How America’s Education System Became a Weapon Against Itself

When college students tore down posters of kidnapped Israeli children in October 2023, parents asked: where did this come from? The answer lies in curriculum materials developed at Brown University. These materials reached approximately one million students annually in roughly 8,000 high schools across America. What teachers didn’t know, and what parents never learned, is that the professor who shaped these materials was funded by a Middle Eastern government. His purpose was to advance one specific narrative: Israel as a settler colonial project. Not to debate it. Not to present multiple perspectives. To establish it as fact.

“This is not a debate,” Professor Beshara Doumani told a Brown audience in 2016. “And it’s not meant to be a debate.”

This is the root of American antisemitism’s resurgence. But antisemitism is just the visible symptom of something larger. The same infrastructure that taught a generation to hate Jews is now teaching them to hate America. The same foreign funding mechanisms that delegitimized Israel are delegitimizing Western civilization itself. America is being systematically dismantled. One classroom at a time. One algorithm at a time. One generation at a time.

The Hidden Infrastructure

Eleven Middle East Studies centers at America’s elite universities receive $260,000 each annually from the Department of Education under Title VI. That totals $2.9 million in taxpayer funding (National Association of Scholars, 2022). The Cold War-era program was originally designed to develop regional expertise for national security purposes. It became a pipeline for foreign influence when universities discovered they could supplement these federal grants with something far more lucrative.

Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait (Bard, 2024). Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73% of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements (Bard, 2024).

The scale is staggering. Cornell received $2.3 billion. Carnegie Mellon took $1.05 billion. Georgetown and Texas A&M each accepted over $1 billion. When you look at Georgetown’s records, you find more than $1 billion with no stated purpose. Just blank spaces where explanations should be.

Here’s what we do know. Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position (Middle East Forum, 2020). Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025). At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel (Bard, 2024).

That was Doumani. His position didn’t exist until foreign money created it. His influence shaped the curriculum materials that were used in roughly 8,000 schools. Those materials reached approximately one million students annually. Brown ended the Choices Program in 2025. The university cited financial pressures and mounting criticism over the program’s Israel-Palestine materials as reasons for shutting it down.

The pattern repeats everywhere. Foreign governments fund academic positions. Universities fill those positions with scholars who share the donors’ worldviews. Those scholars create curriculum materials. The materials reach thousands of schools nationwide. Teachers trust them because they bear prestigious university names. Parents never question them because they don’t know the funding sources. Students absorb frameworks that were designed by foreign governments to advance foreign interests.

And it works. Research examining the years 2015 to 2020 found something striking. Institutions that accepted Middle Eastern funding experienced 300% more antisemitic incidents than institutions that didn’t accept such funding (Network Contagion Research Institute, 2024). Separate studies reached the same conclusion. Undocumented money from Middle Eastern authoritarian states predicted increased campus antisemitism. And the funding came first (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, 2024). The money preceded the hatred. The money caused the hatred.

The Academic Capture

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has over 2,700 members. In March 2022, the association voted 768 to 167 to officially endorse Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel (Salzman, 2022). The organization had claimed for decades to be non-political. That pretense vanished. For many MESA members, characterizing Israel as settler-colonialist has become “an article of faith” (Nelson, 2020).

This isn’t a fringe view confined to radicals. It’s the consensus position. Panel titles at MESA’s annual conferences include references to Israel’s “settler-colonial frontier.” These are the scholars who create curriculum for American high schools. These are the academics who train future teachers. These are the professors that universities hired with foreign money and continue to maintain with federal grants.

George Washington University quietly ended its relationship with MESA in 2023. This came one year after the BDS endorsement. Even university administrators could see where this was heading. But the damage was already done. MESA had shaped the entire field for decades. The scholars it trained, the frameworks it promoted, the orthodoxy it enforced are now embedded throughout American academia. They’re training the next generation. It’s a self-perpetuating system that grows more extreme with each cycle.

