The new school year is underway in Florida, and public schools are doing so under a new mandate that they implement a K-12 course designed to indoctrinate students to oppose what conservatives view as communism.
Florida Republicans aren’t even hiding their bigotry and intent to propagandize, as you can tell from this social media post from Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, who said the curriculum change is needed to target “radical Islamist ideology” and to “teach our children why communism failed.”
The course is going into effect at a time when the Republican Party — facing putrid poll numbers as the midterms approach — has been advised to deploy the scare tactic of labeling Democrats as “communists” as much as possible. I recently wrote about a conservative firm that advised House Republicans to ramp up this dubious effort because the GOP’s related tactic of calling Democrats “socialists” apparently wasn’t scaring voters enough.
The dark irony here is that Florida and its young students aren’t facing a communism crisis. If anything, evidence suggests the state is facing a problem of rising fascism.
A USA Today report found that the white supremacist group Patriot Front — an offshoot of a neo-Nazi group called Vanguard America — is growing in Florida, where its membership total is only surpassed by the number in Texas. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been rebuked for refusing to condemn neo-Nazi demonstrations in his state. And several stories over the past year have involved young Republicans in Florida promoting Nazism and fascistic violence.
In other words, this is not a state that appears to be in dire need of an anti-communism course for its students — let alone one imposed by the same GOP leadership that has sought to ban aspects of school curricula that address racism and other forms of bigotry.
What Florida desperately needs is an anti-facism class. And perhaps it would have one if not for the fact that Republicans have tried to demonize — even criminalize — anti-fascism in the United States.
It would be irresponsible to ignore the historical parallels here. Railing against communism while simultaneously cultivating fascism is literally what the Nazis did during Adolf Hitler’s rise. A key part of this Nazi propaganda involved radicalizing university students to oppose communism, while portraying the doctrine as a contrivance of nefarious Jews — rhetoric that isn’t dissimilar from conservatives’ deranged rhetoric about Jewish megadonor George Soros.
Hitler’s regime offers a cautionary tale about how societies devolve into fascism — not a model for educators to follow. And yet it appears Florida Republicans learned the wrong lesson.
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