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GOP SCHOOL CENSORSHIP 2.0  
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Timothy Messer-Kruse
April 19, 2026
CounterPunch
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_ How the MAGA Crusade Against Critical Race Theory has Become a
Movement Against Knowledge Itself _

Rightwing culture warrior Christopher Rufo on the Joe Rogan
Experience.,

 

A sure sign of spring is the dropping of new GOP bills regulating what
is taught in schools. This year’s legal seedlings are trending
toward more sweeping restrictions.

Missouri’s “Sunlight in Learning Act
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threatens to cut half of any district’s budget found to be teaching
prohibited concepts. It turns out the lights on many topics of
historical discussion. Going beyond merely banning the _New York
Times_ “1619 Project” as many states have done, it takes the novel
step of banning not just that but “any successor theory or
concept.”

The 1619 Project is actually a collection of essays by highly regarded
scholars such as Michelle Alexander, Matthew Desmond, Jamelle Bouie,
Tiya Miles, Mehrsa Baradaran, Jeneen Interlandi, Kevin M. Kruse, Linda
Villarosa, Trymaine Lee, Wesley Morris, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Martha
S. Jones, and Bryan Stevenson. Among the theories these researchers
discuss is how the African American experience of oppression
influenced popular music; the role of the commodification of sugar on
world history; the deep connections between the failures of
Reconstruction and the persistent racial wealth gap and the rise of
mass incarceration; the role of enslaved peoples in westward
“settlement”; the century-long debate about whether slavery was
capitalist or a an obstacle to economic growth; the role slavery and
segregation and even urban planning played in the development of the
modern U.S. financial system and the modern health care crisis.

Not to mention what initially aroused anger against the 1619 Project,
Nicole Hannah Jones summary of historians’ arguments about the role
of slavery in propelling American revolutionaries toward independence.
Fencing off all these historic debates from the classroom will leave
only the feel-good Mason Weems morality tales of George and the cherry
tree, or worse, the Uncle Remus Tales of Joel Chandler Harris.

Both Ohio and New Hampshire are close to passing legislation named in
memory of Charlie Kirk. Ohio calls its bill the “Charlie Kirk
American Heritage Act
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and the Granite State is debating the Charlie Act
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is an acronym for “Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist
Indoctrination in Education Act.” They are different in that
Ohio’s Charlie Act attempts to wedge religious lessons into public
schools while New Hampshire tries to ban ideas conservatives don’t
like.

Both claim to rest on political neutrality and historical fact.
Language is, of course, a pliable thing, but in both states the
concepts of historical accuracy and neutrality is pulled like taffy
until it folds into its opposite. Ohio attempts to justify violating
the separation of church and state by proclaiming that “Accurate
historical instruction regarding verifiable, historical impacts of
religion on American history…is not proselytization or a violation
of the First Amendment.”

New Hampshire tries to hide its heavy-handed censorship beneath the
guise of fighting “indoctrination while preserving academic freedom
for neutral, factual discussions.” Patriotic neutrality apparently
only tips over into excess when “partisan loyalty” or “total
allegiance” is compelled. (It is telling that in defining what
America’s core “civic principles” are, the Charlie Act only
mentions liberty, equality, and what it terms “republican
processes.” Democracy does not make the cut.)

Besides providing no practical guidelines for educators to work with,
this sort of formulation normalizes a vast range of indoctrination by
inflating the concept of “neutrality” to bursting. This can only
make sense to someone who presumes that because the United States is
so perfect, so exceptionally magnificent, that it would be irrational
to question the glory of its institutions, history, or symbols.
Indeed, New Hampshire’s Charlie Act says just this, stating that
“Education should never cultivate a hostile… disposition against
the founding of America or the constitutions of the United States or
New Hampshire.”

New Hampshire’s Charlie Act is a prime example of how MAGA school
censorship laws have shifted from banning certain books and authors to
defining vast areas of scholarly investigation off limits to schools.
It defines a long list of what it calls “pedagogical practices and
praxis” as prohibited indoctrination “compelling adherence to
these world-views.” Broad areas of knowledge and interpretation are
banned, including “Marxist dialectical analysis”, “critical
pedagogy”, “critical race theory”, “critical legal theory”,
“LGBTQ+ ideology”, and “liberation narratives”. This Charlie
Act specifically bans several provable and undebatable historical
facts. One of these thought crimes is asserting that the U.S.
Constitution is “designed to perpetuate oppression based on race.”
(Is it sufficient to note that the Constitution treats Indians as both
non-citizens and non-persons?) Another is a broad ban on framing
“history or current events as class, racial, or identity-based
conflicts intended to foster division rather than resolution.” It is
more difficult to think of an example of a contemporary conflict that
doesn’t violate this reality-bending mandate than one that does.

