It Could Happen Here - Textbooks and Holy Books feat. Steven Moncelli & Dr. Michael Phillips

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

American school children receive two distinct versions of United States history depending on what state they live in: one version of the American past aimed to meet the curricular demands of the largest market, California, and an often strikingly different version to meet the increasingly rightwing expectations of the Texas legislature. Most of the other states in the union pick between the two. This episode will examine how this situation developed, the increasing national influence of one Texas evangelical author David Barton, how Americans perceive the relationship of church and state, the continuing war on the theory of evolution, and the strange story of how efforts to post the Ten Commandments in American classrooms can be traced to Hollywood marketing of the 1950s Cecile B. D. Mille epic, The Ten Commandments. Sources: Dana Goldstein, “Two States.  Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories,” New York Times, January 12, 2020. Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015.) James W. Loewen, Lies My History Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.) Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.)  Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2011  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Kristin Davis, host of the podcast Are You a Charlotte? The incredible Cynthia Nixon joins me this week for a conversation filled with memories and stories I didn't even know. Cynthia could have been Carrie? When I first read the script, they asked me to read for Carrie, as I think they asked you to read for Carrie. Did you? I did.

And they were like, yeah, not so much. You can't miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Brooklyn Nine Niners. It's a reunion. The ladies of the Nine Nine are getting back together for a special episode of the podcast, More Better.

Host Stephanie Beatriz and Melissa Fumero welcome friend and former castmate, Chelsea Peretti. Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing there? Oh yeah! I was like, can I also hug them? Listen to More Better with Stephanie and Melissa on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

Follow More Better and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. What would you do if mysterious drones appeared over your hometown? I started asking questions. What do you remember happening on that night of December 16th? It actually rotated around our house, looking as if it was peering in each window of our home. I'm Gabe Linners from Imagine, iHeart Podcasts and Linners Entertainment. Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

Ow, goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20, comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. What's the way to find a missing person?

Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Call zone media. I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and have co-authored an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who covers extremism

and far-right movements for a variety of publications, including the Texas Observer and the Barbed Wire. School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically spent hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts and other tedious topics. But beginning in 2020, Christopher Ruffo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the Right Wing Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools had become communist indoctrination centers. Ruffo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing school children with something called critical race theory or

CRT for short adherence of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics law and culture that Anti-discrimination laws typically fail While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs It hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed. That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums across the nation

due to its large population and purchasing power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign. Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Rufo's campaign. Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Rufo admitted to in a series of tweets in 2021. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, Rufo wrote. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to

annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans." End quote. On Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets, Rufo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash white children into hating themselves and goading black children into hating white people. Radical teachers and professors, Rufo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life. In a foundational paper called Whiteness as Property, the critical race theorist Sheryl

Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth from the rich, and redistributing it along racial lines. Rufo's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings, remote learning and mass mandates. Now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards.

Reuters reported on one meeting that turned violent in Loudoun County, Virginia. Who pays your salary? Shame on you! What had been planned as a typical school board meeting in Virginia's wealthy Loudoun County this week devolved into pandemonium. With hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium to accuse the school system of teaching their kids that racism in America is structural and systemic, something the school board denies is part of the curriculum. Things got so heated that the board members eventually walked out, leaving the police

to deal with the unruly crowd. Two people left in handcuffs. Loudoun County School Board has been roiled for months by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a school of thought that maintains that racism is ingrained in U.S. law and institutions and that legacies of slavery and segregation have created an uneven playing field for black Americans. The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives who, like many in Loudon, say it is being

used to indoctrinate children that America is a racist country. Critical race theory is anti-white and it's not American. Those with an ear for historical rhymes may find this outcry familiar. Resistance to racial integration and the civil rights era movements drew similar accusations of being hostile to whites and being a product of anti-American communism. And those with experience teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrination. A common joke posted by teachers online is that quote, if we could indoctrinate students, students would always read the syllabus. But that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti-LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being

placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well-funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents. Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, Great Vine Colleyville, from August 2022. In very simple truths, there's only two genders. And boys should go to boys' rooms, girls should go to girls Restrooms and guess what teachers shouldn't be forced to use your freaking made-up fantasy pronouns fight like hell Hold the line against the LGBT mafia and their dang pedo fans keep winning You know what keep the wing they can keep the monkey pox. How's that working? In

fact, keep running so much, we'll keep coming. You know what? We're going to keep coming so hard. The only thing these walk cards got to figure out is whether it's on their face, back, butter, thighs. Woo! It's off. Thank you. As absurd as all this may seem, there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. As of 2020, the United States had become more culturally diverse, racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before. And our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's also a deep irony to this reaction. Prior to the advances of the civil rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education,

but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the right. In fact, it's usually been the opposite. For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism. In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools over the years with a particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about American history depends on where you live, and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.

