Not about "Protecting Kids." Republicans alone want to Own the Youth and Gain the Future!

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

The Walker Youth Movement, Pre-DeSantis. Goin after the kids: When voters kicked Scott Walker out as governor, he took aim at America’s youth, becoming the president of the Young America’s Foundation (YAF). Playing off the “liberal indoctrination” myth, he was pretty clear…

Walker said another priority of his, both at the high school and university level, would be to promote more objective teaching of American history, global history, economics, and simple financial literacy: “If you just give people the facts, if you don’t put your spin on it, the facts will overwhelmingly lead people to be more aligned with our point of view.” He added that because of progressive professors and liberal politicians, “this generation just doesn’t believe what the facts show to be true.”

“YAF has been great – but we have to multiply it a thousand times over and reach more students and more campuses and earlier. Not just in college and high school, but teens and pre-teens, to find more ways to expose people to the truth,” he said he told the board.

White Religious Nationalism Indoctrination Okay? You would have thought some of the $3.5 billion proposed tax cut could have gone instead to our public schools and the UW Engineering Department, but no. Rep. Robin Vos bravely doubles down the imagined enemy of public education, liberal indoctrination:

“They tell me we don’t have enough people to be in engineering. We don’t have enough folks who are teaching an awful lot of careers. But. boy are they able to find millions of dollars to put into a curriculum and an ideology,” Vos added. “So, if they have extra money then I think it should be taken back, and the taxpayers of Wisconsin will have a chance to use it for something better than indoctrinating kids with left-wing ideology. It should not be indoctrination, where you’re only allowed to have one point of view.”

Then there’s the idea that students aren’t allowed to present a different opinion in class. Not true. It turns out conservative students know their view might be unpopular, so they self-censor. No one is shutting them down. From a YAF poll, mirroring a similar recent result from a UW poll:

46 percent admit they “have stopped myself from sharing my ideas or opinions in class discussions.” As for why these students refrained, it appears that peer pressure is the dominating factor as 50 percent said they held back their opinions because they “thought my classmates would judge me.”

That’s not on the instructor or the other students. 

GOP’s Religious Nationalism and Hitler’s Comeback: The following clips may be from around the country, but they clearly represent Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Republican majority. Saying the quiet parts outload now, proving “liberal indoctrination” never did work if it ever did exist, here are a few amazing examples: First, openly admit what you’re doing…

…and pointing out who inspired you…

…doubling down via Moms for Liberty, who hope to “own the youth,” which in someway “empowers parents?” 

…to a history loving 20 year old school board candidate casually quoting Hitler to make his case to voters:

Not going to take it anymore: What more can be said, it’s all here…

NOTE: I thought this is something we should get an update on; the health of democracy in Wisconsin: 

The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem. “Results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period,” he writes. While many researchers have attempted to quantify the health of democracy in different countries around the world, Grumbach’s paper is the first effort to develop some kind of ranking system for US states. And it’s yet another piece of evidence that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic political faction.