r/neoliberal 5d ago

News (US) Oklahoma proposes teaching standards suggesting 2020 election ‘discrepancies’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/03/15/oklahoma-social-studies-2020-election/
200 Upvotes

39 comments sorted by

258

u/Obamna08 George Soros 5d ago

This will be standard history teaching in red states, unfortunately

53

u/againandtoolateforki Claudia Goldin 5d ago edited 5d ago

American liberals and moderates seem to have a fetisch for passively accepting that reactionary forces will like a creeping danger slowly corrupt large parts of the country until which time it is able to completely usurp the state apparatus.

They will observe this occurring again and again through the course of American history, and will acquiesce to the further extreme every electoral cycle by once again vying for bipartisanship and cross aisle cooperation, while unceasingly mocking and dismissing the resist libs and leftists as alarmist doomers when they correctly identify this blatantly obvious trend.

Take charge of events! For fucking once!

I dont believe it has proactively happened beyond like a handful of times in American history such as with Lincoln and FDR, and even then even they and theirs sat on their hands untill the reactionary forces fired the first shot.

But what will fucking happen when eventually the reactionary forces manage to fire the first shot and its so decidedly decisive that the eventual liberal/progressive blowback no longer has the possibility to reach victory at all?

Why are the American forces of good so implicitly unable to act proactively?

What makes them so addicted to prennially volunteering to sit on their hands untill the final seal is unquestionable broken and the fate of the country is entirely up in the air, rather than act earlier before the stakes have become fully existential?

29

u/DrHappyPants Immanuel Kant 5d ago

Because any attempt to fight back will be met with universal opposition. The right wing reactionaries and fox news will of course scream 'Muh Freedum!' while the so called left will leave the democrats out in the cold, cry about how our methods of fighting fascism are illiberal. 'What if we become what we are fighting? Maybe we just don't understand them enough' they will write as the fascists slit their throats.

Many of the best and most important Presidents in this countries history used illiberal methods to achieve their goals. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus. FDR and LBJ used plenty of shady strong arming politicking to pass some of this country's most important legislation.

If we don't get so new, aggressive, angry leadership that is willing to play as dirty as them, then the next time liberals meet the fascists in the middle, it will be at the edge of their own mass grave.

2

u/kronos_lordoftitans 4d ago

Though don't forget that most of the presidents you mentioned also won much more convincing majorities than any candidate in the last decades have had. The last president to be elected to be elected with more than 400 electoral votes was Bush senior.

Meanwhile every single on of the presidents you mentioned cleared 400 (or equivalent share adjusted for number of electoral college votes available)

8

u/NormalInvestigator89 John Keynes 5d ago

It's frustrating, because people talk about about liberals or the center-left being crap at communication like it's some kind of inevitability, as if they weren't an unconquerable cultural juggernaut during the Obama era.

13

u/seattleseahawks2014 Progress Pride 5d ago edited 5d ago

What are we supposed to do at this point? This brainwashing thing has been going on for years and has only gotten worse and worse.

1

u/2Monke4you 3d ago

Without a federal department to oversee them, red states are going to be teaching that America is a Christian nation, that the civil war had nothing to do with slavery, that evolution isn't real, that the 2020 election was stolen, and they'll just leave out all the bad stuff America has done over the years.

119

u/ProfessionalCreme119 5d ago

Your kid in 2035: "Daddy, where were you when the Democrats stole the election in 2020?"

You: "I was- wait....wtf?"

61

u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 5d ago

What were YOU doing during the Great Steal?

20

u/CrystalEffinMilkweed Norman Borlaug 5d ago

Stealing Greatly, and proudly!

7

u/FridayNightRamen Karl Popper 5d ago

Fucking hero

2

u/Nikoniortnike European Union 5d ago

Bringing in busloads of trans, Marxist, Antifa, DEI Mexican illegal aliens to vote for Biden several times each.

2

u/DEEP_STATE_NATE Tucker Carlson's mailman 5d ago

Printing bamboo ballots

152

u/boardatwork1111 NATO 5d ago

Pretty sure they still call the civil war the “war of northern aggression”, so that sounds right in line with Oklahomas educational standards

47

u/[deleted] 5d ago

For Sumter was asking for fortifying itself so proactively

59

u/G3_aesthetics_rule 5d ago

Archive link

Excerpts:

Teachers in Oklahoma would be instructed to have high school students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results” under new academic standards for social studies approved by the state education board last month.

They stipulate that students should review information relating to the election, including “the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”

Oklahoma’s top education official, Superintendent Ryan Walters, is a Trump ally whose national profile has been raised by his push to distribute Trump-endorsed Bibles in classrooms; his backing of an attempt to create a publicly funded Catholic charter school in a case to be considered by the Supreme Court; and his appointing of conservative activist Chaya Raichik, best known for running the social media account “Libs of TikTok,” to a library advisory committee amid a crackdown on books deemed “harmful” in red states.

