While conservatives celebrated Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory, a more insidious battle for America’s future continues raging in classrooms across the nation. Peter Schweizer’s latest warning should serve as a wake-up call to every patriotic parent: “Social Emotional Learning” programs are systematically dismantling the intellectual foundations that built American greatness, and Trump’s return to the White House won’t automatically stop this ideological assault on our children.
For three decades, progressive educators have weaponized SEL to transform schools from institutions of learning into centers of emotional manipulation. Under the guise of supporting student “wellness,” these programs systematically collect intimate psychological data from children, creating permanent records that treat temporary feelings as evidence of systemic problems requiring radical solutions.
The results speak for themselves. American students continue falling behind international competitors in mathematics, science, and reading while excelling in anxiety, depression, and an alarming inability to engage with ideas that challenge their worldview. This isn’t coincidence—it’s the predictable outcome of replacing rigorous academic instruction with therapeutic programming designed to validate every fleeting emotion as profound truth.
Consider the constitutional implications. SEL’s core premise that “words are violence” directly undermines First Amendment principles that have sustained American democracy for nearly 250 years. Students conditioned to view disagreement as aggression cannot participate in the robust debate essential to republican self-governance. They become citizens in name only, lacking the intellectual courage necessary to defend liberty against its inevitable challengers.
The economic consequences prove equally devastating. American employers increasingly struggle to find workers capable of handling criticism, solving complex problems, or adapting to changing circumstances. When education prioritizes emotional comfort over intellectual rigor, it produces graduates unprepared for the competitive global economy that determines national prosperity.
Schweizer’s research exposes how graduate education programs have created an activist teacher pipeline that prioritizes ideological conversion over academic excellence. These educators view traditional American values—individual responsibility, merit-based achievement, constitutional governance—as obstacles to their utopian vision rather than foundational principles worth preserving and transmitting.
The data mining aspect deserves particular scrutiny. SEL programs routinely survey children about their family relationships, political views, and personal struggles, creating detailed psychological profiles without meaningful parental consent. This represents a fundamental violation of family privacy rights and establishes dangerous precedents for government intrusion into the parent-child relationship.
Yet this challenge also presents unprecedented opportunity for the America First movement. Parents nationwide are awakening to SEL’s true nature and demanding accountability from school boards that have operated without oversight for too long. The same populist energy that delivered Trump’s victory can transform local education by electing school board members committed to academic excellence over ideological indoctrination.
The path forward requires sustained engagement at every level. Patriots must demand complete transparency regarding SEL implementation in their districts while supporting candidates who will eliminate federal funding for these programs. States should follow Florida’s example by restricting emotional surveys and requiring parental consent for any psychological assessment of students.
More fundamentally, Americans must reclaim education’s core mission: transmitting knowledge, developing critical thinking skills, and cultivating the civic virtues necessary for self-governance. This means prioritizing mathematics over mood management, literature over therapeutic intervention, and constitutional principles over progressive ideology.
Trump’s victory demonstrated that Americans reject elite attempts to fundamentally transform their nation. Now patriots must extend that same resistance to the classroom, where the battle for America’s future will ultimately be won or lost. Our children deserve better than emotional manipulation disguised as education—they deserve the intellectual tools necessary to preserve and extend the liberty their ancestors died to secure.
The choice remains clear: restore rigorous education focused on knowledge and virtue, or surrender the next generation to ideological programming designed to produce compliant subjects rather than free citizens.