So narrow is the needle which educators must thread to stay within the
bounds of New Hampshire’s Charlie Act that it provides a couple of
helpful examples as guidance. One example of “permissible
pedagogical teaching” (note the idiotic repetition) includes
“teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a historical
achievement” (which it was) but at the same time “describing
critical race theory as a Marxian-derived framework contrary to
American legal principles” (which is quite debatable). Republicans
seem committed to passing the Charlie Act, even though New
Hampshire’s own Department of Justice publicly declared
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opposition because the bill “presents constitutional concerns and
risks conflicts with other laws.”

Likewise, Ohio’s HB 486, which passed the House with all 62
Republicans voting in favor and all 27 Democrats opposed, hides its
true purpose behind the claim that its only goal is an “accurate and
historical account of the influence of Christianity on the freedom and
liberties ingrained in our culture…” This sounds well and good but
is immediately followed by a list of two dozen purported statements of
historical fact that range from half-truths to outright falsehoods.
Some of the howlers include “Benjamin Franklin’s appeal for prayer
at the constitutional convention and the hiring of chaplains that
followed.” (Franklin did, in fact, make a motion for a morning
prayer and for some “clergy of this city be requested to
officiate” but the motion failed
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no chaplains were hired.) Another supposedly “accurate” statement
about Franklin, that he suggested to Thomas Paine that he burn his
_The Age of Reason_ is pure invention as the letter this claim is
based upon was written
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before Paine wrote his infamous book.

Throughout Ohio’s Charlie Act, “accurate and historical
accounts” are slanted to establish a religious consensus among
Americans that never actually existed. Take, for example, the law’s
direction to teach the “history of the national motto: ‘In God We
Trust,’ dating back to the national anthem and traced through its
appearance on currency and the inclusion of ‘under God’ in the
Pledge of Allegiance.” This sentence cobbles together a handful of
unrelated facts in order to imply that Americans have been united
beneath a religious motto since the early republic. Francis Scott Key
did in fact include the line “And this be our motto: ‘In God is
our Trust’” in the never-sung fourth stanza of the _Star-Spangled
Banner_ he penned in 1814. But no one noticed or cared about his song
or his motto for more than a hundred years. Congress
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not adopt that tune as the nation’s national anthem until 1931,
didn’t get around to making the Pledge official till 1942, didn’t
add the words “under God” to the Pledge until 1954, didn’t put
the motto on paper currency till 1955, and didn’t make the motto
“In God We Trust” official until 1956.

Last week Idaho’s SB 1336
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a bill modeled on the “American Birthright
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curriculum developed by a coalition of right-wing lobby groups, became
law. Idaho already bans
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“critical race theory” including historical facts that might make
white kids feel uncomfortable, or as the law put it any suggestion
that “individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion,
color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions
committed in the past”. SB 1336 goes beyond outlawing what teachers
can’t say by mandating what they must teach, in this case a boatload
of chauvinistic ideas that American society and “common history and
culture” is the “culmination of the Western tradition”,
“Christianity,” and “the Western intellectual tradition” and
“Anglo-American heritage”. Every Idaho classroom is now required
to post in a prominent location a state-approved portrait of George
Washington and teachers must teach the “civic virtues” of the
“Founding Fathers” and only mention their “efforts during the
American Founding…to abolish slavery.” Typical of all the bills
pushed by right-wing educational groups, while the bill discusses
Greek democracy three times, it never mentions that the United States
was founded as one.

As 2026’s legislative sessions are just beginning, it is clear that
the old MAGA crusade to ban “CRT and DEI” has lost steam but has
been replaced by a broader movement to censor and control what
teachers can teach and students can think. The range of topics being
prohibited are quietly expanding and doing so with the flimsy claim
that such bans are just restoring “neutrality” to the classroom,
or worse, supporting accuracy and fact-based lessons. But these laws
revealed a more troubling essence of where MAGA thinking is heading:
the world is not knowable but known and education exists simply to
inculcate official versions of it.

_Timothy F. Messer-Kruse is an American historian who specializes in
American labor history._

* Education
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* right wing attack
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* MAGA
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