“Does equity mean that everyone gets the same grade in the end?” I asked the vice principal.

The withering response I received — I was accused of “intellectualization” — with the entire staff copied in was meant to discourage me or anyone from piping up in the future.

But then I received an extra credit paper from a student near the end of what turned out to be my final year.

One of my better students submitted a paper originally written for her biology class, arguing that Christianity was to blame for humans’ fear of snakes. She wrote that snakes were venerated in many indigenous cultures — but the Genesis account of the serpent in Eden poisoned human-snake harmony.

I asked her, “Are you saying there’s no biological component to fear of snakes? That it’s entirely a social construction?”

She became agitated, searching for a response before landing on, “Yes, primarily.”

Incredibly, she hadn’t considered the question from a biological perspective despite writing it for biology class — and was so proud of her effort that she submitted it for extra credit in English.

I sent an email to her teacher asking what grade she’d received for the paper. Her teacher was eager to share that she’d gotten a perfect 100%, saying that it had been “well-researched.”

The sheer absurdity of the episode jarred something loose in me. I had previously resisted the conclusion many other teachers around the country had come to by then, that education had been totally captured by a malign ideology.

But it was impossible to dismiss this episode as merely another isolated overreach. A paper like that isn’t written by an apparently intelligent person and then rewarded by another apparently intelligent person by accident. Both of them had been trained.

The woke creation myth

What they had been trained on was a story — one that turned a hundred isolated absurdities into a single coherent one. A creation myth.

At the beginning, “indigenous” peoples lived in a state of natural, Rousseauian bliss in their preordained lands. Then came the fall: white people arrived on their shores, bringing tyranny, slavery, and the destruction of cultures, up to and including human relations with snakes. Redemption demanded the dismantling of the very civilization responsible for this original sin — what the woke scholars and activists call “the work.”

Viewed in this light, the perfect score made sense. She hadn’t been asked to answer the question. She’d been asked to tell the story, and she told it well.

The pattern, once seen, was everywhere. Disdain for the West was constantly reinforced throughout the school day by teachers and administrators trained to weave themes like race, colonialism, and privilege into lessons that, on their face, had nothing to do with any of it. The students were not being taught to think critically about the harder chapters of Western history — a ledger of crimes was all they were shown. They were being taught to reject the civilization that produced it, and to work toward its abolition.

And then there were the endless performative exercises. “Privilege walks” conditioned them to view themselves as occupying a place on a hierarchy of oppression. “Land acknowledgments” taught them to view the United States as a fundamentally illegitimate nation. “Power mapping” sessions had them chart out their own identities to see which made them oppressors and which made them oppressed.

The children, terrified by the prospect of appearing complicit in evil — “silence is violence,” we often heard — participated in this ideological theater eagerly.

Nor did the ideological bombardment stop at the end of the school day. A decade’s worth of movies, television shows, and popular music reinforced the woke creation myth. Sports leagues suddenly scrawled the movement’s slogans on their fields and uniforms. Major corporations rushed to incorporate woke messaging in advertising campaigns. Algorithms on every screen they carried made sure the message never let up.

From the opening bell to lights out, an entire generation of children had it drilled into them that the West, and its crown jewel, America, was so evil that ordinary political engagement was pointless. What was required was not reform, but revolution — overthrow, abolition.

I’ve thought about that snake essay often in recent months as young socialists conquer the Democratic Party with seeming ease. Diversity, equity, and inclusion practices may be in retreat today, but the harvest is only now coming in. The generation that grew up on the creation myth is only now coming of age, and its ideas are making a real imprint on electoral politics for the first time.

The Red-Green Alliance

This generation wasn’t taught to think critically and solve problems. It was trained to bring the story to its ending.

This training primed them for an otherwise inexplicable alliance — one that grows firmer by the day. Hence “Queers for Palestine.”

Progressives and radicalized Islamists agree on almost nothing — not the status of women, not the treatment of homosexuals, not the place of religion in public life. They share one overriding aim: dismantling the civilization that supposedly oppresses them. And that alone is enough to bind them.

Late in 2023, Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” began circulating on TikTok, and young progressives lined up to say it had changed how they saw the world. The reaction was alarm. It should have been recognition. They had spent their formative years being drilled to “dismantle” and to “smash” Western oppression, and here was a man explaining, at length, why he had ordered airplanes flown into the towers that stood for the civilization he wanted gone.

That same fall, reaction to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks was even more direct. At George Washington University, protesters projected “Glory to our martyrs” onto the side of the library. The same language appeared in statements from Students for Justice in Palestine and affiliated groups at Berkeley, Michigan, and Brown. UNC Chapel Hill’s chapter of SJP promoted a campus demonstration with an image of a paraglider — the same weapon Hamas used to descend on the Nova music festival in southern Israel. 

That was 2023, and it was still confined to campus. It isn’t anymore.

Hasan Piker, the progressive movement’s most visible media figure, broadcasts to an audience my former student’s age, in front of a framed New York Times front page from Sept. 12, 2001. He has called it “the cutie Cinderella newspaper from 9/11.”

Earlier this week, Piker spent the night before Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary at a pool party with Abdul el Sayed, now the Democratic nominee for Senate in that state. He was back at el Sayed’s election-night event the following evening. This is not a fringe figure operating on the margins of the party. He is now, by any reasonable measure, part of it.

Abolish America

There should be no mistaking what this coalition intends. Its leaders will tell you, if asked directly. And no one should make the mistake I made for years — filing each new absurdity as an isolated overreach.

Megan Romer, the national co-chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America, went on Fox News Sunday last month and was asked plainly.

POST-WOKE AMERICA? THINK AGAIN

Shannon Bream ran her through it as a lightning round. Abolish the Senate: true. Replace the presidency and the Supreme Court “as we now know them”: absolutely. Abolish ICE. Defund the Pentagon. Public ownership of most large corporations. Borders and prisons she filed under the long term — “as a long-term plan, yep” — the way you concede a point you’ve already thought through.

She never stumbled. She just smiled and nodded along, the way a good student does when she already knows the answer.