Sinister GOP Propaganda Threatens Our Schools

Republicans are attempting to indoctrinate school children, and it's going to backfire.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

by Justin Rosario

Judging by their actions, Republicans appear to genuinely despise their children and grandchildren. It’s not entirely clear why they despise their offspring, but it is indisputable that they do. 

From taking away free school lunches, a pathology that hurts white Republican children more than anyone else, Republicans have been engaged in a decades-long war in defunding public schools, with entirely disastrous results.

More recently, Republicans are waging war on school curriculums. First it was censoring history, and now they are pushing hardcore right-wing propaganda in a bid to indoctrinate a generation of American children.

This is not going to end well for them.

History from the victor’s perspective

Republicans believe that public education has long neglected the perspective of conservative men (no, seriously) and they are hard at work remedying this injustice. A prime example of this would be Florida incorporating PragerU videos into its K-12 curriculum this year. If you’re not familiar with PragerU, it is the very definition of indoctrination. Don’t take my dirty liberal word for it. Here is Dennis Prager quoted by Vanity Fair:

Dennis Prager himself, as Kruse noted, has described PragerU content as a form of indoctrination. “‘You indoctrinate kids’—which is true,” Prager said of his critics last month. “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement, I said, but what is [sic] the bad about our indoctrination?”

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans clutched their pearls over the idea of children being indoctrinated. Now, they are bragging about indoctrinating children. So how ugly are these new lesson plans? Extremely: 

Israel is “the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations”; climate change deniers are tantamount to Jewish resistance fighters who rose up against the Nazis; and British colonists, who brutally ruled the Indian subcontinent, were benevolent reformers trying to save indigenous people from their own “harmful traditions.”

These are just a few of the distorted teachings that were sanctioned for use in Florida’s elementary, middle, and high schools last month when PragerU was named an official education vendor for the state. 

It gets worse:

Similar content can be found in its product line aimed at grade school children. In one PragerU Kids video, two cartoon characters travel back in time to listen to Christopher Columbus dispute his legacy of violence and subjugation. “The place I discovered was beautiful,” Columbus says of the Americas, “but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.” He then defends his enslavement of the region’s indigenous: “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world.” In another PragerU Kids video, an animated Booker T. Washington absolves two white children of any guilt they might feel about slavery and the broader treatment of Black people in America. “Future generations are never responsible for sins of the past,” says Washington, shortly after falsely distinguishing the United States as “one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery.”

This is how you teach a generation of children, including Black children, that the Confederate South was the noble victim of the evil North’s “War of Aggression.” Florida is not the only state doing this. Oklahoma and New Hampshire are considering it and there will be other Republican-controlled hellholes that almost certainly follow suit.

Republicans are very aware of how effective this is because Southern Boomers are living proof of it. Or did you think whites in the South are genetically disposed towards violent racism? Of course not. This was the air they breathed for decades. It started at home but it was reinforced every day at school.   

Children are our future?

To be perfectly clear: Republicans are not doing this to create what they consider more patriotic Americans. They are explicitly trying to teach children to embrace the politics of hate. Even in states Republicans do not control, this indoctrination is seeping into classrooms wherever MAGA nuts have taken control of school boards. 

In Pennsylvania, the Pennridge School Board voted to use something called the “1776 Curriculum” as part of its Social Studies course. If “1776 Curriculum'' sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a reason for that. While it’s not directly related to Trump’s “1776 Commission,” which is probably what you’re thinking of, both of them stem from the right’s racist temper tantrum over the New York Times’ “1619 Project.” Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information explain how insanely awful the people behind the 1776 Curriculum are: 

The curriculum was developed in part by Jordan Adams, an educational consultant with no experience developing curricula for public schools. Adams launched his company, Vermilion Education, in March 2023. The Pennridge School Board hired Adams in April, paying $125 per hour for his services. The contract includes no limit on the number of hours, no specific deliverables, and no termination date. 

This suggests, rather strongly, that the Pennridge School Board hired Adams based less on his academic qualifications and track record than for the political goals the Republican members were looking to achieve. What makes me say this? Adams has no academic qualifications or track record. At all.

Adams holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Hillsdale College and a master’s in humanities from another private conservative school, the University of Dallas. He does not hold any degrees in education. After graduating, Adams returned to Hillsdale College as an employee, where he promoted the 1776 Curriculum. On July 1, in a private presentation to Moms for Liberty, a far-right organization that pushes for changes in educational policy, Adams described himself as a "fox..in the henhouse." He bragged that "the right people are freaking out" about his contract with Pennridge Schools. As of a few months ago, Adams had no other public school clients. 

Although Adams does not have the qualifications to write curriculum, it was revealed during a Pennridge School Board meeting on August 21 that Adams independently wrote aspects of the new social studies curricula. 

