The Republican Party’s Holy War on Education—and Why It Needs You Stupid
The Republican Party has been waging war on education for more than forty years, and the casualties are obvious: the poorest, sickest, most violent, most religious, and least educated states in America are almost uniformly Republican. This is not some unfortunate accident of geography or culture. It is the intended result of a deliberate, cynical project to keep millions of Americans uneducated, obedient, and conveniently furious at the wrong people.
The statistics are embarrassing enough to be called treasonous. The 15 most educated states are almost all blue, with the Mormon fortress of Utah as the lone red exception. The 15 least educated? All Republican. These same states dominate the rankings for highest infant mortality, lowest wages, greatest dependence on federal aid, and—surprise, surprise—highest rates of religiosity. One might think that this would provoke introspection, but introspection requires education, and education is precisely what these states have been systematically denied.
Why would conservatives—especially the white evangelical base they pander to—support this? Because ignorance is politically useful. The devout are trained not to think but to obey. Questioning authority is a sin; doubting the official story is heresy. The faithful are taught to believe what they want to be true, not what can be proven true, which makes them the perfect audience for a party built on conspiracy theories, grievance politics, and cheap slogans.
Ronald Reagan understood this perfectly. The “amiable dunce” was the first modern Republican to declare open war on public education. In the 1980s, Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education, expand “school choice,” and put God and prayer back in classrooms. Notice what was not on the agenda: improving schools, hiring better teachers, or raising literacy rates. The point was not to educate but to indoctrinate.
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“School choice,” of course, was the perfect euphemism—what propagandists call a “semantic deodorant.” It sounds liberating, but in practice, it starves public schools of funding while siphoning taxpayer dollars into private religious academies. The children who remain in gutted public schools—overwhelmingly poor, Black, Latino, or rural—are left with overcrowded classrooms, underpaid teachers, and outdated textbooks. Which is exactly the point. A population deprived of decent education is easier to manipulate, easier to frighten, and easier to keep poor and dependent.
This is not a new trick. Every authoritarian regime in history has known that to control people, you must first control their ability to think. The Library of Alexandria? Burned. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad? Razed to the ground. Galileo was imprisoned for daring to observe the cosmos honestly. Einstein fled Germany when the Nazis turned universities into propaganda mills. And the Nazis themselves—those master practitioners of ideological control—targeted Poland’s intellectuals for execution. Why? Because a population without independent thinkers is a population without resistance.
The Republican Party has simply updated the method. They don’t burn books; they ban them. They don’t jail scientists; they defund them. And they leave the actual violence to their uneducated proxies—the gun-toting, conspiracy-believing base they have trained to hate teachers, journalists, and anyone who uses words with more than three syllables.
Enter Donald Trump, the perfect messiah for this anti-intellectual crusade. In his administration, Trump appointed two of the most laughably unqualified individuals imaginable to run the Department of Education. First came Betsy DeVos, a religious zealot and billionaire heiress whose only expertise was in dismantling public schools and funneling money into private religious ones. Then came Linda McMahon, best known as the executive who helped turn professional wrestling into a billion-dollar industry by convincing millions of people that scripted violence was real. That’s not an insult—it’s her résumé. Trump didn’t pick her despite that skill; he picked her because of it. If you can sell fake wrestling as reality, selling fake history and religious dogma to schoolchildren must seem like child’s play.
And here we are, forty years into this grand project of engineered ignorance. Whole swaths of the country remain trapped in poverty, dependent on federal assistance, and voting, reliably, against their own interests. They are told to blame immigrants, minorities, feminists, and “coastal elites”—anyone except the actual architects of their misery.
If you live in one of these states, let me be blunt: your ignorance is not your fault; it is the plan. You have been kept uneducated by people who do not want you to think, only to obey. You have been conditioned to cheer for the very policies that keep you poor, sick, and dependent.
So here’s some heresy for you: Question everything. Read books that make you uncomfortable. Learn how to research—not to confirm what you already believe, but to find what is actually true. Get out of churches that tell you to stop asking questions. And for the love of all that is rational, stop voting for people who keep you uneducated on purpose.
Because if you don’t, you are exactly what they want you to be: a pawn, a mark, a slave to their propaganda.
If you believe in what this blog stands for, share it, discuss it below, and wear it as a sign of dissent.
Further Reading Engineered Ignorance: How the GOP’s War on Education Keeps America Gullible
- The Death of Expertise – Tom Nichols
Why the campaign against facts and reason is winning—and what we can do to fight back.
https://civilheresy.com/Death of Expertise - Democracy in Chains – Nancy MacLean
The radical right’s stealth plan to hijack America through education and government manipulation.
https://civilheresy.com/Democracy in Chains - The Language Police – Diane Ravitch
How ideological censorship and corporate power distort what students learn in America’s classrooms. https://civilheresy.com/Language Police
