By Stanley Kurtz
Monday, July 25, 2022
Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate
Stacey Abrams is famous for calling voter ID laws the new Jim Crow. Her
heedless charges of racism over virtually any attempt to prevent voter fraud
chased the MLB All-Star game from Atlanta and earned her the sobriquet “fount of
disinformation” at National Review. So how about letting Stacey Abrams run your
child’s civics class? Sounds absurd, but that’s what’s on tap if Abrams becomes
Georgia’s next governor.
What’s worse, if Republicans don’t wake
up, a civics law quietly passed at the close of Georgia’s last state
legislative session could hand Abrams de facto control of civics education in
much of the state — even if Governor Brian Kemp is reelected. Sadly, GOP
officeholders remain largely clueless about the left’s co-opting of “civics,”
and about Democratic plans to use the new leftist civics as a tool to achieve
dominance. Let’s have a look, then, at politicized civics, Georgia-style —
before it’s too late.
Abrams’s lobbying and voter turn-out
group, Fair Fight Action, is credited with helping to juice Democratic turnout
in Georgia and 19 other states in 2020, flipping many Republican-held offices
to Democrats. One of Fair Fight Action’s projects is “Civics for the Culture,”
a continuing series of five-minute videos designed to mobilize voters —
especially minority voters — behind candidates and causes favored by Abrams.
Civics for the Culture videos blend legislative lobbying with mini-civics and
history lessons. So, for example, a lesson about
police reform “or even abolishing that sh*t” (as
the video puts it), is blended with a civics lesson about the difference
between the local level of government and the state and federal levels.
Civics for the Culture videos use street
slang to appeal to younger voters. When a rapper says he’s doing something “for
the culture,” he’s claiming to be rapping for the art of hip-hop, not for money
or fame. The phrase eventually came to mean doing something for the black
community generally, or for hip-hop-influenced street culture, regardless of
race. In short, Civics for the Culture is designed to appeal to young hip-hop
fans. Don’t think Hamilton the musical, though. Think identity
politics à la Stacey Abrams. Civics for the Culture videos don’t draw young
people into an updated but still unifying vision of traditional American
civics. Instead, they epitomize the new CRT-dominated “civics” orthodoxy — that
America is and always has been systemically racist. According to Civics for the
Culture, voter-integrity laws are just Jim Crow 2.0. That means white men are
“big mad” about minority voter turnout, and that state legislators will
supposedly pass any law they can that strips power from people of color.
Civics for the Culture videos occasionally
strike a nonpartisan pose. One video explains the differences between the parties (Republicans=conservative;
Democrats=liberal) and makes a show of not favoring one party over the other.
More often, however, the mask slips. One video calls on Congress “to prevent any of the bullsh*t that Republicans are
trying to do in our state legislatures” and celebrates Biden’s election.
Another calls the Democrats “our” party.
A typical media puff piece on Civics for the Culture calls it “Gen Z’s Schoolhouse
Rock.” A profanity-rich series aimed at young-adult voters isn’t exactly
your father’s civics, though. The text of the “sad little scrap of paper” who
first sang “I’m just a bill” in 1975 for Schoolhouse Rock read,
“School bus must stop at railroad crossing.” Civics for the Culture is
light-years away from old-fashioned nonpartisan civics like that. For example,
the series pushes for bills said to protect trans people and “non-binaries” (“but
instead we doing this [Don’t say gay] sh*t”). Above all, Civics for the Culture presses viewers to contact their senators to demand passage of the federal
For the People Act and the federal John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This
is “civics” as flat-out lobbying. It’s also civics that gets around. Civics for
the Culture reportedly reached millions of young people in 2020, getting close
to 300 million impressions across
multiple social-media platforms that year.
You might object that none of this has
anything to do with civics education in public schools. Yet that misses the
left’s recent co-opting of civics. The explicit goal of the new
“action civics” is to funnel students into political
protests and legislative lobbying expeditions for course credit. The slightly
less open goal is to use civics classes as a recruitment resource for the
Democratic Party and its favorite causes. The process has already begun in
Georgia, and Stacey Abrams is on the cutting edge.
This past school year, New Georgia Project
(NGP), a group founded by Abrams with the help of George Soros, teamed up with
Atlanta Public Schools and Rock the Vote to offer roughly 2,000 Atlanta
high-schoolers a course called “Democracy Class Atlanta.” As reported by both Fox News and the Washington Examiner, the lesson plan for that class attacked
voter ID laws and directly promoted both the federal For the People Act and the
John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, just like a Civics for the Culture
video.
