How the Liars Get Away With So Much, Part 2

It's easy to call the wingnuts and the freakazoids and the teabaggers and the birthers and the tenthers stupid; they prove themselves stupid - or deliberate liars - every time they defy facts and reality to claim something stupid.

But why are they stupid? And why do so many people believe the stupidity spouted by the deliberate liars?

Because that's what they're taught in school. I don't mean the minority who attend christian madrasas where all they learn is fiction from the bible; I mean the majority who attend public schools, where the wingnut freakazoids dictate the curriculum.

And if you think public schools in your liberal enclave are safe, think again: their textbooks are written for Texas.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

But this time it's not just the old freakazoid demand to teach creationism alongside evolution (their demand to "teach the controversy" always makes me want to demand they teach Marxist economic theory alongside capitalism.) No, this time they are literally re-writing history to eliminate blacks, hispanics, natives, women, gays, labor unions, socialists, environmentalists, atheists, pacifists and liberals of all stripes.

The public education Texas is about to impose on the entire nation is Glenn Beck's wet dream: white christian men imposing order on the world through triumphant war, torture and destruction.

Barton’s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes—if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as “ethical capitalism.” They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, “Read the latest on McCarthy—He was basically vindicated.”

On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.” What’s more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant—the most obvious example being their push to swap the term “democratic” for “republican” when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the “atrocious” treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, “it might be much more appropriate that … demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government.” He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans.

Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men.

Not that this is entirely new - wingnut freakazoid revisionism has been rampant in rural school systems since Reagan. But until now, that revisionism has had to fight against the fact-filled textbooks. If Texas gets its way, fiction-filled textbooks will confirm rather than contradict conservative lies.

If you can't figure out why so many working poor and middle-class people rabidly oppose the Democratic Party proposals that would benefit them the most, consider what the public schools have been teaching.

Read "How the Liars Get Away with So Much, Part 1" here.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....