by Alex Newman
When 30-year law-enforcement veteran Jeff Geoghagan sent his two children to a Seattle-area school on February 1, he never would have dreamed that his students’ tax-funded “education” would include dangerous anti-police indoctrination portraying law-enforcement officers as racist murderers and savages. But it did. His children and their friends were left confused and distraught. And now, Geoghagan — who stumbled on the tip of the iceberg — is mad, disgusted, and seeking answers.
According to Geoghagan and various news reports, students across Washington State’s Mercer Island School District were subjected to a dishonest propaganda film literally painting American cops as mass killers. The video, produced by “news” presenter Ayshah Tull, claimed to be a documentary explaining Black Lives Matter during Black History Month. In reality, it was a compilation of lies, race-mongering, and half-truths designed to stir up hatred against police and the broader justice system.
In the film, Tull describes how American “police kill more than 1,000 people a year.” On the screen, students were shown a graphic claiming that in 2019, “1,098 people in America were killed by police.” Setting aside the fact that this appears to be a significant overestimate, there is no context offered at all suggesting that even one of those fatalities may have been justified.
“The statistics are stark,” Tull claims ominously, painting a racial narrative and citing a “statistic” that “99% of killings by police don’t result in criminal charges.” According to Tull, these numbers are why the Black Lives Matter movement came about, which, she says, “comes from the urgent need to address police brutality.” The video then takes statistics from Mapping Police Violence, a fringe anti-police organization co-led by DeRay Mckesson, an activist who seeks to literally abolish the police.
Of course, the far more relevant statistics are not mentioned at all. Consider, for example, the fact that of the 251 black Americans killed in police encounters in 2019, fewer than 20 were unarmed. And even among those who were technically unarmed, many were fighting against the police or even reaching for the officers’ weapons. Also left unmentioned were the multiple studies showing that white officers were less likely to shoot black suspects than white ones. The children had no idea.
Geoghagan was furious about this indoctrination of his precious little ones. “The video makes several claims about the use of force by police officers that are blatantly false,” the longtime lawman explained to school officials. “The entire video has an extreme anti-police view. It is woefully inappropriate material for students…. As a former police officer, a parent, and a member of this community, I am extremely concerned about the content and misrepresentations in this video.”
Perhaps even more alarming than the negative attitudes is the risk such propaganda poses, Geoghagan continued. “As a parent, coach, and as an emergency substitute teacher, I am in regular and routine contact with school-aged children on Mercer Island,” he said. “The characterization and blatant misstatements of fact directly impact my interaction with these children and any interactions that these children have with police officers they may come in contact with. Imagine the reaction of the impressionable children watching the video and the skewed perspective they may have of me, my family, and the extraordinary men and women with whom I proudly served.”
Systemic Anti-police Bias
The story is hardly unique. All across the country from Florida to Washington State, and even in other English-speaking Western nations, children in public schools are being bombarded with extremist anti-police propaganda disguised as “anti-racism” training or “Black Lives Matter” lessons. Indeed, critical race theory — the Marxist-inspired ideology that condemns America and its institutions (including policing) as “systemically racist” — now permeates practically every facet of what passes as “public education” today.
A public-school teacher at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles made headlines after decorating the classroom with anti-American, anti-police propaganda. One poster on the wall of the class, which was photographed and posted on social media before being picked up in news reports, featured the words “F*** America” and “F*** the Police.”
“Policing is a violent, anti-black settler institution that originated as slave patrols,” the poster falsely informed students, echoing common talking points among anti-police extremists and race hustlers. “Their primary mandate is to protect property and to militarily enforce white supremacist capitalism. They are doing their jobs as they are trained and paid to do. You can’t fix what isn’t broken. That’s why we fight for police and prison abolition. F*** the Police.”
Again, this was on a tax-funded classroom wall, put there by a tax-funded “educator,” as part of taxpayer-funded “education” for children!
Further up the West Coast, a yearbook for Washington State’s Woodinville High School featured a photo of a student at a Black Lives Matter rally carrying an “ACAB” sign. ACAB, of course, stands for “All Cops Are B*****ds.” The acronym has become a rallying cry of the Defund the Police movement as well as the far-left militant group Antifa, which has a history of violent attacks on police officers and has even seized control of and set ablaze police precincts. And that attitude has been and is being instilled in tens of millions of young children by their schools and so-called “entertainment.”
Another yearbook for a separate school just 50 miles from Woodinville featured an entire “Black Lives Matter” section glorifying the Marxist group and encouraging readers to donate to it. Alongside that is a piece of “art” that features a police officer beating a kneeling black woman with a baton as a white woman tries to protect her from the officer. The district defended the decision to publish the propaganda, with a spokesman telling the New York Post that “yearbooks often serve as a historical publication.”
Meanwhile, schools in South Carolina were caught assigning anti-police books such as All American Boys and The Hate U Give that “address racism and police brutality.” Both feature racist police murdering or brutalizing black children. Critics were outraged.
