If you want to know what “progressive” teachers think of conservative parents, please take a gander at the following blog post from recently retired Deerfield High School English teacher (and former colleague) David Hirsch. On October 6, 2022, Hirsch published a post titled, “Watch Out Parents: Big Conservative Is Not Just Coming After Teachers and Librarians” in which he makes a number of mindboggling claims. Warning—Irony Alert:

We need to talk about how you are interacting with your children at home. What are you teaching them? How are you modeling well? Are you making the right choices – the best choices? Would your legislators and political leaders approve of how you are raising your children? Do you talk about CRT? Are you too accepting of gender non-conforming behavior or ideas? Would you allow your child to use they/them pronouns? If so, Big Conservative might knock on your door for this kind of thought crime.

We hear about parents’ choice. That is the rationale for a slew of censorship across more than a dozen states. However, which parents? What choices? For the most part, these book-banning (and sometimes burning) movements are aligned with a far wrong wing political agenda. They do not reflect ALL parents’ choices, just a specific conservative religious and usually white one.

So this isn’t just about parents having a say in what their kids read in school. This is about ideologues having control over your children’s educations. Teachers and librarians were the first to experience this intense scrutiny and vitriol, but this movement will not end with them.

You may think, what I teach my children in my own home is not anyone’s business but my own – and you would be right as long as what you were doing was aligned with Big Conservative. But if it is not, your behavior might be labeled child abuse and you as a negligent parent.

Several states banned children who identify as a gender other than the one assigned at birth from receiving any interventions. They criminalized the act of assisting these children from even exploring anything beyond their gender at birth – even if their parents did it!

So if you are looking at teachers and librarians and thinking, just pick less controversial texts, just make your lessons about the subject area and not about social issues, know this: that same message will be tailored for parents who don’t agree with the censors and extremists.

Let’s go one step further: How will these wrong wing censors know you are veering away from their prescribed curriculum? Your children will tell them. The idea that children would “turn in” their parents was common in totalitarian and fascist regimes. Whether it was the Hitler Youth, the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers, or Communist Youth reading Mao’s Little Red Book, this technique has deep roots in authoritarian governments’ control of parenting.

… this is just the first battle in a larger war for who decides what your child learns – in and out of school.

As with abortion, immigration, and elections, choice just means sticking with Big Conservative’s point of view; freedom means the right to express opinions that echo specific politicians in a specific party. They are not advocating for freedom and choice, they are creating vehicles to coerce and control – and their reach will not end at the schoolhouse – if we don’t stop it, it is going to ram through the door and enter your house!

Time and space don’t permit addressing all of Hirsch’s risible rhetoric and claims, but I’ll try to cover the most ironic.

1.) What constitutes “Big Conservative”? Regressive leftists control public schools, teachers’ unions; academia (including college and university departments of English, library science, political science, education, and theater); the American Library Association; the National Council of Teachers of English; the Modern Language Association; the Illinois State Board of Education; most press outlets; the FBI; the American Psychological Association; the American Medical Association; the American Academy of Pediatrics; the publishing industry; Hollywood; the Nobel Committee for Literature; and social media.

No member of “Big Conservative” has made any demands regarding what pronouns parents use with their own children in their own homes. Meanwhile conservative teachers have lost their jobs for refusing to use incorrect pronouns with students. Leftist teachers and even school districts are openly calling for faculty to conceal from parents if their child is pretending to be the opposite sex at school. Leftist teachers openly admit on TikTok that they seek to indoctrinate other people’s children with leftist views on sex and gender. California will usurp custody of gender-dysphoric children who manage to make it to la-la land from other states.

2.) Hirsch next refers to “wrong wing book-banners” and “burners.” I watch and read a fair amount of news, but somehow, I missed stories about book burners. I have, however, seen firsthand how leftists in public schools ban books. I saw it at Deerfield High School. They do it clandestinely by simply never choosing materials that dissent from whatever leftist ideas they want to advance.

For example, during my last three years (2005-2008) of employment in the writing center at District 113’s Deerfield High School, multiple teachers taught material that espoused leftist views of homosexuality in Freshman Advisory, English classes, and theater classes. Not one of these teachers presented resources that espoused dissenting ideas.

Similarly, the school library had scores of books espousing leftist views on homosexuality and race, while having not one book espousing conservative views.

I viewed this imbalance as evidence of book-banning aligned with a leftwing agenda and pedagogically dangerous, but not Hirsch. Does Hirsch think teachers can help kids learn to think critically without reading material from the best thinkers on both sides of controversial cultural debates?

3.) Victim Hirsch refers to “intense scrutiny and vitriol” experienced by poor, pitiful, put-upon leftist teachers and librarians. To whom and what is he referring? Is he referring to parents justifiably angry about the obscene material teachers select to teach to kids, like when his colleagues Jeff Berger-White and Elliot Hurtig taught the eye-poppingly obscene Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes? Or is he referring to heated school board meetings when presumptuous teachers have gotten their long overdue come-uppance for teaching the obscene comic book Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe?

