While Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from ABC and the Project 2025-inspired government shutdown dominated the headlines and raised fears of new McCarthyism, an equally ominous story percolated underneath the radar. The U.S. Department of Education launched an Orwellian new program, “America 250 Civics Education Coalition.”
The fatal flaw with Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s new venture is that 20 of the organizations she’s partnering with to educate Americans are on the Project 2025 Advisory Board. Virtually all of these groups participated in, or strongly encouraged Donald Trump’s Big Lie, erroneously claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. This disinformation culminated in the January 6, 2021, insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
How could the DOE credibly partner with organizations to impart lessons on democracy, that believe elections are only valid if their side wins?
One partner in DOE’s program is The Heritage Foundation. In July 2024, their president, Kevin Roberts, pronounced on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that the nation is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Is Roberts really the role model our children need to learn about how government works and how will he explain his seemingly violent remarks?
The Heritage Foundation has warmly embraced Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a man Trump once called his “twin”. In March 2024, Trump declared, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic…He’s a great leader.”
Orbán spoke at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington and told Hungarian media that “Hungary has an honored place” with The Heritage Foundation. Following Orbán’s trip, Heritage agreed to a “landmark” collaboration agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian “think tank” that exists primarily as an obsequious sock puppet to praise Orbán’s government.
Another Project 2025 member partnering with DOE is the Center for Renewing America (CRA). Its founder, Russell Vought, is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought characterized those charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as “political prisoners,” claiming federal agencies “are keeping political opponents in jail”.
The Center for Climate Reporting secretly recorded Vought saying that, “I want to make sure that we can say, ‘We’re a Christian nation. And my viewpoint that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism.”
The late Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, is also part of the DOE’s scheme. On a July 2022 podcast, Kirk echoed Vought’s views, “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”
One more “democratic stalwart” in Secretary McMahon’s “all-star” roster is The Claremont Institute. In 2021, Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont Fellow, published an essay in “The American Mind” that opined, “Most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”
Is the Department of Education going to divide students into two groups and explain which half are faking their American credentials?
In 2023, Claremont published a column by a radical influencer known as Raw Egg Nationalist, who stated, “We have it drilled into us, this instinctive revulsion for inequality in any form. And actually, I think we need to ask instead whether inequality has its uses…Maybe men and women shouldn’t work together in the same spaces.”
Meanwhile, Scott Yenor, who works in Claremont’s Florida office, said at an Orlando conference in 2021, “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.”
One wonders how Mrs. McMahon feels about collaborating with organizations dedicated to disempowering women. If they had their way, it seems unlikely she would be in her position of influence.
Hillsdale College is also part of the “America 250 Civics Education Coalition”. In 2023, Hillsdale Associate Professor of Politics, Kevin Slack, wrote in Claremont’s “The American Mind”, “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”
Will such partisan-tinged toxic masculinity be included in the DOE’s efforts?
It is beyond farce that these intolerant organizations, that don’t believe in religious pluralism, separation of church and state, equality of the sexes, or honoring fair and free elections are going to be teaching students about America’s political system—which clearly, they don’t respect, nor understand.
What we fear is DOE’s concoction will be like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative”. DeSantis offered bonuses for teachers who took a civics curriculum designed by the Christian conservative Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation.
Some teachers expressed concern that the classes were “very skewed” and contained, “a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents.”
Richard Judd, a Nova High School social studies teacher with more than two decades of classroom experience, attended the state’s training. He told the Miami Herald, “It is disturbing, really, that through these workshops and through legislation, there is this attempt to both censor and to drive or propagandize particular points of view.”
Ironically, key Project 2025 partners believe the Department of Education should be shut down. In March, Concerned Women for America wrote, “It’s time to turn off the lights and get Washington special interests out of the business of educating our children.”
If Secretary McMahon insists on hijacking DOE for sectarian purposes, rewriting history and undermining democracy by promoting Project 2025 values, perhaps we agree with Concerned Women for America. It’s better to turn out the lights than to have our tax money used to indoctrinate children with anti-democratic principles masquerading as civics.