Rev Left Radio - Teachers Under Attack by the Far Right: The Gabriel Gipe Interview

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Former high school teacher, Gabriel Gipe, joins the show to tell his story of being set up and targeted by the right-wing organization Project Veritas, the subsequent relentless harrassment of him and his family by conservative news outlets, fascist organizations, and other right wing extremists, including the Proud Boys, which culminated in him losing his career. He tells his story as both a warning to other educators and to reveal the strategies deployed by various forces within the right-wing ecosystem in this country to bully, intimidate, harrass, silence, and even asssault their political opponents. Outro music: "Wicked Grin" by No Thanks Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm kind of closing a loop that I opened probably a year or so ago. If some of you may remember, there was an attempt for me to raise some funds for a friend who was going through it, as it was, as it were, was being targeted. I think I put it by the fascist, right, in a really intense way, but that I, I couldn't give too many details because it was an ongoing situation. And I said that the moment we could get the story out, we would do that. And this is that moment. So finally, because of various events that have played themselves out, various legal processes that have played themselves out, the person who I was talking about in that episode finally said, I do want to come out.

I do want to tell my side of the story. And we, of course, create an avenue for him to do so. So this is the story of Gabriel Gipe, who was a wonderful teacher in Sacramento, California, who was targeted by the far right, the proud boys, the absolute Nazis, white supremacists, various fascists in California because of this project spearheaded by Project Beritas, where they more or less, quote unquote, exposed him for being this scary Antifa Marxist indoctrinator of children. and functionally not destroyed his life, but fucked his life up in the form of him losing his beloved career and him and his family, wonderful human beings, who I know personally, being targeted by the worst people in our society under constant threat of physical violence for a year straight and still to this day, being actively harassed, active death threats against them, even though the people behind Project Veritas, got what they wanted. You destroyed this man's career. He is no longer able to do what he loves, to teach children.

You fucking fascist one. And that's not enough. They still want to harass, to intimidate, to make him feel unsafe, him and his wife in their own home, in their own lives, to menace them, to try to drive them off the road. This is not necessarily done by the people at Project Beritas, but this is done by fascists and right-wing psychos. that were riled and fomented into a rage by what Project Veritas does. And Project Veritas has to know that when they do these things,

while they themselves don't need to necessarily do the death threats and the harassment and the threats of physical violence, they know that that shit is coming. And that is part of the glee, I think, a lot of these people get out of this stuff, is that while they can pretend to just be doing some morally noble thing, calling out an indoctrinator, what they're actually doing is ruining somebody who they view as a political opponent's life and career

and make them live in a constant state of psychological anxiety and existential fear, that they will be literally murdered as attempts were done on Gabriel and his family since this project, Veritas, you know, hit piece was released. So, you know, he hasn't been able to give his story. And I'm sure some of the people that have targeted him and that have feds, He didishized him as this object of their hate and their rage, these sad, fearful, angry, bigoted people. Some of them are probably listening right now because Gabriel hasn't been able to speak for himself. And this is the first time he's been able to do that.

Well, this is free speech, baby. This is Gabriel being able to talk about his side of the story, about his version of events, and correct the record on outright lies and slander and propaganda, weaponized against him and his fans. family to make their lives a living home. So I have been a friend of his and have seen from behind the scenes this whole fucking thing play out. It's been heart wrenching and gut wrenching to see this happen and not be able to get his side of the story.

But finally, we are able to do that. So you don't really need to know much. We set the table and then we go into the details of the story. So if you've never heard about this, you could go into this blind or cold and still get a really good understanding of what happened. But if you're at all interested, this is a huge event. This was covered by Fox News. This was covered by all the ghouls you can imagine, the Candace Owens, the Tucker Carlson's of the world, et cetera.

So if you go and just maybe do pause it right here, do a quick Google search, catch yourself up on the basics of the story, and then come into this. That could be helpful. But we do our best to give an overview before going into the details. But it's a harrowing story. And as I say in this episode, he's really a canary in the coal mine. because this attack on education, on public schools, and on teachers is not new, nor is it at any time in the foreseeable future going away. So in a lot of ways, what happened to him is a template that I think will increasingly be used by the increasingly fascist right to try to solidify their grip on the myth-making of America for its own citizens, to destroy real education in favor of this. their rainbow and lollipop fairy tale version of American history and what life in America has

actually been like for the vast majority of people throughout its existence. So, yeah, for so many reasons, this is a fascinating and important episode. I'm finally glad that Gabriel's been able to tell his side of the story after a year of not being able to and having other people speak for him. So this is an emotionally charged, but also incredibly timely and utterly relevant story. And through the specifics of this story, a much broader understanding of the fascist march, the reactionary march against many things, but specifically education teachers, public schools, it really is a condensation of that movement in the form of one story

and one man's having to deal with that form of reactionary backlash. And what it can do, the power of it um to to destroy lives and so uh yeah i guess i don't want to go too far you'll hear the story throughout um but this is an important episode for sure and um i think it's really important to hear gabriel's side of this incredibly controversial and incredibly public story so without further ado here's my discussion with gabriel gipe about his experiences um being attacked harassed and having his career destroyed by the forces of fascist reaction and conservative conspiracy insanity so strap in all right my name is uh all right my name is uh Gabriel Kipe. I am a former teacher in California. It was previously on Rev. Left doing an

episode on dystopian fiction. Some people might remember that episode. Had a lot of fun doing that. It was actually like exactly two years ago. It just popped up on my, my memories on Facebook today. So I am excited to be back and talking to you today. Yeah, absolutely. Welcome back. I think in those instances that you were on that last time. We had to sort of, you know, kind of conceal your identity because of the political implications and trying to separate professional from personal life. But obviously, as people will find out throughout this episode, you know, the situation has fundamentally changed such that you're willing to come on with your real name and tell this horrifying story. And, you know, I've been privy as somebody who's a friend of yours

behind the scenes, kind of seeing how this, this torturous year for you has played out. It's been heartbreaking just to see the shit that you've gone through. People might know that a while back I tried to put together some funds to help you. And I said I couldn't talk about the details because it was an ongoing situation. People did step up as far as I'm aware and throw in some assistance, which I'm very proud of and happy that my audience rises to the occasion like that. But now finally, for those that are interested in what was behind all of that, this is the episode where we're going to finally let it all out. and basically allow you for the first time to tell your side of this story that has been told for you from the worst people in the world, whether that is outright reactionaries or

just completely naive local newspapers or whatever. The story is so skewed. The presentation of who you are, you know, what you stand for has been so skewed. And the shit you've had to endure is absolutely nightmarish. So I think, you know, we'll get into the details of the story for sure. But for those that have no clue what we're talking about, maybe a broad overview, something that can just anchor a brand new listener into what actually happened to you, and then we can move into the detail. Sure. Yeah, I think that for most people, they probably would remember the story that was almost

exactly a year ago as like the Antifa teacher, quote unquote. So it was kind of like a hit piece that was done on me in my profession as a high school teacher. and the kind of the overall narrative was that I was, you know, indoctrinating my students into either Antifa or into communism, like whichever, it depends on which news outlet you might have seen. And then kind of the fallout from that, which was pretty extensive. And yeah, I think that that's, probably for most folks, probably what they were, you know, exposed to. It was, it was something

that, like, I thought when it first happened would kind of say as, like, you know, potentially a local story. But then it blew up onto a scale that I don't think anyone was really prepared for, which, obviously, for the news source that put out the original piece, that was their intention. Yeah, and the national news coverage, I mean, it included, what, Fox News, all the biggest conservative outlets possible. This wasn't just a far right wing fringe website thing. This was a broad conservative thing, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like Tucker Carlson, like did a piece on me. I was on, you know, Candace Owens show, you know, The Daily Wire, which is like Ben Shapiro's news, quote unquote news outlet, did some, some pieces on it. I was on like Fox and Friends.

Like it was, it was pretty wild. I think that for, you know, most of my adult life, I've, I've watched a lot of like um right wing media uh throughout you know since i've been politically conscious and and i've always just been like oh man like if i ever has the opportunity to like get on these people's shows and like debate them um you know little did i know that in the time that i was going to end up on their their show i was just like completely you know gobsmacked totally unprepared was like oh man this is not this was not how i wanted that to go down Yeah. And I also think just this perfect cartoonish archetype in the minds of the right wing as far as, you know, what you filled in for them, you know, the sort of archetype you played for them. I mean, the Antifa hysteria, the communism hysteria, the kids are being indoctrinated hysteria, the schools are ran by Marxist hysteria. It's all this perfect confluence of right wing fever dream, paranoia and absurdity. And you kind of fit the bill so well that you were sort of, sadly, a natural target for their hate, their rage, their insanity.

And you've certainly suffered at the hands of that. Because, you know, when a story goes out publicly, especially on the channels like Fox and Friends and Tucker Carlson and Fox News, all of the psychos that watch that shit are going to be riled up and will come after you. you know i when i was docked in the past i was like on you know neo nazi websites and the highest i got was like a mention on um halix jones's info wars and that spawned just a bunch right yeah i remember that that spawned a bunch of just people trying to fuck with me harass me in whatever ways that they can often lazily from a distance but still the cumulative effect was one of like you know psychological terror as as it were especially when you have a family you have a loved one um and people are making direct bodily threats against you and your family.

But what you experienced was, I think, even multiple times worse than that because of the reaches that it got to. And maybe it's helpful here to talk about before we get into the story, because we're going to tell the entire story. We're just kind of set in the table here. It's helpful to kind of talk about who is Project Veritas. Some people will probably know. But could you kind of give a breakdown on who exactly that organization is and what they do?

Yeah. So Project Veritas, I think, kind of gained national attention. back during like Obama's administration they had done like a secret recording of ACORN and like their founder James O'Keefe at that time had like you know dressed up as a pimp and came in with someone who you know was supposed to be like his his prostitute sex worker that was in his employee and they were trying to get benefits like state benefits or federal benefits and they They had recorded the ACORN employee, like encouraging them to lie about their profession in order to get those benefits. So that was like the story I think that kind of like launched them into national attention.