"The right people are freaking out." Public policy based on trolling the libs. Indeed, you can feel the concern for the welfare of America’s youth flowing forth from the Republican Party. So is this stuff as bad as PragerU? Yup, and then some:

The 1776 Curriculum spends considerable time on the meaning behind the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” A lesson now required for Pennridge School District ninth graders instructs teachers to pose the question of whether “women and slaves were included in this understanding of equality.” At the time, women did not have the right to vote, had limited property rights, and married women could not earn their own income. Nevertheless, the Hillsdale lesson argues that “the Founders meant that men and women share equally in human dignity and in possession of natural rights or freedoms that are simply part of being human.” 

That’s pretty vomitous, but whitewashing America’s racism and misogyny is standard for the right wing. This, however, was a new one for me:

The 1776 Curriculum also creates justifications for not granting women the right to vote, insinuating that it was logical to only give the franchise to men, as they are the ones who “would be called to give their lives up for their country” and “had a high personal stake in what the country did regarding various policies, including going to war.”

That, dear reader, is a Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) talking point. And while it’s difficult for my jaded self to be surprised by the right’s endless talent for depravity, it’s not impossible.

The rapid assimilation of the MRA movement into mainstream Republicanism is something I have been raising the alarm about for some time. It’s an extremely dangerous escalation for a cult that’s already dangerously extreme. Allowing this ideology to be taught to children is no different than allowing white nationalism into the classroom. It’s that corrosive. 

So yes, these new efforts to indoctrinate children into an ideology of hate and bigotry are, let’s not mince words, evil. All of it being driven by people who truly despise the very children they claim to champion. More liberal hyperbole? Here’s Dennis Prager again via Media Matters (emphasis mine):

That school sign that I saw – school room sign that I saw in The New York Times. "The world is better because you are in it." I don't know what grade it was, I assume something like fifth grade. What a stupid message. Plus, it's not true.

What has any fifth grader done to have made the world better because he or she is in it?

This is a person who, despite having had 4 children with 3 wives (family values!), clearly doesn’t like children. Is it any wonder the right is following Prager’s lead in the rush to damage as many children as possible? He’s the perfect avatar for their loathing of future generations. 

Overreach, thy name is right wing

This is a cycle the racist conservative men cannot seem to stop repeating. After losing the Civil War, the racist white men of the South went on a violent rampage to reclaim their power and stop Black people voting. Federal troops were consequently sent in to successfully squash the KKK. In the 1920s and 30s, the pro-fascist right had tens of thousands (or more) of Nazi sympathizers in America. It failed as a political movement when America watched Nazis pummel a Jew on stage. We then went to war with the Nazis in Europe.

In the 1950s and 60s, those racist white men in the South went on another violent rampage as Black Americans fought for their civil rights. The violence shocked the nation into action and the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were passed. 

It took over 70 years for the American right to openly embrace fascism again and it’s not working out so well for them this time, either.

Again and again, we see racist white men get comfortable with their power, and then push it too far. So far that the public pushes back. Donald Trump and his cult of, surprise, racist white men thought they could overthrow the government of the United States. Now, over a thousand of the expendable pawns have been arrested. Several of the leaders are on their way to a decade or more in federal prison. Trump and dozens of his co-conspirators are facing what amounts to life sentences.

Worse (for Republicans), laws have been amended to remove the possibility of another “soft coup,” and Democrats won key positions in several battleground states. This means Republicans have lost any possibility of rigging the 2024 election, an election that is extremely critical for the future of their party. Their overreach cost them far more than they bargained for.

The right, however, never learns from its mistakes. Republicans succeeded in browbeating schools across the country into removing “woke” material from their curriculum. And the GOP could have introduced more subtle forms of right wing propaganda. Or perhaps started small and worked their way up to the more egregious stuff. But they couldn’t do that.

Call it stupidity. Call it arrogance. It doesn’t matter. The right is pouring toxic waste into our schools with all the confidence in the world that no one can stop them. Which is exactly what they thought when they started the Civil War. Or when they lynched thousands of Black men. Or when American Nazis filled Madison Square Garden. Or when Republicans staged a coup in 2021. 

The GOP is going to escalate the propaganda to the point where the backlash to their backlash will be louder and angrier than astroturf fascist organizations like the so-called “Moms for Liberty” can drown out. MAGA school boards are going to find themselves deloused; the parasites removed from office and replaced with people less concerned with the Republican agenda of hate and more concerned with educating America’s children. 

Republicans are their own worst enemy because they’re fighting a fantasy they invented and they inevitably go too far trying to course correct against fairy tales. The result is that out here in the real world, we see insane people doing horrible things. Sooner or later, our patience with their bullshit runs out and we do a little course correcting of our own. The GOP is pushing a lot harder and faster than usual and they are taking aim at our kids. There’s a very good chance our patience is going to run out a lot faster than Republicans are used to and they’re going to find out what real mobs of angry parents look like.

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