Back in February, Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, Tudor Dixon, spoke to the Michigan Chinese Conservative Alliance. She did this by way of a Zoom meeting, and some of that meeting has made its way to the news. At one point, Dixon, a big proponent of creating student accounts for children in order to siphon off public education money into private schools, told the audience that the way to deal with school shootings is to get rid of the Critical Race Theory “training” that has literally never been taught in any public school. According to Dixon, “in most, almost all of these cases,” the warning signs about the student perpetrating the violent gun crime are both the school's and the child’s parents’ faults.
Did you get that? It’s not going to get easier when you read how she jumps to CRT as the issue here. She specifically refers to the 2021 school shooting murder of four high school students at Oxford High School in Michigan by Ethan Crumbley. There were red flags around Crumbley’s deteriorating mental health and his parents’ strange handling of their son—which included purchasing a gun for him.
“Our schools have become so lax on allowing this, allowing parents to break the contract and then extend the rules or change the wording or allowing them to have a child that is in desperate need of help to go back into a classroom. And then tragedy happens. So, we need to see be seeing this ahead of time, and we need to have training. Instead of doing all this critical race training, how about we have training on spotting an emergency before it happens?”
You get that?
Here she is pushing the galaxy-brain ideas that pass for policy in the GOP these days.
It is a real salad of right-wing buzzwords and logic flaws the size of Lake Superior. Dixon’s campaign had this statement about Heartland Signal:
Tudor Dixon is a Constitutionalist and supports Constitutional Carry. Regarding school safety, she has called for all so-called ‘diversity/equity/inclusion’ consultants and administrators in public schools to be cut and the funding for their positions to be repurposed and used for armed school security. She also proposed using one-time federal COVID relief funds to harden schools through increased security features and planning.
Calling yourself a “Constitutionalist” at this point basically means you wish we still had slavery and women didn’t have the right to vote.
Maybe she is interested in having more police and armed personnel that can be blamed for not doing anything when faced with an armed teenager—like in Uvalde, Texas? You remember Uvalde, where scores of law enforcement folks waited around for almost an hour while an armed teenager murdered children. Then the Texas Republican who calls himself a governor made a big pivot to participating in anti-immigrant political theatrics instead of helping his constituents in Uvalde? Dixon’s solution to most problems is to wave guns around in lieu of having the real courage to do the tough emotional and political work it takes to make people’s lives better.
Don’t be fooled. While Dixon will lament how money is being wasted on educators working to make sure most children find the most comfortable avenues of education, she will be the first person to cowardly stay quiet about true wasteful municipal practices like hiring expensive law firms to keep information about law enforcements’ failures to protect children and teachers in schools from reaching the public.
And here’s a reminder from the internets.
And here’s an unrelated story about current Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
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