California Democrats hate free speech because it’s proving to be a hurdle in their crusade to indoctrinate the whole of the state and indeed the entire country into accepting the Left’s political and cultural agendas.

Under the guise of seeking to protect schoolchildren from the threat of “misinformation,” the Democrat-controlled state government recently passed Assembly Bill 873, which Governor Gavin Newsom promptly signed into law.

What this legislation does is “act to add Section 33548 to the Education Code, relating to pupil instruction” on media literacy. The state government is effectively choosing “ethical media” standards to be taught to public school students grades K-12. The curriculum guide includes covering how “the proliferation of online misinformation has posed risks to international peace, interfered with democratic decision-making and threatened public health.”

Gee, we wonder how the Democrats who wrote the law or the Democrat teachers union members who’ll follow it in the classroom will interpret that.

The legislation also presents itself as an effort to protect children from the ills of social media. Its supposed aim is “to ensure that all pupils in California are prepared with media literacy skills necessary to safely, responsibly, and critically consume and use social media and other forms of media.”

But what are these “media literacy skills”? Well, Democrat assembly member Marc Berman, who sponsored the bill, essentially admitted its design is to get students to accept the Democrat Party’s policy agenda items as incontrovertible truth. As Berman put it, “From climate denial to vaccine conspiracy theories to the January 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol, the spread of online misinformation has had global and deadly consequences.”

What this legislation is seeking to do is train up students to accept only Leftmedia sources and narratives as reliable and trustworthy. It’s a blatant effort to bias schoolchildren’s views in favor of the mainstream media, which indoctrinates in the climate cult, suppresses vaccine information, and lies about elections and the January 6 riot, just to name a few.

Opposing so-called misinformation, disinformation, and fake news has become a Democrat hobby horse, and of course the question of who determines what is accurate and trustworthy news is left entirely up to them. It’s an argument to justify infringing on Americans’ First Amendment rights, without blatantly saying as such.

California isn’t the only Democrat-controlled state to engage in such “media literacy” education standards, as New Jersey, Illinois, and Delaware have similar education lessons for public school students. However, no state has been as aggressive as the Golden State.

Teaching the facts, and teaching children how to engage with and think through the facts rather than telling them what to believe, has always been the crux of the issue with educational standards. The basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic were once recognized as foundational building blocks needed to equip students with the skills and tools for them to further develop their ability to access, accumulate, and apply knowledge and information for themselves. That used to be the primary goal of schools.

Increasingly, however, these basic educational building blocks have seemingly become secondary as special interest agendas and policy issues have taken center stage. Teaching students what to think rather than how to think has taken precedence in places like California.