Reframing Conversations About Education

Why because the more that people know, the more robust education that people have, the less ability they have to be controlled, the more questions that they ask. So if you go to war on critical thought, if you ban books, if you ban thinking, if you narrow curriculum to implement

your lies, you further the cause for white supremacy. When you have generation after generation of students believing that slavery was a good thing, that the owning of people, the raping, the beating, the brutalization, the ripping of babies and breaking apart of families, the lynchings, the torture, the domestic terrorism.

When you start to look for the bright side and all of those things and say, wow, you know, maybe they were enslaved and shackled and beaten and weren't fed, and you know, tortured for four hundred, five hundred years. But at least they became a woodworker, least they learned how to be a blacksmith. When the truth of the matter is those very people were stolen from their countries, from their communities with them skills that they came here with.

Those white slaveholders didn't teach them a fucking thing except

how depraved parts of humanity could actually be. So Jonathan and I in today's conversation talk about the fact that Democrats are late to the party with regard to education, public education being on the front lines of the battle to save our democracy, because if we are not fighting for robust, genuine, fact based education, then our society has no chance for survival because what we are creating then is generation of generation of mindless which it workers, which

is sad because guess what, we ain't got no whichet's to work in this country because we've outsourced factories. So you tell me the jobs that people are going to get that allow them to be globally competitive and also, I don't know, competitive against artificial intelligence, which in the next five to ten years is going to replace a lot of fucking jobs. We are creating our own destruction.

And if we don't fight for education, if we don't fight for books, if we just look at this as siloed issues of oh well, they're talking about black people today and Jewish people tomorrow and trans people the next day, if we just take it piece by piece instead of fighting for the whole, which is the right to think.

matters to all of us. So I am encouraging people to find out about your school board elections, find out what the fuck is happening in your school speak out, donate, run for office. We have got to mobilize because right now they are winning. Coming up next, my conversation with our friend Jonathan Metzel. Folks, you know that whenever we have the opportunity each week to sit down with our

in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzil. I am always thrilled and the conversation is always stirring, and this week I'm sure will be no different. Jonathan.

it truly is happening. So, folks, what we know is that over the last couple of weeks or last, yeah, the last couple of weeks, the state of Florida has once again outdone itself with their pure, unadulterated fuckery to erase black people, black culture, to marginalized the trans community, which is already marginalized, and to criminalize women and everyone essentially that is not white, that is not cis, that

is not hetero or male. And they really, I mean just took great lengths to redesign the education curriculum that would have young people in the State of Florida to learn and believe that slavery was somehow beneficial to black people, which is It's what I did in a video the other day, Jonathan, which was stating that it is not enough to oppress, right, they actually want you to be grateful for the oppression, Like that's the place that we're in,

which is to say, oh, well, slavery wasn't necessary evil, and you should be grateful for the fact that you learn skills, because how they see black people were as empty minded animals that they brought here, domesticated and gave all of these skills to left to their own devices. Right, who would have known what would have happened to, you know, enslaved Africans. That's the mentality of white supremacist slaveholders and their ancestors aka the Desantises, the Abbots, the Trumps, and

the Republican Party of the world. Now, please tell the people how far this ideology is now going. And what was just stated on Fox.

And we're seeing that happen a lot. There was a poll that came out, I think last week that showed that over sixty percent of white Americans think that anti white racism is the most parnicious form of racism in this country. So increasingly white Americans are saying, it's not anti black racism that is the problem, it's actually we're the victims of racism, like kind of turning the turning the tide. So number one is that there's this logical

twist in which people become the victims. And what does that do, right, It get off get you don't have to see your own complicity. It's not like, oh, I'm part of a system that's oppressing other people. In fact, I'm the victim of this system. I don't have to

see my own participation. So that's part number one. And then part number two is I'm going to find some strong man or strong person who protects me because I'm the victim of all this kind of stuff, which is we're seeing with the rise of Trump and DeSantis and this logic of not like, let's make the country better for everybody. And then the third is historical revision that fill in the blank, historical atrocity wasn't so bad. Why should we be hung up on studying black history. Slavery

wasn't so bad. In fact, slaves learned marketable skills that they later losed in the job market. Now, of course, it's never the people who themselves, their families, their groups were the victims of that. It's more like people who are on the outside trying to justify. It's more often people who were in the aggressor group who were saying, oh, the system wasn't so bad. We help people, and we have much more to say. I hope we talk about it today about where that logic comes from about slavery

