Professional baseball clubs would become the norm, with a history stretching from the opening months of President Ulysses S. Grant’s first term through the creation of the National and American leagues to today’s Major League Baseball.

Other sports have surpassed it in popularity in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, but baseball remains “America’s game” in the most important sense. Firstly, it remains the sport most tied to our broader history. Its origins come from older base- and ball-focused games dating back to colonial times. Soldiers in the Civil War played baseball between battles. The sport spread to the West, with professional teams following it in the 20^th century.

Baseball played a part in major social and political movements as well. One such movement concerns the struggle for racial equality. Segregation established a color line in the sport, giving us the amazing legacy of the Negro Leagues but depriving all of the excellence that an integrated professional sport would have yielded. Jackie Robinson breaking that color line in 1947 was the picture of heroism, a man who suffered much evil in pursuit of a cause whose justice entailed much more than playing a game. 

Baseball also played a role in the economic conflicts regarding capital and labor. Team owners, for a long time, dominated players with the reserve clause. Then, men such as Curt Flood agitated for change, pushing for greater player say not only with regard to trades but also to pay and all elements of how the game is played.

Secondly, baseball at its best reflects America at its best. Our history certainly shows this truth. Integrating baseball was a public, powerful argument for the country to live out its commitment to human equality. Baseball, at its best, is innovative, whether in particular changes to rules or the inclusion of new technology. And baseball is familial. I root for the same team as my great-grandfather. I am doing my best for my own children to be the fifth generation of Cincinnati Reds fans. 

But baseball also showcases the enduring virtues, and even at times the lingering vices, of our republican form of government. Baseball exemplifies America’s dedication both to individual achievement and to the common good. Players have the chance for their own glory in a home run or a great catch, but they also might be called on to lay down a sacrifice bunt to improve the team’s chances of winning.

Baseball has umpires, often the source of united frustration. But as another political scientist has observed, umpires display to us something similar to our Constitution’s judicial power. Umpires show the need not just for rules but for an impartial judge to apply those rules to real-life situations.

America’s game displays a democratic element as well. A preset batting order rigidly declares who will be at the plate at what point in the game. Basketball might be able to lean on one player to score. Football now is overwhelmingly dependent on quarterbacks. But with the batting order in baseball, any of the nine might have to play the hero or suffer the humiliation of failure. They have an equal place in the lineup and, thus, equal potential to be called upon in the game’s crucial moments.

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Finally, baseball showcases America’s love of excellence. Our republic believes in human equality. Yet, it does not understand that equality to deny the place of merit. Instead, equality should permit all to achieve to the best of their distinct abilities. Baseball has plenty of luck. But it ultimately depends on the combination of grit and greatness. At its best, it rewards those who are excellent at what they do. America is at its best when it also recognizes virtue, intellectual and moral, and seeks such virtue to be a groundwork for our experiment in self-government.

Watch some baseball today. Do so because of the history. Do so because of its connection to our republican values. And do so because baseball, still, is not just a great game, but America’s game.

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.

But fewer are aware that far-left billionaires like George Soros are working with Big Labor to fund groups that exist to promote pro-Hamas propaganda. Many in the media pretend, for example, that the Teamsters Union’s recent $45,000 donation to the Republican National Convention is evidence that Big Labor is drifting rightward. But this is peanuts compared to the $1.8 billion Big Labor spent during the 2020 election, the vast majority going to Democrats. More than 96% of public-sector union spending funds Democrats.

Big Labor is much less powerful than it used to be thanks to declining union membership, which hit an all-time low in 2023. Fewer union workers means less dues money that union bosses can lavish on their favorite Democrats. Big Labor’s steady decline has created a power vacuum in the labor movement that far-left groups are eager to fill. These groups often paint themselves as humble watchdogs against corporate greed, when, in reality, they are composed of the same radicals terrorizing college campuses across the nation. 

Take the “Private Equity Stakeholders Project” for example, a group founded in 2017 that bills itself as a private equity watchdog. Since 2019, PESP has received at least $275,000 from Soros-linked foundations, and $650,000 from the Ford Foundation. PESP has also hopped on the Big Labor gravy train, receiving at least $268,778 from unions since 2018. Overall, PESP has raised millions from various left-wing sources to push their radical agenda. 

