You would think that after the recent election losses in Virginia and the fright they got in New Jersey, not to mention the underwater polling of “President” Biden and the Democrat Party across the nation and across seemingly all issues, that they would be learning from their mistakes and trimming their sails as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 mid-terms elections booted his Democrats from power in both the Senate and, for the first time in forty years, from the House.

Admittedly he and his party didn’t trim until after that catastrophe so perhaps we’re looking at the same thing here.

But I suspect it’s worse than that. Back in those days representatives from Deep Blue districts were not extreme in their approach, despite having majorities the GOP couldn’t touch. Now we’ve got the likes of AOC, who feels she can push the edge of the envelope on policy and extremist verbiage, as well as applying heat to fellow New Yorkers like the previously sensible Jerry Nadler in the form of implied primary challenges that might replace him as she replaced a Democrat Old Guard rep.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of fellow Democrats trying to tell the rest of the party what’s going wrong. Former Clinton advisor, James Carville (the Rajun Cajun) has snarled about “Toxic Wokeness”. Lefty comedy icon Bill Maher has ripped the Democrats over wokeness with increasing passion in the last few months, directly attacking the likes of Chris Cuomo, AOC and others. His audience sometimes clap but you can tell they’re in shock. Senators Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona have been more diplomatic but also clear in their opposition to many things their party is pushing. For their pains, all these people have been snarled at by their erstwhile comrades, including activists following Sinema into the lavatory to confront her.

That’s a big difference from the mid-1990’s. The party has changed and shifted dramatically left, especially on social issues, and when these have backfired the response has been a psychotic mix of denial and attack about the polices: “there’s no Critical Race Theory in schools, that’s just GOP Culture War shit, but we need to teach little kids about oppressors (White) and oppressed (POC), and if you stop us you’re a racist”.

Seriously, that’s the argument, and even Maher – no social conservative he – has called them on this bullshit, as have other lefties like Matt Taibbi (writing on Substack as most good reporters now are):

McAuliffe’s collapse, and the corresponding underdog win by private equity titan Glenn Youngkin, is already being caricatured nationally using the language of 1980s politics. We’re meant to understand that the Loudoun County story – which is too complex to summarize easily but involves furious disputes between local parents and the school board over a variety of issues, including a pair of sexual assaults – was cooked up by Republicans as a cynical dog-whistle campaign.

“The GOP ran a master class on race-based identity politics,” wrote CNN’s Bakari Sellers. “The return of the Lee Atwater playbook. Pretty grim,” is how former Harry Reid chief of staff Adam Jentleson put it. “Hats off to the depraved cynicism and villainy and race baiting. It worked in Virginia,” seethed Wajahat Ali of The Daily Beast. Van Jones last night called Youngkin the “Delta variant of Trumpism.”

Just as McAuliffe had no message apart from trying to tie Youngkin to Trump, these commentators seem helpless to do anything but fall back on a cookie-cutter formula for responding to Republican electoral victories in the Trump era.

I already wrote about this gaslighting of CRT, but since then, on the ground, parents, have found out exactly what’s going on in their schools:

It’s that simple. The left keeps pretending that Critical Race Theory is only this “high-level academic concept” that only very educated people could possibly fathom. That’s bullshit; it’s simple-minded pile of stupid nonsense and gobbledy gook terms that idiots can master in days, which is why it’s so fantastically popular among the stupid and academically ungifted.

That same teacher turned up on a Fox News interview and pointed out that there are two elements of teaching: curricula (what is taught) and pedagogy (how it is taught).

The game teachers are playing is saying “there is no CRT in the curricula,” which is true(ish) – but what they’re not telling you is that they are explicitly embracing CRT in the pedagogy – that is how they teach everything. Critical race theory is the lens through which they teach everything, even math.

Tony Kinnett “Oh yes, definitely math — ‘ethnomathematics,’ a mathematics based on a student’s individual cultural beliefs and traditions, is all the rage among CRT acolytes.”

One irony here is that teachers unions have made it so difficult to fire teachers that these guys can step out and say these things in public with little to fear, aside from being removed from classes and made to sit in a room alone all day on full pay.

But parents began to see all this for themselves over the last eighteen months because schools wanted to do Zoom classes with the kids at home, but weren’t smart enough to switch off the indoctrination. Hence the reaction as they turned up to School Board meetings (normally dullsville) reading out the stuff their kids were being taught, demanding it stop, and also demanding to know how the hell it got started. For their pains they got booted out and sometimes arrested as in Loudon County, Virginia (Rape, Racism, Terrorists and Elections), and/or “cancelled” out of participating in the whole process (The Culture War Against the Little Man, by Wenyuan Wu ). Wu describes a smear job from the LA Times that resulted from an effort to replace CRT proponents on the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE):

Let me set the record straight, as the expert “detractor” who volunteered to replace a vocal proponent of CRT at the OCBE meeting. Volunteer board members and their community supporters spent two months assembling a diverse expert panel… Each panelist holds an advanced degree in a social science discipline, and four are life-long educators. All panelists supported the teaching of history and ethnic studies in a constructive, unbiased, and unabridged manner. None gave even a slight indication that we should refrain from discussing racism.

