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Just when you think The NY Times can't get any worse... [1]

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Date: 2023-04-28  

Jonathan Mahler writing in The NY Times Magazine has an article purportedly dealing with the state of education in America. So what’s with the provacative title?

School closures and culture wars turned classrooms into battlegrounds — and made the head of one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions a lightning rod for criticism.

It starts like this:

When the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious. Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7 million members; the National Education Association has three million.) The A.F.T. did give in excess of $26 million to Democratic candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, but the Carpenters and Joiners union gave more than twice as much. Pompeo, whose remarks appeared in a widely quoted interview with the online news site Semafor, had nevertheless put his finger on something: The pandemic and the ongoing culture wars over race and gender had shifted America’s educational landscape, and with it the political landscape. “It’s not a close call,” Pompeo elaborated. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”

The article is a long hit-piece filled with unquestioned GOP talking points. It’s so appallingly off-target and biased it takes a special kind of cluelessness to produce something like this. I am not bothering to include a link that will get past the pay wall — it’s that bad.

For all the Republicans quoted directly, one voice is missing. Although she’s the headliner in the story, it seems a bit more than peculiar that Weingarten isn’t quoted directly or interviewed for this.

The tell comes at the end, where they describe how Weingarten’s assistance helped Brandon Johnson become mayor of Chicago.

When Johnson narrowly won, it was a stunning upset, not just for the candidate but for the left. Even as the Republicans were ramping up their attacks on Weingarten and on the institution of public education, the teachers’ unions had effectively elected the mayor of America’s third-largest city, who was himself an avowedly progressive union organizer promising to raise taxes on the rich, reform the police and increase funding for the city’s schools. Maybe Pompeo hadn’t been wrong, at least as far as his own party was concerned. It was those who had underestimated the political power of the unions who were mistaken. “They said this would never happen,” Johnson said in his victory speech. “If they didn’t know, now they know!”

emphasis added

I’ve speculated in the past that The NY Times has an obsession with the fear that the country will go too far left. The section in bold type above has to be their worst nightmare. For that, they’re willing to give Trump Toady and Neo Fascist Pompeo all the talking points.

We need more dangerous people like Weingarten.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/28/2166509/-Just-when-you-think-The-NY-Times-can-t-get-any-worse

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