Cool Media.
I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and have co authored an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who covers extremism and far right movements for a variety of publications, including The Texas Observer and The Barbed Wire.
School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and other tedious topics. But beginning in twenty twenty, Christopher Ruffo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the right wing Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project twenty twenty five, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have
become communists and doctrination centers. RUFO falsely claimed that public school teachres were brainwashing school children with something called critical
race theory or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law, and culture that anti discrimination laws typically fail While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level, where the outrage has been directed.
That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums across the nation due to its large population and purchasing power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign. Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Rufo admitted to in a series of tweets in twenty twenty one. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical.
Race theory, Rufo wrote.
We have decotify the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
End quote.
On Fox News, Newsmax and other right wing media outlets, Rufo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash white children into hating themselves and goading black children into hating white people. Radical teachers and professors, Rufo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.
In a foundational paper called Whiteness's Property, the critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth from the rich and redistributing it along racial lines.
Rufa's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hard ships of campus closings, remote learning, and mass mandates, now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems. Parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards. Reuters reported on one meaning that turned violent in Loudon County, Virginia.
What had been planned as a typical school board meeting in Virginia's wealthy Louden County this week devolved into pandemonium, with hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium to accuse the school system of teaching their kids that racism in America is structural and systemic, something the school board denies as part of the curriculum. Things got so heated that the board members eventually walked out leaving the police to deal
with the unruly crowd. Two people left in handcuffs. Louden County School Board has been roiled for months by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a school of thought that maintains that racism is ingrained in US law and institutions, and that legacies of slavery and segregation have
created an uneven playing field for black Americans. The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives, who, like many in Louden, say it is being used to indoctrinate children that America is a racist country.
Critical race theory is anti white, and it's not American.
Those within a year for historical rhymes may find this outcry familiar. Resistance to racial integration and the Civil rights era movements drew similar accusations of being hostile to whites and being a product of anti American communism, and those with experienced teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwas an indoctrination. A common joke posted by teachers online is that quote, if we could indoctrinate students.
Students would always read the syllabus, but that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents. Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, grape Vine Kullyville, from August twenty twenty two, and very simple truths.
There's only two genders, and boys should go to boys rooms, girls should go to girls' restrooms. And guess what teachers should be forced to use Your freaking made up fantasy.
Pronouns find like hall hold the line against the LGBT mafia and their dang pedo fans hate winning. You know what, keep the wing they you keep the monkey cocks.
How's that work?
It?
The keep wrings so much, We'll keep come.
You know what, We're.
Gonna keeck come so hard.
The only thing these bullcards have to figure out is whiler tell their face back one thighs. Wow, it's all.
As absurd as all this may seem there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. As of twenty twenty, the United States had become more culturally diverse, racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before, and our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's
also a deep irony to this reaction. Prior to the advances of the Civil Rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the right. In fact, it's usually been the opposite. For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced
white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism. In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools over the years, with a particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about American history depends on where you live and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.
Textbooks before the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties Civil Rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists. Schoolbooks in the South, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a noble loss cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see
in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war, and this too steeped into the public imagination of movies like NFA Trail starring Van Heflin.
The time is coming when the rest of us are going to wipe you, and you're kind off the face of the earth.
According to the myths promoted first in schools then echoed in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave owning Southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves. Screenplaywriters have often echoed what they heard in the classroom is we see In this scene from the nineteen forty film Santa Fe Trail. Here Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave rebellion Harper's Ferry Virginia in eighteen fifty nine.
Massey portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Aero Flynn depicts future Confederate General J. E. B. Stewart as sweetly rational.
Half of the people in America believe in your theory, A lot of them, even Condonia methods that'll guarantee you a public trial.
I'm not on trial, but the nation itself?
Are you too stupid and blinded by.
A uniform to see what I see?
A dark and evil curse laying all over this land?
A kind will sin against God can only be wiped out in blood?
But why in blood? The people of Virginia are considered a resolution to abolic slavery for a long time. They sense that the tomorrow wrong, and the rest of the South will follow Virginia's example. All I ask is time.
From the eighteen eighties until the nineteen sixties, school books depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time, the Reconstruction period from eighteen sixty five to eighteen seventy seven, as a time of rampant corruption. These books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant lazy and expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.
American school children furthermore learned from their teacher that so called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes dictatorship was the better option. The nineteen twenty four textbook Are World Today and Yesterday, a History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy,
had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator. The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader.
Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up of capable men and has straightened up the badly demoralized finances of the country. He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and downing the communists by violence. Nevertheless, he has done much to do away with strikes and to re establish conditions as they were before the economic demoralization of World War One set in again.