One of the emotive arguments used by CRT proponents is that if you oppose the teaching of these derivations of CRT (lets call the praxis or Applied CRT) it means you don’t want to teach young minds about America’s evil past of racism and slavery, which has not been true in decades.

My daughters began attending public school in Montgomery County, Maryland in the early 1990s. Every February, from Kindergarten on, they received an accounting of racism in America via Black History Month. Nor was this accounting confined to February. It informed the selection of literature my daughters were assigned. And the U.S. History textbooks used in my daughters’ classes in Middle School and High School did not soft-pedal racism in America.

As the Orange County guy describes the LA Times attack (another perfect example of the Cathedral in action):

It is ironic that a top regional media corporation felt it necessary or fashionable to lambast a small local educational board consisting of five elected trustees and two staff members. More disturbingly, the L.A. Times editorial board even went as far as to disparage the parents and community members present for failing to toe the line of political correctness and support its favored narratives of CRT, systemic racism, and a particular brand of ethnic studies.

Even Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer and uber-Leftie, Andrew Sullivan (Mr Gay Marriage himself, with a little detour supporting the War on Terror twenty years ago), can see though the Left Democrat smoke and mirrors of this fight:

[W]hen the Democrats and the mainstream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K-12 kids in Virginia’s public schools are not explicitly reading the collected works of Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are studying critiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school system now thoroughly committed to the ideology and worldview of CRT, by teachers who have been marinated in it, and whose unions have championed it.
…
In 2019, the [Virginia DOE] sent out a memo that explicitly endorsed critical race and queer theory as essential tools for teaching high school. Check out the VA DOE’s “Road Map to Equity,” where it argues that “courageous conversation” on “social justice, systemic inequity, disparate student outcomes and racism in our school communities is our responsibility and professional obligation. Now is the time to double down on equity strategies.”

Equity! That new magical word that sounds like “equality” but really isn’t. When you encounter somebody using that word you know you’re talking to a person trying to gaslight you about what they really want, which is the old Marxist notion of everybody ending up in the same place:

The other big teachers’ union, the National Education Association, has explicitly called for teaching children CRT, pledging to publicize “an already-created, in-depth study that critiques white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy… capitalism… and other forms of power and oppression.” They back The 1619 Project as a teaching tool. So all the unions, the governor, the Virginia education department, the paper of record, and the federal government think CRT is obligatory for teaching children. But absolutely none of that ever, ever reaches into the classroom. Please.

Of course it does. To use a term the woke might understand, it is, in fact, structural.

And exactly as those teachers above describe, it’s the “lens” through which all else must be taught:

In Virginia, the goal is not to make obscure CRT texts mandatory in a course curriculum; it is to filter all education first and foremost through the CRT lens of race and identity; to “interrogate” mathematics, literature, philosophy, and science not as fields of study, but as suspect products of “white supremacy”; to remember “positionality” before you even speak; to grade and discipline so as to remove any group differences; to abolish standardized tests, because there are different group outcomes; to end gifted education, because it’s allegedly racist; to hire and fire on identity grounds; to teach children that sex is not binary and can be chosen; to open restrooms and locker rooms to both sexes; and, most of all, to keep parents at bay and in the dark about all of it.

But the progressive left is clearly going to double down on all-racism-all-the-time. The Overton Window has shifted and they intend to keep on pushing Left:

What has happened this past week, I suspect, is that the woke revolution has finally met its match: educated parents. People can tolerate sitting through compulsory “social justice” seminars, struggle sessions, pronoun rituals, and the rest as adults, if they have to as a condition of employment. But when they see this ideology being foisted on their children as young as six, they draw a line.

And when the public authorities try to disguise this, when a governor says that parents should not decide what is taught in public schools, when the parents are scorned as “white supremacists” for wanting their children to be taught math that doesn’t take a position on racism, and when the media reflexively calls them liars, they are going to get mad enough to vote Republican again. I don’t blame them.

Having said that, even if the GOP takes power over the House and Senate in 2022, and even if they add the Presidency in 2024, what exactly can the Federal government do about this? It’s going to have to be handled at the lower levels of States, cities and counties, so far and deep has it spread.

Disempowering these toxic people is the key. At the Federal level they could start by demolishing the Federal Department of Education, which was only invented in 1979 anyway. That’s right, a huge amount of the USA’s fabulous history of invention and innovation occurred in the 200 years before the Federal DOE came about.

At state levels they could start by firing most of the staff of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices in the public universities, and then really empowering like-minded parents, mayors and others to get into those boards. Ripping apart the specialist Education universities and Education Departments of universities would also be a good thing, since they’re the factories churning out teachers armed with these theories.

BTW, all this is coming to New Zealand soon, if not here already, as shown by the latest Royal Society of New Zealand nonsense.