PESP employs a range of left-wing radicals. PESP founder Jim Baker, previously arrested for criminal trespassing, is a longtime union organizer who most recently worked for a union of hospitality workers. John Ash is the campaign and research director of PESP while also working as lead researcher at 32BJ SEIU. K Agbeybi worked for a constellation of left-wing groups, including Planned Parenthood, before working for PESP. 

When they aren’t busy attacking private equity, PESP employees attack Israel. Fox Business recently reported that five PESP employees engaged in anti-Israel protests or spread pro-Hamas messages on social media. Agbeybi, a self-described “communist,” attended a pro-Hamas rally in November 2023. PESP research coordinator Azani Creekes was arrested for her role in organizing an anti-Israel protest that blocked New York City traffic. Other PESP staffers liked X posts accusing President Joe Biden of committing “genocide” and reposted Rashida Tlaib’s video accusing Israel of committing “war crimes.” 

Big Labor directly participates in pro-Hamas protests. United Auto Workers organizers waved signs with pro-Hamas radicals, no surprise given that UAW President Shawn Fain has deep ties to the Democratic Socialists of America.

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Big Labor’s embrace of this radicalism will only hasten the decline of union membership. Freelance journalist Damien Fisher reported that union members who attended Labor Notes were treated to a scuffle between a pro-Hamas mob and police on the conference’s first day. Attendees reportedly learned “about transgender rights, heard the pro-Hamas feminist perspective on the Middle East, and were invited to join the Democratic Socialists of America.” 

The next time you read a story about pro-Hamas agitators blocking traffic or laying waste to college campuses, know that they have the support of George Soros and Big Labor bosses. 

Tom Hebert is Director of Competition and Regulatory Policy at Americans for Tax Reform and executive director of the Open Competition Center. 

We should take this debate as a moment to think seriously about the way our young people consume news and information.

Shockingly, preteens alone spend an average of nine hours a day on their devices and regularly fall victim to malicious trends and disinformation. Our youth are in desperate need of the skills and knowledge to resist the siren songs they hear online. Civics education can provide a defense.

We also know that America’s adversaries use social media to manipulate our democracy. China, Iran, and Russia have all set up large troll farms to generate content and influence voters — especially young, impressionable ones. These authoritarian regimes want to interfere in American politics, undermine public trust, and divide our people. As the election looms, they will certainly increase efforts to inflame the extreme Left and Right alike.

This should not come as a surprise — our Founders warned that rival powers would seek to exploit our partisan divides. In his farewell address, President George Washington pointed out that faction “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.” The digital revolution and social media simply give our adversaries more sophisticated tools to manipulate the public.

Washington understood that the best way to overcome this malign pressure is to make citizens informed patriots. As he put it, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens,) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake.” Our founding principles, rightly understood, are the bulwark against this threat of foreign manipulation.

That is why investing in civic education is of vital importance to our national security. Free government is our shared project as citizens, and education from the K-12 level to college and even the military needs to reflect that principle. When we really know what unites us, our enemies will find it more difficult to divide us.

As artificial intelligence proliferates and bad actors influence media narratives on apps such as TikTok, civics classrooms are where students can learn media literacy skills. Strong civic education will help young people identify bias and better understand contemporary political debates by studying our nation’s past. Exposure to the great debates of American history, which include some of the best critiques of America, will open up their ability as citizens to easily identify arguments and poor lines of reasoning made in the media.

Students also learn how to think about tough matters in civics classes. Our institutions are built on the idea of self-government, where citizens and their representatives openly debate and discuss topics. We do not believe a central authority should do your thinking for you. The freedom to think means we share a responsibility to think. That’s why open debate is one of the great strengths of democracy. We must invite young people to engage and grow into full participants in our civic life.

Civic education instills these ideas and responsibilities of citizenship while acquainting students with the essential primary source documents of the American political tradition. By reading and discussing the Constitution, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, or the autobiography of Frederick Douglass — by encountering past Americans as they were — our country’s brightest moments and darkest shame can come to life. In this way, we can make civics education foundational to our shared life as citizens and steel ourselves against foreign influence and societal fissures.

Furthermore, by encountering history as it happened, we gain perspective on the events of our own time. We can see the context for events as they unfold before us, and we can beware of certain pitfalls and rhetorical fallacies that recur throughout history.

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The good news is that civics education is beginning to blossom across the nation. At universities including Arizona State, Florida, Utah Valley, Tennessee, and Texas, states are building a curriculum to better prepare students to be citizens. But more work remains — much of it at the K-12 level.