School books reinforced an American culture in the nineteen twenties that responded to the horror of World War One, labor unrest, and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant but also more anti democratic.
All the while, Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of a thriving country and a via leader Iluch stripped down for the camera bok side by side with the peasants and wrestled wild animals. Never mind that this one had no teeth. Nonetheless, it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide, including Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi. Here he speaks to his many supporters among Italian Americans, I.
Tell it the Italians of America, who I want to make America greed.
Another textbook, published in nineteen thirty five, The Record of America, told stins that the so called Founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton were not big believers in democracy, an attitude the authors seemed to endorse. As the Record of America put it.
The Founders had little faith in the ability of people as a whole to maintain self control and wisdom in government. They had no confidence in the man without property. A man who had failed to accumulate property would be regarded as shiftless, lazy, or incompetent, and not deserving a voice in the government of others. The Constitution was written to retain power in the hands of those who release radical and to set obstacles in the way of radical mob action.
After the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African American abolitionists like Surgeon or truth in Frederick Douglas, and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with clarity. But the backlash was swift, particularly after the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama and the rise of the hyper conservative Tea Party.
In response, in twenty ten.
Tea Party supporters took control of the Texas State school Board, which has control over Texas school book curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.
In twenty fifteen, Ronnie Dean Baron got a text from her son Kobe, who was glancing at a ninth grade geography textbook published by McGraw hill signed him by his high school in Perilyn, Texas, near Houston. He sent her a video highlighting a map in its shocking caption. Soon Burn posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation.
A video post on Ronnie Dean Buren's face book page.
So I'm going to show you the book and then there's just an interesting.
Section, went viral. Her video has been viewed more than one point eight million times and has forty eight thousand shares. To get to the topic of conversation, you literally have to turn through the pages of her son's geography textbook.
The immigration in the United States can be divided in four district periods.
Kobe, who's in the ninth grade at Perlin High School, was studying immigration when he read this in his textbook, a comment that referenced African slaves as workers.
As if we worked our way up in America, as if we came here by choice for a better life.
The offensive caption read, in full quote, the Atlantic slave trade between the fifteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work.
On agricultural plantations.
The publisher of the book, simply titled World Geography later apologized for the euphemism, noting that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands.
The caption wasnt an accident. McGraw hill had given the Stay of Texas what it wanted, rather than anything like critical race theory. The State Board of Education twenty ten adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools, known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human caused climate change, and imposed other right wing content to be sold in Texas school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.
Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state and serve four year terms, while the governor appoints the chair of the board. Since the beginning of the twenty first century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists. As a twenty thirteen PBS report.
Deaths Don McElroy has three jobs and he loves them all.
Good morning got to mclary's office.
Job number one dentist, job number two Sunday school teacher, and job number three member of the Texas State Board of Education, a seat he's held for the last twelve years. But it's that third job which has put this dentist and Sunday school teacher from Brian, Texas into a national debate over what kids are taught in school. Critics have accused McLeroy of injecting his religious conservative beliefs into the curriculum. About every ten years, the board revises the textbook standards
for different subjects. Any books bought by the state must conform to these guidelines. The last big battle was over the science standards. This year he's tackling social studies.
The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter, as PBS reported a decade ago.
According to publishing insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit Texas's standards. Because Texas is the largest buyer of textbooks. That means the choices made here could determine books that other states will buy, and that's led to a school fight that has the entire country looking on.
This is how Kobe Burn ended up with the World Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves. Kathy Miller of the anti censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas. We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and so flawed that's become almost a punchline for comedians. Those serious about
education aren't laughing. However, in twenty eighteen, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historic figures Texas students must learn about, a decision later
reversed after embarrassing news coverage. In twenty ten, that board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in twenty eighteen to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintained that quote states rights
and sexualism were key contributing factors. Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools and the Jim Crow Eric quote had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of these separate but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for
affirmative action programs. Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy about whether human activity has led to climate change and to quote consider all sides of scientist evidence regarding evolution, even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels trinking climate change and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is nearly unanimous. Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they
attend schools. A New York Times comparison textbooks used at California Texas show that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of rights in reference to the Second Amendment. However, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces US commentary with a quote blank white space. As The New York Times.
Reported, Texas and California textbooks both introduced students to African American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students are told that quote. Some dismissed the quality of the literature produced by the Harlem Renaissance.
As The New York Times reported. The California version of the history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena whereby parents moved from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbooks said this.
Some people wished to escape the crime and the congestion of the city. Movement of some white people from cities to suburbs was driven by a desire to get away from more culturally diverse neighborhoods. Others believed the suburbs offered better and more affordable living.
