(Daily Caller)—An English course at the U.S. Naval Academy teaches officer candidates left-wing theories of gender and sexuality, along with elements of Critical Race Theory, according to syllabi obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The course description for HE 374, Topics In Gender & Sexuality in Literature, begins by tracing the history of gender and sexuality studies from its origin in the women’s studies discipline rooted in the Second Wave Feminism of the 1970’s and 1980’s, according to a syllabus the DCNF obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. However, the English major course broadens to include studies for future U.S. Navy officers on LGBTQ studies, race, class and concepts informed by Critical Race Theory, which defines people groups in terms of oppressor and oppressed, the syllabus shows.
“Most of the faculty, students, and topics of study in early Women’s Studies programs were limited by being White, middleclass, women,” the female instructor, whose name is redacted but who appears to have served as Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences during that semester, wrote in the course description.
“In the 2000’s, some Women’s Studies Departments renamed themselves Gender and Sexuality Studies in order to better reflect Women’s Studies’ growing interest in exploring Queer Theory, Masculinity Studies, Intersectionality, race, and class. Women’s Studies Programs are feminist at their hearts; Gender and Sexuality Studies Programs are not, and in fact, might even reject feminism for its original focus on White middleclass women.”
Students begin the class by performing a land acknowledgement, the syllabus shows. Students also set the learning outcomes for the course.
The second class period involve study of “theories of gender” and learning about the Genderbread person, a visual made to show a difference between “gender identity,” “gender expression,” “anatomical sex,” “gender” and “sexual orientation.” On the third class period, students create a diversity statement and learn gender and sexuality vocabulary.
Another in-class activity scheduled for week 3 is reading pan-African and socialist civil rights activist W.E.B. DeBois’ “Double Consciousness.”
The primary texts of the course were “The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender” by Nancy Chodorow and “Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory” by Toril Moi. Both books are critical of conservative ideas about sex and gender.
“Women’s mothering perpetuates itself through social-structurally induced psychological mechanisms. It is not an unmediated product of physiology. Women come to mother because they have been mothered by women,” Chodorow wrote, according to a summary.
Moi’s book imagines a world “beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality,” a review shows.
“While you will be expected to understand both of these books and the theoretical positions they present, you are not expected to agree with them (although you might, and that’s okay too),” the instructor wrote in the syllabus.
Two papers due throughout the semester require students to apply concepts from the two books to other readings from the class. The final paper instructs students to describe their takeaways about gender and sexuality from the class.
Journal entries on the Tacit Racism reading are also required most Wednesdays, according to the syllabus.
Students are also required to respond to articles critiquing “The Passion” by Jeanette Winterson and “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel. “Fun Home” is a memoir about a girl coming to terms with her own lesbian sexuality, according to a summary.
The syllabus is not dated. However, the dates on the syllabus correspond to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule that fits the fall of 2021.
“The Naval Academy focuses on respect and inclusion of people of all backgrounds in order to develop well-rounded future leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps,” the academy said in a statement to the DCNF, adding that the course is optional.
“A vast array of intellectual ideas, approaches and theories are mentioned during classroom discussions. The Naval Academy educates midshipmen to be critical thinkers who can analyze issues from multiple perspectives and contexts; our focus is on how to think, not what to think,” the academy said.
The FY24 NDAA prohibits funding for CRT and GUTS Biden's DEI bureaucracy. pic.twitter.com/qKZ1BPo2bK
— Armed Services GOP (@HASCRepublicans) December 12, 2023
The DCNF also obtained syllabi for the spring and fall semesters of 2023 as part of the FOIA request.
The Spring 2023 course was divided into three main sections, starting with “an exploration of the masculine/feminine binary,” then moving to “a historical and contemporary discussion of the rejection and empowerment of specific sexualities” and finally the “utilization of Gender and Sexuality to enforce or deconstruct the othering of nonwestern culture,” the syllabus showed.
“This course promises… [to] create a welcoming space for discussion and practice of vocabulary in relation to Gender and Sexuality,” the syllabus states.
The Naval Academy sought a tenure-track assistant professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies to begin work in January 2024, the website shows.
“We welcome subspecialties in disability studies, film, and multiethnic or global Anglophone literature,” the job description stated.
A course description for the class available on the academy’s website advertises students will learn “advanced methods of analyzing literature and culture are taught through a set of focused readings of theories, histories, perspectives, and/or major figures in LGBTQ, women’s and/or gender studies,” including Audre Lorde, Sarah Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldua — who described herself as a “Chicana dyke-feminist” — and Kimberle Crenshaw, a Critical Race Theory scholar.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.