These scholars don’t stay confined to Middle East Studies departments. They spread to Education departments where they train future K-12 teachers. They move into Schools of Social Work. They populate Ethnic Studies programs where they apply Middle East frameworks to American history. The infection metastasizes. Then it flows downstream to every institution these graduates enter.

The Teacher Pipeline

Here’s what makes this system permanent. College students who were indoctrinated through foreign-funded curriculum become K-12 teachers. Then they deliver that same curriculum to the next generation.

Consider a typical case. A student learns from Doumani-influenced materials at Brown. She majors in education at a state university. Her Education professors were trained in the same ideological tradition. They reinforce the frameworks she already learned. She does her student-teaching under a mentor who uses identical materials. She gets hired by a school district that adopted those materials years ago. The district chose them because they came from Brown University.

Now she’s teaching the next cohort. She genuinely believes what she’s teaching because it’s all she was ever taught. She has no idea that foreign funding shaped her curriculum. She doesn’t know that authoritarian governments designed these frameworks. The cycle completes itself. And it accelerates.

Education is one of the most popular college majors. These graduates disperse to schools nationwide. Within a single decade, foreign-funded curriculum influences far more than just the million students who encounter it directly. It influences the millions more who are taught by teachers who learned from it, believed it, and now perpetuate it.

Each generation of teachers is more indoctrinated than the one before. Each cohort of students emerges more hostile to Israel. More critical of America. More receptive to antisemitic frameworks. The system isn’t breaking down. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work. It has built-in mechanisms for self-replication and intensification.

Corporate Amplification

Students who absorbed these frameworks don’t stop at graduation. They enter corporate America. There they find institutions that reinforce rather than challenge their worldview. Major corporations have embraced DEI bureaucracies. These bureaucracies operate using the identical theoretical frameworks that were taught through foreign-funded curriculum.

The settler-colonial lens isn’t academic abstraction anymore. Neither is the oppressor-oppressed binary. Nor the focus on systemic racism and white supremacy. These are now corporate policy. Google, Microsoft, Disney, Bank of America, and hundreds of other major employers now require training. This training teaches employees that America is fundamentally racist. That Western civilization is inherently oppressive. That different standards must apply to different people based on their identity.

Young employees who learned in school that Israel is a colonial project find corporate environments that validate this exact worldview. Their education taught them the framework. Their employers apply it. The reinforcement is complete.

This shapes public discourse in profound ways. It happens through corporate platforms, advertising, hiring practices, and political advocacy. When Google’s search algorithms reflect these frameworks, it’s not accidental. When Facebook’s content moderation policies reflect them, it’s not coincidental. When Disney’s entertainment products reflect them, it’s not random. It’s institutional. The people making these decisions were educated in a system that was corrupted by foreign funding. Then they entered corporations that reinforced the same worldview they learned in school.

The Generational Weapon

Track one student’s timeline. She used Brown’s revised Choices materials as a high school freshman in 2015. She graduated college in 2022. She spent her formative years learning that Israel is fundamentally illegitimate. That its creation was a crime. That resistance to it, by any means necessary, is justified. She never debated these premises. The curriculum wasn’t designed for debate.

When Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, this student was 26 years old. She didn’t need to be radicalized. She had been prepared for this moment for over a decade. The celebrations of the attacks made sense to her. Tearing down posters of kidnapped children made sense to her. The harassment of Jewish classmates made sense. The chants calling for intifada made sense. All of it made perfect sense within the framework she had been taught.

But here’s what makes this truly insidious. The settler-colonial framework doesn’t stop with Israel. It’s a universal acid that dissolves legitimacy everywhere it gets applied. If Israel is a colonial project because Jews “displaced” Palestinians, then America is a colonial project because settlers “displaced” Native Americans. If Israelis are foreigners with no legitimate claim to the land, then Americans are foreigners with no legitimate claim to the continent. If Hamas resistance is justified against Israel, then any resistance to American power is also justified.

