The Actual Danger to Education Isn’t a ‘Fascist’ Trump Administration

The left is sounding the alarm on what a second Trump presidency would mean for America’s educational system: fascism.

“Now and in the past, schools and universities are and have been central targets of fascism. Attacks on education, including political works deemed obscene, are, to use a cliché, canaries in the fascist coal mine,” writes Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University, in a recent article for The New Republic titled “The End of Civic Compassion: On Education in a Fascist America.”

The projection here is breathtaking.

“Trump has made it abundantly clear that a far-right attack on education will be central to his new administration from its beginning, promising to ‘sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,’” Stanley continues.

According to Stanley, the GOP’s claims about “Marxist indoctrination” in schools and its push for parental rights is nothing more than a smokescreen to foster an “illiberal public culture” with American education, akin to fascist tactics throughout the early 20th century.

Marxist Conquest

The reality is that the American education system has been the primary target of Marxist conquest since the late 1960s. While its revolutionary agenda has been thoroughly documented, it has most recently been exposed by Christopher Rufo in his insightful work, America’s Cultural Revolution.

After Marxist-Leninist militant groups such as the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground failed to violently overthrow America’s foundational institutions, the revolutionaries put down their rifles and picked up their pencils, moving their revolution from the streets into the classrooms.

This movement was heavily influenced by a Brazilian Marxist educator and thinker, Paulo Freire, whose work on “liberation pedagogy” revolutionized the U.S. education system.

According to this new approach to education, the first goal was for students to attain “critical consciousness,” which refers to the ability of individuals to critically analyze and understand the social, political, and economic forces that shape one’s life and the world around them.

Stanley alludes to this method when he states, “Education in a liberal democracy introduces students to the diverse perspectives through a nation’s history, in order for people to foster a kind of empathy and understanding for one another.”

It’s important to understand that one of the primary goals of Marxist indoctrination is to weaponize empathy and compassion and channel it to achieve political ends.

As such, liberation pedagogy, today more commonly referred to as “critical theory,” involves developing a deep awareness of society’s power and oppression structures while understanding how those structures influence individual experiences and opportunities, or the lack thereof.

Critical Theory and DEI

Once students attain critical consciousness, the emphasis shifts to putting the lessons they’ve learned into practice. They are encouraged to apply their critical understanding of social issues in real-world contexts and engage in action-oriented approaches to bring about social change.

With its emphasis on race, sexual identity, and sexual orientation, critical theory has become intricately linked to social justice movements through the three-headed Cerberus of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Education curricula across the country, most notably in Democrat-controlled states, now integrate DEI and other radical ideological theories, such as social and emotional learning, into all facets of education, with devastating effects on social cohesion and traditional test scores.

One such example of this new approach to “education” can be found in New York through its “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework,” where the unquestioned virtue of “diversity” (e.g., race, social class, sexual identity, language, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and ability) is regarded as an asset for teaching and learning.

Within this framework, the New York Education Department believes that “education providers throughout the United States have struggled to meet the diverse needs of American children and families” because “a complex system of biases and structural inequities is deeply rooted in our country’s history, culture, and institutions,” and so “this system of inequity must be clearly understood, directly challenged, and fundamentally transformed.”

As such, students are encouraged to identify the power structures that generate inequities within our culture and to challenge these institutions to redress historical and contemporary oppression directly. This allows the student to become both “sociopolitically conscious” and “socioculturally responsive.”

Of course, this ultimately raises the question: conscious of and responsive to what?

The short answer: “whiteness” and “white supremacy.”

Exposing and dismantling “white supremacy” within the United States is central to today’s critical approach to education. Identifying the systemic advantages, biases, and norms that supposedly benefit whites as a group — at the expense of “people of color” — lies at the heart of the neo-Marxist framework that divides groups into categories of oppressor and oppressed.

As such, DEI initiatives within American education seek to attack “whiteness” from the bottom up while the graduates of these higher education indoctrination programs dismantle “whiteness” from the top down through the legal system, administrative state, corporate governance, and human resource departments.

Despite the recent successful pushback from conservative activists and politicians, DEI remains the primary means of leftist indoctrination for America’s children, starting as early as kindergarten.

Epicenter of Indoctrination

With America’s educational transformation well underway, what does the current political and cultural landscape look like? Judging by events like the 2020 George Floyd riots and recent anti-Israel protests across elite universities such as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and New York University, widespread critical consciousness among students has been attained.

Although organizations like the Weather Underground and the original Black Panther Party are no longer in existence, “social justice” movements such as Free Palestine, Black Lives Matter, and LGBT pride have emerged as the vanguard of leftist activism, and it is through the American education system that these groups receive their ideological training and direction.

The left views the American university system as “the crown jewel of the world’s higher education system.” However, in reality, the American university system serves as the epicenter of the left’s radical indoctrination efforts.

Fearmongering about “fascism” from figures like Stanley is designed to distract Americans from recognizing the ideological poison that has infected the American education system.

Trump’s pledge to cut federal funding for any school promoting critical race theory, gender ideology, and other racially, sexually, or politically charged content would serve as a much-needed antiviral to the ideological contagion sweeping the nation.