Opinion: Governor Braun, Take the Fight to the Classroom — Teach the Truth About Communism Before It’s Too Late

Indianapolis, Indiana: August 22, 2026

Governor Mike Braun, it’s time to stop playing defense and start fighting like Ronald Reagan would have. Florida under Ron DeSantis is already doing what every free American state should have done years ago: forcing students to confront the bloody, documented record of communism. Indiana must follow — and it must do so without apology.

Communism is not a “complex ideology” or a “failed experiment.” It is an evil that has murdered more people than any other system in human history. From the Soviet gulags and Holodomor, to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, to the prison island of Cuba, the hermit hell of North Korea, and the socialist collapse of Venezuela under Maduro and his predecessors — the body count runs into the tens of millions. Starvation, secret police, the destruction of the family, the church, and the nation itself. That is the record. Florida’s new standards make students learn it. Indiana’s students still largely do not.

Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” because he understood that moral clarity is strength. He did not soften the language to spare the feelings of professors or bureaucrats. DeSantis is applying that same clarity in the classroom: students will learn the difference between freedom and tyranny, between the American founding and the systems that treat human beings as property of the state. Braun should do the same — and go further. Mandate a rigorous unit on the history of communism in every Indiana public school. Require primary sources, death tolls, economic failure data, and the testimonies of those who escaped. Make it clear that “democratic socialism” has repeatedly been the gateway drug to full communist control.

The left has spent decades turning American classrooms into recruitment centers for their worldview. They soft-pedal the crimes of the left while obsessing over every flaw in the American story. That ends when we start teaching the actual history of the hammer and sickle with the same intensity they once reserved for their own narratives. Young Hoosiers should leave school knowing that communism is not romantic, not idealistic, and not “well-intentioned.” It is a death cult that has always required mass graves to sustain itself.

America First means protecting the next generation from the same lies that destroyed nations. It means rejecting the idea that our children should be neutral between liberty and totalitarianism. Governor Braun has the power to act. He should use it. Issue the directive. Rewrite the standards. Put the truth in the curriculum — the hard, unvarnished, Reagan-style truth that communism is the enemy of the human spirit and of the American way of life.

Florida has already drawn the line. Indiana cannot afford to lag behind. The classroom is a battlefield for the future of this country. It’s time we started winning it.