‘We’re Paying People To Hate America’: Musk And Ramaswamy Blast Department Of Education

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Twitter owner Elon Musk ripped the current education system in the United States Friday, saying that taxpayers were “paying people to hate America.”

Ramaswamy and Musk took part in a Twitter Spaces forum where Ramaswamy blasted the Department of Education for using funding as an incentive for schools to use certain theories in curricula. Ramaswamy outlined plans to shut down that department during a July 20 forum in New Hampshire.

“You talk about those local schools, what the heck are they doing? That comes from the U.S. Department of Education,” Ramaswamy told Musk. “So it’s a little bit invisible to a lot of people. It’s not just the school boards that parents are happily now engaged in, the U.S. government says you don’t get money from the federal government, which covers about 10% of public-school budgets in this country, unless you adopt these toxic self-hating, you know, racial and gender ideologies.”

“OK, so basically we’re paying people to hate America,” Musk responded.

Earlier in the forum, Ramaswamy and Musk discussed how the United States was dealing with an “entitlement” mentality and how “victimhood” made laziness acceptable.

The contents of school curricula became a hot-button political issue in 2021 as parents protested the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which holds that America is fundamentally racist, and teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Parents across the country also raised objections to books with sexually explicit content in recent years, prompting some states to act to remove them from schools.

The Department of Justice came under fire after Attorney General Merrick Garland issued an Oct. 4, 2021 memo that formed a task force to investigate parents protesting mask mandates and the use of CRT in school curricula at school board meetings.

Musk closed the deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion in October of 2022, seeking to create a “common digital town square.”