But they are, you know, widely known for kind of doing these like political gotcha pieces where they record people secretly, surreptitiously without their knowledge and then kind of compiled. it into a way to construct, like, a very particular narrative. And there has been a lot of, like, issues that obviously have surrounded their work, like most recently, I think, like, the FBI invaded his home because they had Ashley Biden's diary and that had been stolen from her home. And, you know, so the FBI's accusation was that Project Veritas had been complicit in that theft, although obviously they're denying that. I'm not going to speak to what's true or what's not. I have no idea, nor do I really care at the end of the day. But those are the type of outlet that

works very hard at, you know, what they consider to be like vigilante journalism. Maybe they wouldn't call it that. I think that's what other people potentially call it for them. But they're, you know, trying to be, uh, quote unquote, like activist journalists going out in the field, um, setting up these, these interactions with people without their knowledge, filming them, audio recording them, and then, uh, putting it together, um, to kind of do these like smear campaigns on people. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I, I came to know them through the acorn stuff, which was during the Obama year. So they've, they've been around for, for a long time. And I remember that acorn story being absolutely huge at the time and it just seems like they've only moved even further to the

right because with with the attack on you in particular and the forces marshaled against you you know they were much more and this might just be a product of the time that we're in as different from the Obama era just the outright neo-Nazis outright white supremacist fascist gangs like members of the proud boy etc all of these organizations were working in cooperation more or less to attack you. So while Project Veritas will present itself as a conservative outlet, you know, no more extreme than Fox News or a Rush Limbaugh segment, the connections in the conservative and reactionary ecosystem extend to the farthest fringes of the far right. And those were the sort of shock troops that were carrying out various forms of very intimidating and borderline legal as far as I can understand attacks and harassment campaigns on you and your family at your house. Do you want to talk a little bit about that before we get into the full story?

Yeah, I think that you sum that up perfectly. It's kind of like the forces that they have at their disposal to kind of do the dirty work for them is what they rely on. You know, it's like you don't, despite however much the right might want to draw connections between the left and news outlets like CNN, but you never see a news report on CNN, which would then encourage, you know, left-ween activists to go out and do something. you know, to the extent that these forces will go out to do something for these sources, right? So like if you have Fox News or Alex Jones or Project Veritas put out a report, they are reliant on the fact that it's going to stir up these incredibly, you know, reactionary bases of people who are emotionally driven by these stories to put people in dangerous situations I mean like when these stories or when this story was coming out and these posts were being posted like just of course you know like diving into the comment section like holy god like I was at one point like just taking screenshots of every death threat um you know in in visceral detail of what they wanted to do to me my family my friends loved ones um and it just got to the point where I couldn't even keep up with it and it was just like the the overall

all just like, yeah, visceral. I just got to say visceral again, like visceral hatred, descriptions of violence to be inflicted upon me. And then of course, you know, it was like, it was only a matter of time before some people decided to take action on that. And that's exactly what happened. You know, I had people showing up to my house in the middle of the night, like threatening me. You know, I had two occasions in which someone tried to drive me off the road one time during the day and one time at night, you know, had people, so at one point this, a group, you know, was putting up flyers doxing me, and they were putting up flyers like all around my neighborhood, all around the city that I live in, and in an effort to like scrape them down, you know, I was almost like attacked

by people who were keeping eye on them, waiting for people to come take them down. And it was, it was just like this is a an existential threat to my life like every day for months was spent just in severe anxiety about not hypothetical acts of violence but like concrete acts of violence that were trying you know people were trying to inflict upon me and and people were casing your house cars outside of your house all times of the night people people knew the fencing around your house and how hard or or difficult it might be to get through it. So this was a, this was not just like internet harassment. This immediately leapt from the internet into real life and was a real existential threat to you and your family.

And I have to believe that, you know, people in the Project Veritas organization, they know exactly what they're doing. They know that while they can present themselves in suits and ties and go on Fox and Friends and act like this respectful journalist outlet just bringing attention to, you know, what they see as bad things in the world. They know that the actual consequence of what they're doing is going to be life-threatening violence as a possibility against you. And that is a huge part of why they do this. It's not simply, we want him fired and removed from his job, and then he's going back into a citizen and we can leave him alone. It's just this one issue we have a problem with. No, they know exactly what's going to

happen. They know the worst elements on the right are going to threaten you and your family with physical violence and they continue to to chum the waters as it were they're not satisfied when you're when you leave right when you were fired they they want to re throw more gas on the fire as much as they can the moment you think things are settling down they will you know throw more gas on the fire to re bring everything up and reintensify the situation does that sound more or less correct to what you've experienced oh absolutely yeah and i think that you know for the those of you who saw the clip from Project Veritas, they, you know, I was secretly recorded, but then also I was confronted by one of their journalists outside of my house,

like while I was walking my dog, right? So they, they are not, you know, above doing that tactic of showing up at your, the place that you live. Like, of course, they waited until I was half a block away, so I couldn't go back inside of my house. But they were aware of where I lived, they came to me in my neighborhood and tried to, you know, confront me on the street. And then, you know, within minutes of this broadcast being put out online, my address was posted everywhere. You know, it was on every, every website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you know, and it was just like, immediately people were just like, well, it would be real shame if someone showed up at his house. And it was literally the first day. Like the day that the video

dropped, I was sent home from work due to safety concerns, obviously. And as, I don't know, within two hours, like someone had shown up to my house and took a gigantic American flag and put it in the ground of my front yard and just like waited there, just like wanting me to come out and like do something. And it's just like, this is absolutely ridiculous. You know, and the person had specifically taken the license plates off of their car and then like parked down the street with their car facing our house so that they could keep an eye on it and it was just like oh like this is this is how it's going to be like okay like all right well this is um you know this is the route that these people are going to take and they're not afraid to take it yeah

absolutely and like i said i got i was privy to this as it was happening because we're we're close friends and i kind of got to see behind the scenes stuff and i've i've been on the left for a long time i've dealt with this shit myself i've seen a lot of other people deal with this shit this really stood out to me as above and beyond, even what, you know, the worst doxing experiences I had previously been aware of. It was really, really targeted, relentless year long. Every single day you walk out of your house, you have to be looking over your shoulder, checking the cars, you know, driving on the interstate. You said you got almost ran off the road multiple times. So even when you're away from your house, traveling, you have to watch out, is that car next to me, been following me?

I mean, it is, you start to get in this hot house sort of psychological. state of constant anxiety your heart rate is constantly elevated cortisol is constantly being released into your bloodstream and you know the human body can only deal with that um to a certain extent after a while it has to take a brutal psychological toll so you know before we go even any deeper i just want to express like from the deepest parts of my heart like love solidarity heartbreak like you know i cried overseeing the shit that you had to go through and uh knowing you and your family man it just is not fair and so when you said i'm ready just to give my side of the story um you know we were here and ready to make this happen um so with with all of that in mind let's go ahead and

get into the story so now that people have a general understanding of what we're talking about and if anybody wants to pause this and go look at that video or you know just see what what the basic structure of the story is a little bit more you can but now we'll get into the story and this is the first time i think the story has ever been told from your perspective this has been for the longest time because of legal reasons and safety reasons, you just have not been able to speak out. And so your story has been told, as I said earlier, by the worst elements in society or the most ignorant elements in society, masquerading as sources of information and objective truth. So, you know, let's go ahead and just walk us through this story. You can start from

square one. I'll kind of sit back and take as much time as you want. But walk us through this story and how it happened. And then we can get into a broader discussion of what the implications of this are, what other teachers and people in education can expect or ways they can protect themselves going forward. Because I think that's the ultimate thing you want to achieve here is get this story out, not so much so people can feel bad for you, but more so that people can be aware of the mechanisms and the machinations and the strategies involved and the ecosystem involved in these forms of harassment because they are not going away. The right is only getting more hysterical about their moral panics. when that hysteria ramps up violence and hate and these harassment campaigns are just going to be increasingly inevitable. So I'll just stand back, give you the floor, and you can kind of just walk us through this entire story. Sure. Yeah. Thank you. So first, I think I would start with the fact that like I, so I'd been a high school teacher for numerous years. And I was teaching an AP, which is like an advanced placement course, which is U.S. government and politics. so obviously I think that the content that I was teaching can lend itself to a lot of controversy

right off right off the bat however you approach that content I think can be viewed by anyone at any time regardless of your political leanings as a potential you know epicenter of controversy for a classroom so I had over the course of my years teaching put up numerous things on the classroom walls, kind of a reflection of like the political environment that we live in. And I had kind of learned that from from previous teachers that I saw doing very similar things, you know, having campaign signs from multiple, you know, political campaigns throughout the course of their teaching had been, you know, we had very specific rules. Like we couldn't advertise any, any propositions or like policies.

that were potentially on the ballot so we couldn't be like trying to sway the opinion of students one way or the other. So like if there was like a ballot measure for health care in California, like I put up that sign after that election, right? So like I could put it up as long as it wasn't about a current piece of legislation that was to be debated and voted on. So essentially how I've kind of gathered how I became, because I was like, what is like some teacher in Northern California, like, getting targeted by this, like, organization, like, who am I to these people, right? So I guess what had become, I think the reason why I became a target was because I had an anti-fascist action flag in my classroom that had been there for four years and actually

had been put up by a student, which I obviously, I, like, didn't protest that. I allowed my students to put up all sorts of things in my classroom if they felt like it was meaningful to them, something that, of course, Project Veritas would never talk about or any of these other news sources would talk about is I also had a student who gave me a Gadsden flag behind my desk, right? So I was not specifically trying to leave out right-wing paraphernalia. It was just that most of the time my students weren't giving me that to put up in the classroom. I had a student who did, and I put it up, right? So I think that, you know, obviously anti-fascist action or Antifa is a widely misunderstood philosophy, ideology in this country, and it's largely associated with a narrative that has been constructed by the right.

You know, not everyone's going to, like, sit down and read Mark Bray's book, which I think is like a fantastic historical analysis of anti-fascist movements across not only the world, but like, like through time. So essentially, at the beginning of the 2021 school year, I received an email that was passed along from the school secretary telling me that there was a parent of a prospective student who wanted to speak to the APGov or AP econ teacher. so it was sent out to that email was sent out to myself and another teacher and a few days went by and I eventually contacted this quote unquote parent and we had like a probably like a 10 minute over the phone conversation and so this person who you know I later found out was like

an undercover journalist from Project Veritas had had presented themselves not only as like a parent of a prospective student who is moving here from Florida to California for work, but they also identified as, like, a political activist. And they, like, during our conversation, there was a lot of, like, questions that I think were very normal for, like, parents to ask. They were asking about, like, the, you know, the physical facilities of the school. Like, is this a place that, like, you know, has good desks, are the roofs falling apart, you know? How are they with COVID precautions? Like, are they cleaning the room, like just normal things that, like, I think, you know, he could have

asked the front desk person, but was talking to me about it. But then he got into, like, well, the content of the course that I taught. Well, I'm really interested, he said, in making sure that my son comes to a school that doesn't teach, and I quote, American Pie, bullshit, right? So it was like, well, you know, definitely not going to get that in my class. Like, I take my content, like very seriously and one of the things that I think is incredibly important and as part of the AP government curriculum is political efficacy. I think that students' involvement in their community is a foundation to government and politics. And I really push that in my class to be involved. However that looks for the individual student, but it is a big part of what I do. Like I'm not just

looking at government and politics from national perspective. I'm looking at at it from a very local perspective so that students understand that if there are issues that they care about, that they feel passionate about, that there are ways that they can get involved, like on the ground in their community, in their city, in their state, and how that, you know, it's that very overused moniker, like think globally, act locally, right? Like I want to utilize that with my students and, you know, I said to him over the phone, I was like, because I have 180 days to turn my students into revolutionaries, right? And this became one of the biggest, like, you know, the biggest controversial things that I said.

