It’s a new day in Turkey under the rule of their tyrant, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And in the manner of most famous authoritarians it’s a necessary step to mold the thinking of young minds. You wouldn’t want a bunch of crazy, democratic, westernized ideas running rampant as they had been over the past couple of decades. So now that Erdogan has fired or imprisoned thousands of teachers and professors who have the wrong sort of ideas, those loyal to him are changing up the curriculum a bit. For starters, we’ll have no more of what wacky evolution talk in the classroom. (CNN)

Turkish high school students will no longer be taught the theory of evolution.

The subject has been cut from the curriculum under changes made to eliminate “controversial” topics, the head of the national board of education, Alpaslan Durmus, announced in a video address.

“If our students don’t have the background, the scientific knowledge, or information to comprehend the debate around controversial issues, we have left them out,” Durmus said.

Another tactic we’re seeing is a typical maneuver employed by many tyrants. There’s no better way to solidify your support than by giving the people a common enemy to rail against. Traditionally the targets of such attacks tend to be Jews, but the next easiest option is homosexuals, particularly in Muslim nations. CNN further reports that open attacks on gays are on the rise and the police and the government are doing little or nothing about it. They describe one particularly horrible attack on a sex worker named Kemal Ordek and then deal with the growing trend of intolerance.

Although homosexuality has been legal in Turkey since 1923, Turkey has one of the worst records of human rights violations against LGBTI+ people in Europe, according to a 2016 report from the European Region of the International LGBTI Association. A separate 2016 report to the United Nations by Turkish LGBTI+ advocacy groups identified at least 41 hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people that resulted in death from 2010 to June 2014.

Ordek survived the brutal attack, but many others haven’t. In 2009, Eda Yildirim, a transgender sex worker was decapitated and burned alive; her breast implants cut out of her before she was murdered. In 2015, another transgender sex worker died after being stabbed 200 times by a client.

One last item of interest is a decidedly darker tone in Erdogan’s language lately. The international community has taken note of his despotic tendencies and a few nations have actually been pushing back against him or at least criticizing the Turkish government. Erdogan had a response for all of his critics this week, and rather than taking a conciliatory tone, he essentially began threatening everyone with Turkey’s military might. (Hurriyet Daily, emphasis added)

“We are aware of the games being played in Syria and Iraq and the crisis scenarios that are being tried to be staged in the region. However, we hope that everyone knows this truth; Turkey is too big a bite to be swallowed in these types of games,” Erdoğan said in his message released to mark Eid al-Adha on June 24.

“We are determined to give our answer on the field to those who think that they can make our country surrender to these types of traps. It will be too late for those who set their eyes on our territorial integrity and national unity when they understand their mistakes,” he also said.

Erdogan has locked down and consolidated his absolute power at home and shut down the free media. He’s thrown tens of thousands of his critics in prison and used those examples as a way to silence most of the rest. Now, with the internal situation mostly under control, the Tyrant of Turkey is turning his gaze on his neighbors. He’s already claimed the role of intermediary in the current dispute between Qatar and her neighbors. He’s moving military assets around in Qatar as well as Syria like pieces on a chess board. All the signs have been there for us to see ever since the failed coup last summer, so if this situation really goes entirely pear-shaped we won’t be able to say that we shouldn’t have seen it coming.