The Anti-American Radicals Are Winning

Whoever takes over public education will eventually take over the minds of American youth.  Whoever takes over the minds of American youth will eventually take over the nation.

It appears that radicals are succeeding in taking over public education, judging by, among other sources, a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:  “Tim Walz Brings ‘Liberated’ Ethnic Studies to Minnesota,” by Katherine Kersten, August 21, 2024.

The astonishing and alarming op-ed exposed the philosophical and intellectual foundations of the ethnic-studies requirements soon to be released by the Minnesota Department of Education, based on a law signed by former Governor Tim Walz in 2023, the very same Tim Walz who is now Kamala Harris’ running mate.

The radicals behind the initiative are anti-capitalism, anti-market, anti-white, and anti-America.  That’s not an exaggeration or the hallucinations of a white supremacist.

Here is an excerpt from the op-ed about the ethnic-studies initiative:

Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.”

One of the radicals who worked on the initiative is Brian Lozenski, an official with a group called Education for Liberation Minnesota, or EdLib MN.  The group dominated the state’s social studies drafting committee and is dedicated to being a political force that addresses “the status quo of colonial education that prioritizes Eurocentric curricula.”

EdLib MN also wants to defund the police, abolish the social order, and build a new society.  It uses such buzzwords as “decolonization,” “dispossession” and “settler colonialism.”  Naturally, it is anti-Israel and pro-Hamas.

No surprise that Lozenski is an associate professor.  The college doesn’t matter, because almost all of them are infected with the same thinking, but for the record, it’s Macalester College in St. Paul.

In an article on the George Floyd riots, Lozenski gleefully wrote that the riots portend “the inevitable death” of the American “social order that prioritizes vulgar economics.”

Critical Ethnic Studies have been a graduation requirement in the St. Paul public schools since 2021.  Lozenski consulted on the program.  The WSJ op-ed had this to say about the curriculum:

The St. Paul course makes “resistance” to America’s fundamental institutions a central theme. It instructs 16-year-olds to “build” a race- and ethnicity-based “narrative of transformative resistance” and to “challenge and expose” “systems of inequality.” It tells them to “resist all systems of oppressive power rooted in racism through collective action and change.” Accompanying artwork, labeled “seeds of resistance,” features protest signs that read “No Bans/No Walls” and “Abolish Prison.”

Unfortunately, such radicalism is not restricted to Minnesota.  It pervades many school districts across the land, as well as many private schools.  Of course, it also extends beyond K-12 to higher education, from whence it originated.

In their belief system, the radicals hate capitalism for producing unequal outcomes; hate market competition for the same reason; hate America for its history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism; hate white people for founding the nation on these injustices and continuing to benefit from them; and hate themselves if they are “white,” a word that is intentionally loosely defined, malleable, and not rooted in science, in order to facilitate their political agenda.

This thinking has been percolating for decades.  I wrote about it circa 2005, when I shared a point-counterpoint column in the Arizona Republic with a public school official.  Prior to that, I wrote about it when I had a stand-alone column in the same newspaper.

It didn’t take any special prescience or intelligence to see what was coming.  It took attending education conferences at the School of Education at Arizona State University; attending local school board meetings; reviewing the agendas, speeches, and proclamations of national and state conferences of teachers’ unions and school board associations; and analyzing and comparing the curricula and costs between public schools and parochial schools.

As a result of the radical influences on public education, students are susceptible to becoming cynical about America, to seeing everything through the lenses of race and class, to feeling guilty if they are white, to feeling resentful if they are non-white, to thinking that the economy is rigged against them, and to rejecting the norms, values, rituals, and myths that hold us together.

This is precisely what the radicals want.

It’s also what America’s enemies want.  They don’t need to build up their armies and navies.  They can be patient and watch us fragment internally.

Regardless of whomever is elected president, the radicals won’t be stopped.  Harris and Walz are beholden to teachers’ unions and are simpatico with much of what the radicals want.  And Trump doesn’t have the finesse, patience and political capital to convince an overwhelming majority of soccer moms and dads of the harm being done to their children and the nation by the radicals.

I pray that I’m wrong.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.