THEY ARE NOT JUST TEACHING OUR CHILDREN. THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO HATE THE COUNTRY WE LEAVE BEHIND.

September 19, 2026•11 min read

THEY ARE NOT JUST TEACHING OUR CHILDREN. THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO HATE THE COUNTRY WE LEAVE BEHIND.

The man millions of Americans expect to make them laugh stopped smiling and sounded an alarm about the enemies within, the classrooms shaping our children, and a country being taught to turn against itself.

By FactsFirstus.com Editor | September 19, 2026

The studio looked the same.

The lights were bright. The cameras were rolling. Greg Gutfeld was in his chair, exactly where viewers expected to find him.

But something was different.

The grin was gone.

About a week ago, the man millions of Americans turn to for a laugh stopped trying to be funny.

For readers who do not know him, Gutfeld is the host of Gutfeld! and a co-host of The Five on Fox News. He is a political commentator, author, and satirist who has built his career by finding the absurdity buried inside the day's anger. When the news becomes unbearable, he usually reaches for the blade of sarcasm and cuts through it.

That is what his audience expects.

It is not what they received during that broadcast.

There was no mischievous smile preparing the next punch line. There was no joke waiting to release the tension. Gutfeld leaned into the moment with the expression of a man who believed the time for laughing had passed.

The voice was familiar.

The message was not.

What followed was not comedy. It was a warning.

“There are moments in history where things hang in the balance.”

Greg Gutfeld

Gutfeld said those moments demand courage, resolve, and leadership. Then he put words to the fear hanging over a country that looks in the mirror and increasingly struggles to recognize itself.

Does it not feel as if America is standing in one of those moments right now?

The threat he described was not gathering on a distant battlefield. It was not sailing toward the coast or moving across a foreign border.

It was already inside.

Inside the institutions Americans were raised to trust. Inside the language used to divide neighbors by race. Inside the lessons shaping what children believe about their country before they are old enough to weigh the evidence for themselves.

Gutfeld called it the enemy within.

The phrase is uncomfortable.

It is supposed to be.

No nation collapses only because enemies attack it from the outside. Nations also collapse when they lose the will to defend what they are. They collapse when their people are taught that their inheritance is shameful, their history is unforgivable, their faith is dangerous, and their country is beyond redemption.

They collapse when the next generation learns to despise the house before it understands who built it, who died defending it, or why so many people still risk everything to enter it.

That is the fire Gutfeld was pointing toward. Not a country conquered from the outside, but a country hollowed out from within until too few people remember why it deserves to survive.

His warning is still generating discussion because millions of parents and grandparents recognize the feeling. They have watched the language change. They have watched academic achievement recast as privilege, discipline attacked as oppression, patriotism treated as ignorance, and disagreement labeled as hate.

They have watched children become political territory.

And they know this did not happen overnight.

Two years before his recent warning, Gutfeld described what he believed was happening to young children through ideological education about race. He did not whisper. He did not hide behind the careful language of a committee report. He said it plainly.

“It's pure indoctrination.”

Greg Gutfeld, speaking on Gutfeld! on February 6, 2024.

He condemned the idea of teaching five-year-old children that white people and America are irredeemably evil. He said adults were being trained to search for hidden bigotry in children playing with blocks or games such as Duck, Duck, Goose.

He asked what happens when a child is taught to see racism before that child can even spell the word.

What happens when teachers are encouraged to view innocent behavior through a racial lens?

What happens when young children are separated in their own minds into oppressors and victims before they have learned multiplication, American history, or the meaning of citizenship?

Gutfeld's answer was brutal.

“America gets betrayed before kids even reach first grade.”

Greg Gutfeld

That is not a criticism of every teacher. It is an indictment of an ideology.

There are extraordinary teachers in this country. There are teachers who buy supplies with their own money, stay late for struggling students, protect children from broken homes, and carry burdens most people never see. They deserve gratitude.

But gratitude cannot become a gag order.

Respecting teachers does not require parents to surrender their judgment. Supporting public schools does not require the public to ignore what is being taught. Trust does not mean closing your eyes, paying the bill, and hoping the people shaping your child's mind share your values.

They may not.

That is the truth too many Americans were afraid to say for too long.

Gutfeld went directly at one of the most destructive ideas to emerge from the politics of equity.

“Academic achievement is a marker of white privilege.”

Greg Gutfeld, describing the ideology he was condemning.

Think about what that message does to a child.

If achievement is privilege, effort becomes suspect. If excellence belongs to one race, success becomes something to apologize for. If standards produce unequal results, the standards become the enemy. The answer is no longer to lift struggling children toward achievement. The answer is to lower the meaning of achievement until failure can be renamed fairness.

That does not liberate a child.

It robs the child.

It steals the belief that hard work matters. It poisons the relationship between classmates. It teaches some children to carry guilt they did not earn and others to carry anger they did not create. It turns the classroom from a place of discovery into a courtroom where ancestry is evidence and skin color is the verdict.

This is not racial healing.

It is racial resentment handed to children by adults who should know better.

For nearly two hundred fifty years, Americans have fought, bled, marched, prayed, voted, and died to move this nation closer to the principle declared at its birth. All people are created equal.

