In a revealing and extensive new report, a conservative think tank states that children of U.S. military personnel are subject to “grooming” while in military-run schools. They are taught gender ideology and critical race theory in classes, undermining their families and country.
The report, released early last month by the Claremont Institute, is titled “Grooming Future Revolutionaries: Woke Indoctrination at K-12 Schools on America’s Military Bases.” Based on a thorough analysis of the curriculum, along with numerous Freedom of Information Act requests submitted to the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), the two authors concluded that children in military-run schools were subject to sexually explicit lessons on “radical gender ideology,” critical race theory and “white shaming,” along with general left-wing activism.
“Lesson plans are infused with cutting-edge left-wing pedagogical techniques in the service of radical gender ideology and white shaming/antiracism,” authors Ryan Williams and Scott Yenor wrote.
The DoDEA is responsible for around 66,000 children in 160 schools across the U.S. and 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories. According to the Claremont Institute, its 8,000-plus teachers and general operational activities are funded to the tune of $3.2 billion annually. This wide-reaching operational setup has been used to promote its “Blueprint for Continuous Improvement,” which will guide the organization through 2023-24.
Blueprint of ‘Diversity’
A key element of the blueprint is the “establishment of a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Division,” the policies and practices of which will be used to “impact DoDEA’s climate,” writes the DoDEA. Key pro-LGBT watchwords such as “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” are scattered throughout the DoDEA’s blueprint.
Eternal and Natural Law: The Foundation of Morals and Law
The blueprint is centered on four key focus areas. These are not academic in their nature but instead concentrate on issues such as “diversity,” implementing programs to “address achievement gaps between racial, ethnic, ability, and other identified groups” and provide “learning environments where students feel safe, secure, and supported by the entire learning community.”
It is this blueprint that, as the Claremont Institute notes, “involves giving radical meaning to everyday language.”
While employing unassuming, everyday parlance in its publicized blueprint, the DoDEA is nevertheless promoting an agenda contrary to Christian norms or even those patriotic ideals which should accompany a nation’s military.
Teacher Training Presentations
The real damage to the children enrolled in the schools comes from the day-to-day lessons. According to a whistleblower’s testimony to the Claremont Institute, the DoDEA has “fully dedicated itself to the woke agenda.”
Over 50 presentations from a 2021 teacher training conference were handed over to the Claremont Institute – a conference conducted in line with the diversity-promoting blueprint.
Having examined the accompanying lesson plans and the recorded conference sessions, the Claremont report concluded that:
“Lesson plans are infused with cutting-edge left-wing pedagogical techniques in the service of radical gender ideology and white shaming/antiracism.”
Far from instilling virtues such as would be expected in a family, particularly one given to service of the nation, the DoD’s schools were attempting to sever this connection, the Claremont Institute found. “The new military education aims to detach military brats from their families and their country, all the better to make them global citizens. It seeks to disrupt stable sexual identities. This education undermines justice, truth, and the American way of life.”
Gender Ideology Undermining Military Families
A key aspect of the left-wing ideology is the promotion of gender theory, found so widely across society but now also in the DoD’s schools. One teacher, Genevieve Chavez, who teaches humanities to seventh-graders at a Spanish-American naval base, was recorded as saying, “You can talk about LGBTQ+ things in elementary school.”
Learn All About the Prophecies of Our Lady of Good Success About Our Times
“It’s actually the ideal time,” she argued, saying that “kids as young as four years old are already starting to develop a stable understanding of their gender identity. So elementary school is the perfect time because you can really show students the diversity of gender expression and gender activity.”
One of the presentations obtained by the Claremont Institute documents teachers encouraging elementary school children to doubt their biological sex via a series of questions and self-identification using the “four continuums of gender, gender expression, biological sex, and sexual orientation.”
