Liz Wheeler on Culture Wars in the American Classroom

Liz Wheeler, host of the Liz Wheeler Show and author of "Hide Your Children," in Washington on Aug. 4, 2023.Alejandro Heredia/The Epoch Times

A cultural void forced open by today’s pursuit of neutrality has actually been the left’s plan to make space in society for their cultural indoctrination, as no education can truly be values neutral, according to a talk show host.

Liz Wheeler, host of the Liz Wheeler show and author of the book “Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids,” talked about her research in an interview to EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders.

Wokeness and Public Education

Ms. Wheeler has examined history and found that, while the idea of a worldwide communist revolution as Marx and Engels had predicted never materialized and died, an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci actually revived it but in another form in the 20th century.

Gramsci observed that in the nations where a communist revolution took place, the revolution was not just done on economic grounds. The communist ideology in these countries had started to destroy the civic, or cultural institutions, on which the working class relied, the ideas from which the working class was shaped.

In Gramsci’s own words, he viewed the new communist’s task as thus, “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media, by transforming the consciousness of society.”

The cultural institutions that he named are the same that are under attack by Marxists and socialists in America this day, Ms. Wheeler said.

“The end goal of communism is the complete deprivation of basic human rights. It results in oppression, tyranny, and death. It de-persons individuals in the countries in which communist dictators prevail. That is evil.”

‘No Education is Neutral’

Ms. Wheeler said, to her own amusement, that there was one thing she agreed on with Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist educator, who has said that there is no education that is neutral.

Neutrality is something Republicans have fallen for, she said. “We have fallen for this idea that we shouldn’t insert any kind of values or moral order into our society, that we shouldn’t use just authority of government to help create this moral order. And because of that, we’ve withdrawn our values from a lot of these institutions that have been captured.”

Public education was created as a system for indoctrination, Ms. Wheeler said. It became compulsory in 1852 in the state of Massachusetts. The reason was to give knowledge of American civics and instill American values and Protestant values to the children of Catholic immigrants who were coming in great numbers at that time to America. It was an indoctrination system meant to implant love for America first, and not love for the countries that they came from, to the children of immigrants who were to become the next generation of Americans.

From this point of view, indoctrination by itself is good or bad depending on what is being indoctrinated.

People on the right understood that at the time, Ms. Wheeler said. But in more recent years, they’ve left their role in that system in “the false name of neutrality,” and the void created has been filled by the left’s indoctrination of their values.

Natural Law as the Goal of Freedom

Ms. Wheeler said everyone knows that freedom by itself can lead to bad things as well, if there is no inherent morality in it. She gave the example of drug legalization. She said that what the pursuit of liberty meant in the foundation of America was achieving justice, and justice was actually a way to harmonize with natural law. Liberty, as the Founding Fathers meant it, was a word rooted squarely in scripture. In other words, it is the idea that objective truth exists, and that a country is built on such a foundation.

“My challenge to conservatives is we must re-embrace the idea of natural law, of these objective truths, if we are to reclaim our society from this chaos.”

While pointing out everything wrong with American society is easy, it is difficult to point out what is right, Ms. Wheeler said, giving the example of Andrew Tate and his self-destructive recipe for a correct diagnosis. “The Republican Party has embraced libertarianism as conservatism” but in fact, this is wrong.

Hide Your Children

Ms. Wheeler said that beside its comical aspect, her book’s title means giving shelter to one’s child until he or she is able to handle the evil of the world, and is able to discern right from wrong.

“We must, as parents, give our kids shelter from this evil so they don’t grow up confused at best, or at worst indoctrinated. We’ve gotten away from protecting the innocence of children—maybe it’s because of smartphones, maybe because our culture is inundated with overtly sexual advertisements—and now children are exposed to critical race theory and trans theory and drug queen story hours, and neo-pronouns.

“And that’s a key part of the Marxist strategy to destroy our country; it’s to subvert the innocence of our sons and daughters, and we should hide our children from the Marxists, as we eradicate Marxism from the institutional structures of our country,” Ms. Wheeler said.

“If you care about your children, if you care about society and the ability of your family to thrive and to flourish in our society, then be part of this fight with us—build the country that we want.”