In the late 1940s through the 1950s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy were leading figures in the Second Red Scare. The campaign of persecution targeted people accused, often falsely, of being communist and subjected them to public shaming, blacklists, and raids. You may know it better as McCarthyism.
Why is this relevant to Texans in 2025? There’s an old saying apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And another that those who know their history are able to perceive its consonance.
If Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick gets his way, public schools in Texas will be required to teach students about the history of communist ideology and “atrocities attributable to its regimes.” The bill specifically requires that students be taught about how propaganda, public shaming tactics, censorship, and forced conformity were used to spread communist ideology. Nevermind McCarthyism.
In March, Texas Sen. Donna Campbell, a Republican in New Braunfels, introduced Senate Bill 24, which she described in a hearing “aims to educate students on the deceptive methods used to spread communistic ideology and highlight the ongoing threats posed by Communism.”
Patrick has made the bill a priority, and a few weeks ago, Rafael Cruz, a right-wing pastor and the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, testified in favor of it. He argued that young people have been “brainwashed on the virtues of socialism” through Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, though they’ve already been banned or largely dismantled by the state.
The legislation would require the State Board of Education to reshape social studies curriculum to include lessons about: modern threats to the U.S. posed by communist regimes and ideologies; collectivist ideologies contrasted with America’s founding principles of individual rights, merit-based advancement, and free enterprise; and common methods used to spread communist ideas.
Translation: China is our enemy, CRT and DEI are communist ideologies, and Cancel Culture is communism in action.
“This is another way that the legislature is imposing unbearable governance on schools,” Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at Every Texan, a left-of-center nonprofit policy institute, told The Barbed Wire. “It’s another mandate that if some school out there doesn’t comply with, then there’s going to be all these other mechanisms that the legislature is creating around parent grievances and complaints to the school board and attorney general.”
On Monday of last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his intent to depose the superintendent and board of trustees for Austin Independent School District as a part of an investigation into whether the district is secretly teaching critical race theory. The basis for the investigation? Allegations of ties to the New York Times’ The 1619 Project, which places the experience of enslaved Africans at the center of the history of America’s founding.
“It’s outrageous that Austin ISD officials think they can ignore state law to put woke indoctrination in Texas classrooms,” reads Paxton’s press release.
Puente thinks it’s no coincidence that the bill comes on the heels of Gov. Greg Abbott signing school vouchers into law.
“He started his speech by attacking public education because that’s where the majority of funding is going to continue to flow. And the only way that we’ve seen in the last four years that you can really take that public education dollars is by beating up on public schools and making people think that it’s not worth investing in,” Puente said. “My biggest concern is that this is just another way that people will be able to gin up anger and mistrust about public education.”
Even with subsidized private education, there’s little reason to believe Republican lawmakers will end their attempts to embed their worldview into public school curriculums. There are a number of bills making their way through the legislature that would further restrict DEI policies in public schools, punish schools and staffers who support a student’s use of preferred names or pronouns, expand avenues for removing books from school libraries, and make it a crime for librarians and teachers to provide books that contain “sexually explicit material” — a definition that almost certainly includes award-winning works of literature.
A bill similar to Senate Bill 24 stipulating instruction on political ideologies was considered by the legislature in 2023. It included fascism, socialism and totalitarianism — not just communism — and ultimately died in committee.
At the time, Puente with Every Texan testified that the bill would create a chilling effect in the classroom regarding historical figures like Emma Tenayuca, the leader of the Pecan Sheller’s Strike in San Antonio in 1938 when over 12,000 mostly Mexican American laborers protested low wages and poor working conditions. The bill would “require public school curriculums to describe her efforts as having been in ‘conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy,’ when in fact Tenayuca’s labor organizing helped create the multiracial democracy we now enjoy,” reads the testimony, which also noted that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, a 1968 multiracial struggle for economic justice that was relaunched in 2017, has long been labeled “communist.”
Dr. Michael Phillips, a historian specializing in the history of racism, right-wing extremism, and apocalyptic religion in Texas, agreed the target of these bills may not really be communism per se, any kind of liberal or left-wing activism.
“This has been done before,” Phillips said. “In the 1950s a number of school districts, including Dallas and some in the Houston area, had anti-communism courses.”
In Dallas, he said, the course’s textbook was “Masters of Deceit,” by J. Edgar Hoover.
“The book basically suggested that the communist Soviet Union was exploiting tensions over civil rights, that they had managed to deceive a large number of African Americans, and that the civil rights movement was infested with communists,” Phillips said. “Hoover was obsessed with this idea, and he thought Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist.”
But the fact that fascism isn’t included in this year’s version is particularly conspicuous to Phillips.
“Fascism, unlike communism, makes race the central conflict in human history,” Phillips said. “Communists would say it’s class struggle, while fascists would say race and nationality are the primary struggles in human history.”
Phillips posits that Republican lawmakers may be “afraid, for obvious reasons, that students who study the ideology of fascism as a discrete thing would be able to critique Trumpism and see the analogy between the modern Republican Party and fascist movements through history.”
Consider Patrick’s embrace of “invasion” rhetoric echoing the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which alleges a nefarious Democratic scheme to replace native-born white Americans. The conspiracy theory, widely embraced in the modern neo-fascist movement, was the cited justification for the perpetrator of the deadly 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, Patrick Crusius, who released a manifesto that bemoaned “cultural and ethnic replacement” and a perceived “Hispanic invasion.”
Texas Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat in Austin, attempted to amend the bill to include fascism, which she defined as dictatorial power, extreme nationalism, militarism, racism and suppression of political opposition through official means.
“Another ideology that threatens our current modern-day democracies is fascism,” Eckhardt told the Austin American-Statesman. “Understanding fascism is imperative for understanding communism and how we defend against such extremism that threatens a civil society.”
It did not pass.
“I prefer to see what comes out in [the State Board of Education] and make sure we get the communism down, and then next session, let’s work together, and we can put in some fascism,” Campbell, the bill’s main sponsor, told the Austin American-Statesman.
Still, critics like Phillips have their doubts about the motive of the bill, which fails to provide a precise definition of communism.
“I think that the shadow agenda is to provide a course material where you can’t talk to students about activist movements that question power structures and income inequality, raise issues of capitalism’s role and the degradation of the climate, or explore how slavery basically provided the economic foundation for worldwide capitalism,” Phillips said.
“This is going to be used to discredit anything left of the farthest right reaches of the Republican Party. That’s a real agenda in this curriculum.”
