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June 29, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
35:55
The Miseducation of America: A Discussion with Pete Hegseth
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Got a very special episode today.
It's my privilege to have Pete Hegseth, who's a good friend of mine.
I got to know him over the years through when I was time in Congress, working with him at Fox.
And watching him just grow to be a very strong, forceful voice for just American values, our military.
He and I both share that military dish.
I'm 20 years in the Air Force.
He's been military in his, and he's wrote about that a great deal.
But today we're going to get into not only sort of both our backgrounds a little bit, coming up through classical education and what that actually means, but also the attacks that have been coming up.
And he has a new number one bestseller out on the New York Times bestseller list, the battle for the American mind, uprooting a century of miseducation.
Pete, welcome to the Doug Collins podcast.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
We're glad.
Well, Pete, before we get started into your book, sort of talk about how this evolved in you.
We were talking offline about raising our kids, and my kids are older, yours a bit younger.
But we both grew up in education, and probably at the time we were going through it, didn't realize a lot of what you wrote about.
But tell us about your background for those who may not be familiar with it.
100% right.
I mean, first of all, I consider myself a child of privilege because I had a mom and a dad who loved me in a great community, took me to church and taught me the basics.
The older you get, the more foundational you realize that is and you try to instill it in your kids.
But I went to public school, played basketball, played football, loved it.
That's all I really cared about as a kid.
Pretty much an apolitical household.
I mean, they were conservative, but it wasn't something we talked about all the time.
Yeah, went to college, did ROTC, went into the military, did a bunch, but a couple of deployments, and got into vets work, vets advocacy after coming home.
And ultimately, that's where I ended up interacting a lot with folks on Capitol Hill and realizing the challenges up there.
And then stumbled my way into TV, where...
I get a chance now to talk about the issues of the day with great folks like you and have written a couple of books that I think they reflect my metamorphosis of political thinking.
And it applies to education, too.
A little naive about the depth of the problem.
Okay, yeah, the think tank stuff will work.
Okay, no, that's not working.
Okay, here comes Donald Trump.
Nope, here's how poisoned our...
Our culture and political and educational systems are by the left.
Here's what we need to do about it.
And this latest book, Battle for the American Mind, takes it all back to the classroom.
Because I assumed I got a pretty good education, middle America, public schools.
I didn't have any gripes about it.
But when you look back, you start to realize, even in the 90s, how infected that system was with progressive prerogatives.
And I want to give more to my kids if I can.
And that's the charge of the book, is to help parents and grandparents Well, Pete, one of the things I think grounds you is that military side, and for just a moment before we get back into it, because I don't think, you know, Frankly, that we understand, you know, really how much is actually going on in the classroom.
My wife was a teacher for 30 years.
She retired a couple of years going to public schools.
And every year it sort of got worse.
It was not, it was, she was in elementary school.
She was teaching math and she loved that.
But she was always being taken out of the classroom, so to speak, literally, but having to stop while one group came in and said this about how you do your feelings.
And just, I mean, just a lot.
And it took away from the basics of education.
But your military side, you were in Iraq.
I've both been in Iraq.
I was in Iraq in 08, Afghanistan.
One of the things I'm concerned about a little bit in this education process, how much are you seeing this, and I'm still in the military as well as you, what are you seeing this in our institutions, not just our education, which we're going to get to in a second, but our military institutions as well?
It's everywhere.
It is becoming pervasive, and you see it most obviously in the educational institutions of the military, our service academies, West Point, a prominent example where critical theory is prominent there.
Remember, that's a big government bureaucracy.
And when the prerogatives are pushed down from the top and it really started to accelerate under Obama, Obama's politically correct Pentagon, by his direction, started to insert these race and gender policies into the top of the Pentagon.
And then once the generals realized that's how you get promoted by playing those games, they continue to push it down.
And pretty soon you're getting, you know, pride...
Pride videos and celebration month inside the Navy.
Videos that look like they should be made by the Babylon Bee.
I was a platoon leader.
We were both in the military.
Our job was to close with and destroy the enemy.
When I was in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, you had 40 dudes with you.
The only thing you had was each other.
You had a clear mission to accomplishment.
You didn't care where people came from, what they believed.
And what these policies do is divide and create divisions inside units and add variables that I never needed or should have had to deal with as a platoon leader.
And I didn't when I was there.
But new platoon leaders and others are going to have to.
And it has nothing to do with being more lethal.
It has everything to do with being more equitable.
