Once again, the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party that has overtaken the Tennessee statehouse is exerting its political influence over the state’s public education system.
Already, this corrosive force, since entrenching itself in power with Gov. Bill Lee as its leader, has instituted statewide school vouchers. These so-called “scholarships” are subsidies for relatively wealthy, often white, families — revealing the segregationist aims of what is a white nationalist movement.
While vouchers do service, in theory, non-Christian private academies, in practice, just a small fraction of the vouchers go to such schools. Even still, as Hamilton County GOP Chair Gail Greene let slip last summer when she expressed concern over tax dollars going to “Islamic education,” this minimal funding for those of different faiths has some of the Christian nationalist fringe in a tailspin.
Beyond private schooling, the GOP supermajority in the statehouse has also partnered with Turning Point USA, co-founded and headed by right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk until he was assassinated last year, to establish chapters of the organization’s Club America on each public high school campus in Tennessee.
Demonstrating the right’s hypocrisy in accusing the left of brainwashing schoolchildren, this partnership is itself an obvious attempt to manipulate the political persuasions of young people.