Perhaps those watching the madness expanding across our political stage won’t be surprised to find that a left-winger was arrested for disorderly conduct for her zealousness in protesting Rhode Island’s all-Democrat Congressional delegation, but even some among us might be surprised to learn that she was a retired elementary school teacher:

At the meeting in East Providence High School, most people expressed anger over President Donald Trump, his administration and his political appointments. Elizabeth M. Ward, 59, criticized the delegation for not being more supportive of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. …

After the forum, Ward told The Journal, she placed her “Rule 19” sign in front of U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin as someone took his picture. When a Langevin staffer told her to stop, Ward said, she “got loud and started yelling,” including an obscenity at a man who wagged his finger at her.

“I said, ‘Don’t you dare wag your finger at me like [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell did to Elizabeth Warren,” Ward said.

She was “very unruly,” East Providence Police Detective Lt. Raymond Blinn said in an interview. “She was repeatedly told to calm down, quiet down or she’d be subject to arrest. At this point, she demanded to be arrested.”

Although Ms. Ward is taking advantage of the union-delivered opportunity of relatively early retirement to express herself politically, it wasn’t that long ago that she had out-sized influence over young children.  Can we hope that she was unique among her fellow government-school teachers?  Well, two anecdotes from a field of millions isn’t exactly proof, but within hours of reading the above, I came across video of another government-school teacher physically attacking an apparently conservative protester, which initiated a more damaging beating upon him by the progressive protesters with whom she was standing on the street.  The video goes on to show her conversation with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson:

On Monday’s broadcast of his FOX News show, Tucker Carlson debated public school teacher and national organizer for the activist group BAMN, Yvette Felarca. ‘BAMN’ was among the largest supporters of the protests of Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ speech on Berkeley’s campus.

In a now-running theme, we must acknowledge that, obviously, not all teachers (indeed, not most teachers) are aggressive radicals who shouldn’t be given positions of influence over children, but it’s a continuum.  Take the temperature down a notch, and you’ve got teachers organizing protest field trips via an education system that interweaves “social justice warriors” officially in its school environment and gives outside activist groups access to the students under its care.

The telling thing is that both the political lean and the activist excesses always seem to go in one direction and that one doesn’t often come across public objections from other teachers.  Taken together, parents wouldn’t be unreasonable in fearing that Ward and Felarca are just the tip of the iceberg poking into sight of a system that has so lost its way that it can’t even see its own tilt.