Fox News host Pete Hegseth lamented a disturbing new survey from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics that shows American youth have a problem with their country — as in, they hate it.
According to the results of the bi-annual Harvard Youth Poll, only 31 percent of young Americans believe their country should be considered “exceptional,” while half of respondents — 50 percent — believe “there are other nations as great or greater than America.”
Students who identify as Democrats are the least likely to think America is great — no surprise there — followed by those who identify as Independents. Republican students are the least likely to think America sucks.
But what’s disturbing Hegseth is that the current number of students who believe America is “exceptional” is down from more than 50 percent of young Americans who believed that as recently as 2013 based on a separate poll he cited (and let’s face it — that figure was too low as well).
During “Fox News Primetime” on Wednesday, Hegseth said the drop in support for America among our youth does not bode well for our country’s future.
“If you go by the old adage the children are the future, then plain as day this poll shows that the future hates America, or at least they think there’s nothing special about America. It’s just one of many countries,” he said, going on to blame the decline in support for the country on our system of higher education.
“If I had a dollar for every parent who came up to me out on the road and said my kid went to college as a God-fearing patriot and they came back a Bernie socialist who questions America, I’d be a rich man,” he said.
The reason for that became crystal clear during what he called America’s “COVID 1619 moment,” when primary school youth were forced to learn from home and their parents were able to listen to the curriculum.
“It was a moment where we saw what they were really teaching. That it’s not just colleges and universities. It’s elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools,” Hegseth said.
According to BizPac Review:
It wasn’t always like this. According to one of the Fox News host’s former college mentors, Princeton University professor Robbie George, the limited indoctrination that did exist back in the day used to only exist on the college level.
“There were [college] professors who wanted to take the kid who might have come from a farm family in Iowa and is now at Yale or Princeton. The kid was a boy scout. The kid was a churchgoer. And the liberal professor would rub his hands together and say OK, I’m going to take this kid brought up by these rubes and hicks out there and I’m going to indoctrinate him in liberal ideology,” the professor told Hegseth.
Things have since changed, however, and dramatically so.
“If such professors exist today, they must be very frustrated, because they lose their opportunity to indoctrinate the kid, because the kid comes in pre-indoctrinated,” George noted.
Hegseth remarked that the long-term consequences of what amounts to pure anti-American indoctrination year after year is that, “as Abraham Lincoln said, the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation becomes the philosophy of government in the next.”
“Can you keep a country if you’re teaching young people to hate that very same country?” he asked.
“America was founded on Western Christian principles. Our founders? The product of the fusion, the beauty, the brilliance of Athens and Rome and Jerusalem. They knew and understood the Bible inside and out. They knew Latin. They understood the classics, [and] they understood human nature: who we are as sinful creatures…hell-bent on power and greed,” Hegseth continued.
“They built the system – the first in human history – designed to restrain government and protect God-given rights for the individual: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
However, the institutional left in America hates the country for some reason and has made that plain.
“So while for decades, patriots and conservatives fought for good things like free markets and defeating communists and Islamists, the left focused on culture and classrooms. They specifically targeted the way we educate our young people by focusing on removing the most important ingredients,” Hegseth continued.
“They knew our Judeo-Christian faith and tradition were the key to our human freedoms. Our founders understood that; George Washington talked about it. So the progressives knew they had to get rid of it,” the Fox News host concluded.
The latest Harvard Youth Poll indicates that the future doesn’t look bright if America lovers can’t reverse the trend among our youth.
