‘I can’t not make facial expressions!’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) On one hand, Rep.-elect Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., has an Oscar-caliber story that could be an inspiration to young people everywhere.
On another, she may be a parent’s worst classroom nightmare—symbolizing the growing epidemic of schools, at every level, morphing into indoctrination centers under the influence of radical left-wing educators and administrators.
Hayes, a former high-school history teacher, received a prestigious national teacher-of-the-year-award in 2016 and was able to translate that accomplishment into a successful run for Congress this year.
“I had really been teaching kids to get involved in their communities, to be a part of the solution, and it felt like that narrative was slipping away, that people weren’t conducting themselves in a way that was solution-driven,” she told Seth Meyers on his late-night show Monday.
An antidote to the millennial entitlement mentality of some, like her soon-to-be freshman House colleague Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the bubbly-but-well-spoken Hayes, 45, no doubt resonated with her students, and went on to walk the walk with her own civic engagement.
But conservatives may be left wondering how Hayes’s deeply partisan underpinnings impacted her classes—and how they now could impact education policy throughout the entire country.
Hayes’s conversation with Meyers on Monday started off innocuously enough, with a clip of her receiving the national teacher award from then-President Barack Obama.
It would be easy to laugh off her over-zealousness in the moment, during what might have been a crowning career achievement for many, even as Obama chided her, “All right, you need to settle down.”
That is, until Hayes again let her private emotions slip in the Seth Meyers interview, rolling her eyes as the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian-turned-liberal-mouthpiece set her up to attack Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“I can’t not make facial expressions!” she said.
Here, parents may have started to imagine Hayes doing the same in a classroom discussion, using nonverbal cues to show her disdain as a student brought up a dissenting perspective during a debate.
Where in her previous role, though, Hayes might have been limited to injecting bias that was plausibly deniable, as a powerful congresswoman protected by the smokescreen of liberal media, she is now free to let her extremist positions be known.
Meyers bemoaned the unwinding of Obama-era education policies, such as “sexual assault on campus” (coded language for the Obama/Holder exploitation of Title IX statutes that allowed the Justice Department to strong-arm campuses into submitting to alarming new federal regulations and oversight) and “predatory lenders” (a dog-whistle for the socialist-driven push for free—taxpayer-subsidized—college tuition).
“Is that something you are hopeful you will be able to address once, uh, things get started for you?” he asked.
Hayes replied, “I’m gonna die trying.”
She continued: “These are not ‘Obama-era regulations.’ These are things that are put in place that improve outcomes for kids. … It’s ridiculous that we’re even having conversations that begin with not protecting children.”
Unfortunately, many in Meyers’ audience likely failed to cut through the subtext of what “protecting children” means for the Left.
High-profile cases like the 2014 false rape accusations at the University of Virginia—which Rolling Stone magazine published in coordination with the federal Office of Civil Rights—and many other instances of fraud have called into question the Obama narrative on campus rape while raising concerns about the removal of due-process rights for the accused.
However, one place students have found no campus “protection” is in the systemic assault on their minds.
Increasingly, under the influence of intolerant left-wing extremism, ideas that counter the politically-correct dogma have been strangled out on campuses in the name of “protecting children” from what those within the academic power structure arbitrarily deemed disagreeable.
And increasingly, the Left has succeeded in establishing its own de facto “deep state” within the education system, using absurd regulations and instructional demands to create a hostile environment for conservative thinkers while recognizing and rewarding liberal fundamentalists like Hayes.
It is no wonder, then, that being confronted with the threat of having this web of corruption undone by DeVos is enough to evoke in Hayes the same reaction one might expect of an Al-Qaeda operative: to “die trying” to preserve it.
Meyers and Hayes went on to discuss what is shaping up to be the central focus for the Democratic majority in the next legislative session of Congress: impeaching the president.
Meyers asked Hayes—who, he claimed, ran on local issues rather than attacking the president—whether anything had changed for her since being elected, eliciting from her a string of “nobody is above the law” hemming-and-hawing platitudes.
“We want to get to governing—we want to work hard to improve lives for people—but if something comes out of this investigation that says there was collusion… we have a responsibility to act on that,” Hayes said.
As Trump tweeted over the weekend, in response to recent filings from the office of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, no evidence of collusion thus far has been presented linking Trump to Russia.
AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2018
Yet, that won’t stop Democrats from devoting themselves to seeking new ways to attack Trump that they hope will achieve the same outcome.
While a true history teacher might have sought to clarify and contextualize, Hayes showed she is already a natural for D.C., pointedly allowing Meyers’s false implication to stand, that some Congressional “oversight” of the White House was warranted.
Although her partisan rhetoric may be ready-made for Capitol Hill, Hayes told Meyers her new role will still take some getting used to. The hardest part: no longer having a captive audience of impressionable and vulnerable minds to allow her statements—and her authority—to go unchallenged:
“Young people are open to just hearing about ideas that are different from theirs, learning about other people—and of course you have an adult in the room who says, you know, ‘These are parameters by which we behave,’” Hayes said. “All bets are off in D.C.”