I like to discuss things that require me to exercise the ol' melon.

But once in a while I have no choice.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has a new book called Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.

So the president of a national teachers' union characterizes her opponents as "fascists." Terrific.

I think dismantling a national education bureaucracy and turning authority over to localities might be something like the opposite of fascism. I wonder what ol' Randi has to say about that. Probably nothing.

According to the book description, "Attacks on teachers are part of a larger, darker agenda — to undermine democracy, opportunity, and public education as we know it. After the Trump administration declared its intention to dismantle the Department of Education, that alarm became undeniable."

When the Department of Education — an institution we got by just fine without for over 80 percent of our history — was proposed in 1979, the American Federation of Teachers itself opposed it, as did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who said we would thereby "risk the politicization of education itself." The New York Times and the Washington Post, those bastions of fascism, ran editorials against it.

You already know what Randi's book says: fascists hate knowledge and opportunity, so they hate teachers.

If the public were educated, the argument goes, the people would never fall for demagogues (at least not the kind of demagogues Randi dislikes).

They would be informed!

That's a laugh. American schoolchildren emerge from high school as propagandized zombies, with the official version of every historical event seared into their heads.

Actually, scratch that. The brightest ones emerge with the official narrative in their heads. The rest know nothing at all.