Trump speaks in Las Vegas on October 28, 2023. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty
Donald Trump is promising that if he’s elected president in 2024, he will create a federally funded online university that awards free degrees and saves college students from being indoctrinated into “wokeness” by indoctrinating them into anti-wokeness, jingoism, xenophobia, and more of the same old whitewashed curriculum that sets America up as a more noble nation than factual history proves it to be.
Oh, and he’s calling it “revolutionary.”
What Trump is proposing is the taxation of large private university endowments to pay for a new institution called “American Academy.” And while it’s true that taxing the rich in order to give citizens something for free is absolutely what Republicans call “socialist” any time a Democrat proposes it, that little bit of hypocrisy is the least concerning thing about what Trump wants to do, which includes banning “wokeness or jihadism,” which apparently includes any nuanced conversation regarding the complex Israel-Palistine conflict.
From Politico:
Trump’s policy proposal comes as U.S. institutions, including top universities, have come under increased political scrutiny, most recently for their response to the deadly attack on Israel by Hamas. Prominent business leaders, politicians, and donors have criticized their alma maters and even vowed to pull future donations to schools for muddled or muted statements, or for allowing pro-Palestinian speakers on campus.
“We spend more money on higher education than any other country and yet, they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions. We can’t let this happen,” says the guy who inspired a domestic terrorist attack at the U.S. Capitol because he was legally voted out of office and was willing to resort to propaganda campaigns (and possibly a RICO conspiracy) in order to remain in power.
Listen, Trump’s real agenda here is clear and it has nothing to do with being “freedom-focused” as he claimed in his video promoting his little online white nationalism school. This is the same guy who essentially spearheaded the propaganda-reliant war on critical race theory. He tried to establish the absurd “1776 Commission” to counter Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning work The 1619 Project. And these aren’t the only examples of Trump hopping aboard the passive-aggressive displays of white fragility train under the guise of “revolutionizing” education in America by, well, basically teaching the version of America that America has always traditionally taught.
Politico noted that earlier this year, “Trump called for new accreditation standards for colleges and universities and proposed removing diversity, equity and inclusion administrators and promoting the defense of ‘the American and Western civilization’ in school curriculum.”
Yes, the promotion of “American and Western civilization” in America and the West is definitely under attack. How can we combat this? Maybe we can put up American flags all over every single one of our state and federal government buildings and spend generations forcing school students to pledge allegiance to that flag. Maybe we can have multiple federal American holidays commemorating things like the nation’s white-exclusive independence and the celebrations of our veterans both alive and dead. We can fill classrooms across America with history books that do the bare minimum in teaching anything outside of white American and Western history that paints the country as the greatest in the world as opposed to a systemically racist world superpower.
Yes, we definitely need this federally and privately funded online school for right-wing ideology to do what American education has never done before. (I’m honestly not sure if I’m laying the sarcasm on thick enough.)
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump is calling himself a “revolutionary” for rehashing what has already traditionally been done to death in American education. This is, after all, the same man who tried his hand at higher education only for “Trump University” to end up settling fraud allegations with a $25 million payout to former students.
That’s to speak nothing of when Trump recently declared in a campaign speech that if he’s elected, “We’re gonna have a great country. It’s gonna be called the United States of America.” (So, who’s going to tell him?) He also wants credit for being the only person to make the connection that “us” is spelled “U.S.”
“I just picked that up. Has anyone ever thought of that? I just picked that up,” Trump said in New Hampshire of the connection between “us” and “U.S.” that politicians and self-proclaimed patriots have been making for seemingly ever. “Now, if we say something genius, they’ll never say it. They’ve never said, ‘Trump’s a great speaker.'”
Trump thinks he’s a “genius” for being probably not even the millionth person to make this simple two-letter word observation.
Nah—this is definitely the guy to put in charge of our education.
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