by Francis P. Sempa

Florida’s middle and high schools are expanding instruction on communism for students in grades 6 through 12. Last November, Florida’s Board of Education approved new History of Communism standards to be implemented during the 2026-2027 school year.

In 2024, the Florida legislature passed, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law, measures requiring schools to teach about the "evils and dangers of Communism." DeSantis started this process back in 2021. One goal of the law and new standards is to prepare middle school and high school students to "withstand indoctrination on Communism at colleges and universities." Every state in the country should follow Florida’s lead, despite those on the left who characterize Florida’s move as a "dangerous recasting of McCarthyism" and designed to teach students "what to think, rather than how to think."

A history professor at UCLA said: "If I were a teacher, I would feel really scared by this" — apparently teachers should be scared to tell the truth about communism. A retired Yeshiva University history professor expressed concern that the curriculum would downplay or ignore "McCarthyism," which she described as "the longest lasting and most widespread episode of political repression within the United States," ignoring the extent of communist infiltration of our government and society that even McCarthy underestimated.

A history professor at the University of Central Florida claimed that the new standards are a "rewriting" of history. The daughter of blacklisted communist Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo criticized the legislation last year as an effort to downplay the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s.

These are examples of a phenomenon known as "anti-anti-communism," which portrays anti-communists as greater threats to liberty than communists. For this group, Joe McCarthy was a greater threat to America than those domestic communists who worked on behalf of Josef Stalin.

Florida’s anti-communist curriculum is expanding just as increasing numbers of young Americans are viewing socialism favorably — a development at least partly due to their ignorance of the history of socialism in power. And that ignorance is a manifestation of the failure of our educational system.

If our educational system was working better, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would be a household name in every town and city in America; Stalin’s terror famine of the early 1930s (known as Holodomor), the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, and Mao Zedong’s terror famine of the late 1950s-early 1960s (known as the Great Leap Forward) would be as well known as the Nazi Holocaust; students would know that when Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917 he told his comrades that they would now be constructing the "socialist order," and would also know that the Second World War in Europe was started by Hitler and Stalin; the Black Book of Communism and Whittaker Chambers’ Witness would be on bookshelves throughout the country; the Venona Papers would be more widely known than the Hollywood 10; the Victims of Communism Museum would be visited more than the Smithsonian Museum in Washington; and Marxism would have the same evil connotations as Fascism.


The left has used, and continues to use, "McCarthyism" as a verbal weapon to smear anti-communists as the real threat to American liberty. Governor DeSantis, the Florida legislature, and the State Board of Education know better. They have institutionalized anti-communism as part of the state’s educational curriculum. They are not, as some on the left allege, teaching students what to think. Instead, they are teaching the truth about communism in power — an ideology responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million souls in the 20th century, and which in the 21st century guides the rulers of China who today pose the greatest threat to America’s national security.