Or more diverse by some superficial standard.
It's really, really dangerous.
And it means our enemies see us as less serious.
The Communist Chinese and others, I mean, what are they going to do?
Shout the wrong gender pronouns at us?
And are we going to freeze?
So we joke about it, but it is there.
And it's made me for the first time, I don't know about you, but it's made me for the first time wonder if I would want my kids in those institutions.
And I'm still grappling with that.
Well, it's coming on and well, and being, you know, now for me, you know, I just passed the 20-year mark as the old saying goes, I'm up for promotion boards.
But I mean, it's for me to decide if I want to stay or not stay.
And I'll be honest, especially through the vaccine issues and everything that we've had to deal with and how I saw these handled.
It really makes you wonder.
And the reason I bring up military, by the way, I was at Balad.
I don't know if you ever got up to that part of the world in Iraq.
Interesting world.
But the thing that I brought up military is education, military.
These are the foundational kind of things in our society if you go back to the very beginning.
From 1776 on forward, it was that sort of social order that brought it together that we all had sort of what we thought was the basis of understanding.
Really, the premise of your book, and let's kick into it a little bit.
The premise of your book, though, goes back to say that really almost 100 years ago, that those foundational thoughts really began to start to be eroded.
Take us from the beginning a little bit, without getting away, but let's talk about those issues.
They were eroded because they were targeted over 100 years ago.
Progressives had societal change.
Policy change on the mind.
These were almost exclusively, when you introduce to the characters in the early 20th century that targeted American education, almost exclusively, and I mean this without hyperbole, atheists, certainly progressives, socialists, and then eventually Marxists.
This is who went into our educational institutions and started to tinker with how we do school in America.
Because the way we had done school from our founding, prior to the founding all the way basically until the 20th century, was with the Bible and scripture and great books at the center.
And it wasn't as organized as it is today, but it was organized around an understanding of human nature, an understanding of the biblical narrative and biblical wisdom, Latin and Greek, the great books of Western civilization.
That was the core.
And so you understood our story as a society and as a government and why our framers built the type of republic that they did.
And the immovable object inside that that education was God.
And so it was actually God that progressives targeted first to move out of the classroom.
And they were very intentional with a series of projects to create new schools where the bell rang and new subjects were taught.
And then once once a day, you'd have a pullout period so you could do your religious instruction off school ground.
You could still do it because parents were would demand it at the time.
It was it was common.
And then eventually that experiment just continued to accelerate.
It went to New York City.
Columbia's Teachers College is a huge part of the story when the critical theorists landed there as the top teachers college in America.
So they basically, and this is the disturbing part without giving all the details away, in removing God, they had to replace it with a forgery.
And the forgery they replaced God with for decades was the idea of allegiance to the state.
We might call it patriotism.
And I love the pledge and I love the flag and we revere all those things as patriots and conservatives, but progressives cynically used them as a replacement.
So, So effectively, the cross and the Bible were replaced by a flag and a pledge.
The original pledge was written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy.
It did not say under God, as you know.
That was added in the 50s by Eisenhower.
So it was an allegiance to the state they tried to create for the cohering effect.
Now we see, fast forward to today, they're happy to get rid of those symbols because it was never about those symbols to begin with.
Those were placeholders, and that's why you see the 1619 Project and all of that.
So Hemingway once wrote about bankruptcy.
He said, It happens gradually until it happens quickly.
And I think that's what your wife is talking about, what so many of us have seen during COVID-19 is this rapid acceleration of indoctrination.
It's because gradually they burrowed themselves into all of these institutions and it wasn't hidden.
Congressman, they wrote openly about this in the New Republic and in their publications and in books, John Dewey, the Frankfurt School.
It wasn't just higher education.
We talk so much about colleges and universities.
It was our youngest kids they had targeted from the beginning.
Well, and the issue you have there, Pete, and I think this is something interesting to me because I'm a little bit older.
So my elementary school years were the 70s.
And that was a time into middle school.
I graduated in 84. And I can remember this was the time of the 60s and 70s.
And I don't know if you touch on this, how much...
This was the...
The 60s sort of lit the fire under this a little bit more.
And the Saul Alinsky, you know, the whole, you know, new rules for radicals.
So they found the way into our classrooms, through the colleges, into the...
You know, to the local...
I remember having, quote, new math...
Three different sections of new math.
Take it 30 years in the future, my son, who was in a baccalaureate program, international baccalaureate program, they changed basically the fundamentals of their math program in his time from basically fifth grade on to high school, like three different times.
