In her latest at CommonDreams.org, journalist, activist, and truly great human being, Abby Zimet warns of “an Orwelian hellscape” being created by right-wing extremists and zealots.
These Are Not the Best of Times
On the vital, longtime, increasingly bonkers battleground of culture wars that are our schools and our kids and what they can learn, it keeps getting worse. A new report finds wingnuts in calamitous power are begetting a flood of “educational gag orders” that are often sloppily written, factually inaccurate, vague enough to invite confusion if not egregious abuse, extreme enough to spark chaos, and “pedagogically pernicious,” from banning ill-defined “divisive concepts” that cause “discomfort” to setting up a tip line to report teachers “behaving objectionably.” In the process, they chillingly create “an Orwellian hellscape” where teachers are treated “as subversive internal threats who must be zealously rooted out at any deviation from orthodoxy” – a toxic, growing trend, writes Greg Sargent, that can “make teachers feel on such thin ice they end up whitewashing the U.S. past rather than communicating hard truths about it.” The new report from PEN America, which for over a year has been tracking “censorious legislative efforts” across the country, finds a “steep rise” in gag orders,” with over 71 bills introduced in state legislatures, or about three a day. Most are about sex, race or U.S. history; like earlier ones, writes Jeffrey Sachs, “All are sweeping, all are draconian, and few make any kind of sense…This is about putting the fear of God into teachers.”
~
The America of today as described brilliantly by Zimet can be traced to a ‘beginning’ with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Excerpt from Reagan’s ‘New Federalism’
by William V. Thomas, 3 April 1981, in Editorial Research Reports, Volume 1
Ronald Reagan’s first months in office could mark the beginning of a reversal in the role the federal government has played over the last half-century.
Reagan’s program rests on two ideas long associated with conservative politics: that of decreasing the size and influence of the federal government and making it more efficient. To help accomplish these aims, the president has pledged to return a number of federal responsibilities, particularly in the area of social and economic assistance, to state capitals and from there to local governments.
Thomas later notes: The Constitution established the authority of the central government, but assigned none to the states. They were granted only residual powers by the 10th Amendment.
~
Similarities? Undeniable!
School Board Protests Are Not Grassroots Movement, Are Not Spontaneous
Conservatives are disrupting school board meetings by shouting, using Nazi salutes, and even physically assaulting anyone they disagree with. But these attacks are anything but spontaneous.
Most school board members are part-time elected officials who must slog through countless meetings and voluminous reports before facing the public once or twice per month, usually for very minimal compensation; they are no match for the kind of violence-prone tactics we’ve seen at board meetings of late, nor should they be.
~
This Is Gonna Hurt
~
Chaos, Crisis And The Collapse Of Democracy
~
Chaos, Crisis And The Collapse Of Democracy. Part Deux
~
Remember When We Thought It Couldn’t Happen Here