In the late 1990s, this writer took a position teaching history, government, and economics in a New York City public high school. After only two weeks, word circulated that I was a born-again evangelical and politically conservative. One of the senior teachers called me aside and, without any prior argument, said, “Communism is over in the Soviet Union, but it’s alive and well at this high school.” Shortly after that “welcome,” it became apparent that many of the U.S. history teachers were hardcore communists. (This is decades before so-called “wokism.”)
Howard Zinn’s best-selling communist textbook was not included on the list of high school textbooks because it was a college textbook, but nevertheless, this cell of commies would regularly copy pages out of Zinn’s book, A Peoples’ History of the United States, for distribution to the U.S. History students.
The commie hostility toward people of faith was also manifested in that department. The thought that people of faith and people who don’t believe can co-exist is alien to Marxists, for whom “religion is the opiate of the people.” The left feels threatened by the First Amendment, which leftists believe unduly encourages people to believe in God and thereby takes away from a more realistic assessment of life where one is able to see the class struggle as our top social and political priority. On one occasion, a young female teacher began moving around in front of me in the teachers’ office, taunting me by singing, “I don’t have a soul, I don’t have a soul.” Another older left-winger called to me from across the teachers’ office, “Tell me Mr. Ludwig, is God a he or a she?”
