Earlier this year a Canadian pro-life organization launched an online petition calling for the resignation of eight school trustees in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Campaign Life Coalition contends that trustees of the Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) “undid the results of a democratic election and circumvented democracy.”
The petition further contends that the eight trustees “robbed parents and voters of the right to “hire, fire or re-hire” an elected representative of their choice every four years in a free election.
The Manitoba education controversy goes back to the summer of 2023 when the LRSD censured Francine Champagne, a newly-elected trustee, for sharing Facebook posts which expressed opposition to the hyper-sexualization of children.
One of the posts read “Make men masculine again. Make women feminine again. Make children innocent again.” Champagne’s traditional views prompted absurd allegations of “transphobia” and “racism.” She was vilified in Canada’s ultra-left media and suspended, without pay, for several months.
Champagne’s working environment was made unbearable, and she was unable to complete her term of office. As a result of the public vilification, she lost her teaching contract at St. Boniface University and was ultimately left isolated and unemployed.
The dissident trustee sincerely believed she was elected to make a case for quality education and family values, but she was forced to conclude that “a school trustee who holds traditional views will not be tolerated.”
Winnipeg parents argued that Champagne’s concerns about the grooming of innocent children are shared by millions of North American families. But privileged woke elites are seldom in sync with the judgment of ordinary people.
A Culture War Casualty
Francine Champagne was the victim a broader culture war with a long and brutal history. In fact, intellectuals have been at odds with Western values since the early 20th century.
In his 2014 book “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies,” Polish scholar Ryszard Legutko asserted that, over time, Western liberal-democrats adopted the same methods and goals as Eastern-European communists. He argued that both schools of thought sought liberation from obligations to family, nation, custom, faith, and the principles of liberty.
Legutko alleged that neither communists nor liberal-democrats acknowledge value in anything outside of themselves or their egocentric obsessions. And both refused to accept any criticism of their destructive policy positions.
Today, Western institutions are occupied by a curious mixture of reform liberals, radical progressives, democratic socialists, moral nihilists, global corporatists, and neo-Marxists who are commonly referred to as the “woke.”
Triumph of a 21st-Century Oberklasse
Two years ago, British author Joanna Williams produced an insightful book entitled “How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason.”
Williams wrote about a post-modern cultural insurrection that produced an over-bearing, radical-liberal, professional-management class that has acquired incredible levels of power and ideological influence. At the highest levels of our social order, woke hegemony is the new normal.
The most zealous members of this new oberklasse control education and tolerate no opposition. Woke pedagogues are convinced that ordinary parents are just too stupid, prudish, or misinformed to understand the best interests of their own children. And they are certainly not welcome to serve on public school boards.
Instruction in Judeo-Christian ethics, civics, and national history has almost entirely disappeared from school curricula. And, while test scores in reading, writing, mathematics, and science decline, woke experts in education are celebrating a lofty moral superiority.
In his 2022 opus “The Marxification of Education: Paulo Friere’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education,” American cultural analyst James Lindsay asserted that schoolchildren are being transformed into political activists. A more recent book, “The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids” by Logan Lancing, examines how the cult of critical queer theory preys on impressionable children. These volumes are must reads for those who seek to understand how Marxist critical race theory and radical gender theory have become blueprints for indoctrination in schools and universities.
Throughout Canada and the USA, woke influencers encourage vulnerable children to reject all the conventional standards of behaviour they inherited from their parents and grandparents. Scores of citizens object to what is being taught in schools, but they are afraid to object and provoke the anger of ruthless elites.
Like Soviet-era tyrants, our woke overlords seldom permit opponents to escape unpunished. Whether it be a U.S. presidential candidate or a local school trustee, this brutal reality faces anyone who proposes to reintroduce classical education or Judeo-Christian values to North American society.
Sound Advice from the 18th Century
Several years before the American Revolution, Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke called on good men to join in opposition to the “unsupported” and “desultory” ambitions of evil cabals.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle,” wrote Burke.
The Campaign Life Coalition is petitioning in defence of local representative democracy. They are objecting to the nullification of election results and the weaponization of civic institutions. They insist that duly elected, traditionally-principled, school board members should have a right to initiate public debate and propose sensible policy changes.
The full petition can be found here. Perhaps all of us should consider signing it. As Edmund Burke suggested, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men and women do nothing.
William Brooks is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
