President Trump signs order to jail flag burners for one year
President Donald Trump signed an executive order enforcing jail time for flag burning despite First Amendment concerns.
Since when did teachers become the front line of the culture wars? Oh, since always.
Fresh from Florida’s classroom book banning and room-by-room scrutiny of books in the classroom, elected officials are now calling for teacher firings in the wake of the shocking murder of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Some teachers, it seems, have posted bad opinions on social media.
Kirk was a polarizing figure yet his killing united people of all political persuasions in reactions of profound shock and revulsion. Or should have, anyway. We seem to be in a cycle of frightening gun violence by net-intoxicated crazies.
It’s a scary time. And scary times do not invite measured responses.
And the answer to this is … Well, if you are listening to U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, whose district includes Volusia and Flagler counties, it’s that teachers and professors must be sacked.
“If you are aware of anyone in the 6th District of Florida — or heck, anywhere in the state — who works at any level of government, works for an entity that gets money from the government (health care, university), or holds a professional license (lawyer, medical professional, teacher) that is publicly celebrating the violence, please contact my office. I will demand their firing, defunding, and license revocation,” Fine posted on X.
If this were just Fine, someone given to reflexive, out-there social media posting, this could be written off. But no. There has been a national wave of suspensions, investigations and demands to fire teachers and college professors over social media posts in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination.
Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas issued a memo denouncing “despicable comments” and promised he would be “conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior.” This position was amplified by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
It’s alarming that politicians are deputizing keyboard warriors across the state to dig through the social media accounts of teachers and professors so their opinion-writing can be reported to the government, which presumably will react accordingly. Thought crimes that must be denounced and punished by loss of livelihood!
We seem to be living in times reminiscent of the 1950s Red Scare.
Look that phrase up in Wikipedia, kids, while you still can. That was a long-ago time when anyone with a mimeograph machine and a mailing list could destroy academic, government and entertainment careers with charges of communist or vaguely leftwing sympathies. And attention-hungry elected politicos were always more than happy to amplify those charges and dig for new targets.
Florida legislators, not to be outdone at the time, formed the Johns Committee that persecuted, no surprise here, teachers and professors, but also civil rights leaders, college students and state employees with allegations of communist sympathies, and when there weren’t enough commies to find, the committee shifted to looking for gay people. Committeemen denounced “obscene” books in the classroom (“Catcher in the Rye” right here in Florida colleges, folks!), and of course, the teaching of evolution. Dark times long ago.
In our own fraught days, a lot of dumb, tasteless and mean things get regularly posted on the internet. If a post doesn’t get a rise out of your audience, it won’t get clicks. Which is why social media feeds are often so depressing.
Depressing, but hardly criminal. People often post things that, if given a second thought, they wouldn’t have put out there. Things that they wouldn’t say out loud to an actual living person standing in front of them. The web is full of instant, visceral reactions competing for attention. That’s its nature. I know, people they ain’t no good.
However, when the government responds to this by strapping on keyboard hall-monitor sashes, the targeting inevitably gets politically selective. That’s when things start to look a lot like rank authoritarianism. Does it stop at firing teachers for outrageous posts or does it move on to stamp out mere contrarianism, harsh pronouncements and bad jokes? No clear boundaries here. Investigations are starting, and teacher firings are being demanded.
Teachers always seem to be politicians’ first targets. But don’t imagine it stops with them.
Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.