In How I Was Smeared, Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), describes a nightmare scenario that started with a few tongue-in-cheek questions from his book’s back-cover list of How to Tell if You’ve Joined the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”:
- You’re actually relieved that your daughter plays with dolls and your son plays with guns.
- You sit all the way through Dead Man Walking and at the end still want the guy to be executed.
- At your kids’ back-to-school night, you are shocked to discover the only dead white male on your tenth-grader’s reading list is Oscar Wilde.
- And by the end of the night you realize the only teacher who shares your values teaches phys ed.
Stein goes on to tell the story of his son’s English teacher announcing that Huck Finn is “racist”:
My son, already very familiar with the Twain classic, raised his hand and told the teacher that, in fact, it was an anti-racist book — indeed, one of the most powerful ever written. Thus began an increasingly heated back-and-forth that went on for a good 15 minutes, culminating with the teacher saying, “It’s clear you have to work on your racial sensitivity.” “Are you calling me a racist?” my son demanded, deeply aggrieved. When the teacher turned away, refusing to answer, he stalked out of class.
And this all led to Stein getting smeared in the papers for using racial epithets.