This happened a few days ago, but I was in Vermont this weekend and too busy to write right away. Since no one reads this blog anyway I’ll just go ahead. As the title to the post indicates, this is yet another Trump era event that makes one thing again that George Orwell knew what he was writing about:Oklahoma is a red state that has favored the GOP in presidential elections since overwhelmingly backing Richard Nixon in 1968. Donald Trump won the state in 2020 and 2024, each time with over 65% of the vote. The Oklahoma Legislature is solidly Republican, and the governor and other statewide executive officers are all Republicans. All that said, Oklahomans are making headlines for their outrage at MAGA’s latest attempt at self-serving revisionist history. Parents, teachers, and other community members are pushing back hard against a new social studies curriculum that will cost taxpayers an estimated $33 million while forcing students to explore conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, as well as learn lessons grounded in Christian nationalism. Their demand for truth over nonsense in public education is fueling legal challenges and organized activism. State Superintendent Ryan Walters slipped in some extremist last-minute changes to an over 400-page curriculum mere hours before a scheduled vote, according to a Popular Information report. Most notably, these changes require students to spot “discrepancies” in the 2020 election, echoing language from debunked claims, including mail-in ballot “risks” and “sudden batch dumps.” Half the voting board members did not even realize the curriculum contained last-minute changes before their vote, as reported by Oklahoma Voice.
We have to remember that Winston Smith, the 1984 protagonist, didn’t spend all his time dumping the truth down the memory hole, he also spent time producing lies to feed to the folks who were under the heel of big brother. In fact, this short summary of the novel from Wikipedia sounds a lot like what’s happening today, doesn’t it?
The story takes place in an imagined future. The current year is uncertain, but believed to be 1984. Much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party’s Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.
On the bright side, it’s good to see that there are folks, even in Oklahoma (after all, they’re not all loons out there) are fighting back, and it’s particularly rich that they’re using a law that was designed to help right wingers inject their version of religion into the schools. You know, the version of Christianity that tells you to love your neighbor as yourself, unless your neighbor is a different color, a different religion, a member of a different political party, etc., and also teaches that you should feed the hungry and provide shelter to the needy, it being understood of course that you’re talking about billionaires hungry for the food on the tables of the poor and needy for tax breaks so they can own as many houses as they want.