Maybe Hirsch should publish a post sharing what his DHS colleagues say about conservative parents behind the scenes. Readers concerned about “vitriol” might be interested. And maybe Hirsch could share the truth that leftist teachers don’t want any scrutiny. They want to create the selection criteria that allows them to select books that align with their beliefs and values and deselect (i.e., ban) books that challenge their beliefs and values.

Leftist teachers want absolute autonomy to choose to teach whatever they want and say whatever they want in their classrooms. And don’t believe any leftist teachers who say they want parents to be “advocates” for their own children. Those teachers unequivocally do not want conservative parents advocating for their children if that advocacy cramps leftist style.

4.) Hirsch frets that several states have banned gender-dysphoric children from receiving interventions. What he neglected to mention is that the interventions banned for gender-dysphoric minors are medical interventions with irreversible effects and for which there are no long-term studies proving their safety.

Ever the propagandist, Hirsch describes such bans as “criminalizing” the act of exploring gender. No, lawmakers are criminalizing untested medical interventions that cause irreversible effects. The “trans” cult claims “gender” has nothing to do with physical embodiment (which is why the claim that doctors “assign gender at birth” is so absurd). Leftists claim “gender” is constituted by subjective, internal feelings about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither. Therefore, “exploring gender” does not require altering biochemistry or lopping off body parts.

5.) Hirsch frets too about children sharing with their own parents what is taught in publicly subsidized classrooms. He compares children who tell their parents what government employees/public servants are teaching in the classroom to Hitler Youth and Mao’s Communist Youth.

Can Hirsch really not see how his analogy grotesquely fails? Hitler and Mao used children to turn on their parents by reporting to the government. Teachers like Hirsch are the government. He wants children to align themselves ideologically with the government against their own parents—just as Hitler and Mao did.

To make clear his point, in Hirsch’s screed to leftist teachers, he refers to their students as “your children,” saying “Your children will tell them.”  The students of leftist teachers are not those teachers’ children. Hirsch inadvertently happened on one truth: This technique of separating children ideologically from their parents has deep roots in authoritarian control of parenting. Hirsch just can’t get right who the authoritarians are.

6.) Finally, ironist Hirsch warns that conservative parents—you know, “far–wrong wingers”—are the ones who abuse the rhetoric of freedom and choice in their unholy quest to “coerce and control,” a quest that will not “end at the schoolhouse door.” Hirsch believes the conservative quest to control “will ram through” the front doors of leftists. Hirsch’s solution? Leftist teachers must stop conservative parents now—in public schools.

Conservatives, GET OUT NOW.

postscript: Hirsch returned to DHS for two days in November to talk to students, librarians, and teachers. I wonder if he told kids from conservative families that he views them as “far-wrong wingers.”

Videos have been circulating of young bestial thugs—whites and blacks, women and men—shrieking in the faces of al fresco diners, commanding them to raise a fist in solidarity with BLM/Antifa totalitarians. To leftists nothing says freedom quite like coerced performative acts. See for yourself the future of the Democratic Party:

Maybe these young bestial thugs never learned about Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard composed of young people that Mao used to intimidate, humiliate, and attack his political enemies. The New York Times described the Red Guard’s efforts:

Students who answered Mao’s call for continuing revolution … targeted political enemies for abuse and public humiliation. … Under a campaign to wipe out the “Four Olds”—ideas, customs, culture, habits—they carried out widespread destruction of historical sites and cultural relics.

Or maybe today’s totalitarian culture-destroyers are inspired by the Red Guard, whose salute they mimic.

Before Chairman Mao thought to use easily indoctrinated youth to advance political oppression, the Nazi Regime had mastered the tactic. Here’s an eerily relevant description of the Nazi Party’s exploitation of German youth to advance the pernicious Nazi cause:

Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, but by the end of the year this figure had increased to more than 2 million. By 1937 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939. The German authorities then prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations.

Education in the Third Reich served to indoctrinate students with the National Socialist world view. Nazi scholars and educators glorified Nordic and other “Aryan” races, while labeling Jews and other so-called inferior peoples as parasitic “bastard races” incapable of creating culture or civilization.

After 1933, the Nazi regime purged the public school system of teachers deemed to be Jews or to be “politically unreliable.” Most educators, however, remained in their posts and joined the National Socialist Teachers League. 97% of all public school teachers, some 300,000 persons, had joined the League by 1936. In fact, teachers joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than any other profession.

In the classroom and in the Hitler Youth, instruction aimed to produce race-conscious, obedient, self-sacrificing Germans who would be willing to die for Führer and Fatherland. Devotion to Adolf Hitler was a key component of Hitler Youth training. …

Schools played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth. While censors removed some books from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism.

Since some Americans—particularly leftists—struggle with analogical thinking, let’s paraphrase that description to make its relevance easily comprehensible:

Millions of American young people were won over to socialism/Critical Race Theory/“LGBTQ” theory/feminist theory in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. By 2020 membership in or support for what became known as the Intersectionality Regime had increased dramatically. Dominant leftist cultural forces had persecuted youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts into reinventing themselves to align with the Intersectionality Regime.

