Yes, public school students across the country are being exposed to social justice indoctrinating concepts including critical race theory. Yes, teachers are being trained how to view certain students as victims of systemic racism and sexism and that those ideologies are baked into American institutions. 

Yes, that’s also happening here in Idaho. 

That is why members of the Idaho House of Representatives, thankfully, voted down a portion of the public schools budget earlier this week. The progressives and their propagandist allies in the media would have you believe that the vote was “against teachers.” That’s a mantra we’re already hearing over and over, but it just is not true. 

In fact, voting down the public schools budget is not unprecedented. In 2013, the Idaho Senate rejected the public school’s budget in an 18-17 vote. In fact the Senate voted down the budget for teachers, the same budget that the House rejected this time around. The only difference between the vote in 2021 and the one eight years ago is that, back then, no one marketed it to the public as an “anti-teacher” vote. 

The leftists are spinning it that way today because they don’t like the fact that the public and legislators are finally voicing their frustration with the Left’s unchecked radicalization of young people that has been unfolding for years in the government indoctrination camps we call public schools. 

I’ve seen legislators come and go over the last two and half decades, and most of them have said nothing as children were fed a constant diet of lies about America. Students have been conditioned to believe that government solves all the world's problems. 

They’ve read in their textbooks that the U.S. Constitution is a living document that can be altered without changing a word, simply by popular consensus. Students have been programmed to believe the lie that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest president ever because he saved us from the Great Depression. 

Our schools have downplayed the importance of liberty and a free society. Students hear next to nothing about the roles capitalism and private property have played in American prosperity. But they’ve read and heard plenty of positive portrayals of socialism, Marxism, and communism.

Over time, because of a lack of opposition to the Left’s narrative, the education system felt liberated and started to tell schoolchildren to crusade against fossil fuels and global warming. So it wasn’t much of a stretch when, a couple of years ago, students were told to go ahead and take the day off to protest the Second Amendment. Nobody will hold it against ya. And yes, that was the order of the day, even in Idaho.  

All of this systemic lethargy, the failure of leadership—by governors, lawmakers, the State Board of Education and superintendents of public instruction—got us to this point. 

The budget lawmakers voted down in the state House had one problem:  it contained no prohibition on teachers being trained in critical race theory. It provided no protection for teachers who are tired of being encouraged by academia and activists to judge students based on race and gender and to teach concepts that fly in the face of our values. Perhaps it was a bridge too far. 

Teachers asked lawmakers for help, and lawmakers said they would deliver. 

The state Legislature’s efforts to rewrite state education budgets so that they block social justice indoctrination from Idaho’s classrooms, coupled with Lt. Gov.Janice McGeachin ’s new task force to identify and root out additional examples of leftist ideology permeating the education system, can only help. 

One vote on one bill won’t save Idaho, and it won’t save America. But it’s a damn fine start. It should have come years ago. But what House lawmakers did in rejecting the public school budget, and the college and university budgets before it, is the kind of leadership our country has been looking for and desperately needs.