Playing politics with school re-openings is bad, but this is worse.
Of all the brouhahas since the COVID lockdowns, few have provoked more fury, more despair, or more buck-passing than school closures. Last week Governor Roy Cooper’s strong-arming 2 Democrats in the Senate to abstain from overriding his veto on Senate Bill 37 to reopen schools hit a nerve with families:
The whole “Roy Cooper is ruining public schools by keeping them closed” conversation, including the debate over whether or not the NCAE union is pulling the Governor’s strings, has its merits. But it is being undertaken without full comprehension of what Cooper has done to destroy the state’s school system for good. No doubt, school closures have created a painful and destructive tempest for students and parents, but with the help supplemental learning and therapy, children can recover in the long run. But what parents and the public don’t know is what fresh hell awaits students when schools finally do open.
Thanks to Roy Cooper’s recent re-appointment of James E. Ford to the State’s Board of Education, students, and the rest of us, will be flung into an abyss of racist paranoia created by the new critical race theory teaching standards, whose radical tentacles reach far beyond social studies.
This quest to replace reading, writing, and arithmetic with ‘woke’ subjects like white supremacy, systemic racism, and transgender rights began, in part, in 2018. That’s when Governor Cooper appointed former history teacher and director at the progressive Public School Forum James E. Ford to sit on the State’s Board of Education. According BoE’s website, members “set the direction for all aspects of Department of Public Instruction and local public school organization and operations.”
Board chair Eric Davis (Wells Fargo exec.) and others have anointed Ford the apostle of critical race theory, the archangel of “wokeness.” Ford is the indisputable driving force behind getting new supposedly “anti-racist’’ social studies standards drafted, passed in North Carolina — standards that Lt. Governor Mark Robinson has vigorously opposed because they “re-write history,” and use politically-loaded “code words” like “systemic racism,” that give students a negative view of their country. The Lt. Governor stated: The “system of government in America is not systemically racist. In fact, it is not racist at all.” Robinson said. “I think they are politically charged. I think they are divisive, and I think they, quite frankly, smack of a lot of leftist dogma.”
Ford’s opening act on the Board to publicly attack board members for their ‘racist’ decision to close the Charlotte Learning Academy — a charter school with a five-year failing record, whose owner (after closing down) went on to open another school that also failed in the middle of its second school year.
This incident presaged all of Ford’s work on the board. He ignores the plight of black students trapped in failing schools — preferring instead to grandstand about “white supremacy” ostensibly destroying education, which he claims without offering a scintilla of evidence. Meanwhile Ford’s nonprofit CREED, started (coincidentally) in 2018, earns beaucoup bucks for the supposed purpose of solving “systemic racism” in school districts. And while he scavenger hunts for “white supremacists” in schools, reading scores for the very students he professes to care about most — black students- have dropped.
If you asked him to explain why, James E. Ford would tell you that “white supremacy” is to blame. If you pushed back, he’d probably call you a “white supremacist.” That’s exactly what happened to former State Superintendent Mark Johnson when he pointed to Ford’s anti-white bias as a sign of his unfitness to serve on the State Board of Education following this tweet:
Instead of apologizing for offending taxpayers in North Carolina, Ford published a defiant response that painted Superintendent Johnson, and everyone else troubled by his comments, as an out-of-touch racist. Ford explained his tweet this way:
“I am a Black male education professional, the grandson of sharecroppers, and a descendant of enslaved Africans in America. This informs everything I do.”
So obsessed with ‘white supremacy’ is Ford that more than 72% of his Twitter posts since June 2020 (numbered in the thousands) have demonized white people and police — tweeting hate like this up to 10 times per day:
Does he know that he’s talking about the teachers and mothers that make up his constituency? Sure he does, and that’s what makes Ford’s role on the Board of Education so menacing. But white women can take comfort that Ford doesn’t just hate them, he hates ALL people with white skin, even the nice ones:
Pay attention folks! This man has laid the foundation for what millions of public school children will learn for years to come. And he doesn’t just tweet hate, he trains hundreds of teachers how they too can espouse his brand of hatred in their own classrooms:
Ford’s take on cops is equally troubling, though not surprising:
Naturally Ford embraces the anti-American, anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright:
Back in 2008, Rev. Wright lost the support of not only black Christian pastors, but of our first black president Barack Obama. After videos of the good Reverend that showed Wright claiming that the terror attack of 9/11 was an “inside job,” and shouting “Not G-bless America, but G-Damn America” his sermon. Rev. Wright, like his friend and colleague Louis Farrakhan is a notorious, unapologetic Jew-hater. According to Wright:
“The state of Israel is an illegal, genocidal place… to equate Judaism with the state of Israel is to equate Christianity with [rapper] Flavor Flav.”
Rev. Wright now spends his time teaching church congregations that the formation of Israel is a sin and that there is no such thing as a Jewish person.
It’s safe to say that no sane person believes that a man who hates whites and embraces Jew-haters is fit to control what 1.5 million children aged 5–18 will be force-fed learn in our classrooms under the guise of “education.” But elections have consequences, and Roy Cooper’s re-election has put our school system on a dark path where children will either catch “white supremacy” fever- to presume to see racism in every corner of their innocent lives, even where it doesn’t exist, and then cancel anyone who dares to ask: “shouldn’t we look for evidence first?” — or they’ll become so convinced that they cannot succeed, that they will never achieve the American dream, discouraging them from aspiring and striving in their lives.
The key drafter of our new “social studies” standards does not consider himself, or others with black skin, to be part of America:
And it’s here in Ford’s revelation that we see his segregationist, Jim Crow-type worldview: Blacks and whites not equal, the country “belongs” to whites and not blacks, only whites are deserving of their American Birthright. This is a lie, and a dangerous one at that. And that’s the insidious thing about a living in a post-COVID culture where trust has been replaced with fear — a majority of people don’t need to support or participate in a dangerous lie for them to destroy society due to the actions of one man. James E. Ford’s role on the school board, where he can poison the minds of millions of children, where his hands are literally guiding the future of our state’s human capital; does more to obliterate the state’s public education system than protracted school closures ever could.
Will there be a reasonable person who will trust North Carolina’s public school system when they learn what’s going on?
Trust in institutions is important, but the thing that keeps us living in harmony and happiness is trust in each other. These new standards will surely sow discord and erode trust for generations to come.
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