Luke Rosiak is the author of Race to the Bottom, Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education. In this episode, he talks about the Marxist Left's ideological war against America's public schools, and how we need to fight back.
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody. This is the Great America Show, all about the American way in every way.
00:00:07.260Thank you for being with us as we together endeavor to protect and defend this great constitutional republic of ours.
00:00:14.240The forces arrayed against America from within are powerful, intent.
00:00:19.780They were once, for the most part, silent, out of sight, content to subvert and influence government from within their layers.
00:00:27.660But as they've successfully insinuated themselves throughout our federal bureaucracies, they've become not only more confident but arrogant,
00:00:37.220pressing into public view and unafraid of oversight or consequence, knowing how powerful they've become not only in positions held but in sheer numbers within our federal government.
00:00:49.960And the ideological imperatives of the subversive forces within our government, our permanent bureaucracies, are without question Marxist leftists pressing their ideology throughout our government.
00:01:04.280And the ideological imperatives of the subversive forces within our government, our permanent bureaucracies, are without question Marxist leftists pressing their ideology throughout government.
00:01:16.880And there is no doubt that the left's winning that ideological war from within, while authoritarian, totalitarian governments in conflict with all that is America from outside have failed.
00:01:32.120These internal forces, now public, are attacking our culture, our heritage, and founding values and institutions.
00:01:39.700Critical race theory, CRT, is only one of the neatly packaged ideological weapons employed by the left for the simple reason that it works, whether in government at all levels or in public schools, where teachers attack daily the American way through CRT and thereby indoctrinate our children by the millions.
00:02:04.780Today, our guest is Luke Rosiak. He's the author of the important book, Race to the Bottom, Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.
00:02:17.060Congratulations on your book, Luke, which we recommend to all, and thanks for the great service to the country in writing it.
00:02:24.480Welcome to the Great America Show, Luke.
00:02:28.220Our children are our most precious, precious part of our lives, along with our grandchildren.
00:02:38.400I wonder how in the world we're going to be able to protect them from what is obviously a public education system that has been taken over by the quote-unquote woke Marxist left.
00:02:54.300I mean, public education is pretty much the biggest thing that the government does.
00:02:59.640We spend about a trillion dollars a year on it, and yet the results are horrible.
00:03:09.000It's a total failure, and the extent to which they're willing to harm children to advance the financial desires of the adults who work at these places, like we saw during the coronavirus shutdowns, it just kind of shocks the conscience.
00:03:27.200I saw a headline this week that something like half the kids in Los Angeles are just kind of lost now.
00:03:35.100They're like chronically truant because they shut down schools for two years, and now they want them back, but it's like the kids are just off the grid.
00:03:42.800And all of this was totally predictable, but the teachers' union wanted to shut down schools and then use the reopening as like a leverage for like this hostage negotiation.
00:03:55.580I hope they're happy, but what we're looking at is essentially the destruction of this country within the next decade if we can't turn this around because you can't have a country with kids that can't read.
00:04:09.880No one is holding those teachers' unions accountable.
00:04:12.920And, Luke, I want your opinion on this.
00:04:16.500Should we make every effort known to man to get those teachers' unions out of our schools?
00:04:28.280This isn't Democrats versus Republicans.
00:04:30.560It's special interests versus children.
00:04:34.240Schools do not exist to employ adults.
00:04:36.460They exist for one reason only, which is to educate children.
00:04:39.180And so, you know, I think obviously one of the things we can do is charter schools is our, excuse me, school choice where we would get the money.
00:04:48.220We currently spend $17,000 a year per child.
00:04:51.860And, you know, the teachers' unions love to say that schools are underfunded.
00:04:55.240They have to say that to explain their horrible results because people are like, oh, you know, you only managed to get 11% of kids to be proficient in American history.
00:05:03.820Something, there must be some reason why other than total incompetence.
00:05:07.500So it must have been a lack of funding.
00:05:09.220But once you realize $17,000 per year per kid, that's a lot of money.
00:05:15.140So, you know, it really is a bipartisan or transpartisan thing.
00:05:19.080After people woke up with the coronavirus, as you said, these problems existed for decades.
00:05:24.360People just kind of were forced to reckon with them in the last couple of years.
00:05:28.960But you saw Asians who really value academic achievement and hard work becoming motivated to become politically involved and push back against this woke stuff.
00:05:40.160You saw traditional Democrat voters in Virginia, where I am, who voted for Glenn Youngkin because they realized that what's going on in the schools is illiberal and it's irrational.
