Earlier this week, an Oklahoma legislative committee voted overwhelmingly to ban the teaching of AP U.S. History in public classrooms. If passed, Sooner State schoolchildren would be the next in a long line of casualties in this absurd War on History.

This bizarre fixation with APUSH curriculum is nothing new, of course. Last year, Colorado was up in arms over claims that the curriculum constituted an assault on American dignity. Even famous neurosurgeon and rising Republican star Ben Carson gave his two cents, observing humorlessly, “I think most people when they finish that course, they’d be ready to sign up for ISIS.”

Such hyperbole centers around the notion that the curriculum insufficiently emphasizes “American exceptionalism.” In the words of Oklahoma state representative Dan Fisher, the curriculum emphasizes “what is bad about America.” Colorado school board member Julie Williams was even concerned that the materials would “encourage or condone civil disorder [or] social strife.”

Indeed, now the Okies are scared that teaching students about American history will make students hate America. As the ever-eloquent Fisher elaborated, the new APUSH casts America as a “nation of oppressors and exploiters.” As a result, he proposed withdrawing state money from APUSH teaching and replacing it with a home-brewed concoction instead.

The fight extends beyond Oklahoma. Last year, the Republican National Committee demanded that Congress withdraw funding from the College Board (which administers AP exams) because APUSH “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell has identified six states where lawmakers have attempted to amend the curriculum for “liberal bias.”

But America’s history is not perfect and does have some “negative aspects.” From slavery to Jim Crow to the Philippine occupation to Vietnam, we have made plenty of mistakes in our nearly 250 years of existence. The notion that all of this can be edited away because it is inconvenient to their narrative of American perfection is not only galling, but simultaneously reinforces the perception that Americans are jingoistically blind to our own faults.

But as Rampell observes, this paranoia goes beyond fears of anti-patriotism but to ideals of state sovereignty. She notes that both policymakers in both Oklahoma and Kansas have motions to ban all non-locally-generated curriculum, potentially spelling the end of all AP and IB classes in those states. What’s particularly absurd about that is that AP and IB courses are created by non-profits, so it’s not even a federal imposition.

What’s sad about this whole affair is not just the delusion of so many people in power but that the victims of it all are the students. Students, whose only fault was to live in a state with crazy lawmakers, now will be denied access to college-credit courses because someone off in the state capitol doesn’t think it’s red-white-and-blue enough.

I would contend that it is arrogance that leads these legislatures to these lengths. The arrogance to believe that students’ education is just another pawn to be sacrificed for their political agenda. The arrogance to believe that if someone doesn’t like history, they can just change it. And the arrogance to believe that they can get away with it.