Leftist activists have had a heyday dutifully marching through America’s beloved institutions, tearing down history and tradition. From NFL teams to high school mascots, from band names to street signs, it seems nothing is so sacred to escape the cultural undoing.
The 2020 fight to rename the Washington Redskins — which became simply the “Football Team” (so original) for two years before landing on the “Commanders” moniker — was described at the time as a crusade for wokeness, and that was correct in part. So-called social justice warriors love to signal their virtue on all things racial and ethnic.
But more than merely having an affinity for wokeness, they love tyranny. If that weren’t obvious before, it is now with their latest target: the Minutemen mascot of a California high school.
The board of the Bay Area’s Mount Diablo Unified School District voted last week to retire its “Minutemen” mascot in favor of a new mascot: the “Bears.” The Minutemen aren’t gender-inclusive, some whined. Others took offense at the mascot holding a musket, making a fantastical mental leap from muzzle-loaded colonial firearms to school shootings.
“It’s time for new attitudes,” said board member Linda Mayo. “And if changing a mascot will make students feel welcomed, embraced and empower[s] them to participate more at the school, then I will support this.”
Bigger Fish to Fry
Listen, Linda. Empowering students is great, but the best way to do that is to educate and equip them for the real world — which coincidentally is also the primary purpose of schools. How ridiculous that any district is talking about mascots at all when schools haven’t even come close to recovering from the massive learning losses suffered under Covid lockdowns.
Last year in California, the home state of the Mount Diablo district, 2 in 3 students couldn’t meet basic state standards for mathematics, and more than half couldn’t meet them for English. These numbers were even worse among nonwhite students, broadcasting the hypocrisy of the virtue-signaling ed heads. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “84% of Black students and 79% of Latino and low-income students did not meet state math standards in 2022.”
Democrats and teachers unions see poor outcomes like these and typically respond with chatter about the need for more “investing” in public education, which is code for dumping more dollars into failing schools. It’s one of the reasons they lobby so hard against budding school choice ventures. But oh, did I mention that the price tag of swapping out the Minutemen mascot is $200,000? It’s hard to take leftists’ woke pandering and pleas for more tax dollars seriously when they spend them on a Bear costume rather than getting struggling black kids up to speed.
How About Some Cultural Appreciation?
Something else doesn’t add up here: Leftists get mad when a team’s mascot is the “Chiefs” or the “Redskins” or the “Warriors” because they say you can’t appropriate nonwhite culture. But now they’re just as mad about the “Minutemen” — who were a bunch of white guys? You can’t win with woke activists. They live to be offended.
In condemning everything as cultural appropriation, radical leftists fail to have any cultural appreciation — or, in the case of the latest mascot, historical appreciation or literacy. Of course, Minutemen aren’t “gender-inclusive.” They were men. Of course, they carried guns. They were a militia. But if you look closely, you’ll see why the left really hates them: They existed to fight tyranny.
The Minutemen, the young, New England colonial militiamen of the American Revolutionary War who got their name because of their readiness to fight at a moment’s notice, embodied the best of the American spirit. They were strong, brave, enthusiastic, and dutiful — all traits educators should be looking to cultivate in their curriculum and classrooms.
So it’s pretty telling, yet wholly unsurprising, that today’s left-wing educrats want to trade all that for a mascot so devoid of meaning and virtue. If Covid lockdowns, transgender pronoun speech codes, and heated school board meetings, plus the federal government’s subsequent threats, showed us anything, it’s that public schools are hotbeds of anti-American authoritarianism. No Minutemen allowed.
Cultural Iconoclasm
These mascot massacres aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They’re animated by the same impulse that’s motivated angry leftists to tear down historical monuments over the past few years. Back in 2017, a mob vandalized a statue of an unnamed Confederate soldier. It was controversial, but to many, it was understandable because of the sins of the Confederacy.
But, of course, it was never going to stop there. There was no limiting principle. Soon the attackers came for Confederate officers and even Gen. Robert E. Lee, who, as Chris Bedford wrote in these pages, “died a nationally recognized champion of peaceful American reconciliation.” The iconoclasts escalated to attacks on the World War II Memorial, commemorating Americans who fought real fascists, and religious imagery, such as houses of worship and statues of saints. Ultimately they tore down a statue of an immigrant abolitionist.
As with statues, so with mascots and other sources of community and camaraderie. None are safe. In the culture war, leftists aren’t content with one win. They’ll never stop with the Redskins or Confederates; they’ll always come for the abolitionists and proverbial Minutemen.
