Commentary
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times August 22, 2019 Updated: August 22, 2019
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is coming for your children.
Not content with taking over school boards and sending comrades into the teaching profession, the United States’ largest Marxist group is also writing the textbooks your children study.
California DSA member Duane Campbell helped write the new History-Social Science Framework for the state, which was adopted in 2017. Sacramento-based Campbell, a DSA comrade since at least 1983, is an emeritus professor of bilingual/multicultural education at California State University–Sacramento and former chair of the Sacramento DSA. He is also the author of “Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.”
According to Campbell, “Because of California’s large size and market, what goes into California textbooks frequently also gets written into textbooks around the nation.”
In the mid-1990s, Campbell was a contributing editor to Oakland-based Maoist-leaning CrossRoads magazine, which sought to “promote dialogue and build new alliances among progressives and leftists … to bring diverse Marxist and socialist traditions to bear, while exploring new strategies and directions for the progressive political movements.”
In the mid-2000s, Campbell was a contributor to a Bay Area socialist blog called Educational Justice, described as being “from a collective of progressive education activists—stuff about teaching, thinking, parenting, social justice, desegregation, self-determination, economic justice, music, creativity, and building progressive movements for our future.”
Other contributors included Tom Edminster, a teacher’s unionist and DSA member; Karen Zapata of Teachers 4 Social Justice; and Eric Mar, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization supporter and, like Campbell, a member of Progressives for Obama.
As a young man, Campbell was one of several communist or socialist organizers with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union, an experience he now wants to impart to America’s youth.
Campbell has served on DSA’s leadership body, the National Political Committee, and has also served on the DSA’s Latino Commission and Anti-Racism Commission. In 2017, Campbell was co-chair of the DSA Immigrant’s Rights Committee. Campbell is steeped in Marxist racial politics.
More Voters
The DSA’s interest in education is completely political. Inspired by Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci, DSA seeks to infiltrate U.S. society’s main opinion-forming institutions to change the popular consciousness in a socialist direction. In the more short-term, DSA is committed to both expanding the Latino vote and pushing it to the left to give its allies in the Democratic Party an unchallengeable majority in national elections.
Campbell’s DSA comrade, Eliseo Medina, was also active in the United Farm Workers union under Chavez. Medina transferred to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), rising to executive vice president. As one of the most influential advocates for amnesty for illegal immigrants in the country, Medina served as an informal immigration adviser to then-President Barack Obama.
When Obama was still a senator, he declared at a campaign stop while addressing SEIU, “Before immigration debates took place in Washington, I spoke with Eliseo Medina and SEIU members.”
At the America’s Future Now! conference in Washington on June 2, 2009, Medina addressed attendees on the necessity of “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Speaking of Latino voters, Medina explained their importance to the socialist project:
“When they voted in November, they voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up.
“So I think there’s two things that matter for the progressive community:
“Number one: If we are to expand this electorate to win, the progressive community needs to solidly be on the side of immigrants. That will expand and solidify the progressive coalition for the future. …
“Number two: [If] we reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three?
“If we have eight million new voters … [we] will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”
Campbell wants to use his influence on the education system to play his part in DSA’s revolutionary program.
Educational Change
In the early 2010s, Campbell set up a network to change the California history and social studies textbooks, which had mainly been written by objective historians appointed by Gov. Ronald Reagan.
Wrote Campbell:
“I have spent more than six years working on this project—and it was well worth it. The important changes we achieved were produced by years of collective advocacy, lobbying, letter writing, and organizing. After being blocked in our efforts in 2008, we created the Mexican American Digital History site, then organized a statewide network of scholars and community activists to pressure the State Board of Education.
“At each stage, we had to explain why this tedious process of changing the Framework was important. We received assistance from civil rights groups and Latinos in the Democratic Party. Similar and parallel campaigns were organized within the Filipino, Hmong, South Asian, and LGBT communities.”
According to Campbell, this work will result in a new “progressive” path of learning for California’s school children:
“History and social science textbooks in public schools in California and most of the nation are racist, class-biased, and ignore LGBT history. This condition will change in California in 2017 when new textbooks are adopted.
“Under a unanimous decision by the California Board of Education made on July 14, 2016, California students will finally be encouraged to know the history of Latino civil rights leaders like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and Filipino labor leaders like Larry Itliong, as well as an accurate and inclusive history of LGBT activists as a part of the history of California and the nation. These topics are currently substantially absent from public school textbooks.”
That’s right—now young Californians can learn all about Campbell’s old boss Chavez, a man who trained for six years in Chicago with the father of “community organizing” himself: Saul Alinsky. They’ll also learn about Chavez’s right-hand woman Dolores Huerta, a longtime DSA comrade and general communist hang-around.
Chavez worked with a lot of Communist Party USA supporters, including Filipino labor organizer Larry Itliong—who will also be profiled in the new curriculum.
This is supposedly all about fairness and giving minorities equal treatment. Teaching kids about communists, it seems, will make them better students and more engaged citizens—especially the more than 1 in 10 students who Campbell claims are homosexual:
“In the current books … the 51 percent of students who are Latino, the 11.5 percent who are Asian, and the estimated 11 percent of students who are LGBT, do not see themselves as part of history, for many their sense of self is marginalized.
“As I argued in a prior book, marginalization negatively impacts their connections with school and their success at school. This has resulted in a nearly 50 percent dropout rate for Latinos and some Asian groups and LGBT students.”
Campbell then goes on to reel off a whole list of leftist individuals and the radical events they inspired, including the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by communist-inspired militants, the communist-inspired American Indian Movement and the standoff at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the Marxist-led La Raza Unida Party, and the communist-led Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War.
And, of course, the 11 percent of California’s children who are allegedly LGBT shouldn’t feel left out. Their far-left champions are profiled, too: “California activists like Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones were part of a broader movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, which brought a new attention to the cause of equal rights for homosexual Americans.”
Coincidentally, these educational priorities may end up helping DSA’s revolutionary electoral strategy. According to Campbell:
“School marginalization also contributes directly to low-level civic engagement. An accurate history would provide some of these students with a sense of self, of direction, of purpose. History and social science classes should help young people acquire and learn to use the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens throughout their lives. …
“And, while California and the nation have a general problem with low civic engagement among young people, it is also true that the state has a very specific problem with the rate of Latino and Asian voter participation in civic life.
“Rates of voting and voter registration provide a window into civic engagement. The proportion of state voter registration that is Latino and Asian has remained far below the proportions of these groups in the state’s overall population. …
“We know that we can do better. California has the largest school population of any state, with more than 6,226,000 students in school in 2015, more than 11 percent of the United States total.”
So, not only will millions of California schoolchildren be moved to the left by Campbell’s pro-communist propaganda, but they will also likely vote in significantly higher numbers.
This will, of course, consolidate the left’s already iron-grip on California politics, but will likely affect other states as well.
One well-placed Marxist operative can negatively influence millions, even hundreds of millions, of people.
Every pro-American school board in the country should immediately review and probably ban all history and social studies textbooks coming out of California.
Feature photo credit: Children walk past a School Bus in Monterey Park, California on April 28, 2017. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.