By John Klar
National outrage over George Floyd’s death was particularly virulent in super-progressive (“woke”) Vermont, where schools widely displayed the BLM flag beside the American flag. Unconcerned that this was a blatantly illegal government endorsement of an overtly partisan organization, proponents donned the “hear no evil from constitutionalists” earmuffs and prided themselves on agitating their neighbors by violating the Constitution.
John Klar
Many Vermonters have complained publicly that this is obvious abuse by government, but school officials have stonewalled, gaslighted, and suppressed all efforts to assert this axiomatic constitutional truth. The state’s capital city of Montpelier shamelessly painted BLM on the road in front of the Vermont State House and condemned as racist an effort to display “Liberty and Justice For All” beside it. This is a cohesive, deliberate drive to eliminate basic constitutional guarantees to be replaced with an anti-constitutional ideology: the BLM flag is elevated as a superior symbol.
The United States Supreme Court’s recent 9-0 Shurtleff decision, which said the government of Boston discriminated against a petitioner by refusing to fly the “Christian flag,” has caught the attention of these miscreants where parents and taxpayers were ignored. A state leader in this patently illegal flag display has been the Randolph Union High School (RUHS). The school mascot was reinterpreted as racist — the ghost rider on a horse looked too much like a KKK member — after the woke school principal draped an actual robe over it to project his racist interpretation onto the community. Now Vermont is pushing a law for the state to oversee all mascots to supposedly “provide positive and inclusive learning environments for all students.”
RUHS children have been systematically conditioned with CRT and BLM ideology, a bold and obscene indoctrination into liberal-only politics. Speech that detracts from the Democrat ownership of RUHS is verboten. Study materials portray police and conservatives as racists and reference “right-wing nuts.” The left-wing nuts are praised.
Students at RUHS can wear gay pride T-shirts but not shirts that say, “There are only two genders” (that’s a political attack on sensitive trans people) or “Let’s Go Brandon” (too profane). At a recent school board meeting, a clueless equity director was incensed that one student dared to wear a shirt that said “I love Chick-fil-A” in protest against the school’s cancelation of a baseball team fundraiser for using that company’s chicken. The school decided it was an attack on gays and imputed a nonexistent hate motive, aiming:
After the Chick-fil-A fundraiser was canceled, a student athlete wore a homemade shirt saying “I heart Chick-fil-A,” walking past other children, and children that have two moms [sic]. The message was, the Chick-fil-A fundraiser was canceled because it was not inclusive of all identities, and that response of a child who was considered a leader in the community wore a homemade shirt expressing that disdain. Is that what we want to show our children that that’s what a student leader does?
This school decides what is “hate speech” by conservatives while preaching its own variety against parents or students who disagree. Welcome to America’s one-party future!
The community has finally had enough, and parents who understand the Constitution have begun to stand up. Shurtleff has infused them with renewed determination, as has the increasingly absurd speech content discrimination of this and other Vermont schools. At a school board meeting on May 11, many “equity stakeholders” (partisan bureaucrats abusing their positions) stood up in oblivion and beseeched the school board to continue flying their illegal hate symbol!
School superintendent Layne Millington has taken missteps in responding to the community, portraying their rightful indignation at this illegal partisan bias as simmering racism that has infected the schools. However, he has been moved by Shurtleff, and on May 11, he attempted to explain clear law to a fuzzy social justice school board, which decided to “take it slow and study the law.”
Social justice ideology seeks to eliminate First Amendment protections for people (of any color) who do not buckle to their cult. The display of the BLM flag is every bit as inappropriate as a Confederate flag flown at a school. Even children understand that — even in Vermont.
Vermont is on the front lines of a constitutional battle — the entire state education apparatus has enthusiastically leaped onto the BLM bandwagon to virtue-signal its violation of voters’ basic constitutional liberties. Students have experienced a persistent ideological discrimination and are rebelling, with parents at their side who now know more clearly than firever the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Insisting that the school district provide personal indemnity if the BLM flag remained, Superintendent Millington wisely directed the offending BLM symbol to be taken down pending the school board’s decision. After years of community insult, the BLM flag at RUHS was unceremoniously taken off the school’s flagpole during the night.
The First Amendment has been restored for now.
John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. This commentary originally appeared at American Thinker.
