Along with CRT and LGBT indoctrination, children are being taught in both public and private school classrooms to hate America, by teachers who were themselves indoctrinated in university schools of education. Parents have long expressed concerns about anti-American propaganda, with virtual learning during the pandemic proving to have been especially eye-opening.

A recent example of biased instruction is the widely publicized incidence of Austin, Texas Independent School District (ISD) teacher Sophia DeLoretto-Chudy, who claimed in a viral TikTok video that she was punished by her school district for teaching third-graders “about the Constitution and their constitutional rights.” A view of her video tells a different story.

School administrators expressed concern about Chudy’s third-grade students because she asserted that the children questioned the Pledge of Allegiance during a lesson about the Holocaust and Adolph Hitler, and decided “on their own” to protest by sitting during the Pledge. (Texas law requires schools to teach about the Holocaust during Remembrance Week in January.)

In the video, Chudy says she told her students that “during the Civil War, the country was divided about” — sarcastic giggle — “slavery; and so during the 1870s, they created the Pledge to, you know, bring the country together because it was fraught over the issue of, you know, owning black people, and they added the ‘under God’ prayer in the 1970s because Republicans were afraid of Communism.” Here she pauses briefly, muttering under her breath, “classic,” then adds with another giggle “and [afraid of] atheism.” She continues: “And so, my kids, my students, decided amongst themselves that they wanted to protest the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Chudy claims she convinced the kids not to be disruptive, “which is what they wanted to do,” and that she told them that “silent protesting was often more powerful.... And then I told them about Colin Kapernick.” The students then allegedly decided that going forward they would sit during the Pledge.

Actual history of the Pledge

Aside from her blatant attempt to indoctrinate her students, Chudy apparently failed to realize her ignorance of U.S. history. A simple internet search would have told her that the Pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a 37-year-old minister.

According to ThoughtCo.com, “The first recorded organized recital of the original Pledge of Allegiance took place on Oct. 12, 1892, when some 12 million American schoolchildren recited it to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus.” It apparently had nothing to do with the Civil War or the division in the country over slavery, which by 1892 had been abolished for nearly 30 years.

A number of modifications to the Pledge have been made. In 1923, the words “my flag” were changed to “the flag of the United States of America,” in order to make it clearer to immigrants that they were pledging allegiance to the American flag rather than to the flag of the country from which they came.

In 1954 (NOT the 1970s), President Dwight Eisenhower pushed for Congress to add the words “under God” to the Pledge. Rather than simply for “fear of Communism,” as Chudy told her students (while subtly communicating in the video that such fear was laughable), Eisenhower believed the addition “would ‘reaffirm the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future’ and ‘strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.’”

The phrase, “under God,” also appears much earlier in President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettsburg Address. In the final sentence of his rhetorical masterpiece, Lincoln states:... “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom ...”

On June 14, 1954, Congress approved amending the “Flag Code” to certify the Pledge as it remains today, despite legal challenges to its constitutionality by atheists over the decades.

Conservatives point out that, for Chudy and others like her, these facts are unimportant to their agenda, which is to mold the minds of young children to believe that their country is based on evil institutions like slavery, and that honorable traditions like pledging allegiance to the flag are merely coverups for wrongdoing and therefore worthy of protest.

In her video, Chudy admits that her administrator didn’t believe third-grade students could fully understand and articulate what she claimed they did in protesting the Pledge, and suggested, as most parents might assume, that Chudy was “indoctrinating her students.” She ends with exaggeratedly heartfelt self-congratulations on finally being noticed for “all her hard work this past school year.”

When the TikTok video went viral, a number of news outlets picked up the story. There was much handwringing among some Twitter users and liberal media like Buzzfeed, who simply couldn’t fathom anyone doubting that eight-year-olds could decide to protest the Pledge of Allegiance of their own volition, and they defended Chudy for teaching about the Holocaust. The Houston Chronicle.com reported that she said her students “drew similarities between the Pledge of Allegiance and the usage of nationalist propaganda during the Holocaust.”

