To teacher, Katherine Negrete: “Please retire.”
I was reading an article by the Associated Press this morning about some Trump voters who are reluctantly accepting President-elect Biden’s win, and was struck by one voter’s comments, in particular.
Katherine Negrete is, according to the article, a teacher in Arizona. And Negrete believes, as quoted from the article, “If we don’t have the courts that stand up for us,” “If we don’t have an attorney general that will stand up and say, ‘This was wrong and we need to investigate it.’ What are we supposed to do?”
First, it should be noted that, despite Negrete’s apparent inability to understand it, the courts HAVE stood up for us, and have dismissed almost every claim as baseless and without merit. Likewise, the attorney general DID investigate, and found no election fraud. I find it striking that a teacher does not seem to recognize these basic facts.
And second, to answer Negrete’s exasperated, “What are we supposed to do?” What you are supposed to, Katherine, is acknowledge the dozens of investigations into alleged voter fraud that have found no fraud, including those by GOP election committees and secretaries of state; the conclusions of dozens of courts of law across the land — state, federal and even the Supreme Court — that have heard the claims of lawyers presenting cases of alleged fraud (or more accurately, discrepancies, since none of the lawyers brought actual fraud charges in court, as they know that making a false claim of fraud in a court of law can subject them to serious sanctions), and have concluded that these claims were baseless; and the public pronouncement of the attorney general of the United States, stating, after investigation, that he found no evidence of election fraud, as well. (That’s AG, Barr, an ardent Trump supporter, by the way.)
Yet, in the face of all of this overwhelming evidence that President Trump’s persistent claims of election fraud were meritless and baseless, the teacher, Negrete, insists that one man’s claims are correct against all of the other investigations into those claims by so many diverse, often non-political, entities that all found to the contrary. That displays an astonishing level of ignorance. Or perhaps it’s just stubborn denial.
In any context, statements of the sort made by Negrete would be easily dismissed as the absurd opinion of an uninformed, irrational person, perhaps with an agenda, and given no quarter. But Negrete is a teacher. And that makes her comments more than laughable, but potentially dangerous.
I am not stating that Negrete is indoctrinating her students, whomever they may be, with her form of denial and conspiracy beliefs. But I am suggesting that teachers, those responsible for educating others, should possess, at a minimum, mindsets that operate based on facts, reality and reason, and not unfounded — and disproven — falsity.
It may seem that I’m being a bit tough on Katherine Negrete. After all she is not a politician, not a public figure. But she is an educator. And educators have a responsibility to teach based on facts, not delusion.
I suspect Katherine Negrete is not the only teacher who believes President-elect Biden did not genuinely win the 2020 election. But she’s the first I’ve known to publicly say so. We need real educators, not willfully ignorant persons, as our teachers.
So I say, please retire, Katherine Negrete.
