Don't Mention The War!

I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it. 

It's all forgotten now and let's hear no more about it! 

So that's two egg mayonnaise, a Prawn Boys, a Steve Bannon and four Tucker salads.

Sorry I got a bit confused because everyone keeps mentioning the war.

From the AP, more grim reminders of the irreparable damage to our democracy that decades of media Both Siderism has done.

Teachers at culture war front lines with Jan. 6 education

MISSION, Kan. (AP) — What students are learning about the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 may depend on where they live.

In a Boston suburb in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, history teacher Justin Voldman said his students will spend the day journaling about what happened and talking about the fragility of democracy.

“I feel really strongly that this needs to be talked about,” said Voldman, who teaches history at Natick High School, 15 miles (24 kilometers) west of Boston. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, he said “it is fair to draw parallels between what happened on Jan. 6 and the rise of fascism.”

Voldman said he feels fortunate: “There are other parts of the country where ... I would be scared to be a teacher.”

Liz Wagner, an eighth and ninth grade social studies teacher in a Des Moines suburb of increasingly Republican Iowa, got an email from an administrator last year, warning teachers to be careful in how they framed the discussion.

“I guess I was so, I don’t know if naïve is the appropriate word, perhaps exhausted from the pandemic teaching year last year, to understand how controversial this was going to be,” she said...

 

Except there is nothing at all "controversial" about the facts of the January 6th Republican insurrection.  The whole thing transpired in real time on teevee.  The Republican lies and conspiracies that led to this attempted Republican coup  are clear and available to any member of the public who wishes to review them.  

And yet, just like *that*, in Red America we're back to the kind of "War of Northern Aggression" propaganda that Jim Crow segregationists injected into the national vocabulary to try and take the sting out of being celebrants of treason and defenders of slavery.  

Because of course we are.  Because  because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy -- 

-- and needs feeding.

And we know exactly where and how Republican fanaticism and ignorance feeds:

Anton Schulzki, the president of the National Council for the Social Studies, said students are often the ones bringing up the racial issues. Last year, he was just moments into discussing what happened when one of his honors students at William J. Palmer High School in Colorado Springs said, “’You know, if those rioters were all Black, they’d all be arrested by now.”

Since then, three conservative school board candidates won seats on the school board where Schulzki teaches, and the district dissolved its equity leadership team. He is covered by a contract that offers academic freedom protections, and has discussed the riot periodically over the past year.

“I do feel,” he said, “that there may be some teachers who are going to feel the best thing for me to do is to ignore this because I don’t want to put myself in jeopardy because I have my own bills to pay, my own house, to take care of, my own kids to take back and forth to school.”

And the biggest hammer in the fanatic's sack?

Demands that history -- even history that happened just a year ago on live teevee -- be taught "without bias" from meatheads who get their "facts" from the Conservative Ministry of Propaganda:

The biggest fear for Paula Davis, a middle school special education teacher in a rural central Indiana district, is that the discussion about what happened could be used by teachers with a political agenda to indoctrinate students. She won’t discuss Jan. 6 in her classroom; her focus is math and English.

“I think it’s extremely important that any teacher that is addressing that topic does so from an unbiased perspective,” said Davis, a regional chapter chair for Moms for Liberty, a group whose members have protested mask and vaccine mandates and critical race theory. “If it cannot be done without bias, then it should not be done.”

And where exactly did fanatics learn to scream "bias" every time their fanaticism is called out by its true name?

From the pulpit of the mainstream media's High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It of course.  

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