washburn reporting for The Federalist

Pete Hegseth, incoming President Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, will revamp military education to be “patriotic,” blares a terrified Dec. 15 Politico article by Juan Perez Jr.

“Pete Hegseth has pushed for years to steep American education in patriotic principles and Christian theology — and he could implement that vision for thousands of military families,” the article opens.

Politico suggests Hegseth could revamp the Department of Defense Education Activity agency responsible for educating many children in military families. It raises the alarm that Hegseth could “bend a key facet of the education system in his image” by implementing the “patriotic education” of Trump’s 1776 Commission. 

The article paints the DODEA as “a well-regarded school system whose students outperform the rest of the country on federal standardized tests.” The agency that spends $900 billion a year and oversees some 67,000 children also spreads cultural Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion curricula to service members’ children, such as encouraging service members’ children to become transgender without telling their parents. Politico worries Hegseth will disrupt this agency, “install a new chain of command,” and “use federal contracts to marshal consultants” to rewrite curriculum, testing, and teacher training standards.

The DODEA desperately needs an overhaul. While its students do outperform the national average, this is not by much, according to federal data.

Far worse, the Claremont Institute reported last year that the DODEA established a DEI department in 2021 and held an “Equity and Access Summit” in 2022 to plan for pushing gender ideology on students. DODEA has been deceiving military parents and pushing DEI in schools, as The Federalist has reported. The agency celebrated “Pride Month” this year and in 2023.

“DoDEA celebrates our colleagues and friends in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer community, plus anyone not represented by the letters,” reads a press release from this year. The agency published a video in 2023 featuring DODEA staff discussing efforts to push LGBT advocacy in military schools.

“Celebrating Pride Month to me is actually a life-saving activity,” says Danica Allen, a DODEA special education teacher at Kadena Elementary School in Japan, in a 2023 DODEA-branded PR video.

In the video, Bryanne Elliott, another DODEA special education teacher, demands that coworkers be more “open-minded” by using “spouse or partner” instead of “husband.” And Fawne Robinson of DODEA’s human capital management branch tells viewers she wants staff to “learn more about the LGBTQ community” through taxpayer-sponsored government trainings. 

All this reinforces an excerpt the Politico article quotes from Hegseth’s book, Battle for the American Mind: “Almost no school — public or private — seems safe. Conservatives and Christians are surrounded,” Hegseth writes. 

Politico seems concerned Hegseth’s “ideas could then take hold across the country” — and loosen gender activists’ hold on the minds and bodies of servicemembers’ children. But American voters by and large think that would be a good thing. In step with most Americans, Hegseth has long advocated for reforming American schools to keep teachers from pushing critical race theory and gender ideology on students.

The vast majority of Americans agree that schools — especially in the military — should teach patriotism instead of preferred pronouns. Only to outlets like Politico is this a shocking policy position.