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Historian Arthur Schlesinger, the unofficial poet laureate
of the John. F. Kennedy administration, used to say, rightly, that
anti-Catholicism is the oldest prejudice in the United States. It was brought
to these shores in the Mayflower and has persisted underground ever since. Not
only is it an old and moss grown prejudice -- shelved, some wrongly think, by
Kennedy’s election to the presidency – it is insidiously wrong-headed.
One wonders if Assistant Principal Jeremy Boland of Cos Cob
Elementary School, as toney and modish as Greenwich, but less elite, presents
such lessons to his students.
Wonder no more. A Washington D.C. based investigative
reporter for Project Veritas has upturned the
rock.
Cos Cob students might know that the notorious Klu
Klux Klan was every bit as anti-Catholic as it was anti-Black if
only its school personnel, hired or not by Boland, were less -- shall we say
it? – anti-Catholic.
The interview with pro-woke Boland is brought to us courtesy
of Project
Veritas, a group of investigative journalists who regularly document
the leftist project across the United States. That project now includes a not
so subtle subversion of what we might call de-politicized teaching in
elementary schools.
"You’re teaching them how to think. That’s it. It
doesn’t matter what they think about. If they think about it in a logical,
progressive way, that becomes their habit," Boland told the Project
Veritas reporter, who asked, “So, you kind of like, gear them to think in a more
liberal way?"
It is Boland’s ambition to insert into young minds habits of
thought – ideologies? – that will lead students to a desired political end, the
very definition of political propaganda.
"And then later down the line they’re gonna vote
Democrat and you will have done a great service to our country," the
reporter interjected.
Boland nodded affirmatively, adding, “I hope … believe it or
not, the open-minded, more progressive teachers are actually more savvy (sic)
about delivering a Democratic message without really ever having to mention
their politics. It’s subtle . They’ll never say, 'oh, this is a liberal or a
Democratic way of doing this.' They’ll just make that the norm. And this is how
we handle things, it’s subtle.”
But suppose the parents of such students, considerably more
grown-up than their sons and daughters, should object to the subtle shepherding
of students towards a progressive mindset. Then what?
Concerning the normalizing of subversive pedagogical
propaganda, the reporter asked, “So, you kind of like, gear them to think in a
more liberal way? And that’s how you get away with it?"
Boland: “"That’s how you get away with it."
Boland was less subtle concerning the hiring of Catholic
teachers in Cos Cob. How do you de-Catholicize the educational staff?
You just don’t hire Catholics. You weed them out in hiring
interviews, subtly of course.
Boland: "I’m not allowed to ask their political
leanings and they’re not allowed to ask me. So it just comes down to the
questions. One of the questions that I might start including is something
about transgender students, students that are — identify — what is
it, non-binary?”
Should the interviewee cough up an answer to Boland’s
question that might easily target him or her as a Catholic -- "Well, I
don’t think kids have enough knowledge to make that decision [gender identity]
for themselves (sic)" – Boland said, “You’re out.”
Naturally, heterodox Catholics would be acceptable hires or
school visitors. One cannot imagine Boland refusing to allow U.S.
Representatives John Larson or Rosa DeLauro, both nominal Catholics, access to
his students. Sniffing the fetid political air, Boland fancies he can easily
identify nominal Catholics whose progressive enlightened views on abortion, for
instance, give weight to Boland’s own unsubtle Democrat Party leanings.
Boland’s message is simplicity itself: If you are a
conservative, or an orthodox Catholic or Jew, or an older teacher wise in the
ways of pedagogy, you need not apply for a teaching position in Cos Cob.
That message has now been broadcast on multiple media
platforms. Whether Connecticut’s media, sympathetic to Boland’s aims and hiring
methods, will summon up enough moral courage to denounce both is yet an open
question.
The reader of these lines might do well to ask how many
conservatives are presently on the staffs of Connecticut’s left of center media
outlets. And does the predictable left of center political orientation
presented on editorial pages across the state – placid towards progressives and
unduly harsh towards Connecticut conservatives – suggest that discriminatory
hiring protocols are not unique to forward looking pedagogues such as Boland?
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