Sen. J.D. Vance described the not-so-secret agenda of America’s radical left: “And so there’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.”

Predictably, in near unison, America’s media establishment tried to play the Uno reverse card, crying: “He’s weird!”  The media chose ad hominem attacks rather than an even cursory look at the policies that Vance and many other parents find objectionable.

Flack is always heaviest when you’re over the target: Vance is right. The left is indeed trying to brainwash our children. Worse, the far left wants to take our children. President Joe Biden said it clearly, claiming there’s “no such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.”

To conservative ears, the president’s words echo another socialist bent on committing youth to the state. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.’”

Adolf Hitler knew well that socialism, above all else, needed to capture the minds of the youth. In a socialist society, children logically and morally belong to the state, as community outranks the rights of the individual. The Holocaust Encyclopedia lists the myriad ways in which the Third Reich indoctrinated German children through toys, books, board games and education. The indoctrination increased as the child aged, with the ultimate goal to create the Wermacht’s storm troopers.

Similarly, America’s pathway to leftist nirvana begins with gender-neutral infant toys at Target, carries on to showing preschoolers how to apply makeup to their fathers on Blue’s Clues, and debates critical race theory, transgender bathrooms, sex ed and males competing in women’s athletics while U.S. reading and math scores plummet. This year, we have all seen on elite college campuses what happens by the time these indoctrinated children reach young adulthood.

Under this onslaught, pillars of American culture are crumbling as conservative American families choose to leave liberal mainline churches, jettison the Boy Scouts and opt for home schooling. Many conservatives simply retreat rather than fight woke ministers, scout masters and school officials.

Yet, some Americans cannot retreat: our military. A recent report from government watchdog OpentheBooks reveals how the left is attempting to infiltrate the school systems that teach our service member’s children. With 161 schools, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) is responsible for the education of 66,000 schoolchildren worldwide. Under the Biden administration, the DoDEA has taken a sharp left turn.

Last week, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and Republican House Military Personnel Subcommittee Chairman Jim Banks of Indiana, fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The pair lambasted Austin for allowing DoDEA to promote sexually explicit content to children, furnish training aimed to get children to cry and advance classroom materials to turn students into radical activists.

“This is inherently in opposition to the selfless choice our service members make to serve, protect, and defend the United States of America,” the letter said.

This is not the first time Republicans have tried to cut DEI out of the DoD education system. Last year, Stefanik included a parent’s bill of rights into the National Defense Authorization Act for 2024. Republican House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers of Alabama took the DoDEA’s diversity, equity and inclusion chief, Kelisa Wing, to task for tweets such as: “Where can I get a break from white nonsense for a while?”

As Stefanik proved with her blistering questioning of the university presidents of Harvard, Yale and M.I.T., conservatives who engage and fight leftist indoctrination can win.

It’s time that other conservatives step up and put a stop to the radical indoctrination of our service member’s children.

Morgan Murphy is a former DoD press secretary, national security adviser in the U.S. Senate, a veteran of Afghanistan.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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