Ultimately, we need to cultivate an understanding of responsible citizenship in our students. Late historian Bruce Cole, who served on the board of the Jack Miller Center, once wrote, “Citizens who cannot define their liberties cannot defend them.” In times such as our own, the liberties that we hold as citizens are worth defending. So let’s give teachers and students the tools they need to define them.

Hans Zeiger is the president of the Jack Miller Center. Garrett Exner is the Executive Director of The Public Interest Fellowship.

America has rightly developed a heightened sensitivity to warning signs of radicalization on the Right. The unspeakable legacies of the Nazis and the Hutus, among other terrible right-wing regimes of history, have made us responsive to the slightest hints of racial superiority and malignant nationalism. 

But when it comes to the pathologies of the Left, the lines are stubbornly blurry. History is replete with malevolent left-wing governments that caused unfathomable suffering, and yet America seems not to have developed adequate antibodies to leftist extremism. Our culture is suspiciously unmoved by signs of the very collectivism that sent millions to die in gulags and the fervid anti-traditionalism that fueled more than a million deaths in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. 

America’s sudden institutional adoption of the radical concept of “equity,” for instance, once defined by Vice President Kamala Harris as the mechanism by which “everyone ends up in the same place,” caused hardly anyone to blink. Other instances of obvious leftist extremism were allowed access into mainstream discourse with relatively little pushback, including the incoherent “defund the police” movement and “drag queen story hour” — which, as comedian Bill Maher recently pointed out, was always more about satisfying the needs of the drag queens than educating children. 

Recent events have given new urgency to Peterson’s question. Radical left-wing ideas, like their radical right-wing counterparts, have the potential to incinerate a culture and a nation. And so we must at least begin to develop a collective reflex to incidences of leftist excess. This begins with boldly naming examples as they arise. 

Recent headlines supply no shortage of places to begin.

For instance, two weeks ago in Dearborn, Michigan, in the congressional district of the rabidly anti-Israel Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), a pro-Hamas rally broke into a chant of “Death to America.” Days later, a group of pro-Palestinian activists gathered at the Teamsters union headquarters in Chicago to solidify plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this August. They, too, indulged in chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” as their leaders whipped them into a frenzy. 

The campus chaos at Columbia University in recent weeks has been no less alarming. 

“There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” the students chanted at numerous points, echoing the Nazi “final solution” of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

“We don’t want no two-state,” they wailed at another point, in a call to eradicate the nation of Israel. “We want all of it!”

Another particularly ominous video captured a young woman in a mask shouting, “We are Hamas!” at a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag. (The connection between the American Left’s mask fetish and radical Islam’s insistence on veiling women is best left to psychological professionals.)

“Keep it moving Zionist pig!” someone else shouted at a Jewish student.

It should go without saying that people who chant for the death of our nation are national enemies — even if they are aligned with the political Left. Doubtless, coverage of similarly incendiary chanting by figures from the radical Right would be constant, breathless, and unapologetic; it would inspire nationwide protests, marches, sit-ins, walkouts, occupations, encampments, boycotts, etc. The political universe would grind to a halt and wouldn’t spin again until every Republican from the town council to Congress issued a repudiation.

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And we know this because that’s exactly what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when vicious and vile white supremacists (literal white supremacists) marched through the streets chanting Nazi slogans such as, “They will not replace us.” Thanks to America’s well-developed antibody reaction to right-wing radicalism, this event rightly became one of the seminal political moments of the century. 

None of the behavior we are seeing on the Left today is subtle. Nor is it merely the consequence of a sustained effort at political programming in the academy — though it is certainly that as well. Rather, at its root and through its many branches, the extremism we’re seeing around the country is nothing short of a malignant ideological cancer that has spread throughout the American body politic. The pathological Left has emerged, and we must have the fortitude and focus to call it like it is. 

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.

Vikas Dwivedi, a global oil and gas strategist, told Bloomberg that the White House might turn to the SPR to offset an expected spike in gasoline prices during the summer. “There are not many tools available” to stave off price increases, Dwivedi said. The analyst noted that turning to the country’s emergency reserves “is one of the most effective” ways to limit the pain that consumers might feel at the pump.

