“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” —George Orwell, “1984”

Woody Hart, a 70-year-old American history teacher at Suttle Middle School of the Folsom Cordova United School District, was recently “retired” by the Board of Education. His fatal “mistake” was hanging a Confederate flag on one side of his classroom — as part of a history lesson about the War Between the States. Apparently it didn’t matter that he also hung a Union flag on the other side of the classroom or, as Hart student Ana Kneisely told the local CBS affiliate, his presentation was typical of the way he taught, and that she felt “we were getting more involved than what our other classes did.”

All that mattered was the reality that Hart violated a politically correct taboo. The progressives who run the Rancho Cordova, California, school decided the Confederate flag should not be seen by students at all.

“We recognize that regardless of context, to many of our students, families, and staff, the Confederate flag is a racist symbol of hate,” the district declared (emphasis added) in a statement on its Facebook page.

The district also issued a warning. “Any employee who is found to engage in behavior that creates an unsafe environment for students will face full consequences, including the possibility of initiating termination proceedings.”

School superintendent Deborah Bettencourt added a large dollop of rank hypocrisy to the mix, laughably insisting Hart’s ouster did not mean the district was attempting to “limit the free speech of our teachers.” Rather, it was all about teachers adopting “culturally appropriate strategies” that mitigate the possibility of creating that “unsafe environment.”

“In hindsight, I shouldn’t have done it,” Hart said. “I thought about it, but then I thought, ‘Well, I’ve been doing this for 18 years.’” During those 18 years the American Left’s fascistic appetites have grown exponentially, and historical revisionism — or its censorship — has become normalized.

It was not Hart’s first brush with these progressive jackboots purporting to be educators. In November, Tyrie and Victoria McIntyre filed a formal complaint against Hart because their 13-year-old son Tyler was in class when Hart was explaining how some racist Southerners dedicated to segregation responded to calls for “black equality” with derisive statements such as, “We treat all black people equally. We hang them all.”

“I don’t feel that that’s appropriate in any context to alienate anyone,” Tyrie McIntyre said (emphasis added) at the time. “Even if my son wasn’t the only African-American in the class, this is America, we’re diverse. When you say something that’s going to impact people and that impacts children, you have to be very, very cognizant of what you’re saying.”

Cognizant — or fearful? Hart was retained by the district following a subsequent suspension, while the McIntyres filed an appeal of that decision — and had their son’s schedule changed to remove him from Hart’s class.

The McIntyres are certainly entitled to cocoon their son from “alienating” reality. But Tyrie McIntyre’s attempt to frame such self-imposed “hear no evil” insulation as a necessary requirement to preserve “diversity” is utterly absurd.

Unfortunately, McIntyre is no outlier. The most damnable development nurtured by leftist-dominated school districts across the nation is the contemptible notion that the “right” not to be offended trumps the First Amendment. And as columnist Karol Markowicz explains, the proper teaching of history becomes one of the primary casualties of progressive zealotry. “The Brooklyn teacher I spoke with says instructors balk when it comes to history: They don’t want to offend anyone.”

So what happens when teachers walk on historical eggshells? “A 2014 report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that an abysmal 18 percent of American high school kids were proficient in US history,” Markowicz states.

But that’s only half of the equation. As America is learning with increased frequency, there’s an unbroken line between high school students marinated in a toxic stew of historical ignorance and contempt for that which offends them, and college students willing to manifest this triumph of progressive indoctrination. “A new wave of international student activism has targeted names, mascots, statues and other symbols of historical figures at colleges and universities,” the New York Times reports. “Activists argue that the symbols should be removed as offensive reminders of hatred and violence.”

In short, better to purge history than learn from it. That’s not activism. It’s fascism.

And campus fascists are no longer content with their roles as protesters determined to ban conservative speakers and their “hate speech” from college campuses. They’re becoming full-blown rioters, willing to engage in violence and destruction as they did at UC Berkeley, where “more than 100 armed individuals clad in ninja-like uniforms” showed up and threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at police officers, according to UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett. Rioters who also beat a man unconscious and vandalized more than a dozen businesses in the city’s downtown area and Telegraph corridor. Rioters willing to tear up the streets rather than allow Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos — referred to by the Associated Press as a “right-wing provocateur” — to speak on campus.

That would be the same AP, like so many other media sources, that referred to the genuine provocateurs as “protesters.” And, oh, by the way, the AP neglected to mention that Yiannopoulos is homosexual.

“I saw these people. They all looked very, almost paramilitary. They were not from the campus. I don’t want to say factually, but I’ve heard there was some relationship here between these people and the right-wing movement that is affiliated with Breitbart News,” said former Clinton administration Labor Secretary and current Berkeley professor Robert Reich during a CNN interview about the riots last Thursday.

In the real world it has been established that the George Soros-funded Alliance for Global Justice organized the violent outburst at UC Berkeley. Why were they determined to prevent Yiannopoulos from speaking? “He is consciously spearheading the Nazification of the American University,” the group declared.

“The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. … And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” —Orwell, “1984”

The Alliance for Global Justice is similarly adept at moving the blowlamp from one object to the other, warning that “what happened at UC Berkeley is part of the kind of broad, powerful and meaningful protest which needs to continue on an unprecedented scale to OUST this regime from power.”

The seditious seeds the American Left has sown in public schools and on college campuses for decades are bearing fruit. An army of ignorant, arrogant protesters stands ready to violently censor all with which they disagree, even as they remain immune to the searing irony that they are exactly what they profess to despise. Former history teacher Woody Hart is the latest casualty of these fascists. He won’t be the last.