White House attacks HCPS
Plaintiff side of a suit they settled presented as "fact" accompanying exec order
The post-truth nature of the Trump White House came home to Harrisonburg today.
One of Trump’s hundreds of executive orders demands that schools stop teaching critical race theory and quit indoctrinating students. The text is on the White House news site, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/ for those who want to read the entire text. The jargon and faux-legalistic writing can’t hide its incoherence.
The local part is in a fact sheet distributed with the executive order, but not yet posted on the White House news site. The fact sheet says:
Harrisonburg City Public Schools in Virginia implemented a policy forcing teachers to “always use a student’s preferred names and pronouns” while using different ones with their parents.
The policy never existed. The use of quotation marks would seem to indicate the words inside the quotes came from somewhere, but the White House doesn’t say where. It was bad enough when the local newspaper and the TV station drank the ADF Kool-Aid and presented the facts not as they happened but as the plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit said they did. It’s worse that the White House picked it up, and that the Associated Press reported it as fact. Seeing it on a WH “fact sheet” should have been a clue.
The so-called policy was part of an optional training session on best practices. It was never required. The plaintiffs did not attend the training.
Bridget got it right, https://hburgcitizen.com/2024/12/12/lawsuit-against-city-schools-over-teacher-training-ends-after-2-years/, even if no other news outlets did.
National news organizations have adopted a practice press critics call “both-sidesism.” The practice has meant presenting the other side of a story regardless of how absurd it is. But that practice seems to be at an end. Despite what they know about Trump and his followers, they’ll accept his announcements as facts, and pretend there is no other side to the story.
Trump’s team is following the strategy of a monkey in a zoo - throwing shit against a wall and seeing what sticks.
Some memos sent from OMB to federal employees have shown in their meta data to be authored by people with ties to Project 2025. I would not be surprised to learn that the same is the case with this slew of executive orders.
The piece in H’burg Citizen was excellent.
Keep up the great writing. I don’t always comment, but I do read them all.