In a textbook case of liberal-hysteria, Henry Rollins and Vanity Fair [1] fear the Texas Board of Education will wipe Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Charles Darwin, the Civil Rights movement, and even the outcome of the Civil War from the pages of history in the “Great Texan Rewrite.”
At question is a recent victory by conservatives on the Texas Board of Education to adopt more traditional curricula to be used in writing history textbooks. Due to its size, books adopted by
To Rollins, any attempt to restore balance to the teaching of history is an attempt to turn back the clock.
“I fear for the New Deal reforms and any other bits of history that may somehow be seen as inconvenient truths to the architects of the Great Texan Rewrite,” Rollins wrote. “I cringe when I think that the Civil Rights movement may magically vanish from the state's history or be seen as an uppity peasant uprising. What will become of the Emancipation Proclamation? The outcome of the Civil War?”
“I understand a desire for nostalgia. I still listen to records I bought as a teenager. But a return to the dim-bulb cruelty and religious fascism of the past is a little too far in the way-back machine for me. What do you bring back next, the Bubonic Plague? The
It's hypocrisy for liberals to accuse the Texas Board of rewriting history since the liberal rewriting of history and cultural studies have left us with schools in which children are taught to accept and understand third-world barbarism from a cultural perspective, where a literature textbook [2] includes the work of Barack Obama, factual accounts of Islamofascism [3] are literally erased, and where all things Western are routinely condemned.
As Richard Olivastro [4] recently noted in the Daily Caller, “The board strategy was not to cut liberal progressive favorites from the curriculum.” Instead, additional material on free-market champions like Milton Friedman and Friedrch von Hayek, are included, along with a more complete and balanced study of McCarthyism.
In just two short sentences, Rollins managed to betray the left's disdain for views other than their own, and to ascribe sinister motives to those who hold them.
“Poorly educated people are not an asset unless you desire citizens who cannot think critically. Now why would any state want that?” Rollins asked. His answer? To prepare for secession from the
“If I wanted my state to secede, I would need the voters to see that it is in their best interest to detach from a nation full of infidels and unpatriotic enemies,” Rollins wrote. “If it were me, I would start in the schools and the books that students read.”
Rollins' own closed-minded intolerance is proof enough that the actions by the Texas Board of Education could not have come a moment too soon.
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