You know for an awful long time we’ve been told that
Critical Race Theory is not being taught and those who say it is are lying
Governor DeSantis is banning books
Now suddenly we see this from the NYT:
Look at that headline and opening lede. Instead of screaming “Book Banning” you see an acknowledgement of CRT in the course and that topics dear to the left were in fact an option.
In January, Governor DeSantis of Florida, who is expected to run for president, announced he would ban the curriculum, citing the draft version. State education officials said it was not historically accurate and violated state law that regulates how race-related issues are taught in public schools.
The attack on the A.P. course turned out to be the prelude to a much larger agenda. On Tuesday, Governor DeSantis unveiled a proposal to overhaul higher education that would eliminate what he called “ideological conformity” by among other things, mandating courses in Western civilization.
In another red flag, the College Board faced the possibility of other opposition: more than two dozen states have adopted some sort of measure against critical race theory, according to a tracking project by the University of California, Los Angeles, law school.
Fighting Back against the left’s agenda works!. Who knew? The left did, that’s why they do all they can to demoralize us.
Terry McAuliffe (who will now be referred to as McAwful) lost big in Virginia. Since I live in a swing city in Virginia, I saw very heavy campaigning on both sides the entire election, and the media have missed quite a few important points about why the election went so badly for McAwful.
First, the school board issue goes far beyond Loudon County. Loudon County has made news because a young girl was raped and the rape was covered up, but school board issues were brewing for some time. The Virginia Beach school board passed measures concerning transgender students and masking over the very vocal concerns of parents, and attempted to impose CRT under a different name as well. Chesapeake School district attempted to delay the mask mandate, but when Virginia’s health department saw that, they changed their rules to mandate masks, so Chesapeake and others had to comply.
That state government overreach really torqued people the wrong way. Up until then, Governor Northam had the appearance of a pretty middle of the road governor on COVID-19 response. He wasn’t a Ron Desantis, but he wasn’t murdering senior citizens like Michigan, California and New York. I could go to a Home Depot and purchase pretty much whatever I needed, while my parents in Michigan weren’t allowed to purchase anything but cleaning supplies. In fact, the military treated its service members far worse in terms of restrictions, so Governor Northam really avoided the heat for his COVID-19 response.
That’s why Terry McAwful was polling so well for so long. He was literally coasting to a win. That was compounded by Glenn Youngkin refusing the first debate with him because of a conflict of interest with the moderator, a known Democrat supporter. Most swing voters in Virginia were looking around, seeing their state not suck, and shrugging thinking it wasn’t all bad, up until the school boards were basically told to stuff it on the topics of masking, trans kids and CRT. That’s when the rumblings started.
Now, McAwful could have easily still won by simply punting on the issue of school boards. He could have said “I think we need to listen to parents but also listen to educators,” or some meaningless nonsense like that. Had he done that, it would have been difficult for Youngkin to paint him as an extremist because, again, Virginia hadn’t really been all that bad.
But McAwful opened his mouth and used his inside voice, making his now famous statement that parents shouldn’t be involved in their kids education. Right around the same time, Loudon County broke as a story, and kept breaking despite attempts to shuffle it off into a corner.
At this point, Youngkin did exactly what you’re supposed to do when an opponent falls on their sword: twist.
Compare that to previous debate performances by John McCain, now to be called McFakeRebel. Remember when McFakeRebel would try to stick something on Obama, who would just brush it off, and McFakeRebel had no followup? I remember that. I watched those debates saying “Seriously, grow a spinal cord and pounce!” Contrast that to Youngkin, who pounded McAwful every single chance he got on his statements. He did not let up one bit.
Youngkin’s ad campaign was non-existent until the last three weeks, but when it came, man it came hard. You couldn’t drive in Hampton Roads without seeing big, bold, red “Vote for Youngkin” signs. At least one industrial business flew a giant Youngkin flag that was quite visible from the High Rise Bridge. Even better, my kids saw a plane dragging a “Youngking for Governor” banner every time it was bright and sunny outside.
Youngkin was all over social media, especially on YouTube, which is number 1 in terms of social media use. Facebook is beginning to decline, and Snapchat and Instagram are increasing, so its safe to say that should change in the future, but overall, it was a good move on Youngkin’s part.
The last thing that Youngkin did well was let your opponent be your anti-hero. On abortion, Youngkin was quiet, but after Northam basically said it was ok to dump live babies in a bucket and decide whether to kill them later…do you really think Youngkin could be any worse than that? Or on gun control, while Youngkin didn’t get the NRA’s endorsement, nobody believed that he would be worse than McAwful. Youngkin didn’t bother campaigning on those things because nobody in their right mind had doubts about how he compared to McAwful.
Youngkin’s campaign was knocking on doors, putting up signs, holding rallies and in general getting out there. I’ll discuss things that went poorly in a different post, but Youngkin’s ground game was far above what you normally see. I remember the days of annoying Obama kids that wouldn’t leave me alone in my home. I hated them, but I had to admit that they were out there working the ground game, which is a big reason behind him winning. Youngkin had the same enthusiasm going. No amount of support from Biden, Harris or Obama will make up for people knocking on their neighbors doors.
