Bill of Rights Inst

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CMD

The rebrand appears to be working. In the past five years, Charles Koch and his staff have managed partnerships with musicians like and Guns ‘N’ Roses drummer. Celebrity athletes have also participated. Koch’s “Prime 5” collaboration involved retired football player Deion Sanders, and the LeBron James Family Foundation received a $575,000 grant from Koch’s Stand Together Chamber of Commerce in 2020. Charles Koch touts his collaboration with former political foe Van Jones, who allegedly thinks of his primary contact at Koch “

In sharp contrast, Koch’s historical political extremism—dating back to his work with the John Birch Society during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s—continues unabated.

The Bill of Rights Institute, an organization operating out of Koch’s compound in Arlington, Virginia, was involved in efforts to whitewash the history of slavery in the U.S. in its lesson plans. Koch cash flowed to members of a network of neo-Confederates and white supremacists as recently as 2017. Since then, he has continued to support groups that manufacture hysteria over critical race theory, despite his public statements disavowing the trend.

Most recently, the Atlantic Council ceased its $4.5 million collaboration with the Charles Koch Institute after new staff hired from the Koch-founded Cato Institute advocated against focusing on Russia’s violations of human rights. This followed Koch Industries’ controversial refusal to discontinue its business operations in Russia immediately after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February. By April, the company reversed its position following weeks of dogged investigations by journalist Judd Legum.

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REF 1 millions-of-students-are-quietly-being-taught-the-koch-1823742091

VID?

Millions of Students Are Quietly Being Taught the Koch Brothers’ Whitewashed Version of Black History

Cash-strapped social studies teachers across America have discovered an exciting new resource that provides lesson plans, study materials and even seminars geared toward elementary, middle and high school students. Suggested Reading Fans Want in On Victor Wembanayama’s Book Club Too Tall to Grow Old? Why NBA Centers Are Fighting the Clock to Make It Past…

ByMichael Harriot

Published

March 14, 2018

The lessons are extremely detailed and come with suggestions for activities, multimedia and additional reading. More importantly, unlike many educational tools, most of these materials are provided free of cost. There’s only one catch:

It’s right-wing brainwashing.

These free resources are part of an effort by the innocuously named Bill of Rights Institute to brainwash students into buying the far-right narrative on history, politics and economics. The charitable organization describes itself as “a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization that works to engage, educate and empower individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exist in a free society.”

What it really is, is an education arm of a network of right-wing charities funded by the ultraconservative Koch brothers in conjunction with a number of other conservative philanthropic individuals and organizations. It takes millions of dollars in donations and claims to have taught the Bill of Rights to more than 5 million students and 50,000 teachers, including directly training 22,000 educators through its constitutional seminars.

The lessons stress limited government, religious freedom, free-market economics and—worst of all—a revisionist version of the history of slavery that paints it as a necessary evil to further freedom and democracy.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (which—if you have—I can’t blame you; it might offer good protection in the upcoming nuclear holocaust with North Korea), you know the Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch are the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the country. Tied at No. 8 on Forbes’ list of the richest people in the world, the brothers are worth an estimated $60 billion apiece and use their funds to further their conservative agenda.

According to the New York Times, the Kochs planned to spend close to a billion dollars on the 2016 election cycle, more than the entire Republican National Committee. Their investment led to Republican majorities in the House and Senate, their hand-picked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the election of a little-known reality-TV star named Donald J. Trump.

But it is the Koch brothers’ quiet philanthropic efforts that garner them the most bang for their buck. They use foundations and corporations to funnel their money to organizations under the cover of anonymity.

Take, for instance, the DonorsTrust Foundation and the Donors Capital Fund. Conservative Transparency reports: The Koch network has provided DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund with most of its backbone; it is widely noted that DT & DCF are a part of the “Koch Network.” In 2014 (the latest year available), all but one of the contributions to the Bill of Rights Institute came from either the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, DonorsTrust or the Donors Trust Capital Fund.

