Ed Supe John Huppenthal’s anonymous commenting and sock puppetry made Tucson’s 10 o’clock news Thursday night on KGUN 9, as you can see after the jump. Blog for Arizona’s Bob Lord and I were included in the story, but our words took a back seat to Huppenthal’s. How could the two of us compete with Hupp writing, “Obama is rewarding the lazy pigs with food stamps” or calling TUSD’s Mexican American Studies a “‘We hate whitey’ curriculum”?
I got a chance to “perform” Hupp’s comment on a 2012 Blog for Arizona post of mine where he wrote, “You guys are frequently scum, but this article makes you a special form of scum: evil scum.” (My post wasn’t about Huppenthal, by the way. It was about the national charter school chain, Imagine Schools. I have no idea why that got Hupp so upset. He went equally ballistic over another post of mine about Imagine schools, writing, “You have to be kidding me. how stupid and perverted are you?” There may be a story here, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.)
Reporter Justin Schecker said he couldn’t get a response for his story from Huppenthal or his campaign, which is fine — for now, anyway. I’m happy to have Hupp’s comments do the talking for awhile, until someone manages to put a camera and microphone in his face. The only reporter who’s gotten any spoken response out of Hupp since the story broke was Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times. Over the phone, Hupp said to Lemons, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” then hung up. He’ll have to expand on that, either in a face-to-face with a reporter or on the campaign trail.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2014.
Oh yes, KGUN is “digging” into this story that has been well reported by other media outlets.
Must be a slow news week?
Is Fraser Huppenthal too?
So if one tells the truth about the sordid practice of ethnic segregation in AZ, they “Hate Whitey” in Huppental’s way of thinking. I guess we shouldn’t tell the truth about slavery either, because that will make Black Americans hate “Whitey”. Or mention the Kerneyites and the anti-Chinese movement in the 19th Century because that would cause resentment and hatred of “Whitey” among Americans of Chinese descent. The funny thing is that there is NO empirical evidence to suggest that the MAS program produced hatred towards “whitey.” But why should Huppenthal let reality or the conclusions of the independent study commissioned by his own state education department get in the way of the reactionary beliefs passed on to him by his far right-wing catholic parents?