Students who learned to delegitimize Israel simultaneously learned to delegitimize America. Same framework. Same logic. Same conclusion. This wasn’t an accident. This was the entire point.

October 7 revealed something beyond antisemitism. Students didn’t just support Palestinians. They actively opposed America. They burned American flags in the streets. They called for revolution against the American system. They described America as a white supremacist empire that must be dismantled. The antisemitism and the anti-Americanism flowed from the same source. They were taught through the same curriculum. They were funded by the same foreign governments.

The Family Fracture

No consequence cuts deeper than what’s happening inside American families. Parents who raised their children with traditional American values now watch helplessly. Those children return from college expressing hatred for Israel. Contempt for America. Sometimes they show barely concealed disdain for their parents’ entire generation.

Thanksgiving dinners have become battlegrounds. Adult children lecture their parents about colonialism, white privilege, and systemic racism. They use vocabulary their parents don’t recognize. They invoke frameworks their parents never encountered in their own education. The children genuinely believe their parents are racists. Or genocide apologists. Or both. The parents look at these young adults and don’t recognize the people their children have become.

This isn’t normal generational conflict. Previous generations disagreed about politics. But they shared fundamental values and historical understanding. The current divide runs much deeper. Parents and children now operate from completely different factual foundations. They learned different history. They absorbed different values. They developed different loyalties to different ideas of what America is and should be.

This serves foreign interests perfectly. A divided America focused on internal conflicts is an America distracted from external threats. Families that can’t agree on basic facts can’t mount unified resistance to anything. The same infrastructure that taught children to hate Israel and America also taught them to view their own parents with suspicion or outright contempt.

The Chinese Parallel

While Middle Eastern money was capturing Middle East Studies, Chinese money pursued a parallel strategy with complementary goals. Between 2015 and 2019, American universities received approximately $1.2 billion from China. Most of it went undisclosed. A government investigation discovered over $6 billion in unreported foreign donations from all sources combined (U.S. Department of Education, 2020).

Chinese funding came with strings attached. Branch campuses that American universities operate in China must operate under Communist Party censorship. Confucius Institutes spread propaganda while disguising it as language instruction. Research collaborations transfer American technology to a hostile foreign power. Faculty members who criticize China lose access to research sites and funding. Students who question Chinese policy face harassment from Chinese student associations that are backed by their government.

Chinese officials have been explicit about their strategy. In a 2019 speech, Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of “telling China’s story well” through international education. Communist Party documents describe a “discourse power” strategy. The goal is to shape how other nations perceive China and how they perceive themselves. American universities, hungry for Chinese students and research funding, became willing partners in this effort.

Then there’s TikTok. The app has 150 million American users. They’re predominantly young. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is a company that operates under Chinese law. Chinese law requires cooperation with intelligence services. The TikTok algorithm determines what content reaches users. It determines what worldviews become normalized. It determines what ideas trend and what ideas get suppressed.

Following October 7, TikTok flooded American users with pro-Hamas content. Multiple studies found that pro-Palestinian hashtags received billions more views than pro-Israel content. The algorithm wasn’t neutral. It was weighted in one direction. Students who had learned in high school that Israel is illegitimate then spent hours daily on an app controlled by China. That app reinforced those exact views through carefully curated content.

The pattern is devastating. Classroom indoctrination establishes the framework initially. Algorithmic manipulation reinforces it constantly. By the time these Americans reach voting age, their worldviews have been shaped by foreign adversaries. Those adversaries have aligned interests. Weaken America by dividing it internally. Distract America by focusing it on internal conflicts. Ensure that the next generation views America’s allies as enemies and views America’s enemies as victims.

The Foundation: Education’s Corruption

The vulnerability that allows foreign influence to work so effectively wasn’t created recently. It was created decades earlier. It happened through the deliberate destruction of American education’s intellectual foundations.

