Oklahoma’s State-Sponsored Political Grooming of Children
Oklahoma is the test case. Would you trust Charlie Kirk with your child’s education?
It began with an email. Nothing flashy, nothing loud. Just a message quietly dropped into every parent’s inbox in Oklahoma. But when they opened it, they were staring at the state’s future.
Ryan Walters, a politician who clawed his way into the role of superintendent, told families their children could soon be enlisted into something called Club America.
Behind the nationalistic name is actually Turning Point USA (TPUSA) — Charlie Kirks far-right machine — that once bussed people in to participate in the January 6th Capitol riot.
In the email, Superintendent Walters promised kids shiny “activism kits” with pocket Constitutions and pins if they signed up. He promised parents their kids could get leadership titles and mentorship. A future. Growth. Something every parent wants for their child.
Then he threatened to kill any school that refused to obey with revocation of their accreditation. Even investigated them in secret. And then days later he stepped aside, trading his public office to become CEO of a dark money machine built to dismantle teachers unions and promote “moral” ideology in our kids. Public service paid Walters $124,373 a year. Evergreen Freedom Inc offers their CEO’s more than $525,000.
Parents were left with the email. Walters walked away with something else.
See, what sounds like an after-school club is just the first step in building ideological foot soldiers in public schools. Something Kirk & TPUSA have been trying to do for years.
That day parents didn’t just read an email. They read the blueprint of indoctrination dressed as education.
Let’s Talk Developmental Psychology
They are using developmental psychology for indoctrination works. It doesn’t start with textbooks or debates. It starts with emotions. A headline, a teacher’s announcement, a classroom full of kids reacting in unison.
The New York Times (as much as I dislike the times, this is important) recently told the story of an 11-year-old girl in Tulsa who came home crying after Charlie Kirk was killed. Her classmates told her she should be sad, so she was. She didn’t know who he was. Her father worried that if she looked him up online, she’d find his racist statements about Black Americans like their family.
Psychologists have long shown that children and teens are wired for belonging. Especially those in adolescence. Middle school, high school and college kids.
Their brains aren’t finished developing the systems for critical thinking and resistance to persuasion, but their need to fit in is overwhelming. Peer pressure is strongest in adolescence, which is why movements that want obedience always target schools. It’s the entire reason Turning Point USA and PragerU were made.
Think back to when someone first convinced you to do something you didn’t want to — like maybe puff on a cigarette or kiss a classmate. Think about how that felt. That feeling? They’re using that to create ideological soldiers.
Nazi Germany pulled kids into the Hitler Youth and taught them to treat dissenting teachers as enemies. Maoist China unleashed Red Guards to shame and even attack their educators. They do this by creating a heroic identity, name an enemy, and reward conformity.
TPUSA’s “Club America” program follows this script line for line. Give kids leadership titles. Hand them a ready-made identity of patriot, defender of faith, and fighter against the left.
In school-age children and teens, moral and personality development is not yet complete, they are easier to indoctrinate and less likely to resist authority. Former child soldiers often report they “just followed orders” or “didn’t know what else to do” showing how their internal moral regulation was overridden.
Show them who the enemy is: unions, teachers, classmates who don’t agree. And make it all feel normal. That is how classrooms become pipelines. That’s how you turn children into soldiers for someone else’s cause. And in Oklahoma, it’s already happening.
What ‘Club America’ Really Teaches Our Kids
It’s one thing to hear Ryan Walters dangle shiny leadership titles in front of kids, and another to ask what they’ll actually be learning.
To see the truth, let’s look at the educational and organizational “values” TPUSA claims to stand for, and then hold them up against what they’ve really done. Then you can decide if this is what you want shaping our kids from kindergarten on.
When you click through TPUSA’s website, the a lot of the words look harmless: Free Markets. Limited Government. Constitutional Rights. American Exceptionalism. Patriotism.
Neat little lists. Polished. But a polished turd is still a turd. If these are the “values” being packaged into American classrooms, then it’s worth asking what they actually mean once you scrape off the shine.
“All life is sacred beginning at conception”
So, uh, one time Charlie Kirk was asked what he would want his daughter to do if she were 10 years old and pregnant following rape. After calling the scenario graphic, he responds, “The answer is yes. The baby would be delivered.”
Under their morality, even if a child is raped, the takeaway is that forced birth is divine will. That’s what they’ll teach kids.
Next up? “Free markets” — sounds like a civics lesson in entrepreneurship. Teaching kids how to run a business or something — right?
No, TPUSA’s version is nothing more than corporate obedience training. Kids are told that corporations come first, workers come last, and unions are the enemy. (Where have we heard this before?)
They teach kids that being paid at least minimum wage in the U.S. is a “job killer” and Kirk himself believed that people should never be able to retire.
Pair that with their idea of “limited government,” which in practice is a call to gut public schools and funnel resources into private, religious, and partisan programs. Programs ran by loyalists who only teach the ‘approved’ Christian-Nationalist narratives. Programs like Kirks.
TPUSA turns kids into ideological foot soldiers so loyal to Kirks “values” they’ve physically attacked professors.
