I apologize for messaging you a second time today! Some of our readers were having difficulties with the link to register for our upcoming town hall. I am resending today’s email (below) with an updated link. Hope to see you there!

On Tuesday, I spent 14 hours working as an election official in my local fire hall, a fitting place to watch one’s last glimmer of hope go up in flames. This was not the first election I’ve worked in my rural community, but it was the first time I’ve seen us amass such a sizable stack of new voter registrations.

I don’t know how each of these first-timers voted. There were some clues: a hat here, a party declaration there. Now, a few days out, my suspicions have been confirmed: Gen Z — especially but not only men — shifted rightward. Almost the entire nation did, but anecdotally and empirically, the shift among young folks was particularly stark. Exit polls found first-time voters preferred Trump 40 points more than they did just four years ago.

There was also the usual contingent of disenfranchised, disillusioned, or disinterested young people who opted out altogether. Many cited grave concerns about the fate of Palestinians. Others expressed ambivalence or apathy. One young man said, if he absolutely had to choose, “Which one is Trump? I’d probably vote for that one.” And another, “Honestly, it really doesn’t affect me.”

Alas, it really, really does. And with Christian nationalist politicians poised to take control of the White House, the Senate, and, potentially, the House, I’m extremely worried the kids are not alright — especially those who aren’t yet old enough to vote (or choose to opt out), the ones for whom K-12 is not a recent memory but a material reality.

An early analysis from The New York Times identified a rightward shift in more than 90% of counties.

On Thursday, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a new memo and the latest signal he’s positioning himself to head the Department of Education (that is, until he eliminates it). “Working with President Trump,” Walters wrote, “I will do everything I can to limit the federal overreach into education and return parents their rightful authority over our schools.”

We needn’t guess what havoc a Secretary of Education Walters might wreak. As Christian nationalists are wont to do, he wrote it down. And like Betsy DeVos before him, his enmity toward secular public education has been clear for a long time. By comparison, though, DeVos now appears somewhat constrained, by basic decorum and her fixation on privatization.

Walters is constrained by nothing. He’s a Christian nationalist, through and through. He doesn’t bother concealing the real intention of school privatization as DeVos did. He’s an unabashed revisionist. For him, propaganda is curricula. And he will not hesitate to use government resources to procure and disseminate it. If you don’t like it, you’re not American enough. He is, in a single word, dangerous.

It’s a tired but true refrain that public schools are the backbone and beating heart of our democracy. We demand a lot of them. We rely on a skilled workforce and an informed electorate. We ask teachers to impart social-emotional skills because they’re necessary in a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic society.

What Walters proposes instead are segregation and assimilation academies filled with more preachers than teachers. Their priority is to produce “America First” patriots; not graduates who can read and write and think critically; not citizens who can identify bias, misinformation, and junk science; and certainly not freethinking voters who might pick “the other one.”

As a general rule, we election workers are excited by high voter turnout, particularly among young people and new voters. Democracy in action! I think it’s fair to feel apprehensive, though, about the future of that democracy given the now-imminent fate of our education system.

Even as voters in three states rejected the use of public dollars for private schools (as they have in every election), they also elected pro-privatization politicians who will likely — and now easily — pass a national voucher bill called the Educational Choice for Children Act that would divert up to $20 billion tax dollars to non-public, mostly religious, schools.

And much to Walters’s delight, a privatization friendly Supreme Court will soon have the opportunity to overturn an Oklahoma court decision that denied funding to a Catholic charter school. Doing so would pave the way for the nation’s first (but definitely not last) publicly funded religious school. The petitioners’ claim of “religious hostility” echoes the incoming administration’s promise to establish a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and “protect Christians in our schools.” No such declaration to safeguard any other religious or nonreligious group has been made.

We can expect to see the same Christian-privileging policies we’ve seen play out in state legislatures in recent years arrive and thrive at the federal level. Everything from school chaplain legislation, “parental rights” laws, book bans, religious display mandates, released time for religious instruction, Bibles in classrooms, and more. Taxpayers will not only be funding private, religious schools against our will but also an increasingly Christianized public system.

We must face facts: For millions of Americans, the moral panic manufactured by Walters and others about DEI, CRT, and LGBTQ people worked. That they largely cannot define these acronyms only makes them scarier. If we’re going to save public education, we need to educate the public. That means we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and we’re going to need your help to do it.

American Atheists is hosting a virtual town hall on Tuesday to talk about what we’ve got planned, and I hope to see you there. In the meantime, make sure you’re signed up to receive Action Alerts. And please consider setting up a recurring contribution of $10/month, starting today. It’s not enough for us to simply continue our work — we have to build capacity and grow our movement across the nation to prepare ourselves for the torrent to come.

In solidarity,

Melina Cohen
Communications Director

American Atheists is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, nonprofit educational organization that relies on the support of members like you. Contributions are tax-deductible. Our Federal Tax ID Number is 74-2466507 and our Combined Federal Campaign number is 52217.

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