Marxism doesn’t work.
Any college student with sense who reads enough world history will eventually reach this conclusion. Study for even a few minutes, and anyone can detect the rot at the core of Marx’s central thesis.
This presents a problem for the Woke Totalitarians of today. If anyone can find out that your core ideas are built on a fraudulent, evil system just by reading, then even the most sophisticated propaganda campaign will not be enough to win hearts and minds.
Their solution?
Begin the indoctrination process before people can read.
In this, they are following in the footsteps of communists throughout history, who have understood the importance of beginning their revolutions with children. In my father’s home country of Cuba, one of the first moves of Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries was to dismantle the education system and rebuild it from the ground up, beginning almost immediately after they seized power in 1959. No longer would parents be the ones who taught their children values. The parents wouldn’t even decide when and in what manner their children could leave the house and begin working. Every child in Cuba, according to Castro, now belonged to the revolution.
A few years earlier, while hiding out in the Sierra Maestra Mountains after his first failed attempt at a revolution, Castro had met a young doctor from Argentina named Che Guevara. Today, most people would recognize Che Guevara from the sketch of his face that adorns T-shirts and dorm room posters—the one that shows him looking skyward in a decaled hat and military uniform, usually accompanied by the phrase Viva La Revolución. At some point in the 1980s, for reasons that defy understanding, Che Guevara became a cult figure to young leftists who liked his clothes and his politics. Around that time, posters of him became some of the most popular items sold in college bookstores.
I still remember walking into a dorm room down the hall from mine in the late 1980s and seeing the man’s smug face staring back at me. The fellow who lived there was active in left-wing politics at Princeton. I didn’t know him very well, but I couldn’t resist telling him how cool I thought the poster was.
“I see you’re into murderous, torturing thugs,” I said. “But when it comes to that stuff, Che’s really an amateur. Why not throw up a poster of Adolf Hitler to go next to him? Maybe Chairman Mao or Stalin?”
He and I didn’t speak much after that.
What I knew, of course—what most people whose relatives grew up in Cuba know—is that Che Guevara was a monster. According to a memoir written by his cousin, he enjoyed torturing small animals as a child.1 When that no longer gave him the rush he was looking for, he moved on to people. In the late 1950s, when Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries were still hiding in the mountains, Guevara often murdered people suspected of being disloyal to the revolution. He did so without giving these men a trial or allowing them to speak in their own defense. He would simply make the man in question kneel, say a few words, and then fire a single shot into the back of his head.
Writing about the experience in the mid-1960s, Guevara recalled the pleasure he got from murdering his fellow revolutionaries. “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood,” he wrote. “I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”2
Reading that quote, you might not guess that Che Guevara had strong views about early childhood education. But he did. According to him and Fidel Castro, getting the children while they were young was one of the most important goals of the revolution. Children were, in his words, “malleable clay with which the new man, without any of the previous defects, can be formed.”3
By “defects,” communists mean the things that get in the way of violent revolution—things like religion, traditional values, and a belief in the family as the basic structural unit of society. Castro and his allies believed that if children could be taught early enough to reject those things, they would become loyal and unquestioning soldiers in the revolution, willing to defend the principles of communism and Marxism forever.
The idea wasn’t new. From the moment that Karl Marx and his disciples first began writing about their vision for the world in the mid-1800s, they dreamed of a society in which it was the state, not families, that would take care of educating children. Both Karl Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels viewed the nuclear family as a corrupting force on modern society—a “money relation” that should be supplanted by the state. In The Communist Manifesto, they stated plainly that the education of children, “from the moment they can get along without their mother’s care,” should be handled by the government rather than parents.4
This made sense, given that Karl Marx saw his own family mostly as an inconvenience. For years, he refused to provide for his wife or his six children by getting a job, choosing instead to write long books and articles full of turgid, barely readable prose for very little money. He relied on his parents and friends, mostly Engels, for what little income he had. According to most biographers, the Marx family lived in a constant state of squalor and poverty.
