OPINION:
Recently, Ashish Vazirani, the Pentagon‘s acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness, testified to the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. military missed its 2023 recruiting goals by 41,000.
Jake Bequette, an Army veteran and former U.S. Senate candidate from Arkansas, responded to this report by suggesting that no one should be surprised. Why? Because of what we’re teaching in our nation’s schools.
“In our education system today, so few young people are hearing real history,” Mr. Bequette said. “They’re hearing our American heroes being represented as evil racists … who were doing all these terrible things to disadvantaged people.
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At the University of Minnesota, a liberal arts professor named Melanie Yazzie has received national attention for leading a “teach-in” whereby she calls for her students to “dismantle” and “decolonize” America.
“We’re all indigenous people who come from nations who are under occupation by the United States government,” Ms. Yazzie said. “It’s our responsibility as people within the United States … to decolonize this place. … [America] is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed. We want the U.S. out of everywhere,” including “Turtle Island” — a name used by some Native American tribes to describe North America.
She went on to say that “the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States for the freedom and the future of all life on this planet. [We] need to lean into the fact that colonizers are scared. Lean into scaring them and making them feel uncomfortable!”
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The 11th principle, “Black Villages,” states: “We disrupt the narrow Western prescribed nuclear family structure. … We support each other as extended families and villages that collectively care for one another, especially ‘our’ children.”
Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, says it best in response to this BLM agenda:
“We are in a crisis in America in public education. We have the lowest test scores since the 1980s in reading and the lowest math scores ever. Yet we have organizations like Black Lives Matter that are setting aside a whole, entire week, the first week of February, to drive their ideology, [an ideology] that [is] divisive and [seeks] to destroy our culture and our country,” she said.
Ms. Descovich goes on to suggest that nearly all of our nation’s schools are pushing this divisive material as “a cover-up for public education’s failure.”
Do you remember in 2020, when rioters from Minneapolis to Miami were chanting, “Death to Israel, death to America, from Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the intifada”? There’s a reason that thousands of young people marched like lemmings to the drumbeat of such blatant and undisguised antisemitism, anti-Americanism and anti-colonialism. That reason is found in what the schools, colleges and universities are teaching your children.
Call me crazy, but maybe the U.S. military is falling short of its recruiting goals by the tens of thousands because of the culturally suicidal propaganda being peddled by our country’s teachers unions and educational elites.
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Mr. Vazirani, maybe your Pentagon is having a hard time meeting its recruitment goals because at the same time you’re trying to get 18-year-olds to put their lives on the line to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the hapless administration you serve is pumping billions of dollars into a school system that is teaching them that America is exceptionally evil rather than exceptionally good.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.