Amanda Marcotte led off her Wednesday piece for AlterNet with a blast at conservatives’ “massive media campaign against reality that spreads out on Fox News, talk radio and the web,” but she went on to opine that adults aren’t the right’s top propaganda priority: “The kids are who conservatives really want. That’s why the right is relentless about its attempts to get into public schools, throw out actual information and replace it with false and misleading ideology.”
Marcotte’s peg was a report from the liberal Texas Freedom Network alleging, in Marcotte’s words, “that conservatives have been able to inject a shocking number of lies and disinformation into [Texas] public school history classrooms.” (Current Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards founded the Texas Freedom Network in 1996 in the hope it would be a counterweight to the state’s powerful Christian right.) Marcotte added that there's a good chance the bogus lessons will be taught to schoolchildren in other states as well.
From Marcotte’s post (emphasis added):
One of the biggest obstacles for the conservative movement when it comes to recruiting new members is, to be frank, reality itself. History, science, economics are all fields constantly churning out information that makes right-wing ideology look silly, nonsensical and even delusional. In response, the conservative movement has launched a massive media campaign against reality that spreads out on Fox News, talk radio and the web, but despite all this, conservatives are not satisfied. The kids are who conservatives really want. That’s why the right is relentless about its attempts to get into public schools, throw out actual information and replace it with false and misleading ideology…
The latest battle in the ongoing war to turn public schools into propaganda machines for the right is being fought in the state of Texas…[A] new report from the Texas Freedom Network suggests that conservatives have been able to inject a shocking number of lies and disinformation into public school history classrooms…
…Because of Texas' size, what they want in textbooks often becomes the only thing publishers are willing to offer. Your kid may be going to school in some other state, but what she reads in class may be decided by what some right-wingers in Texas want to indoctrinate kids into believing.
As the Washington Post reports, a group of 10 scholars in politics and history examined the proposed textbooks and found that they were stuffed full of lies and distortions, intended to trick students into believing right-wing myths…
…[T]hese books are lying…for the purpose of hoodwinking students into believing that ours is not a secular count[r]y and that it’s okay for the government to force Christian rituals and beliefs on the citizenry.
…The books also try to subtly discredit the civil rights movement by implying that segregation wasn’t so bad, with one book arguing that white and black schools had “similar buildings, buses, and teachers”…
Researchers also found that the books were playing the role of propagandist for unregulated capitalism…[One] book argues that any government regulation whatsoever somehow means that capitalism ceases to be capitalism…
Textbooks should provide information instead of right-wing propaganda based on lies, but such is the stranglehold on power that Republicans have in the state of Texas that they can flaunt their desire to indoctrinate your children without much worry that the voters will kick them out over it.
