Muriel Bowser is the mayor of the District of Columbia and is probably best known for defacing a street near the White House with the Black Lives Matter slogan in 30-foot letters. She pretends, as many do, that BLM’s merit is clear from its anodyne name, ignoring its revolutionary goal of upending society with, for example, efforts to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” as its website boasts.
Her taste for civic vandalism is not satisfied with graffiti on the asphalt. She wants to remove, relocate, or “contextualize” the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, and other iconic features of the capital skyline.
Her reasoning? The founders “participated in slavery” — never mind that slavery was a worldwide phenomenon in the 18th century, practiced by all races against all races. The arrogant presentism of today’s revolutionaries brooks no inconvenient historical truths.
Fortunately, Bowser and her gang lack the authority to perpetrate their proposed cultural cleansing. The monuments don’t belong to them but to the nation and stand on federal land. The D.C. government is under Congress’s thumb, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi would thwart even such deliciously left-wing actions.
For months, Pelosi’s party and its media backers pretended nationwide urban riots were a right-wing myth. But reality can’t be ignored forever. So, Joe Biden finally acknowledges the riots but blames them on President Trump. Democrats distribute memes noting a supposed irony in Trump saying he’s the candidate who stands against the destruction when it’s happening on his watch. But everyone can see which side the vandals are on — they’re lefties, not righties — and pols such as Bowser make the connection explicit with bureaucratic attacks on the founders.
Given the willful ignorance on display, it is long past time for reform of education. And it is to education that we devote much of this week’s magazine.
COVID-19 has disrupted America’s education system by giving the teachers unions a veto over the reopening not only of government schools but of private schools as well. This, Corey DeAngelis argues, is a result of the democracy-eroding power the government exercises over private industry, though there is a solution.
Meanwhile, what are parents to do? Nicole Russell explains the growth of “pods” and “microschools” and why families are choosing them over remote learning. Lindsey Burke walks us through the process of setting up such pods and offers ways to make it easier on parents. And Bethany Mandel outlines the homeschooling solution to America’s literacy crisis.
Ira Stoll gives readers a first-hand account of the primary election last week that may close the book on the Kennedys’ Camelot.
In Life & Arts, Richard Reinsch imagines the future of the papacy, Adrian Nathan West examines love in the Arab world, and Stefan Beck reviews the latest H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. Our obituary this week is on a man who wore the “mask of death.”