Outcome-based education accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. Schools began teaching to standardized tests. They standardized thinking itself. They replaced depth with breadth. Students stopped learning how to analyze arguments, evaluate sources, and question assumptions. Instead they learned to identify correct answers on standardized tests. They stopped reading primary historical sources. They stopped writing analytical essays. The system produced students with credentials. But those students lacked the intellectual tools necessary to resist manipulation.

Marc Tucker’s 1992 letter to Hillary Clinton outlined a vision. He proposed restructuring American education to serve workforce development and social engineering rather than intellectual development. John Dewey’s progressive education theories, which had been influential for decades before Tucker, explicitly argued that schools should prioritize socialization over traditional academic content.

American students now rank as mediocre internationally. This is true despite America spending more per student than almost any other nation. But the real failure isn’t visible in the rankings. It’s visible in capability. Students can’t distinguish credible sources from propaganda. They accept emotional appeals over logical arguments. They repeat slogans without understanding the concepts behind them. They believe what authority figures tell them, whether those figures are professors or algorithms.

This is the soil in which foreign influence flourishes and takes root. You cannot manipulate a population that has been trained to think critically, question sources, and evaluate evidence systematically. You can easily manipulate a population that has been trained to memorize facts, conform to consensus, and defer to credentialed experts. American education created that second type of population. It did so deliberately.

The Publishing Industry’s Role

The corruption extends beyond individual universities. It reaches the textbook publishing industry that supplies curriculum materials to schools nationwide. Major publishers like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin have increasingly incorporated the frameworks that were developed in foreign-funded university programs.

World history textbooks now routinely describe Israel’s creation through the settler-colonial lens. American history textbooks present the nation’s founding as primarily a story about slavery and genocide. Social studies materials emphasize systemic oppression over individual liberty and rights.

Publishers are responding to market demand. Education schools train future teachers using foreign-funded curriculum. Those teachers graduate and prefer materials that reflect what they learned. School districts hire those teachers and adopt materials that align with what teachers want. Publishers provide those materials. Schools adopt them. The next generation of students learns from them. Those students then become teachers themselves. They demand even more ideologically consistent materials. Each cycle pushes content further away from balanced education. Each cycle moves it closer to explicit indoctrination.

Consider the scale. Brown’s Choices Program reached 8,000 schools before it shut down. That’s significant. But Pearson’s textbooks reach tens of thousands of schools. McGraw-Hill’s materials appear in classrooms from kindergarten through high school. When major publishers adopt frameworks that were developed through foreign funding, the infrastructure of indoctrination becomes nearly impossible to escape. Parents who might object to university curriculum often don’t recognize the identical frameworks when they’re embedded in mainstream textbooks from recognized publishers. The ideological capture appears to be educational consensus rather than foreign influence.

Foreign Policy Consequences

The generation that was shaped by foreign-funded curriculum is now beginning to influence American foreign policy in measurable ways.

Congressional staffers in their twenties and thirties were educated through this system. They draft legislation. They brief members of Congress. Their worldview shapes what information reaches policymakers. When a congressman asks for background information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the staffer provides a memo. That memo reflects what she learned in school. The frameworks that were embedded in her education become the frameworks that shape American policy decisions.

State Department officials entering the foreign service went through programs at Georgetown. Georgetown received over $1 billion in Middle Eastern funding. These officials also studied at other elite institutions with similar funding. They bring similar perspectives to their work. Their cables from embassies abroad, their policy recommendations, their negotiating positions all reflect educational experiences that were corrupted by foreign money.

The 2024 elections revealed this dynamic clearly. Younger voters overwhelmingly opposed military aid to Israel. They supported conditioning that assistance on Israeli policy changes. They expressed sympathy for Hamas at rates that would have been completely unthinkable in previous generations. Politicians noticed these trends. Policy positions began to shift in response to this demographic.