The man himself, as the journalist Paul Kengor put it in The Devil and Karl Marx, was “a slob.” In 1849, less than a year after he published The Communist Manifesto, the Marx family was evicted for refusing to pay rent. In addition to the lack of payment, the landlord who kicked them out was revolted by Marx’s “resistance to grooming,” and appalled that he “drank too much, smoked too much, never exercised, and suffered from warts and boils from lack of washing. He stunk.”5
Throughout Marx’s life, while he was writing his books, his children suffered. Both his sons died from exposure, likely because of their father’s refusal to pay for adequate medical care. Two of his daughters killed themselves by drinking poison. Late in life, he fathered a child out of wedlock with a maid he had hired to clean up around the house (for no money), and he refused to acknowledge that the child was his. Marx’s wife, who often wrote that she wanted to end her life, died in misery soon afterward, and Engels ended up supporting Marx’s daughter.
Again, this doesn’t seem like the sort of person whose advice you would seek on anything, let alone something as important as the education of children. But Marxists are strange people. For years, disciples of their strange ideology have attempted to redesign education systems all over the world, always believing that this time, they’ll manage not to screw everything up. Like Charlie Brown running toward the football that Lucy is propping up in the distance, these people always run at full speed toward their goals. They plan lessons, design curricula, and even build schools to further the cause of Marxism and bring about their worker’s paradise.
Every time, they end up flat on their backs.
In 1917, after the Bolsheviks successfully revolted against the ruling classes in Russia, one of the first things the revolutionaries did was establish a school—where students were aggressively encouraged to snitch on their parents.
Almost exactly two years later, in 1919, communists in Hungary attempted to do something similar. It didn’t go well. According to a biography of Georg Lukács, the education commissar of Hungary at the time, the whole thing quickly devolved into madness, as most Marxist ventures eventually do: “Special lectures were organized in schools and literature printed and distributed to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the church, and to ignore precepts of morality.”6
Typically, you find very few mentions of things like mathematics, economics, or critical thinking in the curricula of these Marxist institutions. Those subjects take a back seat to “free love” and “the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes.” Some communist schools may never get around to them at all. Of course, many of these Marxist education systems—and the regimes that attempted to implement them—didn’t last very long. The Hungarian Soviet Republic, for instance, operated for only 133 days before parents found out what was going on and shut the whole thing down.
The rare exception, of course, is Cuba, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara exerted brutal control over the entire country. In 1960, they established state-run preschools to teach children about Marxism. This was the year that my father returned to his native country to find that his home and his family had been devastated by the new Castro regime.
In his childhood home, he sat with my abuela and listened to stories about what she had been forced to endure as an elementary school teacher after the communists took over. She told him about the spies, the soldiers, and the constant sense that someone was watching her every move, making sure that every word she said was perfectly in line with the revolution. It was there, sitting at the kitchen table of the house he’d grown up in, that my father first heard the stories of the soldiers who had barged into his mother’s classroom and told the young students to pray to Fidel Castro for candy—a story that affected me so deeply when I heard it as a child that it still comes readily to mind whenever I hear some left-wing activist extol the virtues of state-dictated education or other neo-Marxist principles. He also heard about how she had feigned insanity, kicking over chairs and foaming at the mouth, to avoid joining the revolution without being thrown in jail or shot.
When my father left Cuba for the last time in 1960, he was leaving behind a country that was about to be radically transformed. Most of that transformation would come about through education. Throughout the 1960s, as my grandmother endured the scorn of her neighbors (only some of whom believed she was truly insane, leaving her open to the incredibly dangerous charge of being a counter-revolutionary), Castro nationalized every educational institution in Cuba. The Communist Party established a children’s auxiliary club and built boarding schools in the more rural areas of the country, where men only slightly younger than my father would be sent to learn revolutionary politics and agriculture. By the late 1960s, according to a recent history of Cuba, about 85 percent of high school students attended those boarding schools.
This total overhaul of the educational system was the first step in the grand plan of the leftist revolutionaries who had taken control of the country. Their mission, as Che Guevara put it in his most famous essay, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” was to do away with everything that had come before. “The new society in process of formation,” he wrote, “has to compete very hard with the past.”7
As my father got messages from old friends in Cuba during his first years in the United States, he learned just how hard Fidel and the revolutionaries were fighting against the past. The children who had been very small when he left were now being shipped off to state-run boarding schools in the countryside, and many people his own age were swept up in a literacy program that Che Guevara had helped to design. They were sent out to villages all over Cuba to teach young children and their mostly illiterate families how to read.
