[[link removed]]

TRUMP’S TAKEOVER OF EDUCATION IS TAKING A PAGE FROM THE CONFEDERACY
 
[[link removed]]


 

Layla A. Jones
December 29, 2025
Talking Points Memo
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ By partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are
exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping
the political opinions of the youngest Americans, threatens to
propagandize public education for generations to come. _

Screenshot ABC-7 News, Feb. 5. 2025, President Trump wants to
eliminate the Department of Education.,

 

The thread of partisan power and control is stitched through
America’s public education system. In the name of the revisionist
Lost Cause history — which holds that the South fought the Civil War
over states’ rights and not to maintain the institution of slavery
— the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the early 20th
century leveraged the group’s considerable political influence and
went after school curricula. The UDC lobbied for ahistorical,
pro-South school materials, and its members joined Southern state
textbook commissions
[[link removed]] where
they helped control which books would be deemed suitable for children
and which would not. For the next several decades, nearly 70 million
Southern students
[[link removed]]
were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the
Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.

In the 1950s, the American Legion partnered with the National
Education Association to create anti-Communist curricula
[[link removed]].
Married couple and religious fundamentalists Norma and Mel Gabler
[[link removed]]
imparted their brand of right-wing influence on childhood education
through the Texas textbook committee circuit, suppressing science
lessons on evolution and upholding “cultural heritage” and
patriotism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 70s.

By commandeering state-level commissions and capitalizing on early
20th century state law, reactionaries managed to control the
historical curriculum for generations of students, particularly in the
South. 

Under President Donald Trump, this blueprint is being adapted and
disseminated directly from the White House. The president in September
announced
[[link removed]]
the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of
conservative and far-right organizations including Turning Point USA,
Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump
administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in
schools across the nation.” Among the administration’s priorities?
“Renewing patriotism,” and “advancing a shared understanding of
America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”

“The reason there’s so much nostalgia in Trump’s politics,”
Adam Laats, an education and history professor at Binghamton
University, told TPM, “is because this popular memory that a certain
type of American used to have more privilege than they do now and that
that privilege can and should be restored. 

“And one of the things that can make it happen is a renewed push in
schools away from inclusion, diversity, critical approaches to race,
and instead a more old-fashioned inculcation in what they would call
specifically quote unquote authentic American virtues.”

Trump II is leaning heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan
by pushing policy
[[link removed]]
that propels the nation backward
[[link removed]].
Experts told TPM that by partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and
his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in
hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans.
With groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation at the helm, the
Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for
generations to come, and to revive the highly politicized, and
ahistorical, curriculum campaigns of the early- and mid-20th
centuries.

The White House did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.

“If this administration says Make America Great Again, again begs of
any coverage to be historical,” Eddie R. Cole, professor of
education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles
told TPM. “Because what is the ‘again?’”

‘REJECT A BOOK THAT SAYS THE SOUTH FOUGHT TO HOLD HER SLAVES’

Fueled by their determination to preserve the legacy of their deceased
Confederate loved ones, the UDC decorated graves, put up monuments to
dead soldiers and officials, and infiltrated the textbook commissions
developing alongside public education in the South with intense and
successful multi-year lobbying campaigns.

Those efforts were codified in 1919 when the UDC’s Mildred Lewis
Rutherford published a “measuring rod” for textbooks. 

The fifth page of its 23-page pamphlet was explicit
[[link removed]]: 

* _Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves._
* _Reject a book that speaks of a slaveholder of the South as cruel
and unjust to his slaves._
* _Reject a text-book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies
Jefferson Davis, unless a truthful cause can be found for such
glorification and vilification before 1865._

Rutherford then promised to release a rolling list of banned books
monthly in a Tennessee-based Confederate publication.

“It was a rock-solid wall for school publishing for a long time,”
Laats said of the hold the UDC had on textbook printers.

Textbook publishers, financially exposed to the zeitgeist and
therefore averse to political controversy, published special editions
of textbooks that whitewashed history, Laats said. 

“Publishers, because of people like Mildred Rutherford at the UDC,
produced mint julep editions, as they were called,” Laats explained,
“where they went way out of the way to make the former confederacy
blameless or even heroic in terms of the war, in terms of things like
slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous land.”

The United Daughters of the Confederacy textbook curriculum reigned in
U.S. public schools through the 20th century, before being almost
phased out by the 1970s, according to a 2019 article from the
Washington Post
[[link removed]],
approved by state textbook commissions and school boards. Today,
states and local authorities still control school curriculum, said Amy
Loyd, executive director at a public education nonprofit called
All4Ed.

“But the influence of the federal role is not to be underestimated.
When the federal role is saying, we need to, cancel, quote unquote
woke culture, and that leads to libraries…becoming a hotbed for our
cultural wars because of book bans,” said Loyd, “that is harmful
to learning.”

TRUMP’S INFLUENCE OVER CURRICULUM REPRESENTS A SHIFT IN POLITICS

The overt injection of partisan, ahistorical, and anti-diverse
perspectives into grade-school curriculum from the highest levels of
government illustrate how different politics and policy has become,
even since Trump’s first term
[[link removed]].
Trumpism appears to be able to achieve what past versions of
conservatism could not. 

“During the Reagan presidency, the [Education Department] employed
pretty radical right-wingers,” Laats told TPM. “The huge
difference between then and now is that in the past, conservative
presidents tried to maintain some kind of respectability and
deniability.”

The president’s America 250 Civics Education Coalition will be led
by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), founded by former Trump
administration officials, and business executive and Education
Secretary Linda McMahon, according to a press release.

“A country cannot survive if its values are forgotten by its
people,” McMahon said in the release.

The coalition will further be led by Katie Gorka, an anti-Islam
activist who advocated designating
[[link removed]]
Muslim groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations as
terrorist organizations; Erika Donalds, a Florida school choice
advocate and the wife of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL); and Ben Judge,
president of AFPI.

Trump alarmed education activists over the summer when the White House
partnered with PragerU, a conservative, anti-DEI media nonprofit, for
educational materials about the Revolutionary War. (The organization
produced “AI-sloppified” depictions of the Founding Fathers,
according to 404 Media
[[link removed]]).
PragerU has published materials with false claims about slavery
[[link removed]]
and racism, echoing the ethos of the UDC, in the name of “American
values.” Like the UDC and other 20th century education activists,
the group has been lobbying to get its materials in schools for years
[[link removed]].
Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and charter
[[link removed]]
and private [[link removed]]) schooling appear
to be right-wing groups like the PragerU, the Heritage Foundation
[[link removed]],
and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.

“Organizations like so many that we see today have always taken
great interest in education,” said Cole of UCLA. “Because if they
can get control over education, and get federal support of that
control, for even five to 10 years, it has the potential to shape a
future generation.”

_[__LAYLA A. JONES _
[[link removed]]_is a reporter
for TPM in Washington, D.C., with experience covering government and
economic policy, race, culture, and history. She has written for the
Philadelphia Inquirer, Billy Penn, WHYY, NPR, and the Philadelphia
Tribune, and participated in the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia
University. She attended Temple University for undergrad.]_

* Education
[[link removed]]
* slavery
[[link removed]]
* Confederacy
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Dept of Education
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* DEI
[[link removed]]
* Heritage Foundation
[[link removed]]
* Project 2025
[[link removed]]
* Linda McMahon
[[link removed]]
* PragerU
[[link removed]]
* Turning Point USA
[[link removed]]
* Charlie Kirk
[[link removed]]
* United Daughters of the Confederacy
[[link removed]]
* Propaganda
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]
* schools
[[link removed]]
* Teachers
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]