Stephen Monticelli
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Stephen Monticelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who covers extremism and far-right movements for a variety of publications, including The Texas Observer and The Barbed Wire.
That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums across the nation due to its large population and purchasing power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign. Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Ruffo admitted to in a series of tweets in 2021.
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, Ruffo wrote. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, end quote.
On Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets, Ruffo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash white children into hating themselves and goading black children into hating white people.
Radical teachers and professors, Ruffo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.
Those with an ear for historical rhymes may find this outcry familiar. Resistance to racial integration and the civil rights era movements drew similar accusations of being hostile to whites and being a product of anti-American communism. And those with experience teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrination.
A common joke posted by teachers online is that, quote, if we could indoctrinate students, students would always read the syllabus. But that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti-LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well-funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents.
Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, Grapevine-Colleyville, from August 2022.
As absurd as all this may seem, there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. As of 2020, the United States had become more culturally diverse, racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before. And our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's also a deep irony to this reaction.
Prior to the advances of the civil rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the right. In fact, it's usually been the opposite.
For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism.
In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools over the years, with a particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about American history depends on where you live, and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.
From the 1880s until the 1960s, school books depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time, the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877, as a time of rampant corruption. These books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy, and expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.
Again, school books reinforced an American culture in the 1920s that responded to the horrors of World War I, labor unrest, and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant, but also more anti-democratic.
After the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African-American abolitionists like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with clarity.
But the backlash was swift, particularly after the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, and the rise of the hyper-conservative Tea Party in response. In 2010, Tea Party supporters took control of the Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school book curriculums.
They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.
The offensive caption read in full, quote, The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The publisher of the book, simply titled World Geography, later apologized for the euphemism, noting that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands.
Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state and serve four-year terms, while the governor appoints the chair of the board. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists, as a 2013 PBS report notes.
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