On Oct. 17, former President Donald Trump visited King of Knockouts barbershop in The Bronx and spoke with barbers and customers inside the shop. According to Javiel Rodriguez, the barbershop’s owner, the appearance took a few days to coordinate.
According to Newsweek, barbers inside the shop wore “Make Barbers Great Again” shirts, a riff on Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
According to the outlet, Trump supporters said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that his appearance at the barbershop means that he is a man of the people.
One account, in particular, claimed Trump went to a Black barbershop, but that claim was swiftly debunked via a community note that clarified that Rodriguez owned the shop.
Inside the barbershop, when asked by a potential voter what his plan was to fix schools in The Bronx, Trump launched into a rant about getting rid of the Department of Education at the state level as well as a transphobic diatribe.
“Well, we’re moving them back from Washington, where you have people who don’t care about New York, frankly,” Trump said.
Trump also claimed that “half the buildings” in Washington D.C. were federal buildings, and he intended to cut it to “one person and a secretary to just make sure they’re teaching English.”
After that statement, Trump continued to make wild claims.
“No transgender, no operations, you know they take your kid. There are some places. Your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl, OK? Without parental consent. What is that all about? And they talk about a threat to democracy; they’re a threat,” Trump said.
Trump continued, “Without parental consent. And first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, ‘You know it’s an exaggeration.’ No, it happens; there are areas where it happens. We’re not going to let it happen,” Trump asserted.
According to The New Republic, although the former president has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, his remarks are congruent with what the document outlines about LGBTQ+ people and the Department of Education.
The outlet also pointed out that Trump’s remarks are false claims, as there are no schools anywhere that give free, clandestine sex change operations to children.
As Steve Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show, posited in an op-ed for MSNBC, Trump’s attacks on the education system and transgender people are intimately connected. The former president has repeatedly threatened to eliminate funding for schools that recognize students as the gender they identify as.
He has also said that schools that teach American history as it occurred but don’t meet the approval of conservatives shouldn’t receive funding.
A recent post from Oklahoma’s Department of Education on X highlights the kind of education conservatives approve of.
Spoiler alert: it’s miseducation at best, state-sponsored propaganda at worst.
The post received instant criticism regarding misrepresentations crafted by PragerU regarding American and world history.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, PragerU can be described as an alt-right content mill.
According to Franchesca Tripoli, a sociologist who studied the platform and published “Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inference in Conservative News Practices,” an academic report, “PragerU gets people questioning and looking for more information, and if nothing else, it is very blatantly algorithmically connected” to alt-right content present on YouTube.
Tripoli concluded, “Content creators like PragerU are not only exploiting the practices of scriptural inference but also relying on search engine optimization and suggested content to elevate their messaging…However, their choice of guests and underlying messaging demonstrates how this cross-promotion of ideas and influencers creates both an algorithmic and cultural connection between conservative ideology and ‘alt-right’ terminology.”
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