Education in America served to indoctrinate students with the socialist/racialist/feminist/pansexual world view. Race, sexuality, “gender,” and Marxist scholars and educators glorified people of color, homosexuals, opposite-sex impersonators, and Marxists while labeling whites, men, heterosexuals, conservative Christians, and capitalists hateful oppressors and bigots incapable of creating culture or civilization.

The race/“gender”/sexuality/class Intersectionality Regime purged the public school system of teachers deemed to be members of the oppressor classes or to be “politically unreliable.” Most educators, however, remained in their posts and joined the race/“gender”/sexuality/class Intersectionality Regime. In fact, teachers joined the Intersectionality Regime in greater numbers than any other profession.

In the classroom, corporate boardrooms, social media, the arts, the mainstream press, and organizations like BLM™ and Antifa, instruction was aimed to produce race-conscious, class-conscious, man-hating, sexual-deviance-supporting activists who would take the fight to the streets. Devotion to the Intersectionality Regime was a key component of cultural conditioning.

Schools played an important role in spreading Intersectionality ideas to American youth. While censors removed some books from the classroom, educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for socialism, racism, feminism, homosexuality, the “trans” ideology, and anti-Christianity.

Co-founder of the Toronto chapter of BLM™, Yusra Khogali, once tweeted, “White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual. … black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.” She tweeted, “Please Allah give me the strength to not … kill these … white folks out here today.” In 2015, she tweeted, “whiteness is not humxness. infact, white skin is sub-humxn.”

Kinda, sorta, maybe sounds like a Nazi talking about Jews.

Compulsory performance of the Sieg Heil/Red Guard/Black Panthers/BLM salute is part of the effort to compel freethinkers to pretend to embrace the ideas of slave reparations, systemic racism, and collective guilt, which hold individuals culpable for sins they have never committed.  The notion of collective guilt for the past sins of other individuals is both unbiblical and poisonous.

In a speech delivered in 1988 in Vienna on the 50^th anniversary of the Nazi occupation of his home country of Austria, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl warned against the dangerous idea of “collective guilt”:

[M]y father … died in Theresienstadt Camp; my brother … did not return from Auschwitz; my mother … was killed in the gas chambers of the same camp; and my first wife[’s] …  young life came to an end in Bergen-Belsen Camp. And yet at the same time I will ask you not to expect to hear from my mouth a single word of hatred. For whom should I hate? I knew only the victims; I do not know the perpetrators—at least, not personally. And I categorically refuse to attribute collective as opposed to personal guilt.

There is no such thing as collective guilt. Believe me, today is not the first occasion on which I have said that. I have been saying it since the day I was liberated from my [fourth and] last concentration camp. It is my conviction that anyone who assigns collective guilt to every Austrian [or German] citizen between the ages of zero and fifty is committing a reprehensible and insane act. Or, to put it in psychiatric terms: it would be reprehensible if it were not insane–and it would be a relapse into the Nazi ideology of collective family guilt [the difficult German word Sippenhaftung here refers to the dangerous Nazi dogma of kin liability, tainted blood(line), or genetic guilt by association]. Let this be said to all those who believe they have the right to expect people to feel guilty or even ashamed of something they did not do or fail to do but something their parents or grandparents had to answer for. …

I’ll tell you I think there are only two ‘races’ of people: those who are decent people, and those who are not. That distinction goes right through every nation, and within nations right through every political party and every other group. Even in the concentration camps here and there we came across more or less decent people who belonged to the SS. And in the same way there were also scoundrels amongst the prisoners.

The decent people are in the minority; they have always been in the minority and, I think, always will be. But the danger lies elsewhere. The danger is to be found in a regime or a system which brings the scoundrels to the top; in other words which puts the reins of power in the hands of the worst representatives of the people. Therein lies the true peril. And no nation … can claim to be immune from such danger. Which is why I presume to say that in principle any country is capable of perpetrating the holocaust.

… In my view there are only two … types of politicians. The first is the politician who believes that the end justifies the means—any means, even terrorist means. The second type is profoundly aware that there are means that can desecrate even the most sacred ends.

[T]he need of the day … is that all men of good will should finally reach their hands out to each other across all the graves and divisions.”

One of my daughters once expressed disappointment that I hadn’t saved any of my clothes from the early 1970’s. I explained that although styles return, they never return in exactly the same form. Same goes for history, which explains why even remembering history doesn’t guarantee we won’t repeat it. Today’s cultural revolution has all the earmarks of past revolutions, and yet too few Americans recognize those earmarks because on the surface this one appears different.

Unless we tear the blinders from our eyes and look clearly at the big picture, the republic as we have known it will be gone in a short time. The children and grandchildren of Millennials will grow up in a world of oppression and depravity the likes of which America has never known but civilizations around the world and throughout history have.

Viktor Frankl points to the solution to evil in our midst:

[P]lease remember one thing: Resistance always requires heroism. And there is only one person of whom anyone has the right to expect heroic acts. And that is oneself.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/BLMs™-Totalitarian-Youth.mp3

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