00:05:50.240And if another thing that has a bipartisan support is vouchers, you know, most black Democrats want to be able to send their kids to private schools or charter schools or wherever they want with the money that we're already spending.
00:06:04.240And so I wonder if you could get that on a referendum where it's put right to voters on a ballot, it could potentially pass.
00:06:11.700And the Democratic politicians, of course, aren't going to let it happen because they do whatever the teachers union tell them to.
00:06:17.440But this is something that actually Democratic voters would even support.
00:06:21.620And once we have vouchers, then the schools actually have to care what parents think because they become their customers.
00:06:27.100But right now it's clear that they treat us as parents with just total contempt, with total contempt and with such arrogance.
00:06:35.400I can't I can't even imagine that we've reached this point when one only one out of 10 teachers are actually teaching a subject to our students that the teacher has majored in their level of understanding of most of these subjects is highly questionable.
00:06:54.220We know that they are not leading the class in terms of their own educational achievement.
00:07:01.320They're getting certificates in teaching.
00:07:03.840So let's get let's get real on this issue.
00:07:06.600These people have to be performing at a higher level.
00:07:10.860And many of them look at as a sinecure, a cushy job with a lot of time off.
00:07:18.220And oh, yeah, I'll put up with the brats if I have to.
00:07:20.940But that seems to be the general attitude.
00:08:14.640They get this unnecessary master's degree.
00:08:17.400That's not in the subject they're going to teach.
00:08:19.420It's in the subject of education, which is really just brainwashing.
00:08:23.600I went through the records of the education conferences where the professors get together and, you know, talk about, you know, basically how they're going to train the teachers.
00:08:33.000It mentioned critical race theory 157 times and reading only 53 times.
00:08:39.320So they're talking about actual academics only a third as much as they're talking about ideology.
00:08:46.320It's amazing because, you know, the old expression, which this younger generation probably is unaware of, was you go to school for reading, writing, and arithmetic.
00:08:58.460And those three subjects, you know, you have to really work hard to find them being taught well anywhere in any public school.
00:09:08.680And the truth is, we don't even begin to start talking about meritocracy in our public education system.
00:09:18.300When they created specialized schools like magnet schools across the country and in New York City, they call them specialized schools like Stuyvesant.
00:09:27.440The idea was to get away from the elite, the rich old white people that controlled everything, and just say, let's do everything based on merit.
00:09:36.200And so they created these schools that, by law, you had to get in only based on how you did on the test.
00:09:43.000So you couldn't use your connections or your political donations or your society stature to get in.
00:09:48.780And it was just, it totally leveled the playing field.
00:09:54.440And you actually, in schools like Stuyvesant, you know how you have a ton of Asians who are like immigrants coming here with nothing, dirt poor.
00:10:00.540And through hard work, they succeed in America.
00:10:03.940We see the American dream alive and well.
00:10:06.200But the activists who run education in America now, they've come out against meritocracy and, in fact, against objectivity and against the American dream.
00:10:17.840I've seen lesson plans where they tell young kids that the American dream doesn't exist and you can't get ahead through hard work.
00:10:24.600And so when you see things like people using studying hard at math to get ahead, they have to destroy it.
00:10:32.100So there's an effort to get rid of these magnet schools and basically bring down our lowest, our highest achieving people.
00:10:40.960And so that's basically equity is, you know, as you said, there's a lot of talk about racial disparities among teachers.
00:10:50.700They focus on the gap between races instead of just helping all children.
00:10:55.680And so if you can bring Asians down or bring whites down, then you've actually shrunk the gap between blacks and whites and blacks and Asians.
00:11:03.140And so they pat themselves on the back.
00:11:05.840But the funny thing is, if you wanted to help poor people and minorities, you would just teach them those three R's, not racism, racism, racism, but reading, writing, arithmetic.
00:11:15.960And then they go on and they get high paid jobs.
00:11:18.320And so if we have sort of this entrenched lower class in this country, the teachers are partially to blame for that because by taking schools away from just focusing on the basics and hard work and meritocracy, they're just perpetuating this status quo.
00:11:37.320And so equity basically means equal outcomes for all, which is essentially communism.
00:11:42.600And you get that by, of course, just like in communism, bringing the top people down or just cooking the books and just stop measuring things.
00:11:50.460And so with these specialized magnet schools, they're trying to just get rid of the test.
00:11:55.660And you see them doing it at colleges with the SAT, too.
00:11:58.460So we just won't give the test because tests are racist.
