Beware the cement shoes threat for educators, journalists and all independent thinkers

Education must teach people to think for themselves and discern truth from falsehood

The American VP debate on Oct. 1 gave us a side-by-side view of young, brash, Ivy-educated Vance up against solid, true-blue Midwestern Walz.

While Walz­—a hunter, soldier, public school teacher and football coach, Congressman, Governor—is an exemplary man who has done great work all his life, Vance is reminiscent of Leo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, an amoral con who can blend in with the intelligentsia in order to secure his own rise.

Trump lies with the intonation of a Mafia boss, daring anyone to challenge him, the blunt threat lurking behind his heavy-handed lies: You want to argue about it? Let’s see how you like these cement shoes!

Vance is much more subtle, and therefore more dangerous, able to impersonate an intelligent, highly educated man as he spins out a pack of lies in a polished, articulate, totally strategic way.

Walz, on the other hand, is Scout’s Honor through and through, which it was why it was so disconcerting—for him and for us—when he was caught in an untruth about being in Hong Kong during 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

This is such a minor untruth, so unimportant in the scheme of things, so unlike the huge, country-crumbling lies that Trump, Vance & Co have been spreading, for instance about whether or not the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democrats.

And yet for those who have credibility to begin with, the slightest untruth, in our slimy times, can be corrosive.

Tim Walz may not have been in Hong Kong on precisely June 4, 1989, but he was in China that spring and summer, teaching, as reported on CNN:

“A source close to Walz told CNN that “the point Gov. Walz is making when he discusses this is that some folks in the World Teach program discussed dropping out after Tiananmen Square, but he continued on with the program because he believed it was important for the Chinese people to learn about American democracy and American history.””

Put into context, it’s unimportant exactly where Walz was on June 4, 1989. What’s essential to know is that in his work as a teacher in China back in the 1980s, Walz was trying to be a force for good, as he has all his life, in every place he has worked.

Why haven’t all the Trump/Vance lies corroded their candidacy? Why does the news media continue to give them a pass?

Heather Cox Richardson led off her October 2 column on the VP debate by calling out our “post-truth politics”:

“When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.””

In such a damaged and dangerous public sphere, it is essential that educators train kids (and people of all ages, really) to think critically and independently, recognize disinformation when they see it, and be truthful themselves.

Unfortunately, we are seeing a concerted effort by the rightwing Trump/Vance crowd to hobble the ability of educators to teach the truth, especially about America.

In the epicenter of MAGAworld, Florida, a George Orwell-style scenario is unfolding, with books being banned and trashed (for all practical purposes, burned on pyres), and legislators forbidding scholars to teach classes in their disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, women and gender studies, African American and diaspora studies.

White supremacist patriarchal fascism is a kind of psychic contagion that has been spreading across the US, fed by rightwing media and not effectively challenged by centrist media outlets.

We need journalists who can and will fact-check politicians—and who are also capable of putting the facts into a truthful context that helps us understand what’s important.

Walz may have “misspoken” about his exact whereabouts in 1989. How does this compare to Vance deliberately lying, and admitting to lying, about the eating habits of legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio?

As a former journalist myself, and a professor of journalism for years, I have to admit that I gave up teaching journalism in the early aughts when it became apparent that the field was cratering­: independent media and small-town journalism became unsustainable under the double-headed onslaught of social and corporate media. I could not recommend to students that they go into this quicksand of a field, so I stopped teaching those courses.

I wasn’t alone. And look what has happened.

I am grateful to persistent independent media journalists like Amy Goodman and independent writers like Heather Cox Richardson, who have kept the torch of truth lit even in these guttering times.

When nothing is true, anything can be true, and people are all too easily manipulated.

Education has a key role to play in preparing citizens to think for themselves and discern truth from falsehood.

We can’t let MAGA make cement shoes for educators.