This represents a strategic victory for the foreign governments that funded these outcomes over decades. They didn’t need to lobby Congress directly. They didn’t need to fund think tanks to influence policy. They invested in education over a period of decades. Now that investment is generating returns as the educated generation enters positions of power.

Young policymakers who were educated to view America as fundamentally flawed are less likely to defend American interests abroad. They question alliances that previous generations built. They apologize for American actions. They accommodate adversaries. They genuinely believe that American power is the problem in the world rather than the solution to global challenges.

The Acceleration

Antisemitic incidents on college campuses increased 321% in 2023 compared to 2022 (Anti-Defamation League, 2024). But the trend line was already steep before that. It had been rising steadily since 2015. That timeline correlates almost exactly with the increased foreign funding and the curricular shifts in universities. Between October 7 and the end of 2023 alone, campus antisemitic incidents increased 1,062% compared to the same two-month period in 2022.

Survey data reveals widening gaps between generations. In 2022, only 41% of Americans aged 18-29 held favorable views of Israel. Compare that to 69% of Americans 65 and older who held favorable views (Pew Research, 2022). By 2023, polling showed that 86% of the Silent Generation and Greatest Generation supported publicly backing Israel. Only 48% of Gen Z and Millennials agreed (NPR/Marist, 2023). On the question of military aid to Israel, Americans 65 and older supported it by a margin of 46 percentage points. Meanwhile, younger Americans opposed it by nearly the same margin (Quinnipiac University, 2023).

The same pattern appears on questions about America itself. Patriotism declines with each younger cohort. Trust in American institutions plummets. Belief in American exceptionalism nearly disappears among Americans under 25. Support for capitalism versus socialism flips entirely when you look at younger demographics.

These trends are accelerating rather than moderating. The gap between generations widened more between 2020 and 2024 than it did in the entire previous decade. Each graduating class is more hostile to American values than the class before it. And remember that these students become teachers. They perpetuate and intensify the frameworks they learned.

University DEI budgets have exploded. They’ve grown to hundreds of millions of dollars at major institutions. These bureaucracies enforce ideological conformity throughout universities. Faculty hiring increasingly requires diversity statements. These statements function as ideological litmus tests. Students who challenge the prevailing orthodoxy face social and academic consequences.

The intellectual monoculture is nearly complete. A professor who defends Israel now risks their entire career. A student who expresses support for American foreign policy risks social ostracism. The feedback mechanisms that might moderate these trends simply don’t exist anymore. There’s no correction coming from within the system.

State-Level Failures

Some states attempted to push back against this. Florida banned critical race theory from K-12 curriculum. Texas investigated university partnerships with China. Several states passed laws against BDS. The results reveal why institutional capture is so difficult to reverse.

Universities simply renamed their programs. Critical race theory became “culturally responsive teaching.” The frameworks remained identical while the vocabulary changed. Teachers who had been trained in the original concepts continued teaching them using new language. School districts claimed compliance with state laws while continuing their previous practices unchanged.

Chinese partnerships at universities moved offshore or restructured themselves to avoid disclosure requirements. Confucius Institutes rebranded as other types of cultural exchange programs. The funding continued flowing through different channels. The substance remained completely unchanged.

BDS bans at the state level proved largely unenforceable. Universities claimed academic freedom protections. Faculty members continued openly advocating for boycotts. Student groups promoting BDS operated freely despite state laws prohibiting such activity.

These failures reveal a sobering reality. The capture runs so deep that reform attempted from above faces insurmountable resistance from below. Partial reforms fail because the infrastructure is comprehensive and interconnected. You can’t fix curriculum without simultaneously fixing teacher training. You can’t fix teacher training without fixing universities. You can’t fix universities without confronting foreign funding, administrative bloat, and faculty culture all at the same time. And you can’t do any of this without also addressing social media platforms and corporate culture that reinforce these same frameworks.

The few states that tried to implement reforms discovered they were attempting to drain an ocean with a bucket. The system is too large. Too interconnected. Too self-reinforcing for any incremental reform to work. It requires comprehensive action at the federal level. It requires sustained political will across multiple administrations. Anything less than that will fail.