Even in this literacy program, revolutionary politics was paramount. The letter “F,” according to the manuals, stood either for “Fidel” or for “fusil,” which means rifle; the sample sentences all told the story of how Castro and his band of revolutionaries were going to save the country and reorient the economy toward communism.
Like all Marxists, the revolutionaries in the Castro regime knew that the best way to teach these backward, rotten principles was by sneaking them into supposedly objective lessons about reading, writing, and mathematics. Children, they knew, would be much more likely to absorb these principles if they were fed them at the same time that they were learning how to multiply numbers, tie their shoes, and find their way home from school. Ideas that seemed ridiculous to adults—such as the abolition of the family or the complete restructuring of the economy—would be more readily accepted by children, who had no better ideas to compare them to.
This was all part of a grand plan to get rid of everything that had come before. Tradition had to go, as did religion and all the old stories about Cuban history. There was nothing more dangerous to the revolutionaries, who wanted to bring about radical change in their society—change that was based on Marxism, which is rotten to its core—than veneration of the past.
“During the transition to this new future society,” as the historian Ada Ferrer has written, “the past was not yet dead. And that made it deadly. For Guevara, the battle against the past occurred everywhere, even within individuals. To achieve communism, people had to defeat the past in themselves and adopt a whole ‘new scale of values.’ People had to be reborn, figuratively, as new men and new women.”8
Reading these words today, it is difficult not to think of the various efforts we’ve seen on the American Left not only to rewrite our history but to annihilate it completely. In classrooms all over the United States, children are being taught to abhor our nation’s past and to view our founders as evil racists who wanted nothing more than to enslave and torture anyone who wasn’t White. Some are being taught a version of history authored by the “journalist” Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 1619 Project has been compressed, rewritten, and dumbed down (a miraculous feat, considering the quality of the original product) specifically so that it can be used in K–12 classrooms.
According to this false version of history, our past is primarily one of genocide, rape, and murder; the United States was conceived not in 1776, when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, but in 1619, when the first ship carrying African slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. This version of our history claims, incorrectly, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve the institution of slavery. It teaches that America is irredeemably racist, and it says that the entire story of the United States of America can be told through one lens only—as a story of oppression—and that anyone who says otherwise is simply enacting White supremacy. Most important, it says that everything students have previously been taught about American history—everything their parents and grandparents believed about this country—is not only wrong, but racist.
In my last book, Justice Corrupted, I wrote about how this dangerous ideology ended up in classrooms all over the United States. I traced the ideology from its origins at Harvard Law School, where I saw up close how it was being developed, all the way through graduate schools of education at other major universities to secondary and primary school classrooms. Over a period of about three decades, beginning in the early 1990s, Critical Race Theory spread from these graduate schools of education to elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools in communities all across the country. By the time parents began looking over their children’s shoulders during the Covid-19 lockdowns and seeing the utter nonsense that was being taught to them over Zoom, Critical Race Theory was already embedded in the curriculum.
To this day, most graduate schools of education still require all their students to take courses in which explicitly Marxist writings are on the syllabus. In September of 2022, RealClearEducation conducted an investigation into public universities in the state of Wisconsin and found that “virtually every primary- or early-education major must take at least one course focused on how to implement ‘equity,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’—buzzwords for radical identity politics—in their future K–12 classrooms.”9
One of the syllabi the investigators studied instructed future teachers to “view the classroom with reference to ‘interlocking systems of oppression, including… race, class, [and] gender,’ ”10 and to plan lessons accordingly. There is every reason to suppose that this is not a phenomenon unique to Wisconsin. The virus of neo-Marxism—mutated with new strands of gender theory, Critical Race Theory, and other postmodernist babble—has spread from our nation’s top universities to countless schools nationwide.
For the past few years, I’ve led a fight in the United States Senate to raise awareness about the horrible teachings contained within Critical Race Theory. I’m often met with objections from Democrats who insist, first of all, that Critical Race Theory is not being taught in schools. These people usually claim that real Critical Race Theory is nothing more than an obscure graduate-level set of ideas that isn’t taught outside of a few university departments. Then, of course, often in the course of the same sentence, these same Democrats will insist that Critical Race Theory is vital, and that it must continue to be taught in elementary schools all over the country.