00:12:00.960And then voila, we've eliminated racial disparities.
00:12:03.620Do you realize that MIT has just resumed using the SAT scores for its admissions office and admission candidates?
00:12:15.520To think that these major schools have walked away from the SAT, and it does have problems.
00:12:45.580I doubt any of them have read the book.
00:12:47.080It's funny because it's not even that partisan of a book.
00:12:49.440I'm known for, of course, the Loudoun County scandals, breaking the story about how they created a hit list on parents and then later breaking the story of the rape cover-up.
00:12:58.920And so some of it is like I've done a lot about critical race theory and all these culture war issues.
00:13:41.880But, you know, basically the issue is you said it very well.
00:13:47.200The standardized tests are the only things they don't lie about.
00:13:50.540And that's why they say things like we've got to get rid of standardized tests because it causes teachers to teach to the test, which is total nonsense.
00:13:58.920Like if the test is about math, of course, the teacher should be teaching to the test.
00:14:03.340Most of these times, you don't even have to pass the test to advance to the next grade.
00:14:07.780It's purely an analytical measure to see if like how the teacher is doing and how the school is doing.
00:14:13.820So these teachers are basically willing to do anything to get out of a job evaluation.
00:14:20.020So we have to see, are we are we are we doing what we're supposed to be doing?
00:14:22.840And the teachers just know if you look at these stats about how competent people are in reading and writing and arithmetic, once people realize that everything changes.
00:14:34.300And so if they can talk about things like social, emotional learning, well, how do you give a grade in that?
00:14:53.220But then there's this other faction and they have this weird alliance.
00:14:57.160And the other faction is just using this stuff because they just want to get paid to work in these schools and not do a very good job.
00:15:03.800And so they've embraced this ideology because the one thing that unites all the all the jargon that you hear, like social, emotional learning and culturally sustainable, responsible education, blah, blah, blah.
00:15:15.900What it all really means is it's subjective.
00:15:19.560We're going to give everyone A's or whatever, but you'll never be able to.
00:15:22.860It's not a multiple choice where there's either right or wrong.
00:15:25.360And so we can basically rig the stats.
00:15:27.360And so I started looking at the school system as almost like Enron.
00:15:30.580It's like a statistical fraud is really underlying all of it.
00:15:34.580We as a government, as a nation, do not have the ability to get an astronaut to the International Space Station unless we hitch a ride on a Russian rocket and capsule.
00:15:51.620Or we turn to Mr. Elon Musk, and I, by the way, prefer this approach.
00:16:00.320He is the only one providing transportation as a private citizen and company to the International Space Station.
00:16:10.180And I guarantee you, when he talks about Mars, he's the guy who's going to be leading the way.
00:16:14.360Your thoughts about society and the quality of our education.
00:16:20.240Well, I mean, I think that's why you see in Silicon Valley them hiring a lot of people from India and China using these H-1Bs.
00:16:28.560It's because our American kids are not qualified to have these jobs that we need to have a first world country and a stable society and who are going to create this health care advancements and national security developments and create the next vaccine that's going to get us out of some health problem.
00:16:47.460You know, you're going to drive across the bridge designed by someone who's been told by radical CRT consultants that math is racist.
00:17:00.740Society is going to collapse if we're indulging this idea that's become commonplace on the far left, that there is no such thing as objectivity and that merit is a myth.
00:17:14.220But I'll tell you where some of these CRT ideas are really coming from.
00:17:18.560I spent quite a while investigating the money trail doing this book.
00:17:22.000And what I found is that it comes from the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation.
00:17:30.620And these groups have a hundred year history of total racism.
00:17:35.680In their early existence, they were pushing eugenics.
00:17:39.280In the 1950s, they created a warehouse of American families and they decided which ones were desirable and which ones we should keep from procreating.
00:17:50.980And now fast forward a hundred years, you've got them funding the activist groups or coming into schools and saying, well, you know, math is racist and hard work and worship of the written word, as they call it, is an attribute of white culture.
00:18:04.860So these are the same racist saying the same racist thing, which is that black people can't live alongside of whites and work hard to jump on time.
00:18:15.640And when you realize who's funding it, it's really the same creepy eugenics ideas with the same effect, which is the perpetuation of this underclass by by by telling minority kids that they can't do all the same things that everyone else does, which is, of course, total BS.
00:18:34.580It's just terrible what's happening in this country.
00:18:37.040We've got people who actually feel guilty about asserting their own ideas in their own communities about their own schools.
