It’s pretty remarkable how the people who campaign on platforms of wanting less government in people’s lives are the very folks to obsess in using government to control lives.
The latest case in point is in the leadership of Ellen Weaver, the state’s freshman state superintendent of education who is trying to control what students read and see in schools.
At issue now is her decision to align the state Department of Education with PragerU, a controversial content producer that pumps out videos with information that its leader has admitted seeks to indoctrinate students into adopting conservative viewpoints.
As if South Carolina isn’t conservative enough.
As Statehouse bureau chief Jack O’Toole reported this week, these PragerU videos aren’t the cute educational Schoolhouse Rock videos from a generation or two ago. They are, in many cases, intellectually disingenuous and dangerous. Here are loony examples of what’s in some of the 360 videos produced by PragerU:
- On slavery. A cartoon version of Christopher Columbus doesn’t deny slavery, but says, “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world. … Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”
- On activism. A cartoon Frederick Douglass tells children that “big problems need to be approached very carefully,” when, in fact, he was the leading abolitionist
of the 19th century. - On climate change. In a video called “How To Think Objectively,” PragerU uses sarcastic rhetoric that denigrates climate change — falling into the misleading trap that it says in the video it wants students to avoid.
- On the left. Dennis Prager narrates one video that starts, “Why does the left hate Israel?” The five-minute presentation then shows him on camera fighting a straw man version of the left: “Israel is a liberal democracy. It extends full rights to women, to gays and to its many Arab citizens. … But compared to most countries, not to mention its neighbors, it is a civil rights paradise.” The left hates Israel? Democracy? Civil rights? That would certainly be news to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. If there’s ever an example of conservative political indoctrination in a video, this is it.
South Carolina lawmakers need to wake up to what’s happening in our public schools. Weaver seems to be operating with the strategy of doing whatever she wants, as she is strategically pushing what sounds like stuff that came from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984. It is dangerous, inappropriate and irresponsible. And it threatens freedom of thought, ideas and discourse.
State lawmakers need to rein in Weaver and her state agency. It seems to be spinning more and more out of balance with the kinds of book bans, inaccurate videos and thought-control tactics typically found in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, not South Carolina.
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