DOE Partners With Right-Wing Orgs To 'Educate' America
Department Of Education Partners With 40 Right-Wing Orgs To Create ‘Patriotic’ Civics Lesson. This Can’t Be Good
Welp, here we go…
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education announced it has partnered with 40 right-wing organizations to create programming around civics aimed at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States.
In other words, the MAGA-fied federal government isn’t even trying to hide its agenda to indoctrinate the youth and all of America into far-right conservatism.
To be fair, the DOE didn’t go into much detail in its press release about what exactly this program, called the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, would entail. The department did say it “is dedicated to renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said it “will take bold steps to educate, inspire, and mobilize youth toward active and informed citizenship.”
It’s just that we’ve heard similar language used by the GOP, President Donald Trump, and his lackeys before, and it always amounts to unbridled jingoism purported to be patriotism, lying about America’s history of slavery, systemic racism, and genocide, and all other manner of attempts to disguise white nationalism as American pride.
And if the DOE had any interest in appearing to be non-partisan in its approach to educating America about America, it would have chosen different partners.
Instead, the list of 40 organizations that are on board with this project includes America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, Conservative Partnership Institute, Moms for Liberty, Prager U, the 1776 Project Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation, which literally authored Project 2025.
Mom’s for Liberty was labeled a right-wing extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2023, which is arguably less insulting than the moniker folks on social media gave the group, “Klanned Karenhood.” The group earned these labels by getting Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem banned from a Florida school district because Gorman mentioned racial equality and gender identity affirmation. Members of the group also launched anti-critical race theory complaints against Black history books that taught the Civil Rights Movement era stories of Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges.
And don’t even get me started on Prager U, an unaccredited conservative non-profit organization that was selected by Florida’s Board of Education to provide classroom materials to Florida schools. I’ve written about this organization and the racist who founded it pretty extensively. My favorite example of the kind of materials it’s known for is an animated video for children that teaches that abolitionist and former enslaved person, Frederick Douglass, would have agreed with the U.S. government’s decision to prioritize the greater good of America over ending slavery.
And I’m just guessing here, but the 1776 Project Foundation sounds like it was inspired by Trump’s “1776 Commission,” which was denounced by historians for excusing slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise as another necessity for the greater good of the nation, among many other attempts to whitewash U.S. history at the expense of accuracy. The project was also just a petty response to journalist, educator, historian, and activist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project, which was published in the New York Times in 2019 and earned her a Pulitzer Prize.
Maybe I’m just being a cynic, or maybe I just refuse to ignore that the America 250 Civics Education Coalition is the brainchild of the same administration that is purging the Smithsonian of Black history, and recently ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, including the iconic slavery-era photo, “The Scourged Back.”
This new program is just going to be more MAGA miseducation. There’s simply no reason to think otherwise.
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