Thankfully, Virginia will have a House of Delegates and Executive branch next year that just might end our stupid pandemic and get us back to normal.
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The one great comet of my lifetime was the Hale-Bopp Comet of 1997. But its spectacular night time display was overshadowed by the mass suicide of the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Because they believed that here was a spaceship traveling behind the comet they took some barbiturates, drank some vodka, and put hoods over their heads so they could reunite with one of the founders of the cult, who they believed was a passenger on that craft.
They had faith, or something akin to it, in their beliefs.
On a lesser and of course non-deadly scale is the cult-like beliefs Democrats, and their media allies, have in themselves and their policies.
There are exceptions here and there, James Carville being a notable Dem who has decried the liberals’ wokeness, but after the victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race and the GOP near-miss in New Jersey, leftists are doubling down on failure, despite clear evidence that their policies are unpopular.
Just like cult members.
Let’s start with Critical Race Theory. I was one of many conservatives who switched the channel over to MSNBC to see how the left was responding to last week’s election coverage. Commentator after commentator said, like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that CRT was not being taught in Virginia schools or anywhere else for that matter. I laughed particularly hard when former Obama HUD secretary Julian Castro said so on a program that Brian Williams, no stranger to fiction, hosted. Castro is a lawyer and while probably in a lie-but-avoid-perjury mode he fixed his mind on a mental crumb–that no one anywhere in pre-college classrooms is teaching the arcane original Critical Race Theory texts from the 1970s–the Dead Sea Scrolls of leftist bigotry. What is being taught in some schools is that American society is inherently white, meaning racist, and that white people, even children, are oppressors.
For instance, shortly before Election Day a mother said she was told by her six-year-old daughter in a Loudon County, Virginia classroom that she was “born evil” because she is white. Not surprisingly CRT is hated by most parents–and not just white parents.
I don’t want to dig too far into semantics but the meanings of words and phrases evolve. Critical Race Theory now means dividing people into those oppressor and oppressed camps and that our society is rigged and incurably racist. Well there is one antidote–leftist indoctrination in schools, or so liberals believe.
Yes there are white supremacists. There are far fewer of them than when I was a child and those remaining should be shunned.
Oh, MSNBC talking heads I have a message for you: CRT is not a “racist dog whistle.”
Now let’s move on to infrastructure. Many left-wing experts, that is, people who know a lot of things about stuff that isn’t true, made the ludicrous claim that if Joe Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure bill had been signed into law before Election Day McAuliffe would have won. I’ll try to be brief on this whopper of a fallacy but for starters, infrastructure was not a major issue in the Virginia governor’s race. Also, as Barack Obama learned, enacting infrastructure legislation doesn’t make thousands of building projects “shovel ready.” Part of Build Back Better was signed into law on Saturday–I’m not breathing the smell of hot asphalt today. But it will be many months before BBB construction projects commence and even longer before they are completed. Okay, the food and beverage improvements on Amtrak, part of the infrastructure bill, could be available soon.
Do you remember Obama’s not-so-shovel-ready stimulus bill from 2009? Only about $100 billion of the $800 billion bill actually was spent on infrastructure.
On the other hand, inflation is a problem in America for the first time in decades. There is a growing belief among voters that government is getting too big too fast. And the Democrats have been the party of Big Government since the presidency of Joe Biden’s idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As for the current president, he was elected because he passed himself off as a moderate, or perhaps as an old school liberal–but certainly not as Bernie Sanders.
There is a deeper problem for Democrats, particularly among hard-left members such as the members of The Squad. As I mentioned earlier Dems have a cultist faith in their policies. I encounter left-wingers regularly here in the inner-suburbs of Chicago. On those rare instances I engage in a political conversation with them, I am usually told, “Well, you just aren’t properly educated on the issues. You listen to too much talk radio and watch too much Fox News–you are indoctrinated.” But unlike them, I am regularly confronted by the other side. For instance, I sat for hours in a hospital waiting room last month. First I endured former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America and then the leftists on The View, although I was in for a minor treat as Joyce Behar was not on the couch that day. And overall mainstream entertainment media is drenched with covert and overt liberal bias. Take a look at late night comedy shows, excluding of course Fox News’ Gutfeld! And as I mentioned earlier, I dabble with watching MSNBC–and CNN.
So yes, I am educated and I am exposed to multiple political views.
In the post-mortems among Democrats, again with a few exceptions, there was no call from them to moderate their policies and to address what went wrong on Election Day last week. It’s still full steam ahead.
I’ve mentioned this quote many times before but too many people still haven’t seen it “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said, “but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
You can’t reason with most leftists.
And there was no spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp Comet.
Oh, no one is always right. Yep, not even conservatives.
The last words I’ll leave to Dr. Martin Luther King.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
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