Janissaries at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453.
Many things contributed to my decision to uproot my family, move across the country, and leave my career in public education for the foreseeable future. The biggest reason of all was the realization that I wasn’t making a difference, but merely giving the illusion of balance within the public education system and providing it with a veneer of undeserved legitimacy in the process. It took a long time to accept this realization but I’ve come to see America’s modern compulsory education system as a modern devshirme, the primary function of which is to turn American children into Janissaries for the globalist American empire.
The devshirme was practiced by the Ottoman Empire for approximately five centuries. The Christian populations of southeastern Europe and the Middle East—Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, etc.—were its victims. Children of these ancestries were forcibly taken from their parents by the Ottoman State, circumcised, and converted to Islam. Raised to have unquestioning loyalty to the sultan and to Islam, their native cultures were quickly forgotten. When they grew up, they became members of the elite cadre known as the Janissaries. As soldiers, they often became the shock troops of the Muslim sultan who went forth as jihadis, conquering their unconverted Christian cousins.
The Janissaries were handsomely rewarded with wealth and prestige. For a very long time, they comprised the most fanatically loyal pillar supporting and expanding the Ottoman State. Eventually, the Janissaries became so privileged that some Muslim Turks and less observant “Christian” families actually sought to have their own children admitted into their ranks for the material comforts and benefits the position brought.
Something strikingly similar is happening in America today.
This realization was one of the deciding factors in my own demoralization and resignation from the public teaching profession. Despite my best efforts to encourage students to think critically and openly consider the traditions of our ancestors, a majority of my most promising pupils became modern Janissaries for the ruling regime of today. They attended institutions such as Harvard, Chapman, Gonzaga, and the University of Washington. As I saw them become adults, the regime rewarded them with status, wealth, and a feeling of superiority over the unwashed and unwoke masses from whom they originated. I was disillusioned to see the vast majority on social media parroting the usual nonsense about feminism and critical race/gender theory. They willingly internalized these and all the other dogmas which are required as entry keys into the counterfeit American ruling class. As I watched mostly young Americans trash countless cities in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, something snapped. I couldn’t unsee the parallel as these modern Janissaries waged warfare against their own patrimony.
The tidal wave of cultural programming they received from 13 years of public schooling (to say nothing of the other cultural institutions in the media, entertainment, and tech worlds that control our discourse) won out by sheer volume. Gen Z, our youngest generation, is less loyal to traditional religion and national pride than any generation before it. Its loyalties are being appropriated by the counterfeit American regime. For every traditionalist American teacher, typical students in American high schools have three or four progressive activists or liberal fellow travelers indoctrinating them. For those who aim to become teachers themselves, they must first survive the leftist madrassas in the universities, which seem to have the sole purpose of making them even more woke than they were as high school graduates.
The rewards the current regime offers to today’s Janissaries are just too much for most young people to resist. They are happy to exchange the culture and heritage of America for the status, wealth, and prestige offered by America’s economic and cultural commanding heights—from the boards of the S&P 500, to Hollywood, to professional sports, to academia, and Silicon Valley. Rejecting one’s native ancestry, history, religion, and culture—if one is actually American—are requirements for entry or advancement in nearly all of these arenas today. Sadly, too many Americans are willing to trade their birthright for a mess of ideological pottage.
Americans of all colors and stripes need to realize that we are living under an alien, illegitimate, woke occupation. None of us voted for these zealots who steal our kids’ minds and program them to detest our history and traditions. None of us asked these Janissaries—teachers, public school administrators, and education professors—to make our children into woke jihadis. But here we are. Americans need to realize that the compulsory system of education as it is presently constituted is abducting our children—in spirit if not in body—and forging them into weapons against America.
Republican state legislators, governors, and local governments—as well as individual families—need to start treating these institutions as unwelcome interlopers, and formulate offensive strategies to replace them.
There are things you can do, right now. First, start to view the secondary public schools and universities with proper and well-deserved disdain. These institutions are not friends to our nation. Yes, there are plenty of well-meaning individual teachers, but as a whole, the system is undermining our country.
Second, vote for politicians who want to break the nexus between public schools and the poisonous schools of education in the universities. We need to break this monopoly on teacher training and certification, deprive it of funds, and transfer that money to new, patriotic organizations.
Third, pull your kids out of the public schools and either homeschool them, or place them in non-woke private schools. Finally, pray that fate sends us leaders who will organize us both politically and spiritually to repel this counterfeit-American invasion.