Last week, a post in this space juxtaposed Roger Williams University’s requirement that new hires model woke values in their off-campus lives with a federal ruling that Catholic schools cannot have a similar requirement for their employees and their values. This week, Jeff Reynolds brings news on Legal Insurrection that a teacher of math and business at Hanover High School, in Massachusetts, was terminated over online videos she’d posted as part of a successful campaign for school board in a town a 40-minute drive away:
A math and business teacher at Hanover High School received a termination letter over social media posts she made that expressed her opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT), as well as the LGBTQ agenda in public schools. The teacher, Kari MacRae, says she has sought out a lawyer and will consider her options. Elected to the Bourne School Board in May 2021, MacRae made TikTok videos for her campaign in which she said she would make sure CRT wouldn’t be taught in Bourne schools, and expressed her opposition to schools teaching that students “can choose whether or not they can be a girl or a boy.” She has refused calls to resign from the school board position.
The teachers union in her home town has called for her resignation, but in Hanover, her principal Matthew Mattos, took advantage of the fact that she’s within her first 90 days of employment. His claim is that “continuing [her] employment in light of [her] social media posts would have a significant negative impact on student learning.” One wonders what “negative impact” canceling a teacher for non-job-related reasons a month into the school year might have on student learning.
If nothing else, the firing shows that some Massachusetts schools have a de facto ideological litmus test for hiring. How many excellent teachers never know that they didn’t get a job because somebody involved with the hiring process disagreed with her or his beliefs?
More profound, perhaps, is the mounting evidence that some people simply aren’t permitted to be represented. While acknowledging that MacRae’s campaign was unopposed, there is self-evidently a constituency for her message. Her firing proves that government agencies will block Americans from employment if they represent the wrong views in the democratic process.
So, those of us who disagree with the state religion find ourselves hindered from electing people to represent our views, and courts are often no recourse. What does that leave us?
Featured image from Kari MacRae TikTok video on The Enterprise.
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… too bad it’s not studied more. (Maybe because academics know what they’ll find.) Anyway, it now takes the most-taxed award:
[Open full post]Connecticut received the dubious honor on Sept. 29 of displacing New Jersey as the state with the highest taxpayer burden, according to a new “Financial State of the States” report from Truth-in-Accounting (TIA).
Illinois, Massachusetts, and Hawaii follow in the 48th, 47th, and 46th positions among the nation’s 50 states, as calculated by the Chicago-based nonprofit that tracks government spending and debt at the metropolitan, state, and federal levels.
Each Connecticut resident’s share of the Nutmeg State’s total outstanding debt is $62,500, compared to $58,300 for New Jersey, $57,000 for Illinois, $38,100 for Massachusetts, and $37,000 for Hawaii.
Laura Damon provides some of the reasons, in a Newport Daily News article, why police departments on Aquidneck Island may be having a hard time finding police officers:
This year, calls for applications to join the Newport Police Department yielded a significantly lower turnout than years past. …
“First of all, we have a lot of highly educated people who may not want to go into policing based on, sort of, the current way that we’ve structured policing,” [police trainer David] Lambert said. “People complain about these generational differences. … They don’t want to work nights for the rest of their lives. They don’t want to work weekends and holidays. They want more flexibility in their schedule. They want better work-life balances. And I think police departments maybe haven’t recognized that to the degree they should. [And in this job market] these kids have options.”
Also listed in the article, of course, is the anti-police sentiment promulgated by the news media and the “defund the police” movement. Consequently, even those considering a criminal justice career look more toward federal agencies and other occupations in the broader field.
Then add in COVID fears and the damage of the response thereto.
I wonder if something more fundamental should be added to the mix, too: We aren’t a confident nation. Police are the frontline, most-visible representatives of government. To the extent that people identify government with the nation, if they don’t support the project, then they’re going to be less inclined toward an occupation visibly defending it at the street level.
Moreover, the people who most support using government to impose their preferences are ideologically most primed to be skeptical of official police, preferring to leave enforcement of their policies up to somebody else.
Featured image by Fred Moon on Unsplash.