“Freshmen, they’re at the age where their interactions with law enforcement have been very minimal. They’re not driving yet, they haven’t been stopped for speeding, they don’t have these type of interactions,” John Blackmon, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Tri-County Lodge #3 in Charleston County, told local news station WCBD. “This is putting in their minds, it’s almost an indoctrination of distrust of police and we’ve got to put a stop to that.”
In Florida, schools were caught assigning another anti-police propaganda book, Ghost Boys, to fifth-grade children, most of whom are around age 10. The back cover of the book reads: “Twelve year old [sic] Jerome is the latest victim, shot by a white police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a threat. As a ghost, he observes the devastation that’s been unleashed on his family and community in the wake of what they see as an unjust and brutal killing.”
The book also includes easily discredited falsehoods. “Did you know Black people are shot by cops two and a half more times than white people,” the book claims, falsely. “In 2015 over 1,000 unarmed Black people were killed!’” Of course, neither of those statistics is even remotely accurate. According to The Washington Post, just 95 unarmed people were killed by police that year, and just 38 of those were black. The overwhelming majority of those shot and killed by police were white, too.
Florida Fraternal Order of Police District 5 Director Paul Kempenski wrote an open letter blasting the decision to subject young children to this sort of blatantly fraudulent propaganda. “This book convinces its reader — the children of our community — that police officers regularly lie as they routinely murder children, while painting police officers as racists,” he wrote, blasting it for promoting “an inaccurate and absurd stereotype of police officers in America.”
“Teaching for Black Lives”
Another resource used in “education” nationwide, a handbook titled “Teaching for Black Lives,” is touted as a tool to teach educators how they “can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-blackness.” At the heart of that mission is demonizing the police.
Indeed, just the introduction focuses endlessly on examples of alleged police racism and brutality. It goes on to claim that a lack of enough black people in school curricula causes black students to become defiant, which then leads them to “get swept up by police officers stationed in school and be hit with criminal charges.”
“The school-to-prison pipeline is a major contributor to the overall epidemic of police violence and mass incarceration that functions as one of sharpest edges of structural racism in the United States,” the handbook’s introduction tells teachers.
The handbook also claims true education is about “orienting them [students] toward community activism and social transformation.” In other words, the handbook is a piece of propaganda designed to indoctrinate students against police and America and then turn them into anti-American, anti-police activists.
In the minds of the racialist authors and editors of the handbook, that activism should become a full-blown revolution. “A new rebellion against structural racism is under way in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement, galvanized by extrajudicial executions of Black people by the police,” it says approvingly, as if “extrajudicial executions of Black people by the police” were common occurrences plaguing the nation.
Teachers, the disjointed and often incoherent propaganda handbook says, must “fight back” against the allegedly racist policing and justice systems by, among other strategies, indoctrinating children and “march[ing] against police brutality in the streets.”
After detailing a number of high-profile incidents involving police, such as the deaths of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, the teachers’ handbook goes on to describe America’s entire justice system as racist. “Student walkouts, mass marches, and urban rebellions swept the country as people’s anger boiled over at the racist criminal (in)justice system,” it reads. “The continuing police murders of Black people, and the refusal of the court system to punish police for these crimes, has continued to fuel an explosion of protests — from the streets to the schools.”
The first section of the handbook, meanwhile, “frames how police violence and the movement for Black lives can explicitly be brought to schools and classrooms by educators through organizing mass action and through curriculum,” it states. In other words, teachers have a duty to indoctrinate their children to hate police.
“We do not expect Teaching for Black Lives to end police violence against Black communities, stop anti-Black racism in schools, or end the school-to-prison pipeline,” the document continues. “We do, however, see this collection as playing an important role in highlighting the ways educators can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as well as sites for knowing the hope and beauty in Blackness.”
This sort of indoctrination is highly effective, too, since children do not have access to factual information. And it is even in the heartland of the nation. When Muncie, Indiana, school officials asked a teacher to take down from the hallway an anti-police display featuring an image of a police officer as a pig, almost 300 brainwashed students protested the decision, spewing the sort of anti-police extremism that is now ubiquitous in schools and on TV.
The anti-police hysteria coming out of American “educational” institutions and media has gotten so extreme that it has now infested public schools in other English-speaking nations as well. At the Lindfield Learning Village in New South Wales, Australia, for instance, posters were hung in a classroom with messages such as “stop killer cops” and “Pigs out of the country.” Officials said this was a response to the situation in America.
Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory
Much of this indoctrination in the classroom is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. As the Law Enforcement Intelligence Brief documented in an issue last year, Black Lives Matter is not a “civil rights” group at all. Instead, it is a revolutionary movement that was founded by three self-proclaimed “trained Marxists.” Their goal is to overthrow the American system of government and replace it with a Marxist regime along the lines of the vicious dictatorship ruling Venezuela. One of the three founders, Opal Tometi, even posted on social media a picture of herself next to mass-murdering Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, praising the nation’s politics. Top leaders of the group regularly praise cop killers, too.
