Who is the most dangerous person in the world? Vladimir Putin comes to mind for not only the vicious evil he's doing to Ukraine right now, but what he could do if he got really carried away.
Kim Jong Il? North Korea has just tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. Nobody who's interested in that can be labeled as anything other than deeply dangerous.
Mohammad Bin Salmon? His control of fossil fuels in Saudi Arabia, plus his ruthlessness in muscling up his power, demonstrated several times now, makes him a prime candidate for that title.
Xi Jinping? The military forces he controls, including a decent number of nuclear weapons, and tensions rising in Taiwan, might give him the edge.
Ex-? Well, not anymore. Not now, anyway. But he's running for president again, and should he regain power, nobody can possibly know the hijinks he can commit.
But Mike Pompeo, obviously testing the waters to see if enough members of the Republican Party can get behind a presidential run, has named someone else. In his deep, delusional analysis, the most dangerous person in the world is: Randi Weingarten.
Huh? The world? More dangerous than the abovementioned five individuals? He was perfectly serious. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, he said, was more dangerous than any of them.
Really? She can inflict more damage on our country than any of those other guys? How does that work?
He's put together a scenario that rivals anything I've seen for nonsense since QAnon. I wonder, in fact, if his comments aren't made directly toward them to gain a base for him. Crazy? Yes, they are. Yes, that would be. And yes, Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were re-elected to their House seats.
But it follows a familiar pattern: Get out there ahead of everyone else, make outrageous statements that can't be disproven, and stand by while everyone (you hope) discusses it and drills down to no avail, one way or another. Then you come back with something else, other claims that you can't ignore.
That's how you build attention. At least, that's how ex- did. How did that work for him?
But where did he get Weingarten's name from? How did he bestow upon her such gravitas?
I really have no idea. But as bombastically ridiculous as this is, I don't think it's too hard to speculate.
Consider what he added to this claim: "It's not a close call. If you ask, 'Who's the most likely to take this republic down?' it would be the teachers' unions, and the filth that they're teaching our kids, and the fact that they don't know math and reading or writing."
Pray tell, Mike, what is this "filth" of which you speak? Is it pornographic? Sexist? Misogynist?
He didn't say, but I'm betting that once again, it's a reference to that which has never been practiced: Critical race theory. Filth? Dirty? Disgusting? Or truths that would just as soon not be faced--ever?
Once again: Critical race theory is a phrase that, in 30 years of teaching history, never once crossed my desk or entered the conversation of any colleague or department meeting. Never. Critical race theory is not some conspiratorial, sneakily entered concept that somehow poisons the minds of young people. It's the idea that, if you're going to discuss the effects of race on our society--it's there whether you like it or not--it does you far more good to drill deep to totally "get it."
The deeper you go, of course, the more insidious it becomes. Lots of white people don't like that, of course. They'd just as soon look past it. But filth? Disgusting? Au contraire--it's disgusting to refer to it as filth, when it's a serious, purposeful study in the terrible effects racism has had in seeping its way into so many things we routinely do and say on a daily basis.
Does that make America a bad place? It depends who you are. If you're Mike Pompeo, striving to be chief blusterer and exaggerator for a tragically misguided political party, then it's best to point out and cherry-pick circumstances where someone has said something disparaging toward America in some classroom. But additional insults, actually, aren't needed. We enslaved human beings for 250 years and let go of it only in our worst war in which more than half a million of our countrymen died. Then we manipulated our legal and cultural systems so that those who were enslaved continued to get the worst of it. It's all there in whatever textbook you want to choose.
Mike Pompeo can't change that. It's extremely disturbing that he even wants to.
But not only that. He's dragged along by media, which prefers to rely on Randi Weingarten for cogent comments on educators and education, when in fact she leads a labor union with less than one-third the size of the largest in the nation. That's right--the AFT has something like 900,000 members. While that's fairly impressive, the largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, has more than three million. Three million.
The president of that group is Becky Pringle. I've known her for more than twenty years. While I haven't read anything she's said about critical race theory, it's probably tangential to what Weingarten said in response to Pompeo's empty attacks: "So Mike, let me make it easy for you. We fight for freedom, democracy and an economy that works for all. We fight for what kids and communities need. Strong public schools that are safe and welcoming, where kids learn how to think and work with others. That's the American Dream!"
This is the greatest threat to the world? This threatens whom? It only threatens those who choose to smear, like Mike Pompeo. It only threatens the clueless, like Mike Pompeo. But it also means that while ex- looks to be losing his personal influence, it doesn't mean that other Republicans won't keep trying to characterize unions and educators who choose to stand up for themselves as, somehow, threats to our society and culture.
It was that way when I traveled amongst union people at all levels, when I kept pointing out that that's what they had in mind from the start. It had to be enough of threat to the Cedarburg School District that they more or less forced into retirement when I tried to return after my stint on the NEA Executive Committee and try (as I would have) to give the kids an idea on what life in Washington, DC was really like. It's no different now.
That we dodged a huge bullet on November 8 and managed to retain a semblance of our democracy doesn't mean it still isn't being threatened. Keep your eyes on Mike Pompeo and see what kind of influence he'll have. It won't be pretty.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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