admin
Former Rep. Pete King and fellow conservative Jack Kingston laid into the collapse of our civic education on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Weekend, warning that an entire generation is being fed a steady diet of left-wing talking points instead of the basics that made this country great. They argued that the result is a politicized, impressionable Gen Z that doesn’t understand American history or the responsibilities of citizenship. This is not a policy debate; it’s a national emergency for anyone who loves liberty and the Constitution.
The facts back up their fury: the Nation’s Report Card shows troubling drops in civics and U.S. history scores, an education system still reeling from pandemic disruption and ideological capture. When young people can’t identify the functions of our constitutional system or grasp the lessons of our founding, we aren’t just losing test scores — we’re losing the next generation’s commitment to ordered liberty. Washington’s education bureaucrats and union bosses must be held accountable for these catastrophic declines.
Meanwhile, the political consequences are real and measurable: recent polling has found unusually high favorable views of socialism and even communism among younger voters, a trend that should terrify every patriot. When kids are taught to distrust free enterprise and praise collectivist nostrums, you can expect results like more calls to expand government power and undercut national sovereignty at the ballot box. This is exactly the kind of cultural shift Pete King and Kingston warned about — one manufactured by activist educators and amplified by Big Tech echo chambers.
Republicans can’t win by pretending the problem isn’t political. King and Kingston rightly pointed out that conservative messaging must break through the media filter and speak directly to parents, families, and working-class Americans who still believe in the American dream. That means campaigning on school choice, parental rights, and restoring rigorous standards in civics and history so kids learn how our republic actually works instead of being lectured in grievance studies. If conservatives fail to make education reform a top midterm issue, we’ll watch the rot deepen.
The urgency is underscored by the broader NAEP data on reading and math, which show pandemic-era learning losses that haven’t been repaired by tired, woke curricula. Restoring literacy and numeracy is the first step in defending truth; without it, young voters are easy prey for demagogues and ideological organizers. Conservatives should force a choice: either schools teach children how to read and think, or taxpayers demand alternatives that do.
In researching the Wake Up America Weekend segment I found multiple Newsmax appearances where King and Kingston hammered these points and paired their commentary with public data on learning declines and polls about young Americans’ political leanings. I could not locate a full verbatim transcript of the specific YouTube clip you cited, so this piece relies on their on-air comments and the publicly available NAEP and polling evidence to explain why a propagandized Gen Z is the predictable consequence of a failed education system and why conservatives must act now to win the midterms and save our civic future.