The Bill of Rights Institute is funded by the Koch brothers … tax-free.

So what does the Bill of Rights Institute teach?

Almost every lesson plan stresses the conservative idea of the limited role of government, best explained by this quote from the lesson on “The Limited Role of Government”:

Perhaps the most definitive limitations on government are found in the Bill of Rights. A firewall protects a computer from outside attempts to harm it, so too does the Bill of Rights guard fundamental rights, natural and civil. In fact, far from most Americans’ popular understanding of the Bill of Rights as a “giver” of rights (ask most Americans where they get their right to free speech and the answer will almost always cite the First Amendment), it is actually the “limiter” of government authority.

According to the lesson plan titled “Health Care and the Bill of Rights,” it “focuses on the health care law from multiple constitutional perspectives.” Here are the “multiple” constitutional perspectives:

Religion: The lesson includes two articles examining cases where the Affordable Care Act is said to violate religious freedom.

Expression: Asks if it is a violation of the First Amendment to require restaurants to include calorie counts.

Personal liberty: Students get to read about the ACA’s abortion coverage.

Criminal procedure: How you might be criminalized if you don’t purchase health care.

Federalism: How Obamacare is indicative of big government.

In the lesson on Roe v. Wade, the only quote from the Supreme Court decision included in the material is from the dissenting opinion about the value of life. BRI has videos instructing teachers how to teach the Second Amendment. It selectively plucks excerpts from the Constitution to teach lessons on the Defense of Marriage Act and Affirmative Action, not to mention the very special lesson on the late, great Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

But it is BRI’s view of slavery and discrimination that is most troubling. A homework help video titled “Slavery and the Road to the Civil War” was so inaccurate, it was removed from the organization’s website. To be fair, not all of the lessons are as blatant as the one that describes the raid on Harpers Ferry this way: “John Brown deceived himself through self-righteousness, thinking he could end slavery in the United States by freeing and arming slaves to launch a racial war in the South.”

An extended tutorial on “Slavery and theConstitution” spends a lot of time explaining why the Founding Fathers shouldn’t be considered racists, arguing that the founders knew slavery was wrong, but they just weren’t “active enough.”

The document even contends that Jefferson included blacks in the Constitution, and cherry-picks parts of historical documents to prove that the founders “consistently worked to build a constitutional republic of liberty that equally protected the rights of all Americans.”

When students are finished with the lesson, they will have learned absolutely nothing about the inhumane torture of slavery. The chapter neglects to offer any details about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the abolitionist movement or the plantation system. The economic impact of slavery and how it made the U.S. an economic superpower is completely ignored by BRI’s instruction.

You might think I’m joking here, but in the 3,000-plus words on the civil rights movement, there are only four black people mentioned in the chapter: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall. BRI mostly explains how freedom-loving Caucasians fought for equality for all by putting their lives and careers on the line:

As a result of the Brown decision, many white politicians and ordinary citizens engaged in what they called “massive resistance” to oppose desegregation. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to use the state National Guard to protect black children at Little Rock High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to compel local desegregation and protect the nine black students while federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to block Faubus. The Little Rock Nine attended school under the watchful eye of federal troops. The principles of equality and constitutional federalism came into conflict during this incident because the national government used the military to impose integration at the local level.

Nothing about fire hoses. Nothing about Freedom Riders. Nothing about lynching. Nothing about bombings, beatings and church burnings. But notice the shoutout to small-government principles clashing with freedom for black people.

Again, these lessons are reaching millions of children across America. Most schools and teachers are willing to take any free educational resource that allows them to stretch their meager budgets. Furthermore, most school districts don’t have the time or the manpower to closely examine every single teacher’s lesson plan.

BRI also hosts educational seminars for teachers all over the country, instructing them how to teach history and civics. The instructional seminars can even go toward continuing education credits required in some states. Even the online lesson plans are tailored to the education standards for each state.

Combine those facts with two billionaire brothers and unlimited resources, and you get a secret brainwashing program permeating the education system. BRI funding is steadily growing, its reach is widening and American schools are increasingly underfunded—a dangerous mix that ends up in the Koch brothers’ favor.

