Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation

by Pete Hegseth

politics is a lagging indicator. Things change in our politics because our culture has already changed. In this way, representative politics in America is a reflection of the culture we cultivate (or that is intentionally cultivated for us). My pastor, Chris Durkin, calls it the “cult of culture.” Culture sets the tone. Culture determines what, as a society, we lionize and idolize.

Yet America spends even more on school than on defense—more than $700 billion annually on education alone. The largest union in the United States supports not steelworkers or the teamsters, but schoolteachers. Public schools in the United States are the largest state-owned monopoly in the world, outside of China.