And as with Abrams’s civics videos, New
Georgia Project CEO Nsé Ufot dances around the issue of partisanship. She
told Politico in January that while she was “not in the business” of electing
Democrats, nor is she shy about treating Republicans as a “criminal enterprise
that is intent on attacking our democracy.” When the partnership between New
Georgia Project (NGP) and the Atlanta Public Schools was announced, NGP COO
Kendra Cotton praised the project for “ensuring that we are training up the
state’s next generation of progressive champions.” While Cotton quickly
committed to “uplifting the voices of all Georgians,” the partisan thrust of
her overall effort is unmistakable.
Former Georgia Republican senator Kelly
Loeffler, whose group exposed the troubling “civics” curriculum with a FOIA
request, condemned the politicized course in no uncertain terms: “Allowing
partisan groups like the New Georgia Project to advocate for liberal policies
in the classroom is wrong. Schools fail to serve the best interests of their
students when they promote a political agenda and push them into partisan
activism rather than academic success.” Exactly. But Atlanta’s Public School
system defended the course as a “nonpartisan, two-month, voluntary program to
increase civic education, participation, and leadership.”
Don’t buy it. This was obviously partisan
activism under cover of “civic education.” As for the voluntary nature of the
course, it ended with a free concert sponsored by the parent company of the
Atlanta Falcons, in partnership with Atlanta Public Schools. That means the course
was “voluntary” in the sense that sixth-graders might “voluntarily” rush to a
class that included excursions to amusement parks. The same woke businesses
that drove the All-Star game out of Atlanta can drive Abrams’s politicized
indoctrination into Atlanta’s schools with schemes like this.
Stacey Abrams has been a close ally of
Georgia’s teachers’ unions for years. That also helps explain how her political
surrogates managed to shoehorn themselves into Atlanta’s “civics” curriculum.
And thanks to her blending of civics and politics, Abrams’s partnership with
the teachers’ unions has now gone national.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
got plenty of publicity in the summer of 2021 when their national conference
featured Ibram X. Kendi and Deena Simmons, leading practitioners of teacher
training based in critical race theory. The fuller list of headline speakers at the 2021 AFT conference is even more revealing,
however. In addition to officials from Biden’s pro-CRT Education Department,
and leading lights of CRT itself, the conference featured Stacey Abrams and
Danielle Allen speaking on the new action civics. (Allen is a leading action civics
advocate, a former field organizer for the 2008 Obama campaign, and a former
Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts.) CRT and action civics are
the yin and yang, so to speak, of the woke education Left. That’s why both CRT
and action civics were represented by headlining speakers at last year’s big
AFT conference. This means that, far from being considered too political to
influence schools, Stacey Abrams’s synthesis of civics and lobbying is
considered a model to emulate by today’s progressive educators (i.e., most
educators nowadays).
Republican officeholders still have no
idea that civics — especially action civics — as often as not means Democratic
activism and recruitment instead of traditional lessons about federalism and
the three branches of government. That’s why SB 220, the Georgia Civics Renewal Act, is so dangerous. Among other things,
the bill establishes a Georgia Commission on Civics Education and charges it
with recommending changes to the state’s civics programs. Republican commission
appointees could easily be lured by Democratic colleagues into approving an
action civics requirement, without quite realizing what’s at stake. That would
allow Abrams-style lobbying groups to propagandize in Georgia’s schools
unchecked.
Should Abrams be elected governor, action
civics will surely be enshrined in Georgia’s schools, with or without the support
of the new commission. Whether by law, state education standards, bureaucratic
subterfuge, or executive order, Abrams will see to that. She’ll also throw open
Georgia’s doors to national action civics advocates such as iCivics, and
to Danielle Allen’s other leftist allies in Massachusetts. But if Republicans mishandle the commission,
action civics will invade Georgia’s schools, whether Kemp defeats Abrams or
not.
Here’s what Governor Kemp can do to block
the politicization of Georgia’s schools: 1) pledge to keep action civics out of
Georgia’s public schools; 2) ensure that appointees to the Georgia Commission
on Civics Education are pledged to the same policy; 3) pass legislation that
blocks action civics (model provisions here); 4) highlight the choice between a governor who will keep lobbying and
political activism out of Georgia’s public schools, and one who will not.
To all appearances, Speaker of the House
David Ralston, Attorney General Christopher Carr, and State School
Superintendent Richard Woods have yet to announce their appointments to the
civics commission. Like the governor, they should make those appointments or
sit on the commission themselves where the SB 220 provides that option, with
opposition to action civics top of mind.
Action civics has become the hands-on
do-it-yourself version of CRT. No one illustrates that equivalence more clearly
than Stacey Abrams. Unless and until Republicans wake up to the dangers of
action civics, Stacey Abrams has every prospect of politicizing civics
instruction in Georgia, and in many states beyond. She needs to be stopped —
for the culture — that is, for the very idea of a common American civic culture
that transcends “identity” lines.
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