Designed for ages 4 and up, the School of the West bills itself as an online educational resource for home-schooling families. White families, that is.
The focus is on the study of “white wellbeing,” within a curriculum of history, math, science, and the arts designed for “Westernkind,” meaning white boys and girls, according to the site, to help them “develop self-esteem” and “the truth of their heritage.”
The site was launched by a man who refers to himself only as “Brant,” but who The Daily Beast and Anti-Defamation League extremism researcher Mark Pitcavage identify as Brant Williams.
Williams says in one of the introductory videos that the site gives parents an “alternate way of teaching children,” calling the school “a role model” to address “the many problems in the public education system.”
He goes on to list the problems as “confusing gender roles,” “forced gender transgenderism,” “intentional misrepresentation of history,” and of course, “a ton of anti-white propaganda.”
If you’re curious about what “white wellbeing” means, a video with the title “White Wellbeing” advocates pulling kids out of “government education,” because, a voice warns, “our children are under attack,” and “no one is coming to save them.”
The video goes on to add that “it’s time for our children to learn what makes the white race unique,” and for them to learn the history “they’re denied by the anti-whites that control our textbooks.”
Finally, with what seems like a million photos of wintery snow scenes with a few of Roman soldiers mixed in while inspiring piano music plays in the background, a deep voice resonates, “It’s time there was a school made for our people.”
The foundation of white wellbeing is “Going Free,” which is explained in eight slides.
The slides include topics such as understanding why the anti-whites “want us to feel bad.” Because they don’t do as well in school or their jobs so they “blame us for their poor performance.” And “anti-white victimizers” who want white boys and girls to “to grow up and marry racial strangers [non-whites] because they will have non-white babies after they are married.” But after understanding the hatred of the “anti-whites,” the idea is that the Westernkind can “go free.”
In the “Science” section, there’s a “Life Science” dropdown that takes you to six lectures including genetic, structural, physiologic, reproductive, disease predilection, mental behavioral, and psychological.
Videos open with “Hello white families.” The “Genetic Differences” lecture teaches a dizzying array of misinformation. At one point it even names a group of people in the Black race as “mentally retarded,” and pointing out that there are “significantly” more “mentally retarded” people in the Black race than in the white, and whites have higher IQs.
The “History & Culture” section offers “Meet Your People” (youngsters), “The Great Westmen” (teens), and “Viking History,” also for teens.
The school additionally links to the Institute of Historical Review, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center published numerous antisemitic materials and hosted a Holocaust denial conference in 2004.
It could be easy to ignore this obviously racist, homophobic, and xenophobic “school” as just another extremist with loony ideas of indoctrinating kids. But the reality is after a term under former President Donald Trump, this is a reverberation of his and his followers’ acceptance of white nationalist ideas gone mainstream.
“Our political environment is more receptive to this sort of messaging at the moment,” Amy Cooter, a sociologist who studies white nationalism and grew up in a private Southern Baptist church school with connections to far-right home-schooling groups, told The Daily Beast.
“White nationalists are interested in creating their own parallel society,” Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist who studies white nationalist communities, explains to The Daily Beast. “Educating children in white-supremacist values is part of this plan ... White nationalists understand that exposing their children to multicultural curricula can lead to a rejection of their beliefs.”
Look no further than the push to remove books by Black and brown authors in states such as Virginia and Texas.
Indoctrinating kids via home-school isn’t new. Christian home-schooling has been on the rise going back to 1999. Since the pandemic, home-schooling has doubled with nearly 2.6 million kids leaving traditional education. According to census data, more than 11% of U.S. households are now home-schooling.
"The Christian home school subculture isn't a children-first movement. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ideology-first movement. There is a massive, well-oiled machine of ideology that is churning out soldiers for the culture war,” Ryan Lee Stollar, a former homeschool student, toldThe Guardian.
Cynthia Jeub writes a blog about growing up home-schooled, which she calls “a cult of sorts.” In a piece she wrote for HuffPost, she talks openly about what she learned while at home.
“Democrats, I was told, just wanted to kill innocent babies waiting to be born in their mothers’ wombs,” Jeub says she was taught. And on her blog she writes: “I believed that I had received a better education than my peers. The truth was that I had been indoctrinated with propaganda to interpret everything in the world through a lens of fundamentalist teachings. Part of what I had to believe was that I was highly informed and educated, and the rest of the world was in fact being misinformed and indoctrinated to believe in falsehoods, like evolution.”
Williams, founder of School for the West, recently explained in an interview his view of teaching children.
“If I told them that aliens came down and made these people in Hollywood and now everyone in Hollywood is aliens, they’d go, ‘Yeah, OK, alright.’ When you develop trust with your students, they’ll believe pretty much everything you say.” That just about sums up his intentions.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