And here’s the worst part: Even if parents examine their children’s lessons, they might not know the source of the information because the institute is geared toward teachers, not students. Even teachers whose lessons are compiled by a conservative principal or a right-leaning department head might not be aware of the content or from where the lessons originated.

To be fair, it is important for students to learn about the free market. How else would they discover that money actually can buy everything …

Including history.

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https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/koch-brothers-want-students-learn-slavery/

adam g -- 2018

given that the billionaire Charles Koch has poured millions of dollars into eliminating the minimum wage and paid sick leave for workers, and that in 2015 he had the gall to compare his ultra-conservative mission to the anti-slavery movement, he’s probably the last person you’d want educating young people about slavery.

Yet the history-teaching wing of the Koch brothers empire is seeking to promote an alternate narrative to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The political goal of these materials is to ensure students see racism and slavery as flaws in an otherwise spotless U.S. record, rather than woven into the fabric of our country from its inception.

The Bill of Rights Institute (BRI) is the education arm of the network of front groups the Koch brothers use to promote their far-right ideology. Maureen Costello, the education director from Teaching Tolerance, has pointed out the:{many factual inaccuracies in the “Homework Help” video the BRI has recently promoted to teach students about slavery. She concludes that the history presented is “superficial, drained of humanity, and neglects to reckon with the economic and social reality of what opponents called ‘the slave power.’”}:

A dive into their “Documents of Freedom” readings reveals an even more disturbing agenda. The BRI bills the “Documents of Freedom” as a “modern take on the traditional textbook” — a “completely free digital course on history, government, and economics” authored by unnamed “teachers.” It’s essentially an online textbook that aims to promote a particular version of history, government, and economics that aligns with the interests of the Kochs.

The main “Documents of Freedom” reading on slavery, titled “Slavery and the Constitution,” is essentially a defense of the founding fathers and the Constitution against “some scholars” who “portray the founding fathers as racists.” The reading cherry-picks quotes from “the Founders” to argue that they believed slavery was morally wrong. Although the authors write that “most of the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution own[ed] slaves,” they steer clear of the brutal reality of chattel slavery.

They paint Thomas Jefferson as an anti-slavery crusader who “attacked the slave trade in harsh language” and “included African Americans in the universal understanding of the promise of liberty and equality.” But the Kochs’ curriculum fails to mention that Jefferson wrote Black people were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Jefferson kept nearly 200 people in bondage, and even in his death emancipated only five. He regularly sold human beings away from their families to raise money to buy wine, art, and luxuries that only wealthy planters could afford. Nothing in the BRI reading acknowledges any contradiction between “the Founders’” awareness of “the immorality of slavery and the need for action” and their actual actions defending and protecting slavery.

Furthermore, the reading justifies the so-called three-fifths compromise — whereby an enslaved person was counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional representation — by arguing “the Founders” had to make a “prudential compromise with slavery because they sought to achieve their highest goal of a stronger Union of republican self-government. Since some slaveholding delegations threatened to walk out . . .” Not only is this type of “compromise” immoral, but the problem with this logic is that the “slaveholding delegations” that threatened to walk out were themselves “Founders” who played an important role in crafting the Constitution.

In addition to selectively quoting the founders, the authors use quotations from Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to bolster their argument that the Constitution was an anti-slavery document. It ignores that most politicians, including Lincoln, believed that the Constitution protected slavery where it existed. It also ignores the very large wing of the abolitionist movement, whose most prominent figure was William Lloyd Garrison, that viewed the Constitution as a “devil’s pact,” one “dripping with blood.” Douglass himself was part of that wing of the movement until he broke with Garrison in the 1850s, when he became convinced that framing the Constitution as an anti-slavery document could be a useful tool in the struggle to end slavery.