And again, it's all...
Did you see this more as a dumbing down effect or a neutralizing effect so that they could bring everybody to the middle or to the lower middle?
I think that's what my wife was seeing.
It's a great point.
There is a dumbing down effect.
The new phrase for that dumbing down is equity.
If everyone's going to be equitable.
And we hear it everywhere.
Diversity, equity, inclusion.
It's the same idea dressed up as something else.
But you've got to get rid of the AP courses and everyone needs to come down.
So you end up...
Not only in excellence terms coming to the lowest common denominator, but you do it culturally also.
So if one child or one family is offended, then you need to reorient the entire instruction around everyone else understanding and including this one aspect and then telling everyone they need to celebrate it and recognize it.
And then that becomes part of not just the curriculum, Often it's not in the curriculum.
It's in the pedagogy.
It's in the method in which teachers are instructed or told to teach.
So teach this subject through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion is an example of that.
But yeah, they're going at standards across the board.
We write a lot about what happened in the 60s and 70s.
The thing is, the soil was already tilled at that point in the institution, so they were prepared to press their advantage.
And then, of course, the Supreme Court comes in and strips God out of the public square.
The unions, these very nice actual conservative teacher associations become hijacked by the government union movement and they become radical left.
You got the Alinsky.
Then you have Howard Zinn and his People's History of the United States, which is the most prolific textbook since it was written in the United States of America.
So at every turn, they've reduced the demand for excellence in the name of equity.
And then they have upended the idea of the American experiment and whether it is good or bad.
And they've effectively indicted it in the way they teach with kids who want to have a view and an understanding of the founding can barely find that in their textbooks today.
And that's why I say a lot of people read this and say, how did I not know this?
And it's because Progressives write the textbooks.
And so, of course, you're going to have one-sided view of what our history looks like.
And our kids are worse off for it.
They're critical thinking and reasoning.
Not critical theory.
Critical thinking and reasoning is what was the centerpiece of what we call the Western Christian Piede or the Western educational experience from the beginning.
Liberated minds, the liberal arts are what keep people free.
And it was Dewey and others who said, no, no, no, no, no.
Regular people should just be trained on basics and vocational.
They have no need for bigger thinking or asking bigger questions.
So there was always a vocational aspect to the rationale of the progressives used.
But underneath it all was always an ideology as well.
But that's also a very European thought.
That's also a very European-look, collectivist thought that you group people early in life and say, okay, here's your machinists, here's your mill workers, and you train them for that.
And only the quote, again, the most amazing point about this that they never point out is they truly have a vision of elitists and commoners.
I mean, it is there that they don't want you to know.
Right.
Woodrow Wilson said it openly.
I mean, Woodrow – I mean, this was – and here's the thing, too.
The progressives of the early 20th century, it's different than we label progressives today, and you know this.
I mean, it was a political movement then, a label of a party, even Republicans, progressives, Teddy Roosevelt.
But they actually looked quite – Dare I say, moderate, when compared to the alternatives of anarchists who were assassinating presidents and communists who were out in the open.
So the progressives looked like this sort of patriotic left-wing side of it, and they burrowed in and used that advantage to press it.
Only now are we seeing, in some ways, their true colors.
But it's very European.
In fact, critical theory, as you know, came from Germany, Marxists that landed at Columbia's Teachers College.
And here we are with Well, there's a couple of things that are interesting for the listener out there.
Again, I feel sort of free now.
My wife is, for years, while I was even in Congress, You know, because it is such a closed-in community in the educational system, is I would see all this working for 30-plus years that she taught.
And you could see, like, I mean, taking history and trying to cram 150 years into, you know, 35, 40 minutes every other week.
I mean, it's just you can't do it.
But you've brought up something interesting, and I'd love for you to touch on this a little bit.
Because I know you probably, you do in the book, but I want you just to give maybe a bigger picture.
In the Navy, our friends in the Navy, they always like to joke that the ship at sea, the captain is God.
I mean, there's no other place to go as long as that ship's at sea.
In very similar ways, the college professor and then in turn their teacher that they're teaching, but then that teacher getting in a classroom.
This is what I see, and I've heard from you several times, the teacher colleges.
Explain why that link is important, the teaching of the pedagogy, the ideology, and for the teacher, quote, teacher college, into the classrooms in elementary schools and high schools.
It's so important because that pipeline is what insulates a lot of what is taught from what we say as conservatives all the time of local control.
