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Fox Hosts Lose Their Minds Over Education Secretary Criticizing 'Misbehaving' Parents

The hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend went on an extended rant this Saturday after Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona made some mild criticism of the crazy wingnuts showing up at school board meetings across the country.

The hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend went on an extended rant this Saturday after Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona made some mild criticism of the crazy wingnuts showing up at school board meetings across the country.

Cardona gave an interview to the Associated Press on Friday, and this is the portion that had their heads exploding on the right wing propaganda network:

Cardona gave a video interview with the Associated Press discussing the state of education in the U.S., including the recent Supreme Court decisions on race-based admissions and President Biden’s attempt to relieve student debt.

Cardona was also prompted to address his past comments saying that public education was "under attack."

"I wonder whether this is something other education secretaries have had to grapple with," AP reporter Collin Binkley asked Cardona.

"I [sic] been in education, you know, about 25 years. Not including the time I was in higher ed as a student. I’ve never seen it where it is now," Cardona replied.

The education secretary explained further that while he doesn’t have a problem with differences of opinion, and it was possible to discuss things in the past, he doesn’t "respect" people who he claims behave badly in public.

"There was civility. We could disagree. We could have healthy conversations around what’s best for kids," he said. "I respect differences of opinion. I don’t have too much respect for people that are misbehaving in public and then acting like they know what’s right for kids."

Cardona went on to say, "Or people that have a problem when we're trying to provide some support for those who are buried in debt complain about a 10 thousand dollar support for thousands of their constituents but are Ok taking over a million dollars in loan forgiveness themselves as an elected official."

"That hypocrisy--I want to call it out at the top of this conversation because there is a team that is fighting for kids and a team that is fighting against kids."

The Fox article on the interview highlights a tweet by Nicole Neily, who is associated with the Federalist Society, and is the founder of some Astroturf 501(c)(3) organization, Parents Defending Education, that is associated with... surprise, surprise... the Kochs.

The segment also featured a woman named Blanca Tapahuasco, who is painted as just some ordinary Baltimore mother who is concerned about the education system there, but a simple Google search of her name shows that she's some right wing political activist who has gotten her name in the news quite a lot over the last few years, and I'll be shocked if there's not some big money group funding her as well that we don't know about.

Which brings us to the over the top rant during the segment after they played some of Cardona's interview, where both Pete Hegseth and Rachel Campos-Duffy both looked like they were about to lose their minds.

They started out by giving credence to Tapahuasco's remarks that 23 Baltimore schools had no students that were proficient in math, but as an op-ed back in March in The Baltimore Sun rightfully pointed out, that statistic doesn't give any context whatsoever to where those schools are located and the "many factors affect student performance, including class size, funding and even the backgrounds of students."

Of course, Fox isn't big on "context," so they could care less about the economic disparities and the way schools are funded that were the cause of those students doing so poorly.

After feigning shock over what Cardona said, and accusing Cardona of "gussied up in soft talk and the cloak of empathy and sincerity," Hegseth and Campos-Duffy went on an extended rant that kids are supposedly not being taught math or reading at all, but instead are being taught "really weird sexual masturbation stuff," and Duffy claiming that "we're allowing the rest of the world to kick out butt," and accusing a "cartel of cultural Marxists" to "take your money and indoctrinate your kids."

All of them continued mocking Cardona, and almost admitted that yes, there were people "behaving badly" at school board meetings, before denying that anyone caused problems at school board meetings, before basically trying to justify if and saying the behavior was warranted.

Campos-Duffy also gave away the game with all of this, which was to tell their audience they need to pull their kids out of public schools. They're bound and determined to give the people who make a ton of money off of charter schools some more customers while helping to defund public education in America.

They hate public education and love to push for private ed for a whole host of reasons, whether it's the fact that a good deal of the workforce is unionized, the fact that private ed is more likely to push their political agenda, to wanting to keep a whole lot of Americans stupid and uneducated, to doing the bidding of those that make money from private education.

They manage to get people to vote against their own interests by keeping them worked into a lather with segments like this one.

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