Last weekend I wrote about the paramilitarization of the bureaucracy:
Two years ago in this space, I noted that the U.S. secretary of education, who doesn’t employ a single teacher, is the only education minister in the developed world with his own SWAT team: He used it to send 15 officers to kick down a door in Stockton, Calif., drag Kenneth Wright out onto the front lawn, and put him in handcuffs for six hours. Erroneously, as it turned out. But it was in connection with his estranged wife’s suspected fraudulent student-loan application, so you can’t be too careful. That the education bureaucracy of the Brokest Nation in History has its own Seal Team Six is ridiculous and offensive. Yet the citizenry don’t find it so: They accept it.
I’m embarrassed to say that the town of my birth has just staged a low-budget Canadian remake, and on an even more disreputable pretext. The Toronto blogger Blazing Cat Fur has been a tireless critic of the confused social engineers at the Toronto District School Board, who simultaneously promote both vegetable sex and Muslim sex-segregated prayer sessions at which menstruating girls have to sit at the back. Many of his exposés have been picked up by local TV, radio and newspapers. Yesterday, the School Board decided they’d had enough of being publicly embarrassed. As the Toronto Sun puts it:
TDSB Sics Police On Sarcastic Blogger
It seems a wee bit over-sensitive for a school board that promotes murderous goons like Che Guevara and cop-killers like the Black Panthers as role models to its young charges to get its knickers in a twist over a blog post. But, of course, for leftie social engineers, the glamor of the revolutionary aesthetic is mostly a useful cover for inculcating a bovine, unquestioning statist compliance from which no deviation is permitted. There was barely any pretense by the cops that there was a legal justification for what happened yesterday; it was just a friendly warning: “Nice blog ya got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.”
One of the most disquieting trends in Western Europe is the state’s increasingly open intimidation of those who dissent from the official ideology. Sad to see it on this side of the Atlantic.