I was just, he has 180 days to turn his kids into revolutionaries. Like, as if I told, as if I said, like, violent revolutionaries or communist revolutionaries, I just said revolutionaries. Like, every single person that we talk about in an AP government curriculum is considered a revolutionary, right? Like, we're, you know, despite how I might feel about the, constitutional framers, right, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, these are all people who are considered revolutionaries by a vast majority of Americans, right? Martin Luther King is considered a revolutionary, right? Rosa Parks, like these are figures that we talk about

that are part of the curriculum that are considered revolutionaries, right? And it's that term, I think, that caught so much, you know, heat from the right. Every time, just quickly, every time they fly a Gatson flag, every time they put 1776 on anything, you know, they're consciously saying that, you know, we're part, we see ourselves at least as part of this revolutionary tradition. And the far right especially is constantly talking about the need for a new, you know, what they call revolution, what we would call something like a counter-revolution or reactionary, whatever.

But they also see themselves as in this revolutionary tradition, as seeing revolution as being much, very much on the table, as romanticizing it in their own. right wing way to think that these people are like no the status quo needs to be conserved and protected by all means you know these are people ready to go to civil war so Trump can get a second term and there you know absolutely and there's like you know he's a revolutionary trying to turn him into revolutionaries I mean it just is so silly but sorry it's neither here nor there right no no I I totally agree and I think that like that frustration is something that like is so palatable to me because I it is I like felt like I was screaming

into a void watching this happen for so long that I couldn't like say these things and now like having the opportunity to, you know, I'm trying to keep my own, like, emotional response at bay because it's just so frustrating to try to talk to people about something that should be so explicitly clear, but for some reason has been, you know, manipulated or shrouded and misunderstanding for so long. So at the end of this conversation, he said that he was part of an organization in Florida called Get Out the Black Vote that was working to increase, you know, African-American voter turnout in all elections, local, national, et cetera. And he was really, he was like, they did their homework.

Like, they knew exactly the things to say to, like, get my guard down. So, like, Bravo to them. Like, I understand that, like, this is ultimately comes down to a point that, like, I, being the person that I am, I'm a trusting person. Like, I want to see the best in people. I'm not going to think that someone's manipulating me to get, you know, this very particular narrative um but he he was like i've worked with like the dsa like i've worked with you know other progressive groups and in florida on these campaigns like i'd be really interested in getting

plugged in um you know into the activist community like in in this area of california like i know this is kind of unorthodox but would you be willing to like meet up with me for coffee so we can like talk about this and i was like yeah like totally you know like it's not unusual uh for teachers to to be friends with the parents of students you know like they it we live in a small community like you run into people all the time in fact i think it's like one of the um one of the best parts about being a teacher is being a part of their extended families right like getting to know their parents you know so that when you call them if something's going wrong like hey you're you know they didn't seem well today that you have already like created a foundational relationship of trust

that, like, we both are here for the best outcome of your child in school, in my class, et cetera. So I agreed. I agreed to meet up with him for coffee. So it was, like, a week later, we met up in, like, a public coffee shop, you know, this is how they were able to get around with that consent rule of recording in California because there's, you know, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place. So they were able to record me legally record.

me. And so we sat there and had probably about like a 45 minute long conversation. Now, if you watch the video clip that Project Veritas put together, I think the total runtime of me talking is about four and a half minutes total. Like their whole piece, I think, is like 12 minutes long, but there's a lot of like, you know, James O'Kill keep jumping in and talking, you know, saying how he perceives this video. So about a 45-minute long conversation cut and edited down to about four and a half minutes with very little of the person who was presenting themselves as a parent input in that conversation. So there's very little context to what I'm saying.

It's just a lot of things that I'm saying being put together in a broader clip. And during this conversation, we had a lot of time to talk about a lot of different things. A lot of it was, like, about me personally. A lot of it, a lot of it was about, like, activism within the community at large. A lot of it was about how I, you know, my own, like, pedagogical approach, how I taught in the classroom. And then, you know, these were then edited down into a very, like, particular manner. But some of the things that I, like, want to point a light on that I think caught a lot of people's attention was, You know, so, like, he, he had asked, like, about Antifa, and it was just like, he was like, I mean, just like, do, do you know who, like, Antifa is in, like, in this area? And I was just like, yeah, Antifa's not, like, really a group. Like, they don't keep membership roles. You know, it's not, like, this isn't an organization. These, all these questions came off to me as someone who was, like, genuinely curious and, and wanted to know more and might not have been super familiar with, like, more radical organizations.

And a lot of this conversation in the coffee shop in particular, largely under the pretext of you talking to him as an adult getting into activism or under the pretext of let's continue to talk about my kid. And also we can talk about this as well. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it was a conversation between two adults in a coffee shop about a myriad of topics. And we were like going in between, you know, and I think what was very useful for them was kind of how we were interweaving. my personal activism with like what goes on in the classroom and then being able to mash that together. You know, and there was a lot of instances in which their their video clip had to

utilize like parentheses about what they were pushing what I was talking about when in fact I wasn't talking about that at all. Like for instance, I was talked about a couple of organizations that were doing work in the area. And I was like, well, you know, like this group, you know, they do this type of work. These are the people that they reach out to. and then we have this organization that does this type of work. And they kind of work together. And then they put in parentheses after that, Antifa, right? So I was saying like, Antifa works with these organizations, which is like not at all what I was saying.

And they had to, you know, like I at one point said, like, I'm not asking you to be on the front lines, but I am asking you to be involved. And after me saying, I am asking you, they put in parentheses students, right? Like, this isn't who I was talking about at that moment, right? And another big clip that they kind of focused on was he had asked me, well, do you ever get pushback? Like, do you ever have like parents or students who, you know, voice concern or like they don't like what you're doing? And that was when I brought up the Antifa flag in my classroom. And I said, you know, I had one year a student who, in an anonymous service,

at the end of the year, brought up that they were uncomfortable with it. And what the student had actually said in that anonymous survey was they wrote, you know, when I came into your class and I saw the Antifa flag in your room, it made me concerned about how the year was going to go. But then, you know, like I got to know you and everything was fine. But I would really reconsider having that up because a lot of people don't understand what it's connected to. And so I was like, fair.

That's a fair thing to say. You know, so I didn't know who had wrote the comment. It was anonymous. So then I approached it in all of my classes the next day. And I was like, you know, we have a lot of things on my walls in this class that we don't have enough time during the year to like talk about all of these things. But we do spend a significant time in the fourth unit, which is political ideologies discussing a wide range of ideologies. is the fact it's the only time in the class, the only unit where communism is mentioned

because we go over all of these ideologies and there are six political parties in California, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Green Party, libertarian party, the American Independent Party, and Peace and Freedom Party. And Peace and Freedom Party is a socialist party. So having my students understand what socialism and communism is is a fundamental feature of them seeing these parties on the ballot in California.

Right? So, like, it's not, I'm not coming out of like, hey, guys, let's talk about communism. It's like there is a party on the ballot that's a socialist party. You need to understand what that means in order to be an educated voter. Absolutely. And as you just said right there, you're teaching an AP government course. And one of the sections is literally explicitly on political ideologies. You literally cannot understand the 20th century at all without acknowledging that socialism and communism, whatever your feelings about them, were present and still are present in our politics,

like liberalism and fascism and everything else are. And also, to my understanding, you had a political compass up on your wall. And so you also had, like, correct me if I'm wrong here, but a swastika up on the far top right. Like this is what, take far right politics to its extreme. You end up with Nazism. On the left here, you take this to this extreme. You end up with something like communism, you know, and then there's the liberalism somewhere in the center. We all know the political compass.

But this is a class for, I mean, AP, so, you know, gifted students, learning about the realities of government and politics. You're talking about all these different sides. You're putting things specifically in their proper places. I'll talk about communism only when we're talking explicitly about ideologies and I'm not pushing it. So all of this seems like completely inbound, completely relevant to the topic at hand. And as you said, it wasn't picking sides. There was a Gatson flag and a Nazi swastika as well as an Antifa flag and whatever, a pride flag or whatever else it may have been. So I just wanted to kind of point that out. Absolutely. No, and the political compass became like a center of controversy as well because the narrative became that I was forcing

students to put. So how that assignment worked, it was it was unit four in the class, but I would do it as the second unit because I felt like ideology was really important to understand before we got into legislation and how the government functions. You can't understand praxis without understanding the theory behind that praxis. So we would cover it as the second unit right after the foundations of government where we went over like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the articles of Confederation, the Federalist papers. We read so many of the Federalist papers in this class. They act as if I was like having them read the Communist Manifesto. It was like the things that I had them reading was

exactly what was in the curriculum. And they would love, they would love that you're teaching their kids the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and shit. Right, right, absolutely. So then when we would do this, this beginning of the unit, I would have them take a political ideology quiz. It's I sidewith.com. A ton of government teachers use this. Have the students take the, it's super expansive. It's obviously not perfect, but it's a pretty good ideology quiz. And what's, what's great about the website is that it updates itself, you know, every few months with, like, new questions about, like, new political, you know, topics. It will get the students' opinions. So this is all based completely off of their opinions. And I have them do it at the beginning of the unit

before we even talk about what ideology is. So when they land, at the end of the quiz, they land somewhere on the political compass. It shows them a picture of the political compass. It shows them where they land on the political compass. And it will show them, like, the top three parties, that they identify with. So it will be like, you know, I am somewhere over here on the right. The top party that I got was the Libertarian Party and like the American Constitution Party,

you know, a lot of parties that don't exist in California, but somewhere else in the US. And then I would put their picture on the compass if they wanted, because I would ask them to bring a picture and then they could choose, it wasn't worth points. They just could choose to do it. And I would put their picture on the compass so then the students could see like an overall understanding

of where, they generally landed in comparison with their peers or with, you know, other, other, you know, people in the class. And what I said in this clip that they recorded was every year that I've done this, I've noticed that my students move further and further left, right? And this is, they manipulated this. They didn't make me like, you know, they didn't show me saying this because I don't say it. They are saying that, oh, because of my class. they're moving further and further left. And it was like, no, this is literally when the first activities that they do

after we just go through the founding documents, like I haven't taught anything yet in terms of ideology. And so this, you know, like this entire process just became the center of so much like he's pushing kids to, you know, show their identity and he's, you know, placing anyone on the right next to a swastika. And it's like, do you understand how the political compass works? Like, do you understand? Like, obviously, even the political compass itself is inherently flawed.