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This is how the messaging should have been for COVID and the vaccine for a long time:
The holiday season fast approaching, and R.I. Department of Health Medical Director Dr. James McDonald is expecting the celebrations to look like they did prior to the pandemic.
“I’m not planning on a virtual Thanksgiving or Christmas this year,” he said during his monthly interview on 12 News at 4. “I expect this year, all of us will gather [for the holidays].”
That being said, he urged those who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19 get the shot as soon as possible to protect themselves and their loved ones.
No carrot, no stick… just the professional opinion that the vaccine is safe and that it’s a good idea to get it.
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This is an ominous development, reported by Jack Phillips for The Epoch Times:
A federal judge on Oct. 8 denied a request to block Michigan State University’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the basis of natural immunity.
An employee at the school, Jeanna Norris, filed a lawsuit against the mandate and asked a judge to intervene on the basis that she had already contracted COVID-19 and recovered. She presented two antibody tests showing her previous infection, and her doctors told her that she didn’t need to get the vaccine at this time. …
“This Court must apply the law from the Supreme Court: Jacobson essentially applied rational basis review and found that the vaccine mandate was rational in ‘protect[ing] the public health and public safety,’” Maloney said in his order. “The Court cannot ignore this binding precedent.”
The judge can refer to “binding precedent,” but being bound to a level of precedent doesn’t mean being bound to find a rational basis. That’s what the judge is judging.
Unfortunately, our country’s elite have decided that natural/acquired immunity does not count when it comes to COVID-19. No legal or medical argument will suffice because it’s become a marker of class. Enlightened people want mandates; a Supreme Court ruling from a quarter-century before the discovery of Penicillin and addressing a disease that had killed around one-seventh of the people who caught it in Boston before the advent of inoculation (roughly 1 in 14 of the entire population) says government has this power; so the enlightened people will have their way, no matter how much science or how many tests dissidents might produce.
To repeat a point made in this space often: What terrifies the enlightened people most of all is the prospect that government might not be able to force everybody to do these things. Freedom is the disease that terrifies them so, and they can’t imagine a variant that might turn on them.
In this light, nobody should expect the courts to stand up for the rights of the people. The rights of the people are the crux of the dispute, and they have been erased.
Featured image by Eskay Lim on Unsplash.
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That’s a conclusion that leaps off the page of Stacey Matthews’s roundup of info on New York City’s ban on gifted & talented programs for children. First, consider a tweet from New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz:
It really is leftism in action. They could not make the bad schools better so they’ll make the good schools worse and call it a win.
Next, note that the city isn’t just eliminating the programs. Then, people who know their value would push back. Instead, they just aren’t testing kids into them anymore, so many or most affected families will never know the opportunity that was taken from them.
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Looking to cross a movie off my never-shrinking “to watch” list, last night — preferably with something inspiring and relevant to the holiday — I watched The Mortal Storm. Perhaps in counterintuitive ways, it fit the evening well. Indeed, this may be a movie for our times.
Released in 1940, as Nazi Germany made its way across Northern Europe, the film tells the story of the Roth family in a university town near the southern border of Germany. The father is a “non-Aryan” (i.e., Jewish) biology professor, the two eldest sons are pure Aryan from a prior marriage, and James Stewart is a farmer and family friend who opposes Nazi rule. News arrives on the professor’s birthday in 1933 that Hitler has been made chancellor, and the idyllic life of the family quickly deteriorates.
From this early scene to the very last, the central theme of the movie is the right of people to disagree, whatever the ruling party may declare. The scene at the beginning of this clip has particular resonance for our times as we learn that “disagreeing” with the regime can extend to upholding objective, scientific fact:
Student and Nazi youth leader Holl: Is it your opinion that there is no difference between the blood of an Aryan and the blood of a non-Aryan?
Professor Roth: Those are the findings of science. Until now, physiology has been unable to discover any difference in the blood of the various races.
Holl: Did you hear that? [Angry commotion in the class.] It’s in direct contradiction of our leader’s principle of racial purity. It’s an impudent defense of racial degeneration, and it’s a lie!
Roth: I’ve given you the facts. Scientific truth is scientific truth, unchangeable and eternal. It cannot be altered to suit the policies of the hour or the clamor of immature hoodlums.
