Right-wing activists have escalated their assault on the country’s public education system, birthing what The New York Times calls an “increasing tempo of radical right attacks on local government, libraries, school boards, [and] parent-teacher associations.”
The year is 1966 – and some things never change.
Today, just as the Times reported 59 years ago, right-wing activists are launching attacks on local governments, libraries, school boards, and parent-teacher associations in their decades-long quest to undermine the public school system. And today, just like back then, those activists are motivated by a deeply held belief that public schools are a tool of the political left, indoctrinating children into liberalism as part of a plot to erode the American way of life.
If you think that’s an exaggeration or an unfair depiction of their beliefs, I have bad news for you. As a Colorado-based Moms for Liberty leader told CNN in 2023, today’s right-wing education activists believe that there is a coordinated effort by public schools to make children trans and gay as a way to “break down the family unit” and “slowly erode away at constitutional rights” as “conservative values are broken down.”
Hypermodern specifics aside, it’s not a new idea, or an uncommon one. The belief that public schools are liberal indoctrination centers has been a central tenet of conservative faith for generations. It is an idea which has survived long enough and been repeated enough times that it has taken on a status similar to fact. But it’s not a fact, and it never has been.
From its beginnings, the myth of a left-wing takeover of public schools was built on conspiracies, lies, and absolutely mouth-frothing lunacy on par with QAnon. It was a narrative spun by fringe figures of the midcentury right which slowly became one of the conservative movement’s most common beliefs. Now, in the hands of a newer generation of activists, it poses a serious risk to the great American promise that every child can get an education.
As World War II wound down, the Cold War spun up, and the American government shifted its footing from fighting fascism in Europe to opposing communism around the globe, fears of communist infiltration seized the American public. Though history has shown that large numbers of communists never actually infiltrated the U.S. government and American society, the idea seized the imaginations of the post-war public and kicked off a decade-long paranoid furor which we now remember as the Red Scare or McCarthyism.
It was a heady time: reds under every bed, hiding in every government agency, working on every major motion picture. And, like any moral panic, it spun out of control. Careers were ended, families were torn apart, and lives were ruined in pursuit of an imaginary enemy. Today, the McCarthy era is often and understandably compared to the Salem Witch Trials.
Around the same time that D.C. was beset by hallucinated communists, the federal government’s role in public education was growing. Before 1931, the feds played almost no role in the underdeveloped and wildly unequal school system. By the end of WWII a decade and a half later, that had changed dramatically. Thanks in large part to federal funding, the public school system had been formalized, developed, and knit together in a way it never was before, ensuring that American children could receive a quality education no matter where they were born.
Naturally, these two trends clashed. The federal government’s New Deal-era modernization crashed straight into the McCarthy era’s fears of communist infiltration. When Congress passed the School Lunch Act of 1946, ensuring meals for American students and subsidies for American farmers, the right-wing fringe called it “communistic.”
And that was just the beginning.
As McCarthy’s red scare roared into the 1950s, the right-wing fringe grew, attracting activists and funders which would eventually turn its midcentury preoccupation with imagined communism into a decades-long crusade against the school system.
In 1958, a group of wealthy industrialists who strongly opposed communism – by which they seem to have meant anything which would either raise their taxes or impose any regulations on their business interests – came together to create the John Birch Society. Formally founded by Robert W. Welch, the group’s founding members also included men like Fred C. Koch and Harry Lynde Bradley, whose namesake foundations continue funding right-wing education activism to this day.
Buoyed by its founders’ fortunes, the John Birch Society quickly grew into a major national political force, with local chapters springing up in state after state and the group’s fringe, conspiracist beliefs becoming more and more influential.
By 1961, the Birchers had members in Congress, with California Republican Representative Edgar W. Hiestand telling the New York Daily News that he was a proud member of the “violently anti-communist” group which he said was dedicated to promoting “less and less government and greater individual rights.” In the interview, Hiestand voiced the rationale which the group and its modern descendants have parroted for decades now: that they must use the tactics which they imagined their opponents were already using against them.
“I’ve heard it said within the group that we’ve got to use methods similar to those of the Communists,” he said. “We realize methods of fighting communism can’t be handled only by gloved hands.”
Simultaneous to the Birchers’ rise, a book by the controversial former police chief of Salt Lake City, W. Cleon Skousen, was on its way to becoming a cult hit in far-right circles. Published in 1958, Skousen’s The Naked Communist put imaginary flesh on the imagined bones of the communist peril. Though the book is a citation-free screed written straight from its author’s imagination, it has remained an influential conservative text ever since its publication. As of 2017, it had sold nearly two million copies.
Like the Birchers, Skousen was convinced that communists were working to take over the United States. And, like the Birchers, he was convinced that this imagined communist plan ran through the school system.
In a passage presaging modern activists’ beliefs about schools trying to turn kids gay in order to erode conservative values, Skousen wrote that Fidel Castro wanted to “break up Cuban family life” so that “the children will be under the influence of teachers and not their families,” in schools which “serve as propaganda transmission belts to dispense Communist doctrine.”
But the threat was not relegated to communist Cuba, according to Skousen. It had already arrived in the United States, with thousands of secret communists serving in public schools to convert children to “collectivism.”
