(Opinion) Last summer, Spanish Fort High School teacher Gene Ponder made national headlines when he committed the unforgivable sin of including authors like Ann Coulter, Ron Paul, Thomas Sowell and Ronald Reagan on an AP Government/Economics class summer reading list.

As you might imagine, even in one of the most conservative counties in ruby-red Alabama (Trump won Baldwin County by nearly a 4-to-1 margin in 2016), busybody Democratic activists and local media know-it-alls sprung into attack mode.

It went as expected. There was a national outcry about those rubes in Alabama indoctrinating schoolchildren to perpetuate the GOP stronghold on the state’s politics. And after enough concern trolling from outsiders, sadly the reading list was pulled from the curriculum.

Ponder is back in the news because according to a Sunday report from the Press-Register’s John Sharp, Baldwin County School Superintendent Eddie Tyler is not taking action against Ponder. Indeed, Tyler labeled criticisms of Ponder “character assassination[s]” after anti-Ponder agitators attended last month’s school board meeting.

In 2018, you do not have to look far for the liberal perspective on politics. It pervades our pop culture, has invaded our sports and is generally the overarching ideology in most newsrooms.

School children do not need to read Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn to get exposure to the left-of-center viewpoint. All they have to do is turn their television on any channel besides Fox News or the Christian channels.

Conservatives are not even asking for equal time. They would just like the occasional concession of something like a few books on a high school reading list.

But fine, if people do not want public school children exposed to modern conservative ideology (even if it is just a small vocal minority), then make the classroom completely apolitical. Beware, however, that would mean eliminating the use of any Alabama Media Group newspaper as an educational tool in our public schools.

That’s right – no more abstract artwork from J.D. Crowe. John Archibald righteous indignation? Not in our taxpayer-funded classrooms! The public school in Alabama will have to be a demilitarized zone for Kyle Whitmire’s war on dumb.

While we’re at it – let’s take a look at some of the reading lists at Alabama’s four-year and two-year public colleges and universities. If a high school AP class, which is supposed to function as a college class for high school students, is subject to this type of scrutiny, how about we take a closer look at that reading list for that “American Government in Multicultural World” political science offering at Auburn University?

No, we should not start regulating texts in public school classrooms—even if it would come with the added perk of eliminating some cringe-worthy AL.com copy. That’s a slippery slope that could take us back to the days of book burning (or, in 2018, book recycling).

As for Ponder – he is just one of many teachers at Spanish Fort High School. However, his school outperforms others not just in Alabama, but in the Baldwin County school system. Considering Ponder teaches arguably one of the hardest classes at that high school, the state of Alabama would be better served with more Gene Ponders in its classrooms and fewer self-proclaimed do-gooder grandstanding at school board meetings.

Jeff Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and works as the editor of Breitbart TV. Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeff_poor.