MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Maryland (LifeSiteNews) – A radical teacher in Maryland is under scrutiny after being caught on social media openly bragging about her desire to “indoctrinate” students into socialism and other far-left causes.
Fox News reported that self-described “proud as f*** to be liberal” Rebeca Rothstein of North Bethesda Middle School had an active TikTok presence until her postings caught the attention of conservative media, prompting her to deactivate her account. But material captured before that reveals a lengthy record of statements expressing a passion for mixing education with activism, including boasting about giving students “Marxist literature” and quipping that she was “tired after a long day of indoctrinating students.”
“As a teacher I wish we could do more with our students like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people,” Rothstein wrote in one post. “Does anyone else feel like … we can skip the math, skip the science, like we’ll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist.”
“I had to un-brainwash myself from capitalism in order to fall in love with socialism and communism,” she said in one video. “If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything […] capitalism must go […] revolutions involve violence.”
“There are so many a******* in my comments saying, ‘What about all the burning of the buildings, and the looting and the rioting?’ Why do you care more about buildings than human lives?” she asked at one point, apparently excusing the violence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. “It’s like you’re stomping around, being like, ‘All buildings matter.’ No, no, they don’t. And the fact that you don’t understand where the rage is coming from, why there is so much rage of burning buildings, that’s the exact problem.”
Rothstein also claimed that “boys should get vasectomies at birth, or when it is safe to do so” in order to mitigate women’s share of the responsibility for avoiding pregnancy, that “all White people experience White privilege,” and that “racism is a White person’s problem.”
Montgomery County School District reportedly ignored Fox’s requests for comment as to Rothstein’s comments about her views or teaching practices.
Left-wing indoctrination in public schools has long been an issue of concern to many Americans, with recent years seeing a wave of pushback focused on material pertaining to sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and gender-fluid ideology as well as critical race theory, a doctrine that holds race is a “socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color,” and that “racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”
More than a dozen states have imposed laws or executive actions restricting CRT in public schools, and 35 have proposed legislation on the subject. The issues of CRT and LGBT indoctrination in taxpayer-funded education have in recent years fueled a parent backlash that has been credited with Republican gains in states like Florida and Virginia, whose current respective governors have taken leading roles on the issue.
Such policies have provoked some activist teachers to threaten to quit education, a development conservatives welcome as an added benefit to their favored reforms.
Last September, a New York Times/Sienna College poll found that 70% of respondents “oppose[d] allowing public school teachers to provide classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in elementary school,” including 53% of Democrats.