AAEC-feed Editorial cartooning

Right Wing, Russia Media Assail Fitzsimmons Toon

Skip to comments

D. D. Degg September 15, 2020 1 minute 0 comments

If you thought the pearl clutching over last month’s David Fitzsimmons
cartoon being used in a classroom setting was over, not so.

On Sunday, September 13, the New York Post reported:

A Westchester County high-school teacher kicked off his first day of classes by handing out an image on the Black Lives Matter movement — comparing modern-day cops to slave owners and the Ku Klux Klan.

“My daughter showed me the paper. I said, `What is this?! You’ve got to be kidding me!’ ” said Westlake mom Ania Paternostro. “This cartoon compares the police to the KKK. It’s an attack on the police.”

The mother “fired off letters of protest.” The newspaper report also got responses from a retired police officer and a Republican candidate for the state senate, both unhappy with the cartoon.

Today the right-wing site The Blaze picked up the story:

A teacher in Thornwood, New York, is facing backlash after distributing a political cartoon to 11th-grade students. The cartoon compared police officers to members of the KKK.

The cartoon, an attachment to a larger assignment promoting the Black Lives Matter movement, disturbed student Nicole Paternostro, who told the outlet that the cartoon was “disgusting.”

“It compared the police with all the terrible people in history,” she said. “It was not fair. It wasn’t right.”

As did the state controlled Russian media company RT:

In case there was any confusion about the ‘right’ answer, it was likely resolved for young Nicole after her complaints about the cartoon – which she called “disgusting” for comparing police to “all the terrible people in history” – were published by the Post. She told the outlet she’d been excoriated as a “racist” on social media after uttering all of two sentences in defense of cops. One can only imagine what kind of treatment she’ll get from the teacher, or her fellow classmates, for the rest of the semester.

Perhaps Nicole’s mother didn’t look past the anti-cop cartoon. It’s hard to imagine how a complaint about “brainwashing” could overlook that implied demand that students swear fealty to BLM on penalty of a lowered grade, social ostracism, or worse. Presenting the desired ideology as the ‘correct’ answer to a supposedly factual question is textbook thought reform.