Like, I'm just basing this off of, like, a model that most people generally understand to be, like, a pretty good way to measure where you land ideologically based off of their own opinions. Like, this was all based off of their opinions. I did not tell them how to answer the questions. I did not. I would help them understand the questions. Like, one of the questions might be, like,

how do you feel about the Dakota access pipeline? And then students would ask, like, I don't know what the Dakota access pipeline is. So then I would tell them what it was, right? As objectively as I possibly could, it's like, well, it's a pipeline. It's going to take crude oil from Canada and it's going across, you know, recognize indigenous land. And there are people who are arguing that it could present a safety concern to the water rights of the people who have lived on that land for generations. like that's that's the concern and why it's a controversy and they would be like oh okay well now now they can answer the question with some insight into what that issue is um so you know this this whole conversation gets kind of like twisted into a way that makes it look um as if i'm i'm kind of like projecting onto my students uh their um you know their ability to become like left wing radicals and and another uh potential, you know, a primary issue was these extra credit assignments that I would offer in my class. So as I had mentioned, like political efficacy being involved is a big part of the course.

So what I would do is that every month I would put up a calendar on my whiteboard of different things that were going on in the area. So they could be something like, you know, an author who had written something about either history or politics was coming. and you can go listen to their lecture about a book. You could go to, you know, like a food distribution. We have a food distribution every Sunday that hands out, you know, clothing and food to the unhoused population. Or it could be something like the Women's March, right,

which is like a nationally recognized march that happens every year. It's very liberal. It's very, like, you know, it's safe, right? So I wasn't giving my students anything that, like, potentially, like, erupted into violence. violence and on top of that. So I would put up a calendar of events that I knew were happening, but students could go to anything that was political in nature and get credit for it. So I had students who went to a March for Life, which was like a, you know, a quote-unquote

pro-life rally. I had a student who went to a Trump rally and wrote up a reflection and got extra credit for it, right? I had students who would just go to city council meetings on Tuesday and get extra credit for it. It's like it could be anything that was political in nature. Now I had one occasion and this was when I was student teaching so before I even had my credential.

I had a situation in which there was like a candlelit vigil for someone who had died in ice custody and I had put that up on the calendar and a student showed up and the vigil ended up turning into a march and then some police showed up in riot gear and I was like

oh my God like this is not situation that I want a student in. And the student was there with their mom. And I informed them, I was just like, hey, you know, it was not my attention to be putting you into a situation that could potentially like turn out, you know, turned into a violent situation. So I would, I would recommend that you leave right now because like now the police have showed up and they're, you know, in the gear that would indicate that they might escalate

this situation. And then that, you know, gave me an opportunity as a student teacher to learn from that and make sure that I was very particular about the opportunities that I gave them and make them as benign as possible. Now, of course, in this clip, they had to put in parentheses that I was having students go to Antifa events. Like, whatever the fuck those are, man. Like, what are Antifa events, dude? Like, what are you talking about? So it just became this ridiculous idea that I was inculcating my students into, like, favorably viewing communist.

isn't. Because, of course, one of the other things that was in my classroom that got a lot of attention was that I had a poster of Mao in my room. And this was like, I think one of the height of like cultural revolution, uh, you know, Mao propaganda styles, right? So it said in, in Mandarin, like, uh, chairman Mao, uh, like the son of the nation, right, as like a play on words with like a radiating like sun, sun behind him. Um, and a big part of, uh, of the AP government course is understanding media and media as an extension propaganda, right? I would always say to my students it became like a joke with all the kids that took my class because I was always telling them, you know, all media is bias. One of the early assignments

that we did in the class was understanding how to like, you know, how to identify bias. And then after we went through ideology, being able to pinpoint which ideology, the bias was stemming from and all media is propaganda right like we of course we called it marketing in the u.s but if you were to analyze marketing from any other perspective it's it's just propaganda right like propaganda is just a method of instilling a a strong emotional response um so every you know like objectivity like give me a break like uh everything that we see on the news you you walk down the street you open your phone you you're reading magazines, everything is propaganda.

And I thought that the poster itself was a really good, you know, representation of, like, overt propaganda, right? And of course, you know, it doesn't matter to them because most people aren't like us and the fact that, like, I'm not even a Maoist, right? That doesn't mean anything to them because, like, if they've got into the milieu of, like, all of the ideological distinctions on the left, I think that even like most of us, our heads start to spin. But it was like, you know, this idea that I was like promoting like Maoism or something.

I don't know. It was just, it was like ridiculous. And so what I think is also kind of interesting about this is that when I got home after meeting with this parent, I was like, yeah, like there was some like really weird things that he asked. Like there, it just that like kind of caught me like in the gut at that moment that it was just like, that's a weird way to phrase that question. So like one of the things that he asked me because he was like, you know, we're moving to Sacramento. My son is a young black male. Is this a safe

place for him? Right? And I was like, well, you know, like Sacramento I think is a pretty progressive area, but we are surrounded by a lot of like right wing rednecks. Right. Like there are a lot like we live next to a town that is called Old Hang Town, right? There are historically a lot of places around this area that have been, you know, sundown towns. And it, it obviously, we have issues with people who, like, literally drive around our city, which gigantic Confederate flags out of the back of their truck. Like, there are issues with overt racism here. Yeah. Like, it's not, I mean, it's as safe as any other city in the United States, but, I mean, these are problems that most of, most of us face um and then he was like i just don't understand why people don't rise up like take arms

up against the government and that was like the comment that i was just like what the fuck dude like you you know we're sitting at this coffee shop and i was just like yeah man like i i've gone down those deep dark rabbit holes before where i think like why aren't people doing this and he goes doing what so that i say it and i'm like you know taking up arms against the state and then and then we look back at like history and we have examples of people doing that and then you know getting murdered and they become you know martyrs for cause and you just have to look at that and be like well you know it takes a it takes a lot of work like we have to build a movement like it's not a simple answer of let's rise up against the government because isn't that like ultimately like the right wing you know answer to it is just like take up your you know pick up your guns by this tyrannical government it's like no what I'm interested in doing is making sure that we have, you know, the ability to meet people's needs in the moment so that when the state doesn't come to save us, like we know that it's not going to, when we're facing climate catastrophe, you know, rising unemployment, extreme poverty, you know,

the dystopian hellscape that we currently live in. What I want to make sure that we have is water, food, shelter, the ability to meet people's needs in the moment without relying on some kind of bureaucratic, you know, capitalist system to be able to come and relieve us of these, these ills. Now, of course, you know, they manipulated that to make it look like I was suggesting that people should rise up against, you know, like, I'm encouraging my students to take up arms against the state. I was just like, man, I couldn't, couldn't think of anything further from what I was saying. I literally just said, we have examples of that happening, and they literally get murdered. Like, this isn't a good idea, right? You know, and, uh, man, uh,

And then the other thing was that we, so during our conversation, we were talking about China. He was like, you know, I'm really interested in, like, learning about China. Like, have you been there before? Like, I think that we could learn a lot from their model. And we started having a conversation about, like, the, you know, superstructure and base and, and, like, the cultural revolution. And I was, like, he was asking me to go into further detail of that. And I was like, yeah, you know, there was a lot of excesses during the culture revolution. like some people were, you know, definitely taken out in the street and shot that probably shouldn't have been.

And then they, like, put that and, like, highlighted it in red. And I'm like, what are you trying to to insinuate that I was saying there? Like, are you saying that I'm suggesting that people should be dragged out in the street and shot? Like, I literally just said there were people who were dragged out in the street and shot that probably shouldn't have been as an excess of what happened. Like, so, you know, turning this whole idea into that I was just like, you know, violent Antifa slash communist teacher who was, you know, encouraging my students to be left-wing activists, ultimately was their narrative. And like you said at the beginning of this, I think that, like, I definitely fit their,

their perfect boogeyman, right? You know, it was like I have been politically active for a long time. They were able to find videos of me, like, talking at events and put that in, you know, with their, their larger clip. And I think another, another key point of theirs was that when they confronted me out in front of, or around my house, I was wearing a shirt that had a hammer and sickle on it.

And I also have a hammer and sickle tattooed on my chest, right? So they, like, they found pictures from my social media accounts where, like, it didn't have a shirt on. And, like, as if I walked into class with that shirt on or without a shirt on, Like, I think one of the most encouraging things, you know, that happened after this was kind of the flood of past student support that I received and these letters that students were sending in my defense. And I made it a key part of my class that students could not know my political ideology. Every year, I'd have kids trying to guess, and I cannot tell you how often they would guess a right-wing ideology. Because I played devil's advocate very well in my class, and I would push them, like, especially the kids that were, like, left-leaning.

I would push them because I want to make sure that they were able to defend their points, right? Because they're going to enter a world in which everything they say is going to be highly scrutinized and become, you know, a, a, battleground that they have to test themselves and prove themselves that they that their views and their opinions are not only defensible but worthy of of defense you know so it was you know they they were acting as if i was coming in there and just like i'm a marxist this is what i'm going to teach you like this you get a gun you get a gun right it's like this is ridiculous and you know what was fascinating to me and my first year at that school I had a student come into my class during, like, lunch, and she was like,

Mr. Gipe, I wanted to ask you some questions about Marxism, and I was like, oh, okay, sure. Like, why me? And she's like, well, I mean, you teach AP government, so I figured you would know a lot about it. And this other teacher said that you were a Marxist. And I was like, what? Like, that shouldn't be communicated to students, like, if they know that. And I don't even know how he knows that. I didn't talk to him about that.

Like, I was perturbed that a student knew my political ideology, you know, and it became like a situation in which, like, I had, you know, students would try to guess all year, you know, and I remember, like, most often, most students thought I was a libertarian, and it was hilarious to me, but I also think a very good testament to the fact that, like, I wasn't coming into class preaching my ideology, right? Like, this wasn't about me. Everything in my class was about inculmonary. my students with the ability to articulate their views and put them into context and then

provide a larger scope of understanding of what those things meant. Absolutely. But then, of course, that's not what the narrative was. Yeah, the job fundamentally and the job you took seriously is teaching kids how to think, not what to think. Right. And, you know, I think you did a great job. And one of the aspects of the story that I just wanted to reiterate and reemphasize

is the amount of grassroots support that you guys. got from students that you've had. Students absolutely loved you. You know, you are objectively a great teacher and that came across in this wide spectrum of support that I could see from the behind the scenes little view that I could have sometimes of this support from students, from your, from your colleagues, if I'm not mistaken, from often parents of students that you had close relationships with. So this is somebody who is a genuinely great teacher doing their best to teach children how to think and not what to think. And even in those places where there's controversy, like, you know, making them take a political compass test, that shouldn't be controversial at all because what you're doing

is allowing them to get out explicitly their own values, interrogate, what do you believe on this question? And that's crucial for intellectual growth. You're not telling them you need to answer this question this way or if you're on the right side, you're bad and on the left side you're good. You're just saying, learn what you think. And these, asking a question explicitly is a great way for a budding intellectual or a budding mind in just. general to get a good grasp on what they believe as a as a beginning path to understanding who they are as a human being. So that's, that's beautiful. The concern about kids moving left in your, in your course, over the course of your class, you're teaching in California. You're

teaching diverse, you know, young students in a deep blue state. And as they learn more, the fact that a majority of them perhaps tend to move leftward, that is not your fault, nor is it to be unexpected, nor is it completely out of left field. You know, my experience of learning about the world is a move leftward. Some people have different experiences. But just the mere fact that some of your students, again, in a very progressive state, in a very diverse community, would have left-wing politics, or the more they learned, they would move towards the left.