The Consequences We’re Living

Jewish students face unprecedented levels of harassment on campuses. Synagogues now require armed security guards. Antisemitic incidents reached record levels in 2023. Then they exceeded those records in 2024. The perpetrators aren’t neo-Nazis from the far right. They’re young progressives who are convinced they’re fighting against racism and colonialism.

But the consequences extend far beyond antisemitism. Crime increases in cities as policing gets reframed as oppression rather than protection. Major cities that adopted “defund the police” movements saw this firsthand. These movements were driven by young activists who were educated in these frameworks. Homicide rates spiked dramatically. Educational standards collapse as meritocracy gets attacked as a form of discrimination. School districts eliminate advanced courses because they produce “inequitable” outcomes. They abandon standardized tests. They close gifted programs. American students fall further behind their international peers while the education establishment celebrates achieving equity.

Economic mobility declines as capitalism gets portrayed as exploitation rather than opportunity. Young Americans who were educated to view business as oppressive don’t start companies. They don’t pursue careers in productive economic sectors. Instead they gravitate toward activism, non-profit organizations, and government jobs. The entrepreneurial spirit that built American prosperity withers generation by generation.

National unity fractures as shared American identity gets condemned as a form of colonialism. Balkanization accelerates along racial, ethnic, and ideological lines. A population that doesn’t see itself as one unified nation cannot act with unified purpose.

Military recruitment plummets as fewer young Americans view military service as honorable or necessary. The military struggles to meet its recruitment targets while America’s adversaries expand their forces. The most educated young Americans, who in previous generations would have become military officers and strategic thinkers, now view the military as an instrument of imperialism to be avoided or actively opposed.

Innovation suffers as the best minds pursue activism rather than STEM fields. American technological dominance erodes as Chinese universities graduate more engineers each year. Meanwhile American universities graduate more social justice activists.

These aren’t accidents. These aren’t unintended consequences. These are the designed outcomes. The system was engineered to produce exactly this generation.

The Administrative State’s Role

University reform proves nearly impossible because of the administrative structures that now dominate higher education. These administrators overwhelmingly lean progressive. They were educated in the same corrupted system. They control hiring decisions, curriculum approval, budget allocation, and campus culture. They do this through sprawling DEI bureaucracies, student life departments, and compliance offices.

These administrators actively enforce ideological conformity throughout universities. They mandate diversity training. They investigate speech they deem hateful. They adjudicate harassment claims in ways that punish dissent. They make hiring decisions that prioritize identity over merit and qualifications. They control access to resources. Departments that resist the dominant framework receive less funding. Departments that comply receive more funding and prosper.

Faculty members who challenge this system face administrative harassment. Their emails get investigated for potential violations. Their classroom comments trigger student complaints. Their research funding gets scrutinized for ideological compliance. Their promotion cases get mysteriously stalled. The message to faculty is crystal clear: conform or suffer the consequences.

This administrative structure serves foreign interests perfectly. It doesn’t require any conspiracy or coordination. It simply requires foreign money to flow to positions and programs that align with donor interests. Then the administrative mechanisms enforce and expand that alignment through normal university operations.

What Must Happen

The solution requires political will to act comprehensively and immediately. Half-measures will fail. Incremental reforms will be absorbed and neutralized. Only comprehensive action can succeed.

First, enforce disclosure laws with brutal severity. Universities that hide foreign donations must lose all federal funding immediately. Complete cutoff. This includes grants, student loan eligibility, and research contracts. No warnings. No grace periods. No negotiations. Violate disclosure requirements once, lose federal funding permanently.

Second, ban foreign government funding from non-democratic countries to American universities entirely. Qatar sponsors Hamas. Saudi Arabia exports Wahhabi extremism. China runs concentration camps and harvests organs from political prisoners. These are not appropriate funding sources for American education under any circumstances. Universities must choose: foreign money or federal money. Not both.

