Recent indications are that younger citizens don't think — or know — much of their own country.

“Congratulations to the leftists who’ve taken over the nation’s public education system. They’re now producing generations of Americans who know little about their own country, other than that they hate it.” —editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

Investor’s Business Daily is referring to the latest YouGov poll conducted by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (FLAG). It questioned 1,078 Americans aged 14 and up about their knowledge of America’s history, institutions and patriotism, and one suspects most Patriot Post readers know where this is going. Like this writer, regular readers at this site are beginning to realize that younger generations of Americans increasingly see us all as anachronistic pariahs with wholly illegitimate values that must be “fundamentally transformed” — out of existence. The idea expressed by John Adams that our Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other” no longer resonates.

Today, morality is “relative,” religion is for “bitter clingers,” and it’s likely a majority of young Americans have never heard of John Adams. Older generations of Americans have been reduced to being proverbial keepers of the flame, hoping this nation can outlast the tsunami of orchestrated ignorance so all-encompassing that even “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is cannon-fodder for the terminally offended.

Thus, the survey’s key findings are completely unsurprising:

Half of those surveyed believe the United States is sexist (50%) and racist (49%)

46% of younger Americans do not agree that “America is the greatest country in the world”

38% of younger Americans do not agree that “America has a history that we should be proud of”

One in eight (14%) of Millennials agree that “America was never a great country and it never will be”

46% of younger Americans agree that “America is more racist than other countries”

84% of Americans do not know the specific rights enumerated in the First Amendment

19% of Millennials believe that the American flag is “a sign of intolerance and hatred”

44% of younger Americans believe Barack Obama had a “bigger impact” on America than George Washington

“Mmm, mmm, mmm! Barack Hussein Obama/ He said that all must lend a hand/ To make this country strong again/ Mmm, mmm, mmm! Barack Hussein Obama/ He said we must be fair today/ Equal work means equal pay/ Mmm, mmm, mmm!” —sung by 18 second graders at B. Bernice Young Elementary School, Sept. 24, 2009. “There was no intention to indoctrinate children,” District Superintendent Christopher Manno said in a statement at the time. “There was no political agenda underlying the activity.”

Nine years later, there is a political agenda underlying every activity — an agenda historian Victor Davis Hanson accurately describes as a “progressive synopticon” where the 40-45% of traditional Americans are “relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers.”

Overseers determined to institutionalize contempt for America in general, and its exceptional nature in particular.

The late Andrew Breitbart once observed that politics is “downstream” from culture. Everything is downstream from education, and four years of “seed planting” has been expanded to 13 years, if one goes from kindergarten through the 12th grade, and 17 years if one goes on to attend one of the Marxist finishing schools purporting to be colleges.

In a column entitled, “Here’s What College Freshmen Are Reading,” NPR reveals how the bedrock principles of Western civilization and our constitutional republic have been supplanted by a curriculum of identity politics. The classic literature that used to be the backbone of a legitimate education? As the National Association of Scholars reveals, “67 percent of common reading books assigned were published after 2011.”

Of course they were. One can only imagine the consternation that might arise if those same students were required to read something like the collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay known as The Federalist Papers. No doubt they would be astonished to discover that men routinely dismissed by many of their “woke” professors as “dead, white slave owners” had incredibly keen insight with regard to human nature. Those same students might even be embarrassed to discover that such complex ideas were published in newspapers and read by ordinary citizens.

Yet barring self-discovery, they will never know any of it. Today it is far more important to be well-versed in the politics of victimization, group grievances, genderism, racism, white supremacy, etc. Better to hate America for the sin of slavery than celebrate the enormous effort undertaken to eradicate it. Better to celebrate the “glory” of socialism while remaining largely contemptuous of the capitalism that lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the planet. Better to be so bereft of economic acumen that the idea of “free” anything actually resonates. Better to be younger Americans obsessed with “rights” even as only 11% of high schoolers could name those enumerated in the First Amendment.

Better to assume that anyone who disagrees with you is not wrong, but evil.

Given the popularity of moral relativism, the irony is stupendous. Nonetheless, reducing one’s opponents to evil is, by far, the most useful convention employed by those invested in upending everything that does not align itself with progressive dogma. If one is evil, debate becomes unnecessary, and the ends of eradicating such evil justify the means for doing so — even when those means engender a justice system wholly contaminated by double standards.

“We suspected that we would find decreasing numbers of Americans well-versed in our nation’s most important principles and young people less patriotic than the generations that came before, but we were totally unprepared for what our national survey reveals: an epidemic of anti-Americanism,” stated FLAG founder Nick Adams.

Adams is naive. The opposite of anti-Americanism is pro-globalism, and it’s time Americans (who still want to be Americans) realize the ongoing bastardization of traditions, morals, law, language, culture, and borders — along with the unconscionable student data collection taking place in America’s classrooms — is all part of the same agenda. One cannot make a globalist omelet without breaking nationalist eggs, and nothing is more important than making sure America’s youth are ready to “transition” from being proudly American to being “citizens of the world.”

As the survey demonstrates, it is a transition well under way.

While the Senate is still controlled by Republicans, it would behoove those members of the GOP who still believe in national sovereignty to conduct nationally televised hearings exposing this agenda. Hearings that should be considered the beginning of a wholesale pushback. A pushback that must continue until the restoration of our founding principles takes hold. We have abided the wholesale inculcation of ideological conformity in lieu of independent thinking, as well as the legitimization of emotion over reason, for far too long.

Citizens of the world? Really? What’s the split-the-difference compromise between the Constitution and Sharia Law?