Trump's Top Policy Adviser Says Schools Must Teach Children 'to Love America' if They Want Federal Funding
One of President Donald Trump's top advisers gave a briefing on Thursday, May 1, about the state of the Department of Education, leveling threats at schools that he claims 'promote communist ideology.'
Stephen Miller, Trump's homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy, outlined the Trump administration's plans to eliminate critical race theory from schools, saying, "For any nation to be successful, it cannot teach its children to hate themselves and their country."
"Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots," Miller said. "Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding."
Related: Trump Wants to Eliminate the Department of Education: What That Means for American Schools
On March 20, Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin taking steps to dismantle the Department of Education to the extent that she is able.
The plan, according to Trump's directive, is to 'return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.'
As funding is returned to the states, Miller clarified in Thursday's briefing, the Trump administration plans to withhold it from any schools they believe are promoting 'communist ideology."
"These are a few of the areas in which President Trump has fought the cancerous, communist, woke culture which is destroying this country," he said. "Where we were led to believe that men were women and that women were men, where racial discrimination was good and merit was bad, and that safety and physical security mattered less than liberal ideologues."
The comments from Miller — who has espoused white nationalist views and whose organization America First Legal was initially listed on the advisory board of Project 2025 — send a message similar to the one he gave while introducing Trump at a campaign rally in October 2024.
"You have a right to love the community you grew up in," he told the crowd in Aurora, Colorado. "You have a right to love your neighbors as they are. You have a right to want a country that is of, by and for Americans, and only Americans."
Related: How Could a Department of Education Shutdown Impact Book Bans?
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Miller also told reporters on Thursday that the Department of Justice is currently coordinating with law enforcement to push back against what he called "child abuse" in American school systems.
"It is child abuse to change a child's gender, particularly if you do not inform the parents,' he said. 'If a 5-year-old or 6-year-old goes to school, or a 7-year-old goes to school, and the teacher tries to turn the boy into a girl or a girl into a boy that is child abuse, and this administration is treating that as child abuse and a gross violation of parental rights."
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