Arizona Superintendent of Public Education is anything but. He is a mean-spirited, truth-averse hater of public education, that which, over the past century, made America the greatest country in the world. He doesn’t care about public education. He wants private education funded by public funds, designed to benefit only those people who look like him and think like him.
Horne’s latest scourge upon Arizona is the introduction of the PragerU videos, flat-out right-wing propaganda designed to counter what Horne and those of his ilk consider to be “rampant woke-ism.” These things are brought to our school kids by the same people who think that slavery was just a jobs program and that a democratic system in which the person who gets the most votes is the winner is a danger to their America.
One of the videos features MAGA creature Dinesh D’Souza, the maker of propaganda films that are so patently false that even Fox News and the Wall Street Journal dump on them. That guy is wrong more often than a “Jeopardy” contestant who’s trying to hold in explosive diarrhea.
Unlike in his books and movies, where he tries to tiptoe through the minefield of truth while leaving out verified information that would destroy his argument, in the PragerU video, D’Souza claims that fascism is a left-wing philosophy. Yeah, Hitler the Hippie.
D’Souza says that fascism comes from the writings of Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, whom D’Souza claims was a liberal. Virtually every expert who knows of the life and works of Gentile will say that he was the patron saint of the revolutionary right. But now D’Souza is ready to inform Arizona’s home-schooled kids that Mussolini was somehow woke.
An honest intellectual could argue that modern fascism has elements from the right and the left, as played out in George Orwell’s brilliant “Animal Farm” and as is outlined in Rachel Maddow’s current bestseller “Prequel,” a chronicle of the rise of American fascism in the years before World War II. But only a MAGA dumbass would try to claim that fascism sprang up from liberal thought.
Then there’s “The Suicide of Europe,” a blatantly racist and anti-Muslim video that argues that Europe, that last bastion of whiteness, is being overrun by people who don’t look like Chris Evans or Charlize Theron. I mean, the Dutch soccer team has Black people on it! No wonder Johan Cruyff died before his time.
And finally, there’s the one with the greatest (misleading) title ever: “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy.” No, really.
While Horne is touting the introduction of the PragerU Propaganda Poop Pile, he’s also finding himself having to defend against the fiscal catastrophe that is the Arizona school voucher program.
You have to give credit where credit is due. While much of the national Republican Party has devolved into this putrescent ooze of Donald Trump Worship, some Arizona politicians kept their eye on their long-term goal of giving rich friends free money with which to send their kids to expensive, white private schools.
It actually started decades ago with the Great Charter School Hoax, a boondoggle that was pushed through as a “screw you” to public school teachers’ unions and somehow survives to this day. Back in the 1990s, Arizona was the Wild West of bad (or no) education. The state Legislature threw blank checks at anybody willing to start (or, even, to claim to start) a charter school. People would lease an abandoned Circle K building, send the state a phony list of “students,” get the check, and then skip town.
Arizona might have lost billions of dollars to shady operators and poorly run schools in those years. No one was entirely sure how much because one of the selling points of charter schools was that they were free from regulation and oversight. There still isn’t sufficient oversight and, despite 30 years of “innovation,” the fact remains that the average charter school student still underperforms in comparison to his/her counterpart at the nearest public school.
The public school haters in positions of power are now draining the state coffers to pay for the school vouchers after which they have been lusting all these years. It started out with the tiniest of measures. They wanted to help out a few special-needs kids. They said (among themselves), “Let’s find a Black kid in a wheelchair with an eyepatch and a speech impediment. We’ll put the kid on camera and say, ‘Here’s who we’re trying to help.’”
It was like Fanucci in “The Godfather, Part II” saying, “I just want enough to wet my beak.”
Ten years later, it’s costing Arizonans nearly $1 billion a year. And more than half of the voucher dollars are going to families who live in ZIP codes where the average household income is in the six figures.
Now comes word that Arizona is bleeding money. Backers claimed that the program would cost Arizonans $65 million this year. It’s gone past $800 million and is still rising. Horne and his cronies in the Legislature will try to tell you that the fact that the amount spent on vouchers and the $835 million budget shortfall are almost identical is just a coincidence and that they have nothing to do with each other.
Maybe D’Souza can do a PragerU video on math…and coincidences.
