By Shane Smith

Thanks to our great Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, along with conservative legislators and the many parental rights activists who have pressed the issue, we have made great strides in protecting Oklahoma’s students from the pornographic content that has quietly made its way into schools across the country.

Gender ideology activists, who are almost exclusively the pushers of this graphic content, are on the defensive in our state. They are throwing tantrums at the thought of someone standing in their way, prohibiting them from giving their students access to disgusting content that is also totally devoid of literary or educational value. Books like Gender Queer, This Book is Gay, and Beyond Magenta, if you were wondering. “Censorship!” they cry. But they never seem to name the books being censored – probably because they know that the public at large would collectively wretch upon viewing the perverse content, products of a sick mind, and throw their support to the so-called “censors.”

We normal adults understand the fundamental need to protect the innocence of children. Unfortunately, over the last few years, we’ve allowed a rainbow-adorned quasi-religion to infiltrate every aspect of our society. We naively believed that this group of people had no ill intentions. In the face of bright colors, rainbows, and flowery language, we dropped our guard, let them gain a foothold in our institutions. Now we’re stuck with the task of removing their degenerate, hyper-narcissistic ideology from our schools.

But while we’ve focused so much attention on this threat, we’ve completely dropped the ball on what to me seems to be an even greater threat to impressionable young minds: radical environmental activism. The extreme, Greta Thunberg-esque environmentalism has taken root in our school system more completely than gender ideology ever could, probably due to its ostensibly benign nature. We all want to take care of the environment, to protect our oceans and rainforests for the benefit of future generations. In this way the green religion weaponizes the compassion of young minds, emotionally tethering them to what amounts to a fundamentalist belief system before the full story can be presented to them regarding pollution, the climate, carbon dioxide, and the role they play in it.

The threat of radical environmentalism was made clear to me first-hand when my 4th grade daughter began talking about the dangers of carbon dioxide, “carbon footprint,” the terrible “fossil fuels,” the environmental hazards of incandescent lightbulbs, the beneficence of electric vehicles, et cetera. And after several years of “Earth Day” celebrations, I realized that this isn’t a benign concern for our planet that is being taught. This is something else entirely.

Most worryingly, she exhibited a general view that the world is heading towards an environmental apocalypse due to man-made climate change. This was an extremely disturbing revelation to me. Why are 8 year-olds being instilled with this level of anxiety over environmental concerns? These are concepts that young children cannot comprehend the complexity of. But they do understand fear, and death, and that is what this strain of environmentalism preaches. It’s a doomsday cult, and I realized immediately that it must be exorcized from the classroom before it creates an entire generation of young adults who have been guilted through emotional sabotage into supporting every new radical environmentalist agenda.

To begin nipping this school-induced enviro-anxiety in the bud, I explained to her that our planet is, in fact, becoming greener. She was dumbstruck by this. I argued that carbon dioxide is the yin to oxygen’s yang, a life-giving element that our plants and oceans need in order to survive. In return, we are given the air we breathe. We ourselves are comprised of carbon, as is all life on this planet. Attempting to eliminate carbon is a fool’s errand, a mirage that environmental activists insist we must pursue deep into the desert, sacrificing the modern industrial world on the way.

Notably absent from these lessons was any talk about protecting our rainforests, protecting our oceans, or the level of pollution created on a daily basis by the totalitarian dystopia of China. They also are not taught of the miracles of nuclear power. Instead, our students are on the receiving end of fact-free environmental jeremiads that push proto-Net Zero, carbon neutral nonsense, with no counter argument from the other side. It’s a dangerous situation for the minds of our children.

Superintendent Walters, if you happen to read this, I implore you to scour the curriculum for this insidious radicalism, before it turns a generation of Oklahomans into left wing environmental activists. Or, at least promote a counter to these ideas in our classrooms, so the children can hear both sides. A persuasive counter to these ideas would be ideal, but at the moment, Greta is behind the wheel.

Environmentalist totalitarianism is a very real phenomenon, just look at what has happened to farmers all over Western Europe. Shutting down farms en masse, culling cattle by the hundreds of thousands, extreme restrictions on gas vehicles, gas appliances, all in a vain effort to reach net zero carbon emissions by some arbitrary date. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The individuals pushing these nutty ideas are totally beholden to the anti-carbon cult, which amounts to an anti-human cult. They hold the same ideas that are now sliding in under the radar into our schools, specifically the “MyView Literacy” curriculum used at Norman Public Schools.

It’s vitally important to protect our environment, but environmental issues shouldn’t be framed in Doomsday terms. Becoming good stewards of our planet shouldn’t involve guilt for merely existing as a consuming human. When I was a child, the big environmental issues were protecting the rainforests, and keeping the oceans clean, two issues that are notably absent from what my daughter has said is being taught. Environmentalism can and should be taught in a sane manner, but currently, it is not.

Shane Smith is a pro-liberty writer based in Norman, Oklahoma. He blogs at: RepublicReborn.com