wasn't so bad. But once that gets to be your logic, it gets to ridiculous endpoints, like what happened a couple of days ago on Fox News where a Jewish Fox News host was talking to another Fox News host and the Fox News host said, I'm Jewish, Are you going

to tell me that the Holocaust wasn't so bad? And the Fox News people all said, yeah, there were marketable skills that Jews who survived the Holocaust got and people who survived the Holocaust, and they were citing Victor Frankel, whose brothers, parents, and pregnant wife were all murdered in concentration camps as saying because Victor Frankel survived the Holocaust, so in a way, what they're doing is just using this and the Holocaust thing for me was like, man,

it's just like mad lips, Like you can just fill in the historical atrocity and then say it wasn't so bad for that kind of thing. But it's gotten to the point where, yes, the Holocaust taught Jews marketable skills that they could later use in the job market. That's a logic that is actually being said on the biggest news channel in the United States.

The vileness of slavery that we are still feeling the effects of and will until the end of days in this country and around the world. It is what anti

blackness is perpetuated off of. It is what policies are created around, right, And so to have this Florida Board of Education decide that this is how they're going to teach slavery goes to show you the lengths that white supremacy has to go to in order to survive, the lengths of lies and the depths of deceit, in order to continue to indoctrinate generation after generation to believe that black people deserve the treatment that they've received because all

white people are benevolent, right, and that without the institution of slavery, that black people would have never been able to thrive and survive in society. Again, and perpetuating lies and stereotypes about the humanity of black people, denying the depravity of white domestic terrorism, which is what founded this country.

To then go to the other length to begin to erase the responsibility of people's roles in the Holocaust, including the United States that allowed and waited for millions of Jewish people to die before you actually to be murdered, before you engaged in war. I just I don't know. I mean, you talk to these people. I don't know how you talk to these people.

on anybody. I think that this it's not even just revisionist history, it's wrong history, right, Like what they said on Fox News, for example, was that Jews survived concentration camps by being the word they use was useful, and so you would have to like know nothing about the Holocaust to know to not know that the Jews who survived the Holocaust, it was just totally capricious, like there was no everybody died basically, but the ways that they made deals with people is like if you help push

your aunt into the gas chamber, you you'll survive another week or something like that. Like what useful meant was serving the needs of the murderers, right, And so in a way, it's it's it's it's ignorant, but it's also a really dangerous lie. And so part of the story is that this is playing out in the context of all of these attacks on education for being too woke and redoing the standards and stuff like that they're trying to kind of and so I think we need a

massive mobilization and defense of education. I think education is the terrain that this is obviously being fought on. And we were late to the game. Right a year ago we talked about it on this show. Right wingers were mobilizing at school boards and saying let's ban books and

stuff like that, and we were horrified. But every time there were five hundred parents saying we want these books banned, there should have been five thousand people showing up at the school board saying we're not going to stand for that, or running for school board elections or things like that. Like I think, I think we're seeing and I'm surprised that education is the terrain right. It's been right in front of us this entire time.

term win the election. But if you convince enough people that the system was rigged or Trump actually won the election, and then you overturn the school boards and stuff like that, you can actually create your own reality. And so there's something about this that flows for me, at least out of Trump taking the most obvious fact in the world, like, dude, you lost the election and saying we don't have to stand for any fact that we don't agree with. Yeah, And that to me like opened the doors. And so

in a way, obviously we're fighting back against that. But these things to me like kind of all seem they all seem connected, which is, there is no truth except for the one that makes you feel good or something something like that. And so in a way it just seems to me like education is is I just I'm thinking that any schools across the country have closed their dei offices after the Supreme Court ruling. And have you heard a lot of protests about that?

there are things that are factual. And once you had a group that decided that no, no, these scientists don't know what they're talking about, this isn't real, This isn't you know, this isn't actually happening. That was the beginning of the creation of their own reality, getting their own quote unquote scientists getting their own you know, doctors, and

creating this alternative set of facts. And I think that when we look at this now and we go to Glenn Youngkin, right now we fast forward to Glenn Youngkin's campaign for governor on CRT and parental choice, right which all hearkens back to your kids, your white kids shouldn't have to go to school with these black kids. That should be your choice. There should be no mixing of

the races. That should be your choice, right Like, it all hearkens back to those days, and to your point, DEI offices are being closed, people are being fired from those roles that were created really the aftermath of George

