I have the trivial fix for it. Voting for a Republican is a sin. Incorporate that into their minds. Hammer on that simple true fact until it’s “processed in.”
Okay, implementation is probably non-trivial. But ya gotta admit, it’s trivially simple, and has the advantages of being snappy, easy to remember, and best of all, utterly factual.
Nah. The actual “radical left” are the people saying stuff like “abolish capitalism” and “support Aztlan secession” and “liberate the unfairly imprisoned livestock animals”, messages that have very little traction among American liberals and basically zilch in the way of effective propaganda.
To the extent that there is effective organized messaging on the part of the American left, its effectiveness is based mostly on its factual validity. The reason that liberal PR messages like “Trumpists’ ‘stolen election’ claims are a Big Lie” and “Republicans are trying to undermine democracy by attacking voting rights” and “Right-wing media are promoting delusionist conspiracy theories” have any significant traction at all in public opinion is because they’re true.
If you’re talking about opportunistic looters and brawlers at mass protests, they’re not “organized” and they’re not a “wing”.
If you’re talking about militant antifa, they’re pretty much nobody’s “wing” but their own, in the sense that they don’t really promote any coherent political ideology other than being aggressive toward fascists and white supremacists. And they’re definitely not “organized” either.
Not sure if I should sympathize with you for the typo or congratulate you for its brilliance.
The metric by which we judge them is assy. Just how assy are they.
Eh, if I could go back to 2018 and change my vote for county sheriff from the terrible Democrat who won to the Republican I would.
Yeah! Ketchup on children? Next your gonna tell me you like pineapple on pizza!* Heathen! Now BBQ sauce on my baby back ribs on the other hand…
*I actually don’t mind pineapple on pizza occasionally.
My response to fears about teaching white kids that it’s bad to be white goes something like this–and I know I’m laying it on a little thick:
The proudest American tradition, the tradition that our nation was founded on, is resistance to injustice. From the Patriots of the American Revolution, to the Underground Railroad, to the Suffragettes, to the organizers against child labor, to Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans stand up to injustice and fight for justice. Learning about this proud history is a central part of any American child’s education. But to learn about this history of Amerians fighting for injustice, children must learn about the injustices. And if we want our next generation to join in this proud tradition, we can’t pretend that everything is fair in the world today: they need to be invited to look at today’s world, see where things aren’t what they could be, and draw on the lessons of history to make tomorrow better.
I don’t teach about Ruby Bridges to make children feel bad about being White. I teach them about Ruby Bridges to show them how to be proud to be American.
Are there public schools in America that do not take this approach in teaching K-12 students? I’m not talking about exceptions due to individual teachers failing to do their jobs properly. I’m asking whether there is a significant number of school districts that teach “alternative historical facts” as part of the curriculum.
To be clear, this is my response, not just my approach. The anti-“CRT” movement is, as far as I can tell, an attempt to squash teaching about past injustices, claiming that teaching about them makes white kids feel bad. This is an explanation for how such teaching gives them an opportunity to be the best of our country.
Okay, but I think we can all think back to a recent time when CRT wasn’t the boogeyman it is today. Did the people who now oppose teaching of historically accurate facts, oppose it then? I realize that it’s faint praise but most of these people are products of an education system that taught reasonably historically accurate version of America’s slavery and oppression. I mean certainly anybody who was born and educated post ERA must have been exposed to the concepts you describe. Do they now dispute their accuracy?
As I said, I think lots of angry liberals online are excluding the hell out of the middle, especially if some of the people using the term CRT are finding it a useful shorthand for people like Kendi and DiAngelo. A parent can both agree that the Lost Cause is bullshit and disagree with “white fragility”. Even more so if said parent isn’t white.