Their young kid, that's not surprising at all, nor is it a product of your indoctrination. And then the last thing I wanted to say is the political cartoons, the mouth, becoming a huge problem here. You know, when you learn about government, you learn about history, you learn about the various propaganda mechanisms of various countries. I remember deeply in middle school learning about political cartoons, for example, which is obviously a form of propaganda. Rosie the Riveter, any Uncle Sam poster.

I remember learning about Nazi propaganda in World War II and some of the Nazi posters that were put up. The Gats and Flag, in and of itself, is a propaganda tool or is a marker. of one's ideological place in the spectrum. And Confederate flags, as you said, whether they're driving around in trucks or you're learning about them in history books,

that in and of itself took on meaning that it was ideological and can be seen as propagandistic. So the idea that one of the largest revolutions of the 20th century that still has profound impacts on the world today, rising China, is off limits.

You can't even have an example from that revolution as political propaganda is just wild and shows the bad faith starting point that they're coming from. This is not, you know, objective or neutral mediators coming to a conclusion. These are highly partisan people with an agenda crafting that agenda. And the fact that the discussion was this conscious weaving, asking about the school and the kids and, you know, what's that about with this increasingly, you know, rhetoric about left-wing activism. and I'm just asking for myself and maybe we should take up arms.

This is a conscious ploy to get those two conversations so weave together such that, in my guess, they could be pieced together more easily. You know, you want him to say some stuff over here on this side and then mix it with the stuff we're talking about the kids and present the worst possible version of this conversation. That is my at least understanding of what happened. Absolutely. Yeah. No, totally.

And, you know, I think, you know, in terms of the overall fallout, of this was that uh so project beritas ended up coming to uh the school that i taught at and kind of uh you know confronted um the school administration with like an ultimatum like you need to to give us a statement on this or we're going to release this video is how i was made to understand i never saw it but this is what i was made to understand they said um and so i sat down with administration the day before it came out and we went over the comments over like on a piece of paper of things that I had I had said quoted and I explained to them like the context of the conversation like I'm doing with you now you know and at the end of that you know the people

who were sitting in that meeting were like well you know like that makes sense I guess we got I kind of see what happened with this situation and see what they do with it. And then, of course, you know, like the blowup happens. And then a couple days later, the administration sits down with Project Veritas in a one-on-one interview with them. And during that interview, the person who's representing the administration who was not in the meeting with me the day before. says that they talked with me, and I came clean about everything.

I said, you know, I'm, I'm part of Antifa, and I'm a communist, and I'm teaching it in my classroom. And I was just like, what? What? Like, I didn't say any of that. And not only did I not say that, but, like, you weren't even in that meeting. Like, I didn't say any of those things. And so that, I think, was really the beginning of.

of just like the process of watching a story snowball of not only having my comments taken out of context, but then people just saying things that I said that I never said at all, right? Like just putting words in my mouth. Like I had obviously spent a lot of time in my class focusing on the media. We live in the post-truth world. This is the age of disinformation, like focusing on how the media is able to manipulate. stories and narratives, you know, to the particular advantage of either, you know, mainstream parties, either Democrats or the Republicans, conservative or slightly less conservative.

But they, we spend a tremendous amount of time analyzing that. And it was a really good opportunity, unfortunate, however unfortunate it was, for my, for my past students to see this in action with me as their target. You know, it was just like, anyone who had sat, and this is another point that I really want to emphasize is that I was put in a light as if I was doing all this secret stuff like behind the scenes like oh this is you know like this is what he's doing no one knows about it bullshit bullshit like everyone had access to my classroom to the assignments that I assigned to my students to the readings that I had them doing those were all accessible in my Google classroom and available to parents at any time.

I had multiple parents of students that they were allowed to log into my Google classroom. And so anytime I sent an assignment to a student, it would also send it to that parent. So they had direct access to the things that I was providing my students to read, what assignments I was having them work on, daily warm up questions, discussion questions, anything and everything that I did in my class was open and available. to parents, administration, members of the community, other national site reps. I mean, like, I was teaching an AP class.

This is part of college board. This is a national organization. And all of that was available. All of it was available. Nothing I did was secret. Nothing I did was hidden. Everything that I did could be aligned with the college board curriculum point by point. Like, you can show me an assignment and be like, where does this fit in?

And I can show you the standard. that it did like I was very good at my job and and this idea that I was doing it all in a way to be like nefarious to get my kids to be like left wing activists is just is absolute fabrication absolutely yeah you were a great teacher that consciously went out of his way not to do the things you're being accused of doing and that is what's so frustrating your life in so many ways because as you say you're you're functionally lost this career that that was you've worked your entire life for you were getting you are very good at that you found a lot of meaning out of um you took your job and the responsibility that it implies incredibly seriously on

every front and then to have you know all of that work all of that heart that you've poured into this stuff um you know turned into the worst caricature of a caricature of a caricature and then have that weaponized to threaten the physical safety of you and your loved ones i mean this is truly, the only crime here, the only bad things happening here is precisely this right-wing opportunistic, cynical attack on a teacher that is just doing his fucking job to the best of his ability. That's the real crime. But then you got turned into this, as I said, feverish hot house caricature of a caricature in their eyes. And for so long, just trying to survive day to day and also being unable for other reasons to give your side of the story.

And so anybody could just say anything about you. And you had a very limited ability, if any, at all, to respond. And it was really taken on board as fact by a lot of people with power over you and your career and, you know, whatever, however that plays out. And that's kind of what I want to move into next because we know how this video happens. We know what they're using against you. We know how they're framing you. Then, of course, this hits the school system. This is now in a situation where parents are coming to school meetings, having seen these videos, these presentations of who you ostensibly are, and now they're riled up.

Can you talk a little bit about that fallout in particular? Yeah, so I think that the school board had a meeting two days after the video was launched, or might have actually been the next day. And within that 24-hour time frame, kind of there were all sorts of pages. popping up on Facebook or Instagram encouraging community members to show up at this school board meeting. Now, everyone, this was like an hour, an hour and a half long school board meeting with like some of the most vile people saying some of the most vile things. I tried to watch the whole thing when it happened and I couldn't.

I was just like, these people are going to kill me. They legitimately want to see my head on a stake. like this is frightening in ways that I cannot possibly like comprehend you know and they were all doing this under the guise of protecting the children right like we have to protect the children from this man like he is he is a threat to them and it was like I could not think of anything that I think that was more heartbreaking than the idea that I was ever a threat to my students my my classroom was a place that all of my students regardless of ideology were safe um and and often when we would have structured debates in the classroom, you know, students who were more on the right

often got ganged up on. And that's when I would jump in and help try to defend their points. Obviously, in ways that I found acceptable, I'm not going to, you know, if they were saying something that was like explicitly racist or sexist, I was just like, okay, and this is why that isn't a good argument. And let's dissect that, right? You know, but that was also one of the reasons why so many of my students thought that I was more right-leaning than I am, because I was always kind of defending the kids who were having a more difficult time, defending their points because they were in a minority ideologically. So, you know, they have this board meeting where all these people are speaking. And I had kind of foolishly looking back told, I had put out

a video on my own personal Instagram story, which I later found out was, you know, someone, someone on my Instagram was recording these things and feeding it to the media. You know who? Do you know who, by the way? I have no idea. But was that a private Instagram with friends? It was a private. So there's like some betrayal in this shit. Yeah.

Yeah. And I eventually deleted everyone off of that page and then added, added people back so I could just clear house. But I, you know, wrote or I said in this video, I said, you know, I don't want anyone who, supports me to show up to this meeting because they potentially could be put in danger and I don't want the media to create this idea that like Antifa is showing up to defend this teacher you know because like that's exactly how they would have spun it and I was very conscious of that so I you know told people not to show up if they if they supported me some of your students wanted to am I correct yes yes yeah I said no do not do that

Correct. Right. And I, you know, had students who had reached out saying that they had defended me on Twitter, and people were calling their work threatening them, right? Like, these are the people who are saying that I'm a threat to my students. These people that are legitimately finding out where past students worked, calling their place of work, threatening them, you know, threatening to hurt them online in these comment sections. Like, these are these people, right? So this school board meeting is just, filled with everyone and anyone who wants to see me not only fired but potentially physically harmed. And they're given, you know, the ability to do their public comment. And one, only one of those people. I eventually watched the whole thing. Only one of those people was a parent of a student. And it was a parent of a student that I had that school year. So we had been in school for, I think, 12 days in total. So this student I had in my class for 12 days, their mom got up, you know, and said that, like, that I was teaching their children, as she said, fascist crap. I saw that. I was, that I came in, that their daughter, that they had just moved

to California, and their daughter had, you know, been in my class for, for two weeks. and already was pushing against their mom's wishes and that I was the reason for that. And I was just like, man, have you met a 17-year-old kid? Yeah, for it. You, like, this is what boggles my mind is like, I can't even get my students to turn in assignments on time. And you think that I have enough power to completely flip their entire worldview in two weeks? Like, not likely. And it is unheard of that teenagers push back.

their parents authority that's unheard of yeah never never have right yeah exactly and it was just like so this this school board meeting then you know blows up um and it's it's pasted all over that i think that's when like tucker carlson did his his piece and and kandis owens did did a piece on it um and this is this is kind of like a humorous and a a dark humorous side note um i at the time was going to a gym pretty pretty frequently and I was like I can't I can't go anymore like I can't like leave my house without being afraid of someone hurting me so I went to the gym to cancel my membership and it was you know early still early on in the pandemic so everyone's still wearing masks around around here obviously that's kind of died down but so I I walked in with like a hood and like a face mask

and I was like I need to cancel my membership and the TVs in the gym were the news um every other tv had me on it and and i i was just like i like couldn't i was just like are you like how is this that big of a story you know it was it was incredibly surreal so i you know that that was just like the explosion i think really happened after the um the school board meeting and then and then the narrative became that you know an emphasis on on what they've already been saying for decades right the education is is the epicenter of marxist indoctrination and that this is you know all these lefty teachers are coming in and turning your kids into you know trans anarchist you know violent super soldiers right it's just like give me a break

like i can't you know like if i can get my kids to write like a coherent thesis statement i feel pretty successful right like all right so so yeah that's that's the basics um we can we can talk about happened since then that that that conference with parents and the whole thing I saw that too and that was absolutely you know carnivalesque in the interpretation of some of these people and it had to hurt your heart to think like there probably were some parents who were good people that just were under this false impression of you as this monster and you know if you could have had a chance to either talk to them directly or if they could have seen how you actually taught in class it all could have been cleared up but it has to hurt thinking like you know I remember that student

