What people are saying:

• Secular Education Association: These are the kinds of policies and standards we are talking about when we say honest history is under attack.

  Florida state standards on enslaved people developing skills for “personal benefit”:

  Click to access 6-4.pdf

  Education Week tracker on state restrictions targeting CRT, racism, sexism, and “divisive concepts”:
  https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

  Oklahoma Bible-in-classrooms mandate rescinded:
  https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/oklahoma-abandons-requirement-bibles-every-classroom-2025-10-16/

  Oklahoma Bible-centered social studies standards:
  https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/08/05/oklahoma-supreme-court-declines-to-pause-new-social-studies-standards/

  Ohio Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act:
  https://ohiohouse.gov/news/republican/ohio-house-passes-charlie-kirk-american-heritage-act-139729

• Facebook User: 100000%
• Facebook User: Without knowing our history, we don’t understand how it affects the present.
• Facebook User: Real teachers don’t get scared of the truth. Hard truths need to be taught.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Yes, but teachers also need to know that they won’t lose their livelihoods when they teach the truth.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User I think if more teachers do their jobs in this manner, very few would actually lose their livelihoods.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Not when you’ve got right-wing dumbasses legislating curriculum
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Teachers definitely need to not have threats. Education doesn’t need threats.
• Facebook User: Do not erase how it was the Democrats largely responsible for the racism and slavery in America at that rime.
  • Secular Education Association: Facebook User A minister should care more about truth than partisan deflection. Yes, Lincoln’s Republican Party was the anti-slavery party. Yes, Democrats of that era defended slavery and segregation. And yes, party coalitions and ideologies changed over time. That is exactly why honest history matters.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User, those Democrats are now Republicans because they can’t stand anyone of color or who isn’t male having the same rights.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Don’t erase the Southern Strategy which took the old racist Democrats to become the current Republican party.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User you sound SUPER smart. Picking and choosing history to fit your narrative
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Can you spell Dixiecrat? or perhaps Nixon’s “Southern strategy”?
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Go back to American history class. That way you can learn the difference between the “Southern Democrats” of the Civil War South, who were more commonly called “Dixiecrats,” and the Democrats of today. You’ll also learn how the Republican party of Lincoln has more in common with today’s Republican party than with today’s Democrats. Stick around long enough, and you’ll learn just how the Democrats and Republicans of the Civil War era switched sides to becme what we have today of each party. All of that would be honest history. Not claiming that the “Southern Democrats” of the Civil War are the same as today’s Democrats. Because that would be blatantly false history.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User “conservatives responsible for the racism and slavery in America at that time” ftfy
  • Facebook User: Facebook User White conservative christians have always been 100% responsible for racism and segregation in this country.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User And do not erase the fact that Republicans NOW are doing everything in their snowflake power to keep it from being taught. You all always bring this up like it’s some kind of “gotcha!” moment and all it is is a deflection.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User it is the Republican Party now. Same parties, different people just switched names. That still doesn’t take away from the fact that all of history needs to be taught, even the horrible and disgusting parts.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User “At that time…” History isn’t static. How did the conservative, southern, segregationist, white supremacist Democrats morph into conservative, southern, segregationist, white supremacist Republicans over the last 100 years?
  • Facebook User: I should add that it was a Republican president at the time too. Basically, the Democrats have switched plantation models to keep people under their control. As the slavery model was ended by war and the 13th amendment, a new model with the help of Marxists and progressives (Marxism and fascism lite) was adopted for control. It developed into the unconstitutional welfare plantation, much more palatable than slavery in the fields. It gets them enslaved to the family- wrecking public dole in the name of phoney compassion.
  • Secular Education Association: Facebook User, “welfare plantation” is racist propaganda, not history.

    And no, you do not get to use “Lincoln was Republican” as a dodge while modern conservatives are actively trying to soften slavery, censor racism in classrooms, and rewrite civil rights history.

    The issue is not party labels from 1865. The issue is who is defending whitewashed history right now.

