Jay Chen, a member of the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District Board of Education, informs on his Facebook page that The Daily Show With Jon Stewart segment on a district school's controversial Confucius Classroom airs tonight.
“My Daily Show interview with Aasif re: our Chinese Class is scheduled to air tonight, at 11 p.m.,” writes Chen of the fake news show's correspondent Aasif Mandvi and the language and culture classes that have come under fire for being tied to a red Chinese government takeover of impressionable young American minds.
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Wham-O Moves to America | ||||
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Speaking of Mandvi and China, above is a recent story he did showing that Wham-O moving its production of Frisbees, hula hoops and pool noodles from China to the U.S. is reverse colonialism.
Chen says he is “proud” of the district's decision in January to approve
launching a Confucius Classroom next fall at Cedarlane Middle School in Hacienda Heights, with the
Chinese government's Chinese Language Council International, also known
as HanBan, picking up the tab. HanBan has
established 272 Confucius Classrooms worldwide since 2005. The
collegiate version, Confucius Institutes, have been implemented in 282
universities over that same period.
“As someone who was born in the U.S. but grew up and
worked in Asia and Latin America, I can't stress enough the importance
we need to place in teaching our students a second or third language,
such as Spanish or Mandarin, two of the most widely spoken languages in
the world,” Chen wrote in a May 25 open letter to the community.
Someone else who was not born in the U.S. but in China–Los Angeles-based activist Kai Chen (no relation to Jay, presumably)–previously informed Clockwork that cameras from The Daily Show would be turning up at an early May Hacienda La Puente Unified School District Board of Education meeting where Kai and other Confucius Classroom foes confronted Jay and the other trustees.
Indeed, Kai Chen–who first came to Clockwork's attention last
September when he organized
demonstrations over the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and
Museum's Mao
Tse-Tung statue in Yorba Linda–later lamented the fact that he was not interviewed on camera for the fake news report.
But that snub was more than made up for thanks to interviews the night of the school board meeting by Japanese television and subsequent coverage of his anti-Confucius Classroom campaign by a host of outlets, including (partial list): Epoch
Times, The New American, Ron Paul's Daily Paul, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and, naturally, Fox News, which has featured the Chen interview on several of its programs.
Jay Chen writes in his open letter that activists like Kai Chen are spreading “a great deal of misinformation,” including “accusations
that our teachers will be brainwashing students with Communist
ideology.”
“I find it curious and disappointing that a handful of individuals have
chosen to make our diverse community ground zero for a false propaganda
campaign, and have cast aspersions on the intentions and abilities of
our great teachers,” Jay Chen states. “With budget cuts looming, now is not the time to
attack teachers or deny our students an opportunity to expand their
horizons past ours.”
Kai Chen–an author and former Red Army and Chinese
national basketball team member who
vehemently opposes what he views as an oppressive Chinese regime–wore an Olympic Freedom T-shirt when he addressed the school board the night The Daily Show cameras rolled.
“They recorded my speech,” he later told Clockwork, “but I doubt they will air it.”
We'll apparently find out if he was right tonight on Comedy Central.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.