Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman and his NJ Public Education Coalition (NJPEC) are back, once again seeking to intimidate school boards into adopting their progressive agenda, this time at the North Hunterdon-Voorhees school district (NHV).  NJPEC gets funding from the NJEA, so it is also the NJEA that is aggressively pushing progressive agendas on school districts.  We thought the NJEA’s purpose was to represent teachers.

The mendacious Gottesman is a proven liar, so NJ citizens would be wise to question his assertion that “The Book Banners are Back” at NHV.  Gottesman is parroting the oft-repeated claim that progressive books are being banned around the nation, but a recent investigation by James Fishback in the Free Press found the truth to be closer to the opposite.

Fishback looked at the 35 largest school districts in America, covering 4,600 schools, and discovered that it “isn’t so much a problem of banned books. It’s that kids are often exposed to only one side of the story.” Guess which side of the story?  It turns out it’s actually progressive books that are over-represented in schools libraries and conservative ones that have been banned (to use Gottesman’s word).

It also turns out that it’s “no secret that many school libraries have become reflections of politicized librarians.”  Meaning politicized progressive librarians. Per Fishback, the president of the American Library Association, “a self-proclaimed Marxist,” stated: public education “needs to be a site of socialist organizing. I think libraries really do, too. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”

Fishback reports there’s also a larger movement among librarians known as “critical librarianship,” which the American Library Association defines as “challenging regressive conceptions of gender identity in cataloging” and “documenting microaggressions in librarianship.”

We do not know the specifics of the NHV situation, but we do know that people should cast a skeptical eye on Gottesman’s book-banning narrative.

In addition to being a liar, Gottesman is also a bully.  As he did in Colts Neck, he put out the call for NJPEC activists (in red shirts — the NJEA’s “Red for Ed” color) and the media to attend the NHV school board meeting. His “Media Advisory” directly attacks NHV residents and school board members by name in the harshest terms.  Given that NJ media has been noticeably biased in its coverage of the culture wars, we can only imagine how their presence and the omnipresent threat of Gottesman’s personalized attacks will impact school board members, who are unpaid volunteers and mostly parents of school kids.  They didn’t sign up for this sort of scorched-earth politics.  

But that’s the whole point.  Gottesman is a liar and a bully who will stoop to whatever means necessary to impose his progressive agenda.  And NJEA money is helping him do it.

We wonder if NJ teachers would approve of their dues being used in this way.  Not that they have a choice.