The tempest found a teapot.
Please pass the popcorn!

To the contrary, being pulled off your job for an unspecified complaint is NOT "a great commotion over a small matter." The administration messed up big time in their handling of this parent complaint and in so doing harmed the reputation of a highly-regarded veteran teacher. An examination of the facts would support that there are indeed numerous similarities between the actions of Hitler and of Trump. The district owes Mr. Navarro a public apology.

Can we drop the lame and pointless Trump/Hitler comparisons. It was just as dumb when the right made comparisons between Obama and Hitler as it is with the left doing it now.

@MVHS Parent

The Hitler comparisons are ridiculous. There is more a comparison between Trump and Hitler than there is between Hitler and Hillary Clinton. It is a lazy and tired accusation that is made when the accuser is concerned with flinging a vicious statement. It is devoid of thought and any teacher making such an accusation has no business in a classroom with impressionable young people. A classroom should be a place for reason and logic, not personal opinions and vitriol.

Any teacher worth their salt needs to keep their personal opinions out of the classroom. No child should walk into a classroom and feel that, if they don't give the "politically correct" answer that matches the opinion their teacher has espoused in class, that they will be punished with a lower grade. This is particularly an issue in a subjective discipline such as history.

Mr Navarro doesn't deserve an apology. I, for one, am happy he is not in the district any longer. Furthermore, I hope any other teacher who thinks their political opinion has a place in the classroom is given the option to cease espousing such opinions in class or be dismissed. Not everyone shares the same political opinion and it is our right as citizens not to be victimized for those opinions, just as we should not be victimized for our gender, skin color or any other aspect of who we are. Standing in a classroom and making statements of that kind victimizes those who don't agree.

I would expect a history teacher to understand that our government is based on a system that prevents the tyranny of the majority. Just because we live in a liberal area, that doesn't give anyone the right to abuse and disrespect those with different opinions. If you are willing to have an environment of respect for all points of view, then by all means, discuss them in class. However, if you use your teaching position as a bully pulpit, you are in the wrong.

I’m actually very offended by this comparison. My grandfather was killed in WW2, another grandfather was a war veteran. How can you compare.a mass murderer to a clown?

There's more to the story than the Trump Hitler language. I know a student who was in the freshmen classroom when the incident happened. Mr. Navarro crossed a line.

There is a good explanation for this teacher to have said what he did:

Adolf Hitler was a masterful political scientist, he used the weaknesses of democracy to manipulate the German people into adopting a singular authoritarian government. One can observe the political rallies of both Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump and come up with significant similarities.

One is that the people at the rallies were chosen to perform to support both men. And if those present would criticize them, they were met with violence and threats. Both men have documented evidence of this happening.

Another parallel was proven by a famous study called the Milgram experiment which Milgram theorized that Americans would never be encouraged to commit violence upon others by the inherent nature of the American culture. However, his theory was proven wrong as documented here:

“The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject is led to believe that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.[1]

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner." These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.[2]

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of men would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[3]

The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[4] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[5] The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.[6]” (Web Link

So can there be a comparison between the Trump political techniques and Adolf Hitler. Objectively you have to admit that they practiced VERY similar political strategies that actually are proven to work. The American people are just as vulnerable as the Germans in 1930s, especially because so much change occurred in the last 10 years regarding both public policies and those in our society that are adamantly opposed to those policies.

The simple issue is that we are now voluntarily adopting an authoritarian state, where the execuative, legislative, and judicial components of our country are now under a singular control. There in effect is no check and balance operating now in the U.S. This situation is VERY dangerous because there appears to be no means to balance it at this time.

We are now in the threshold of becoming a country with a similar authoritarian model of government that will be identical to the mode that Germany adopted in 1938.

You cannot underestimate the danger that this is at this time, can you?