00:18:45.120And they're listening to these these ignorant teachers unions and and basically cowering before them.
00:18:53.500I can't stand it that we have become such a passive and malleable society in this country.
00:19:01.180Yeah, I like that you said that, because, first of all, the issue that bothers me most, I think, is that we all want our kids to be happy as parents.
00:19:11.540That's what we want most more than them even being smart, successful.
00:19:17.600And when you look at kids like Greta Thunberg or David Hogg, they're clearly not happy.
00:19:23.080They're constantly worked up into anxiety that's been pushed on them by adults about things that they don't have the life experience to contextualize.
00:19:31.540You know, they literally believe like the world is ending and it's really sad.
00:19:35.700That's what they want for these kids is to make them all feel that they're oppressed when they didn't previously perceive any oppression.
00:19:42.360Making kids sad is evil and no parent should want it.
00:19:46.400But, you know, basically, one of the things that I think is most interesting to read in this book is the consultants who have made millions of dollars off of this and how they all are just total charlatans with some unhappiness in their own life that they're projecting onto everyone else.
00:20:03.960And so one of them out of Seattle has become very important in this area.
00:20:07.080She I found I looked into her personal background.
00:20:09.860She's married a child molester and moved her eight year old kid in with this guy that just got out of prison for molesting a nine year old girl.
00:20:16.520And then she the kid has like mental issues and she makes the kid trans, according to her ex-husband.
00:20:22.500You know, basically, she pretends that she's oppressed in Seattle because she's Hispanic.
00:20:27.580Where are the child protective services that that woman has responsibilities to that child that transcend her?
00:20:37.080A choice to be virtue signaling by marrying a pedophile, for God's sake.
00:20:44.640I mean, there's arguably like mental illness like on these people where this lady is, you know, she's a quarter Hispanic.
00:20:50.880She looks white and she lives in in Seattle.
00:20:54.540And she says, well, I finally understood why I've been unhappy my whole life.
00:20:58.340It's because I'm being persecuted for being she can X.
00:21:01.480And it's like, dude, literally no one even first of all, there's not a bunch of racists running around Seattle and literally you look white.
00:21:09.260No one knows that like one of your four grandparents were Hispanic.
00:21:12.960Clearly, this is a woman who has mental issues where she's sad.
00:21:38.120These companies are dying to pay people like a quarter million bucks a year to do computer coding, which is basically math.
00:21:43.900And so here, this woman who pretends that she's who's basically a white woman, who's just has this completely made up background that she's oppressed is causing kids to be sad and to be permanently impoverished.
00:21:58.100And then there's another guy, Glenn Singleton, who's a really if you hear the word in your school district for all your listeners, there's a good chance they've heard this phrase courageous conversations.
00:22:08.640That all comes from this guy, Glenn Singleton.
00:22:37.180It's it's complete craziness that is being pushed by just a total charlatan.
00:22:44.260And and when you you're sitting in that local school board meeting and you start listening to the pedantic sanctimonious teachers representatives and sometimes the administration as well, since they all went to the same education department.
00:23:02.840Usually you can't even make head and your tails of what the hell they're saying, because everybody in the room is a parent who's a parent is working for a living, is paying taxes for everybody in that building, paid for the building.
00:23:16.740And we're being told, you know, just buzz off and just, you know, put away your racist hangups and all of your triggers that have been inherited from your forebears.
00:23:30.300We're going to do things our way and our way is the hell with S.T.E.M., the hell with your objective testing and multiple choice.
00:23:40.900We are going to have highly impressionistic and subjective testing where the teacher can decide whether you're left or not, if whether your parents are liberal enough, whether you really get woke this and how you how you work so hard to not offend anyone in your class.
00:24:02.440Johnny, Johnny or Jill, it's sickening to watch what we become and it is a war.
00:24:08.260I mean, Disney has entered the CRT sweepstakes.
00:24:13.160It's entered the woke brigades and wants to have the gayest kids movie yet.
00:24:19.440And the head of Disney Entertainment says she wants half, half of the movies Disney produces to be for for trans, for gays, for the underrepresented.
00:24:34.080Who? What in the hell is she talking about?
00:24:37.840I mean, what we've seen over the last couple of years is people willing to inflict emotional, physical and sexual abuse on children in order to advance their own interests, whether it's, you know, abortion to this lady on Supreme Court who's letting child molesters out of jail to what they did with the masks to CRT, which is making kids sad.
00:24:58.600And then this Disney thing, I mean, transgender people have a very high rate of suicide.
