According to Former Sec. of State Pompeo, the Award for 'Most Dangerous Person in the World' Goes to…
In a continued assault on education, the former secretary of state claims America's teachers are more of a threat to democracy than right-wing autocrats and domestic terrorists. Yes, teachers.
Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash
How would you answer this question: “Who is the most dangerous person in the world?”
Is it Korean leader Kim Jong Um?
Russian president Vladimir Putin?
Chinese president Xi Jinping?
Donald Trump?
White American domestic terrorists wielding AR-15s?
Teachers?
Wait…what?
Teachers?
That’s what former Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during an interview this week for Semafore.
More specifically, he was referring to American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten.
Pompeo, rumored to be considering a presidential run, said:
The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. 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.
So not right-wing dictators like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Putin, or North Korea’s Kim — all people Pompeo has dealt with personally.
No, America’s teachers’ unions are the existential threat because of “the filth they’re teaching our kids,” who apparently can’t read, write, or “know math.”
Weingarten fired back:
This is not just ridiculous bluster from a wanna-be republican presidential contender.
It’s another example of the stochastic terrorism that has lately become the republican party’s stock in trade.
And it’s dangerous.
As we’ve seen, particularly since the elevation of Donald Trump to the nation’s highest office, violent rhetoric breeds violent action.
We don’t need to stretch that far back for examples.
Just look at the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul last month.
The assailant, who left Pelosi with a skull fracture and injuries to his right arm and hands, demanded, “Where is Nancy?” after being groomed by right-wing hate propaganda calling for Nancy Pelosi’s death, such as what Georgia republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has encouraged.
The domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overthrow democracy had her in their sights as well.
We mourn more violence last weekend after a gunman, shot up a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub.
But federal hate crime charges aren’t stopping right-wing hate media from mocking it with headlines like “Politicizing the Colorado Springs Massacre,” “Vigilante ‘Journalist’ Blames Libs of TikTok and Tucker Carlson for Colorado Shooting,” “Dems Twist Shooting to Smear Parents Against Gender Bending,” and “Gender Clinic Founder Admitted in 2017 That Child Sex Change Surgeries Were Performed Without Evidence of Efficacy”.
Of course we remember the mass shooting of mostly Black patrons of a Topps supermarket this summer outside Buffalo, NY, for which a 25-count indictment of the perpetrator states he carried out a “domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate…because of the [victims’] perceived race and/or color.”
According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, the shooter was radicalized on dark web platforms like 4chan.
However, one doesn’t need the dark web when he (and it’s always a he) can consume right out in the open headlines like “U. of Florida Revokes White QB’s Scholarship After He Used N-Word in Rap Video,” “SF Considers Axing Elections Director for Being a White Man,” and nearly every night Fox so-called “news” pundit Tucker Carlson spews “white replacement theory,” a racist, anti-Semitic ideology that promotes the erroneous premise that people of color are on pace to “replace” Caucasians.
These are catalysts for a fire that has been smoldering for years and has been heating up since Donald Trump stepped onto the scene in 2015 calling Mexicans “ rapists, murderers, and drug dealers.”
It is that same animus behind Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
It is the same racism behind Trump’s Muslim ban.
And the white supremacy that motivated Trump’s “shit-hole countries” slur.
And the hatred that emboldened Trump to tell four female House members of color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”
The republican party has thrown in with adherents of the extreme right-wing conspiracy theory group Q-Anon, who believe — not making this up —Democrats are part of a global satanic pedophile cabal, members of which Donald Trump has been sent to arrest and possibly execute.
A recent report from researchers at the University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) reveals an alarming number of 8,600 respondents — one in five — believe political violence may be necessary to achieve certain political goals.
According to the survey, half of Americans somewhat agree the country will engage in civil war “in the next few years.”
Nearly one in five assert they will soon arm themselves in situations “where political violence is justified.”
Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a Carnegie Endowment senior fellow specializing in democracy and security, stated:
This is a very strong methodological study that backs up what we are seeing in a lot of other data. America is at risk of experiencing major political violence.
This data comes at the same time members of the House of Representatives are going to start receiving up to $10,000 to upgrade security at their homes amid increasing threats.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), chair of a House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Capitol Police, told Axios “everybody’s on high alert” after two incidents in which a man was arrested for threatening Wash. Rep. Pramila Jayapal with a handgun outside her home.
US Capitol police reported 9,625 threats and “concerning actions or statements” against congressional members last year.
Five years ago, there were 3,939 reported.
44% — nearly half of respondents identifying as republicans on a CBS and YouGov survey administered to 2,021 — answered that we should accept mass shootings as the price of living in a free society.
So much hate and violence have been lately directed at school board members and school district personnel, the FBI has gotten involved.
Librarians have also become targets of extremist threats from neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Former Sec. of State Pompeo should be ashamed of himself.
But, of course, he probably isn’t.
Why would he be?
No matter how outlandish the conspiracy theories, no matter how inciteful the implications of carrying out one’s threats may be, stochastic terrorism is “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act.” It doesn’t require the person at the top instigating it to be specific about what that violent act should be.
Despots, dictators, and terrorists throughout history have just had to plant the seeds of violent action in followers’ heads, sit back, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may.
As Andrew Gawthorpe wrote in The Guardian:
Political violence in the United States has tended to come in two forms. The first consists of simply unhinged acts, like John Hinckley Jr shooting Ronald Reagan in the hope of impressing the actress Jodie Foster, or Timothy McVeigh hoping to bring down the government with a bomb. The second is more systematic and sinister: the violence used to keep down groups who threaten the social and political order. This is the violence of strikebreakers and the KKK…This was violence of the people, by the people, for the government.
In September, President Biden delivered one of the most important speeches any president has ever had to deliver in which he warned about the existential threat the rise of right-wing extremism presents to America’s future.
Scapegoating teachers is a cheap fallacy.
Hopefully it won’t get anyone killed or injured.
But we be can’t sure when someone the status of a former secretary of state is literally singling America’s educators out as “the most dangerous people in the world” for having the temerity to shape the future of a country with more guns than people in which school shootings are becoming more commonplace.
He joins Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis, another presidential aspirant, also demonizing teachers in the “Parental Rights in Education bill,” what opponents have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, he signed, which decrees:
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade three or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
Last year, he went full George Orwell when he signed legislation requiring the state’s public universities’ and colleges’ students, faculty, and staff to register their political views to promote “intellectual diversity,” compelling taxpayer-funded educational institutions to implement annual surveys to determine “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” and whether members of the educational community “feel free to express [their] beliefs and viewpoints.”
An additional bill prevents state colleges and universities from exposing students to ideas “they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.”
Another creates a K-12 “portraits in patriotism” civics curriculum contrasting the United States with communist and totalitarian governments.
These are just his assaults on educators.
He’s also all in with promoting hatred against immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and members of the LGBTQ community.
They’re part of the extreme right-wing crusade behind organizations like “Moms for Liberty” that dupe parents into harassing school boards, librarians, and teachers for fear of students being exposed to non-existent “Critical Race Theory” (CRT).
Why would they want to pick on teachers?
Because teachers are on the front lines of shaping the future of this country.
Education is a powerful weapon, and keeping people ignorant and compliant is essential in creating foot soldiers for the republican agenda of deregulation of corporate polluters and tax cuts for the economic royalists.
Plus, Randi Weingarten heads one of the country’s most powerful unions, something else republicans hate.
80 years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.”
Former secretary Pompeo wants to cancel that freedom, and he’s not alone.
Wouldn’t that make them the most dangerous people in the world?