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America is about to enter its 250th year, an anniversary set to revive interest in civics and in celebrating U.S. history in schools. And it’s just in time, given how close America’s domestic enemies have come over the last few years to changing what the Marxists would call our “hegemonic narrative.”
These enemies did not seek to reform but to destroy and replace. Far too many Americans were cowed into believing the claims that America was systemically racist or oppressive, necessitating systemic overhaul.
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But did these domestic enemies receive encouragement, help, or even financing from America’s foreign enemies? Did foreign states take a direct hand in our education to change the course of our future?
It would make sense for them to foment chaos, as internal strife would distract America from defending itself.
So, yes, the usual suspects, including China, Cuba, and Qatar, were busy attempting to distort what is taught in our classrooms. Then there are countries that don’t usually make it on this list, such as Mexico.
All infiltrated U.S. classrooms to spread anti-American animus, recruit agents, and influence the course of American policy.
Cuba
The anti-American animus of Cuba’s regime has made it one of the worst offenders in terms of infiltrating all corners of our government and society. China gets the lion’s share of attention when it comes to its influence on U.S. classrooms, and Cuba’s efforts fly under the radar.
It shouldn’t. The FBI has, for years, warned U.S. universities that the Cuban Intelligence Services recruits American academics to identify and assess students who could be recruited to work for Cuba’s government clandestinely.
“Cuban intelligence views U.S. universities as high priority targets in their efforts to fulfill the strategic objectives and goals of the Cuban government, as sources of foreign policy expertise, future government leadership, and as broadly informing U.S. public opinion,” reads a report issued last year by the FBI’s Office of Private Sector. “The CuIS has sought to recruit professors and academic leadership to spot, assess, and recruit students who may have future access to sensitive or classified information, or who may enter a position of foreign policy development and influence.”
Cuba uses these professors, who turn into Cuban agents, to first blame America for everything bad that has happened in Latin America, and especially for the communist mismanagement of the Cuban economy. These professors then spot who among their U.S. students this message resonated with and concentrate on warping them against their own country and agree to work for Cuba’s communist government.
The report, and others that came before it, give examples:
“The CuIS invests in long-term recruitment operations at U.S. academic institutions. In one exemplary case, the CuIS recruited and operated a network of professors and researchers at two prominent U.S. universities over the course of 30 years, from the 1970s through the 2000s, and exploited the professors’ standing within the academic community and their placement as mentors and advisors to assess and recruit students.”
The report notes how “a now deceased U.S. professor … claimed to have assessed as many as 50 students and colleagues, and recruited at least six motivated by admiration and loyalty.”
The professor claimed “to have assessed and groomed students for recruitment by determining their willingness to engage in open, unclassified research, determining their political leanings, and then guiding them to engage in more discrete work. The U.S. professor then induced them to meet secretly with Cuban intelligence.”
China
China is a notable example of a country that utilizes both academia and K-12 classrooms to ensure its worldview becomes widespread across the United States. The most famous example is the Confucius Institutes program, which funded centers in universities in the U.S. and other Western countries that ostensibly taught Chinese, but also stifled campus discussion of China’s many human rights transgressions and presented a positive view of the country, destined to be our main 21st-century adversary.
There were well over 100 such Confucius Institutes on U.S. university campuses until a few years ago, but increased scrutiny forced many university administrators to close them. The National Association of Scholars estimated in 2023 that “a total of 111 Confucius Institutes … have closed or are in the process of closing.”
But with China, it is always best to look beyond the façade. Of the 28 institutes that have closed, “at least 28 have replaced their Confucius Institute with a similar program, and at least 58 have maintained close relationships with their former Confucius Institute partner,” according to the NAS.
Confucius Institutes also nurture so-called Confucius classrooms at the K-12 level. According to Parents Defending Education, on whose board of advisers I sit and which has done stellar work in uncovering China’s educational efforts here, Beijing has spent millions on the classroom program.
In one example, between 2014 and 2023, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia received more than $1 million from Chinese organizations such as the “Shirble Department Store Holding China,” a Chinese department store and construction company “incorporated in the Cayman Islands;” the Ameson Education and Cultural Exchange Foundation, a Washington-headquartered nongovernmental organization “dedicated to promoting cultural exchange and educational cooperation between China and the rest of the world; and Tsinghua University High School. Most of this money went to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in the northern Virginia suburbs.
Qatar
The Gulf state is the largest foreign donor to U.S. universities. It funds American schools through its Qatar Foundation International. QFI program officer Craig Cangemi described it as “a private, education-focused foundation in Doha, Qatar,” and insisted that “we are an autonomous organization. … We do not have any ties with Qatar: the government, the state, or really [the] Qatar Foundation,” to which Oren Litwin, writing in National Review, commented, “This is patently false.”
At a 2018 “Middle East 101” event held with teachers in Phoenix, Cangemi distributed material from Al Masdar, QFI’s main curriculum project. None of the lesson plans included any criticism of Qatar. Litwin found, however, several lessons produced by the Zinn Education Project, which claims to promote a revisionist “people’s history.” That’s putting it mildly. The Zinn Education Project is based on the works of Howard Zinn, a Marxist who, critics charge, was a member of the Communist Party USA and wrote “history” that invariably blamed the U.S. and the West in general for all of humanity’s ills.
Writing in the Jerusalem Post this year, Amine Ayoub, an analyst based in Morocco, wrote this year that “Qatar has poured over $6 billion into U.S. universities” in the past decade alone, which would make it the single largest foreign donor to U.S. academia. The money has been allocated to institutions such as Harvard, Georgetown, and Northwestern universities, and many of these universities have established campuses in Doha.
Ayoub calls QFI’s educational programs “a Trojan horse to introduce anti-Western, pro-Islamist perspectives to American children.” Indeed, the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy has, for years, been studying the connection between Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and such activist groups as Students for Justice in Palestine and the American Muslims for Palestine, and has found significant links between Qatari funding and the presence of these groups on U.S. campuses. Some of the most lavish Qatari funding went to campuses such as Columbia and Harvard universities, where antisemitism has become a growing threat.
Mexico
Our southern neighbor employs a more subtle approach, utilizing joint university programs, binational cultural exchanges, and language-immersion programs, which are often financed by Mexico’s extensive consulate network in the U.S. or the Foreign Ministry itself, to influence U.S. students. Through these means, Mexico emphasizes the Mexican War of 1848, deportation programs, and casts Mexico as a victim in the relationship. This is not new to Mexico, which, during the student radical days of the 1960s and 1970s, quietly used its consulates to support groups such as the Brown Berets and the Chicano Movement in general.
Joint programs include those between the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Arizona, or between UNAM and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Among the goals of the Tucson program were “to develop joint programs of study, encourage joint research projects, strengthen student mobility, promote Mexican culture, and support migrant programs.” Leftist Mexican professors are then free to give lectures on “Yankee imperialism.”
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Mexico’s Foreign Ministry even directly funds the Mexican Cultural Institutes, such as the one in San Antonio. The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, has partnerships, such as with the Tucson Unified School District in Arizona. Materials, of course, incorporate Mexican perspectives. According to a 2022 National Education Association report, in programs at Pima Community College in Arizona, Mexican-sourced texts emphasize economic exploitation and cultural erasure.
These are just four examples. Many other countries exploit the open U.S. system. There is a role for Congress to play in this matter through legislation. And obviously, Qatar and Mexico are not adversaries of the U.S., and can be encouraged to do better. But this also means that efforts such as the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which I am a member of and includes over 40 organizations, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, cannot come a minute too soon. We should get started right away, undoing all this rot.