So you might live in a more conservative state where you've got a Republican governor and school boards that are watching it, but more or less the educational pipeline of Teacher accreditation, what they get taught, the new types of teaching methods that they are, you know, the unions that they confront, all of the aspects of how they land in the classroom are controlled by the hard left.
And so even if, especially today, I think their consolidation is even more powerful today.
So by the time you reach the classroom, you know, as a new teacher today, you've gone through an education college and accreditation certification, all of which...
During which you have to engage with these diversity, equity, inclusion concepts.
And if you don't engage with them as gospel, you're not allowed to pass or you have to quietly, you know, you can't dissent from it.
So once you get into the classroom, you've already gone through that.
And then if your local school board or school district is saying you can or cannot do that, it conflicts with the curriculum and the pedagogy that's still in the classroom.
So I was always a believer of local control.
And I still am, of course.
But I'm trying to disavow parents and grandparents of this view that I can just move to the right zip code, or just move to the right state, and my school's going to be okay, or I know my principal, or I know my teacher.
And this is not an indictment of teachers.
In fact, I've loved the feedback I've gotten from teachers on that.
They say, thank you for not impugning teachers, but being full-throated about the problem that we face inside the educational, inside the classroom.
It is almost every single school district.
And so our argument is pull your kids out of public and government schools if you can, and find them an alternative.
And eventually, on the policy side, things like universal educational tax credits, like what Arizona just did, should be top of the list for conservatives and freedom lovers to empower parents to make a different choice, to break up the monopoly that is the assumption We're a long way from that.
And so I think if you've got a young child right now, hoping they survive the next 13 years in government schools is not a good strategy.
At night at dinner and at church on Sunday, the progressives wrote about this 100 years ago.
They said, what chance do the theists or the Christians have with their one hour on Sunday to confront our 40 hours of secular instruction inside government schools?
They knew it.
You can't counterbalance it.
You can, but it's going to be a full-time job.
Why wouldn't you rather find a place that reinforces their values Monday through Friday and fortifies them to go into this culture battle that you know about better than anybody else?
And I think that's one of the things we're seeing.
And Pete, one of the things that also brings this out a little bit further, and let's discuss here as we go forward, is, and I've heard you talk about this, I've heard as well, one of the things that bothers me the most in our political conservatives, I think we're We get isolated on thinking top thinker.
And I say this in this way.
We're isolated on the President, the Senate, the U.S. Congress, maybe a governor.
But we fail to see that in our, even our local communities where we just don't like to think these things are going on, it's the local school boards.
You know, if you talk about this, because there'll be some who can't make that option.
But what they can do, and we've seen over the past year, and I've heard you talk about this as well, is confront the local school boards and understand that At the same time, moving the children, giving that ability to turn.
But I've been very disappointed at conservatives, Republicans in particular, their areas of criminal justice reform, education reform, that we as conservatives don't feel like...
I mean, what it looks like, I hear other members of Congress and others, they don't, oh, well, yeah, I'm for school choice, but I don't want to lead it.
I'm for this, but...
It's like, when did conservative...
In any ways, it's almost like we've lost our willingness to realize our history of the Buckleys and others that you go out and you confront as an intellectual superiority the conservative movement.
Well, you're precisely right.
We have the principles, but they have the positions.
And so we think by voting every two or four years, we're going to vote our way out of this problem.
And the book...
Thoroughly disavows the reader that this is an effective strategy.
It's exactly how we got where we are.
And yes, running for school board is a part of the solution.
If you don't have an alternative or your lifestyle doesn't provide an option to homeschool or find a classical Christian school, And if they're in that public school, then you better be all over it or run for those positions to oversee it.
But don't go there to be a placeholder and think you're just going to vote and solve everything.
You got to be aggressive.
You got to be an activist.
You have to be involved.
And the left has, I mean, you've seen it with our justice system and Soros and others.
They found these very influential local positions and they leveraged them.
Add that to their power at the national level.
I mean, when we tell the story of how the unions elected and this is this is a lot.
Some people will know this story, but how the unions became what they were and then how the unions elected Jimmy Carter.
And it was the first time educational unions had endorsed a president.
Over half of the delegates at the 76th convention were from teachers unions.
And then what did Jimmy Carter turn around and do?
At the behest of those teachers unions, he created the Federal Department of Education, which has always been in bed with the teachers unions.
And since then has been federalizing curriculum and testing based on D.C. values and union prerogatives all the way down.
So it...
It's captured there.
