September 28, 2022

Dear Friends,

I have some alarming, albeit unsurprising news: educators and administrators running K-12 education on America’s military bases are indoctrinating the children of military personnel in radical gender ideology, critical race theory and left-wing activism. In a new Claremont Institute investigative report, my colleague Scott Yenor and I document this latest evolution in America’s culture war. 

This development at military-run schools tracks broader trends in American education. In recent months, Claremont Fellow Chris Rufo has exposed the rampant woke indoctrination occurring in our nation’s K-12 schools, with striking examples from Los Angeles, Portland and San Diego. 

Through a whistleblower, the Claremont Institute obtained over 50 videos from a recent “Equity and Access” educational summit hosted under the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (“DoDEA”). The DoDEA runs 160 schools on military bases and educates 69,000 students across the globe.

We learned that educators at military bases are pushing radical gender ideology that seeks to unsettle and disrupt gender identity starting in kindergarten. A seventh-grade humanities teacher from a military base in Spain said that “Kids as young as 4 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.”

In previous generations, parents were informed frequently by teachers about lesson plans and classroom happenings; these days, parents are kept in the dark as possible enemies, as the teachers are the only “experts” competent to guide children on such sensitive matters as gender and sexuality.

This is not education, it’s ideological grooming. Rather than learning objective facts about the world or how to be civic-minded Americans, students are encouraged to transform themselves and their environment in the service of revolutionary ideologies about gender and race. Whether they know it or not, these teachers and the DoDEA that employs them are useful idiots in a revolutionary and anti-American project with deep left-wing intellectual roots.

As the U.S. Senate takes up the National Defense Authorization Act in the coming weeks and months, legislators ought to take a very close look at what we’re teaching the children of our military personnel overseas.

More to come,

Ryan P. Williams

President, Claremont Institute