In the past few months, we’ve told you about Jody Hice, a Baptist pastor and right-wing radio talk show host from the Atlanta suburbs who is all but certain to succeed Paul Broun as the Republican congressman from Georgia’s 10th District. Even by Georgia Republican standards, Hice is bat-guano crazy. This is a guy who thinks that the Second Amendment gives us the right to own mini-arsenals, considers the separation of church and state to be a Satanic plot, and thinks gays ought to sit down and shut up because they already have the same rights that straight people have.
Apparently, Hice doesn’t like sunshine. Ever since People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch found out about him earlier this summer, he’s been frantically deleting shows from his YouTube archives. But PFAW noticed that someone managed to find the March 17, 2011 edition of his show and archive it at the Internet Archive. Hice claims that liberals are using the public schools to indoctrinate our kids–a page from Nazi Germany’s playbook.
Hice pointed out that almost as soon as Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, almost the first thing he did was to “grab, so to speak, the minds of the youth.” Although he cautioned that he didn’t think we were “necessarily headed in that direction” (wink, wink), he claimed that liberal politicians are working hand in glove with teachers’ unions to keep the school system “underneath their total, absolute, totalitarian control.” Hice said that if the liberals lose control of the schools, they’d lose access to a large amount of their funding since “the teachers’ unions are the number one biggest supporter politically to liberal ideology.”
Later on, Hice claimed that public schools are being turned into “camps for indoctrination” in which kids are being taught “to actually disdain America,” dabble in “all forms of sexuality,” actively support abortion and homosexuality, and gradually teach them to have “no tolerance for political incorrectness.” Under the liberals’ thumb, public schools have become part and parcel of “the push for relativism, for globalization, for environmental agendas, the green agendas and tolerance for everybody.”
This sort of talk has been standard religious right fare for almost three decades.? The only change is that instead of claiming that those evil libruls are taking their cue from Moscow, they’re taking it from Berlin. To understand this logic leap, remember that a lot of tea partiers accuse Obama of being a fascist/Nazi and a Communist. What makes it this kind of talk from Hice particularly dangerous, though, is that he almost certainly punched his ticket to Congress with his victory in a July primary runoff. This district consists of a large swath of rural and exurban territory between Atlanta and Augusta, and most of it would vote for a Georgia Bulldogs jersey if it ran as a Republican. So short of Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn winning the races for governor and U. S. Senate in massive landslides, Hice is on his way to Congress. And in all likelihood, he’s going to be there for close to a decade.
If you’re still on the fence about going to the polls, let me give you a big reason to get out and vote. As long as Republicans control the House, extremists like Jody Hice are going to hold a dangerous amount of influence on our policy.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