And we just have to be...
That's why we argue for tactical retreat in the book.
And you know, you understand, you know, military parlance.
You know, when you're surrounded and you want to live to fight another day, you're not quitting.
You're saying, I can't win this battle right now.
So we're going to retreat out of the government schools...
Create an alternate ecosystem that truly revives Western Christian education as it was understood for 2000 years.
Doesn't sprinkle a little God on top of otherwise a progressive education system, but does it the way our family...
And then we're going to create 1%, 2%, 3% of future citizens that think that way.
And oh, by the way, when there's a clamoring for more of that type of education, then we push for educational choice.
So we actually lay it out as an educational insurgency.
And that we're in basically phase one of Mao's three stages of insurgency as educational insurgents.
And the big benefit of the last three years is that people are awake to the woke because of, we call it the COVID-16-19 moment, this last two and a half years where the classroom came into our homes and suddenly we're doing gender pronouns for eight-year-olds and the founding date is 1619. It's an absolute wake-up call.
I have just been, it is amazing, and I'm glad to hear you say this.
I am so tired of conservatives complaining about what the left does and realizing the same alternatives are there for us.
If we want to organize, we want to, you know, it's there for us.
Why do we, it's amazing.
I saw Alan West do this the first time, and I've done it many, many times since then.
I've actually taken a book, and I said, how many of you, and this will be a conservative audience, how many of you have actually read Saul Alinsky's New Rules for Radicals?
And as a conservative, you know, None.
Maybe one or two.
I said, then how are you supposed to fight this that you're, quote, talking about if you don't understand what they're doing?
And it goes back to something that you mentioned earlier.
Critical thinking.
To me, as an employer who hires...
Let me see a mind at work.
I can see your pedigree.
I can see that.
But let me see a mind at work.
That's one of the things that has been taken out with this liberalization, is that critical thinking, taking from all areas, and then making and processing yourself.
The opening quote of the book is, only the educated are free.
I mean, that was the premise from the beginning.
The ability to identify demagoguery.
The ability to identify fallacies.
Poor arguments or people that want to control you or are using a shallow argument.
If you can do that, you can push through the lies of the left, which really rely on a groupthink and a consolidation of intimidation.
And if you pump out folks that can...
That have one view of the world.
They're easy to control.
Very easy to control.
And that's the scary part about COVID, to use COVID as an example.
What's the age group that's still wearing masks the most these days?
It's 25 to 35-year-olds who have been trained more than anyone else to comply with whatever the latest shiny object is based on social justice and political correctness and their ability to virtue signal.
Their religion, an actual religion, has been replaced by other religions like health and safety and climate change.
And they're easy to control in that context as a result.
So it is all about free thinking and critical thinking.
And education today is about being told what to think.
And it used to be about being told how to think, how to think critically.
We have to get back to that.
It doesn't mean you'll create automatically a bunch of conservatives, but I bet you will.
Because when you engage with the actual reality of human nature, of our fallen condition, of where our rights come from, it all becomes crystal clear.
As you look ahead, as we sort of looking ahead to the future, you take this in the call that you're making and this book, and I think beginning is the, as you said, the COVID-19 moment, this looking ahead.
Are you hopeful?
Less hopeful?
Where do you see this in the next 10 to 15?
Because as you said, this is not a gonna change tomorrow moment.
And this is what frustrates me with conservatives.
I tell this all the time, Pete.
I say conservatives are like gnats on Red Bull.
I mean, we're here, here, bing, bing, bing, all over the place.
I mean, we chase shiny objects more than a bass dozen in my lake down here in Georgia.
I mean, it is amazing.
Liberals...
Slow, methodical, and then all of a sudden when they see that moment, they talk.
I mean, I tell this all the time.
People don't understand.
You know who the first Democrat president who actually pushed for universal health care such as Obamacare?
Oh, it's probably further back than we think.
Truman.
Truman was actually the first one.
And most people say Roosevelt.
It wasn't Roosevelt.
It was Truman.
And then they kept going and going, and they get a little more Medicare.
And by the time Johnson came along, implemented Medicare, Medicaid, a little bit, a little bit.
And they never complained when they went home and said, oh, we only got a 1% increase in Medicare.
They didn't do that.
They said, we got 1%.
They took it as a victory.
For Republicans and conservatives in this education movement, we got to realize it's going to be a long-term battle.
What's your thoughts looking ahead?
Yeah.
I agree with you completely.
I'm ultimately more pessimistic and more optimistic.