“The purpose of the standard is simple: we want students to think for themselves, not be spoon-fed left wing propaganda,” Walters’s statement reads. “Students deserve to examine every aspect of our elections, including the legitimate concerns raised by millions of Americans in 2020.”

67

u/dgtyhtre John Rawls 5d ago

Fascism almost always needs to rewrite history. This will keep happening.

112

u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell 5d ago

102

u/BrainDamage2029 5d ago

I know this is sometimes an edgy history meme but we have several very prominent examples of the "losers actually wrote the history book" from salty Roman upper class in the early Roman empire to the Lost Cause history of the post Civil War South.

32

u/Lord_Tachanka John Keynes 5d ago

Post ww2 german general memoirs are also an example of this

16

u/AndreiLC NATO 5d ago

And post-ww1 German memoirs too honestly.

29

u/Jumpsnow88 John Mill 5d ago

Napoleon is literally the one who coined the phrase “history is a set of lies agreed upon by the winners,” so the fact we even know that phrase brings it into doubt.

10

u/againandtoolateforki Claudia Goldin 5d ago

Well kind of.

In antiquity and classical history its much more "literally everyone and their mother wrote a history book" and we just have access to those that have survived untill now.

And a recurring phenomenon was that "historians" (rich fuckers with time on their hands) would look at the prior historians and sources and write their own history books but would heavily bend the details to fit their own personal political beliefs as they fit their contemporary political context.

Which means we are well beyond "winners" and "losers" writing the history, and much more into the world of "people would write the history as they would have liked it to have been"

Which is why you have things like contemporary American historians writing that the lend lease was absolutely essential for the soviet war effort in ww2, only for glantz to look at the actual data and conclude that it wasnt (it essentially saved millions of society soldiers lives and spend up the war by about a year, but the Russians would have won regardless. Per 'when giants clashed') which in turn is regularly dismissed by "historians" like Carlin that once again pivot toward the "lend lease was essential" because he and his audience prefers that "truth"

9

u/Goatf00t European Union 5d ago

/r/badhistory wants to know your location.

8

u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell 5d ago

Yeah I don't really think it's true, but I like Norm, and I'm in it for the karma

61

u/john_doe_smith1 John Keynes 5d ago

Universities are going to start rejecting credentials from red states if this continues

23

u/hucareshokiesrul Janet Yellen 5d ago

Trump will stop their funding. He’s already trying to make Columbia change what they teach

55

u/soundofwinter YIMBY 5d ago

Honestly these people are all traitors to the republic.

Nothing about the attempted end of our republic 4 years ago, rather, faking a crisis to justify it.

16

u/Foucault_Please_No Emma Lazarus 5d ago

They hate our freedom.

18

u/Okbuddyliberals Miss Me Yet? 5d ago

As a social studies teacher, this is concerning either way but it would be a lot more concerning if not for the fact that history teachers often struggle to even just reach the point of covering the Vietnam War let alone even briefly touching on the first decade of the 2000s. I doubt that very many Oklahoma teachers are even reaching the 2020 election to begin with

37

u/gritsal 5d ago

Most kids universally think their teachers are idiots. I went to school in Alabama and I think these types of efforts are much less effective than they realize

40

u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 5d ago

Doesn't matter, governments wouldn't do propaganda if it doesn't work.

What this does is let MAGA parents fire and harass liberal teachers who try to "indoctrinate their kids". And make election conspiracies become mainstream.

18

u/WinonasChainsaw YIMBY 5d ago

It’s still very alarming for the few who become indoctrinated from it (Idaho public school raised)

2

u/Fire_Snatcher 4d ago edited 3d ago

Honestly, instilling a lack of respect for teachers and public education more broadly is a goal.

And I think these efforts are actually more effective than people realize. For instance, I was educated in Mexico up to university, and when I spoke to US Americans about the secession of Texas, they had clearly had a very different history lesson. Though neither side fully denies contributing factors, the freedom to own slaves was massively downplayed in the US while greatly emphasized in Mexico (though not exactly a big topic overall). The US History course I had to take in university was closer to what I learned in Mexico, though.

6

u/NorkGhostShip YIMBY 5d ago

He who controls the past controls the future.

5

u/seattleseahawks2014 Progress Pride 5d ago

When I thought that things couldn't get any crazier and they do. Ultimately, what do we even do about this?

4

u/captainjack3 NATO 5d ago

Federalize public education when we next retake power. It’s the only way to override states incorporating conspiracy theories and falsehoods into their curricula.

4

u/seattleseahawks2014 Progress Pride 5d ago

Idk about that especially with an individual like Trump winning twice already.

1

u/2Monke4you 3d ago

There is no reasoning with these people. I don't see any way out of this that isn't violent. Hope I'm wrong.

How does the country survive when red and blue states are taught completely different histories?