Holl: I demand that every loyal follower of our leader leave this room immediately. From now on, this class is strictly boycotted, and those who remain do so at their own peril.
Although the increasingly mandated racial policies of our hour are directed toward different ends, the clamor of immature hoodlums is the same.
The next scene shows Professor Roth closing up his classroom in the evening, and when he turns out the lights the flicker of firelight invades the room. Outside, students are burning books. Holl holds up each book and proclaims the sins of its author. As he throws it in the bonfire, the crowd makes the Nazi solute and shouts, “We burn you! We burn you!”
In our times, books needn’t be burned. The chant is, “We cancel you! We cancel you!”
The title of the movie (and the book on which it is based) comes from the idea that human nature periodically brings our species to points of frothing certainty that we must kill our fellow man to appease the angry gods of the storm. The moral lessons of The Mortal Storm are not subtle, just as the parallels in our time are not subtle. Let’s hope the lessons of history are fresh enough in our cultural memory to avoid the inevitable consequence of frothing certainty.
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Not only did I learn that actor Clint Howard is the brother of Richie Cunningham, but also that he isn’t the same person as Curtis Armstrong.
Just when you think you’ve got a grip on reality…
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Understanding that not everybody has a degree in journalism, let’s try a quick quiz.
You’re a journalist with a mainstream news organization covering the Ocean State. A protest outside the governor’s house sees some modest action when two participants are arrested. One local freelance journalist captured the entire thing on camera and the video on his Facebook page. Do you:
A. Pay the journalist and license key portions of his video for your own coverage?
B. Request to use portions of his footage for your coverage and provide a link to your audience for the complete video?
C. Use portions of his footage and give him credit, but without providing a link to the full video?
D. Embed or link to the complete coverage with or without a request, because that’s how the internet and social media work, and freelancers can make money off of eyeballs?
E. None of the above. It’s John DePetro, and it’s more important to try to deny him any credit than inform your audience.
Rhode Island’s mainstream news organizations chose to answer the question in different ways.
- ABC 6 avoided the question altogether by actually covering the protest and getting video of its own.
- Channel 10 (WJAR) went with option C, flashing a tag, “John DePetro Facebook” over the key moment from the video, but not providing a link from the online story.
- Channel 12 (WPRI) did something similar, using “John DePetro Show” on the video, but using a clip from an irrelevant part, mentioning John by name in the online story, although without any link.
- The Providence Journal went with option E, saying only that “videos posted to social media showed that a group of protesters gathered outside McKee’s Cumberland residence.”
- But the award goes to Edward Fitzpatrick of the Boston Globe, whose long report doesn’t mention video of the incident, much less John DePetro. In fact, Fitzpatrick goes so far as to include video that Valley Breeze editor Ethan Shorey managed to capture (apparently) of the tail end, while the protesters were walking back to their cars.
This presents an important lesson. None of the coverage shows anything to contradict the claim of the police that they “responded to a disturbance” outside the governor’s house. As John’s video makes clear, and as I described earlier today, the police were there and waiting from the beginning and had a big hand in making the protest challenging, tense, and ultimately productive of arrests.
This story raises important and intriguing questions that could generate investigative reports, talking-head debates, and commentary for weeks. Groups are being treated differently. Out-of-uniform officers may be causing disruptions at rallies. The police were ready and waiting, with zip-tie handcuffs at the ready.
But the news media doesn’t really want to touch it because they’re ideologically opposed to the protesters (in contrast to BLM, whom they thought it a privilege to cover and support), and because direct footage of the key incident was captured by a source they’d rather ignore, pretending he’s not what they claim to be.
UPDATE (10/9/21 6:15 p.m.)
A pseudonymous account on Twitter responded to this post, saying John “created his own legacy, not us.” This is precisely the point. They would rather enforce their group shaming than better inform their audiences (which means instead of better doing their jobs).
This attitude has a second harmful effect more profound than leaving Rhode Islanders more ignorant: It negates the possibility of redemption. They’ve written John off (as most of them have done to me, by the way), and he is therefore banished with no hope of return.
Nobody should behave that way, but more so those with a pretense to informing the public about the state of reality.
Featured image by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.
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