Fox News Calls de Blasio Segregationist
A 21st-century George Wallace
In early March, Bill de Blasio approved 14 of 17 charter school applications to colocate in traditional public school buildings, the Times reports. The three rejections had reasonable bases: two were elementary schools that wanted to open within high schools, which has proven in the past that it can potentially pose a problem; the other was in a public school in Harlem that the mayor worried could eventually drive the school to overcapacity, pushing out children with special needs—the kinds charter schools don’t take.
Yesterday, Fox News republished a National Review article about this headlined “Bill De Blasio: 21st Century George Wallace,” a reference to the segregationist governor of Alabama who literally stood in the way of integration when he famously blocked the front entrance of the state university. “Just as Alabama’s segregationist Democratic governor notoriously stood in the school door to deny quality education to disadvantaged black children in 1963,” Deroy Murdock explains, “New York’s far-left Democrat mayor stands in the charter-school door to deny quality education to disadvantaged black children in 2014.” Sure, same thing!
The denied charters were all schools run by Eva S. Moskowitz, who has been going around “proclaiming that the mayor was disenfranchising ‘poor minority kids who want a shot at the American dream,'” the Times reported, “as if the autistic and behaviorally challenged children [at risk of losing their place in the Harlem public school] were coming from Sutton Place.”
But apparently people like Deroy Murdock will swallow just such bullshit. A favored tactic of the right is to align themselves with celebrated figures of the left, like foes of Obamacare who consider themselves the heirs to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a fun spin on that: aligning your political enemies on the left with those on the right who’ve been demonized by history. Except it’s not exactly fun: it’s blatant falsehood meant to drive us further apart, so that even supporters of charter schools will demonize one of their more-or-less allies. (No, de Blasio doesn’t support charter schools without reservation, but for a “far-left liberal” he’s pretty fucking agreeable!) “he has to pay the teachers union back for all the votes they got him so this is what the people of nyc get,” one Fox News commenter writes. “have fun with it.” 21st-Century America: where we hate the people who agree with us most of all!!
Follow Henry Stewart on Twitter @henrycstewart
