On May 26, the U.S. Department of Education, in association with the Labor Department, officially announced a new partnership to promote “patriotic education.” It was something we’ve known was coming since January 29 of last year when President Trump announced he was going to “end radical indoctrination in public schools,” but what wasn’t clear was when this was going to happen.
And it turns out the exact time to do this was as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary. According to Jack Roberts at Campus Reform, ten grants will be awarded, totaling around $20 million, to nonprofits, private businesses, and public institutions. The awards are meant to be for recipients that “demonstrate the ability to “improve the quality of American history, civics and government.””
But what, according to the Trump administration, does that mean? It could mean the “History Rocks” program of religious civics curriculum for kids, which McMahon has been traveling the country to promote that is associated with the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College. It could also be the America 250 Initiative, a “coalition” that partakes in “nationwide programs including state tours, lectures, student competitions, and teacher summits [to] celebrate our nation’s rich history, inspire citizens of all ages to reflect on America’s story, deepen understanding of civic responsibility, and reinforce the shared values that unite us as one nation.”
That organization, by the way, is associated with Moms for Liberty.
But the truth is: patriotic education is whatever McMahon and Trump want it to mean.
”Under the previous Administration, schools were encouraged to prioritize anti-American, race- and gender-based ideologies in the classroom, rather than to equip students with a comprehensive and honest understanding of American history and founding principles,” the statement from the Education Department says.
You might remember a little thing called Project 2025, a 900-page federal policy blueprint created by the “fine” folks at The Heritage Foundation, which sought to reshape the government into a much more conservative image, all while expanding the power of the presidency and turning back the clocks on any progress made in the United States in the last 100 years or so. This is bar for bar a part of that plan, and you don’t even need to dive deep to find the first reference to this on page 8 of the text:
“Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”
What does this mean to Linda McMahon, the Trump Administration, and the Heritage Foundation? McMahon herself told Fox News that, “…too many schools have moved away from teaching the basics of what it means to be an American. From understanding the Constitution to showing respect for the nation’s symbols… we don’t teach love of country. We don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. We are not creating that same sense of patriotism.”
The Pledge of Allegiance is something we treat like a timeless school tradition, as if it was there at the start of America, it’s here in present day America, and it will be there long after we’re dead and gone at the end of America. Yet the Pledge was only recited publicly for the first time publicly on October 21, 1892:
“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.”
Was the Pledge of Allegiance also a push from a “Patriotic Education” initiative? Did the 1890s equivalent of Linda McMahon (which I guess would be - I don’t know - Nancy Fish, the second wife of P.T. Barnum???) decide that we needed to be more patriotic as industrialization expanded and Ellis Island opened to immigrants for the first time? The answer to all of those things…
Is no.
Depending on who you ask, The Pledge of Allegiance was either written by Captain George Thatcher Balch, a Union army officer in the Civil War who later wrote a book on how to teach patriotism to children in public schools, or former Baptist preacher Francis Bellamy, who reportedly revised Balch’s quote into the Pledge in two hours for the magazine the Youth’s Companion as an oath. Why? Because it was a marketing gimmick.
As Amy Crawford at Smithsonian Magazine summarized it, “the Companion offered U.S. flags to readers who sold subscriptions, and now, with the looming 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World, the magazine planned to raise the Stars and Stripes “over every Public School from the Atlantic to the Pacific” and salute it with an oath.”
(by the way, I think we’re better off crediting Bellamy than Balch, since Balch’s was simply “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!” Not quite as catchy.)
The Pledge, as created by Bellamy, likely would have stayed a curio in a magazine if it weren’t for the timing of its release; as Boston Review points out, native-born Americans were VERY anxious with the arrival of immigrants, as “more than 2.7 million immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1870s, followed by over 5.2 million in the 1880s and another 14.5 million between 1900 and 1919. Bellamy channeled the alarm many felt when he told the NEA in 1892 that “Americanism brings a duty . . . it must be made a force strong enough to touch the immigrant population which is pouring over our country.” Naturally the use of his pledge in public schools was a key component, he contended, for the inculcation of loyalty to the United States.”
One thing would lead to another - the New York Manual of Patriotism would include the Pledge of Allegiance as a potential flag salute for students, the National Americanism Commission believed we needed a single standard flag code, which led to the shift in the pledge saying “the flag of the United States of America” rather than just “my flag” - but it wasn’t until 1942 when Congress passed the U.S. Flag Code, adopting Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance as an official pledge for students, and it wasn’t until 1954 that the decision to add “under God” to the pledge.
Quite a sixty year journey this marketing gimmick has gone on. We went from a quick rewrite of a veteran’s pledge for a flag contest to a “strongly requested” pledge of patriotism, with an added dose of religious nationalism for good measure! But there was one important step I skipped over: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, which was ruled on June 14, 1943.
This landmark case is actually why students are not REQUIRED to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school, despite the West Virginia State Board of Education making saluting the flag mandatory for all students and teachers in any school supported by public funds a year prior. But as Jane Metters LaBarbara for West Virginia University Libraries recounts, a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses (the Barnett family - the Supreme Court screwed their name up. Really.) felt that reciting the pledge went against their own beliefs. Father Walter told his daughters to “stand respectfully but to not participate in the salute or the pledge.”
This resulted in the girls being expelled.
“The Barnett family filed suit in the United States District Court for themselves and other Jehovah’s Witnesses in the area,” LaBarbara writes. “They won the case. In the two years since the Gobitis judgement [ed. note: a 1940 ruling that deemed the pledge and flag salute “secular practices], three justices who had supported the majority opinion had made it known they no longer agreed with their decision. Because of this, the District Court felt they did not have to accept the decision “as binding authority.” The State Board of Education then appealed. The appeal went to the Supreme Court. Justice Harlan Stone had been the lone dissenter in the Gobitis case. He was now the Chief Justice. The SCOTUS ruled 6 to 3 to overturn the decision.”
You might be asking right now: what does all of this have to do with Linda McMahon’s push for patriotic education?
Put simply: the implementation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the implementation of patriotic education within the United States are both based off of jingoistic fearmongering that strike into fears that Americans have about the “other.” In 1892, it was Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and Poles. In 2026, it’s Black history. Trans history. Gay and lesbian history. World history. And even the darker aspects of American history.
McMahon’s initiatives are America-focused, but the scale of what she’s whitewashing isn’t fully known yet. So we can look at other aspects of history that the Trump administration has worked tirelessly to remove from national parks sites. Earlier this month, lower courts granted the Trump administration permission to keep removing signs and exhibits about slavery and climate change across the country. Right when he took office in January 2025, LGBTQ and HIV resources were removed from the White House and other government websites. And one month after that, references to trans people were removed from the Stonewall Monument website - as well as the “T” in “LGBTQ.”
Access to education, a complete education, is a cornerstone of our democracy. Knowledge is enlightenment, and information is currency. The Pledge of Allegiance, for any value it may have in regards to helping Americans develop a love of country, is just a marketing gimmick that evolved into something bigger. Yet to people like Linda McMahon, the symbolism matters more than the truth behind its history.
“It was about belonging, responsibility, and an oath to America,” she tweeted.
And maybe it is. But if children are not granted access to a freedom of information, there is no belonging in an irresponsible nation we are effectively forced into reciting an oath to. The only way to “end radical indoctrination in public schools,” in fact, is to end Linda McMahon’s stewardship at the head of the Department of Education.