You’ve noticed that Barack Obama hasn’t appointed a new secretary of education. And why? I’ll tell you.

Obama is going to appoint — surely in the dark of night, while we sleep — ’60s terrorist Williams Ayers to the post. Yeah. That’s right.

Or if he doesn’t, it will be someone who answers to a vacuum tube direct to Ayers’ Chicago basement.

I wish I could say I was making this up. But except for the vacuum tube, the notion is direct from the frothy mind of Phyllis Schlafly.

Founder of the Eagle Forum, Schlafly’s commentaries can be heard across the country on talk radio.

Days before the sum of all right-wing fears added up to an Obama victory, Schlafly wrote a piece titled Bill Ayers’ Scary Plans for Public Schools (Obama’s Secretary of Education?).

Submitted for your approval: Obama has a nodding acquaintance with Ayers. Ayers is an influential Chicago education professor. Ergo, only at our peril will we ignore the influence the ’60s radical stands to gain over on our nation’s schools. I’m serious. Phyllis Schlafly is.

At issue, she wrote, is a movement toward the “transformative” education theory espoused by Ayers, which is, in Schlafly’s words, about using “public school classrooms to train a generation of revolutionaries who will overturn the U.S. social and economic regime.”

Maybe it was the case all along, but: Since Obama’s election it has seemed like voices of the hard right are out in the corn fields flagging flying saucers.

Have you heard about Barack Obama’s plan to silence talk radio?

If you listened to talk radio, you have. If you’ve listened to Obama, you’d wonder what the sharks of the hard-right air waves are drinking.

The issue is the Fairness Doctrine, the now-defunct construct that once required “equal time” for political statements on regulated airwaves. The dominance of the right on talk radio over the years has caused a few frustrated Democrats to talk of bringing the doctrine back in a way that would cripple the genre.

A few isolated quotes to that effect have been churned from milk to cream to butter by Rush Limbaugh.

“You favor taking away broadcasters’ First Amendment rights,” I’ve been told more than once. Liberals, goes the line, lust for a return of the Fairness Doctrine.

No, I don’t. It was always a screwy and unenforceable law.

Obama has said he has no intention of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. Nonetheless, the right-wing sirens haven’t so much as modulated the alarm they continue to sound about their future being at stake. Of course, listeners who believe only them will, well, believe only them.

Dave Helling of the Kansas City Star sought to find actual sentiment among Democratic power brokers showing they seek to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine. He came up empty.

Rather, he found, in the words of Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, the tempest is “entirely a creation of a bunch of right-wing talk show hosts trying to make a ruckus.”

Post-Election Day, conservative talk-show host Michael Medved wrote in USA Today about the future of his craft and “a conservatism that connects with only a disgruntled, paranoid 5 percent of the public.”

He offered a warning certain to bounce off impermeable ear drums:

“If the new president makes credible efforts to govern from the center, then talk radio can’t afford long-term marginalization as a sulking, sniping, angry irrelevancy.”

Well, just you watch, Mr. Medved.

When America’s public schools are training terrorists in social studies class and sending third-graders home with bombs in their backpacks, you’ll be the one marginalized.

John Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.