The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War Two. The Texas State Board also specifically asked one textbook publisher demphasized how many clergies signed the Declaration of Independence and to underscore the supposed importance of religion to
the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by Texas Christian nationalist David Barton.
Barton, a seventy year old lifelong resident of Aledo, Texas, which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth, has become a major influence on the Republican Party and its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star State, but across the nation. While reporting on the Conservative Political Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a copy of one of Barton's books. He calls himself a historian, although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious
education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A one time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in nineteen eighty eight as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote, your sexual choice is not a God given right, he said on one occasion.
In nineteen eighty eight, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit. The organization says dedicated to quote educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion. The Founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick
a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith. Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with a religion, but that Christians should dominate the government. As Barton said in an interview.
So we've got to get away from being scared to say we're a Christian nation. What we've got to do is to find it the right way, define it the historical way. We can't let the left steal three hundred years of heritage. We can't let them wipe out three hundred core cases, wipe out what dozens of presents and governors have said, simply because they don't like the term, we are.
A Christian nation.
We have been a Christian nation, and that doesn't mean anything they think it does. We're not theocratic, we're not coercive. We believe in free choice. We don't believe in any of the others. And that's what we've got to get back to doing. We don't need to be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we believe we have a Christian nation.
The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the generation that led the Revolution and wrote the Constitution agreed with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that when church and state mix, both are harmed. Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in seventeen eighty six when it adopted
the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The first Amendment, adopted in seventeen eighty nine, also banned Congress from quote establishing a religion, and most states embraced, to varying degrees, the doctrine of church state separation.
There were some states that objected to this notion. The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could. Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist Church, respectively, until eighteen eighteen. In eighteen thirty three, for decades, some states had so called quote Jew laws that prohibited non Christians from holding office
or had similar bands on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the nineteenth century. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in eighteen sixty eight, placed the same limits on state power that were placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the nineteen forty seven Supreme Court case. Ever since versus Board of Education.
Artin has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately one hundred thousand primary documents written before eighteen twelve. Based on that selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation. And that American law should be based on the Bible.
Barton believes that not just the Bible, but also the original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery such as the Three Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God. He asserts, again with no evidence and without defining terms, that fifty two of the fifty five signers of the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote orthodized or evangelical Christians. In reality, the early leaders of America didn't
speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears the universe together, wound it up, and let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in
history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals. When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session the seventeen eighty seven Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion, and a gathering that as many as fifty five attended on any given day.
In their letters, many of the founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations. As John Adams said of the Bible.
In an age when fraud, forgery, and perjury were considered as lawful means of propagating truth by philosophers, legislators, and theologians, what may not be suspected.
Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Styles that Jesus was a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that Christ was the son of God. Franklin questioned whether the depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as describing the Gospels, could be trusted.
As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see. But I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have doubt with most of the present dissenters in England as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.
And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists, believe that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about a central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth.
Jefferson wrote, Jesus was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law.
Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been able to find. He cherry picks evidence to Bolster's claims about the founder's religious beliefs. Bartin, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church
services in the US capital. More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially. What's more, Jefferson was far from an orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservativism today. He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible. Which is a condensed version of Jesus's teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on. These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's twenty twenty two New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, Exposing the Myths You Always believed about Thomas Jefferson.
For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson in his seventeen eighty five book Notes on the State of Virginia.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does mean no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some of Barton's fellow Christian Conservatives. The History News Network website derided the book as quote the least credible history book in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it
had quote lost confidence in the book's details. Yet, in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.
In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican US House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about staffing at the Capitol. Johnson made his speech at a wall building event, telling the audience that the Theocratic evangelists had quote a profound influence on me, my work, my life, and everything I do.
Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed those lesson plans.
Huckabee has long produced so called history videos for school children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea of the United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a revolutionary war soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side.
We will bring the plagues upon our British oppressors, just as Moses did in ancient Egypt.
And we will win the same preto. We fight for the idea that we can make something right here. God's spirit compels us forward, and the times of fighters upon us.
This video series may not be shown to kindergarteners in Texas, but the lessons in the Huckabee Design curriculum clearly favor a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions. The scripture field lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckaby's product. This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.
Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last decade. One of his political action committees played a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate. He has close allies with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors and other states. Patrick said this at a twenty twenty two Conservative Political Action convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the US Constitution.
We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but.
The words of God.
Because he wrote the Constitution, he empowered them. We were a Christian state, and we've been blessed because of that for so many years.
In twenty ten, the Texas State School Board for the first time required that textbook publishers portray a particular biblical figure as an honorary founding father. This supposed founder was famously portrayed in the nineteen fifty six box office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five term president of the National Rifle Association.