It is normal for gas prices to increase during the summer, a peak driving season. But it isn’t normal to turn to the SPR to keep prices down in an election season. In November 2021, the Biden administration turned to the SPR to offset rising gas prices ahead of the holiday season, a move that House Republicans condemned.

The SPR was established in 1975 when President Gerald Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act into law. At the time, the United States was facing mounting energy crises. The SPR was created to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out national obligations under the international energy program. As the Department of Energy notes, the SPR’s sheer size — with an authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels — makes it a “significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool in foreign policy.”

The latter phrase is key. The SPR exists for crises. It does not exist to stave off electoral defeat.

Indeed, unnecessarily relying on the SPR for domestic political concerns is dangerous. As its name implies, the federally owned oil stocks are “reserves” — and they should be treated as such, used only when necessary.

Should China invade Taiwan, the world economy would be thrown into a tailspin. The resulting supply chain disruptions would make what happened after COVID-19 look like a walk in the park. Energy prices would skyrocket. We don’t know when China will launch its planned invasion. But we do know that Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, has called for the People’s Liberation Army to be able to do so by 2030. It is entirely possible that an invasion might occur before then. The SPR will be critical to America should China attack. The U.S. must harness its resources.

Nor is China the only factor that should make Washington more cautious in employing the SPR. 

The Middle East is in turmoil, with Iranian proxies — even Iran itself — launching attacks at Israel. For more than six months, the region has been engulfed in war. And it seems unlikely to end anytime soon. Iran is also actively seeking nuclear weapons. It is unlikely that Israel will let them cross the threshold and let the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism become a nuclear power. More war, including potentially bigger wars, seem likely in a part of the world that is key to America’s energy supply.

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Russia, another major energy producer, has continued its war on Ukraine, keeping alive the possibility of further disruptions to the market.

In short, America must learn to husband its resources. Washington must have a serious energy policy, not one that relies on a “green revolution” that largely benefits China. And it must not create the precedent of turning to the SPR for selfish political benefit. The risks are too great.

The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.

Take Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and all-purpose mini-me. He boasted in 2016 that the administration had misrepresented the 2015 Iran nuclear accord to the public, selling Tehran as more trustworthy than they were. Rhodes added that this was no problem because the media were idiots who were easily fooled. Rhodes was so anti-Israel that his nickname in the Obama White House was “Hamas.” 

At least Biden hasn’t brought Rhodes back into the West Wing, but that may be the only good news here. As the Middle East threatens to explode into a wider war, it needs to be asked how we got to the strange place where the White House considers it more important to militarily restrain our ally Israel than our enemy Iran, which has regularly denounced America as “the Great Satan” back to 1979. This is, at best, naivete on a grand scale. But is there more to it? 

Here we must turn to the mysterious and troubling case of Rob Malley. He’s the Obama-Biden go-to guy on Iran. Malley holds far-left views on foreign policy, especially the Middle East, that were considered fringe even among Democrats a generation ago but are now deemed normal. Malley worked for President Bill Clinton, then served on the National Security Council during Obama’s second term as the mullah-whisperer. Malley was the driving force behind JCPOA, and once President Donald Trump killed the Iran deal in 2018, Biden brought Malley back into the White House in 2021 expressly to resurrect it. 

That hasn’t happened, and it certainly won’t happen now that Iran and Israel are in a de facto open war. The other reason JCPOA isn’t coming back is because Malley’s no longer in the White House. In April 2023, Malley was quietly placed on leave when his security clearances were suspended by the State Department for unspecified reasons. Malley claimed not to know what the problem was and professed that he hoped to return to the White House eventually. In the meantime, Malley was soft-landed at Princeton University.

One year has gone by and we still don’t know why Malley’s long government career came to a screeching halt over some security issue. There are tells. His case was handed from Foggy Bottom over to the FBI for investigation, which means it’s no longer a State Department internal matter since espionage may be involved. Last August, Iranian regime media added fuel to the fire, salaciously publishing a purported State Department memo elaborating that Malley’s Top Secret clearance was pulled due to apparent mishandling of classified information. Efforts by Congress to get answers about the Malley affair led nowhere. For a year, the Biden White House has stonewalled all inquiries. 

In the meantime, it’s only gotten worse. Semafor exposed an Iranian influence operation going back to 2014 called the “Iran Experts Initiative,” which featured mullah-friendly operatives who were supposed to steer U.S. policy toward Iran in ways Tehran wanted. Several of those involved with IEI were close associates of Malley, including think-tankers Dina Esfandiary and Ali Vaez, as well as Ariane Tabatabai, who since 2022 has been working in the Pentagon in a high-level job requiring Top Secret clearances, namely as chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations.  