  • Facebook User: Facebook User racist trash
  • Facebook User: Facebook User why the fuck does it matter. “At that time” both parties were full of racists. And?
  • Facebook User: Facebook User take the party names away. The Conservatives wanted to keep slavery, the Progressives wanted to end it. The platforms and motives are the important part, not the names.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Sorry, I can’t hold back. You stupid fuck. The Democrats of the 1800s became the Dixiecrats until the 1960s and the Republicans of today. Get a fucking education.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Tell us how you aren’t a racist.
  • Facebook User: Guilty before proven innocent according to the public educator advocates of the Secular Education Association. Is that how the progressive leftist law operates in America?
  • Facebook User: Facebook User That’s your opinion. Substantiate it.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Who is saying the horrible and disgusting parts should not be taught. Btw, should we teach how horritble and disgusting abortion is and the wretched torturous techniques used on pre-born children?
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Back up your claim.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User You wouldn’t ask such stupid questions if you’d ever read a history book. I don’t listen to commands from racist weirdos, by the way.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Same people, different name, still extremists. Have a great life.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User go learn about US political history. The Republican Party was created before the Civil War as a liberal party against the then-conservative Democrats.
• Facebook User: 250 years of progress is cause for celebration. Teaching children about the documented truth of our progress as a nation and the sacrifices made by activists, officials, and soldiers to achieve that progress should serve as inspiration for the next 250 years of progress.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User It is our actual strength, not manufactured MAGA “strength.”
• Facebook User: Wish I was taught about Tulsa in school
• Facebook User: Amen!
• Facebook User: Yep. Slavery is bad. America only accounted for 4% of the African slave trade. Slavery is still practiced in Africa and the Mide East.
  Teach it, but don’t leave out the big picture.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Don’t try to leave it out altogether.
• Facebook User:
  • Facebook User: Facebook User calls himself a “historian”…ignores huge swaths of history to share narrative propaganda. lol
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Facts hurt dont they? Its ok though.
• Facebook User: Juneteenth Celebration, I Did Not Come to Be Polite

  I came to the Juneteenth celebration at the Margaret E. Morton Government Center wearing a T-shirt meant to do what Juneteenth itself is supposed to do: draw attention to the freedom work still unfinished. My shirt showed the governor’s image with a demand for a $17,000 ECS foundation, because symbolic recognition of Black freedom means little if Black and Brown children are still educated under a funding formula frozen in inequity.

  I did not arrive planning to disrupt. I came intending to bear witness. Intead, I found myself standing in a perverse civic dystopia. A Juneteenth celebration, a holiday born from delayed freedom was taking place in front of the very government center tied to Bridgeport’s struggles over power, education, and representation. The celebration was supposed to be about freedom, resilience, culture, and community. But freedom without equity is not complete.

  The mayor and governor appeared, and elected officials were gathered to be recognized and offered the opportunity to give remarks. Before the governor and mayor spoke the looked at my shirt and sneered briefly. Then put back on his mask before speaking. Both he and the mayor spent a portion of their time patting themselves and each other on the back for their “contributions”. As an elected official with intimate knowledge of how they have both hurt the black and brown community thorough their policies on education and by campaign operatives in elections.
  So when I spoke, I did what I always do. I told people what they needed to hear, that uncomfortable truth to power. We do not need another study to tell us what is wrong. We already know what is wrong. Connecticut’s education funding system is broken. Bridgeport’s children do not need another study they need fully funded schools. They need librarians. They need staff. They need a foundation amount that reflects real costs and racial equity. And they need a governor that does not create false narratives to withhold $5 million already identified as relief for Bridgeport children.

  The hypocrisy was unbearable. Juneteenth commemorates delayed emancipation, people being free in law, but kept waiting. And there we were, in Bridgeport, still waiting, waiting for education justice, waiting for the Governor to stop studying harm he has caused and start repairing it. Put an end to urban and rural districts waiting for the money to be released, waiting for a funding formula that does not hide racial inequities behind complicated underfunded poorly weighted formulas.

  Just after my remarks, I overheard the mayor speaking privately to a member of the city councilor. They stood about a yard to my left. The mayor characterized my remarks as inappropriate.
  If anything was inappropriate, it was not my refusal to stay silent. What was inappropriate was watching two white males one a Governor in a state that has never had a governor of color and the other a mayor (elected in two consecutive elections in questionable circumstances) stand at a Juneteenth celebration beneath the shadow of Lewis Latimer’s statue, a statue honoring a Black inventor whose contributions to modern light were long under-recognized, while Bridgeport’s Black and brown children still sit inside an education system denied the resources they deserve through chronic underfunding perpetuated during both these leaders entire tenures.

