A New Jersey principal lacking principle has angered residents by calling a pro-police flag “racist” in a move that, via guilt by association, likewise tars the students who innocently waved it. In fact, outraged local parent Brian Nashel appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight last Friday, after having written a letter of complaint, to make this very point.
It was during a football game last October that students of Millburn High School (MHS) in Millburn, in the Garden State’s Essex County, waved a Blue Lives Matter flag honoring police officers killed in the line of duty. Cops had previously been at the school for the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program, which perhaps inspired the kids’ action. In fact, wholesome as can be, as Fox News host Tucker Carlson characterized it, the banner’s image even made it into the school’s yearbook.
No one was offended at the time, not even MHS principal William Miron. But that was 10 months ago, an eternity in gods-of-the-moving-goalposts, “woke” (d)evolution, and now Miron has sent an e-mail to parents apologizing for the wholesome symbol’s display.
Calling the picture “understandably appalling,” Miron wrote, “The need for growth is apparent. I wish we had realized in October any of the negative associations with the picture. We should have known. I personally can only apologize that I did not.”
“The need for growth” certainly is apparent — growth toward virtue, that is, with heavy emphasis on wisdom and courage, Mr. Miron.
Parent Nashel seems to agree. He responded to the principal with his letter of complaint, which stated: “As a parent, a Milburn resident, and an American, I found your letter to be not only condescending and offensive, but also spurious, misguided, and ironically intolerant of anyone holding views which do not conform to the currently prescribed, and carefully constructed language of wokeness.”
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Nashel is no activist and didn’t expect his complaint to make it beyond Miron and the school board. To his surprise, however, it made waves and got him on Carlson’s show, where he presented himself every bit as well as his sentence above suggests.
“I knew exactly what was happening,” Nashel told Carlson. “I follow the news and I see what’s happening with cancel culture, and I see what’s happening to anyone who speaks out and dares to veer off the carefully constructed script that businesses and politicians are meant to convey when they’re speaking about these things.”
Nashel also said it was his “duty as a father and as a citizen to actually stand up and say what I’m saying.” And what “really seemed appalling,” he said, is that Miron was “reacting without even thinking about the kids” — and was implicating them in a “racist” act.
“So he is calling the flag that these boys are holding, these football players, he’s calling the flag racist, so essentially he’s saying the boys are out there waving a racist flag around,” Nashel elaborated, “without any regard to what that might mean to the boys’ images or the boys’ futures now to be branded in such a way that clearly wasn’t their intention” (video below.)
That really is the point, too: As with the Covington Catholic boys, who were defamed as bigots by a morally bankrupt media, the cancel cultists and their callow enablers proceed blithely indifferent to how they’re playing with the lives of real people and, in certain cases, real youngsters.
As I recently pointed out, the “woke” mob is small in number and relies on the cowardice of corporations and others with institutional power to effect their “cancel” persecution — and as Nashel implied when calling Miron’s letter “spurious” (not genuine), he appears one of those cowards.
Perhaps Miron heard about the Vermont principal placed on track to be fired for not wholly supporting Black Lives Matter, but his e-mail reflects all the sincerity of 1984’s Winston Smith claiming, to placate his torturer, that the latter was holding up five fingers when there were only four.
The four fingers in the MHS case are that when the pro-police flag was flown, no one objected, said Nashel; in fact, he stated — speaking of the silent, and increasingly silenced, majority — that “there seemed to be lots of town and school unity that night.”
The five-finger lie is that there’s something wrong with what’s right as Miron and others try to unite — with evil. Of course, their capitulation to the mob ultimately won’t save them from mob injustice, if history is any guide.
As for “racism” accusations, do realize that the upper-echelon, Machiavellian manipulators by and large aren’t really sincere about such charges; rather, they often use them as just a ploy to gain power. But since many do believe the “woke” narrative, it’s important to know how to neutralize a racism accusation.
Remembering that the best defense is a good offense, say, unabashedly, “No, you are the racist — for you’re only leveling your charge because I’m white.” It’s not only rhetorically effective, but also often happens to be true.
And while the Truth won’t matter to people who want capitulation and not explanation, the pushback sure will.
Image: KeithBishop/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
