A Florida Congresswoman is on a mission to stamp out Gen-Z’s growing support for left-wing ideas, and is turning to a hard-line neocon group for help in educating the youth on the “evils of communism.”
In the latest front in the culture war over school curricula, the House of Representatives is set to vote Friday on a bill that would give a congressional stamp of approval to the lesson plans of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a group closely linked to fervently hawkish corners of the foreign policy blob.
The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, also known as H.R. 5349, would direct the VOC Foundation to develop an educational curriculum it could offer to school districts to help instruct students on atrocities both historic and contemporary carried out by communist regimes.
Inspiration for the bill came to its sponsor, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., when she learned of a 2020 survey — published, as it so happens, by the VOC Foundation — showing that 28 percent of Gen-Zers and 22 percent of millennials held favorable views of communism.
“Communism is one of the most destructive political ideologies the world has ever seen,” Salazar said in a press release in September. “The Crucial Communism Teaching Act is important because our youth must remember the crimes of the communists, including those inflicted upon my constituents and their families in Florida’s 27th district.”
The legislation, which Salazar explicitly modeled after a 2020 bill mandating the development of educational materials about the Holocaust, has largely flown under the radar, and response to it has been muted. But some Democrats in Congress have already raised concerns that the bill’s monomaniacal focus on communism would leave out important lessons about other forms of repression.
“The bill neglects to mention our country’s long history of using the label ‘Communism’ to enflame, scare, and pit Americans against one another.”
“The bill neglects to mention our country’s long history of using the label ‘Communism’ to enflame, scare, and pit Americans against one another,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., in a Rules Committee hearing on the bill Tuesday. “If we want students to examine the effect of Communism on the world, it would be negligent not to warn against the dangers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the vitriol of Joseph McCarthy, and the negative impact of the Red Scare on many innocent Americans, particularly those seeking racial progress in the Civil Rights era.”
In an attempt to round out the focus of the bill, Scott and other Democrats put forward an amendment that would add lessons about the dangers of fascism, but it was unanimously rejected by GOP committee members.
Despite the concerns of Democrats, the bill is expected to pass Friday with a healthy share of Democratic votes, according to Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa.
“We will vote in favor of it, most of us, Democrats and Republicans, because it’s sort of a no-brainer vote,” said Houlahan, who declined to say how she would personally vote. “Of course —of course — we should decry communism and teach our young people about it.”
The highest-profile battles over education have in recent years taken the form of book bannings and frenzied fights for control of local school boards. But the introduction of right-wing teaching resources is another tactic, with curriculum designed by organizations such as PragerU making their way into schools in Florida and Oklahoma.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has championed legislation passed in recent years in Arizona and Florida that requires early and consistent education on the evils of communism, and would likely be well positioned to offer up its own curriculum as an easy way for schools to meet the new requirements for anti-communist education laid out in those states’ legislation.
In Florida, educational standards already mandated that such lessons begin in 7th grade, but the new legislation, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in April, calls for it to begin as early as kindergarten.
Representatives of the VOC Foundation did not respond to several requests for comment, but the group’s leadership has enthusiastically supported Salazar’s bill.
At the VOC Foundation, meanwhile, work on a broad anti-communist civics curriculum is already underway. On its website, the VOC Foundation lists lesson plans covering the origins of communism — including an exercise instructing teachers to “take a student’s favorite pencil or pen, backpack, phone, etc.” and ask them to reflect on the confiscation of private property — up through the eve of World War II.
While the full curriculum around World War II is not yet published — a number of planned chapters are listed as “Coming Soon” — the material available so far shows a laser focus on the atrocities of Communist forces, including repression of the clergy during the Spanish Civil War and the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners of war by Soviet troops during the German-Soviet partition of Poland.
The VOC Foundation goes into visceral details about the abuses of communist governments, but its research and curriculum, much of which touches on atrocities of World War II, barely mention the horrors of the Holocaust and other evils carried out by non-communist forces. This hyper-focus on communist atrocities has long been a hallmark of right-wing historical projects, and it has landed the group’s fellow travelers in the anti-communist movement in hot water in recent years.
In Canada, a long-planned Memorial to Victims of Communism, funded in part by taxpayer dollars, has come under fire for its celebration of fascist collaborators in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The memorial’s list of victims at one point included tributes to Ante Pavelić, the Nazi puppet who presided over the Holocaust in Croatia, and Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian nationalist who murdered tens of thousands of Jews and other minorities during the war.
That project, set to be unveiled — without any names for now — on December 12 after years of delays, has roots in post-war efforts to form a right-wing answer to the Communist International, according to Dan Boeckner, an independent researcher who has focused on the movement in Canada.
Under the guise of promoting freedom, organizations like the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations often acted as a vehicle for fascist emigres to regroup and exploit Cold War tensions — and legitimate grievances against communist dictators — in the West to rewrite history in a way that would equate communist atrocities with the Holocaust, Boeckner said.
“They basically brain poisoned an entire generation or two of Canadians into thinking that the Soviets were the bad guys during World War II,” Boeckner told The Intercept.
The VOC Foundation in D.C. is unaffiliated with Tribute to Liberty, the group behind the memorial in Canada, but it emerged out of the same global movement. Where the Canadian anti-communist crusade has been led by emigre groups with ties to war criminals and fascists, the manifestation of the movement of the U.S. has instead been dominated by American hard-line “Cold Warriors” dedicated to advancing U.S. interests abroad.
Founded in 1993 by congressional charter, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is an offshoot of the National Captive Nations Committee, a Cold War advocacy group led by prominent conservative intellectuals and proponents of a belligerent stance toward the Soviet Union. Its founder, Lee Edwards, was a high-ranking member of the Heritage Foundation, and under his aegis, the group committed itself to carrying the torch into the 21st century to continue fighting a Cold War that, to the foundation’s leaders, never really ended.
In 2022, the last year for which financial documentation is available, the group received nearly $4.5 million in government contributions and over the past five years has been awarded grants by USAID, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy in Havana totaling more than $3 million for efforts to highlight government repression in Cuba and China. In the past, it has also received funding from conservative grantmaking groups as well as from the Polish National Foundation, a state-funded nonprofit that has been accused of diminishing Poland’s role in the Holocaust.
In addition to its educational programs, the VOC Foundation each year issues the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom to individuals and organizations it considers as major figures in the fight for democracy and human rights.
Past recipients of the medal include various dissidents and post-Soviet leaders of former Eastern Bloc nations, as well as Donald Rumsfeld, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, and weapons company Lockheed Martin.
Despite the fact that H.R. 5349 is nonbinding and provides no funding mechanism for the VOC Foundation’s work, its passage would be a victory for Salazar, the daughter of Cuban exiles who has been trying to get the legislation through since 2021, when she introduced an earlier version of the bill that failed to gain traction. There is already a companion bill in the Senate introduced earlier this year by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.
Congressional insiders told The Intercept it was unlikely that Senate Majority Leader Schumer would move it forward in this session. And the decision by the House GOP majority to advance the bill to a floor vote at this moment at all has left some Democrats scratching their heads.
“It’s interesting that this is the choice of what we have to vote on this week,” Houlahan said. “We have so much work to do in what remains of this Congress. We haven’t even funded the government — let’s start with that.”