Whatever it’s called, the ideas on race being taught in our schools are nonsensical and downright evil. That’s why I’ve cheered on several efforts to ban CRT at the state and local levels, including in Florida and my home state of Texas.
But banning the racist and dishonest material might not be enough. Already, we’ve seen signs that the neo-Marxist Left’s “war of position,” in which they planned long ago to infiltrate every institution in this country, has proven quite successful. Every day, children graduate from public high schools in the United States spouting left-wing propaganda as if it is the complete, uncontroversial truth about the world.
Consider what happened to Vincent Lloyd, a Black professor from Philadelphia who had been a model leftist for most of his adult life. Since the early 1990s, Professor Lloyd has taught seminars about antiracism and the struggles of racial minorities in the United States. In many ways his early efforts—including work by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other prominent scholars who would later come to write the CRT syllabus—prefigured the “racial reckoning” that would enthrall the United States during the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
To Vincent Lloyd, Critical Race Theory was not a set of evil ideas, but a necessary framework for dealing with the institutional racism that he and his leftist colleagues believed was all around us in the United States.
One of his favorite jobs, as he wrote recently in a brilliant (and terrifying) piece for the new online magazine Compact, was teaching a seminar for gifted high school students. The last time Lloyd had taught the seminar, in 2014, the students had shown up eager to learn lessons about racism and oppression and how to combat them in modern society. As the six weeks of the seminar went by, he writes, “I could see the students forming bonds with each other and with me, and I could see their commitment to the course. They always showed up on time. They always did the work.”11
But during the summer of 2022, things were different. Something about the students had changed. Whereas before Lloyd’s students had been open to new ideas and eager to debate with their classmates, now they were much more close-minded and militant—a change Lloyd attributes to the sudden prominence of woke ideology after the “racial reckoning” that occurred in 2020.
The structure of the seminar was also markedly different. Now, rather than focusing on critical theory in general, the program would offer only “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies” seminars. The former, according to the institute, would “seek to focus more specifically on the needs and interests of Black students.”
It didn’t take long for Professor Lloyd to realize that something was very wrong with the students. During the workshops he led on “race and the limits of the law,” most of which would be focused on anti-Black racism, he noticed that the students were no longer interested in learning or discussing things with one another. Rather, they were interested in “crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about.”
In the piece for Compact, Lloyd lists those dogmatic assertions, almost all of which are staples of neo-Marxism and Critical Race Theory. In his words:
Almost immediately, the high school students Professor Lloyd had been tasked with educating began ganging up on their fellow students, particularly two Asian students who didn’t always repeat the right bits of anti-racist dogma. Those two students were soon removed from the seminar. Before long, under the leadership of a college-aged teacher’s assistant that Lloyd calls “Keisha,” the students turned on him, believing that even he was not sufficiently radical.
This, as we’ve seen throughout history, is a common occurrence in revolutionary left-wing movements, particularly Marxist ones. Even the most revolutionary figure of today—the person who says all the right things and seems like he’s got all the right ideas—can be shouted down and chased out of town by the new, more extreme revolutionaries of tomorrow.
As Professor Lloyd tells it, he walked into his seminar room four weeks into what was supposed to be a six-week seminar to find the students sitting unsmiling with pieces of paper in their hands. “Each student,” he writes, “read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.”13
On a first read, it’s tempting to wonder where seventeen-year-olds would have learned such strange language, which sounds like something you’d hear in a graduate-level humanities seminar from hell. But we know exactly where they heard it.
This is the language that has infiltrated almost every middle and high school in America, where, from the time they’re old enough to read, American children are taught that the country they live in is an evil place where even the kindliest, most mild-mannered professors are out to “perpetuate anti-Black violence” against minorities. It is no surprise that we are seeing the horrible effects of these ideas at elite programs first. The students who attend such seminars are, as Professor Lloyd points out in his piece, the top performers in their classes; they are the ones who’ve shown they can do the best job at taking what their high school teachers tell them and regurgitating it back to earn the highest grades.