I really don’t think this is true. Our teaching of American history has inspired a raft of books about how bad it’s been. Wasn’t 20 years ago that Charleston’s History museum talked about the War Between the States and how sad Charlestonians were to see the invading Union army; wasn’t thirty years ago that my AP history teacher prevaricated at length about how the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery. I still don’t think most kids learn how strongly despised MLK Jr. was by so many of his contemporaries, nor about the Southern Strategy, nor about how marital rape was finally outlawed in North Carolina in the nineties. (that last one is a high school lesson, natch).
You gotta teach the injustice, you gotta teach the history of racism, you gotta teach the institutionalized nature of inequality, if you want kids to understand, and to be able to formulate a position of resistance and of fighting for what’s right.
MSM: “Why a strong jobs report is a problem for Democrats”
For sure you have to do that. While I’m sure there are many people who would make the specific complaint that you aren’t teaching history the way they want, because it makes their heroes look bad, though, I don’t think it’s quite the same as what has mostly been under discussion here. Your response is an excellent one as to why teaching history does not equal “you’re bad if you’re white,” even as much of history is whites being bad.
The complaints about teaching kids that “white people are bad,” whether in good faith or not, mostly don’t rely on that, I don’t think. They rely on the existence of academic concepts of whiteness and white supremacy, white fragility and white dominant culture, etc. The answer that I think Democrats could give more effectively has to do with that side of things. In other words, if you are not teaching your kids lessons about how whiteness is literally a malignant, parasitic-like condition, which I am sure you are not, I think the version of you that was running for public office could say something like “I am not teaching my kids that whiteness is a disease, and it would be bad to do that,” if the topic came up. If some right wing hack has accused you of teaching some poorly worded or extreme concept that they found in an obscure academic article or on a slide in some local government’s training archive, which you aren’t actually teaching, then I think it isn’t effective to give your good answer about how you are teaching history the right way.
My sense is that Democrats generally don’t go so far as to actively distance themselves from the idea that elementary-school kids will be taught that they are “performing whiteness” or whatever. I think it leads people to believe that something more like that than they’re OK with might actually be going on. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t make that clear**, since I do think it would be pretty silly to be teaching those concepts to kids.
(**I suppose I should say I do see a reason, just not a good one. If they think it’s politically harmful for them to reject any anti-racist principle at all, in any way, then that’s a reason they wouldn’t be more clear about that. But I think that’s politically untenable in the long term.)
“… is a DISEASE” is not a progressive, liberal or democratic platform or value, and doesn’t come from any academic setting.
It’s a projection outward of nazi/fascist values onto a feared and hated enemy.
If the Dem party responds to this it will just morph to another iteration to fit conservative needs for a hated and feared enemy.
I think the responses have actually already been made and ignored. In threads like this that fact just gets ignored too. There’s really nothing left to hash over except to blame dems for being in asymetric warfare with Republican fascism.
I’m not sure that’s right, though. The complaints I’ve seen teachers talking about in FB groups are when parents are angry about their kid reading about Ruby Bridges and coming home angry at white people, and that sort of thing. I don’t have examples at my fingertips, but the pushback seems to be against teaching about history, when the history involves white people being shitty.
It’s true that conservatives tend to exagerrate such teaching into indoctrination about how All White People Are The Devil. And they conflate very rare instances of teachers doing boneheaded things like trying to teach third-graders about Whiteness as a concept with the general teaching of history.
But I lean toward responding to such people by pointing out the heroic nature of resistance in American history, and by separating that clearly from the sort of academic discussion of Whiteness that almost never happens in K-12 schools.
If someone did bring that up, I’d say something like,
Look, yeah, no kid should ever be told that their racial identity makes them lesser than others. Sure, on very rare occasions, a teacher might do that to a White kid, and they should absolutely face appropriate professional consequences for doing so. But if we want to address the problem of racial shaming and denigration, it’s still far more common for children of color than it is for White children, and I hope you’ll join me in active work to eliminate the very real barriers than children of color face in their education.
The idea that children need to be sheltered from reality is so strange coming from the right.
But then again I’m still trying to figure out the dif between all the vaccines these idiots took between 1940 and 2020 and the new “bad” one.