America did not always live by that promise. Slavery mocked it. Segregation violated it. Discrimination denied it. The country carries real scars, and children must learn where those scars came from.

But those failures are not the entire American story.

The story also includes the people who fought slavery, broke segregation, expanded liberty, crossed oceans to defeat tyranny, built institutions, opened doors, raised families, defended neighbors, and forced the nation to honor words it had too often betrayed.

That is the story the cynics leave out.

They teach the wound and erase the healing. They teach the sin and ignore the sacrifice. They present America as uniquely evil while enjoying freedoms unavailable in much of the world.

Then they call it education.

The consequences are no longer theoretical.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 22 percent of eighth-grade students performed at or above the proficient level in civics in 2022. Only 13 percent reached proficiency in United States history. The nation's average eighth-grade civics score declined for the first time in the history of the assessment.

Those children are growing up.

They will vote. They will sit on juries. They will enter newsrooms, corporations, courtrooms, classrooms, and legislatures. They will inherit the authority to preserve the Republic or dismantle it.

Yet millions are approaching adulthood without a firm understanding of the system they will control.

A child who does not understand the Constitution will not recognize when government violates it.

A child who does not understand free speech will believe speech is protected only when it is approved.

A child who does not understand due process will cheer when it is denied to the right enemy.

A child who knows only America's failures will see no reason to save it.

And a child who does not understand September 11 will be vulnerable to anyone willing to rewrite it.

That was the shadow over Gutfeld's words about a week ago.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, he reflected on the more than one hundred million Americans born since that morning. They never saw the smoke rise. They never watched the second plane hit. They never felt the silence of grounded skies or the terror of families waiting for calls that never came.

Their memory of September 11 will come from someone else.

Who will tell them what happened?

Who will explain the hatred that drove the attackers?

Who will tell them about the people who ran into burning buildings while thousands ran out?

Who will teach them that America did not deserve the murder of innocent people?

Gutfeld did not hide his fear as a father.

“I don't want my kid hearing that.”

Greg Gutfeld, rejecting the idea that America deserved September 11.

That sentence reaches beyond politics.

Every parent eventually faces the same frightening truth. You will not always be in the room. You will not hear every lesson, see every screen, know every influence, or stand beside your child when someone presents ideology as fact.

There will be moments when another adult tells your child what America is, what faith means, what history proves, and what kind of person your child is allowed to become.

Silence leaves that moment to someone else.

That is why this story cannot end with outrage at teachers, unions, bureaucrats, or the political left. Outrage alone changes nothing. Posting a clip changes nothing. Complaining after the damage is done changes nothing.

Parents must look.

Read the assignments. Examine the books. Attend the meetings. Ask what teacher training materials say. Demand to know whether children are being taught how to think or being told what to believe.

Ask whether a lesson presents evidence or demands obedience.

Ask whether it teaches history or recruits activists.

Ask whether it brings children together as Americans or separates them by race before sending them home angry at one another.

Then refuse to be intimidated.

The strategy of ideological power depends on silence. It depends on parents being too busy, too trusting, too frightened, or too exhausted to ask questions. It depends on ordinary people backing down the moment they are accused of intolerance.

The accusation works only if Americans allow it to work.

There is nothing hateful about demanding that children learn to read, write, reason, calculate, and understand their country.

There is nothing racist about believing achievement should be celebrated.

There is nothing dangerous about teaching children to love America while telling them the truth about its failures.

There is nothing extreme about insisting that a five-year-old is a child, not raw material for a political movement.

What is extreme is teaching children to distrust one another before they know one another.

What is extreme is turning innocence into evidence.

What is extreme is convincing a generation that the country their grandparents defended is too corrupt to deserve their loyalty.

America is approaching its 250th birthday, but age does not guarantee survival. A country can retain its flag, its buildings, its elections, and its name while losing the spirit that made those things matter.

The destruction does not always arrive with tanks.

Sometimes it arrives in a lesson.

Sometimes it hides inside a training seminar.

Sometimes it enters through a child who comes home believing that love of country is shameful, faith is foolish, excellence is oppressive, and neighbors with the wrong politics are enemies.

By the time the adults notice, the fire is already inside the walls.

Gutfeld sounded the alarm. Now the country must decide whether it will listen.

Parents have a choice.

Grandparents have a choice.

Teachers have a choice.

School boards have a choice.

Every American who still believes this country is imperfect but worth saving has a choice.

We can continue handing our children to institutions we refuse to examine. We can remain silent while ideology fills the space where history, faith, character, and citizenship once stood. We can wait until another generation knows everything America did wrong and nothing Americans sacrificed to make it right.

Or we can stand up.

Not with hatred. Not with violence. Not with censorship.

With truth. With courage. With questions that will not go away simply because powerful people do not want to answer them.

The enemies within are counting on Americans to remain polite, distracted, divided, and silent.

They are counting on parents not to look.

They are counting on citizens not to care.

They are counting on the country forgetting itself before the children are old enough to remember it.

That is the battle now.

It is already inside the classroom.

It is already inside the culture.

And the future of America is already sitting at a desk, listening.

Official Sources