The nation’s ultra-liberals and leftists have made Arizona the focus of their anger. Why?
Let’s examine this.
Beyond advocating an ever-expanding nanny state, working to undermine the nation’s military, defending racial preferences, and maintaining Big Labor as the Democrats’ political machine, only two other issues are seen by leftists as issues worth waging nationwide battles over.
Immigration and indoctrination (through identity-based high school and college classes) are these two other causes. Arizona has just thrown down the gauntlet against these two pet causes of the left.
Arizona’s political leaders “called out” the left when SB 1070 was signed into law. Twenty days later they signed into law a bill outlawing race-specific ethnic studies classes.
As I’ve said, Arizona’s on a roll!
Bringing to life a tough anti-illegal immigration law was considered an “in-your-face” act by the nation’s open-border advocates. They immediately began screaming for a national boycott, claiming the law was “racist.”
Knee-jerk leftists everywhere genuflected.
In Highland Park, Illinois, the local high school is preventing its girls’ basketball team from traveling to Arizona to play in a basketball tournament. The assistant superintendent said the trip “would not be aligned” with the schools “core beliefs and values.”
These poor girls sold cookies for months to raise money for the trip, which was taken away at the last minute by some dim-bulb administrator. But a parent of one of the players said, “I’m not sure whose values and what values and what beliefs they’re talking about. We just want to go to Arizona to play basketball.”
In San Diego, the president of the school district, Richard Berrera, pushed through a resolution restricting employees from traveling to Arizona.
He told parents and students, presumably mostly Latino, that they shouldn’t travel to Arizona because they might be the targets of racial profiling or harassment.
But a long-time employee of the San Diego schools said, “They have no authority or jurisdiction on matters in another state and they certainly have no authority to give directions to parents.”
But things really got crazy in Los Angeles. The politically liberal Los Angeles City Council voted thirteen to one to ban official travel to Arizona and will order a review of all contracts the city has with Arizona.
But since many of the existing contracts are airport, port, and energy services that can’t legally be affected by the boycott, the city of L.A. just engaged in a silly, empty, and largely meaningless gesture to stroke their liberal political egos.
At the council meeting, a long line of activists trouped to the microphone to condemn Arizona and even the people of Arizona as racists, bigots, and Nazis.
Not to be outdone by the activists, council members compared Arizona to Nazi Germany and the beginnings of the Holocaust. Without an ounce of shame, Councilman Ed Reyes said: “As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport. If I came across an officer who’s having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be … deported, no questions asked. That is not American.”
Shouldn’t this man, an elected official in the nation’s second largest city, be embarrassed to display this kind of uninformed, over-the-top posturing?
But Reyes was no different than the other thirteen city council members who voted for the boycott. None of them have taken the time or have the intellectual honesty to actually read the Arizona law, nor have they attempted to understand national immigration law.
But apparently they don’t care — because through their vote they are thumbing their noses at the American people.
A Pew Research Center poll found that, nationwide, seventy-three percent of Americans support Arizona’s law requiring people to produce documents verifying their legal status if police ask for them. A Rasmussen poll similarly found that seventy percent of Arizona residents support the law.
However, now Arizona has done something else that is causing leftists and liberals to become apoplectic.
In my last Hicks File I reported that Arizona was considering a bill banning certain kinds of ethnic studies classes in public schools.
Well, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has now signed that bill, HB 2281, which bans schools from teaching classes that single out a particular ethnic group, promote resentment, or advocate ethnic solidarity over treating students as individuals. It also bans classes that promote the overthrow of the government.
How many of you think this is a bad thing?
What you think apparently doesn’t matter. Immediately, howls went up from leftist radicals who have made careers out of indoctrinating students from a hate-America perspective.
They seem to think training students to hate America and Americans is their right.
But these programs have been troubling from their very beginning.
I was once part of a radical black nationalist organization that helped bring about the black studies program at UCLA in 1968. This resulted in a vicious struggle between competing black power groups that left two members of the Black Panther Party dead after a campus shoot-out.
Radical Latino organizations followed suit. I was in attendance when revolutionary Latino nationalist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales argued for El Plan de Aztlan at a conference in Denver, Colorado — a plan that essentially called for a separate Chicano nation.
It is no accident that one of the books featured in the Latino ethnic studies classes in Arizona is titled Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. The book is written by the old hard-left radical Rodolfo Acuna, who was a professor at the country’s most radical ethnic studies program, the Chicano studies program at Cal State Northridge in Los Angeles.
Yeah, I have known these folks; I also know their motives, their goals, and their methods. It was right for Arizona to ban these classes. Often taught by radicals, these classes promote ethnocentrism and xenophobia, and espouse something called, I kid you not, ”Aztec math.”
Listen to the opinion of John Ward. He’s a former teacher of a sociology class at a Tucson High Magnet School, which teaches a Raza (race) curriculum. He has revealed the following:
He says the basic theme of the class was that Mexican-Americans were victims of a racist American society, driven by the interests of middle- and upper-class whites. As a result, social, political, and economic events in America must be seen through the lens of white domination.
Ward taught that the southwestern United States was stolen from Mexicans because of the greed of whites and that that area of the country is “Atzlan,” the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, and still rightfully belongs to their descendants.
So let me get this right: the taxpayers of Arizona have been supporting public school classes that teach some students, in this case Latino children, that the country they live in is their enemy.
So are these ethnic studies a joke?
Hell yes! But the joke has been squarely on us.
Here in California, a Balboa High School freshman went before a meeting of that city’s school board to argue for stronger ethnic studies.
She said, “How can I know who I can be if I don’t know who I am?” Ethnic studies, she claimed, “provides me with the foundation to learn who I am.”
Uh huh … but let me ask an inconvenient question. Why do taxpayers have to teach this young girl who she is?
Arizona provided us with an answer. We don’t!
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