Clearly, the mission that Cultural Marxists set for themselves in the late 1960s—to infiltrate the knowledge-making institutions of this country with left-wing ideas and change the culture in a major way—is far along the road to succeeding. Even today, when parents and politicians are more aware than ever that these ideas exist in our school system, the cultural revolutionaries manage to smuggle the ideas through anyway. Even in the face of legislation that makes Critical Race Theory illegal, and an all-out assault on the worst books and ideas by parents and independent media, these vicious ideas still dominate American education.
Anyone wondering how is obviously not familiar with the backhanded tactics of the modern Left. Proponents of Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and other neo-Marxist ideas will lie, obfuscate, and knowingly manipulate people to slip their ideas into our institutions. They are comfortable doing this because they believe they are on the side of the angels—though most of them don’t believe in God or angels—and that their mission is righteous.
If you don’t believe me, prepare to meet just one of the people who writes curricula for children in grade school.
“I’m a good salesman,” says the man at the other end of the table. “But I’m also an evil salesman.”
Like many victims of Project Veritas, the man has no idea that he is being recorded. He believes that the guy he’s having dinner with is a potential romantic partner who shares his left-wing politics. He also believes, as many leftists do, that Critical Race Theory is integral to the education of children, and that it should be slipped into lessons about everything from politics and history to math, science, and economics. For the next two hours or so, he’ll talk about how he designs curricula, sells them to school districts, and makes sure that that happens.
“They don’t know… if you don’t say the words ‘Critical Race Theory,’ you can technically teach it. People don’t know what Critical Race Theory is.”
Asked what’s in these curricula, which the man sells to school districts for use in classrooms—often for enormous sums of money, which he claims goes “right into his account”—he says, “Everything. Banned books, stuff they don’t want kids to see. All of it.”14
In the state of Georgia, where these two men are having dinner, teaching Critical Race Theory is illegal—largely because of a bill passed by the state legislature in April of 2022, which made it illegal to teach children using materials that contained Marxist ideas such as Critical Race Theory. It was one of many similar bills that were passed around the same time.
Although the content of these bills varied, the aim of them all was pretty much identical: to ensure that students in elementary school would not have left-wing dogma shoved down their throats. Several of the bills explicitly stated that teachers could not include any material in their lesson plans that said one race was superior to another, or that some students bore hereditary guilt for the sins of their ancestors because of the color of their skin.
There was a time when you might have been surprised to learn that such bills were even up for debate in the United States, let alone that more than fifteen had passed in the span of a few months. I’m sure that the civil rights leaders of the 1960s, for instance, would have been surprised to learn that in the year 2023 teachers at public schools would still be so obsessed with race that it would become necessary for various state legislators to step in and tell them to teach something else besides aggressive advocacy for racial discrimination.
But the evidence of left-wing racism in our classrooms has become impossible to ignore. Every few days or so, it seems, we hear another story about radical neo-Marxist teachers in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools across the country attempting to teach Critical Race Theory and other strange pieces of left-wing dogma to their students. Many of these stories came via the reporting of Christopher Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker who has set up a tip line where parents can send the ridiculous documents that come home with their children.
Each story is more shocking than the last. In a third-grade classroom in Cupertino, California, for instance, students were split into groups according to their race, then told to rank themselves according to how much “privilege” they had in society. Black students were placed at the bottom of this hierarchy, cast as eternal victims, and White students were placed at the top. During this lesson, the class learned that people with white skin had traditionally been oppressive to Black students, and that Black students would experience racism in society no matter what they tried to do.15
In Buffalo, New York, kindergarteners were made to watch a film in which the ghosts of murdered Black children spoke to them from beyond the grave to warn the children about the dangers that lurked around every street corner for people of color in the United States.16
Images from schools teaching lessons like these could be shared easily via social media. As parents were just beginning to learn the buzzwords and code phrases that accompany lessons in Critical Race Theory—things like “spirit murder” and “intersectionality”—they saw photographs of the classrooms where American children spent eight hours a day, five days a week. Many of these images came via the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which exposed some of the more insane videos and images from leftists and shared them widely on social media. Parents saw rooms where rainbow flags hung above the blackboard beside giant “Black Lives Matter” banners, often without an American flag in sight.
