NEA Mussolini Demands ‘All the Things’ in Unhinged Speech
“We WILL organize for power!”
By Mark Tapson
At the annual assembly of the National Education Association (NEA) in Philadelphia last weekend, President Becky Pringle addressed representatives of the three-million-member labor union with a bombastic speech that sparked social media comparisons to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
In her heavily political speech, Pringle raised such progressive issues as LGBTQ rights, unrestricted abortion, equity and inclusion. She shouted about the union having “worked hard to rid ourselves of a tyrannical, deceitful, and corrupt [Trump] White House,” about resisting any “scheme” such as school vouchers to “drain resources from our beloved public schools,” about fighting nonexistent “book banning” in Florida, and about “transforming” the American educational system “into something it was never designed to be – a racially and socially just and equitable system that prepares every student, EVERY student, EVERY STUDENT, EVERY ONE!”
Declaring forcefully that “We WILL organize for power!” she referenced the legacies of other left-wing activists such as Cesar Chavez and Harvey Milk, then closed in a crescendo of screeching about the NEA being “the ones who help shape the heart of this nation’s hope and dreams! We are the ones who hold steadfast to the belief in the plausibility of the possible! We are the heirs of all who did this work before us! We must keep going! NEA delegates, we can do this work! We must do this work!”
“Keep going, NEA, to preserve our democracy! We must win all the things,” Pringle continued to yell as she whacked the podium and waved her hands aloft. “Our students are depending on us to win all the things,” she continued, while chanting ecstatically, “All the things! All the things! All the things!”
“We are the NEA!” she shrieked repeatedly.
Pringle’s completely uncorked dramatics prompted widespread online mockery and comparisons to an episode of NBC’s hit comedy The Office in which intense nerd Dwight Schrute delivered an equally histrionic speech at a sales convention, reportedly modeled in the style of Mussolini.
“These power-hungry control freaks think they own your kids. They’re in a cult that worships government and detests parents,” school choice activist Corey DeAngelis told Fox News. “It’s time to defund teachers unions and allow the money to follow the child. Becky Pringle pulled a Dwight Schrute. She is off-the-rails and desperate to maintain control over the minds of other people’s children.”
This isn’t the first time the Schrute/Mussolini comparison to Pringle has been floated. After last year’s NEA gathering, a National Review headline about that Pringle address read, “Teachers’ Union President Goes Full Dwight Schrute in Unhinged Speech.” “Pringle believes she’s a revolutionary,” wrote the magazine, which also posted a tweet from educator Paul Rossi observing, “The closing of Becky Pringle’s latest speech to the NEA was a Hitlerian performance. This is not a casual comparison.”
Nicki Neily, founder and president of the Parents Defending Education nonprofit, noted on X that Pringle ranted this year for nearly a half hour without mentioning the learning loss suffered by students impacted by the pandemic lockdowns supported by the NEA totalitarians. Indeed, there was nary a moment of the speech devoted to anything of substance for the children – only soaring promises of “excellence” and “brilliance.” The rest was devoted to calls for transformative activism and total victory.
That’s because the union’s mission is not education or children. As with all leftist entities and agendas, the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution, as a radical from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) once wrote. And the Frankfurt School-influenced, Saul-Alinsky-idolizing, Critical Race Theory-promoting NEA, whose agenda checks off every left-wing box you can name, long ago established itself as one of the most powerful political organizations in America.
The Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks (DTN) site, the online encyclopedia of the Left, describes Pringle’s obsession with prioritizing social justice activism over education:
At the NEA’s annual conference in July 2019, Pringle launched a bid to become President of the 3 million-member union. Among the many topics discussed at the conference were: the “need [to hire] more teachers of color”; the importance of supporting the “MeToo movement”; the phenomenon of so-called “white fragility”; and the “defense of a person’s right to control their own body, especially for women, youth, and sexually marginalized people” – i.e., unfettered rights to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy, and to transgender surgeries or medical interventions at any age.
What do such agenda items as the MeToo movement, dealing with white fragility, and promoting abortion-on-demand have to do with educating our children? Nothing, unless you see educators, classrooms, and children as tools for advancing that agenda.
DTN also reports on Pringle’s committed support for the Marxist revolutionaries of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement:
Pringle in early 2020 promoted the NEA’s national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, whose highly racialized perspectives were incorporated into innumerable classroom lessons across the United States during the week of February 3-7. “We as educators need to deepen the dialogue and support our students to dismantle institutional racism,” she said. “When we fight for education justice, all students win.”
No they don’t. When the pursuit of education justice, whatever that means, takes precedence over actual education, all students lose. But hey, the union wins and the revolution is furthered, and that enables Pringle and the NEA to amass more power with which to seize “all the things.”
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.
Image Credit: NEA/YouTube screenshot