"Global War on Terror was not meant to be won. Here we are at the Texas State Capitol on Monday, June 22nd, where the Texas State Board of Education is trying to implement drastic, sweeping, ahistorical changes to the social studies curriculum of our students throughout the Texas public school system. My name is Greg Stoker. I'm a Texan. I'm a former member of the 75th Ranger Regiment with four combat deployments to Afghanistan under Joint Special Operations Command. I'm now a geopolitical analyst and journalist here based out of Austin. So I'm here today in opposition to the incredibly racist ideological indoctrination that the TEEX is masquerading as a new social studies curriculum. Kids in Texas deserve better. The proposed recommendations are disingenuous, meant to exclude certain groups of people from public and civic life. Crafters of this curriculum should at least have the decency to be transparent about what their actual objectives are. Create a specter of the racialized enemy within in order to indoctrinate our youth to accept without question the expansion of the billionaire-driven national security and surveillance state, which has been expanding relentlessly for the past 25 years. Specifically, the 7th Great Knowledge and Skills draft recommendation 16B proposes to describe the war on terror and explain the role of al-Qaeda and al-Sama bin Laden in shaping United States foreign policy after September 11th, as if that was even a main factor. Good standards teach students to find, weigh, and reason about information. They invite multiple perspectives. This requires naming specific wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their effects on U.S. involvement in West Asia. Adding documented detail rather than a general propagandized description, the global war on terror was not meant to be won in the fact that we had no concept of victory or vision. It was meant to last as long as politically possible in order to wash our tax money out of the public sector and into the hands of private defense contractors. Most Americans, most Americans now agree that the war in Iraq was for oil, kind of reductive, and al-Qaeda didn't even have a presence in Iraq until we invaded. And if you want to argue that, you can take it up with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. We spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban just like we spent untold billions of dollars to replace the Ayatollah community with a more hardline Ayatollah community. And now the global war on terror continues, heedlessly learning no mistakes or lessons learned. But since we can't power project anymore like we used to, the next for-profit, forever war is going to be fought here against our own people, all in the name of a hysterical non-threat. The Muslim population has increased by roughly 3%. Since 2001, what are we talking about? It's meant to divide us while our government is being plundered. If you think seventh graders can handle the entirety of the truth, fine, tell it. If not, and this is just some ahistorical ideological slop, I simply urge you to prepare our students to become critical thinkers in the global marketplace because students overseas are learning it and not passive consumers of wartime propaganda made to increase corporate super profits. Thanks so much."