Conservatives will do anything, say anything about anyone in order to get their way:
A metropolitan Phoenix school district has launched an inquiry into a substitute teacher who wrote a letter that portrayed Hispanic students in a harsh light and was read aloud last week at the Arizona Legislature during a debate on an immigration bill.
The Glendale Elementary School District said it has determined that some statements by teacher Tony Hill in his letter to Senate President Russell Pearce were inaccurate.
In the letter, Hill said a majority of the eighth-graders he had recently taught at a Glendale school had refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance and declared that Americans had stolen their land. Hill also wrote that while substitute teaching in the area, he came to believe that "most of the Hispanic students do not want to be educated but rather (want to) be gang members and gangsters."
The letter quickly inflamed the immigration debate in Arizona. A Republican in the Legislature read the letter on the Senate floor during the immigration debate. Democrats expressed suspicion that it was a hoax that had no place in the public debate on immigration.
District spokesman Jim Cummings said all students questioned in the inquiry have said everyone stood for the pledge and that none said their land had been stolen. "What we are finding here — and what we believe — is that the statements that he made weren't accurate," Cummings said.
After the completely unprincipled Tony Hill decided that it would serve his ideological goals to libel the students he taught, the Republicans in the Arizona state legislature gave a profound example of how conservatives will also believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, if it confirms their worldview and/or advances their agenda.
Anyone with the slightest degree of intelligence - and without the massive levels of pure racism and nativism that courses through conservatives' veins and causes their malformed synapses to erratically misfire - could see that the letter was in no way true.
Children in eighth grade don't go around talking about the freaking reconquista* or the glories of a resurgent Aztlan. They don't refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance. While there are certainly many discipline problems in our nation's junior highs, there are very concrete ways for schools to deal with misbehavior. This means that students are going to misbehave when they feel that the benefits outweigh the consequences. The number of young teenagers who feel that the benefits of making highly-charged political statements to a substitute teacher outweigh the consequences is vanishingly small.
If all that wasn't enough, the line, "most of the Hispanic students do not want to be educated but rather (want to) be gang members and gangsters" should have sealed the deal. That's shockingly obtuse, and I say that as someone who has had to boot trolls from a comment board. It's extremely racist, a textbook example of how conservatives/racists - should we use separate words to describe them anymore? It's not like you find the first without the latter - have to create a world in which everyone different from them is a criminal.
It's not the fringe, it's not just elected officials or interest groups. Every single conservative in the USA, with the exception of pretty much just statistical noise, has gone insane with rage and hatred: at women, at non-white races, at liberals, at foreigners, at poor people, at non-Christians, and on and on, world without end.
*My wife purchased Rosetta Stone software for Spanish. She's been doing the lessons and listening to the audio CD in the car. She recently took her team out to lunch, they saw the cd, and expressed surprise that she would feel it necessary to study Spanish at all. A few of them made comments about "they need to learn our language." When she told me that she had troubled making them understand why she would want to learn it, I said that she should tell them that because I'm a native New Mexican, the many, many illegal immigrants that I know have assured me that when the reconquista happens and Aztlan is formed as a subsidiary of Mexico, I will be granted citizenship and given 40 acres and a burro, even though I'm a white boy.