I had a good relationship with them, and now this mother is thinking on this, I mean, to say that you're now pushing fascist crap, it just goes to show the ignorance and the naivete of a lot of these people, but it also shows how they can be easily manipulated, you know, and how you could get to the point where this person with this Mao poster and this anti-fascist flag is actually a fascist, I mean, it's just this soup of confusion and it sucks. Yeah, I don't know what else to say. I guess the question I had for you that I've had for a while that I wanted to ask is you said the person who reached out from Project Veritas eventually got you to the coffee shop and filmed you had reached out to you and one other teacher. So my question is, how do you think you and that other teacher, or you don't have to mention them at all if you don't want to? But how did you become the target? Was there anything prior to this that would make you a target? Yeah. So I think that they reached out not knowing which content I taught. I think that someone had reached out to them because they have like an anonymous tip line. And someone had reached out to them saying the AP, because I also taught economics. I didn't teach AP economics. I just taught regular economics. And so I think that they thought that I taught both. And that's why they were asking that the teacher who taught AP economics, he, he, he, didn't reach out to them. I don't think that he ever, ever did. Once they talked to me, they realized that I was, I was their target. But what I'm assuming happened was, um, I think that if I was able to identify correctly, the person who, um, who sent me or sent them the tip about me was because of, of this story that I, it's just, it's so ridiculous. Okay. So, So during the 2020-2020 school year, almost every school in the United States was doing some form of distance learning, right?

Like we were teaching from home over Zoom. And because of that, there was certain things that as teachers we had to rely on more consistently than we would if we were in a regular class face-to-face with our students. One of those is an application blanking on the name. It's a way to text your students without them having your phone number. And like all teachers that I know of use it, right? It's a good way to like send out reminders like, hey, this assignment is due, this, you know, whenever. So there are numerous like confession pages that students would run on Instagram that teachers became aware of because there was a lot of bullying going on on these accounts. So teachers started watching these accounts without students realizing that we were watching them.

You know, because, like, there was a tremendous amount of, like, you know, threats of violence, like, fights that would happen on there that would erupt into the real physical fight. So we were trying to, like, keep track of these and make sure that, like, you know, they were shut down as quickly as possible. And there was a, and they were all anonymous. So it was very difficult to figure out who was posting what. And we came back to in-person learning in, like, spring of 2021. And there was a mask mandate in all of California. So, like, we had very small cohorts of students who, you know, would come in on A, B, days and then CD days. And then, you know, so we try to minimize the amount of students that were there in person and they were required to wear masks.

And someone on this confessions page posted, we're going to. going to walk out of school tomorrow and we're going to protest this mask mandate, we have to stop this socialist agenda. Okay. So I took a screenshot of that and I sent it to my APgov kids in this app and I was like, if I find out that this is one of you guys, I'm going to fail you automatically because this isn't what socialism is and you know that because we went over it in ideology as like a joke, right? I'm an incredibly sarcastic person. So like I'm, I'm, I'm very sarcastic with my kids, too. And they all understand that about me. And so these kids, like, these kids are, like, cracking up and they're just like, oh, like, Mr. Guy, like, go in there

and teach them. And I'm like, I'm not going to get involved. I just need, you guys need to know that these confession pages are watched by a lot of teachers. Because, like, I know that, like, some very reprehensible things get posted on these, and you need to be more cautious about this. So they were like, oh, it's on the confessions page. So then a bunch of my students jump into that comment section and they start lambasting whoever this person is right um and uh so i i kind did some some digging in it and i think that that was what caused it was that my students were then saying like if you had mr gype like you would understand what this thing is blah blah blah blah blah and then someone came into my class saw the things that i had on my wall sent it into project

varitas, they got this tip, and they're like, oh, we're going to, you know, come after this, this teacher. And, you know, when it first happened, I think that most of us were, like, under the understanding of like, okay, well, I mean, where is this going to fit into the larger political narrative? Because at the time, you know, the conversation around, like, school choice, quote-unquote school choice of diverting public funds into, like, school voucher programs had kind of died down. So we were, I was like, well, you know, this always kind of fits into a larger narrative about, you know, left-wing indoctrination in schools, so they might utilize it that way. But I kind of was just like, I don't, I mean,

this can't potentially pick up any steam. Like, this is ridiculous. Like, I'm just like this random dude who teaches the class of them, you know, like, who cares? Like, this isn't going to be anything. But I think that that ultimately was what led to it. Was a student that I never had, who had some understanding of who I was. as a person and a teacher because of this interaction that they had with students of mine was what led to it. And if a student is already talking about, I mean, in the middle of a pandemic, that masks are socialist tyranny, you just know that they're plugged in, their parents or whatever.

I mean, this is somebody that has that sort of background ready to jump on the archetype of you, as we've already talked about. So, yeah, I guess that does make sense. but we've talked about how the event happened. We've talked about the culmination in both the form of physical harassment for you and your family, also in the form of trying to, the explicit goal at that point is to try to get you fired. This was ultimately, I believe, successful.

Can you talk about basically what has happened since? You know, you've dedicated your life to being a teacher, and basically at this point, you can no longer do. that you can't pursue that dream and you've you've attempted and that has fallen apart it you kind of want to catch us up on what's happened since all of that yeah i mean there there was a lot of um obviously like the kind of legal situation behind it um in in terms of like how that that played out ultimately the uh school was wasn't successful in actually firing me um i i eventually resigned And, you know, that became a whole new news story rather recently, which is actually what encouraged me to sit down with you and do this because, you know, I just want to express my gratitude that since, like, from the very beginning, you'd always been, like, whatever you need, however I can help.

And I remember at the beginning of all this, just like, I can't say anything, and this makes me feel absolutely like that I'm in effect. at being able to do what I have taught my students to do, which is to speak up for themselves and to defend themselves when attacked. And I wasn't able to do that for myself. And this kind of recent round of news coverage about me resigning and the kind of overall structures of that resignation is what would encourage me to do this. But I think that since everything happened, And, you know, it's my goal has, has been to kind of help people understand that this is so much not about me. Like this, this is a much bigger attack on education. And I just happened to become like a poster boy for that, you know?

And it was, it was really difficult to kind of see how this fits into. to that, that structured battleground that they've, that they've created, you know, and I think that, you know, when we were talking about the school board meeting and kind of the naivety of a round, of calling, calling me a fascist, right? But that, that ultimately plays into the obfuscation that works very well for the right to, to label, uh, the left as, as fascist. And it's often done in a way that's like, oh, you know, there's a protest against Richard Spencer. They're shutting down freedom of speech. That's because they're fascists, right?

And to plug your recent episode on Red Menace that you and Allison did on the three-way fight, which I highly encourage all of your listeners to listen to, you both did a fantastic job of kind of creating a foundational understanding of this current political moment that we're facing when it comes to like the rise and threats of fascism and how they're using education as kind of a bludgeoning tool. Like it's being utilized to push a very particular political agenda under the guise of objectivity because the ultimate, you know, kind of framework that they have been able to establish is that the left, comes in to these educational spaces and indoctrinates students and that they should just come in and teach the curriculum, right? As if the curriculum that's established hasn't been established through a political battle. Right, exactly. Right. That these things that we teach,

regardless of your own political understanding, they are political. There is no objective way to teach government and politics. And the idea that we can, I think, is a testament to most people's inability to fully understand political bias and how it is manifested and reflected in everyday life, right? Like, how are you supposed to teach both sides of the civil rights movement, right? But, like, that's the, that's, you know, quote unquote, the encouragement that that you get from these people is that you are supposed to, you know, be just presenting the information, right? Like in California, we've adopted ethnic studies as a requirement for high school.

How are you supposed to teach ethnic studies from both sides, right? Like, are you supposed to talk about, you know, and we're seeing this play out in a lot of states, like Florida, where you are no longer allowed to present information that could make any student feel uncomfortable on a basis of race is one of the defining categories. So this is their ultimately their attack on quote unquote the critical race theory being implemented in schools, which of course is not being implemented in schools at all and is a testament to their misunderstanding of what critical race theory is. But the idea that anything that could potentially make students who like white students feel uncomfortable about the topics needs to be avoided at all cost.

right so like if if we're talking about slavery you know we need to talk about it in a way that doesn't make anyone feel uncomfortable right like how this and this is their goal right is to is to create a curriculum and create an educational environment in which their ideology is seen as the status quo um and their and since it's the status quo is therefore objective right like we as as as you know politically conscious individuals we understand the role of of cultural hegemony and how that plays out in education institutions. And the fact that these people who want to control and dictate curriculum are doing so under the guise of remaining a political, are remaining objective, centrist if you want to apply that term to it, even though they would probably even disagree with

that. But ultimately, their goal is to teach the history of America from a Western chauvinist perspective. And from an inherently imperialistic and nationalist perspective, which is, you know, the foundation of fascism. And I think that there are a lot of very significant texts that have been written on this. And the advantage that they have is being able to muddy the waters as much as possible by misusing terminology and misapplying ideology, right? Like, I follow a lot of right-wing accounts just to, like, keep a finger on the pulse and Prager University, great, great Prager You, I was supposed to a thing the other day that was like, the founder of fascism was a student of Marx, right?

And it was like, that's like saying that Milton Friedman is a student of Marx because he read marks, right? Like, of course, people who are serious about political philosophy, political economy, are going to read Marx. Like, if you don't, you don't have a firm grasp over the entirety of that content. Like, to ignore Marx would be a huge disservice to it, right? So to act as if someone who was the foundation of fascist ideology was a student of Marx because they had read and critiqued Marx is obviously just patently false, right? But they don't have to worry about people who are absorbing that to do any background research, to do any digging into their claims.