Even though Tabatabai and other IEI members appeared to be uncomfortably close to Tehran, and some of her emails with top Iranian officials resembled a spy talking to her handler in the eyes of any counterintelligence veteran, she is still working in the Pentagon. Inexplicably, a security review in 2023 determined that Tabatabai should keep her clearances, which is highly abnormal given the circumstances. 

The Biden White House has hushed this big spy scandal up, aided by the mainstream media largely ignoring it, and has proceeded as if nothing has happened. Now the Washington Examiner reports that known IEI operatives remain welcome in this administration. Esfandiary, Vaez, and Tabatabai have visited the Biden White House 10 times, including as recently as December, many months after Malley was removed from his position.

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You might think Team Biden would want to keep distance between the White House and suspected Iranian spies. You would be wrong. 

The FBI is investigating Malley while the State Department is conducting its own inquiry, but that’s all we know. Repeated efforts by Congress to get more information about Malley and his associates, plus their ties to Tehran, have gotten nowhere. Rob Malley may be the Alger Hiss of his generation. The public has a right to know what happened here, particularly as a wider war with Iran looms.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.

The incident made me wonder if Fairfax County School Board member Melanie Meren was in the audience. In May 2023, Meren, now the board’s vice chairwoman, reportedly demanded the removal of artwork containing images of the American flag in the school board’s headquarters because it “triggered” her.

The idea that Americans are “triggered” by our nation’s flag is troubling. Quite frankly, if “triggered” was not such a pathetic word overused by weak-minded leftists, I might use it to describe my own feelings about the matter. But really, I’m furious that a small segment of our fellow Americans claim to be “triggered” by Old Glory.

Many brave Americans paid with their lives for the freedom that our flag represents. Our freedoms, including those of the so-called triggered people, are a result of that blood sacrifice. My husband, brother, father, and both grandfathers are all veterans. Families of veterans are intimately familiar with the sacrifices that our men and women in uniform have made and continue to make for the principles that our flag represents.

We are so free, in fact, that we protect these leftists’ right to sit during the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance. Their failure to stand is repugnant, but wonderfully illustrative of the constitutional freedoms that our flag represents and for which our military servicemen have paid.

There is a certain type of person “triggered” by our flag. They are generally affluent enough that they do not have much else to think about outside of the problems that they manufacture. Their graduate school education, (Meren went to Duke University, for example), probably helped them along their journey of considering all the ways that they are personally oppressed.

So, the solution is simple. These predominantly white, leftists might consider using their resources to take advantage of our porous southern border and find a flag that they do support. 

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There’s no shortage of migrants who would gladly take their place. In Fiscal Year 2023, for example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 3.2 million encounters with illegal migrants. With no signs of letting up, border encounters approached 1.5 million in Fiscal Year 2024 by the end of February. Illegal immigrants are clearly flooding in from south to north, but I wonder if the Mexican government might be amenable to taking American asylum-seekers who are “triggered” by our flag and “feel unsafe.”

Perhaps as asylum seekers, these Americans would find comfort living in Mexico and the Mexican flag would not trigger them. Maybe the Rain Country Dance Association could even hold its next dance competition in Mexico so its audience might feel more safe and less triggered.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this phenomenon is unique to just the news industry. The decline in quality and credibility is merely a reflection of an increasingly polarized country. 

It’s not just the news media — it’s everything. Everything has grown more hyperpartisan, from newsroom staff to the audiences they claim to serve. Traditional news media and conservative media have grown more radical as their respective bases have grown more radical. It’s like Congress. Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate have moved further to the fringes, according to data from the Pew Research Center, because voters have moved further to the fringes.

As the electorate becomes more polarized, so will our institutions — from Congress to cable news. 

Why would it be any other way?

You want to know why the New York Times and the Associated Press have become more left-wing? That’s because their staffers and audiences have become more left-wing. The shift in editorial choices simply reflects that change.

Consider the following examples of what passes for serious mainstream news coverage nowadays. 

At the Washington Post last week, staffers buried the fact that a black man who was shot and killed by Chicago police last month allegedly fired first on the police officers. In fact, Washington Post readers don’t even learn until the eighth paragraph that the man reportedly had a gun. That’s not just burying the lede. That’s an outright attempt to mislead readers. 

