Far-Left Radicalism Goes Mainstream

From Michael Goodwin, at the New York Post, "Radicalism is going mainstream":

Something’s in the air, and it’s not just the normal spring rituals of protests, love and allergies. It’s the unsettling sound of radicalism tearing America apart.

Ideas that only recently were relegated to the fringes are now going mainstream. And policies that were settled, established norms are under vicious assault.

Here’s the real shocker: The radicals are not limited to Occupy Wall Street and other anarchists demonstrating against cops, capitalism and all authority. Instead, respected public figures and government officials who would normally defend the establishment are leading the charge against it.

Take the growing New York movement to opt out of standardized student tests. While unions are protesting the use of tests for teacher evaluations, many middle-class parents are joining them.

Indeed, the most prominent opt-out leader is Rob Astorino, the county executive of Westchester County and last year’s GOP gubernatorial nominee.

Astorino, who presides over a suburban bastion of orderly and manicured prosperity, wants to repeal the Common Core standards adopted by New York and more than 40 other states. He boasted that he and his wife, a special-ed teacher, withheld their children from the exams for the second year because the tests “are poorly and secretly devised, developmentally inappropriate, disruptive to wider learning, and federally rather than locally engineered, among other concerns.”

A Bronx middle-school principal went further down the rabbit hole, charging in a published letter that the tests come from “the same system that facilitated our current economic gap, redlining, crack ­cocaine, Jim Crow and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

The principal, Jamaal Bowman of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, insisted, “We should not trust the state” because it uses “testing as a smoke screen to destroy public education.”

Wow, imagine what his students are learning.

If that were all, it would be bad enough. But mainstream radicals also are assailing childhood vaccines as another government plot. California is the epicenter, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went off the deep end making the case...

Keep reading.

Armageddon times, on the firing line.