Textbooks before the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists. School books in the South, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a noble lost cause. This influenced popular culture as we see in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war. And this too steeped into the public imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail starring Van Heflin. According to the myths, promoted first in schools, then echoed in mass entertainment. Slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave-owning Southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves. Screenplay writers have often echoed what they heard in the classroom

as we see in this scene from the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail. Here Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Massey portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Aero Flynn depicts future Confederate General J.E.B. Seward as sweetly rational. Half of the people in America believe in your theory. A lot of them even condone your methods. That'll guarantee you a public trial.

I'm not on trial, but the nation itself. Are you too stupid and blinded by a uniform to see what I see? A dark and evil curse laying all over this land. A carnal sin against God. It can only be wiped out in blood. But why in blood? The people of Virginia have considered a resolution to abolish slavery for a long time. They sense that it's a moral wrong.

And the rest of the South will follow Virginia's example. All they ask is time. From the 1880s until the 1960s, school books depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time, the Reconstruction Period from 1865 to 1877, as a time of rampant corruption. These books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy, and expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks. American schoolchildren, furthermore, learned from their teachers that so-called radical

democracy was not a good idea and sometimes dictatorship was the better option. The 1924 textbook Our World Today and Yesterday, A History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy, had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator. The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader. Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up of capable men and has straightened up the badly demoralized finances of the country.

He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and downing the communists by violence. Nevertheless, he has done much to do away with strikes and to reestablish conditions as they were before the economic demoralization of World War I set in. Again, school books reinforced an American culture in the 1920s that responded to the horrors of World War I, labor unrest, and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant, but also more anti-democratic. All the while, Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of a thriving country

and a virile leader. Iluce stripped down for the camera, worked side by side with the peasants, and wrestled wild animals, never mind that this one had no teeth. Nonetheless, it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide, including Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi. Here he speaks to his many supporters among Italian Americans.

I tell it, the Italians of America, who are working to make America great. Another textbook published in 1935, The Record of America, told students that the so-called founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton were not big believers in democracy, an attitude the authors seemed to endorse. As The Record of America put it, The founders had little faith in the ability of people as a whole to maintain self-control and wisdom in government. They had no confidence in the man without property. A man who had

failed to accumulate property would be regarded as shiftless, lazy, or incompetent, and not deserving a voice in the government of others. The Constitution was written to retain power in the hands of those who were least radical and to set obstacles in the way of radical mob action. After the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African American abolitionists like Surgeon of Truth and Frederick Douglass, and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with clarity. But the backlash was swift, particularly after the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, and the rise of the

hyper conservative Tea Party in response. And I know a lot of people are gonna attack me. Why are you gonna go visit your dad? Your mom wouldn't be okay with it. I'm gonna tell you guys right now, I know my mother. And I know my mom had a very forgiving heart. That is my story on plastic surgery. This is my truth. I think the last time I cried like that was when I lost my mom. Like that, like yelling.

I was like, no. I was like, oh, and I thought, what did I do wrong? And as always, you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more. And don't forget, I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies. So my fiance and I have been together for 10 years

and the first two years of being together, I find out he is cheating on me, not only with women, but also with men. What should I do? Okay, where do I start? That's not love. He doesn't love you enough, because if he loved you, he'd be faithful.

It's going to be an exciting year, and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheeky's and Chill, season four, as part of the My Kultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How? Goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all-new fictional comedy podcast series.

Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Hmm, pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out-of-his-element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my brah.

Listen to The Hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching?

They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones, or are they? We used the word drone because it was comfortable to other people. One minute it was there, one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically? Yes, absolutely.

Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation Island, stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future, we will all be canceled for 15 minutes. But don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like Bad Touch Football, Anti-Racism

Spin Class, and Mand ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the cancel to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karen, where have you brought us? Cancellation Island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation Island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2010, Tea Party supporters took control of the Texas State School Board, which has

control over Texas school book curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans. In 2015, Ronnie Dean Barron got a text from her son, Kobe, who was glancing at a ninth-grade geography textbook published by McGraw-Hill, signed in by his high school in Perlin, Texas near Houston. He sent her a video highlighting a map in a shocking caption. Soon, Buran posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation.

