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.

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:

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.”