Federal Anti-Commie Education Bill

Yep, someone has proposed (and 33 shining lights co-sponsored) a bill to root out that damned commie education from our classrooms.

HR 5349 was proposed by Rep Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican. Salazar was the daughter of two Cuban exiles who rose to prominence as a reporter for Univision and Telemundo. In 2018 she was beaten by former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala. In the 2020 rematch, endorsed by Trump, Salazar won. But she went on to be one of the few GOP reps who voted to create the January 6 commission. She has been fairly moderate, as GOP reps go.

But this bill-- the "Crucial Communism Teaching Act."

It's short and sweet. Its purpose? To help prepare school students to be "civically responsible and knowledgeable adults." And to ensure that high school students know that "communism has led to the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims worldwide, to ensure that they understand the "dangers of communism and similar political ideologies," and to ensure that they "understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism."

To do that, the bill says that the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (yes, that's a thing-- an educational, research and human rights nonprofit organization" authorized by a unanimous act of Congress under Clinton in 1993)-- the VCMF is to develop a civic curriculum that should discuss communism and totalitarianism and explain that these "conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States."

That curriculum should be updated to keep abreast of changing communist and totalitarian regimes. Particularly China.

Also, the VCMF should develop some oral history resources gathering "Portraits in Patriotism" from "diverse individuals" (that may kill the bill right there) who "demonstrate civic-minded qualities, are victims of above mentioned political ideologies, and can point out how these contrast with the USA.

I suppose the good news here is that there's no mandate to actually use these materials, just a directive for VCMF to "engage" with state and local education folks to "assist" with high schools using the stuff. VCMF actually already has a whole bunch of Communism Is Bad education materials.

It could be worse. It's not a mandate to use Prager U materials, after all. And to be clear, I'm not personally a big fan of communism, though in my reading of history, nations that "turn communist" usually keep being awful in ways that they were awful before anyone pretended to be a communist.

In fact, now that I think of it, some study of what creeping totalitarianism wouldn't hurt Americans (in or out of high school) right about now.

But teachers recognize this same old dodge. "We want students to know and agree with This Particular Thing," say some bunch of leaders somewhere. "How can we do that? I know! We'll get teachers to teach it to them. Because there's lots of room in the day to slip in one more slab of curricular materials. Also, students always believe what teachers say. Also, legislating curriculum always works out well."

Congress may very well pass this. Teachers will either ignore it or not as they are so inclined, and politicians will be proud of themselves for battling the scourge of communism and for once against standing up for only the correct sort of indoctrination in our schools.