A video post on Ronnie DBuren's Facebook page. So I'm going to show you the book. I mean, there's just an interesting section. Went viral. Her video has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and has 48,000 shares. To get to the topic of conversation, you literally have to turn through the pages of her son's

geography textbook. Immigration in the United States can be divided into four district periods. Kobe, who's in the ninth grade at Peerland High School, was studying immigration when he read this in his textbook, a comment that referenced African slaves as workers. As if we worked our way up in America, as if we came here by choice for a better life.

The offensive caption read in full, quote, the Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the Southern United States to work on agricultural plantations. The publisher of the book, simply titled World Geography, later apologized for the euphemism, noting that it did not adequately convey

that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands. The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw-Hill had given the state of Texas what it wanted. Rather than anything like critical race theory, the State Board of Education in 2010 adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools, known as Texas Essential Knowledge

and Skills, that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human-caused climate change, and imposed other right-wing content. To be sold in Texas, school textbooks had to meet the board's standards. Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state and serve four-year terms, while the governor appoints the chair of the board. Since the beginning of the 21st century century the board has been dominated by Christian right activists as a 2013 PBS report notes. Don McElroy has three jobs and he loves them all.

Good morning Dr. McElroy's office. Job number one, dentist. Job number two, Sunday school teacher. And job number three, member of the Texas State Board of Education, a seat he's held for the last 12 years. But it's that third job which has put this dentist and Sunday school teacher from Bryan, Texas, into a national debate over what kids are taught in school. Critics have accused McElroy of injecting his religious, conservative beliefs into the curriculum. About every ten years, the board revises the textbook standards for different subjects. Any books bought by the state must conform to these guidelines.

The last big battle was over the science standards. This year, he's tackling social studies. The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter, as PBS reported a decade ago. According to publishing insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit Texas's standards, because Texas is the largest buyer of textbooks. That means the choices made here could determine books that other states will buy. And that's led to a school fight that has the entire country looking on. This is how Kobe Byrne ended up with the world geography textbook that used the word workers

to describe chattel slaves. Kathy Miller of the anti-censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas. We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and so flawed that it's become almost a punchline for comedians. Those serious about education aren't laughing, however. In 2018, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historical figures Texas students must learn about, a decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.

In 2010, the board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in 2018 to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintain that quote, states rights and sexualism were key contributing factors. Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools in the Jim Crow era quote, had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of the separate but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included a cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's

eligible for affirmative action programs. Texas Standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy about whether human activity has led to climate change and to, quote, consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels tricking climate change and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is nearly unanimous. Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they attend schools.

A New York Times comparison of textbooks used in California, Texas showed that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of Rights. In reference to the Second Amendment, however, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces this commentary with a, quote, blank white space, as the New York Times reported. Texas and California textbooks both introduce students to African-American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students are told that,

quote, some dismissed the quality of the literature produced by the Harlem Renaissance. As the New York Times reported, the California version of the history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena whereby parents move from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbook said this, Some people wish to escape the crime and the congestion of the city. Movement of some white people from cities to suburbs was driven by a desire to get away from more culturally

diverse neighborhoods. Others believed the suburbs offered better and more affordable living. The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War II. The Texas State Board also specifically asked one textbook publisher to emphasize how many clergy signed the Declaration of Independence and to underscore the exposed importance of religion to the founders.

These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by a Texas Christian nationalist, David Barton. Barton, a 70-year-old lifelong resident of Aledo, Texas, which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth, has become a major influence on the Republican Party and its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star State, but across the nation. While reporting on the conservative political action conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a copy of one of Barton's books. He calls himself a historian, although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A one-time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in 1988 as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote, your sexual choice is not a God given right, he said on one occasion. In 1988, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit the organization says is dedicated to, quote, educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment

to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion. The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith. Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with religion, but that Christians should dominate the government, as Barton said in an interview. So we've got to get away from being scared to say we're a Christian nation.

What we've got to do is define it the right way, define it the historical way. We can't let the left steal 300 years of heritage. We can't let them wipe out 300 court cases, wipe out what dozens of presidents and governors have said simply because they don't like the term. We are a Christian nation, we have been a Christian nation, and that doesn't mean anything they think it does. We're not theocratic, we're not coercive. We believe in free choice, we don't believe in any of the others, and that's what we've got to get back to doing. We don't need to be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we believe we have a Christian nation.