Woo unto the you're Israel, you have sinned a great sin in the sight of God.
You are not worthy to receive these ten commandments.
In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publisher are required to tell students that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo Christian scripture as well as the Qur'an, as leading the Hebrews out of slavery was a major influence
on the authors of the Constitution. Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June twenty twenty four which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus, derived from Protestant translations of the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an injuction barring enforcement of the law.
With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought to get a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments at least sixteen inches wide and twenty inches tall, and, as the law put it, quote in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision
from anywhere in the classroom. The bill passed the state Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when it didn't come before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline. As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue his crusade in the coming months.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. That bill was originally proposed during last year's legislative session, but missed a key deadline and died in the House. Louisiana just passed a similar law this week, the Lieutenant governor posting on x saying quote, Texas would have and should have been the first state in the nation to put the Ten Commandments back in our schools end quote.
The Lieutenant Governor says he will pass the bill during the next legislative session.
Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state government violating the First Amendment. Princeton Histori and Kevin Cruz explained by such laws like those signed by Louisiana or Governor Jeff Landry ignore the United States Constitution.
There are three references to religion and the Constitution. All three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away from the state. There is no religious tests required for office forms. A remarkable revolutionary act at the time, the First amendment says there will be no national religion established by the national government. Says that we will not interfere with your private right to worship or not worship as you see fit. Right, that is what the Constitution says.
And so Landry says he wanted to put this up because Moses was the first lawgiver.
He's not.
The Code of Hamerabi predates Moses by four centuries or something. But also, if you want to look at the real law of the land, put the Constitution up on those walls. Let students read what the real law of this country has to say about the proper role of religion in politics.
The history of posting Ten Commandments signs or plaques are building such monuments in public spaces over the last seventy years has an origin that might shock many right wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism. As Cruise points out in this book One Nation Under God, How
Corporate America invented Christian America. The three hour, forty minute epic movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wild audiences with its twenty five thousand member cast and advanced special effects when it was released in nineteen fifty six, The movie grossed more than eighty five million dollars. The
film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director Cecil B. De Mel hated the New Deal and testified to the House un American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood, that drove up the cost of filmmaking.
The film can be read as a metaphor about the Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union and the freedom loving Hebrews standing in for the United States. At the beginning of the movie, Demill appears and calls the movie quote the story of the Birth of Freedom, the story of Moses. The movie also captures the racism and ironically, the anti semitism of a country that had
not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadell tells a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant. Demill then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses.
When Heston's wife gave.
Birth to a son.
Demill sent her a telegram saying congratulations, He's got the part.
Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who broke the thirteen year informal NFL ban on African American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in nineteen forty six, stro played both in an Ethiopian king
and the enslaved attendant of Moses's adopted Egyptian mother. Demill thought that the audiences could tell whether swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light skinned cast.
Even though Demill's mother was Jewish, the only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters, and who won de Mill's favor, perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House
on American Activities Committee during the Communist Witch hunts. Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in The Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters.
You take too much upon yourself.
We will not live by your commandments.
We're free.
There is no freedom without the law.
Who's law most yours?
Did you call those tablits to become a prince over us?
As Cruz documents? When the Ten Commandments film was initially released, the mill came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He teamed up with a conservative anti communist organization, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, to establish Ten Commandment monuments across the country. Around the time that Southern States erected new Confederate monuments to protest desegregation. Ten Commandment monuments appeared at the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall,
and near the US Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly one hundred and fifty such monuments were erected across the country. Momentum stalled during the Civil Rights era to the extent that in Alabama, State Justice Roy Moore ord ridicule when he placed, without authorization, a self funded five two hundred and eighty pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing State Supreme Court in two thousand and one.
The monument was ordered removed two years later, but once fringe figures like More have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick and their allies.
The contemporary of session with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal Men like anti crt crusader Christopher Rufo, along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the world that made The Ten Commandments film, a world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history
of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide. And now once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.
The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. It's called accreditation for a reason. The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally. When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.
On January twenty ninth of this year, Trump issued an executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any public school that allegedly imprints quote anti American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our nation's children. This can include teaching them about transgender identity, proing services to trans students, or educating students about America's long, bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia,
or transphobia. The order also requires public schools to provide
quote unquote patriotic education. Those like Trump, Barton, and others who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days of the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties, when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place, and those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys.
In the Civil Rights era, black and brown parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow laws. Parents who want their children receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors and to disrupt the meetings of right wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned into
a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This is Michael Phillips.
And this is Stephen Monicelli.
Thanks to Betsy Freoff for reading passages from textbooks, and to Dan Glass for reading quotes from the founding fathers. Of course, thanks to you for listening.
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