Fearful that people are waking up to the left’s agenda, a Miami-Dade union is trying to stop Florida’s proposed Stop WOKE Act.
AFSCME, which represents employees of the Miami-Dade Public Schools and other government workers, has circulated a mailer to local residents claiming Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP lawmakers in the Legislature want schools to stop teaching history.
“We cannot let Tallahassee prevent our students from learning about the Holocaust, Black enslavement, human rights abuses in Cuba, and other tragedies,” the mailer says.
This has been the standard line from the left.
On its website, AFSCME highlights a WUSF story from February, shortly after the legislative session began, that noted, “Progressive groups are trying to slow the advancement of several bills that could severely limit discussions of race, sex, gender, and history in businesses and public-school classrooms.”
WUSF then quoted Ranka Milligan Ashcroft of the social-justice group Dream Defenders. “I have sat, and sat for the last five years and wondered – I could have died for a country that doesn’t love me. That doesn’t want me to know about my history,” Ashcroft said. As WUSF notes, she sits at the top of the intersectional hierarchy, since she’s black, a woman, and a lesbian. She also is a veteran.
Yet much like the hyperventilating reaction to the Parental Rights in Education bill, which liberals dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” AFSCME’s effort to whip up opposition to the Stop WOKE Act is long on emotion and disinformation, and short on facts.
AFSCME appears to hope that people will trust its word, and not actually read the text of the bill.
Its provisions include language that prohibits employers from subjecting any worker to “training, instruction, or any other required activity” that promotes or advances the idea that one race is morally superior to others, that an individual just based on his or her race is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that members of one racial group are responsible for “actions committed in the past by other members of the same race.”
The bill also says that it’s unlawful to claim people of one racial group “must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, or to assert that “virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness” are racist.
Furthermore, the bill outlaws employers’ actions that maintain members of one racial group “should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.”
The bill says such concepts can be included in training if such training “is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.”
The bill also applies the same logic to education.
But what AFSCME, other liberal activists, and the media largely don’t tell people is that students “shall develop an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms, and examine what it means to be a responsible and respectful person, for the purpose of encouraging tolerance of diversity in a pluralistic society.”
Moreover, it says specifically that the “inspirational stories” of black Americans “who prospered, even in the most difficult circumstances” will be celebrated.
Finally, the bill grants educators the latitude to build lessons on how slavery and Jim Crow laws undermined individual liberty – so long as this classroom instruction and curriculum is not used “to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view inconsistent” with the other principles outlined in the bill.
In closing the bill echoes the Declaration of Independence, saying, “The Legislature acknowledges the fundamental truth that all persons are equal before the law and have inalienable rights.”
The measure adds that the State Board of Education must adopt a curriculum called “Stories of Inspiration” that seek “to inspire future generations through motivating stories of American history that demonstrate important life skills and the principles of individual freedom that enabled persons to prosper even in the most difficult circumstances.”
Contrary to AFSCME’s claims, DeSantis’ office pointed out that under Florida law schools are required to teach the history and lessons of both the Holocaust and slavery.
Yet, as The Free Press has reported in the past, the real effort to wipe out American history comes from the left.
Since the death of George Floyd in May 2020, liberals have waged a campaign across the country to tear down statues or guilt-trip elected leaders into doing that.
The left’s culture war has not only fought against the continued presence of Confederate monuments, but also prompted the removal of memorials dedicated to the Founding Fathers, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt.
As the legislative session ended, Democrats complained that DeSantis and Republican lawmakers were “bullying” people, especially minorities and the LGBT community, with such measures, and bemoaned the “culture war.”
Yet with the Stop WOKE Act, as with their efforts to protect Florida’s youngest schoolchildren from the politics of gender identity and sexual orientation, DeSantis and Republican lawmakers have fought liberals on their own turf. They’ve shown they understand the late media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart’s maxim: “Politics is downstream of culture.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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G0BDEM AFSCME Union psychotic projection.