The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the generation that led the revolution and wrote the Constitution agreed with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that when church and state mix, both are harmed. Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in 1786 when it adopted the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The First Amendment adopted in 1789 also banned Congress from quote establishing a religion and most states

embraced to varying degrees the doctrine of church-state separation. There were some states that objected to this notion. The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could. Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist Church, respectively until 1818 and 1833. For decades, some states had so-called, quote, Jew laws that prohibited non-Christians from holding office, or had similar bans on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the 19th

century. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, placed the same limits on state power that are placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the 1947 Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education. Artin has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately 100,000 primary documents written before 1812. Based on that selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation and that American law should be

based on the Bible. Barnum believes that not just the Bible, but also the original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God. He asserts again, with no evidence and without defining terms, that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote, orthodox or evangelical Christians. In reality, the early leaders of America didn't speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears of the universe together, wound it up, and

let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals. When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion and a gathering that as many as 55 attended on any given day. In their letters, many of the founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations.

As John Adams said of the Bible, In an age when fraud, forgery, and perjury were considered as lawful means of propagating truth by philosophers, legislators, and theologians, what may not be suspected? Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Stiles that Jesus was a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that Christ was the Son of God. Franklin questioned whether the depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as described in the Gospels could be trusted. As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see,

ever saw or is likely to see, but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have doubt with most of the present dissenters in England as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon having never studied it." And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believe that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about a central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth. Jefferson wrote, Jesus was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbited according to the Roman law." Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical

figures that no credible scholars have been able to find. He cherry picks evidence to bolster his claims about the founder's religious beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church services in the U.S. Capitol. More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially. What's more, Jefferson was far from an orth Orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservativism today.

He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus' teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on. These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's 2022 New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, exposing the myths you always believed about Thomas Jefferson. For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson in his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others, but it does mean no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some of Barton's fellow Christian conservatives. The History News Network website derided the book as, quote, the least credible history book in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it had, least credible history book in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it had, quote,

lost confidence in the book's details. Yet in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version. Hey, y'all, it's your girl, Cheeky's's and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Cheeky's and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys. And I know a lot of people are going to attack me. Why are you going to go visit your dad? Your mom wouldn't be okay with it.

I'm going to tell you guys right now, I know my mother and I know my mom had a very forgiving heart. That is my story on plastic surgery. This is my truth. I think the last time I cried like that was when I lost my mom. Like that, like yelling. I was like no. I was like oh and I thought what did I do wrong? And as always you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more. And don't forget, I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies.

So my fiance and I have been together for 10 years. In the first two years of being together, I find out he is cheating on me not only with women, but also with men. What should I do? Okay, where do I start, but also with men. What should I do? Okay, where do I start? That's not love. He doesn't love you enough,

because if he loved you, he'd be faithful. It's going to be an exciting year, and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheekies and Chill, season four, as part of the My Kultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said

the first night I came over here? How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers

about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Hmm, pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived, investigative hookups.

Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And, as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my bruh. Listen to The Hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there?

We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous, that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching. They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones, or are they? We used to work drone

because it was comfortable to other people. One minute it was there and one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically? Yes, absolutely. Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell, and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation Island, stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future, we will all be canceled for 15 minutes.

But don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like Bad Touch Football, Anti-Racism Spin Class, and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the canceled to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing.

Karen, where have you brought us? Cancellation Island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation Island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about staffing at the Capitol.

Johnson made his speech at a wall-builders event telling the audience that the theocratic evangelist had, quote, a profound influence on me, my work, my life, and everything I do. Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed those lesson plans. Huckabee has long produced so-called history videos for schoolchildren that promote Christian

nationalism and the idea that the United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a revolutionary war soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side. This video series may not be shown to kindergartners in Texas, but the lessons in the Huckabee Design curriculum clearly favor a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions. The scripture-filled lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckabee's product. This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.

Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last decade. One of his political action committees played a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate. He is close allies with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors in other states. Patrick said this at a 2022 conservative political action convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the U.S. Constitution.

We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because he wrote the Constitution. He empowered them. We were a Christian state and we've been blessed because of that for so many years. In 2010, the Texas State School Board for the first time required that textbook publishers portray a particular biblical figure as an honorary founding father. This supposed founder was famously portrayed in the 1956 Box Office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five-term president of the National Rifle Association. In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers are required to tell students

that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo-Christian scripture as well as the Koran as leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence on the authors of the Constitution. Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June 2024 which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus derived from Protestant translations of the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law. With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought

to get a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. And as the law put it, quote, in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.

The bill passed the State Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when it didn't come before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline. As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue his crusade in the coming months. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. That bill was originally proposed during last year's legislative session, but missed a key deadline and died in the House. Louisiana just passed a similar law this week.

The Lieutenant Governor posting on X saying, quote, Texas would have and should have been the first state in the nation to put the Ten Commandments back in our schools." End quote. The lieutenant governor says he will pass the bill during the next legislative session. Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state government violating the First Amendment. Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained why such laws, like those signed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution. There are three references to religion in the Constitution, and all three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away from the state.

