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Everyone Is Saying The Same Thing About This New Banner On The Department Of Education Building
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The guy who wrote "The College Scam" is the face on our Department of Education building. I'm an LA-based trending news writer covering health, politics, and internet culture. This painting in the Grand Foyer of the White House replaced a portrait of Barack Obama. I found these to be interesting selections to put next to him, so here's a little background: Booker T. Washington, born into slavery, became a pre-eminent intellectual, founding the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and the National Negro Business League. While an influential speaker and advocate for education for Black Americans, he did not support desegregation, instead advocating that Black Americans follow economic self-determination over political and civil rights, which was famously criticized by civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Catharine Beecher was a 19th-century advocate for women's education, but she's best known for promoting the idea that women's central role was as mothers and educators in the home — reinforcing rigid gender hierarchies that positioned women as subordinate to men. She did not support women's suffrage. While certainly pioneers of their time, they're definitely...a choice...to place next to Charlie Kirk — who once said slavery "was bad and was evil" but Black Americans "committed less crimes," and who largely advocated for women to stay home and have babies — on the façade of the modern-day Department of Education building. During a Jubilee episode, a woman asked Kirk what he would want his daughter to do if she were 10 years old and got pregnant following a rape. He called the scenario "graphic" and told the woman to "calm down" before responding, "The answer is yes. The baby would be delivered." According to WIRED, at a Turning Point USA event in December 2023, Kirk said, "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s." He argued that the Act led to a "permanent DEI-type bureaucracy." Kirk wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth, in which he argued against going to college, contending that "academia has lost all credibility."