In The Naked Communist, Skousen – again, with no cited sources whatsoever – laid out a list of “Current Communist Goals.” In it, he included “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, starting public schools on the path to racial desegregation, also added to the milieu of conspiratorial murmurings about a supposed communist takeover of public schools. Though the ruling came down in 1954, before the formation of the John Birch Society or the publication of Skousen’s book, it took more than a decade to fully implement, thanks in large part to the “massive resistance” protest movement led by conservative white southerners. During that decade of resistance, the ideas put forward by Skousen and the Birchers infiltrated the racist anti-integration movement, allowing it to rebrand itself as an anti-communist movement, too.
Their reasoning, as archived for history in a pamphlet by Eugene Cook, who served as the Attorney General of Georgia from 1945 to 1965, was that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was a communist organization (it was not), and had been the plaintiff in the Brown case. Ergo, in their minds, integration was a communist plot.
By 1959, massive resistance protesters in Little Rock, Arkansas could be seen holding signs declaring “race-mixing is communism.”
In the same way that modern activists have employed faulty alchemy to transmute the idea of sexual and gender equality into a grand plot to “break down the family unit” and “erode constitutional rights,” their predecessors mutated the concept of racial equality — and public or publicly-funded education in general — into a communist plot to destroy America.
Anyone with a halfway decent grip on reality today understands that there is not, in fact, a high-level plot by teachers’ unions and school administrators to turn children gay in order to erode family values and eventually destroy the Constitution. We live in the same context as those making the claims, which makes it relatively easy for us to see through them.
But what about their forebears? The Birchers and Skousen and all the others who warned that communists are taking over the schools. Were they onto something at the time?
No. In fact, their battle cries from the 1950s and 1960s were every bit as ludicrous, conspiratorial, and evidence-free as the modern equivalents. There never was a communist attempt to infiltrate American schools, or any sort of concerted left-wing effort to influence public school curriculum with left-wing politics.
As a 2015 paper by Jonathan Hunt found, “The thought of Moscow-controlled teachers eager to turn America’s youth away from capitalism captured the public imagination. Though there was little evidence these supposedly wily educators had in fact made their way into American classrooms…in the case of Communism, that simply didn’t seem to happen…In fact, students were much more likely than their teachers to use the classroom as a recruiting ground, and members of student movements were likely more responsible for radicalizing their teachers than the other way around.”
Like today’s activists who believe in a grand plot by the schools to somehow turn students gay and trans as a means of turning them liberal, Skousen and the original Birchers were nothing but conspiracists, raving about something which never happened. They were fringe figures so far outside of the mainstream that many of them believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist. Despite their fringe status, though, they also became one of the most influential cohorts in the history of American conservatism, and a club they never quite belonged to now parrots them in lockstep.
By the early 1980s, as neocons rose to the helm of the Republican Party, the Birchers were shunted to the sidelines. They spent the next few decades relegated to a supporting role in the conservative coalition, weighed-down by the self-inflicted brand damage wrought by decades of conspiratorial racism. Then Donald Trump arrived on the scene and the Bircher renaissance began. Now, right-wing activists are no longer simply tacitly inspired by the Birchers’ playbook, they’re actively echoing — and associating with — the Birchers themselves.
James Lindsay, a major figure in modern right-wing education activism, recently published a book claiming that “Marxist” educators are training students to “disrupt and dismantle America” — a direct reference to baseless Bircher conspiracies. In 2022, high-profile Colorado Republicans like gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, U.S. Senate candidate Deborah Flora, and state Senator Mark Baisley attended an event hosted by the society. Last month, conservative activists in Douglas County promoted a school which uses curriculum by a man who identifies W. Cleon Skousen as his mentor. And last week, Darrel Lee Phelan, the newly elected Vice Chair of the Colorado Republican Party, shared a post by the John Birch Society to his personal Facebook page.
From the start, the attempted political takeover of American public schools has been a project of the conservative movement. And, from the start, they have justified it by saying “the left” did it first. But it was never true, just like it was never true that school lunches or school funding or school integration were dastardly plots by the forces of international communism. It has all, always, been a conspiracy theory.
There is, of course, another way to look at this. A way in which public schools are fundamentally liberal – but it involves ceding territory which the right-wing activists who purport to care so much about education likely won’t be interested in giving up.
If you consider the concept of shared public goods to be liberal, then yes, the schools are liberal. As liberal as roads and bridges. They exist for everyone, a concept which Skousen, Welch, Koch, and Bradley would likely consider downright communistic.
If you consider learning the real events of American history, warts and all, to be a liberal endeavor, then yes, the schools are liberal. They would be negligent in their duties if they did not teach our children the truth, both good and bad.
But if you are able to accept that universal public education is the hallmark of all developed societies, the very thing which allows successive generations to participate in the economy and society, the engine driving our wealth and prosperity – if you are able to accept that the people who feel otherwise have been influenced at every turn by baseless conspiracies and barely concealed bigotries – then no, the schools are not liberal. They are vital, they are for everyone, and, from where I’m sitting, we must do everything possible to ensure that they stay that way, no matter how hard their conspiracy-fueled opponents try to change them.
If feeling that way makes me a communist, well, so be it, comrade.