But others who commented on the Chronicle’s story were skeptical. One responder wrote: “Third graders taking a stand on an issue and organizing a protest during the Pledge? I’m not buying it. There was definitely some staging/adult involvement here...” Another stated: “LOL - these are third-graders, they have no idea what the term ‘nationalistic propaganda’ means. They were obviously put up to this by the teacher. Sad...” Yet another wrote: “I'm more aghast that she thinks ‘under God’ was added to the Pledge ‘in the 1970s.’ Is that what she taught her class? I mean, a one-second online search would tell her that was added in 1954.”

In a second video, after Chudy’s probationary contract was terminated by school administrators, she smugly grins into the camera and asks why they are concerned about her telling students about their “legal and constitutional rights.” She repeatedly asks “why is that a concern? Why is that a concern? Why are you concerned?”

Indoctrinated by leftist ideology

But many parents are concerned about precisely the type of lessons Chudy and her ilk are teaching.

In a June 2022 commentary appearing on The Heritage Foundation's website and originally published by The Daily Signal, former teacher, news producer, and podcast host, Douglas Blair, gives a firsthand account of the type of indoctrination he personally witnessed. Blair says the education system originally designed to teach kids how to think critically “has been weaponized by the radical left to push an anti-American agenda.”

He describes the process as starting with propaganda, with teachers giving assignments to instill “the idea that the pillars of Western civilization were evil, and their memories deserve to be thrown in the trash.” He cited the following as a first-person example:

• I was helping one of my elementary school students with a homework assignment about listing famous Britons throughout history. She already had some of the more obvious ones: Shakespeare, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth. “Well, how about Winston Churchill?” I recommended. “Oh no, not him,” she replied. “He was a racist and didn’t think women should have rights. He wasn’t a good guy.”


• I was floored. It clearly wasn’t something she came up with on her own. She was just regurgitating propaganda her teacher had taught her. All sense of nuance and critical thinking about the man who saved Europe from the Nazis was gone. Churchill committed “wrongthink,” so in the bin he goes.

Blair says a second tactic of the left is to normalize “its views and positions as nonpolitical.” He gives as an example the Black Lives Matter organization which, given all the leftist propaganda, his colleagues believed was exempt from being considered political because BLM is “a matter of human rights.”

Finally, says Blair, “suppression of ‘wrongthink’ is equally as important to the brainwashing process.” He relates as an example a lesson he was preparing for Thanksgiving that involved an activity “centered on making paper teepees for arts and crafts.” His fellow teachers “became incensed that a non-Indian was ‘appropriating’ Native American culture for an activity.” He concluded the anecdote by writing:

• The whole thing culminated in a hilarious incident where my colleagues tracked down the one teacher on staff who was one sixty-fourth Native American and asked her if this [proposed activity] was cultural appropriation. In her esteemed authority, it most certainly was. The school administrators pulled me aside and promptly nixed the project.

Bias in private schools

But not only public-school teachers like DeLoretto-Chudy are brainwashing students. Some private schools have made news in recent years for demonstrating woke bias.

Last year, the New York Post.com published an article about elite New York City private schools “teaching kids that American society must be destroyed.” Wealthy parents pay upwards of $60,000 per year to have their children taught that “the system is broken, unable to be reformed, rotten to the core, and deserving of demolition.”

As a graduating senior at the tony Horace Mann School in June 2022, student Ryan Finlay “published a pointed but measured essay describing the aggressive political bias that dominated his education on [the school’s] Bronx campus.”

The Post article noted that “Finlay’s essay breaks the self-imposed conspiracy of silence that has largely shielded top private schools from criticism from within,” which is part of the problem nationwide in both public and private schools. Teachers toe the mark and students are fed lessons that not only poison their view of their country, but foster the belief that they can change their gender, their pronouns, and attend assemblies featuring drag shows, all without parental knowledge or consent.

Ultimately, parents and citizens who value our constitutional freedoms and Republican form of government must continue to demand transparency in education. As Blair wrote: “The young adults who today gleefully tear down statues of the Founding Fathers were incubated in our very own schools, groomed to burst from the education system and burn America down ... Conservatives must demand an end to the indoctrination of our youth or face a new American public taught since childhood that the country shouldn’t exist.”

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