A new Florida law requires public schools to teach students in kindergarten through 12th grade “age-appropriate” and “developmentally appropriate” lessons on communism. The Florida Department of Education will develop lessons which, as The Miami Herald noted, will focus on the history of communism, the “increasing threat of communism in the United States” and the “atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism.”

A mandatory topic for the lessons, starting in the 2026-2027 school year, will be “[t]he increasing threat of communism in the United States and to our allies through the 20th century,” along with “the economic, industrial and political events that have preceded and anticipated communist revolutions.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill during a mid-April visit to the Hialeah Gardens Museum coinciding with the 63rd anniversary of the failed 1961 CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. “My view is we might as well give them the truth when they are in our schools because a lot of these universities will tell them how great communism is, so we are setting the proper foundation,” DeSantis said as he stood at a podium displaying a sign, “ANTICOMMUNST EDUCATION,” The Herald reported. “We are committed to telling the truth about this ideology and we are going to make sure that people have a very accurate understanding of the human carnage that has resulted from communist regimes throughout history.”

An Institute for Freedom in the Americas will be established at Miami Dade College, based at its Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, to “preserve the ideals of a free society and promote democracy in the Americas.” The institute will sponsor workshops, symposiums and conferences in partnership with Florida International University’s Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom. A history of communism museum is also proposed.

It will not be the first opportunity for Florida students to learn about communism. As USA Today Network noted, they “currently can receive lessons on communism in high-school social studies courses or in a seventh-grade civics and government course.” Also, a high-school government class required for graduation includes 45 minutes of instruction on “Victims of Communism Day” and covers communist regimes through history.

It should be a surprise that, according to USA Today Network, the bill had bipartisan legislative support, with only seven Democrats in the House and Senate opposed. But the legislation is obviously directed at the state’s Cuban American population, estimated at two million or around 70 percent of the total nationally. They have been decisive in elections and vote mostly Republican. Democrats who supported the bill evidently hoped to cut into that support.

So it is merely pandering because there is no chance that communists will take over the United States. A rightwing dictatorship is much more likely and that is what should be taught in schools. Membership in the Communist Party of the United States is estimated at around 5,000 – compared to 100,000 at a 1940s peak – while millions harbor anti-democratic sentiment, stoked by former President Donald Trump. If, as DeSantis said, universities will brainwash students on “how great communism is,” they are doing a bad.

It is no coincidence that, like several others which the Legislature passed and DeSantis signed, the anti-communism bill was apparently inspired by an outside source. Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts interviewed talk-show host Jesse Kelly on the topic on his radio show, focusing on Kelly’s book “The Anti-Communist Manifesto.” The introduction, according to the transcript, claims: “Hiding behind a veil of ‘progressivism,’ today’s communists have infiltrated many of the institutions that Americans cherish and use their newfound power to control and regulate the actions of everyday Americans.” Really?

In fact, this is just a return to U.S. Sen, Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” campaign against communists in the early 1950s by today’s Republican Party and Trump. The former president lumps communists with “Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country …” Florida lawmakers and the governor are, as usual, just falling in line.

DeSantis did not mention that there are only five communist-governed countries today — China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea — compared to the dozens during the existence of the Soviet Union. And while he talked about “the human carnage that has resulted from communist regimes throughout history,” communism as an ideology originated in 1848 with the publication of the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and the Soviet Union declared itself a “socialist state in 1922. There was a whole lot of history before that.

The anti-communist bill provides a stark contrast with how state policy deals with the more than 3.6 million African Americans who comprise nearly 16 percent of the population. The lawmakers and the governor have enacted laws that are downright unfriendly to them. They have limited discussion of race in schools and maintain that slavery was a skills-training program, even though it, too, produced “a human carnage.” They banned critical race theory (CRT) from classrooms – where it never existed. CRT is a highly technical academic argument, usually in law schools, which insists that racial discrimination is baked into the American system. DeSantis has claimed that it teaches children “to hate this country or to hate each other." Also barred are programs that seek to address that very racial inequality which he says does not exist. Those include diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and, in the case of businesses, environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives.

This, and more, has been happening partly because the Democratic Party, to which a majority of African Americans belong, seems unable to compete with Republicans. That failure has been worsened by Republican political sleight-of-hand and gerrymandering.

The result has been, as the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported last year, that while Republicans comprise 36 percent of voters, they are 71 percent of state lawmakers. More than 60 percent of the members of the Florida House of Representatives and 70 percent of the Senate are European Americans; African Americans are 18.3

percent and 17.5 percent, respectively. Few African Americans hold key executive positions; the notable exception is the surgeon-general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, whose claim to fame is his willingness to blindly support DeSantis, who appointed him, in rejecting health science.

This lack of representation has produced significant consequences for African Americans. The Florida Department of Health reported that, from 2018 to 2020, the death rate from heart disease for those aged 35 or older was 338 per 1,000 — 18.6 percent higher than the 285 for European Americans. The stroke death rate was 120 per 1,000, or 58 percent higher than that for European Americans, at 76. Infant mortality rate in 2007 was 13.36 and 5.18, per 1,000, respectively.

U.S. Census data put the average African American household income at $48,998 — 30 percent less than for European Americans. The National Association of Realtors reported that 49 percent of African Americans owned their homes, compared to 75 percent of European Americans. African American enrollment in public universities declined by 12.2 percent between 2010 and 2022; that could drop further because of the hostile environment which has been created.

But there is one area in which African Americans surpass European Americans. Though they are 17 percent of Florida’s population, they comprise more than 47 percent of state prisoners.

State lawmakers’ answer was to declare war on a non-existent communist threat, while ignoring the fact that Florida was a slave state, with the enslaved working on cotton and sugar plantations, and that European American terrorists destroyed entire African American communities. But no study or institute has been mandated to explore that history and its consequences. If African Americans hunger for such education, they can always turn to the churches, such as Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Melbourne which began offering Conscious Reality Teaching classes.

The Rev. L. Ronald Durham, pastor of the Volusia County Democratic Black Caucus, told Florida Today in November, “Unless the Legislature comes to its senses and realizes how much damage is being caused by their openly hostile bills targeting minorities and women, we are heading toward a society that has the potential to implode, causing untold psychological repercussions that will take years to overcome.”

Should that happen, of course it will be blamed on “communists.”