TPUSA also runs several “watchlists” (i.e. the Professor Watchlist & School Board Watchlist) targeting teachers and professors accused of “leftist propaganda,” and those named have faced harassment, threats, and even firings.
Now imagine TPUSA planted inside your child’s school, deciding a teacher mentioning evolution was enough to get them harassed, threatened, or fired.
Trump just shared an anti-Muslim video from Charlie Kirk complaining about the way Muslims pray and claiming they “hate America” and should be deported.
And when TPUSA talks about “constitutional rights” and “American exceptionalism,” they’re not teaching civics, they’re teaching kids to worship guns and a whitewashed version of history. Often called a ‘1776 style’ teaching plan. An ode to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Charlie Kirk even attacked universities as “full of Marxist professors … who force students to take … courses which indoctrinate them with … socialism.”
Yeah, Karl Marx is kind of their own personal boogeyman over there. For TPUSA, reading Karl Marx and caring about other people both basically qualify as crimes against America.
The 1776 curriculum isn’t about history, it’s propaganda.
What they really want to do is erase slavery, deny systemic racism, and call it patriotism. American as apple pie.
The name itself nods to originalism, the alt-right legal doctrine that dark-money master Leonard Leo loves. As an originalist, Leo has spent decades installing SCOTUS judges who interpret the Constitution as it was in the 1700s, when rights belonged only to white male property owners.
It’s a philosophy cherry picked by the rich to drag America wayyy backward. Hundreds of years. And Leonard Leo’s dark money empire is the fuel keeping it alive.
It’s not a surprise to learn that Turning Point USA wasn’t built by students with bake sales; it was propped up by dark money like Leonard Leo’s network.
You may be asking what is ‘dark money’ and how does it work? Simply put, dark money works like this:
Donate to a ‘donor-advised’ charity
Get the tax break
Tell that ‘donor-advised’ charity where to quietly pass the cash — into whatever political foundation you choose.
It works because the IRS rules erase the donor’s identity. By the time the check reaches a political foundation, the original name is gone, replaced by the “charity” that donates for them like DonorsTrust.
Into the dark. Hence ‘dark money’ because the financial power stays, the accountability vanishes.
Final Thoughts & Summary:
In Oklahoma, this educational indoctrination is stacked on top of everything else: lawmakers there are filing bills to create a holiday in Kirk’s honor, pushing for statues of him at every state college, firing educators who dared to criticize him, and even holding university memorials.
They really went all out turning the entire state into a shrine. A real modern day Horst Wessel.
Other states are already testing the waters, because the goal isn’t just Oklahoma — it’s nationwide.
What they want is Christian nationalism baked into classrooms, the wall between church and state torn down brick by brick. It’s the exact opposite of what the founders envisioned.
But, as I’ve said before, originalists that fund these programs don’t actually follow one Constitution.. they cherry-pick the parts that serve their agenda.
It isn’t just Oklahoma. Florida’s attorney general has threatened schools that resist TPUSA chapters, while the U.S. Department of Education, TPUSA, Hillsdale College, and dozens of groups launched the “America 250 Civics Education Coalition” to push “patriotic” curricula nationwide. Which as you can imagine is just a bunch of dark money fueled ‘think tanks’ endorsed Secretary of Education lady that ran WWE.
States are already blurring church and state — Louisiana and Texas tried mandating Ten Commandments displays, and in 2024 Walters himself ordered Oklahoma classrooms to teach the Christian Bible, even budgeting millions to buy copies.
This wave of Christian nationalism in schools didn’t come out of nowhere. America laid the groundwork when it memorialized a white nationalist as if he were a hero.
Mainstream America treated Charlie Kirk like a martyr while ignoring the consequences of what he built. NFL and MLB teams held moments of silence, C-SPAN carried his memorial live, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan gaslit the moment by calling Kirk a “modern day St Paul.”
CNN and CBS booked Jack Posobiec to eulogize Kirk’s “life’s work” without even bringing up the fact that Posobiec is a real-life domestic terrorist (that frequently toured with Kirk).
Meanwhile in Texas someone threatened Pride marchers “for taking out Charlie Kirk,” showing how this canonization fuels real-world violence.
Do you want your child growing up inside a movement that produces threats, memorials, and recruits all at once?
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No white Christian Nationalist viewpoints do not belong in K_12 classrooms or Prager University values either which are one in the same where white man gets to vote as head of household and women submit to their husbands every whim and are treated as second class citizens because white men feel threatened by women who have a voice, an opinion, etc This is not the 1950’s we have been there done that not going back. Separation of church and state there is a reason that is in the constitution!! How is WCN better than any other religion or faith (if that is what you want to call it) it isn’t and it is very narrow minded and racist, not Christian at all
He should have been forced to resign his first week in office!! The damage he has done to Oklahoma schools is immeasurable. This should stand as warning to all school districts throughout the nation that religion should be taught in churches not in schools! The secret plans of Ryan will disrupt Oklahoma school s for decades! The Christian Fundamentalist White Nationalists will only harm our schools and divide our students, parents and teachers! Beware!!!!!