Although it received scant media attention, the FBI foiled a plot by members of the pro-Palestinian Turtle Island Liberation Front to bomb Southern California businesses on New Year’s Eve.
Most Americans have probably never heard of the term “Turtle Island,” a name said to be used by some indigenous communities to describe North America. “Turtle Island” proponents view the United States as a nation founded on stolen land and express solidarity with a host of anti-American positions and groups — most notably pro-Palestinian activists who support dismantling “colonizing” and “oppressive” power structures.
These ideas are being promoted by organizations that pressure school administrators to implement anti-American educational material.
TILF’s attempted terror attack shows the natural ends of the group’s subversive ideology: hatred, division, and violence. And unfortunately, teachers who view their role as agents of social change are now disseminating these ideas through the country’s K-12 schools in an effort to turn America’s students into child soldiers on the front lines of the country’s culture war.
Curricula such as liberated ethnic studies — a benign-sounding program that encourages students to view the world through an oppressor/oppressed lens and to treat their peers accordingly — is one such vector. Turtle Island is frequently cited in school curricula in the form of land acknowledgements, as well as in school meetings and school board notices on how to “support teachers of color.” The phrase also appears in lesson plans on “the social construction of race” that seek the “inclusion of Black and Latino studies in the public school curriculum.”
In 2021, a whistleblower provided Defending Education with photographs of a classroom at Los Angeles Unified School District’s Alexander Hamilton High School, where posters included “in 2020, make Israel Palestine again and make America Turtle Island again,” “F**k the Police,” and “F**k Amerikka, this is native land.” While those responsible ultimately removed the material under pressure, it is certain that those materials would have remained if not for withering public pressure.
Unsurprisingly, professors promote these ideas in college courses nationwide.
At the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, students can take a course called “Critical Indigenous Theory,” in which “indigenous” is described as a “comparative, interdisciplinary, and global project that exceeds the material conditions of Turtle Island …” One of the required readings for that class is “Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine.”
The University of Texas offers at least five courses with explicit land acknowledgements to Turtle Island, while at the University of California, Irvine, a doctoral candidate wrote a 300-page dissertation on the development of liberation schools on Turtle Island.
While examples abound of academics forcing radical ideas on impressionable university students, it is particularly galling for this to take place in the nation’s taxpayer-funded universities.
It is important to recognize that these ideas aren’t occurring organically. They are being promoted by organizations that pressure school administrators to implement anti-American educational material.
Consider the Great Schools Partnership, which provides professional development to K-12 school districts. The GSP’s self-proclaimed goal is “redesigning” public education with anti-American propaganda, including a 2020 blog post that preached about the need to “Decolonize Education” on “Turtle Island” while smearing Christopher Columbus.
There’s also the Zinn Education Project, a so-called history program coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, which refers to Turtle Island in its abortion advocacy.
One of the most concerning examples of Turtle Island’s negative influence is through its connection to Teach Palestine, an organization corrupting K-12 education with anti-Israel propaganda. Teach Palestine’s sixth-grade lesson plans emphasize the need to “talk about Palestine and Turtle Island in the same breath.”
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Photo by Joshua Lott/Washington Post via Getty Images
Through incendiary rhetoric about the perceived injustices indigenous people suffer, Teach Palestine actively encourages students to believe that their country and its history are inherently evil. While the organization doesn’t explicitly endorse violence, its partisan framing, one-sided view of history, and portrayal of Israel and the United States as oppressive colonizers could lead some, like the suspected TILF bombers, to justify violent resistance.
We’re already seeing the effects of this brainwashing destabilizing America.
Anti-Israel protests erupted on college campuses in the wake of the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, resulting in Jewish students across the country being violently attacked by their peers. Many of the 18- to 21-year-olds complicit in these riots seemed to genuinely believe they had the moral high ground and that they were “liberating” their campuses from “oppressive” power structures.
Their skewed logic and hatred are the inevitable result of forcing anti-American ideological frameworks on young students, rather than encouraging pupils to think critically for themselves or teaching the basics of history, science, and mathematics — areas where American students are increasingly falling behind.
Without critical thinking and basic education, future leaders and voters become frighteningly easy to pressure into despising their country — and into treating violence as a legitimate answer.
The fact that 2026 nearly started with a Turtle Island-inspired bombing should be a wake-up call for our leaders to address this crisis in the months ahead.
Education, Dei, Turtle island, Pro-palestine, Land acknowledgement, Critical theory, Great schools partnerships, October 7, Opinion & analysis, Leftism, Critical race theory in classrooms, Public schools, Colleges and universities, Anti-semitism, Diversity equity inclusion, Anti-american propaganda
