Last year, DeSantis made a major update to Florida’s civics standards. As revised by DeSantis, Florida’s standards now highlight the benefits of the free market and of America’s constitutional system, while explicitly comparing the advantages of America’s institutions to socialist, communist, and authoritarian regimes. That is not how America’s left-dominated education establishment does civics. Yet it’s exactly what parents in many states want.

Nothing threatens a state’s ability to go this traditional route more than federal grants administered by Biden’s pro-CRT Department of Education. Yet that is what CSDA is. The Civics Secures Democracy Act is a series of baited hooks — civics grants with strings attached by Biden’s leftist bureaucrats. On top of that, CSDA’s state grants are tied to student performance on a national test, which gives the designers of the federal test (who are chosen by Biden) de facto control over state standards and curricula.

Understanding this, last week DeSantis slammed the Civics Secures Democracy Act for trying to “buy off states with $6 billion if they sacrifice American History for Critical Race Theory and Biden’s other political whims of the day.” It’s easy to see why DeSantis accused Biden of planning to use CSDA’s fat grants to “indoctrinate” students with CRT. Last year, at around the same time DeSantis was releasing his revisions to Florida’s civics standards, the Biden administration published a rule assigning priority to history and civics grants that follow in the footsteps of CRT theorist Ibram X. Kendi and the infamous 1619 Project.