Still another “lesson” appears to undermine the role of parents even further, as teachers encourage children to live a double life, keeping their ‘new gender’ secret from those at home. “Maybe that student is not ‘out’ to other students in their gender identity,” said Chavez, “they may be out at school, but they may not be out at home.” With the teacher presuming this scenario is the case, he would then encourage the student to use his preferred “pronouns” at school, building a trusting relationship with the teacher and other children but learning to mistrust their family.
School “might be the only place where they can truly be themselves and use their name and their pronoun,” said another teacher.
So great is the promotion of gender ideology in the classrooms that one teacher is reported to have a student keep count of how often the teacher accidentally “misgenders” a student.
Science Confirms: Angels Took the House of Our Lady of Nazareth to Loreto
As the Claremont Institute notes, while the DoDEA’s blueprint claims it builds “trust,” in reality, “this means that teachers try to undermine the trust students have in their parents through confidential communication and sharing naughty secrets that teachers will treat in a nonjudgmental way.”
Drag Shows for Children
However, the promotion of the LGBT movement is not limited only to the classroom. Recent years have seen drag shows proliferate on U.S. military bases—drag shows specifically aimed at children. In late July, the joint U.S.Army/Air Force base Joint Base Langley-Eustis hosted a “kid-friendly ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Summer Festival.’” The event was described as a “festival” of “diversity,” but one JBLE worker anonymously revealed the event was “burlesque, it’s hyper-sexualized, it’s not something appropriate for children.”
While such ideology has been gradually pervading the ranks of the military for some time, under President Joe Biden, it has vastly accelerated. Only days after moving into the White House, Biden quickly overturned President Donald Trump’s ban on allowing “transgender” individuals to serve in the armed forces. Biden’s January 25, 2021 order claimed that the nation’s military “thrives when it is composed of diverse Americans who can meet the rigorous standards for military service, and an inclusive military strengthens our national security.”
Race Theory Training
No less a part of the DoDEA’s blueprint is the inclusion of so-called “antiracism” training, which encourages children towards “activism.” The Claremont Institute noted that a large part of this was drawn from a document compiled by the left-wing and pro-abortion Southern Poverty Law Center.
Instead of educating children about genuine meanings of justice, the DoDEA “presenters understand injustice only in terms defined by critical race theorists,” writes the Claremont report.
Order Your Copy Here: I Have Weathered Other Storms
Children, and indeed the entirety of society, are described by teachers as being either “racists” or “antiracists” to push such activism onto the children. Summarizing the theme, the Claremont report wrote: “All good white people must relinquish unearned privilege so that racism can be actively fought.”
Still, another teacher, whose work was revealed to the Claremont Institute, was recorded as rejecting practices like singing the national anthem or saluting the flag, arguing that such actions “are offensive to many identity groups.” Instead, “Global citizenship education” is promoted as “a means to combat these ideas and practices.”
Benefit or Cancer?
In January, the U.S. Department of Defense Press Secretary John Kirby dismissed concerns over “wokeness” in the military, saying “things like diversity and inclusion, that makes us a better military because it brings to the fore in the decisionmaking, operational decisionmaking that we conduct, better ideas, more unique perspectives, somebody else’s lived experiences which might actually make us smarter on the battlefield.”
However, Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI)—the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Military Personnel—rejected such arguments. By “co-opting the Woke left’s obsession with racial and gender diversity, the Pentagon’s DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] evangelists are ironically stifling the very type of diversity that might improve military performance: intellectual diversity,” he said. “But that, of course, is the real point.”
The Claremont Institute’s report echoes these concerns, also highlighting the devastating impact this agenda has on children and their families. The report concludes:
- These ideologies undermine attachment to our nation.
- These ideologies undermine America’s competitive advantage in education.
- These ideologies undermine traditional family life.
- These ideologies lead to further extensions of state power.
“It is completely unacceptable to corrupt the children of those serving in the military to subject them to anti-American, anti-family hatred in the name of perverse, dangerous, and false ideologies,” the report wrote.
Photo Credit: © Roman Bodnarchuk – stock.adobe.com