The same professor and scholar who opposed same-sex marriage, called President Joe Biden’s presidential win a “literal coup,” and suggested a high school African American studies class replace the term “mass incarceration” with “high incarceration rates”—which he claims is “more judgementally neutral”—is now in charge of advising high school social studies curriculum in Texas. 

In Nov. 2020, Stephen Balch wrote an essay for the conservative outlet American Greatness, in which he called Biden’s win a coup and urged former failed President Donald Trump to “lead his followers into America’s streets and squares.” 

“President Trump and his allies have rightly taken their case into the courts. But more needs to be accomplished. … So damn the COVID, the president must now lead his followers into America’s streets and squares. They must especially flock to the capitol complexes of all the critical states and register indignant protest,” Balch wrote. 

Balch holds a doctorate in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and served as the director of Texas Tech University’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He founded the National Association of Scholars, a conservative education advocacy nonprofit, and, perhaps most importantly, is one of nine appointees who oversee content for the 2021-22 social studies curriculum standards.

In an essay he co-wrote in August, Balch railed against immigration and the border, claiming that the U.S.-Mexico border had “been thrown open by the Biden Administration.”

“This is not only a violation of the presidential oath to defend the Constitution and the laws enacted under it, but part and parcel of a larger project to transform our civic order through demographic change,” he wrote.

“We want experts who aren’t extremists,” Texas Freedom Network (TFN) political director Carisa Lopez told the Dallas News.

Balch reportedly recommended that students argue “for and against open border and immigration restriction policies.” He has also suggested removing courses on sociology and psychology in favor of a class titled “Genocide and Mass Murder,” which would “review the twentieth-century occurrence of these all-too-common crimes,” including the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide.

“The Texas State Board of Education does have a long history of politicizing curriculum standard revisions from social studies to science to health,” Lopez said. “But this year especially, we’ve seen such national rhetoric around these attempts to whitewash history. And I do think if we’re not careful, Texas will become a battleground.”

Balch, who also opposed same-sex marriage in 2015 as the Supreme Court overturned the ban, calls the opinion of TFN “pure defamation” and said the views he expressed were “similar to those expressed by many other commentators and public officials.”

The social studies overhaul comes on the heels of mounting pressure from Texas Republicans to scrutinize curriculum to avoid teaching what they’re misnaming as critical race theory (CRT) in classrooms. 

In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Education Agency to investigate pornography in schools. Soon after, the agency opened an investigation into Keller ISD over its library books, and in June, he signed House Bill 2497. The bill is designed to appeal to those who are terrified that critical race theory—which, again, no K-12 school district has ever taught—will teach white kids to hate themselves. It promotes the “patriotic education” of Texans.

Called “The 1836 Project,” the legislation will set up a commission to figure out what to write on pamphlets given to Texas constituents receiving their drivers’ licenses. 1836 marks the year that Texas received independence from Mexico. Of course, only certain Texans received “independence,” and the rest of those folks were Black and brown and Indigenous nations.

In December, Abbott successfully passed a law outlawing teaching CRT in classrooms. (Compliance is 100%, of course, because no K-12 school district in all of American history has made CRT part of the curriculum, just so we’re clear.)

The new law espouses that a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” But, of course, the law doesn’t define what a “controversial issue” and if the teacher  does discuss these topics, they must “explore that topic objectively and in a manner free from political bias.”

The new law also has the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project in its crosshairs, outlawing students from being required to read the 1619 Project essays and baring students from receiving credit for working as a volunteer with a political campaign or interning for companies or organizations where they will be lobbying. 

“All of this is really about routing out any acknowledgment of the salience of sex, race, gender and silencing those conversations, which, in the end, ultimately hurt students of color and students in the LGBTQ community,” Chloe Latham Sikes, deputy director of policy at the Intercultural Development Research Association told the Texas Tribune. 

All of this comes on the heels of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s anti-CRT snitch line, set up last week to give his conservative constituents the opportunity to rat out educators who have the nerve to teach actual American history in all of its dark, racist, and brutal past.