The Republican-controlled Texas legislature is freaking out that students are learning things. They are feverishly working to enact an end-of-session bill to put a stop to this. They’re also angry that students are doing things, and they’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen any more too. You might what some more specifics, and I ‘ll get to that. But it’s important to understand that Texas Republicans are trying to control what students can learn and what they can do.

For example, the Republican legislation bars students from learning about the New York Times’ 1619 Project because it focuses on slavery and suggests that slavery is bad. It also prevent students from getting credit or extra-credit for “participating in civic activities that include political activism or lobbying elected officials on a particular issue.”

The latter problem is part the Republicans’ nationwide obsession with the educational consequences of the George Floyd controversy.

Since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer last year, schools across the country have been overhauling their curriculums to address systemic racism and seek to make classrooms more equitable. Among other efforts, districts are instituting anti-bias training for teachers and requiring that history lessons include the experiences of marginalized groups.

Conservative politicians have pushed back on these attempts to talk about race more often. Critics say teachers are trying to “rewrite history” and should not consider race when interacting with students.

They particularly don’t want to see students petitioning their political representatives to do anything about issues like police violence against minorities or gun control.

Christopher Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute recently explained why these efforts have been branded as opposition to “Critical Race Theory.”

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”

Of course, this isn’t accurate. Critical Race Theory isn’t a collection of “various cultural insanities,” but actually a fairly fringe branch of historical interpretation. It’s doesn’t even equate to “woke” or “cancel” culture because it puts little emphasis on individual acts of racism or political incorrectness and instead focuses on endemic or embedded causes of racism.

But any discussion of race is being lumped under these terms, and now Republican legislatures are trying to codify this in law.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is a likely frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024, puts it like this: “Let me be clear, there’s no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”

This is really part of the more general freakout that white America is losing control of the historical narrative. In the most extreme examples, the Confederacy is being rehabilitated, but more common is just a refusal to allow discussion of why the Confederacy was bad. Discussing that or discussing the way Native Americans have been treated has the potential make white children feel guilty or less than 100 percent positive about the country’s history. The same is true about examining how blacks have suffered from housing discrimination or in the criminal justice system or in employment.

One thing it’s important to understand is that this stuff isn’t just about racists wanting to be shielded from criticism. It’s a message the Republicans believe will help them win elections. This is a political campaign, and it’s poll-tested and likely to be pretty effective. It works by making whites think of politics in racial terms. So, it’s pretty much exactly what they say they don’t like about woke/cancel/critical race theory culture.