San Francisco Schools Chief On Erasing Lincoln: He ‘Is Not Someone I See As A Hero’

the federalist ^ | February 10, 2021 | Joy Pullman

[Kaslin]

The New Yorker interview with San Francisco's school board president reveals how political ideology has replaced knowledge among especially younger American leftists.

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Last week, The New Yorker ran an interview with San Francisco school board President Gabriela López, a 30-year-old former teacher leading the district’s charge to bury American history. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.

López was elected on a campaign to cancel history. Under her leadership, the nation’s seventh-largest school district has spent its time not teaching its 57,000 students — who have been “learning” online for nearly a full year — but plotting to take the names of historic figures down from more than 40 district buildings. The names targeted for removal include Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The effort is part of a wave of anti-American iconoclasm that has swept over the United States in the past year. It has included violent activists toppling and vandalizing statues illegally and city fathers taking down monuments and school names legally, sometimes in the dark of night. Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jefferson are among the most-targeted historical figures in these ideological sweeps, as are religious figures including saints and Jesus Christ.

The New Yorker interview with López reveals how political ideology has replaced knowledge among especially younger American leftists. They seek to validate and replicate their ignorance among the youngest Americans by blacklisting and smearing historical leaders and every ideal they stand for. It’s sometimes eerily reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1950s and ’60s, which also featured monument-defacement, historical revisionism, memory-holing, and never-ending character assassination.

Here are some parts of the interview I thought especially worth noting.

López Admits Ideology Is More Important than Truth

While López initially claims the renaming schools initiative aims to have students “talking about the brutality and the truth that is often not discussed in our classrooms,” it becomes clear later that when she says “truth” she doesn’t mean truth. She may mean a “poetic truth” that conflicts with the actual truth or may not understand or believe in the concept of truth at all. It’s unclear.

What is clear is that falsehood does not bother her one bit so long as lies appear to further her political goals. And she is pretty explicit about that.

Some of the claims San Francisco’s school board have made about historical figures such as Revere and Lincoln to justify removing their names are simply false. New Yorker interviewer Isaac Chotiner asks López about that.

She replies: “So then you go into discrediting the work that they’re [the school board is] doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list. So when we begin to have these conversations, and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.”

Translation: I don’t care if our decisions are based on falsehoods, what’s important is our narrative. She repeats these sorts of statements throughout the interview.

These People Are Complete Hacks

As Chotiner notes in the interview and the Washington Free Beacon’s Alex Griswold noted on Twitter, the school board’s Google document used to organize their attack on dead people is rife with historical inaccuracies. See a few below.

Another example: "Paul Revere led the Penobscot Expedition, which led to the colonization of the Penobscot."

Notes: "What? No. The Penobscot expedition was fought against the British, in Penobscot Bay. The natives weren't involved."

(voted to rename anyway) pic.twitter.com/uGiKu0moBd

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) January 29, 2021

"Abraham Lincoln executed 38 Dakota Indians!"

Notes: "The Minnesota governor was going to execute *300*. Lincoln intervened when he had no obligation to, and saved the vast majority of them."

(voted to rename anyway) pic.twitter.com/KVLCU7TtvD

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) January 29, 2021

Chotiner asked López about problems like these. He gives another example of the board getting their history wrong: “There was a question about James Russell Lowell and whether he wanted Black people to vote, which he was actually in favor of. The name of this businessman, James Lick, was ordered removed because his foundation funded an installation that didn’t go up until almost two decades after he died… But that’s not something you’re concerned about?”

“No,” López replies. Then she reframes the issue, again essentially saying political narrative is more important than reality. She acknowledges maybe the board could be convinced to fix their inaccuracies but maintains the inaccuracies are less important than the board’s political goals.

“I know the committee is still meeting, and they’re still open to that [concerns about historical inaccuracy],” she expanded. “So it’s not that it’s not a concern. I think it’s something that’s missing without a dialogue…So here’s my piece. The real issue is how we are challenged when we talk about racism. And how then the masses come out in order to combat this, when it’s an idea that harms what we’re used to. My current situation is sharing with people very simply that I don’t think it’s appropriate to have symbols of racism and white-supremacy culture.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter that Abraham Lincoln was the pivotal figure in freeing African-American slaves and that he intervened to save Native Americans from death. It matters that to the left he is a symbol of “white supremacy,” likely because of his commitment to the U.S. Constitution and the natural rights philosophy it expresses. It doesn’t matter if you free literal slaves if you do so while disagreeing with leftist ideology. Ideology is more important than reality.

Leftists Don’t Care About Minorities, They’re Using Them for Power

While López and San Francisco’s school board oversee a Zoom-driven cultural revolution in the name of “dismantling” “white supremacy,” their year-long school shutdown has disproportionately harmed minority children, and the damage will affect the rest of their lives.

The city of San Francisco recently sued the San Francisco Unified School District to try to get the schools open. San Francisco Mayor London Breed says “data show that Black, Latino, and Asian students, especially those who are low-income, have fared worse than white and wealthier students during the distanced learning.” The same is true worldwide.

