I’m certain that garden-variety illegal fraud, combined with the legal fraud of ballot harvesting and mail-in voting, went a long way to explain how Americans suffering terribly in a bad economy did not deliver a wipeout to the Dems in the 2022 midterms. I also reserve a great deal of blame for the GOP, which is trying hard to drive MAGA from its ranks and is willing to lose to do so. But one cannot get past the fact that the American population, after 60 years of leftist education, may be incapable of connecting cause and effect. That brainwashing is everywhere, including ostensibly non-fiction educational material for the 8-12-year-old set.

A friend of mine tutors people in reading and one of the books a student brought her was What is Congress?, a non-fiction book published in 2021 that promises to provide “an enthralling overview about the branch of our government closest to average Americans.” The book is marketed to the 8-12-year-old set and seems to do well. According to “best sellers” information on the book’s Amazon page, it’s “#9 in Children’s Government Books; #28 in Children’s Books on the U.S.; [and] #64 in Children’s American History.” It garnered four-and-a-half stars from those readers who reviewed it.

But is it teaching American political history as you and I remember it? Well, certainly not as I remember it. I learned about Congress in an admittedly rather dry fashion. Using the Constitution as the starting point, I was taught that it’s part of the tripartite American government, set up to maintain a system of checks and balances: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. I learned about the two bodies in Congress (House and Senate), how their members are elected, and how they work together to create legislation.

Image by Andrea Widburg using a public domain photo of Jill Abramson and a photo of the Capitol dome by Joshua Sukoff (Unsplash license).

What is Congress? takes a different approach. Instead of being a civics book, it’s a hardcore political tract. The author is Jill Abramson, the former executive editor at The New York Times. That’s why, in addition to explaining what Congress does, the publisher’s blurb promises that “this book is peppered with fascinating stories, including the bloody beating in the Senate of a lawmaker in pre-Civil War days, the Watergate hearings, and Senator Joe McCarthy's shameful ‘witch hunt’ of Communists.”

Still, those are somewhat leftist-oriented, but they’re still ordinary educational tropes at this point. Any parent or librarian looking for a book for young political junkies, even if that person is not a leftist, could reasonably believe that Abramson is a good writer who knows her stuff. Her “fascinating stories” should engage children a lot more than the boring civics material earlier generations studied. The extended excerpt supports this belief, for it talks about the famous moment in 1856 when Andrew Butler beat Charles Sumner in the Senate after Sumner cruelly imitated Butler’s post-stroke affect; the decisions behind Congress’s creation; and the beautiful Capitol building.

What parents and educators won’t know is that the book is an open pro-Democrat, anti-Republican diatribe. Below is an image from a single page in the book which writes in easy-to-understand words the entire Trump impeachment and January 6 narrative right down to the lie that a police officer was beaten to death—even though it was known long before this book was published that Officer Sicknick was not beaten but died from a stroke. In other words, the content is pure Democrat-created narrative propaganda.

Image from What is Congress? Reprinted here for purposes of criticism and news reporting under the fair use doctrine.

If this is what American kids are reading—and is representative of what they’ve been reading over the last 20 years—it’s no surprise that young voters saved the Democrats from getting drowned in a red wave during the mid-term election. Essentially, thanks to leftist control over what young people learn both in school and out of it, we’re watching devolution, as Americans progressively get dumber.

Hat tip: Mara Jacobowitz