Floyd and then boom, they're gone. So it's like, I don't education and the lack thereof have always been on the front lines of pushing against white supremacy because the more educated that people are, the more critical thought that you instill in them, right, the more the less likely they are to be duped, and that's what they want. And I just don't understand. I don't know how to break on through right past what it is that they are, the bullshit that they are feeding.

core asumptions are completely up for grabs. Like I think that if somebody like Trump or to Sant just wins, you might see something like brown versus Board of Education being thrown up for grabs. And so I just think people have been relatively late to the game of like seeing the centrality of education to all of this agenda, But what does it mean to defend education? Like what

tools do we have to defend education? And I don't like ending desegregation was a unified agenda that people could agree upon, not everybody, but it became a kind of rallying cry for legal interventions for building infrastructure. What is our tool right now for defending education? When there are people all across.

to be globally competitive. That Rohndesson said, Oh, we need to go back to the basics, the basics of what we're battling against, fucking AI And you want to teach the basics, right, Like, the basics are not doing it because there are no basic jobs anymore because they've all

been sent overseas. So I'm like, I'm confused about why people are not outraged, right, Like why there weren't thousands of people that were organized to fight back against their school boards when they were talking about, you know, reversing COVID restrictions. So you're just sending your kids into a fucking patriotish.

metonyms for all liberalism. All education has become too liberal because boys are dressing as girls and stuff like that. And in a way we were. The fight was on, there was on their terrain. And so I guess the question it's it's a it's a question which is like, how do you reclaim education in a way that is mobilizing across the spectrum of Democrats independence, which isn't fighting

about wokeism? Right. I think that what the right has been able to do is say all liberals are woke, and all everything woke is about fighting about pronouns, and it's very divisive for Democrats in a way, right, And so the issue is how can we defend education in a way that is completely unifying for Democrats? And I think the issue is, I think you're right, run for school boards, facts, truth, all that kind of stuff. We've just been put back on our heels and slow to the game.

The Vice President gave an impassioned speech and which you know had I forget who wrote it, but it's out right now, which was an article written by a Republican that said, I agree with the Vice President of the United States. Why are Republicans afraid of critical thought?

spread these lies about these women that destroyed their lives. Right, And so if we are to unify, the unified message needs to be about critical fighting for critical thought, and fighting for and fighting for truth right, and that goes that hits every single place, from climate change to the classroom to Capitol Hill in our elections.

make is that it's for too long. It's been like, oh, I'm so sorry that those books are being banned about those people, but that doesn't really affect me, right, And I think what we need to do is, like we need a real big tent, like do this is about everybody in a certain kind of way, Like it's even for democrats and liberals. It's like, oh, those books about drants people are being taken out of our library. But you know, that's just a small subset of our thing.

But in a way, what we're seeing now is that that's part of a much bigger agenda. And so how do you craft this in a way that people see, like Republicans see like, oh, I don't want like there are a lot of Jewish Republicans who don't want the narrative about the Holocaust to be the people who survived were the We're the ones who were the most resilient as opposed to just getting thrown into a gas chamber

when you got off the train. And so, in a way, this is such a big national issue and it has to be framed that way, which I think the Democrats have been slow to wake up on and now are kind of realizing.

But the fact is is that there are multiple ways

to fight this battle. It has just to be decided that it needs to be fought right, And I think that you know, again, when we're just looking at these communities as silos that are being initially affected and not looking at the whole of how our democracy is being destroyed and education being the cornerstone, public education being the cornerstone of any democracy, like, we have to attack it in that way and not just as community by community, right, it needs to be the collective and that to me

is the place that we start.

and think let's bring this back to the center. But in a way, the agendas are so repetitive and obvious and clear that I think that again, I think we're right that the trick here, Like there was a moment in Brown versus Board where like a majority of the country and justices felt like, man, what we're doing is bad for the country, And I think that's what we need to get back to, and that is going to be the trick is going to be like that, that'll be the fight of this election, Like, how can we

frame this in a way that like, man, we're fighting for the future of the country right now.