The San Francisco schools Google document entry on why they hate Lincoln starts out: “Abraham Lincoln is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations and Native peoples of the United States.”

When Chotiner asks how she views Lincoln “generally,” López uses similar language: “I think Lincoln gets more praise than the . . . how can I say this? Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t think that . . . Lincoln is not someone that I typically tend to admire or see as a hero, because of these specific instances where he has contributed to the pain of the decimation of people—that’s not something that I want to ignore. It’s something that I’m learning about and that I know it’s not often spoken about.”

Pardon my French, but López is a self-righteous hypocrite. She is attacking Lincoln for not agreeing with her while she is personally harming black kids. Let’s reframe the issue according to objective reality instead of ideological lies: Lincoln singlehandedly kept the greatest nation on earth together while pushing it to make good on its founding promise of securing for all our inalienable natural rights from our Creator. He is the single greatest thing to happen to black Americans in our nation’s entire history.

Lincoln freed 3 million slaves. What is Lopez’s greatest achievement — graduating a college that taught her fake history?

Like all of us, Lincoln was not a perfect man and criticism of his flaws is absolutely legitimate. His good and bad deeds have been subject to the judgment of the American people, history, and God Almighty. But his achievements are also singular in world and American history. He bought them at massive personal suffering unlike what any American leftist would ever endure for themselves, let alone anyone else, and he has earned every single bit of honor he receives.

And a two-bit 30-year-old who doesn’t know one true thing and whose political prejudices are setting back the lives of tens of thousands of poor black and Hispanic kids this very minute with unnecessary school closures has the gall to rip Lincoln’s name off buildings and say he’s not a “hero”? It’s a national disgrace that anybody voted for this destructive fraud.

This lady would be better serving the dispossessed in her community by cleaning their bathrooms than by pontificating about heroism and “justice” to The New Yorker. She doesn’t know the first thing about justice. All she knows is how to lie to get ahead by making others suffer. In the real world, we call that injustice, and it’s sickening.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

Absolute lunatics living there. I don’t understand why any thinking person would want to live in that dump. On the other hand, I think all the woke leftists should all move in together there. Let them build their “utopia” and stop infecting the rest of the country with their nonsense.

[Da Coyote]

“...Not somebody he sees as a hero...”

Typical dumbass ‘eddikashun’ type. Really, why do we let such idiots teach our children? And why do we let unions rear their fugly heads in schools? And why do parents who want private schools instead of publik skoolz have to pay out of their pockets?

Such stuff is ample reason for revolts much more violent than those of the talking asshat crowd such as BLM and ANTIFA.

The revolution is long long past due, folks.

[ETL]

BLM co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, says in interview she and co-founder, Alicia Garza, are inspired by Mao Zedong

Meanwhile, Mao Zedong, via his so-called “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution”, is reported to have killed close to 70 million people!

Below, from Time Magazine, February 26, 2018

“[Patrisse] Cullors [CO-FOUNDER “BLACK LIVES MATTER”] weaves her intellectual influences into this narrative, from black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

Reading those social philosophers “provided a new understanding around what our economies could look like,” she says.

Aric Jenkins | Time Magazine | February 26, 2018
________________________________

“I went through a year-long organising programme at the National School for Strategic Organising (NSSO), and it was led by the Labour Community Strategy Centre.

We spent the year reading, anything from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao...”

-—Patrisse Cullors, co-founder Black Lives Matter

_____________________________

Profile: Mao Zedong (aka Mao tse-Tung)

“Mao Zedong was the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party fro m 1949 until his death in 1976.

Mao is arguably the greatest mass murderer in history, eclipsing even the murderous Joesph Stalin in this regard.

Some 70 million Chinese, along with countless Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchus, Koreans, Hmong, Uyghurs, and other nationalities, perished at his hands during his long and brutal reign.”

DiscoverTheNetworks com

[Skywise]

Sooo... he’s a confederate then?

[traderrob6]

I heard something on of all things a Star Trek TNG or Deep Space Nine episode, I can’t remember:

“Truth is in the eye of the beholder”

Now that had to come from Progressive lefty Roddenberry as it is the virtual template phrase for the ultra left wing psycho cabal. No right or wrong, no good or evil, no truth no moral absolutes period, only what the group thinks and “feels” at that particular moment in time.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Democrats love slavery. That’s why they hate Lincoln.

[ETL]

"They're not going to stop," she said.

"This is a movement, I'm telling you, they're not going to stop, and everyone beware because they're not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they're not going to stop after Election Day.

And everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they're not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”

"...a longer version of the exchange posted by the 'Late Show' shows Harris saying that the protests continuing is "critically important" to achieve change.

Black Lives Matter [New York] leader states if US ‘doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system’

“[Hawk] Newsome told the host, “if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right?

And I could be speaking ... figuratively. I could be speaking literally.
It’s a matter of interpretation. ...”

—Victor Garcia | Fox News | June 24, 2020

"They're not going to stop," she said.

"This is a movement, I'm telling you, they're not going to stop, and everyone beware because they're not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they're not going to stop after Election Day.

And everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they're not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”

"...a longer version of the exchange posted by the 'Late Show' shows Harris saying that the protests continuing is "critically important" to achieve change.