The reading also ignores how central slavery was to the economic growth of the United States, with phrases like “the number of slaves steadily grew through natural increase.” Natural? There was nothing natural about the expansion of slavery. Slavery expanded because it was profitable. The authors seek to divorce the expansion of slavery from the economic design of the capitalist cotton empire and from the horrific practice of breeding, which became a large source of revenue, especially for Virginia slaveholders.

What is most egregious is what the reading leaves out. Even today’s corporate textbooks will include a paragraph or two that attempt to provide the perspective of enslaved people. However, this reading concludes by arguing there was a steady “rise of freedom” after the Constitution because “the new nation was mostly bent on expanding liberty and equality.” The only way the Koch brothers’ Bill of Rights Institute can draw this conclusion is by completely ignoring the perspective of those whose land and labor were violently stolen by the wealthy U.S. elite.

As if that reading wasn’t bad enough, the follow-up reading, titled “Civil War and Reconstruction,” is a long, boring account that almost exclusively focuses on the battles between Radical Republicans in Congress, who the authors claim wanted to “punish the South,” and Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, who favored more “moderate” reconstruction plans. It might be the first reading I’ve ever looked at on Reconstruction that makes almost no mention of what Black people were doing during the era and barely discusses anything happening in the South.

Only in a pro-KKK film like *Birth of a Nation* and in the Koch brothers’ curriculum is Reconstruction reduced to a punishment for white Southerners. Let’s look at Reconstruction from the standpoint of those who were freed from more than 200 years of enslavement. It was a time when the formerly enslaved became congressmen; when the Black-majority South Carolina legislature taxed the rich to pay for public schools; when experiments in Black self-rule in the Georgia Sea Islands led to land reform, new schools, and a vital local governance. During Reconstruction Blacks and poor whites organized Union Leagues, and led strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and educational campaigns. During this period other social movements, especially labor and feminist movements, were inspired by the actions of African Americans to secure and define their own freedom.....

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headhunter:

Leaders placed by Talent Market in right-wing think tanks include Lawson Bader as President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (now President and CEO of DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund); David Bobb, President of the Bill of Rights Institute; David Keating, President of the Center for Competitive Politics; Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity; and John Tsarpalas, President of the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

:{Bill of Rights Institute: $4,353,694:{}:

Launched by Charles Koch in 1999, this educational nonprofit aims to "educate young people about the words and ideas of America’s Founders, the liberties guaranteed in our Founding documents, and how our Founding principles continue to affect and shape a free society." The website includes games like "Are They Watching You?" ("Play this interactive game and see if you can find all the ways someone is watching you. Is it the government? Does it matter if you freely choose to be watched?")

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:{:{AlterNet [1] / *By Zaid Jilani}:

How the Koch Brothers Are Trying to Brainwash America's Kids

:{*:{December 9, 2014}:

You've heard a lot about how the Koch brothers spend big in our elections. Indeed, in 2014, the network of Koch groups spent $100 million [3], making them the largest juggernaut of the election.

But in addition to direct spending to impact elections, the Kochs are waging an ideological war for the minds of Americans, hoping to convince them of the merits of far-right-wing ideology. In North Carolina, that war is now being waged for the youngest recruits: children.

Rewriting North Carolina's Curriculum, Koch-Style

The Kochs have come under intense scrutiny in recent years as their names have become synonymous with far-right, pro-corporate ideology. One way to get around this brand problem is to finance front groups that allow the Kochs to promote their worldview while the oil billionaires themselves remain in the background.

One prominent example is the Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute, which the Kochs finance [4]. BRI promotes itself chiefly as a civic-minded organization offering basic education about America's founding principles; its mission statement [5] says it simply seeks to “educate young people about the words and ideas of America’s Founders, the liberties guaranteed in our Founding documents, and how our Founding principles continue to affect and shape a free society.”