00:25:03.780I mean, we shouldn't want to induce more children to become transgender who haven't thought of it on their own.
00:25:09.460And we're like persuading that I'm curious about something.
00:25:13.280How many transgender people are there in this country?
00:25:17.480Because this has exploded upon our society in the last two, maybe three years.
00:25:23.180You would hear a rare instance of it 20, 30 years ago.
00:25:31.080It is a group that has immense political and social power and is occupying mind space for anyone who watched children's television more than five minutes.
00:25:43.520I mean, yeah, obviously, if there was that many transgenders, I don't think our society, just biologically speaking, would have been able to procreate for all these generations.
00:25:53.600It clearly there's half the people are not transgender, but Disney wants half half the people to be gay or transgender.
00:26:02.340First of all, I'm proud to be working at The Daily Wire where they they pledged to spend one hundred million dollars over the next couple of years creating their own children's entertainment.
00:26:12.200And I think that's yeah, it's amazing.
00:26:16.200They're not going to be doing I think the goal is not to create political propaganda for kids.
00:26:21.480It's not going to be indoctrinating them to be like mini Ben Shapiro's.
00:26:25.320It's just going to be regular stuff that lets kids just kids.
00:27:19.400Luke, I know that you live near Washington and that, you know, you've got to work with these people.
00:27:25.460Well, I live out on a farm in an undisclosed location, and I want to tell you the hell with the Democratic Party, because they put Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the White House.
00:27:36.680And I have never seen two more inept and competent people in my life in government service of any kind, let alone the two top jobs in America.
00:27:48.380We have our entire nation at risk because of the Democratic Party, its actions and its lack of principle.
00:27:57.660I won't even get into the election of 2020.
00:28:00.780I won't get into any number of issues.
00:28:02.760But let me say, until the Democrats can act like responsible citizens of this great country instead of confused and lazy citizens of the world who are just waiting to work for either Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, I say the hell with them.
00:28:58.700And that's the thing is that there are traditional people who like voted for Bill Clinton, you know, back in the day who still think it's the same Democratic Party of that age.
00:29:07.440And it's not what's going on in the schools is a fringe failed idea.
00:29:12.740You know, most of this equity stuff comes from Seattle and Minneapolis, and it hasn't worked there.
00:29:20.320And in Minneapolis, they're burning down their own city because they think it's so racist.
00:29:24.220In Seattle, the race and also because they thought it'd help win the election in 2020.
00:29:29.740And in Seattle, you know, the racial disparities are among the worst in the country.
00:29:34.060So we know that progressive policies don't work.
00:29:36.600The problem is actually even in conservative places now, they've started to mimic these failed policies.
00:29:43.560And so even like the Indiana State Board of Education, it has this thing called social justice standards that they get from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
00:29:52.180And let's go back to what you started with.
00:31:17.360And I think we're seeing a similar almost populist style revival because of schools where a lot of people who in the past were not politically engaged had no choice but to get involved because what they because they were coming for their kids.
00:31:29.680They understood that bad people were trying to take their kids from that.
00:31:33.640And so it's been amazing to see parents become the country's newest special interest group and start showing up at these school board meetings.
00:31:40.260And by the way, you broke the Loudoun County story.
00:31:45.340Tell us how that came to be, by the way, if you would.
00:31:49.300Well, I knew I have several stories about Loudoun, really crazy stuff in this book.
00:31:53.400I was familiar with it from researching the book, and I saw the man being arrested the same way everyone else did on TV, where there's a school board meeting about transgender and a dad is angry there and the cops beat him up.
00:32:05.260And you see this picture where he's handcuffed with a bloody face being dragged wet.
00:33:02.340You have the Soros funded D.A. who doesn't think anyone should go to prison.
00:33:05.560Actual child abusers should not go to prison.
00:33:07.880But then they wanted to put this guy across the country, by the way, not just Loudoun County, but county after county, major metropolitan senators centers.
00:34:04.560And that's my goal is for readers to be able to understand because I can't come to every school district and bust these things open.
00:34:11.300But I can assure you that it's going on in every school district.
00:34:14.280Even if you live in a rural place like Indiana or a red state, they have infiltrated every nook and cranny.
00:34:21.440And so we have got to one of the things that I try to do in this book is through all these stories of corruption and fraud and lying and harming kids is help people understand all that jargon that you mentioned.
00:34:34.080You go to these school board meetings and they try to trick you and confuse you with their fancy like lingo.
00:34:39.460And it's an alphabet soup of, you know, acronyms.