They can just say something and it's true. Yes. Right. And then if they have other people just regurgitate it, then that just shows the validity of their statement. And that I think is one of the deepest ironies in a story full of ironies, which is, as we said earlier, what you were objectively doing is teaching your students how to think and not what to think. Under the guise of trying to or pretending like they're doing that, they're actually literally deep down wanting to teach what to think and not how to think. Because at the moment you start teaching anybody to think critically about American history, you're going to immediately piss off the fairy tale lollipop and rainbow version that the conservative now internalizes a part of their very self. And so this whole idea that you're the one leading kids astray and what they want is just for you to stick to the neutral objective material when it is actually precisely the opposite. You're teaching in an unobjective reality, government, politics, right?

There's no objective, necessarily objective way to talk or think about those things, but you're doing it in the proper way, the way that a responsible teacher should do it. And they really don't want you to do that. They don't want kids to learn how to think critically about their own history. They want them to be given this fairy tale version that makes the conservative feel comfortable. And so, you know, they present this in this absolutely upside down way where they're the ones fighting for objectivity and truth. and against fascism, when it is just this wild projection, which if you understand psychological projection, you'll immediately understand 85% of right-wing American politics. And I think that's that play here.

100%. Yeah. I think that that is a constant source of frustration is watching kind of the right-wing attacks on the left and their ability to just, you know, we're similar age. And I don't know if you ever watched peewee's playhouse when you were a kid, but I feel like it is the perfect line, the peewee insult, like I know you are, but what am I? You know, and that's exactly what happens. It's like you make the accusation accurately to these people, like, hey, these are, these are fascists, right? Like, because I understand, and I think, again, that you and Allison did a really good job on that, that last episode of Red Menace and kind of highlighting how difficult it is for people to clearly identify and define what fascism is and that fascists are able to utilize

that to their advantage, right? But when we make the accusation that these people are fascists, we're doing so with a historical and political understanding of what that movement is, what it represents historically as well as contemporary. And all they have to do is say, that's you. Exactly. Right? And like everything then that we've done and the copious amount of research and and education and understanding of these movements and being able to articulate this is why you're fascist, A, B, C, and D, right? Here's the reasons why I'm applying that label to you and what the course that you've chosen. And all they have to do is turn around and just be like, but you're a fascist.

And then like, it just crumbles. Then just like everyone's just like, well, that's what, you know, Dennis Prager said. So I guess that's what's true. You know, it's like, oh, my God, like, how much time do I have? I always think about that quote from, like, Che, where he's like, I don't have time to show you how wrong you are. And then he's like, you know, it's going to bother me if I tell him. It's just like, yeah. And I also want to frame all of this. You know, we talked about the attack on the left and all the fantasies and feverish, you know, paranoia of the right.

There's also this explicit and longstanding attack on public schools in and of themselves. A lot of this is one of the targets of these sorts of movements is the very idea of public school. the very values that underpin public funds going to educate people. You know, not just white kids, but everybody. And that is a part of this psychological makeup. And it's also what made you such a good archetype and target for them. But also, you know, this is a broader attack. And like in Florida right now with DeSantis, you see this new policy where they're now going to let veterans,

military veterans without bachelor degrees teach in their Florida public schools. The only credentials, right, that you have to have ostensibly under this policy is having gone to the military. And that somehow equips you with the intellectual, moral, responsible elements of being a good teacher. And being a good teacher also, as I'm sure you would agree, is not just knowledge of the facts and the ability to teach it, but it's more nuanced, less, more abstract things like classroom management. you know dealing with perhaps a problem child and trying to keep everybody else on task dealing with the kids home problems spilling over into the classroom these are all you know skill sets that need to be educated and develop their experience and this idea that you can

just throw somebody in the classroom because he was a 19 year old and went and killed some people in iraq and that's all the credentials he needs to teach your kid i mean this is insanity but it's all part of this much broader attack on on public schools in general i think and it's it's broader than you but you are a sort of perfect you know inflection point for them on yeah totally and and that point i just really want to drive that home that teaching is is so much more than knowing your content area in fact i remember when i did did my student teaching um that was something that uh was because under social science the credential um qualifies you to teach you know u.s history world history ethnic studies, econ, government, and psychology. And I remember just being like, I don't know

anything about psychology. Like, if I had to teach that class, like, I would be at a severe disadvantage. Like, I would not be doing my students any service, you know, teaching, teaching them that class. And I remember my master teacher at that time was just like, man, 90% of what you do as a teacher is not delivering content. And it's so true. It's a vast majority of it is, you know, a variety of other roles that you play as a teacher. And obviously, like, having mastery of your content is something that we would hugely prefer all of our teachers to have. But it's, yeah, I can't imagine, you know, some 19 or 20-year-old person coming out of the military feeling equipped that they're able to handle a classroom. Like, good luck.

Like, you know, we'll see how well that. And as if some person who's coming out of the military is somehow objective, you know, when it comes to their role that they play in education. But in terms of the kind of the overall attack on education, I had two quotes that I wanted to read out of Jason Stanley's book, how fascism works, the politics of us and them, which is a great, very quick read. I highly recommend it to anyone. But he has an entire chapter. And this is also, I think, touched on pretty extensively in Bryn Tanna Hill's recent book, American Fascism, which I also highly, highly recommend folks to read. But this chapter on anti-intellectualism really focuses it on and hones in on like kind of the right-wing attack on education as an institution, and it's kind of history of doing so. So Stanley says, this does not mean that there is no role for universities in fascist politics.

In fascist ideology, there is only one legitimate viewpoint, that of the dominant nation. Schools introduce students to the dominant culture and its mythic past. Education, therefore, either poses a grave threat to fascism or becomes a pillar of support for the mythical nation. And I think that that really articulates that there is no middle ground, right? And this, right, there are, and as products of the American school systems, you know, both of us can testify to the fact that like the mythic nation as being part and parcel for the curriculum is its core value, right? Like the United States is consistently shown to be, you know, the hero historically. on the right side of history, that even though it might have had, you know, assorted past with

discrimination and slavery, that like we've ultimately overcome those things, that we've become a beacon for freedom and democracy and equality that the world aspires to. And that ultimately is what these people are arguing should be taught in classrooms. Regardless of the reality of the situation, it is this idea that America stands as, you know, this benevolent empire that sees the rest of the world as its playground, right? That we're going to help the rest of the world. We're going to do the, and if they step out of line, that we have the vested authority. you know, because we're God's chosen people, essentially, to punish them, right, to put them back into order. And anyone who stands in contradiction to our global hegemony is only doing so

on a basis of illegitimacy and tyranny, you know. And that's their goal. When pushing people out who want to restructure the way that education is perceived, right, as not a fostering of the dominant culture as a place where students are able to come, find things that they're passionate about, be given tools and resources, so that they can ultimately, at the end of the day, create a better world, something that they are proud of, right? We're all supposed to be stewards of this planet and students should come out of school feeling that they have the ability to change the world around them, to be more equitable, to be more just, to be something that they are not a victim of, right? That they are an active participant in creating their future.

Yeah, incredibly well said. And, you know, the idea that, I mean, we all know, it's a lot. laughing stock, this idea that public schools are Marxist indoctrination centers, the only thing you really have to do to dispel yourself of that, you know, lie is just ask like a normal everyday American, you know, somebody that maybe just graduated high school, has a job, has a family, doesn't a super political person, doesn't even, you know, think or maybe not even vote, ask them just like, you know, what are your thoughts on America? And a lot of those people will regurgitate that middle school, elementary school, and high school propaganda. If it was

true that Marxists have been and are in control of the educational institutions, then you would see a more ambient level of basic Marxist things being taken as common sense rather than the anathema that they're often treated as. To present Marxist ideas so often, even to non-political, ostensibly non-political people, will immediately hit a roadblock. Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you saying? And that shows that that passively consumed propaganda that they've been forced fed their entire lives is gearing towards the right, towards these protection of these myths and these narratives. And I think what the right wing is going through now, especially in the last few years, Black Lives Matter protests, the Trump administration, you know, millennials and Gen Zs,

preferring socialism over capitalism, is they're really feeling that these myths that have been central to their own sense of self and their entire worldview really are collapsing. And they really are because every, you know, fairy tale we've been told about America is being stripped and revealed for what it actually is, you know, moment by moment, year by year. And more and more people are seeing everything they told us about capitalism is bullshit, you know, everything they're telling us about how great America is is bullshit. I actually know some people and because of the internet, I can talk to people in different countries. This idea that America is God's chosen country and the best country to ever exist is bullshit. it. People are just coming to these realizations as America is revealing itself to be what it actually is. And this is causing a great amount of anxiety among conservatives and reactionaries

alike. And so they have to over-extend themselves. They have to go out of their way to get more, they have to become more radical. They have to become more fascist to keep the lid on. And I think you are a victim of that, as so many others are as well, a victim of that increasing insecurity and hysteria and feeling as if they're losing the narrative battle, let alone the ultimate political and cultural one. Absolutely. Yeah, perfectly said. Over the past week, there has been several other people who work in the field of education who've been, you know, targeted by Project Veritas. And it just is an example of how they are continuing this battle, right? This is ultimately a part of that larger culture war that everyone needs to take seriously, right?

That this is a part of the backlash of, you know, especially within education, the ability for people to have been able to, like, shape the way that curriculum is developed, right? Like there is a much broader a group of people who are developing curriculum, right? There is a much broader understanding of like whose voices we should not be marginalizing anymore, right? When we're teaching things like history and politics, like the ability to focus on people who've been historically oppressed and giving their side of history when we're teaching about events like World War II or the civil rights movement or, the American Revolution and even being able to talk about, you know, the indigenous people who were being subjected to a genocide were also writing and creating history. Now it's time for us to amplify those histories, right, so that we understand that this entire, this entire, the context

of this nation cannot and should not be perceived only through the eyes of wealthy land-owning individuals, right? Wealthy land-owning white men, right? that there are other voices here that need to be taken into consideration. And we have been, you know, people, educators, curriculum developers, have been successful in doing that, right? And now what we're seeing is a massive backlash against that. Any semblance of progressive, you know, quote unquote progressive education is being attacked with the utmost veracity at a level, I think, that is completely disproportionate

to what's actually happening, because anything that's progressive gets labeled Marxist, right? Anything that amplifies the voices of women or people of color is Marxist, right? Everything is just a tool of quote-unquote cultural Marxism, and they're able to say those things out loud, right? I mean, how many times is Tucker Carlson talk about cultural Marxism with absolutely no irony? And no one's calling them out for using just a straight anti-Semitic dog whistle, right? And I mean, people are calling them out. But like the people who listen to those shows don't care, right? They're just either completely unaware or they are aware and they don't care because they know that it ultimately serves their agenda and their worldview. Absolutely. And the immediate mobilization of anti-communism

to tar anybody to the left of, you know, I don't know, to the left of Joe Rogan is, you know, they're all Marxists. They're all communist. There's no distinctions, as you said earlier, between like a liberal and a socialist or whatever. It's just all seen as that. And then this anti-communism that's been beaten into the heads of every American for a fucking century is the easiest thing to just

