South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced recently that she’s the first candidate nationwide to promise to fight action civics and critical race theory by signing the 1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools, a pledge drafted by a new patriotic education group.
“1776 Action is an issue advocacy organization focused on stopping the anti-American indoctrination happening in our schools,” the group said in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a central voting issue in state and local elections where decisions over education are primarily made.”
“We’re doing that through ongoing ad campaigns, as well as the release of The 1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools to help parents evaluate relevant candidates and officials.”
1776 Action opposes action civics, which refers to K–12 and college students being required to protest and lobby for political causes for course credit.
“Equally significant to its intellectual content is the role Critical Race Theory plays in promoting fundamental social transformation,” the report states, “to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of Americans. This work of cultural revolution has been going on for decades, and its first political reverberations can be seen in 1960s America.”
In his first executive action, President Joe Biden dissolved the 1776 Commission.
“In classrooms across the country, the far Left is successfully indoctrinating children with anti-American lies and divisive theories that pit them against one another based on race and gender,” Waldeck told The Epoch Times in a statement.
“We don’t have decades to waste trying to persuade them that they are misguided, and so 1776 Action was founded to defeat them politically, culturally, institutionally and financially.”
Critical race theory-based trainings impart a false and hateful narrative about American history that exacerbates racial tensions, 1776 Action supporters say.
Noem’s embrace of the pro-American education pledge comes as state lawmakers nationwide consider legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory, which maintains, like The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project, that America is an inherently racist nation.
It also comes as Democrats promote the proposed Civics Secures Democracy Act in Congress, which involves distributing $1 billion per year in federal grants over six years for K–12 curriculum development, teacher training, and research on the teaching of history and civics. Some of the money will go toward action civics.
The 1776 Commission report states that action civics “uses direct community service and political action (such as protesting for gun control or lobbying for laws to address climate change) to teach students to bring change to the system itself.”
The education bureaucrats who will be in charge of disbursing the money from the proposed act are overwhelmingly left-wing, and the recipients are likely to be of the same ideological stripe, conservative critics say.
The candidate vows to “restore honest, patriotic education that cultivates in our children a profound love for our country,” and to “promote a curriculum that teaches that all children are created equal, have equal moral value under God, our Constitution, and the law, and are members of a national community united by our founding principles.”
The candidate also commits to “prohibit any curriculum that pits students against one another on the basis of race or sex,” and to “prevent schools from politicizing education by prohibiting any curriculum that requires students to protest and lobby during or after school.”
Among 1776 Action’s objectives are “supporting candidates for school boards, state boards of education, and other relevant offices who believe in teaching our children to love America,” and “defeating local and state education officials who indoctrinate our children with the false and divisive lies of the radical Left.”
The group also aims to use targeted messaging campaigns to pressure colleges and universities “to stop the anti-American propaganda,” and promote “pro-American alternatives to the radical version” of American history that is taught in many parts of the country.
