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January 15, 2021, 6:55 am
Education isn’t so hot in the United States these days. History and science seem to be the subjects that suffer most, as textbooks gloss over horrors so as to not paint America in a negative light, and science is constantly facing off against religious zealots who don’t want facts taught as facts.
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And in what should come as no surprise, apparently, even current events are being relayed to students with factual inaccuracies, as if the classroom is their own personal Fox News.
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And one substitute teacher in Lake Wales, Florida, is now out of a job for her part in spreading misinformation to impressionable students.
A student in her middle school language arts class turned on their camera to record when the unnamed teacher was already in the middle of a diatribe about the Capitol riots, after realizing she was placing full blame for the violent siege on a federal building on Antifa.
“Supporters arrived and suddenly there was violence. Already, three of those have been identified as Antifa members,” she lied.
Early on, false reports circulated on Facebook that one rioter (immediately identified as Jake Angeli) must be Antifa because he had a “hammer and sickle” tattoo that was actually a completely different symbol from a video game, and that another was Antifa because Google images pulled up a different picture of him on an Antifa website — as part of an exposé on a neo-Nazi he was posing with.
These were both quickly shut down with a very easy search, but right-wing conspiracy theorists continued spreading them all the same.
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The teacher goes on to claim that this is just another example of an ongoing problem in which Antifa is paid to go to peaceful protests and stir up violence “so that the Trump supporters would look bad.”
When the student secretly filming her suggests that it was actually Proud Boys and Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol — as seems to be the case — the teacher flatly denies it.
“No. In fact, there’s video showing Trump supporters trying to stop the people breaking windows,” she says. “Anybody can put on a MAGA hat. When they’re paid to be there and cause a riot, they want to make it look like Trump supporters, so they wear Trump hats and carry Trump flags.”
Many of the QAnon, Trump-supporting, right-wing extremists who stormed the Capitol have since gone out of their way to make it absolutely clear that they are not Antifa. They are “patriots” who wanted to take back a “stolen” government on behalf of Trump — so they believe — and their social media histories and statements from people who know them have often backed that up as they’ve been outed and/or arrested for their crimes.
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Moreover, the FBI has said that they’ve found no evidence of this “Antifa” boogeyman the right likes to blame everything on during the Capitol riots — just a whole bunch of angry, violent Trump supporters.
The video went viral across social media platforms, and eventually caught the attention of administrators at Edward W. Bok Academy South, where the video was filmed.
“We met with her and she has been dismissed not only from our school, but also from the Lake Wales Charter School System,” principal Dr. Damien Moses told TMZ.
A commenter on Instagram who claimed to be familiar with the teacher said she previously taught full time at the school, retired, and came back as a substitute. It’s hard not to wonder how much damage she may have done during all that time.
*First Published: January 15, 2021, 6:55 am
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