After all, Boebert has never valued education, as evidenced by her own background. She didn't even finish high school until she first ran for office, when she received her GED one month before she was elected to represent Colorado's 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to the Pew Research Center, 94 percent of representatives in the 118th Congress have a bachelor's degree, and many of them have a graduate degree as well.
Boebert's orange-golden-idol Donald Trump is currently threatening to do away with the Department of Education via an executive order, whether that's legal or not. Trump, at least, took some advantage of education, and not just to help him avoid the draft. (Thanks, bone spurs!) He often repeats the lie about graduating first in his class at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1968, one of many extreme abuses of fact in which he indulges.
Representative Massie, proving that even an MIT education can be overcome through a commitment to idiocy.
House Resolution 899 was introduced by Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, known primarily for his obnoxious assault-rifle Christmas card in 2021 (one that inspired a similarly tone-deaf holiday greeting from Boebert).
“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said in a statement far longer than the bill itself. "States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students. Schools should be accountable. Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school."
Boebert is more succinct — which is to say, less nuanced and thoughtful. "I'm with President Trump!" she posted to X on February 4. "The Department of Education should be shut down. School choice is the way to go!"
Honestly, this was pretty wordy for the level of Boebert's actual understanding of the issue. She does have something of a conservative boilerplate Education page on her website, which essentially boils down to support of "school choice," GOP code for giving public money to private — often religious — schools, and vilifying the Common Core. Whether Boebert knows that Common Core was actually a Republican movement until the far-right Tea Party took over the conservative mainstream is anyone's guess. She just knows her attack lines, and recites them dutifully.
But for the thinking people of America, the prospect of dismantling the Department of Education is worrisome. It's far more than curriculum design, which admittedly might be its least successful aspect. These efforts have ranged from the well-meaning-but-much-maligned-even-among-educators "teach to the test" standardized exams to more malicious attempts to address the completely fabricated sturm and drang concerning the teaching of Critical Race Theory.
But back here in reality (and off conservative media), the DOE does a lot for students, every day, at every level. It supports education access. In ensures services for children with disabilities. It provides for early childhood education programs, student loans for higher education, and so much more.
It's important to look at the attack on the Department of Education in the context of past moves by Trump and his autocratic minions. Their supposed case — some might call it their cover story — is that they want to improve education for American children by giving the power back to the states. This is somehow couched in emphasizing parental rights while ignoring that at one time, cultural presumption accepted that trained professional educators knew how to teach better, and parent involvement was meant to be supportive in that vital process, not directive.
On the surface, that seems like a rational position that could be rationally argued — but that's the pro forma trap offered up time and again, and one that too many Americans step right into. Because it's not about improving American education. It's about controlling American education.
Americans need to remember that Trump openly admits he "loves the poorly educated." That's because they're the voting bloc that's supported him from the beginning, why there are virtually no Trump supporters left in the intellectual braintrust of America save for those who still want to gain power by keeping their lips firmly attached to Trump's flatulent orange backside. And there aren't really even many of those; instead, Trump's circle is largely made up of Fox News "entertainers," if they can accurately be called that. Ironic, certainly, for a GOP base that used to decry how useless it was for Hollywood to opine about American politics — but no less ironic than pretty much everything else the Trump supporters believe despite all evidence to the contrary. The stubborn denial of reality and rational thought is the hallmark of any cult; Trump's is no different.
But this attack on the Department of Education is a horse of a different color, because it's aimed directly at the children of America. You know, the ones who are our future, the ones we're supposed to teach well and then let lead the way. But instead of that, Trump and Boebert and Massie and their ilk are more interested in indoctrination. Of wresting the educational funding of America away from public education designed to serve the greater good, and redirecting it into profit centers for their cronies, while at the same time programming children with Christian Nationalism and a venomous resentfulness of any minority group: People of Color, the LGBTQ+ community, faith-based people who still follow the actual teachings of Christ and not the twisted biblical falsity that Trump pretends to love in order to sell more Bibles.I’m with President Trump!
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) February 5, 2025
The Department of Education should be shut down.
School choice is the way to go! https://t.co/9nEKlgfpCa
But Boebert's position on this issue is somewhat tragic in the abstract. She's been convinced that education doesn't mean anything, that it isn't important. She dropped out of high school and got her equivalency some twenty years later, and then only for fear she'd be rightly attacked for running for national office without a high school diploma. But she did win, and while it's true that she hasn't accomplished much in her terms in office save create outrage, it's important to note that she still considers herself a success. And education didn't help her one bit.
Boebert's story is a warning for us all, herself included, even if she can't see that. She was manipulated into becoming a prop for the far-right, a rabble-rousing failed restaurateur from a small town who knew how to piss people off. She's a living, breathing, ridiculous distraction from the real issues, one who will consistently vote how she's told to, one who will constantly tweet unyielding support for a man and a cause that doesn't care about her in the least, let alone the constituents she now represents in CD4.
"Sadness is caused by intelligence," author Charles Bukowski is often quoted as saying. "The more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn't understand them." That sentiment originated with Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote in Crime and Punishment that “pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
Lauren Boebert won't understand either of those quotes, and for a multitude of reasons; with the threatened dissolution of the Department of Education, neither will most American students in years to come. They will recite an empty Pledge of Allegiance, know none of the mistakes made in history in order to learn from them, and appreciate no art that doesn't kiss the ring of convention. They will fully embrace the Orwellian concept of doublethink without understanding that the context was originally satirical, a literary warning of the thing they've become. Americans will become disciples, not citizens; serfs, and not thinkers.
Which is precisely the point.