Perhaps it was just such an innocuous introduction to the organization that convinced the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to grant [4] BRI a $100,000 contract to help it develop a new civics curriculum for its students. Yet as Media Matters' Daniel Angster points out [6], there's a deeper right-wing scheme at work here. In 2011, the state's legislature passed the “Founding Principles Act,” which was a bill from the corporate front group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which also happens to be funded by the Kochs [7]. BRI's board of directors includes [6] a senior vice president at Koch Industries, Mark Humphrey. Also on the board are Ryan Stoweres, who works at the Charles G, Koch Charitable Foundation, Rob Testwuide of the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research, and Todd Zywicki of the Koch-backed Mercatus Center.

BRI is, as Angster notes, also financed by Art Pope, North Carolina's resident billionaire conservative. So why are the Kochs and other right-wing billionaires financing BRI? What does it have to offer?

Teaching Kids Civics Means Being Conservative

In 2013, IndyWeek's Billy Ball dug [8] into some of the educational materials promoted by BRI. What he found was that the organization was promoting a far-right agenda masked as nonpartisan civics education. One of its lesson plans encourages students to question whether the 2010 Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Another lesson plan took aim at gun control, reading, “Some regulations have been criticized as criminalizing the behavior of millions of law-abiding Americans because of the criminal acts of others. Should laws be based on harm/intended harm, or also on the potential to do harm?”

Online, the institute has published a series of YouTube videos explaining core American concepts. [9], on representative government, sounds like a litany of conservative talking points. “Though many refer to the United States as a democracy, this is not accurate. The United States is not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic,” it lectures. “A constitutional republic would be a republican bounded government, a limited government,” one of the featured academics then says.

In its online “Americapedia,” the institute labels [10] “industry” as a civic value, quoting James Madison that “private industry...is the basis of public happiness.” Under the section on paying taxes [11], Americapedia warns that the Founding Fathers believed “the power of taxation was prone to abuse,” in an entry replete with quotations about not taking too much from the citizenry.

Ignoring The Story

Media Matters' Angster cataloged this week [6] how most North Carolina newspapers have ignored the story of the BRI contract altogether. Only one of the four major newspapers in the state wrote an original report linking the Kochs to BRI and the civics education overhaul. "It’s not allowing teachers to be professionals. I would love to look at the lesson plans, but I would not want that to be dictated,” said Paige Meszaros, a Raleigh teacher, to the paper [12].

Perhaps that reaction is exactly what the Kochs fear happening. When a Denver-area school board earlier this year moved to install a right-wing history curriculum, students revolted [13], forcing them to abandon the plans. North Carolina has been the site of intense protests [14] led by the Moral Monday movement, which seeks to throw off the far-right's hold on the state. If news of the Koch takeover of civics education spreads, those protests could soon turn to the educational system.

*See more stories tagged with:

education [16],

koch brothers [17],

funding [18],

schools [19]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-koch-brothers-are-trying-brainwash-americas-kids

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/zaid-jilani-0

[3] http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-koch-network-spent-100-million-this-election-cycle-20141104

[4] http://www.wwaytv3.com/2014/12/04/nc-might-encourage-history-material-funded-koch-brothers

[5] http://billofrightsinstitute.org/about-us/

[6] http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/12/08/north-carolina-newspapers-mostly-silent-as-alec/201793

[7] http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/alec-exposed-koch-connection

[8] http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/us-history-according-to-charles-koch-the-conservative-billionaire-could-be-teaching-your-kids/Content?oid=3344870

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVD0bZ5H4MY

[10] http://billofrightsinstitute.org/resources/educator-resources/americapedia/civic-values/industry/

[11] http://billofrightsinstitute.org/resources/educator-resources/americapedia/civic-values/paying-taxes/

[12] http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/03/4374397/state-education-department-used.html

[13] http://www.alternet.org/education/hundreds-high-schoolers-walk-out-protest-conservative-takeover-history-standards

[14] http://www.thenation.com/article/180491/how-moral-mondays-fusion-coalition-taking-north-carolina-back

[15] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on How the Koch Brothers Are Trying to Brainwash America's Kids

[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/education-0

[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/koch-brothers-0

[18] http://www.alternet.org/tags/funding

[19] http://www.alternet.org/tags/schools

[20] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B