And I know that's a cop-out answer, but I'll tell you why.
I think the darkest day of American education, the darkest period of American education was actually the 1970s.
And I say that because...
Classical Christian, classical forms of education in K-12 were completely gone.
They almost outlawed homeschooling completely.
They tried to outlaw Christian schooling, Catholic schooling.
It was, I mean, how close they were to consolidate and complete government control of the classroom was right here.
And classical thinking was basically buried in the K-12 situation.
Thankfully, Courageous Parents 40 years ago started forming schools.
Today, there are almost 500 classical Christian K-12 schools across America.
There's thousands of more online options and homeschool options.
There are other great Christian schools and classical schools out there.
So the renaissance has begun.
The insurgency has begun.
To use a word of the left, we're in the awareness raising phase of this as well.
Parents just have to know, A, that government schools are fundamentally broken, and I would argue at this point irredeemably broken, for this generation of kids.
And as a result, you've got to look for alternatives, and not all private schools are created the same.
In fact, most private schools are more woke than their public counterparts, especially if you're paying a lot of money for them.
And a lot of religious schools are actually quite progressive as well.
So you've got to find the right schools and then go find them.
But there's more options than ever.
There's more awareness than ever.
And the unions have damaged the brand of public education more than ever.
So these Republicans that you talk about, who in the past have been for school, it's just like the pro-choice Republicans are like, ooh, how do we message this Roe v.
Wade thing?
Yeah.
Same idea.
It's like, be full-throated about being for school choice because parents now are more informed about the depth of the problem than they've ever been before because of COVID and because of unions and because of the nonsense they're pushing.
So let's press the option, give them that option.
So I'm optimistic in that sense.
I mean, you saw the ruling out of Maine where they allowed for Parents to take the money to religious schooling.
You saw what happened in Arizona with the universal voucher program they just passed, $7,000 for every single family.
Now is the moment to make this our top issue.
And it doesn't just have to be, here's a particular type of school, even though our book does argue for that.
It could just be straight-up educational choice because you're being underserved, whether you're an inner city or a rural school, and the options are out there more than ever.
So it's worse than it's ever been, but our opportunities are greater than they've ever been.
And if we can be intentional about a 100-year strategy, I'd say we're about 40 years into it, to be honest with you.
And it may not feel that way, but we are 40 years into the counter-revolution here on education, and we have an opportunity if we get some courageous leaders to go even further.
Well, and I think, Pete, you just hit it.
And I think the one thing that I remember being in the state legislature before going to Congress is the teachers' unions understand.
And even like in Georgia, which is a non-collective bargaining state, GAE is a full-blown union with NAE. And then you have a group called PAGE down here, which is the largest quote of the non-union.
They act just like a union.
They do.
And at the legislature, I can always remember when anything about education funding or anything else come up, it was always, well, you better do this because these groups...
We want that.
And so it was that pressure as we go along.
They're going to make you anti-education.
You don't want to be the anti-education candidate.
Same thing with the Federal Department of Education.
That's over.
The schools are failing kids.
They haven't delivered excellence in public schools for 50 years.
That's obvious.
That's laid bare.
And now we're ideologically indoctrinating kids You are anti-education if you're feeding into the complex that's continuing to do this.
And it's not a hard argument to make.
And guys like you who understand it intuitively and know how to articulate can make that case.
Hopefully, we're able to educate politicians, pundits, leaders, and others to just be unafraid and take them on.
Well, take the stands.
I mean, because at the end of the day, if you don't stand for your values, if you don't stand for what you believe is right, even if it costs you politically, then you might as well not even articulate them, because at the end of the day, the other side's going to win, and we get that.
Pete, thanks so much.
Folks, if you're listening to the podcast today, Pete's book is linked in the...
Comment section for this podcast, please go buy it.
It is one of the best written materials that you can have right now.
Understandable, gets into the depth, but don't go far enough to where it just loses you.
I've seen these books before where it just sort of loses you in the intricacies.
This actually gives you both.
Pete, you've done a great job here.
We're glad to have you a part of it.
As we go forward, we'll continue this conversation.
Love to have this conversation anywhere with you because this is something for me that's been modeled up for almost 30 years.
Watching my wife want to teach, want to teach these young people, you know, just debate math or learn how to think critically.
But yet the forces were out there continuing to push that aside.
So thanks for all that you're doing and thanks for being a part of the podcast today.
Let's do it again soon on Fox& Friends, for sure.
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