Third, require explicit disclosure on all K-12 curriculum materials. Every teacher guide, every student handout, every online resource must state clearly and prominently: “Development of these materials was funded by [country/organization].” Let parents and teachers decide whether they trust curriculum that was created with Qatari money.

Fourth, end Title VI funding to any programs that demonstrate ideological uniformity rather than genuine viewpoint diversity. Federal grants should support education, not indoctrination. Programs that fail to meet this standard don’t deserve taxpayer support. Conduct regular audits of curriculum content. Programs that present only single perspectives on contested issues lose their funding.

Fifth, ban TikTok and any other social media platform that is controlled by foreign adversaries. The First Amendment doesn’t require America to allow hostile foreign governments to operate propaganda networks that target American children. TikTok isn’t speech. It’s a weapon of information warfare.

Sixth, dismantle outcome-based education and restore classical liberal education that focuses on critical thinking. Students need to learn how to analyze arguments, evaluate sources, distinguish fact from propaganda, and think independently. This requires reading primary historical sources. It requires writing analytical essays. It requires engaging with challenging material that makes them uncomfortable. Without this intellectual foundation, all other reforms will ultimately fail.

Seventh, eliminate university DEI bureaucracies as a condition of receiving federal funding. These offices exist solely to enforce ideological conformity. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. They serve no legitimate educational purpose. End federal funding to any university that maintains these structures.

Eighth, prosecute violations aggressively and publicly. Universities that failed to disclose foreign funding broke federal law. Charge the administrators who were responsible. Seek prison sentences, not merely fines. Companies that deceived users about data practices violated federal regulations. Pursue maximum legal penalties for all violations. Deterrence only works when there is consistent, visible enforcement.

Ninth, require viewpoint diversity in faculty hiring as a mandatory condition of receiving federal funding. Universities that claim to value diversity while maintaining complete ideological monocultures are committing fraud against taxpayers. Make intellectual diversity auditable and measurable. Universities must demonstrate that they actively hire faculty members with genuinely different perspectives, not just different skin colors or gender identities.

Tenth, break the teacher pipeline that perpetuates this system. Require Education schools to demonstrate that their graduates can actually teach critical thinking, not just progressive ideology. Conduct rigorous audits of teacher preparation programs. Those programs that function as indoctrination centers rather than professional training must lose their accreditation entirely. Dramatically expand alternative certification paths that bypass captured Education schools.

The Stakes

Rome didn’t fall in a single day or year. It decayed over multiple generations. Civic virtue eroded gradually. Citizens slowly lost the will to defend their civilization. Barbarians were welcomed and accommodated rather than resisted. The parallels to contemporary America are profoundly uncomfortable. But they are also undeniable.

The barbarians aren’t at the gates this time. They’re already inside. They’re in classrooms teaching children to despise their own heritage. They’re embedded in algorithms that shape worldviews. They’re in university administration taking foreign money and corrupting education. They’re in corporate HR departments enforcing ideological conformity. They’re producing generation after generation of Americans who are convinced that their country is evil, their civilization is illegitimate, and their history is purely criminal.

This is what civilizational collapse looks like from the inside. It’s not dramatic invasion or military conquest. It’s internal rot that spreads gradually. It’s not external defeat on battlefields. It’s internal surrender in classrooms. It’s not military failure. It’s spiritual exhaustion and the loss of belief in one’s own civilization.

Every single day that these mechanisms continue to operate, America grows weaker. Every day that foreign funding flows into universities, that ideological indoctrination proceeds in classrooms, that algorithmic manipulation operates on social media, another thousand students absorb frameworks that were specifically designed to make them hostile to their own civilization. Another thousand families fracture along ideological lines they can’t bridge. Another thousand teachers perpetuate what they learned without questioning it. Another thousand corporate employees enforce frameworks that actively undermine American competitiveness.

