California has long been celebrated for its wackadoodles. Well, the lunatics are truly about to take over the asylum. The California Department of Education will vote next week to introduce a new state-wide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum as part of a campaign to decolonise America. This curriculum will help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression”.

California’s universities have succumbed to a pernicious viral infection of Marxist cultural thinking since the late 1960s; but now such thinking threatens to infect the state’s 10,000 public schools.

One slight problem is that these Aztec gods required human sacrifices from their devotees

The new curriculum was inspired by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose most famous work was Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). “Critical pedagogy”, Freire argued, is the best way to help the oppressed develop “critical consciousness”, and thereby cast off the “culture of silence” imposed on them by their oppressors. Once a fervent advocate of extending literacy to the Brazilian peasantry, Freire claimed to be a Christian socialist, but drew upon Marxist thinkers as well as anti-colonialist radicals such as Frantz Fanon. Needless to say, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; he also had a profound influence on American teacher-training programmes.

The original co-chair of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Advisory Committee is one R. Tolteka Cuauhtin: a teacher at the César Chavez Learning Academies, which is a public high school in the San Fernando Valley. In his 2019 book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, Cuauhtin states that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe”.

White invaders brought capitalist hegemony and subjected minorities to “socialisation, domestication, and ‘zombification’”. They also committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes and established a regime that entailed “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity”. The appropriate response is to create an ethnic studies curriculum that will promote a new culture of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony” to displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity”.

The proposed curriculum offers “lesson resources” for teachers to lead schoolchildren in a series of indigenous songs and chants, such as the “In Lak Ech Affirmation”, which starts with clapping, followed by a declaration that “you are my other me” and “if I do harm to you, I do harm to myself”, and an appeal to the god Tezkatlipoka: “Seeking the roots of the truth, seeking the truth of the roots, elders and us youth, (youth), critical thinking through. Tezkatlipoka, Tezkatlipoka, x2 smoking mirror, self-reflection Tezkatlipoka.”

Next, the schoolchildren invoke the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, asking for “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit”:

Pulsating creation Huitzilopochtli cause like sunlight, the light inside of us, in will to action’s what brings… Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, x2 transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.

The chant concludes with a request for “liberation, transformation, decolonization” and the words “Panche beh! Panche beh!” (seeking the roots of truth).

Of course, one slight problem is that these Aztec gods required human sacrifices from their devotees. Anyone who has seen Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto will remember the scene when the high priest plucks out the heart from a human sacrificial victim in the name of the very Aztec gods that the radical Left adore.

Another chant refers to the Mayan deity “Hunab Ku”, or “One-God”:

We’re here to transform the world we’re spiralling, rotating & revolving in, giving thanks daily, tlazokamati, giving thanks daily, tlazokamati, healing & transforming as we’re evolving in this universe, universe, of Hunab Ku, Hunab Ku, x2 Nahui Ollin Lak Ech – Panche Beh, Ethnic Studies For All, Represent!!

Despite the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which says that public schools are forbidden to lead students in Christian prayers at the behest of the republic, the California Department of Education is expected to vote in favour of this new curriculum with its appeals to pre-Christian deities.

“The best hope for opponents is to strike out some of the most galling material, such as the chants to the Aztec gods, and then devise a long-term strategy to push back against the public education establishment,” says conservative documentary filmmaker and commentator Christopher F. Rufo. “For now, the activists appear to be driving the narrative – and they will not stop until they have solidified their ‘counterhegemony’.”

This must be confusing for California’s oppressed Hispanic population, most of whom are Catholic.

Anyone wondering what future California public school assemblies might look like should watch this video.