Earlier today, conservative education activist Chris Rufo reported: “Following a lawsuit from parents, the State of California has permanently removed the ‘In Lak Ech Affirmation’ from the state curriculum, which would have forced students to chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice in order to become ‘warriors’ for ‘social justice.’”
Yes, in case you’ve forgotten (or were unaware in the first place): The state of California wanted to make kids sing ditties to Tezkatlipoka. For those who aren’t familiar with the Aztec deity, he’s the literal god of human sacrifice. Oh, and cannibalism. Just to give you a sense of what kind of culture the California Board of Education is revering, here’s Cameron Hilditch on the history of Aztec ritual human sacrifice:
The remains of more than 40 boys and girls were discovered at the excavation site of the great pyramid, most bearing the marks of severe and prolonged torture. This was to be expected given that the Aztec pictorial codices that have come down to us invariably show the children crying before being sacrificed. The priests of Tlaloc believed the tears of innocent children to be particularly pleasing to the god, and they took great care to ensure that their little victims were crying before and throughout the ceremony so that the smoke of the sacrificial fire would carry their tears up to the god above at the moment of death. The ritual began with the bones of the children being broken, their hands or their feet burned, and carvings etched into their flesh. They were then paraded before the celebrants of the ritual while crying. Insufficient tears from the children were believed to result in insufficient rains for the crops that year, so no brutality was spared. At the end of it all, the mutilated victims were burned alive.
All in the name of multicultural education, of course. Just think of the chants as the Aztec version of Christmas carols.
In fact, the changes to the California curriculum — made at the behest of a mandatory new ethnic-studies curriculum introduced by the state’s Board of Education last March — were actually far worse than incantations to cannibalistic deities, if you can believe it. NR covered it extensively. Beyond Hilditch’s piece on the issue, National Review‘s editors called it “a political catechism, clearly formulated for the purpose of indoctrinating children into the intersectional electoral priorities of the far Left.” And indeed, that’s exactly what it was:
White Christians are accused of having committed “theocide” against indigenous peoples, murdering their gods and replacing them with the god of the Bible. This, students are told, has led directly to “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” and to the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” In response, students are encouraged to establish for their generation a new social order characterized by “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will eventually allow for the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”
All this sounds like a figment of a right-wing media fever dream. But it isn’t. As the editors pointed out on the day the vote was taken, California’s new ethnic-studies curriculum is “probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world.”
Luckily, as Christopher Tremoglie reported in the Washington Examiner, “the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation earned a settlement with the California Department of Education and the State Board of Education last week that removes Aztec and Ashe affirmation prayers from an ethnic studies curriculum.” In the grand scheme of things, the legal victory to remove the Aztec chants is a relatively small win. The insane bureaucracy that rubber-stamped the plan will undoubtedly have more horrors in store for California’s parents. Nonetheless, it’s a good place to start.