The student who is using foreign-funded curriculum materials today becomes the teacher training the next generation tomorrow. The teenager being manipulated by TikTok’s algorithm today becomes the journalist framing news stories tomorrow. The college graduate who is convinced America is fundamentally evil today becomes the politician shaping foreign policy tomorrow. The young professional going through mandatory corporate DEI training today becomes the executive making hiring and firing decisions tomorrow.

Foreign adversaries understand something that many Americans still don’t grasp. Nations fall from internal collapse before they fall to external conquest. You don’t need to defeat America militarily if you can convince Americans to defeat themselves ideologically. You don’t need to invade with armies if citizens welcome your cultural and intellectual influence. You don’t need to destroy American institutions through force if you can corrupt them from within through funding and influence.

That corruption is already far advanced. That collapse is already underway. Unless Americans recognize what is happening and demand that it stop immediately, the nation that saved the world from fascism in the 1940s and from communism in the 1990s will join the long historical list of civilizations that fell. Not because they were conquered by stronger enemies. But because their own citizens lost the will and the ability to defend them.

The choice facing America is completely binary. Confront this crisis now with comprehensive action, or watch it accelerate until recovery becomes permanently impossible. There is no third option available. There is no path of gradual reform that will work. The system is too thoroughly captured. Too deeply self-reinforcing. Too comprehensively corrupted for any incremental change to succeed. State-level reform attempts have already been tried. They failed. The problem is national in scope. It requires federal action. It requires sustained political will that persists across multiple presidential administrations. Anything less than that will fail to stop the decline.

What’s required is comprehensive simultaneous action across all these fronts. Enforce disclosure laws with brutal severity. Ban foreign funding from authoritarian regimes completely. Mandate curriculum transparency absolutely and without exception. Eliminate federal support for ideological programs entirely. Ban foreign-controlled social media platforms definitively. Restore classical education universally throughout the system. Dismantle DEI bureaucracies thoroughly at every institution. Prosecute violations vigorously and publicly. Require viewpoint diversity strictly as a condition of funding. Break the teacher pipeline permanently.

This will require extraordinary political courage. Universities will scream about threats to academic freedom. Media outlets will accuse the government of authoritarian overreach. Activists will organize massive protests. Foreign governments will threaten diplomatic and economic consequences. Corporate leaders will complain loudly about workforce disruption. The attacks will be absolutely relentless. This is inevitable because the infrastructure being dismantled took multiple decades to build. It was funded with trillions of dollars.

But consider the alternative carefully. The alternative is national extinction. Not a dramatic collapse that happens overnight. But slow dissolution that occurs over decades. Each generation will be more hostile to American values than the one before. Each cohort will be less capable of defending American interests. Each wave will be more sympathetic to America’s enemies. This continues until America becomes completely unrecognizable. Until it’s unable to govern itself effectively. Unable to defend itself militarily. Unable to maintain the civilization that its ancestors built and defended.

The infrastructure of American decline is operating at full scale right now. The mechanisms are completely visible to anyone willing to look. The solutions are clear and well-defined. The only remaining question is whether enough Americans will demand action before the window of opportunity closes permanently.

Which will America choose?

Eric Buesing, MBA is an author and researcher who studies the patterns of power and influence that have shaped civilizations throughout history. His work combines historical analysis with philosophical inquiry, tracing how wealth and control have been concentrated and deployed across millennia—from ancient empires to modern institutional structures.

Every declining civilization shows the same symptoms America displays today. The difference is whether citizens recognize what’s happening in time to stop it. The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations (TrineDay, June 2026) documents the historical patterns that reveal—and help us resist—the infrastructure of decline. Pre-order now.

Editor’s Note: This article was written amid Brown University’s ongoing grief over the tragic shooting on December 13, 2025, which claimed the lives of two students and injured several others. Our deepest sympathies extend to the victims, their families, and the entire community affected by this senseless act of violence.