Black Lives Matter [New York] leader states if US ‘doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system’

“[Hawk] Newsome told the host, “if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right?

And I could be speaking ... figuratively. I could be speaking literally.
It’s a matter of interpretation. ...”

—Victor Garcia | Fox News | June 24, 2020

[AlmaKing]

They can get rid of that whole notion that Lincoln freed the slaves.

[EinNYC]

I don’t know where Gabriela López received her own education, but it obviously wasn’t a very good one. And it wasn’t one which revered the brave men who bucked everything to found our great country. She sounds like the typical indoctrinated commie idiot. What a travesty that she has the power, by virtue of her position, to damn all the kids in schools there to be as ignorant as she is. She has no place educating kids; maybe she could handle an office job, clerk in a bakery, work in a library, something along those lines.

[a fool in paradise]

ALL of these changes came AFTER the Democrasts repealed prohibitions on Communists and seditionists from teaching in California schools about a decade ago.

If you want Communism, that’s how you get Communism.

[a fool in paradise]

>> San Francisco school board President Gabriela López, a 30-year-old former teacher

A millennial describes himself as a “former teacher” and isn’t even old enough to be president of the United States.

A bureaucrat and nothing else.

[ETL]

You’d think the communists in the Democrat party and those running the “peaceful protests” in our streets would learn from history, yet they never seem to.
________________________________

The long bloody FAILED history of COMMUNISM...

And you can add to the following totals the now ONE MILLION PLUS (worldwide) already dead from the communist China virus that they KNOWINGLY set loose upon the world. .......

“The Black Book of Communism, a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone [65+ million for communist China under Mao Zedong]), and some say that number is too low.”

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
by Jonah Goldberg, August 2008

[a fool in paradise]

>>BLM co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, says in interview she and co-founder, Alicia Garza, are inspired by Mao Zedong

The original Black Panthers espoused Mao’s “kill your parents” edict. And that was where they got it from.

[brownsfan]

Their heroes are Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro... you know, the good people.

[FormerFRLurker]

That’s the Bay Area for you. If only they cared as much about reopening the schools as renaming them. Who cares what a building is called if you’re not allowed to set foot in it?

[Altura Ct.]

They, the left, will work and are working to eradicate and destroy all of our history at least up to 1965 and maybe even until current day. There is a way to stop it but it seems nobody or very few have to will to really push back. In the not too distant future all of our founders and many many of our ancestors and even more recent Americans will all be labeled evil people and banished from our history and discussions. It appears the Marxist have won using race as the battering ram.

[a fool in paradise]

“Death to America” chant in Oakland CA in 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyEcTx_ECPo

[a fool in paradise]

2008
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/communists-schools-controversy-california/

Communists in the Schools: Controversy in California
The California legislature is considering a bill to repeal the law, passed in the heyday of McCarthyism, that permits the firing of Communist Party members who teach in public schools and community colleges. The mainstream media hasn’t noticed, but Fox News, conservative think tanks and the right-wing New York Sun have complained loudly that the repeal “will promote communism in the public schools” (from the Fox News report).

The bill, proposed by a Democratic state Senator from Long Beach, Alan Lowenthal, would also eliminate the state’s loyalty oath. Currently public employees are required to swear that they do not belong to any organization “advocating the forceful or violent overthrow of the government of the US” or of the state of California.

[ETL]

ERIC MANN, Part 1 of 2

“[Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse] Cullors, 36, was the protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization”

________________________________________

Black Lives Matter co-founder describes herself as ‘trained Marxist’

by Yaron Steinbuch, New York Post, June 25, 2020

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a newly surfaced video from 2015 that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists” – making clear their movement’s ideological foundation, according to a report.

Cullors, 36, was the protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization, and spent years absorbing the Marxist-Leninist ideology that shaped her worldview, Breitbart News reported.

---

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers,” she said, referring to BLM co-founder Alicia Garza.

“We are trained Marxists. ...”
___________________________________

Part 2 of 2, ERIC MANN

“Mann was elected to SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] national committee in 1968.[18] He told the Associated Press that he believed in “continuous resistance” against “institutions and policies of corporate capitalism” and that SDS chapters transition from campus protests groups to community groups that would guide students as a “de facto government.”[19]

When SDS splintered into three groups in 1969, Mann, then a leader in the SDS faction, the Weathermen (Weather Underground), adopted the Revolutionary Youth Movement’s belief that violent “direct action,” a euphemism for terrorism, should be used as a tactic to dismantle the group’s perceived power centers of “US imperialism”.[20]

Mann and 20 others were arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs, which the Revolutionary Youth Movement saw as a university-sponsored institution for counter-insurgency.[14] [21]

Mann and 24 other Weathermen were charged with conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the police headquarters on November 8, 1969.

Mann surrendered to the police on four counts stemming from the November 8 incident: conspiracy to commit murder, assault with intent to commit murder, promotion of anarchy, and threatening.[22]

Mann was sentenced to two years in prison of which he spent 18 months in Billerica, Deer Island, and Concord State Prison ...”

________________________________________________________________________________________