Kansas Commissioner of Education Randy Watson’s mistake wasn’t making a joke during a Zoom conference about the satirically remote possibility of an Indian attack on the Kansas plains.
Instead his mistake was being born white, and living long enough to have to survive in a victim class-obsessed culture of fragile, wailing political crybabies where businesses and organizations are too gutless to tell them all to go pound sand.
So Watson’s 30-day suspension without pay by the chagrined Kansas Board of Education takes the plac eof his resignation or firing, which was whined for by none other than Lockdown Laura Kelly and a handful of whimpering state legislators, won’t solve the problem. When Watson comes back to work in April, he will most likely still be white.
Whether Watson should lose his job for other reasons is up for debate. Considering Kansas’ low student performance to grade level standards he hasn’t done a particularly good job overall, though it’s hard to say how much of the blame falls at his feet in view of the dumbed down, social consciousness pus sack into which public schools have devolved. But we still have to give at least a little credit to the Kansas School Board for voting unanimously not to accept Watson’s letter of resignation when he wrongfully but dutifully offered to fall on his sword during this manufactured controversy last week. It’s rare nowadays to see any public body stand up for sensibility and contradict the breathless, blubber-faced cancel culture mob when they demand a scalp in their unending quest to never again be offended.
Could it be that the current situation in the world – where a Slavic superpower now ravages one of its sovereign neighbors; where awful American leadership ignores our debt-plagued economy; where imbecilic, inflation-feeding “Green Energy” policy promises gasoline prices most of us can’t afford and where surging crime and a teabag southern border threatens our household and family safety – has finally illustrated what real problems actually look like?
When we can watch the tank tracks of actual despotism roll over Ukraine almost in real time, maybe all these media-agitated, fake oppression, woe-is-me hurt feelings affronts here in luxury’s lap don’t look so threatening after all?
Indeed, there are those even in Kansas so obsessed with themselves and their imaginary victimhood that they wholly support ending a longtime professional’s career over a wisecrack about his California cousins being afraid to visit Kansas back when he was a kid. Watson joked that his California kin were afraid of tornadoes, as per our Wizard of Oz infamy. No, he quipped – what you really have to worry about is Indians attacking the town! It was good-natured satire and gentle mockery of the ignorance which folks on the coasts have of Kansas, not vindictive and racist hatefulness. Besides, if you mock someone from California for any reason, you’re almost always in the right anyway.
Not that historical facts matter to the Kansas victim class, but upon study we might hesitate to be so quick to lock arms with modern, habitually-oppressed Native Americans and their sympathizers who are so emotionally shattered by Watson’s quip. Actual Indian attacks did indeed occur and are well documented. The slaughter and mutilation of settlers, women and children, not to mention the killing of opposing federal soldiers in the latter 1800s war for territory did in fact happen – The Dakota War of 1862; the Bloody Point Massacre in Oregon; the atrocities committed by Lakota Chief Red Cloud against both whites and other native tribes. Traditions of brutality, rape, castration, decapitation, disembowelment and slave taking in inter-tribal warfare is also well documented among Native American tribes. Those facts have been minimized by revisionist historians and an anti-white culture which would rather sympathize with Billy Jack movies than objectively analyze historical facts.
The knee-jerk refrain when raising these issues, of course, is a defense of Native Americans because they were fighting whites who were taking their land. What is also true is that neither side owns moral high ground on the topic of atrocities; and no other invading army or government in history has adopted a policy to financially subsidize those that were vanquished and their descendants – in perpetuity – to the extent the United States has with its Native Americans.
And speaking of moral high ground, where does Governor Laura Kelly get off demanding Watson lose his job? Kelly’s uneducated, lock-step, Blue State playbook for the Covid pandemic shuttered thousands of Kansas businesses and ruptured private employers to the point only emergency federal funds could save us – and this was after she stole a tax refund Kansas businesses should have received after Trump’s tax code revision and kept it instead in state coffers. Kelly embraces the murder of the unborn, but shames Watson for a goofy joke? She vetoed a bill that would have kept Kansas high school and college women athletes from having to compete against boys who say they’re girls. Yet she claims to understand fair treatment?
When Kelly calls for someone else’s resignation on the basis of poor judgment, one wonders if there’s a mirror anywhere in the governor’s office. The raiding party of Kansas voters coming for her in November may be able to loan her one.
Even though the crisis in Ukraine provides an awful illustration to fragile wokesters in the U.S. of the difference between real and manufactured problems, it probably won’t make a lasting impression on them. At least Randy Watson’s scalp won’t be on their lodgepole.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.