Nowhere in our culture is the anti-American movement more unabashedly embraced than in our nation’s educational system – universities, colleges, high schools, and, yes, even elementary schools. Just as jihadists have successfully institutionalized their extreme Islamist and anti-Westernist doctrines in their madrassas, so too have America’s academics seized the educational system as a platform for fomenting their radical ideologies.

The Duke of Wellington, after the battle of Waterloo, reportedly said that victory was built on the fields of Eton College. George Orwell, always prescient, foresaw the deterioration of our higher learning years later, commenting, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.” Today’s America is chock full of “Etons.”

This isn’t a recent development, nor is it solely the province of American education. Germany’s universities were among the first institutions to support Adolf Hitler’s policies in the 1930s. In the face of spreading Nazi aggression, England’s renowned debating society, the Oxford Union, resolved “not to defend King and country.” The inevitable result of academia’s shortsighted and misguided perspective was world war and the deaths of tens of millions.

In this country, the campus unrest of the 1960s spurred the opposition to the Vietnam War and led to American withdrawal from Vietnam – the result of which was the deaths of 2.5 million people. Today, blind to the repeated lessons of history, educational institutions continue to propound the message that America is imperialist, evil, and its leaders are warmongers. 

It wasn’t always this way. For most of this nation’s history, America’s intellectuals abandoned classrooms and filled our nation’s ranks to fight for liberty and justice. It was understood that to be a soldier was to be a good citizen. A statue of Nathan Hale stands in front of the oldest building at Yale University as a reminder of the role educational institutions once played in our nation’s security. Hale, a member of Yale’s class of 1773, served as a captain in George Washington’s Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Captured by British General William Howe and hanged at the age of twenty, Hale is remembered for his inspiring final words: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

There are no Hales on America’s campuses today, and we’re very far removed from those sentiments. The mutually beneficial marriage of academia and American interests ruptured in the 1960s, when the New Left emerged. In the aftermath of their successful campaign to twist Vietnam from military victory to humiliating international defeat, these activists didn’t go away. They pursued advanced degrees, became tenured, and hired like-minded people in their long march through America’s institutions. Today, they’re presidents, deans, senior professors, and principals. This ideological homogeneity on America’s campuses allows radical leftists to flourish in a protected environment, providing launch pads for subversive movements consistently countering the interests of the United States.

Our education system has turned into factories of programmed, indoctrinated, empty vessels who get their news from China-controlled TikTok. The college experience is negatively affecting all our lives, whether we’re currently attending school or not. Democrat politicians, business leaders, media members, and popular culture all take their cues from our academic Left. To our nation’s demise. As the wars in the Middle East are inevitably going to slog on for months or years, remember how a large, impactful subset of America views itself, our nation, and events. These are no longer bastions of higher learning. They are well-funded leftist incubators. Instead of producing valuable members of society with sound intellectual foundations, they are manning armies for self-hatred and national destruction.