The LA School District Is Now Bribing Children With Pizza to Consent to a Vaccine Jab -- and Telling Them Not to Tell Their Parents About It, So They Don't Get "In Trouble"

As John Ekdahl said: "If this happened to my kid, I'd be in jail."

But why aren't these people in jail?

Why are we allowing these radical activists free access to indoctrinate, medically experiment on, and sexually groom our children?

John Sexton loses his usual good sense to bend over way to far in the interests of supposed fairness to a teacher who was caught repeatedly indoctrinating student in strident leftwing positions -- and who continued doing so, even after warned by the school board.

Sexton is trying to be "fair" to the teacher by urging "leeway" for teachers' free speech in the classroom -- but they have very little. They are not speaking in their private capacity as citizens -- they are speaking as paid employees of the government, and hence paid agents, indirectly, of the citizenry, to do a job we're telling them to do, and telling them how to do.

They are not at liberty to just teach "whatever the Muse tells them to teach each day."

And frankly: I don't have free speech in my fucking life outside my job. But teachers are to have near-absolute free speech in the performance of their 8 to 3 jobs -- government jobs! -- teaching our children!?

One of the top stories at the Washington Post today is this piece about a teacher named Matthew Hawn who was fired for teaching his class about “white privilege.” Actually, the argument here is really over whether or not Hawn was teaching the topic, i.e. offering it as one perspective, or just telling students to adopt his own progressive viewpoint on political issues. In the end, the school decided it was the latter and he was fired.

Regular readers will know I’m always hesitant whenever someone is getting fired over their political opinions. That’s a double-edged sword that, once endorsed, can do do damage to a lot of people. Even so, in this case I’m hard pressed not to see a teacher who had really abandoned any pretense of objectivity.

Hawn teaches a class on contemporary issues which is meant to discuss things that are happening now. After the shootings in Kenosha by Kyle Rittenhouse, Hawn pointed to Rittenhouse as an example of white privilege.

...

“My question to you, and this is going to be a tough one,” Hawn said to his class on Aug. 27, 2020, “is how is that not a definition of White privilege?”

Tired after a long day of hybrid teaching, Hawn accidentally uploaded the video to the folder for his personal finance students, where a parent spotted it. The parent immediately contacted Sullivan County administrators to complain.

That description doesn’t really do any justice to what Hawn actually said. The Post does include video of this statement which seems a lot more strident and misleading.

I’ll go ahead an say it. There’s no really arguing this or debating this. This is white privilege is what it looks like. That kid right there. Whenever you can fire into a crowd of people and kill people and then you can walk to the police without fear of being shot back, that is the definition of privilege, of white privilege. It’s awful. These aren’t isolated incidents. This has been happening to African-Americans for 400 years.

In January he assigned a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay to his class in which the author blames Trump’s election on racism. He was reprimanded and appealed the reprimand claiming he had planned to introduce other reading into the discussion. But ultimately the school board upheld the reprimand. Then, just a few weeks later Derek Chauvin was convicted for the murder of George Floyd and Hawn was asked what it would have meant if Chauvin had been acquitted. Instead of answering in his own words, Hawn pulled up a video clip about white privilege.

Hawn decided to let the poet Kyla Jenée Lacey speak. He clicked to YouTube.

Jones and several other students in the class later said they remember a group of White boys throwing up their hands in anger during the poem.

“The video is definitely very confrontational and doesn’t sugarcoat, the point of it is to be in-your-face-harsh,” said a White 18-year-old in the class, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash from her conservative family. “I think that’s what really upset the boys.”

One of those boys complained to administrators, his classmates said. Within two weeks, Hawn was fired.