to use as a bludgeon for anything during Martin Luther King and the civil rights. There are constant attempts to tie him to communism. This is a communist threat. Black liberation. Civil rights is a communist plot. It's just a current in American history that any progressive movement at all

will be met with reaction that will almost always take up the anti-communist bludgeon as a part of that, that attempt to react and create backlash to progressive movements forward. And it's just a fact that if you actually want to understand American history, if you truly want to understand as close to objectively as possible, American history, you would have to understand it through the eyes of the founding fathers in that mainstream version, understand it through the eyes of the indigenous people, who were genocided to create room for it understand it through the eyes of the of the Africans who were kidnapped and forced into centuries and centuries of enslavement and then Jim Crow brutality understand it through the eyes of women

through marginalized gender and sexual identities and if you can see like this is how the black experience of America is here's the woman's experience of America you know and then we already are beaten into the head with the white male founding father's version of it then you can kind of then you can think

critically have all these perceptions and that's how you can actually come to a reasonable understanding, objectively, if you can even say that, of American history. But their exact attempt is to eliminate everything except for that mainstream, same shit being taught 50 years ago version of American history. And so, you know, they are actually against learning the real history. They want to preserve their mythical version. And so I think that's very clear here. We've talked about the story, we've gone through the details, the implications, broadly you said you had a quote maybe you have another one this would be a time to read that but

is there anything else you want to say at all anything you want to say to teachers in particular or any advice you might give to maybe somebody who you know shares or doesn't share our politics but wants to be a teacher and navigate that in a way that they don't become a target of this insane moral panic on the right yeah um you know it's it's one of those things where i i it's like with a heavy heart think that, you know, teachers understand, I guess, like, that they all have, like, a target on their back, you know, especially for supporting students who are marginalized, historically oppressed, right? Like, I know that there was an immediate backlash in the surrounding area where teachers were

all told to take down anything that could be perceived as political, right? So any pride flag was told to be taken down, right? Anything related to Black Lives Matter as a movement, right? And of course, like, these are movements that automatically get pigeonholed into, like, Marxism, right? Like, as you just said, that's, it's always the tool that they default to is claiming that these things are all Marxists, that these movements are a tool of nefarious, like, Marxists behind the scenes, pulling the strings. I think that we're in currently a huge national teacher shortage, right? And teachers who are passionate about teaching going into a profession that not only gets

generally treated like garbage, but also gets paid like garbage in comparison to other professionals with advanced degrees, like I don't see a lot of incentive for people going into a field in which they are going to become, you know, potentially the next person who gets attacked by these people. I think that there are a tremendous amount of educators who are just selfless, incredible human beings that give so much of themselves emotionally, physically, mentally to their profession, and I encourage them to not be, you know, not have their light snuffed out by stories like this, but at the same time, I am very aware of the long game of this tactic that the right is using, that ultimately their goal is to grind teachers down,

right um and consistently put them in a position of of defense uh where anything um and of course it's only it's only teachers that they view as left right like i know i know plenty of teachers who who who go into class every day and spew off um you know right wing conspiracy theories that that advocate all sorts of of right wing under you know i know teachers who had who had posters of regan in their room and any right wing hero of theirs i i had a community college professor of meteorology hand out Fox News articles on why climate change was a hoax in a community college. I mean, come on. They're everywhere. And they never get any pushback. There's never any threat to their jobs. I mean, I had more explicitly conservative or right-wing

professors in my career than anything else. Most people would go out of their way to conceal whatever their personal beliefs were. But those that felt comfortable expressing it were almost always conservative. Absolutely. Yeah, my entire educational experience, from kindergarten to, you know, graduate school was almost exclusively with right-wing professors or neoliberal professors, you know, it's just like those are pretty much like, that's the variation that you get. So I think that what I want my story to kind of serve as a reflection of the current political moment and the current political climate and the things that we can take for granted, like having a supportive administration or having, you know, the kind of defense of transparency

be there for us until push comes to shove. Because then when you become a target, all of those defenses, they just crumble, right? Like, it's almost as if they were never there to begin with, right? People, and again, you know, I think that your episode on Red Menace really touched on this is that the liberal establishment is incapable of standing up to fascism because they know that at the end of the day that their economic interests in particular, even if there are social differences in terms of how they might view the world, that they would rather capitulate to the fascists, right, than stand up to them and potentially create a bigger political rift between

themselves and the most reactionary right-wing forces. And we need to as educators and people who are concerned parents, you know, really understand that they aren't, they're not backing away from this fight. In the area that I live, we have, you know, several people that are running for open school board seats that are openly aligned with right-wing, you know, militant right-wing groups that have been caught on on tape saying things like they believe that immigrants should have their heads smashed into concrete right and and this is this is a person who is who is very open about their their views of Western supremacy anti-Semitism and and they're running for school board these are the people who want to shape the curriculum right so

when they when they say that the people who are you know quote unquote leftist marxist whatever that they're they're really the ones that are controlling behind the scenes like i i challenge anyone uh to pick up a textbook that a school is using and and try to find the marxist indoctrination in those books right like it's it's just laughable it's it's absolutely ridiculous so we we need to take this um as the threat that it is um for for the future right that they are they feel like as if they're losing the battle, so they're now coming with the full force and the might that they have, and especially with recent political movements,

especially centered around people like Trump and DeSantis, being able to rile up even, I think, more moderate Republicans into a frenzied kind of like fascist conspiracy theory, horde of individuals that are that are willing to get the pitchforks and the torches and go to war over it you know and that's that's a frightening reality yeah you said something about them being against teachers and making it more and more precarious for teachers just to do their their job in a multitude of ways the broad the broadband assault on public schools in general the low wages the constant hating of teachers unions you know the the idea that they're all

being indoctrinated, but then also the mask thing. The right wing movement is like in the middle of a global pandemic, you know, saying that really trying to, I mean, whatever they, they explain it to themselves in their heads, actively trying to make a less safe environment physically for teachers and students in the school because of their insane conspiracy theory about masks and government tyranny and all this bullshit. So it's just this constant assault. It was heightened during the pandemic it's heightened after the pandemic it takes on many many different forms um but this is an absolute important front in the fight for the future and we have to understand as you and i have alluded to so much throughout this conversation this hardcore reaction as reaction always does

comes from a place of profound insecurity it comes from a place of feeling like they're losing their grip as the dominant you know racial class religious whatever you know mill you at the top of the hierarchy, they feel that in these various ways, less and less secure in that position. And so this backlash, this reaction is fundamentally coming from that place of profound insecurity. And really what undergirds insecurity, fear. And fear drives right-wing politics. And it can undergird a lot of hate, a lot of the insane hate or the racism or the bigotry if they had the capacity to know themselves and look deeply within and see what's underlying those feelings of hatred and bigotry so often is a profound sense of insecurity

and gut-wrenching fear that they can't look at and so it must be projected out onto society and that's happening right now and in so many ways i think you and there probably are other examples but are a canary in the coal mine because this is not going away these attacks on education these attacks on our future these attacks on equality on diversity on just basic fucking human decency are only going to ratchet up as all of the old norms and the old center of politics continues to fall out of the bottom. And so if anybody out there is in the teaching education world is thinking about going into the education world, you should do that.

You know, kids need to be taught and they need to be mentored and they need to be helped. You know, this shouldn't dissuade you from going into that profession, but it should equip you with some warnings and some things to look out for and some things to avoid doing. if you can. And to know that, look at this situation where you were just contacted ostensibly by a parent looking for information and you were the good, willing teacher to step out, go meet with coffee in your free time, try to help this person and their kid, and you got punished for it, brutally punished for it. And so, you know, people listening to this story can see some of these tactics and can at least be on the lookout for them and to try to protect themselves as they enter this increasingly,

sadly, precarious field. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that perfectly summarized. is there anything else before we wrap up that you would want to say anything else you want to quote any last words you'd want to leave us with or anything else that we missed throughout this conversation no i i just also wanted to extend my uh gratitude to you know the listeners of rev left when you did that um episode and i think that you did such a fantastic job you know keeping keeping my identity at the time completely like off off the table and i listened to that when just tears in my eyes and an incredibly heavy, grateful heart and to all of the listeners who sent, you know, any funds that were able to help during that time, you know, just so, so incredibly thankful and

moved by the overall generosity of your audience. And, you know, I think a lot of people probably knew which story you were talking about at the time, but even ones who didn't still, still, you know, decided to donate a couple bucks to help out and that was was really just like a moment of clarity that and you've said this numerous times on on your show and throughout the time that we've known each other that like what the right ostensibly lacks is community you know and that and that is what we have that they do not right that we we ultimately are the foundation of our beliefs is on is built on a foundation of building community, extending community, understanding that we are here on this planet in the middle of space, in the middle of the universe, floating together, that we're all

on this rock together, right, and that we are ultimately trying to make a better world for everyone to exist in. And I just, you know, want to say thank you as much as I possibly can extend that gratitude to everyone who listened to that and felt compelled to help well yeah i just wanted to say thank you so much to my audience it makes me so proud that i've been able to foster a sort of audience that can behave that way and can come to the to the to the you know have the back of somebody who they don't even know but they just know share our values of as you said ultimately a world of more justice more equality more truth more love more caring and that will always be our advantage over the far right because no matter what they tell themselves the functional role

their politics play is one of fear, division, hatred, and making a more precarious, more scary world for the generations coming up. And that's what we stand against that. So sue us. I don't believe in bigotry. I don't believe in racism. I don't believe in genocide. I don't believe that just because you're white or you're rich, that you're an inherently better person than other people. And that makes us, I think, good, decent, regular human beings, not some scary Marxist conspirator monsters out here trying to ruin the lives and minds of young impressionable children so yeah thank you to my audience and from the bottom of my heart you know thank you for being willing to come on and tell your story you took a

hit for a much broader movement you have been kicked out functionally of doing what you love to do through no fault of your own and I think this was an insane injustice and I don't want to see it happen again and I know you don't want to see it happen to your fellow teachers and so hopefully by getting this story out telling your side of the story putting our finger on some of the strategies at the right employees that we can at least you know act as a bulwark or help other people prevent themselves from from having happened to them what so unfairly has happened to you and your family so i just wanted to say i'm so fucking sorry that you've had to go through this and and the courage of you and your family

in the face of this has has really truly been inspiring thank you yeah all right well we'll there love and solidarity and i'm sure whatever your life takes you next um there's a purpose in there because you are at the at the bottom of your being a good person and i do believe that in most cases things shake out for genuinely decent human beings so love and solidarity thank you to my audience who came to his uh support when he needed it even when the details weren't always on the table and um we're always here for you if you want to come back on clear up anything else if anything else develops you know you have a home here at rev left thank you so much.

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