There is no religious test required for office forms, a remarkable revolutionary act at the time. The First Amendment says there will be no national religion established by the national government. Says that we will not interfere with your private right to worship or not worship as you see fit, right? That is what the Constitution says. And so Landry says he wanted to put this up

because Moses was the first lawgiver. He's not. The Code of Hammurabi predates Moses by four centuries or something. But also, if you want to look at the real law of the land, put the Constitution up on those walls. Let students read what the real law of this country has to say about the proper role of religion in politics. The history of posting Ten Commandments signs or plaques or building such monuments in public

spaces over the last 70 years has an origin that might shock many right-wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism. As Cruz points out in his book One Nation Under God, how corporate America invented Christian America. The three-hour, 40-minute epic movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wowed audiences with its 25,000-member cast and advanced special effects when it was released in 1956. The movie grossed more than $85 million. The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable.

The director Cecil B. DeMille hated the New Deal and testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood that drove up the cost of filmmaking. The film can be read as a metaphor about the Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union and the freedom-loving Hebrews standing in for the United States. At the beginning of the movie, DeMille appears and calls the movie, quote, the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses. The movie also captures the racism and ironically the anti-Semitism of a country that had not

yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadel tells a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant. DeMille then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth to a son,

DeMille sent her a telegram saying, congratulations, he's got the part. Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who broke the 13-year informal NFL ban on African-American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, Stroh played both an Ethiopian king and the enslaved attendant of Moses' adopted Egyptian mother. DeMille thought that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike. Meanwhile a movie set in ancient Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely

light skinned cast. Even though DeMille's mother was Jewish, the only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson who earlier became famous playing gangsters, and he won DeMille's favor perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist witch hunts. Thus the one prominent Jewish face in the Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian

masters. We're gathered against you, Moses. You take too much upon yourselves. We will not live by your commandments. We're free. There is no freedom without the law. Whose law, Moses? Yours?

Did you carve those tablets to become a prince over us? As Cruz documents, when the Ten Commandments film was initially released, DeMille came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He teamed up with a conservative anti-communist organization, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, to establish Ten Commandment monuments across the country. Around the time that southern states erected new Confederate monuments to protest desegregation, ten Commandment monuments appeared at the County Courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall, and near the U.S.-Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly 150 such monuments were erected across the country.

Momentum stalled during the Civil Rights era to the extent that an Alabama state justice Roy Moore suffered ridicule when he placed without authorization a self-funded 5,280 pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing the state's Supreme Court in 2001. The monument was ordered removed two years later. But once fringe figures like Moore have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and their allies. The contemporary

obsession with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal. Men like anti-CRT crusader Christopher Ruffo, along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the world that made the Ten Commandments film, a world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark-skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands is an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide. And now, once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that. Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. It's called accreditation

for a reason. The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally. When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniac maniacs and lunatics. On January 29th of this year, Trump issued an executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any public school that allegedly imprints, quote, anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our nation's children. This could include teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to trans students, or educating students about America's long, bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia,

or transphobia. The order also requires public schools to provide, quote unquote, patriotic education. Those like Trump, Barton, and others who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days of the 1920s and the 1930s when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place and those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys. In the Civil Rights era, black and brown

parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow laws. Parents who want their children receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors and to disrupt the meetings of right-wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were caught into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This is Michael Phillips. And this is Stephen Monticelli. Thanks to Betsy Frioff for reading passages from textbooks and to Dan Glass for reading

quotes from the founding fathers. Of course, thanks to you for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

I'm Kristin Davis, host of the podcast Are You a Charlotte? The incredible Cynthia Nixon joins me this week for a conversation filled with memories and stories I didn't even know. Cynthia could have been Carrie. When I first read the script, they asked me to read for Carrie as I think they asked you to read for Carrie. Did you?

I did, and they were like, yeah, not so much. You can't miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Brooklyn Nine Niners, it's a reunion. The ladies of the Nine Nine are getting back together for a special episode of the podcast, More Better. Host Stephanie Beatriz and Melissa Fumero

welcome friend and former castmate, Chelsea Peretti. Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing there? Oh yeah, you were like, can I also hug them? Listen to More Better with Stephanie and Melissa on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow More Better and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. What would you do if mysterious drones appeared over your hometown?

I started asking questions. What do you remember happening on that night of December 16th? It actually rotated around our house looking as if it was peering in each window of our home. I'm Gabe Lenners from Imagine, I Heart Podcasts and Lenners Entertainment. Listen to Obscura, Invasion of the Drones wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How? Goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.

I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to The Hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.