In one video, a teacher with purple hair brags about how she tells her students to pledge allegiance to the Pride flag. Another says that he has been enjoying coming to work “in full drag” and watching the students whisper about his high heels and short miniskirts; the administrators at his school are apparently “just fine” and “very supportive” about his choice of attire.17
It seems these are the people Joe Biden was talking to in July of 2021 when he welcomed a crowd of left-wing educators to the White House and said that children are effectively property of the state. “You’ve heard me say it many times about children, but it’s true,” he said. “They’re all our children. And the reason you are the teachers of the year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”18
Obviously, passing bills that ban racist texts from being taught in schools will not be enough. As long as people like the man who quietly slips Critical Race Theory into the curricula of our public schools are still employed, elements of the Left’s neo-Marxist agenda will continue showing up in the textbooks, homework assignments, and even the math lessons that our children are given in school. Anyone who doubts the part about math, by the way, should familiarize themselves with the “K–12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework” that was introduced in Seattle Public Schools in February of 2019.
This framework, which comes in a handy chart with subject headings such as “Power and Oppression” and “History of Resistance and Liberation,” includes these “learning targets”:
Reading through this document, it is tempting to be amazed at the extent to which supposedly graduate-school-level language is now completely normalized in public school systems all over this country.
Then, of course, there are the books that fill the shelves of our school libraries, only a percentage of which have begun coming to light in recent years. By now I’m sure you’ve seen some of the worst titles. We have Gender Queer, a book that gives children advice about masturbation and counsels them on how to tell their parents that they want to change genders—which, the book assures them, is a perfectly normal and even cool thing to do.20 Other books that have been pulled from the shelves include Lawn Boy, which contains a graphic depiction of two ten-year-old boys having oral sex,21 and a graphic novel that offers children this jaw-dropping advice: “A great place to research fantasies and kinks safely is on the internet. There are tons of people and communities out there who share your interests….”22
Tellingly, if I had wanted to print excerpts from these books—which the Left assures us are perfectly normal and necessary to have in our kids’ classrooms and school libraries—the book you’re holding couldn’t have been distributed to many bookstores across the country, particularly those with Christian leanings. So I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Feel free to Google this nonsense, if you dare.
A few years ago, I walked into my daughter’s bedroom and asked what she’d been learning about in school. She said she had been learning about Christopher Columbus… the “real” story.
I asked what she meant.
For the next few minutes, I heard about the crimes of Christopher Columbus in minute detail. Every murdered Native American, transmitted disease, and stolen acre of land seemed to be accounted for. I heard that Columbus, who claimed the land for himself because of his straight White privilege (or something like that), had not actually discovered anything at all but rather had landed on the shores of what would come to be known as America by accident. This “revelation,” familiar to most adults in the United States, is something that American children encounter sooner or later in a textbook, believing that they’re accessing some secret, hidden knowledge that the grown-ups don’t want them to have.
When I was young, some kids found out about it by reading A People’s History of the United States by the Marxist scholar Howard Zinn, a book that sold about a gazillion copies for its willingness to look at history from the vantage point of the oppressed rather than the figures we’re accustomed to reading about. This book, as anyone who has cracked the cover will know, begins with an extremely unflattering account of Christopher Columbus and his “discovery” of America. It recounts how Columbus viewed the natives as little more than potential slaves, and reprints diary entries in which he spoke about his plans for conquest in language that makes the man seem like a maniac by modern standards.23
Sitting on my daughter’s bed, I asked if she might be able to think of anything good that Christopher Columbus, or any explorers of his era, had done.
I observed to her, “We actually have a federal holiday, enacted into law, called Christopher Columbus Day.” I continued, “Do we typically create federal holidays for racist and genocidal maniacs?”
What followed was a longer conversation. Now, I’m not vested in proving that Columbus was a saint; he was a man of his era, more than five centuries ago, and he certainly had his flaws. But he also had incredible courage and determination. He had the willingness to board a rickety wooden ship and to lead the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria off into the great beyond, at a time when many feared they would fall off the edge of the world.
Some time later, as our family was preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, my daughter and I began another conversation, about Pilgrims and Indians. She expressed her view, no doubt taught to her in school, that the Pilgrims were oppressors who brutalized and oppressed the Indians.
