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Just Say No: Congress Considers Neocon Lesson Plans to Keep Kids Off Communism

7 14
06.12.2024

A Florida Congresswoman is on a mission to stamp out Gen-Z’s growing support for left-wing ideas, and is turning to a hard-line neocon group for help in educating the youth on the “evils of communism.”

In the latest front in the culture war over school curricula, the House of Representatives is set to vote Friday on a bill that would give a congressional stamp of approval to the lesson plans of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a group closely linked to fervently hawkish corners of the foreign policy blob.

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, also known as H.R. 5349, would direct the VOC Foundation to develop an educational curriculum it could offer to school districts to help instruct students on atrocities, both historic and contemporary, carried out by communist regimes.

Inspiration for the bill came to its sponsor, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., when she learned of a 2020 survey — published, as it so happens, by the VOC Foundation — showing that 28 percent of Gen-Zers and 22 percent of millennials held favorable views of communism.

“Communism is one of the most destructive political ideologies the world has ever seen,” Salazar said in a press release in September. “The Crucial Communism Teaching Act is important because our youth must remember the crimes of the communists, including those inflicted upon my constituents and their families in Florida’s 27th district.”

The legislation, which Salazar explicitly modeled after a 2020 bill mandating the development of educational materials about the Holocaust, has largely flown under the radar, and response to it has been muted. But some Democrats in Congress have already raised concerns that the bill’s monomaniacal focus on communism would leave out important lessons about other forms of repression.

“The bill neglects to mention our country’s long history of using the label ‘Communism’ to enflame, scare, and pit Americans against one another.”

“The bill neglects to mention our country’s long history of using the label ‘Communism’ to enflame, scare, and pit Americans against one another,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., in a Rules Committee hearing on the bill Tuesday. “If we want students to examine the effect of Communism on the world, it would be negligent not to warn against the dangers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the vitriol of Joseph McCarthy, and the negative impact of the Red Scare on many innocent Americans, particularly those seeking racial progress in the Civil Rights........

© The Intercept


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