A recent Newsday article presented a prelude to this year’s May school board elections on Long Island, and painted a picture of parent advocates backing down on the issue of inappropriate sexual content found in K-12 school libraries.
The article accurately stated that the volume of discourse in this year‘s election, compared to last year’s, was somewhat muted. The rationale given in the article was that the parents suffered resounding defeats in the races against teacher-endorsed candidates who were accepting of the injection of racial politics and gender reassignment materials in the schools.
But the issue is far more complicated than that. It is true that parent groups seeking more transparency were losing more races than they were winning, and it’s also true that parents are not speaking out as much this year as they did last year, but the question is “why?”
We would submit that concerned parents have not come to conclude that these materials are acceptable, but rather have been scared off from speaking out for fear of being labeled as homophobic, right-wing, white nationalist extremists.
Of course, this is total nonsense, but there’s no doubt that this is the picture painted by the media. In fact, in almost every article written by Newsday on this issue, they describe the parents’ groups as having been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as anti-government or white supremacist groups.
Nowhere in these articles does Newsday note that the SPLC is a discredited radically leftist organization that had to settle a $3 million defamation suit for falsely labeling those opposed to their far-out ideology as being extremists themselves.
The Marxist radical left and the gender transitioning lobby have been very successful in intimidating parents from speaking out and this is partly because the mainstream media distorts the facts.
Consider the 1619 Project, which teaches our impressionable school children that America is a racist nation that was founded to establish an enslavement camp in the New World. This is despite the fact that just about every legitimate American historian debunks this nonsense and confirms that we were born from settlers who were fleeing religious persecution in Europe.
Yet, when traditional parents object to this indoctrination, they are countered by the radicals and the left-leaning media that they are seeking to whitewash slavery and the Jim Crow era. But this is nonsense. Every curriculum throughout the country includes the teaching of slavery, the Holocaust, and Jim Crow laws. Yet, the radicals know, if they paint the parents and those who love America as being the extremists, they win. And since they have a compliant media on their side, they have been winning in spades.
Thus, books are being allowed in our school libraries that are outright pornographic.
See our front-page story from May 13.
Our newspaper was one of the few to actually publish the sexually graphic photos and written passages in these appalling books. Neither Newsday, nor most of the mainstream media, bothers to inform parents as to what the hullabaloo is all about.
Parents’ complaints of books on school library shelves — including depictions of two minors performing oral sex on each other or passages of one individual describing himself being penetrated by another — fall on deaf ears because readers never see the details. Instead, the media give massive attention to the radicals who claim these parents objecting to the smut are homophobic or anti-trans.
If you want to know what happens to someone who is tarred with these pejoratives, you can check out the Internet as to how many decent people over the last five years have been canceled from their jobs, friendship networks or other positions in society. This is what chilling one’s speech is all about.
The radicals know they cannot win an argument that is fully flushed out on its merits, but if they can scare their opposition — that being the parents — into silence, they have won.
And given there has been little debate going on at school board elections this year, it’s appearing that they are indeed winning. If parents and decent school board members continue to remain silent while these Marxists and radicals begin taking over our school boards — just as the radical progressives took over many district attorneys’ offices leading to massive increases in crime — we are in for serious trouble down the road.
We have already seen how indoctrination by the radicals is having a severely deleterious effect on our new generation. Polls show that an alarming number of young people would not fight to defend America if attacked. A democracy can survive only as long as its citizens are supportive. We should not allow those who want to tear down our decency and traditional democratic institutions to prevail.
The radicals won in the first year, because the parents did not have enough time or resources to mount decent campaigns. They were non-political folks who were amateurs at the process. They could not compete against the well-oiled teachers’ unions and radical established advocacy groups.
This year, the parents were scared into submission. But there is time over the next year for parents to mobilize, and to prepare races in the future that are far more well-organized and educational to the voters. When most voters actually see what’s being pushed on our kids, they will be outraged and willing to act, even if they are threatened with cancellation.