By Mark Anderson
President Donald Trump recently stated he plans to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—a global school-curriculum coordinator and facilitator founded chiefly by humanist-internationalist Julian Huxley.
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This move was announced via a brief July 22 U.S. State Department press release from staffer Tammy Bruce. The release noted, in part:
Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest. UNESCO [advances] divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs [ Sustainable Development Goals], a globalist, ideological agenda … at odds with our America First foreign policy.
While controversial K-12 federal educational crusades, such as the No Child Left Behind scheme and the more-recent Common Core curriculum, represent attempts to, in effect, globalize education at the national level, UNESCO has been an enduring presence since 1946. It has received praise in international circles, as well as condemnation in many quarters.
In conservative-constitutional circles where parents and local schoolteachers are deemed to be the proper educators of youth, the idea of such a lofty educational entity is, at best, unrealistic, or even perilous.
And when you consider the “woke” ultra-liberal worldview that defines UNESCO’s credo—and the corrosive social policies which that worldview tends to engender—the question of whether to maintain U.S. membership and financial support of the UN affiliate naturally arises.
Trump backed out of UNESCO during his first term, which was reversed by President Joe Biden.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan withdrew from UNESCO. That lasted until 2003—when “conservative” George W. Bush rejoined UNESCO.
U.S. taxpayers’ financial support is currently 8% of a total UNESCO budget of about $75 million annually. The United States used to pay 22% of the budget.
PALESTINE FACTOR
Most conservative-populist constitutionalists, traditionally skeptical of or outright opposed to meddlesome world bodies like the UN and its 30-plus agencies and affiliates covering a wide range of operations, would agree with the administration’s concerns about UNESCO embracing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The fourth of the 17 SDGs pertains to educational matters. Another seemingly incongruent issue has crept into the equation: Palestine.
The same State Department press release gives as much emphasis to Palestine as it does to UNESCO’s “woke” radicalism in terms of the reasons the Trump administration is intent on leaving UNESCO.
The press release noted:
UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a member state is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.
The release concluded:
Pursuant to Article II(6) of the UNESCO Constitution, U.S. withdrawal will take effect on Dec. 31, 2026. The United States will remain a full member of UNESCO until that time.
During Trump’s first term, UNESCO was but one of several international bodies from which he withdrew. He tried to back out of the World Health Organization (WHO) at the time, but that effort failed due to acting too late to meet the one-year extended deadline to finalize the move. So, Trump on January 2025 withdrew from the WHO a second time, with plenty of time to make the move official, as of January 2026.
The same back-and-forth applies to the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump initially announced a desire to withdraw in June of 2017, though it did not actually happen until Nov. 4, 2020, a year after Trump formally notified the UN of his intention to withdraw the United States. Biden soon re-entered the pact after he took office.
Today, Trump again appears on track to leave the pact, though that, too, won’t be effective until 2026.
HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
America has also withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council—yet another repeat from Trump’s first term. The withdrawal was part of an executive order that halted funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, which aids the Palestinians.
That aid, like UNESCO’s recognition of Palestine, angered Israel and raises the question of whether the Trump administration’s moves to untangle the United States from UN entities may be more about Israel than anything else.
Thus, the more traditional and arguably justifiable reasons to depart UN agencies may get overshadowed.
When it comes to UNESCO, those reasons include the agency’s Health and Education Resource Center and its apparently unbounded support for widespread abortion, at a time when World O’ Meter online data show abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide—upwards of 73 million lives snuffed out—in 2024 alone.
WHO, while it manipulatively acknowledges that so many induced abortions take place, does not even bother to classify abortion as an actual cause of death. That speaks volumes about the largely dehumanizing worldview of UN agencies.
UNESCO also supports gender-altering surgeries, LGBTQ rights and so-called gender-equality measures that actually undercut the traditional family.
Moreover, while UNESCO provides propagandistic resources for school curriculums about the UN’s SDGs and Agenda 2030, it also provides, in a broader sense, various resources such as research papers, curriculum guides and teaching strategies that tout world governance under a secular humanist-socialist worldview with highly relative moral customs, far removed from Christian nation states’ more solid moral code.
UNESCO also has disseminated school-instruction materials to combat “conspiracy theories,” with a special emphasis on “climate deniers,” “election deniers” and other incorrigibles.
“The fight against conspiracy theories begins at school … yet teachers worldwide lack the adequate training [to fight them],” UNESCO Director Gen. Audrey Azoulay stated in 2022.
