MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry’s new “Lean Forward” ad has raised the eyebrows of Sarah Palin and some of her conservative media friends.
In the ad, Harris Perry argues that the United States should invest more money into its school system and public education.
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children … We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘these are our children,’” she says in the ad. “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents,’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
Last week, Ken Shepherd of conservative media watchdog Newsbusters compared Harris Perry’s call for collective responsibility and community engagement with communism. Shepherd wrote, “The notion of collective responsibility for children was a philosophy that undergirded the Cultural Revolution in Communist China under Chairman Mao.”
This past weekend, Sarah Palin stated her opinion on the ad by tweeting, “Apparently MSNBC doesn’t think your children belong to you. Unflippingbelievable.”
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck voiced their opinions of the ad on their shows as well. According to the Daily Caller’s Jeff Poor, Limbaugh referred to Harris Perry’s statement “as old as communist genocide.” The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said Beck commented on Harris Perry’s ad by saying “My kids do not belong to me. My kids are not my kids. They’re the community kids.”
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