And about how parents all of the sudden get to determine school curricula. Or else it’s NOT AMERICA" anymore. Sheesh.
So could you please provide some sort of cite about this then? I fully admit that up until reading this thread, I knew jack shit about this incident. So for now all I have to go on is babales cite. If you want to convince me or anyone else that this is a huge issue, you are going to need to give me something. Ideally something that shows what this incident has to do with McCauliff , the Democrats and transgenderism. I’m not asking for much here, I don’t need a quality cite from a reliable source, I’d gladly take an Ed Anger OPed from the late lamented weekly world news. I just want to know what the fuck your talking about.
Ah, I see. I might have the “advantage” over you of not having any actual practical experience. So anytime I hear somebody talking about it, it’s in the context of political complaints, as opposed to an actual parent yelling at their actual teacher about what happened in class.
I can believe that most of the complaints an actual teacher gets are about specific material. But I think in the context of electoral calculus, a lot of those people are write-offs anyway if you aren’t an actual confederate. The people who don’t want you saying slaves were slaves are not amenable to a reasonable political position. My impression has been that “CRT” as a political controversy is more about whether kids should be exposed to, like, “critical” “theories” about “race.” Could be wrong.
One of the chief complaints about the CRT-driven race agenda is that it doesn’t teach accurate history. The problem with notions such as “the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery,” “the Second Amendment was passed to preserve slavery,” “the 3/5 compromise was a metaphysical pronouncement about what percent human black people were,” and “police originated as slave patrols” is not “that they make white people feel bad,” it’s that they aren’t true. But in CRT land it’s not enough to talk about the actual history of slavery, segregation, lynching, and all the rest - teaching people to look at the contradictions and complexities of American history and use sources to form their own supportable judgements about what happened is hard, and goes against the flattening, simplistic impulse of CRT. In CRT, the story of America is not one of hypocrisy and compromise, where the same people who fiercely advocated liberty for some denied it to others, it’s simply the story of the evil whites conspiring against the blacks 100% of the time, because they’re evil and that’s what they do. There’s no room for any motivation or other kind of event besides racism - everything that has ever happened was an effort by whites to oppress blacks, no one ever does anything for any other reason - which is just as inaccurate as the idea that “slavery wasn’t so bad” or “the Civil War was about states’ rights.” It’s lazy, inaccurate history that replaces the indoctrination of one incorrect conclusion with another and doesn’t teach any sort of critical thinking or historical practice.
As the quoted post already included:
The superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools sent a brief, confidential email to school board members on May 28 — the same day a female student at Stone Bridge High School said she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom.
The e-mail is screenshotted at the link and clearly is describing the rape of Scott Smith’s daughter. This shows that the superintendent was aware of the incident on May 28.
On June 22, at the meeting that ended with Scott Smith being dragged off by police and arrested for trying to speak to the school board about his daughter’s rape, Ziegler flatly denied being aware of any rape allegation:
But a month later, on June 22, when he addressed an unruly school board meeting over claims of a female student getting raped by another student in the girl’s restroom, he said, “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
There is no interpretation of this besides a knowing lie. Babale’s contention that Ziegler was just so confused by exotic five-dollar words like “rape” and “bathroom” that he gave an answer that would make no sense to any interpretation of the question is ludicrous on its face, and becomes even more so when we recall that the victim’s father was at the meeting trying to get answers about the incident in question. The superintendent knew what he was being asked, and he chose to flat-out lie about it.
And, despite consistent Democratic Party hack insistence to the contrary, most parents do not want their children raped, do not want to be lied to about the fact that their child was raped, and do not want to be arrested for asking about why their children’s rapist is going unpunished. This is not a “fake and made up” concern by people whose agenda is secret transphobia, no matter how many times the people living in progressive crazypill land insist that no one could possibly be upset about the rape of their own child and the subsequent cover-up without an ulterior bigoted motive.