  What felt inappropriate was standing at city hall where an absentee ballot drop box became a national symbol of Bridgeport’s election scandal. That ballot box, in the shadow of the Morton center became part of the story of how Bridgeport was kept from the possibility of electing a mayor of color in two consecutive contests clouded by absentee-ballot controversy.

  What felt inappropriate was remembering that Bridgeport has had two consecutive mayoral contests involving candidates of color, Marilyn Moore in 2019 and John Gomes in 2023. Elections tainted by absentee-ballot controversy. The 2023 Gomes primary was overturned; the 2019 Moore race was not overturned. Criminal charges were tied to alleged absentee-ballot misconduct in Bridgeport’s 2019 and 2023 Democratic primaries and while guilty pleas were entered and others await trial.

  So no, I do not apologize for calling out the governor. Or rather, let me offer the apology this moment deserves:

  I apologize to the event organizers, not for telling the truth, but for the fact that the truth had to be spoken there at all. I apologize that a celebration of freedom had to share space with the ongoing reality of educational neglect. I apologize that the state and local leadership has made it possible for a Juneteenth stage to become the place where someone had to remind elected leaders that freedom is not a one day celebration, equity is not a campaign slogan, and justice is not another time consuming study.

  If Juneteenth means anything, it means delayed freedom must be named. In Connecticut’s Black and Brown cities delayed education funding is delayed freedom, and in Bridgeport elections stolen from people of color is designed to allow freedom to be delayed even longer.

  My remarks were not inappropriate to Juneteenth. They were Juneteenth. Freedom delayed, justice deferred, and a city still waiting for the state to stop celebrating equity and start funding it.

• Facebook User:
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Nearly 200,000 black men served in the Union army and navy. Nearly 40,000 lost their lives fighting for freedom from oppression.

    Don’t give us your racist interpretation of history, dimwit.

  • Facebook User: Facebook User poor thing has to be childish as expected and call names. Bless your heart. LMAO
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Your wit is dim. And you are a racist. Not name-calling when it’s true.
• Facebook User: …to be fair is real history taught in school, No. Its what the book publishers decide to put in there…then a bullshit curriculum. We stray from true history and its going to repeat itself at some point. People getting mad about what really happen doesn’t change it.
• Facebook User: Democrats are the ones rewriting history and destroying statues of Democrat slave owners
• Facebook User: Conservative Christian racists hate the truth
• Facebook User: You’re just Marxists
  • Facebook User: Facebook User , you’re still wearing a white hood and robe.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User so

    No

    But you are in fact a Marxist

  • Facebook User: Facebook User what in the world does Marxism have to do with unwhitewashed and factual history?
  • Facebook User: Facebook User , please define Marxist.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User Do you even known what “marxism,” is?
  • Facebook User: Facebook User when one of you braindead leftoids asks this question

    It is asked obviously because you think that I don’t know

    Ironically implying how little you know

    About the history and evolution of the word

  • Facebook User: Facebook User when one of you braindead leftoids asks this question

    It is asked obviously because you think that I don’t know

    Ironically implying how little you know

    About the history and evolution of the word

  • Facebook User: Facebook User That is a non-answer, but lots of stupid MAGA bluster. You don’t know. What are the differences between socialism, marxism, and communism. For that matter, what is capitalism?

    You stupid MAGA don’t know sh+t.

