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The Right has a rare opportunity to turn the tables on the administrative state—and also prepare the way for the great re-learning that America needs.
If you’re an American who works for a living, chances are good that between state and federal laws, insurance carrier requirements, and woke corporate Human Resources (HR) departments, you’ve had to endure “anti-harassment” trainings. These are delivered either in live group settings or via online modules that combine videos with quizzes, with only certain responses deemed acceptable. Some of the content has amounted to forced indoctrination in leftism to a captive audience—which was, of course, the point.
I work for the Claremont Institute, which leaders on the Right have called “America’s most consequential think tank”—and which even frequent critics such as the New York Times have had to admit is “a nerve center of the American Right.” Yet even on this island of sanity, we have had to devote multiple hundreds of staff hours to watching training videos that explain what is and is not acceptable to say and do in California’s woke legal environment.
It would be much more appropriate to stop the ideological chicanery and instead require employees in federal agencies to be trained on how to not harass American citizens.
By executive order, the Trump Administration should require that all three million employees of the federal government participate in training focused on teaching them that weaponizing government and violating the people’s natural and civil rights is deeply unjust.
Even better, the trainings should include heaping doses of civics and sound American political theory to “deprogram” the cultish anti-Americanism that infects the Swamp. Rather than making it torturous and boring like the woke HR trainings, we should make these modules fascinating and fun. We should use humor and pathos to disarm the audience, weaving the beautiful, inspiring story of America’s history and principles throughout. (I’ll explain the “we” part in a moment.)
Such trainings would serve several important purposes:
- Correct Misunderstandings and Appeal to the Law: Many in the federal bureaucracy have been falsely led to believe that America was founded on oppression, because they were educated, employed, and trained in systems that were long ago captured by the radical Left. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out how this miseducation has helped co-opt so many federal employees into weaponizing the government for their own ends. But the federal workforce needs it spelled out. They need a mental reset of what constitutes good and bad behavior, and to know the corresponding rewards and punishments.
- Lay the Groundwork for Restoring American Civic Knowledge and Patriotism. The trainings I propose would reach an audience of millions. Done well, they could attract an even broader audience by making them available online and promoting them to the general public. The trainings could be a tool to help Americans amend their historical and civic knowledge in preparation for America’s 250th birthday.
- Help Unify Americans and Turn Adversaries into Friends. Many hardboiled Deep State types will reject the tenets of the trainings. But surely the story of America and its principles, told honestly and well, would win the admiration and allegiance of many who have never received a decent education in history and civics. This would in turn make the federal bureaucracy less recalcitrant toward their elected president and his political appointees. It would also contribute to uniting Americans around a shared understanding of our country’s heritage, principles, and civic duties.
- Gum Up the Deep State’s “Resistance” Operations. The Deep State has used lawfare, “malicious compliance,” and a hundred other tactics to resist the legitimate use of executive power. Here is where the Trump Administration can play hardball in response.
Now, let me explain what I meant by saying “we” earlier. Many alumni of the Claremont Institute’s educational fellowship programs (like OMB Director Russ Vought and State Department Director of Policy Planning Staff Michael Anton) currently serve in the Trump Administration. The Institute has been planning to launch a modified version of our highly respected Publius Fellowship—the same one Vought and Anton attended—as an online class. Like the Publius Fellowship, it will be taught by some of the country’s top constitutional scholars and political theorists. Our working title for the class is “The College Course You Never Took.” And we have a curriculum that could help get it up and running on an expedited basis.
Some will object about a word I used earlier: “deprogram.” Hillary Clinton used the term in an October 2023 statement where she maintained that perhaps there should be a “deprogramming of the cult members” who still supported President Trump. She was right about one thing: America is at a crossroads. Either America will be guided by constitutionalism and the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence or by the historicist understandings of the revolutionary Left. They are diametrically opposed. Only the former should be recognized as the legitimate object of loyalty for our public servants.