Meanwhile, the AP updated its style guide last week to instruct staffers that “the terms climate change and climate crisis can both be used in broad references. The terms often can be used interchangeably. … The term climate crisis may be used when describing the current situation.” That’s not a style choice. That’s an editorial one.

It’s worth noting here that the AP in 2021 issued a memo instructing staffers not to refer to the border crisis, which at the time saw an estimated 75,000 illegal border crossings per month, as a crisis. 

Elsewhere this year, a trans activist detonated a bomb outside the office of Alabama’s attorney general. At NBC News, pro-lifers are to blame. 

“The detonation happened one day after the state attorney general’s office said Marshall did not plan to prosecute in vitro fertilization providers or families after a controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling,” NBC reported. “The motive authorities attribute to the suspect has not been released.”

Lastly, while we’re on the topic of major media simply giving up and hurling slop at their audiences, MSNBC’s Ari Melber this week interviewed convicted felon Michael Avenatti from prison to discuss Trump’s legal woes. There are few better examples of a media in decline than Melber turning to Avenatti (who, again, is in prison for fraud) for legal analysis. 

Longtime National Public Radio reporter Uri Berliner expressed dismay this week over the ideological capture in major media. Because of NPR’s embrace of progressive ideology, he writes, the once-beloved radio network’s listenership has dwindled to just hardcore white liberals. 

“Back in 2011,” Berliner writes in the Free Press, “although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the Left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23% as middle of the road, and 37% as liberal.”

He adds: “By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11% described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.”

This is indeed troubling, but it also seems consistent with the general shift in voter sentiments. 

Lost in Berliner’s article is a broader understanding of the fracturing of GOP and conservative circles with the rise of former President Donald Trump. There was a great scattering between 2015 and 2016. The Right today is not the Right of the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign. There are people who happily identified as Republicans in 2012 who don’t feel the same way in 2024. Some even renounced their party affiliation altogether. 

NPR has indeed lost Republicans, yes, but the Republican Party itself has lost Republicans. The GOP didn’t hold steady post-2011. It changed in radical ways. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the audience shift at NPR is not one purely of NPR’s making. 

NPR’s listeners, like NPR, have changed.

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Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.

The students undergoing this “education” would become not only seething activists intent on transforming their country, but also woefully ignorant Minnesotans, having been taught wrong events and causal relationships. This turns on its head the traditional goal of education, which is to transmit a nation’s culture to future generations, as well as knowledge of subject matters.

Academic standards matter. They amount to the official expectations of the state for children going through the K-12 educational pipeline. They are renewed every so many years — a 10-year cycle in Minnesota’s case.

Once the state’s educational authorities have decided on a plan, school districts “are required to put state standards into place so all students have access to high-quality content and instruction.”

The Minnesota standards, however, are replete with the jargon of critical race theory and other cultural Marxist schemes to induce students to mistrust their own culture, and to boil down all human interaction to an epic struggle between dominant and subservient groups.

For example, the guidelines for the social studies standards give instructions on how to analyze “dominant and non-dominant narratives,” (the term “dominant” appears a total of 85 times in 120 pages), “oppression” (which, when teamed with “systematic” or “systems of,” appears 17 times), and “power” (72 times, often twined with “dynamics”).

The word “identity,” so important to the campaign to upend traditional understandings of nationhood, also pervades the standards, appearing in singular and plural forms 65 times. Variations on “colonialism” appear 28 times, and are coupled with “settler” 10 times. Lastly, “race” or “racial” appears 36 times, and “climate” 16 times.

The MDE can tell parents all it wants that the standards are “unifying,” but as Katherine Kersten of the Center of the American Experiment wrote in the Star Tribune, “In reality, they will divide our young people by group identity, teach them to view social life as a zero-sum power struggle between oppressors (bad) and victims (good), and convert public schools into boot camps for political activism.”

The Center of the American Experiment has done important yeoman’s work in spotlighting the brewing catastrophe. It shared with me the standards’ “examples,” which explain to teachers how to implement the curriculum, after obtaining them from a reluctant MDE through a public data request.

The Center has revealed, for example, how activists from a leftist group called “Education for Liberation Minnesota” and its affiliate Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition took over the writing of the standards.