The movement, which has been funded by billionaire anti-police extremists such as George Soros as well as numerous Fortune 500 companies, was responsible for violent protests and unrest. It caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage to communities nationwide just in recent years. BLM riots and affiliated unrest resulted in the burning down or seizing of police precincts, the murder of multiple police officers, and a growing hostility to law-enforcement nationwide. Surges in crime were the predictable result of the movement’s calls to “defund the police.” Now, the movement is determined to make school children the top priority.
The roots of this indoctrination go deep, stretching back a century to Marxist theorists seeking ways to overthrow societies and implement communism. The racialized Marxist argument is that police and law enforcement uphold white supremacy and the property rights of the “dominant” or “oppressor” class, at the expense of the “victim” or “oppressed” class. Of course, adults can see this is silly. But when taught to children who do not know better, it causes a profound hatred for and distrust of police.
Even more ominously, this sowing of distrust divides communities from each other and their public servants — especially the men and women in law enforcement. And it drastically increases the danger to both citizens and law enforcement. Children who are repeatedly told that police are racist monsters upholding “white supremacy” while looking to murder innocent black people will end up not just distrusting police, but inevitably lashing out in violence, too.
There is a method to the madness. Every communist revolution in history has been marked by the division of a society into two groups: the oppressors and the oppressed. In Communist China, mass-murdering dictator Chairman Mao Tse-Tung divided the Chinese people into a red class and a black class. The red class — workers, landless peasants, and revolutionaries — was said to be the oppressed who could only be liberated by a revolution against the black class. Meanwhile, the black class — landowners, business owners, the educated, and counter-revolutionaries — were the oppressors who had to be overthrown at all costs.
The result was a bloodbath of unprecedented proportions. Children from the black classes turned against their parents and families, even handing them over to the authorities to be tortured and executed. They were forced to apologize in a bizarre ritual dubbed “self-criticism,” which bears stunning resemblance to the schools in America forcing children to apologize for their “white privilege.” In the end, Mao and his minions murdered an estimated 75 million to 100 million Chinese people.
Victims of communism who have fled to the United States from around the world recognize the same disturbing developments here. And many are sounding the alarm surrounding what they are seeing. The reason so many victims of communism see the parallels between CRT and what they experienced under communist oppression is simple: critical race theory, a derivative of critical theory, is literally a Marxist tool created by Marxists to be used for dividing and conquering nations to further Marxist objectives.
Leaving aside the fact that the Bible never speaks of “race” as an issue — in fact the Bible says all men come from “one blood” and are descended from Adam and Eve — the New Testament sheds light on the dangers of CRT and its utility for subversives. Three of the four Gospels quote Jesus warning that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. In fact, Matthew quotes Him warning that divided kingdoms will be “laid waste” or “brought to desolation.” That is the point: Marxists know dividing a nation will destroy it.
In Europe and other places, “class” was used as the dividing fault line. In America — the land of opportunity and unprecedented wealth — such demagoguery was not effective. And so, communist theorists decided to weaponize racial issues, and now “gender and sexuality,” to divide society into “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Former Communist Party USA leader Manning Johnson, after realizing the evils of communism, defected and warned that the communists were racists themselves, and were weaponizing race to destroy America.
The Outcome
With an entire generation of young Americans being indoctrinated to believe these lies, the nation is in grave danger. Already, the results of this propaganda in school are becoming obvious. Young Americans are becoming increasingly hostile to police, government, and even America itself. The nation’s foundational principles — the notion that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, for instance — are being replaced with hatred, division, violence, and more. If this continues, tragedy awaits.
From a police perspective, the brainwashing of children in schools to view police as dangerous racists and murderers represents an enormous threat to officer safety. Children trained to view police in such a way are far more likely to lash out violently, resist arrest, or even shoot at law-enforcement officers. The indoctrination is also a threat to law and order, as the institutions and individuals that uphold them are painted as tools of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”
Interestingly, federal law enforcement is rarely demonized like America’s local and county agencies. That is because many of those pushing the narrative have openly stated that one of their goals is the federalization of all law enforcement in America. Infamous race hustler Al Sharpton, caught on film urging supporters to start “offing the pigs,” even said in 2015 that the U.S. Justice Department should “take over policing in this country.” That is their goal.
Of course, every communist, socialist, and fascist dictatorship of the last century has relied on a centralized national police agency to terrorize the population into submission. Local police accountable to and friendly with a local community could never be used for that purpose. Thus, it should be no surprise that would-be tyrants would like nothing more than to see America’s decentralized system of local law enforcement dismantled and replaced with an unaccountable national force.
The brainwashing and weaponization of America’s children against police is literally an existential crisis, not just to American law enforcement but to the very nation itself. Police and those who support them must work to ensure that the false anti-police propaganda and misleading narratives have no place in taxpayer-funded classrooms, or anywhere else. The lives of countless officers — and civilization itself — hang in the balance.