We have a Republican governor who supports these communist, racist, scam artists and voted for Joe Biden and the Vermont Republican Party is just fine with that!
Those running the school system and the government would not dare to attempt or pull any of these stunts unless they were well compensated to do so…follow the money!
The destruction of our tax run educational system is an act of war.
Our Schools are run now and controlled by political activists.. that force their side upon the population and silence opposing views..
I mean wake up people and see what is going on here and stop this!
Yes, they are literally after our kids- where is the red line Parents? I’d think it would be with your kids.
It’s a bit absurd that our schools are getting involved with indoctrination of theory (CRT) derived from Marxism, when the identity of our country includes that it was founded on the principle that our greatest good is that each of us is free to pursue our own greatest good, within broad constraints. Those who espouse CRT and BLM must know that those ideals submit the individual to the demands of a particular group that supposedly knows what’s best for the rest of us: this is not what our country was founded on. And no, our country was not founded to perpetuate racism, another egregious example of bad logic easily refuted by historical fact.
Black lives matter? How about all the lives lost in the Civil War and in world wars– lives all of races– to defend the ideals of liberty for all? Do they matter? If they do, then stop indoctrinating children with Marxism and the theory of oppressed versus oppressors: we can all, each of us, be oppressed or oppressor at different times, and the ideal of our country is that those who would be oppressors never get the upper hand so that they can then dictate to the rest of us. Yet CRT is thoroughly dictatorial, justifying itself by Marxist reasoning. Fine: then go to Russia or China. We are not, nor should we ever be, a Marxist country. We are by design a free country, if we can keep it, but if we allow ourselves to wallow in unreason, we won’t be able to stand against the monsters that arise when reason sleeps. But this is exactly what CRT wants: they say it outright. They want their narrative, based on such falsehoods as that America was founded to perpetuate slavery, to serve as truths that light our way. No.
Yes, racism was and is real, but just because it exists at some times and places, or even at many times in many places, doesn’t mean that it’s therefore everywhere at all times: the fallacy of universal attribution, or to put it more colloquially, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.
We live in America and its ideals of freedom and liberty are a beacon for the rest of the world, even as specious reasoning (“I’m an anti-racist but I believe in separating people out by race”) attempts to subvert common sense and decency.
How about we spend our children’s time in school educating them about basic logic so they don’t fall for the narratives that are supposedly more real than what reason and logic tell us, but that only open the way for monsters to enter in? We can have all the private narratives we want to, all the religious reasoning we want to, in private: these are subjective matters the state has no right interfering with. By the same token, no one has the right to assert matters of faith or supposition or assumption or narrative and tell us that these are essential truths, while on the other side of their mouths they tell us there are no essential truths.
Please stop the nonsense, stop the indoctrination, stop imposing Marxism on our children, and teach them the basic logic and reasoning they’ll need to sort things out for themselves. If our teachers can’t or won’t do it then we need to get teachers who can. And if our superintendents don’t get it, then get rid of them.
LIVES MATTER
IF YOU NEED TO PUT A COLOR IN FRONT OF THESE TWO WORDS,
YOUR RACIST!
Well stated, Mike!
There is only one race, the HUMAN race. No matter the color of our skin or our outward appearance, we all bleed red. The sooner everyone comes to terms with that truth, the better off we will all be. There will always be those who think they are superior to others, and those who are convinced that they are oppressed and victimized. Both of these attitudes are a form of arrogance in which some feel that they are entitled to something more than what they already possess, be it material possession or honor and respect, all of which much be EARNED. If we all treated others the way we would desire to be treated, LIVES would really matter!
Randolph continues to make BAD , ill- advised choices in who leads their school system…all the while plummeting their school achievement levels into the briny wastes of the Winooski to Champlain overflow.
Their last Apostle of Woke was; T.E. Hawks who graced us with “Are you teaching the children of White Supremacists?” article that ACTUALLY made it into the Teacher’s Summer camp series here in Springfield last summer.
T.E. Hawks has since removed that horrid lead-in question to his horrid article because ( Ahem) I challenged him on it. Not only me though.
T.E. Hawks is now in leadership at an Upper Valley teachers school where he pushes his “White guilt” onto other WOKE teachers in the area.
Many of us parents and guardians aren’t done with shoveling that CRT / DEI excrement back to where it came from .