The process took years, but as it has become evident in case after case, cultural Marxists intent on burrowing inside educational institutions in order to shape the instruction of the young are patient, committed, and ruthless with those espousing competing views.

The standards and the accompanying explanations are perfect illustrations of how deeply ideological the content of education can be. The concept of “dominant and non-dominant narratives,” for example, has been a staple of cultural Marxism — the idea that revolutionaries must take over the culture first and de-emphasize Marx’s economic imperative, focusing instead on tearing down society’s dominant norms and traditions — for at least a century.

In Paulo Freire’s 1993 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” the word dominant—as in “dominant standard discourse,” “dominant ideology,” of “dominant social construction”—appears 54 times. The book by Freire, a Brazilian Maoist, is the most used textbook in schools of education, some studies have shown.

The “examples” accompanying the standards suggest to teachers that they use Israel as an example to show the students not just how a dominant culture oppresses another, but even how “genocide” is practiced.

Worse yet, that example comes in the section on geography. All the different subject matters included under “social studies” these days—geography, history, economics, citizenship and government, and ethnic studies—are equally ladened with ideological bias.

Another example under geography enjoins teachers to describe to students “places and regions, explaining how they are influenced by power structures.”

Under ethnic studies, teachers are told at one point to, “Compare the liberation struggles of people in different regions of the world that have fought for self-determination, liberation, and the empowerment of disenfranchised and/or marginalized groups.” It gives as examples not just the Israel/Palestinian conflict, but also, in China, “Cultural Revolution/Chiang Kai Shek.”

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Except that Chiang and his nationalists fled Mainland China in 1949 after being defeated by Mao’s communists. Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966, almost two decades later, and it lasted until 1976. Not only did it have nothing to do with Chiang, but it has been recognized by all as a destructive outpouring of violence, as Mao turned students into “Red Guards” in a bid to stay in power.

In other words, it was pretty similar to the cultural revolution some people would like to unleash in Minnesota, and all of the United States, today.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.

It happened when I heard “Nothing Compares to You.” Not the Sinead O’Connor classic, but the recent single by New Orleans singer Britti.

It’s a beautiful song from Hello, I’m Britti, my favorite album of the year so far. It’s also a reminder that while conservatives bemoan the collapse of culture, if you step outside, fantastic music is being made. A lot of it is coming from the Easy Eye Sound label, owned and run by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. Auerbach has a deep love for America’s roots music, particularly blues and early soul. 

As music writers such as Stanley Crouch and Ralph Ellison have noted, the American black music tradition isn’t one of pessimism and despair but of affirmation, love, and hope. The blues, as Crouch observed, is about “dealing with adversity with grace.” Of course, there can be great tragedy, anger, and depression in America’s native music forms. Yet there is always hope and a deep faith in God. 

Indeed, the black American music tradition has always celebrated the power of love — both erotic and spiritual. In her book Hole in Our Soul, scholar Martha Bayes argues that in the 1960s, this tradition was corrupted by “perverse modernism,” including bands such as the Rolling Stones that started singing about drugs and violence. Gangster rap was a particularly bad period of perversity.

It’s 2024, and rock music has been usurped by dance, pop, and even jazz. Beyoncé made a hugely successful country album. Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift deliver euphoric songs influenced by 1980s synth-pop optimism and love. Critics could argue that popular music isn’t about “social justice” anymore, but there’s nothing more serious and challenging in this world than love, faith, everyday life, and relationships. It’s also hard to imagine any protest song with lyrics as lovely as this from Britti:

Silent movies, foreign beauties

Doesn’t truly matter what comes my way 

Old love letters lost forever 

Guilty pleasures even those dreams they fade

Because nothing compares to you 

One of the most famous pieces of music criticism is the review by the legendary Detroit critic Lester Bangs of the Van Morrison album Astral Weeks. Morrison is an man from Northern Ireland whose music is completely informed by American black soul and jazz. When Astral Weeks came out in 1968, Bangs wrote, he was deeply depressed, “nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming across the mind.” Then Bangs said this: “In the condition I was in, [Astral Weeks] assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what’s more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction.” 

In Astral Weeks, he continued, “there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.” This was a tonic, wrote Bangs, because “the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great ‘60s party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in its maw and was pulling straight down.” 

The undertow of the disastrous 1960s party is indeed dragging a lot of people down. But American popular music has largely escaped.

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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.