By Nate Jackson, Patriot Post [ source | listen ]
The Civics Secures Democracy Act is a way for critical race theory to destroy what’s left of civics education.
We’ve expended a lot of energy over the last couple of years explaining what critical race theory is and why this Marxist ideology is incredibly dangerous to America. It’s no longer just a crackpot theory bandied about in the offices of academics. This anti-civics grievance framework is becoming mainstream, and Joe Biden wants your kids to be steeped in it.
But first some background.
Civics education has gradually fallen out of favor in American public schools. There’s a simple reason for this: Educated citizens present an obstacle to Democrat policy objectives, and Democrats control the education complex. Citizens who know what the three branches of the federal government are and what they’re supposed to do (or not do) are less apt to clamor for bread and circuses come election time. The same goes for the states and the federalist system of government in our Republic.
Yet in too many schools, civics has either totally fallen by the wayside or is grossly mis-taught. The resulting civic ignorance, as we’ve warned before, presents a very real threat to our Constitution.
Enter the Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), introduced in Congress last year and gaining a few Republican cosponsors on its way to a possible vote soon. The first thing that should jump off the page is that a bill about civics should not use the word “democracy” in its title. We live in a constitutional Republic. It is not, by the historic definition of the word, a democracy. That is modern lazy shorthand for “we get to vote on stuff.” It also just so happens to subtly remind every American that Democrats are the party supposedly standing up for our “democracy.”
But our Founders repeatedly warned about democracy for good reason. “Remember democracy never lasts long,” said John Adams. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Next comes the substance of the bill, which brings us back around to our opening warning. Stanley Kurtz calls it “an opportunity for Biden’s education bureaucrats to fill students’ heads with CRT.”
How will this happen? Kurtz is glad you asked:
Nothing threatens a state’s ability to go [the] traditional route more than federal grants administered by Biden’s pro-CRT Department of Education. Yet that is what CSDA is. The Civics Secures Democracy Act is a series of baited hooks — civics grants with strings attached by Biden’s leftist bureaucrats. On top of that, CSDA’s state grants are tied to student performance on a national test, which gives the designers of the federal test (who are chosen by Biden) de facto control over state standards and curricula.
Republican Senators John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, and James Inhofe signed on to the bill, no doubt under the mistaken impression that a “bipartisan” effort to boost “civics” is a great idea.
But no less than Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called out how very wrong they are. Congress, he warned, is trying to “buy off states with $6 billion if they sacrifice American History for Critical Race Theory and Biden’s other political whims of the day.”
DeSantis is no stranger to the debate over indoctrination posing as education. He took on the Rainbow Mafia earlier this year with the much-lied-about legislation banning sexual grooming in the classroom. And to the civics issue, last year the governor updated Florida’s curriculum to explicitly tout America’s constitutional and free market system, contrasting it with vastly inferior socialist and authoritarian nations.
So DeSantis knows a leftist rat when he sees it.
He’s also exactly right. As Kurtz also points out, “This is how we got Common Core.” Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative ended up being a Trojan Horse for changing school curriculum to comport with leftist sensibilities, all thanks to federal grants. It worked because rejecting big time federal education bucks is a tough thing for governors to do. DeSantis is so far alone. Remember the bread and circuses? Remember the civics ignorance at the core of this issue? It’s all a vicious cycle.
There are critical reasons for Republicans to sink this bad piece of legislation rather than sign on to it. But the more important goal Republicans ought to be working to achieve is dismantling the Department of Education.
Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the department after Jimmy Carter established it in 1979. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos created a plan to do so as well, but she was unsuccessful. That’s all because, as Reagan said back in his 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
In this case, that government bureau is poised to further poison your children’s education, and thus their entire worldview and life course.
