Everyone here talks about what the teacher said from a moral point of view, but did anyone ponder how stupid it is on purely strategic grounds? There are many examples of videos available online where teachers, professors or student get mad at people who wear MAGA hats. In that climate, how disconnected from reality do you need to be to do something like this and expect everything will be fine? Even if you do not forbid and merely suggests that kids should pick less controversial heroes, you're walking on a very thin line.
At another level, this is also very wrong. Your job as a teacher is to provide kids with conceptual tools and critical skills so that they can function in the world, regardless of their future political opinions. You have no business enforcing beliefs on children or teenagers. For some people, it is to a point where all conservatives must be presumed to follow ill motives and argue in bad faith. You have to be a racist, you have to be misogynistic, you have to be xenophobic, you have to be islamophobic to hold those views. No space is left for disagreement to be reasonable and, discussion, civil. I personally dislike Trump and find his attitude repudiating, but I would stand up for someone else to be able to wear their hat, their shirt and talk about whoever they want. It's not a matter of what I want you to talk about, or of what I would rather hear. It's a matter of reciprocity: I want to be able to talk and think as I see fit, so I must grant you the same courtesy in exchange.
I am getting very, very tired of encountering situations where people feel so certain they're right, they feel it gives them the legitimacy to shut people up by force, insults, lawsuits, or drowning them in noise. Did they never learn how easy it is to fool ourselves into thinking we're right? It never occurred to them that some of the disagreements they had and disputes they had erupted out of a misunderstanding that they couldn't fix because they stopped paying attention when others were talking? Do they not see that once we give up on speech to solve conflicts, only force and violence remains?
I lean to the left, in Canada of all places, and these things make me boil with rage. There is a government that was elected recently in Quebec. They lean to the right, I didn't vote for them and I do have some issues with some of their policies. But what I see in newspapers are large scale accusations of racism, xenophobia, and comparisons with the Third Reich. I understand there was something wrong about halting thousands of verification processes (many people who applied for permanent residence see their file rejected and are presumably asked to apply again). But, racism? That government got a majority, so the population is filled with hatred for everything non-white and non-french speaking? It doesn't seem possible for anyone to make a more conservative case without personal attacks flying left and right.