Again, you won’t really get a sense of what Hawn was promoting by reading the Post story. Here’s the video he apparently showed the class (contains some NSFW language):

Should he have been fired for assigning the Coates reading or showing the video clip? My own take is that teachers should be given a lot of leeway in class. But in this case it seems that Hawn wasn’t really presenting anything like a range of viewpoints to his students. It’s just one leftist diatribe after another with him directly telling students in some cases that there’s no discussion. Hawn himself, when he appealed his firing this summer seemed to belatedly acknowledge that how he taught the class wasn’t really appropriate.

Again, Sexton is offering what he feels is "fairness" here which is inappropriate.

I think people are very confused on this issue, so let me unconfuse people:

We have an individual right to speech, which is supposed to be absolute.

There is also something that can be called "collective speech." Collective speech is the speech we make together, as when we decide, collectively, to put up a statue in a public park.

Collective, "corporate speech" -- "corporate" in the sense that it's "of the collective body," of the corporate whole -- is by its nature politically shaped, subject to the editing and frankly censorship of the group.

Obviously, this is group speech and no individual has an absolute right to control its content, because how could one person have a veto right over the group?

Now I disagree with a city deciding to pull down a statue of Thomas Jefferson -- but I have no doubt that the city has the right to make that decision as part of its collective speech. They take a vote on it, they politically decide what their collective speech is.

Collective speech is rarely the best, most interesting, or truest speech, because, well, it's decided by a group of people which is made up of, let's face it, >50% idiots and >10% degenerates.

But still, it is what it is: A lot of public speech is collective speech, and collective speech, unlike individual speech, is subject to public monitoring and public editing and public censorship and public debate.

My -- your -- our -- individual speech isn't. Or shouldn't be, and didn't used to be.

But our collective speech has always been subject to pressure from the group and majority rules. (Or, as if often the case: rule by an animated and loud minority.)

Confusion over this critical distinction results in our applying the rules of collective speech to individual speech -- and insisting that the Group should have censorship and veto rights over individual speech -- while also insisting that collective speech, which is what teachers have when they show up for their government jobs to teach kids mandated by law to appear before them, have free speech rights to argue indirectly with the kids' conservative parents about what the HuffPo told them was on FoxNews last night.

(Anyone who watches Libs of Tik Tok knows this is what animate 99% of leftwing activists teachers -- they're angry about what they're leftwing "news sources" on Twitter like Jezebel and HuffPo and Daily Beast them "the right" is doing, and they're attempting to get revenge on their evil conservative parents of their imagination by going after their children and "converting" them. Some are pretty explicit in straight-up admitting this motive.)

What teachers are supposed to teach in class, and what they are allowed to teach in class, is collective speech, not individual speech.

Telemarketers do not have "free speech rights" when they're delivering the boss's pitch to potential customers on the phone.

These are not fucking college professors. They are not doing original research here, guys. I'm pretty sure that we've plumbed the full mysteries of the bowtie method.

And people aren't seeking them out of their own free volition. Kids are forced into these specific schools due to the happenstance of where they lived, and forced to attend classes taught by these teachers based on an automated classroom assignment system.

When kids are forced to be in a classroom, the teachers' rights to free speech diminish.

The kids' have rights too, don't they?

Weird how all that CRT training about "power dynamics" and "unearned privilege" goes right out the window when it's a leftwing teacher with control over a student's grades and therefore over his future earnings telling a student what he is required to believe.

These are our children, not theirs. We are now in the bizarre position where parents' control over their children is doubted and questioned and highly disputed by the state, whereas teachers' control is assumed.

This is not a free speech issue. They are being paid to say what we tell them to say in class.

We don't have free speech in our lives outside the classroom, but inside the classroom, where our children are mandated by law to be present, which we are compelled by law to fund with our taxes, they live in a bubble of nigh-absolute free speech?

This is madness. This is MADNESS.

Fire every single one of them and make them re-apply and re-interview for their jobs, and hire back about 40% of them. Open the hiring pool to non-holders of the crap Education degrees and get some quality non-activist Actual Teachers in there.

And end tenure -- forever. Pass a fucking constitutional amendment to kill it dead.

posted by Ace at 01:48 PM

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