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Thursday, Aug 11, 2011 5:12 PM UTC

Bachmann in ’02: School reform will lead to Holocaust

An old video surfaces, raising new questions for the GOP candidate

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Topics: Bachmannalia, War Room,

Bachmann in '02: School reform will lead to Holocaust

This post is past of our Bachmannalia series, in which we keep you updated on Michele Bachmann’s bizarre, outrageous or just plain wrong utterances.

Aug. 11: Mother Jones reports that in 2002 Bachmann filmed a movie with the message that Minnesota’s educational standards could lead to a second Holocaust — a claim first made by an education activist colleague of Bachmann’s at the time, Michael Chapman.

Bachmann and Chapman together made the two-hour feature, called “Guinea Pig Kids II,” in which they gave a presentation warning that education reforms abandon Christian documents in favor of secular documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that this was part of a dangerous globalist plot.

In the film, Chapman made the allusions to Nazi Germany. He suggested that school-to-work programs, which help students identify skills needed to get jobs in their specific fields, are an echo of Nazi concentration camps. Later the film displayed an image of a desolate looking landscape with the banner “Work Makes Free!” superimposed on top — a rough translation of the phrase that hung in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

One segment of the footage featured Bachmann fretting that the education reform and its shift towards relativism threatened even mathematics: “How would you like it if you went into Herberger’s this weekend,” she said, alluding to a local department store. “[You] bought a blouse — gave a $50 bill for a $30 blouse. And the student said, well, here’s $5. And you said, ‘Hey, I deserve 15 more. What’s the deal’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s my mathematical worldview!’ You’d be knocking on the door of the manager so fast it would make your head spin!”

Watch this clip below, via Mother Jones:

Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com. More Natasha Lennard.

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Rep. Michele Bachmann said the founding fathers tried to end slavery; she said that John Quincy Adams was among those founding fathers; she mistakenly praised clown serial killer, John Wayne Gacy. In fact, she has made more false statements than any other public official, says Politifact.com. Bachmann's slip ups, shocking

statements and plain false historical claims seem to just keep coming -- and we will use this feature to bring them to you, as and when the Tea Party darling (mis)speaks.

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