MAGA's cynical, morally corrupt rewrite of social science and history

When MAGA is in charge, social science and history just ain't what they used to be. An Inside Higher Ed article, Florida Introduces ‘Sanitized’ Sociology Textbook, makes clear a false history that MAGA elites want to con everyone into false beliefs about human history. 

Florida MAGA officials rewrote an introductory sociology textbook for public universities. MAGA's version of sociology is packaged on a drastically shortened, “sanitized” textbook that strips out core sociological content. Information about race, gender, sexuality, inequality and systemic power are mostly gone. For the course to retain “general education” status  in the Florida university system, this MAGA propaganda has to be used as the primary textbook. 

The new MAGA-approved textbook is a heavily edited version of an open-source Introduction to Sociology 3e. It is cut from 669 pages to 267 pages. Entire chapters on media and technology, global inequality, race and ethnicity, social stratification, and gender, sex and sexuality simply vanished. A section on government-led genocide of Native Americans was removed. Use of the term “transgender” drops from 68 uses to one, and “racism” from 115 uses to six. All discussion of systemic or structural racism, which faculty describe as a core concept of the field, is deleted in its entirety.  

Legal impetus for MAGA's perversion of history and sociology comes Florida’s 2023 Senate Bill 266. That law bans general-education courses from teaching “identity politics,” “distorting” historical events, or using theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in U.S. institutions. State MAGA politicians have cynically attacked sociology as ideologically “hijacked,” “mushy,” and lacking the kind of academic rigor they falsely claim to want. This is just part of MAGA's broader attempt to hide, deny or delegitimize inconvenient sociology and history.