“I’LL SEE YOUR CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND RAISE YOU ONE HITLER YOUTH”
The Facebook algorithm has gone nuts. There is nothing on earth that could get me to buy anything from Mike Huckabee. Yet, for the past two weeks, my Facebook feed has been flooded with right-wing, inner-circle pleas for cash, and/or personal information to get me into their databases.
I have, for example, been polled to pick who I hate more: (1) Joe Biden (2) Kamala Harris (3) Other Communist Democrats.
The FB comments from people who were proper Trumpist targets are illuminating and, of course, depressing. The January 6 insurrection had nothing at all to do with Trump, but was a deep fake Soros-sponsored conspiracy aimed at taking our guns, unborn babies and voting rights, so that only Joe Biden and the Commies can ever again win elections operating from their Federally-controlled Bolivian-Voting-Machine-Jewish-Space-Laser headquarters. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this. But looking under rocks can be worthwhile.
The Huckabee ads, offering to supply kids with “information” to teach them early on, how to ignore, well, us:
Kids are easy to influence, and the media knows it. Fake news and dangerous lies are being spread beyond the TV screen and into some of the very places your kids see and hear the news, like popular social media sites and even their classrooms! Big media is flexing its muscle to infiltrate the minds of our kids and undo the values you’re working so hard to teach them.
It’s why we created the Kids Guide to Media Bias & Fake News, and it’s why we’re making it FREE for a limited time as part of this new gift bundle.
The Kids Guide to Media Bias & Fake News will help your kids to easily sort fact from fiction, while teaching them how and why the media is biased. This fun Kids Guide will show them how the media uses techniques like poisonous headlines, manipulated images, deepfake videos, and censorship to shock their audience and push their agendas!
This important free gift bundle also includes the latest issue of the wholesome, award-winning EverBright Kids magazine, packed with great featured content and activities that will keep them entertained for hours! Both the Kids Guide and magazine are yours for free. You just pay $1 s&p each with this special offer.
As part of this bundle offer, your kids can look forward to a new Kids Guide covering an important topic for kids every 3–4 weeks, including an accompanying streaming video lesson and digital workbook, all for just $21.90 per set. Plus, we’ll send your kids a new issue of EverBright Kids magazine each month for only $6.49. You can cancel at any time. And, if you’re not 100% satisfied, let us know within 90 days to receive a full refund of your purchase price.
Note that the “free” offer includes a commitment to $180 a year of further indoctrination, cancellable only if you act within 90 days. Hucksterism is no surprise in Trumpland.
In recent months, Republican governors and legislatures have sought to ban the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) on grounds that it seeks to indoctrinate youth into thinking that they have to feel bad for the racist or sexist conduct of their forebears. In fact, the bans are couched in term of prohibiting the teaching of “divisive concepts.”
There could be a no more blatant repudiation of the First Amendment. For more than two centuries, our courts have interpreted the First Amendment to permit — without government intervention — all kind of toxic ideas in the public arena on grounds that exposing divisive concepts and sorting them out through public debate only strengthens a democracy.
Not surprisingly, there have been lawsuits filed, challenging these provisions. In New Hampshire:
AFT-NH president Deb Howes likened the current new law to book burning.
“This is one of the few such lawsuits in the nation aiming to protect educators from the recent onslaught of politically motivated state laws that put teachers at risk simply for discussing honest historical and societal concepts in their classrooms,” Howes said. “Today, we are taking a stand against a law that brings political partisanship into the classroom and chokes off learning in a way that’s reminiscent of book burning.”
She said the law is so vague, “It is next to impossible for teachers to follow it and know what would get them in hot water and result in them losing their license to teach.”
“We also charge that the law violates the state’s own constitution and provisions of state law that require teaching accurate history and social studies.
“This law signals that New Hampshire believes it is OK to censure education, thought and freedom and doesn’t believe teachers should be able to teach honest and accurate history,” Howes said.
“The bill is trying to legislate a ban on teaching so-called critical race theory without actually using those words, making it deliberately vague and difficult to interpret and thus, harder for teachers to know what they can say in the classroom — and that is by design.”
https://www.wmur.com/article/lawsuit-challenges-constitutionality-of-divisive-concepts-law/38505123#
In Virginia, recently installed Governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order banning the teaching of “divisive concepts.” He then set up a “Tip Line” so kids and parents could rat out any schools and teachers who might be crossing the divisive concepts line. This of course is exactly what you’d expect in a democracy — in the USSR or in Nazi Germany. Brilliantly, thousands of people have flooded the Youngkin tip line with bogus messages. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/26/tip-line-teachers-jokes-concern/ (I particularly like the one warning that schools are teaching Arabic numerals — which can only lead to Sharia Law.)
All of this, of course, is coming from the party which has been blathering about Democrats promoting “cancel culture.” And from the party that decries liberal efforts to indoctrinate young people, we now see the propagation of mind-control-for-profit efforts by people like Mike Huckabee.
The strands connecting Glenn Youngkin’s report-on-your-neighbors brand of totalitarianism, Mike Huckabee’s brain-cleansing efforts and the youth-indoctrination efforts of the Nazis and Chinese Communists are not hard to see:
As Germany hurtled toward war, children who refused to join were alienated, then punished. By 1939, over 90 percent of German children were part of the Hitler Youth organization.
For the Nazis, the group had other benefits. Not only did it allow the Third Reich to indoctrinate children at their most impressionable, but it let the Nazis remove them from the influence of their parents, some of whom opposed the regime. The Nazi Party knew that families — private, cohesive groups not usually under political sway — were an obstacle to their goals. The Hitler Youth was a way to get Hitler’s ideology into the family unit, and some members of the Hitler Youth even denounced their parents when they behaved in ways not approved of by the Reich.
Though the Boy Scouts were banned, the Nazis co-opted many of its activities and traditions. Hitler Youth took part in typical scouting type activities like camping trips, singing, crafts and hiking. They went to summer camps, wore uniforms, recited pledges and told stories over campfires.
But over time, the activities changed. Though girls’ groups focused on things like rhythmic gymnastics and winter coat drives, the boys’ groups became more like a mini military than a Boy Scout den. They imposed military-like order on members and trained young men in everything from weapons to survival. And all groups included hefty doses of propaganda that encouraged an almost religious devotion to the Führer. https://www.history.com/news/how-the-hitler-youth-turned-a-generation-of-kids-into-nazis
It is no longer interesting or profitable to describe Trumpism as a cult. Any Republican Party member who entertains “divisive concepts” such as the legitimacy of Biden’s election or Trump’s culpability for the January 6 insurrection must be expunged. The fact that Huckabee is targeting young people with Trumpist propaganda — no doubt to lead to “purity of thought” — is chilling.
Teaching kids about Jim Crow is divisive. Teaching them to ignore science or the liberal press is necessary for the preservation of “the values you’re working so hard to teach them.”
The cure? VOTE and support Democrats for the Senate and House. And Governors and state representatives. AND school board members.