Again, I tried to press back gently. Did she suppose, I asked, that the violence was only from one side? The history of humanity has in many ways been a story of conquest, of one people conquering another. For millennia, wars have been waged, from Solomon to Alexander to Caesar to Genghis Khan to the Wars of the Roses. And inevitably the conquered have felt anger and resentment at their mistreatment. Did America’s founding, and the Western settlement of our nation, come at the expense of Native Americans? Of course. Did the settlers carry out acts of brutality and oppression at times? Definitely. As has every other conquering nation in the history of the world. On every continent. In every era.
And were the Native Americans wholly innocent of violence? Of course not. From whence, I asked my daughter, did the verb “to scalp” come from?24 In any war, there are tragic casualties on both sides.
I wanted her to see the connection between those two conversations. Those who vilify Christopher Columbus and those who decry the Pilgrims are both saying fundamentally the same thing. A simple thread connects them both, a question that reveals the premises that underlie the modern Left: Was the founding of America, the discovery and growth of the New World, a good thing or a bad thing?
America’s founding, like the founding of any nation, had good chapters and bad chapters. It included acts of violence and brutality—like the founding of every other nation in history—but also acts of incredible grace and sacrifice and generosity. And America, unlike other nations, was founded on ideals that were pure and powerful and profound. No words are more important to our founding than these of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To be sure, our journey to realize that vision has been slow at times and imperfect. But it has been steady nonetheless. And over the course of two and a half centuries no nation in the history of our planet has lifted more out of poverty, has produced more prosperity, has liberated more captives, has defeated more tyrants, and has advanced more liberty than the United States of America.
Leftists hate that fact. And that’s why they despise Columbus and Jefferson and Washington and, ultimately, America.
And so when their ideas are packaged up and sold to your children, press back. This is the first step toward making sure that our children are protected. Ask them what they’re learning in school, talk to them about it, and see if you can gently correct the record.
Then, of course, there is the matter of speaking out publicly, which is not easy. It can often come with serious consequences.
When my grandmother feigned insanity to avoid teaching the principles of communism to her students, for instance, she knew that she would have to endure a stigma for the rest of her life. Some of her neighbors, she knew, would believe that she had lost her mind and could no longer care for herself. That was bad, but it was nothing compared to the neighbors who suspected, correctly, that she was faking the whole thing—the ones who knew that she harbored anti-revolutionary views. In Cuba in the early 1960s, that could sentence you to horrific torture and death. My abuela would sooner have walked straight into the path of Che Guevara’s firing squad than say that she was against the revolution out loud.
Luckily, we live in the United States, where the penalty for defying the new woke totalitarians is not yet a firing squad or years in jail. For some people, it’s a few days of being yelled at on Twitter. For others, it’s possibly losing a job or having some friends send you concerned emails about how you should really “do the work” and get onboard with the revolution. To some, those consequences are endurable; to others, they’re not.
If we want to defeat the woke takeover of our K–12 schools, we must fight back at home, fight back with other parents, fight back at school board meetings, fight back in our legislatures, and fight back in the public arena.
I’ve seen amazing things throughout this country, especially at political rallies where like-minded people have come together to fight for causes they believe in. I think most people would be surprised at how many friends and allies they can make by simply showing up at a rally or a school board meeting to protest what their children are being taught in schools. They would also be surprised at the extent to which they can come up with better things to teach when they put their heads together and discuss their values.
This is a good first step in taking our society back from the woke neo-Marxists who have captured it. Show up at meetings, make your voices heard, and see if you can make some friends along the way. That might sound quaint or naïve, but I’ve seen it happen.
When the parents of Loudoun County, Virginia, learned that Scott Smith, one of their own, had been arrested for disorderly conduct after expressing outrage over the sexual assault of his daughter by a boy wearing a dress in a school bathroom,25 many of them were outraged. In some cases, they joined groups dedicated to ensuring that parents could have more control over what their children were learning. Within a few months, some of these groups—including Fight for Schools, which made national headlines—succeeded in getting several of the liberal school board members who had covered up the sexual assault removed from their posts; they also managed to sway many voters in Virginia toward Glenn Youngkin, who was then running for governor of Virginia on a parents’ rights platform.26
Today, Glenn Youngkin—a friend and a man of integrity, for whom I campaigned vigorously all across Virginia—is one of the most important state-level voices in the fight against neo-Marxism, and he is in office for the simple reason that enough parents and other concerned citizens came together and decided that enough was enough.
Like I said, it can happen anywhere.