The bizarre right-wing campaign to discredit striking Arizona teachers

The teachers striking in Arizona have been called Democratic operatives. Masterminds of a national socialist revolution. Architects of a plot to legalize marijuana.

The backlash is fiercer than in other states where teachers have protested or gone on strike. And the comments aren’t coming from the ideological fringes of the internet. State politicians, lawmakers, and journalists are making these accusations to discredit teachers who are demanding higher pay and more funding for public schools.

Thousands of teachers in Arizona walked out of class on Friday for the second day in a row to protest low pay and cuts to public education funding. Like the teachers who went on strike in West Virginia and Oklahoma, teachers in Arizona are among the lowest-paid in the country and have suffered some of the deepest cuts to public school funding — largely a result of steep Republican tax cuts that didn’t bring the promised economic windfall.

More than 50,000 teachers and supporters marched to the state Capitol in Phoenix Thursday in 98-degree heat. Administrators at 100 of the state’s 200-plus school districts told parents schools would remain closed again on Friday.

So far, state lawmakers have not introduced any bills to meet teachers’ demands. Instead, they are trying to paint the organizers of the grassroots group, Arizona Educators United, as outsiders on a secret political mission.

“Cursory research (my public school teachers taught me well) reveals that #RedForEd’s music teacher leaders, 23-year-old Noah Karvelis and comrade Derek Harris, are political operatives who moved here within the last two years to use teachers and our children to carry out their socialist movement,” wrote Republican state Rep. Maria Syms in an op-ed published in the Arizona Republic, in which she also accused them of being “Bernie Sanders political operatives.”

Karvelis and Harris, two of the organizers of the #RedForEd campaign, have acknowledged their disgust with President Donald Trump’s policies, and Karvelis has not denied volunteering with Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. But they’ve insisted that their partisan views are personal and not part of the group’s demands for more funding for public schools.

That hasn’t stopped the flow of sinister stories and strange conspiracies about the organizers of the strike.

The pot legalization theory

Among the theories: Fox10 host Kari Lake said the teachers strike is actually just a cover ploy to legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona. Lake seemed to be suggesting that teachers wanted to force lawmakers to allow recreational marijuana sales in the state as a way to create new tax revenue for education.

“This is a big push to legalize pot and to make it more savory by tossing teachers a bone with a substantial raise,” she tweeted, according to the Phoenix New Times. The evidence for her theory was that an independent online T-shirt seller was making shirts with the logo #GreenForEd (not affiliated with the teachers group).

Lake deleted her tweet later that day amid a fierce backlash.

Meanwhile, right-wing blogs and talk radio shows have focused their efforts on digging up every shred of evidence they can to prove that the teachers organizing the strike are part of a socialist plot to take over the state.

A conservative radio talk show, The Mike Broomhead Show, published an article highlighting a variety of social media posts from Harris’s personal Facebook page in which he lashes out against the National Rifle Association, Trump, and Republicans in general. Like this one:

“The movement has said in the past that they are not a political movement and they are only about getting raises for teachers and more money for education, but if you look at the social media past it tells a different story,” the article says.

Breitbart has done its own social media investigation of Karvelis, a music teacher and one of the other main organizers of Arizona Educators United. In its story, Breitbart suggested Karvelis is brainwashing Arizona students with Marxist propaganda, and highlighted a tweet in which he urges teachers to discuss feminism and race in the classroom:

Things more educators should discuss (especially if they work with young (white) men) in the classroom in 2018:

1. Gender, Feminism, #MeToo
2. Race
3. Gun Violence

Teaching is political and silence is complicity.

— Noah Karvelis (@Noah__Karvelis) December 10, 2017

It’s not just conservative media — politicians are out to bring them down

Republican politicians in Arizona seem to be on a mission to discredit the strike. They’ve threatened to sue teachers and even strip them of their teaching certificates. One Arizona lawmaker said she is preparing a class-action lawsuit.

The state superintendent of education, Diane Douglas, threatened to investigate striking teachers and potentially revoke their license to teach in the state.

“There are solutions to this problem, but hurting our families and our children are not one of them,” Douglas told CBS 5 News on Wednesday.

On Thursday, lawmakers didn’t introduce any bills to address school funding, not even a plan proposed by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to give teachers a 20 percent raise by taking money from other state agencies. They adjourned for the weekend Thursday, without any plans to address teachers demands when they return on Monday.

Teachers didn’t seem too discouraged.

“The Legislature chose to adjourn until Monday without passing a budget, without facing the crowd outside, and without coming up with a solution to our school funding crisis,” wrote one of the administrators of the Arizona Educators United private Facebook group. “They ran from red. But, we’ll be back. We’re not giving up.”

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Ancient Peruvian empire sacrificed 140 children, archaeologists say

LIMA, Peru — Archaeologists in northern Peru say they have found evidence of what could be the world’s largest single case of child sacrifice.

The pre-Columbian burial site, known as Las Llamas, contains the skeletons of 140 children who were between the ages of five and 14 when they were ritually sacrificed during a ceremony about 550 years ago, experts who led the excavation told The Associated Press on Friday.

The site, located near the modern day city of Trujillo, also contained the remains of 200 young llamas apparently sacrificed on the same day.

The burial site was apparently built by the ancient Chimu empire. It is thought the children were sacrificed as floods caused by the El Nino weather pattern ravaged the Peruvian coastline.

“They were possibly offering the gods the most important thing they had as a society, and the most important thing is children because they represent the future,” said Gabriel Prieto, an archaeology professor at Peru’s National University of Trujillo, who has led the excavation, along with John Verano of Tulane University.

“Llamas were also very important because these people had no other beasts of burden, they were a fundamental part of the economy,” Prieto said, adding that the children were buried facing the sea, while the llamas faced the Andes Mountains to the east.

Excavation work at the burial site started in 2011, but news of the findings was first published on Thursday by National Geographic, which helped finance the investigation.

Prieto said that besides the bones, researchers also found footprints that have survived rain and erosion. The small footprints indicate the children were marched to their deaths from Chan Chan, an ancient city a mile away from Las Llamas, he said.

Verano said the children’s skeletons contained lesions on their breastbones, which were probably made by a ceremonial knife. Dislocated ribcages suggest that whoever was performing the sacrifices may have been trying to extract the children’s hearts.

Jeffrey Quilter, the director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology Ethnology at Harvard University, described it as a “remarkable discovery.”

In an email, Quilter told the AP the site provides “concrete evidence” that large-scale sacrifices of children occurred in ancient Peru.

“Reports of very large sacrifices are known from other parts of the world, but it is difficult to know if the numbers are exaggerated or not,” Quilter wrote.

Quilter is heading a team of scientists who will analyze DNA samples from the children’s remains to see if they were related and figure out which areas of the Chimu empire the sacrificed youth came from.

Several ancient cultures in the Americas practiced human sacrifices including the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas, who conquered the Chimu empire in the late 15th century. But the mass sacrifice of children is something that has rarely been documented.

The Las Llamas site is located in a shantytown and has been fenced off to stop illegal developers from building homes on it.

Prieto says the site shows how in Peru history can be just around the corner.

“This site surrounded by houses in a working-class neighborhood can tell us a lot about a macabre event that is perhaps one of the darkest moments in our history,” Prieto said. “But this is also part of our cultural heritage.”

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