  • Facebook User: Facebook User , please stop avoiding the question. I’ve heard many different, conflicting versions of what defines a Marxist. I don’t question that you have an opinion about what a Marxist is, I simply ask you to share it with me. You have no idea about what I know about the history and evolution of the world, and didn’t ask me to fill you in. You called me a Marxist, but until/unless you tell me what your definition is I cannot honestly tell you whether I meet that definition.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User right

    You can believe that

    Which, right, you’re going to

    Or you could know the truth

    Which is that i no longer bother with this gotcha

    Given that i have read more Marx and am better informed than anyone who has ever asked me this question, to whom I have bothered to respond

    And I have no expectation that you’ll buck that trend

  • Facebook User: Facebook User I guess i lied to Brian, below, because I’m going to respond to you, because I’m hopefully not mistaken in perceiving that you seem to be asking the question in good faith

    It’s honestly a bit hard to define

    Because we live in both Marcuse’s and Gramsci’s worlds

    As we are increasingly bombarded with calls for leftism from business, education, entertainment, and media

    I obviously do not just mean vulgar Marxism

    I mean something like the Marxism of the Frankfurt school and the intellectual children thereof

    I mean the entire vault of anti-American and anti-capitalist thinking that ultimately boils down to:

    Something in the capitalist west isn’t or wasn’t perfect, and therefore we should burn it all down and replace it with socialism

    I think that most of the people participating in this are not aware that they are being manipulated by a deliberate Maoist influence from social and legacy media

    I think that there are essentially no classical liberals remaining on the left, or if there are, they are too cowardly to risk their social status by speaking out, and so therefore, de facto none remaining

    And as a result, so-called “liberals” who should presumably stand for limited government, property rights, and respectful disagreement stand instead for infinite government, “eating the rich”, and they dance on TikTok when conservative pundits are assassinated for their political opinions.

    I was going to give you another specific example, but that one paints it pretty clearly

    Marxism is dancing on TikTok when a conservative who peacefully disagrees with you is shot in the neck

  • Facebook User: Facebook User You STILL can’t define it. You are intellectually dishonest. Go back to school, son.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User I defined it for Mary in another thread on this post, because she seemed to be asking in good faith, unlike yourself

    You’re welcome to go read that. I look forward to reading the smug gotcha that will ooze out of you, despite what is almost certainly inferior knowledge on the topic

  • Facebook User: Facebook User I am not Mary and you refuse to respond. What I want from YOU, is YOUR definition of what YOU think “marxism,” is. Since you refuse to respond, I can only assume that you either won’t or can’t define the term.

    You started this with a nonsensical comment, pal, and are rapidly retreating while avoiding the question. THAT is intellectual dishonesty!

    Inferior, indeed.

  • Facebook User: Facebook User oh man I just got wicked deja vu

    From the last time that a leftist in a similar conversation said things that were similarly just so insane and unreasonable

    It’s literally off of another thread in this very post

    I’m not going to retype or even copy/paste a lengthy response I offered yesterday to the same question so that you don’t have to scroll up some

    This is very childish behavior

  • Facebook User: Facebook User You are intellectually dishonest. Caught your hand in the cookie jar and you can’t fake your way out of it.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User, I did ask the question in good faith and I appreciate that you responded. Based on your definition of what a Marxist is, that’s not what I am nor are anyone else I know. Using that term to describe an entire group of people is disingenuous. If anything, many of the traits you listed are not reflective of the Left. We love our country as much as those on the right and we are just as patriotic. We aren’t aren’t anti-capitalism, we believe that the worker bees who create the profit deserve a more equitable share. We all (Left and Right) prefer respectful disagreement, both sides say things that help and hinder it. We could talk forever to bolster our own viewpoints and tear down each others. We both are guilty of this. We need to stay away from making blanket statements about one side or the other, but that’s not easy. Again, thanks for your civil reply.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User I respectfully disagree

    Let me give you an example

    Do you believe that trans women, meaning biological men, should be able to compete in women’s sports?

  • Facebook User: Facebook User You are consumed with a garbage can full of ultra-right wing nonsense.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User This person is intellectually dishonest and cannot answer a straight question: What is marxims? He defines nothing and rants at everything.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User oh good, you figured out how to scroll up

    Ok man, thanks for your opinion

    You’re welcome to make an actual argument against my actual position

  • Facebook User: Facebook User Define, “marxism.” You either can’t or won’t. You are dishonest all day long. You are a fake.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User lol Brian

    You’ve literally just read my definition, as I’m using the word

    Feel free to comment on it

  • Facebook User: Facebook User Okay, if that’s your definition, then it’s clear you are clueless. You are dishonest. Calling someone a “marxist,” is name-calling and is intellectually lazy and stupid. Typical of people like you.
  • Facebook User: Facebook User which part of it is clueless