The Patriot Post® · A New Front in the Culture War: Action Civics
There’s more news on a subject we analyzed back in February from Joe Biden’s Department of Miseducation. Our federal bureaucrats have taken what the state of Illinois proposed at that time and supercharged these rules by proposing new federal regulations codifying Critical Race Theory (CRT) — a key concept within action civics — into government-sanctioned education. While they claim, “We propose these priorities to support the development of culturally responsive teaching and learning and the promotion of information literacy skills in grants under these programs,” the devil is, as always, in the details.
As has been the case throughout this academic obsession with the racist and Marxist fad of CRT, Stanley Kurtz is on the case. “Biden is obviously co-opting conservatives’ interest in reviving traditional U.S. history and civics to deliver its perfect opposite — federal imposition of the very ideas conservatives aim to combat,” Kurtz writes at National Review, and he’s correct. It took the Biden regime nanoseconds to disband the 1776 Commission, President Donald Trump’s much-needed rebuttal to the fallacy of the 1619 Project, but now we will be spending real money on fake history.
“I have argued that additional anodyne-sounding priority criteria in the Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA) — criteria favoring grants targeted to ‘underserved’ populations and the mitigation of various racial, ethnic, and linguistic achievement gaps — would be interpreted by the Biden administration as a green light to fund Critical Race Theory in the schools,” Kurtz continues. “The new draft federal rule for grant priority in American history and civics education makes it clear that this is indeed the Biden administration’s intent.” That “anodyne-sounding” criteria is likely why the bill has a Republican cosponsor in both the House and Senate; however, the lead sponsor in both chambers is a Democrat.
As further proof of how this will turn education into indoctrination, Kurtz uses Massachusetts as an example in practice. In 2018, that state scrapped its highly regarded 2003 civics curriculum in favor of a new “action civics” set of courses at the behest of radical leftist educational groups. No one should be surprised to find the funding for the CSDA is intended to be targeted to those populations the Left feels are the victims of society and in need of “racial equity.”
A second part of the new regulations speaks to the need to “distinguish fact from misinformation” by “help(ing) students develop the skills necessary to meaningfully participate in our democracy.” The question is whether there will be any facts to distinguish in the sea of misinformation that is likely to be presented and, in many cases, acted upon — a significant ingredient of action civics is taking protests to the streets, including demonstrations advocating for driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, gun control, and the Green New Deal, among other pet leftist issues. (No word on whether it’ll include all “peaceful” protests.)
As John Fonte explains at American Greatness, though, “One can assume, with a fair degree of certainty, that ‘action civics’ will not see students involved in pro-life and pro-gun rights protests or in projects supporting the hardworking, underpaid (often Latino) agents of the U.S. border patrol who risk their lives daily to enforce our nation’s laws.”
We’ve said it before, but elections matter. Perhaps Ken Starr believes that these changes won’t survive a Supreme Court challenge, but that’s a very tenuous lifeline to hold on to at this juncture in our nation’s history. Despite their lack of a clear mandate given narrow House and Senate majorities, Democrats are rolling full speed ahead on all fronts to secure perpetual power through whatever means necessary. Ongoing attempts to revamp voting laws, add the District of Columbia as a state, and pack the Supreme Court have all grabbed the headlines, but if we allow the educational system to be a further means of indoctrination, the rest will be rendered all but meaningless.