Stephen Monticelli
Appearances
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 Ruffo admitted to in a series of tweets in 2021.
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The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, Ruffo wrote. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, end quote.
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On Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets, Ruffo 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.
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Radical teachers and professors, Ruffo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.
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Those with an ear 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 experience teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrination.
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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.
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Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, Grapevine-Colleyville, from August 2022.
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As absurd as all this may seem, there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. As of 2020, 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.
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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.
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For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism.
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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.
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From the 1880s until the 1960s, school books depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time, the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877, 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.
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Again, school books reinforced an American culture in the 1920s that responded to the horrors of World War I, labor unrest, and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant, but also more anti-democratic.
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After the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African-American abolitionists like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with clarity.
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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 2010, Tea Party supporters took control of the Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school book curriculums.
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They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.
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The offensive caption read in full, quote, The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
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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.
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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 21st century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists, as a 2013 PBS report notes.
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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 scientific evidence regarding evolution, even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels, drinking climate change, and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is nearly unanimous.
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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.
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Barton, a 70-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.
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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 1988 as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia.
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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.
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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.
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Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in 1786, when it adopted the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The First Amendment, adopted in 1789, also banned Congress from, quote, establishing a religion. And most states embraced, to varying degrees, the doctrine of church-state separation.
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Barton has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately 100,000 primary documents written before 1812. 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.
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In their letters, many of the founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations.
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Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Stiles 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 described in the Gospels could be trusted.
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And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believed that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about his central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth.
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For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson in his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia.
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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.
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Yet in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.
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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.
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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-filled lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckabee's product.
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This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.
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In 2010, 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 1956 box office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five-term president of the National Rifle Association.
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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 16 inches wide and 20 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.
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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.
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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 historian Kevin Cruz explained why such laws, like those signed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution.
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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, DeMille appears and calls the movie, quote, the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses.
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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.
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DeMille 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, DeMille sent her a telegram saying, congratulations, he's got the part.
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As Cruise documents, when the Ten Commandments film was initially released, DeMille 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.
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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 U.S.-Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly 150 such monuments were erected across the country.
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Momentum stalled during the civil rights era to the extent that an Alabama state justice, Roy Moore, suffered ridicule when he placed, without authorization, a self-funded 5,280-pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing the state's Supreme Court in 2001. The monument was ordered removed two years later.
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But once fringe figures like Moore have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and their allies.
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On January 29th 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.
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This could include teaching them about transgender identity, providing 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.
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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 1920s and the 1930s 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.
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Thanks to Betsy Freehoff for reading passages from textbooks, and to Dan Glass for reading quotes from the Founding Fathers. Of course, thanks to you for listening. Thank you.