Virginia election-talk me down off the ledge

Politics & Elections
141

Really? When that fact came out everyone on the pro-school-destruction side gleefully wrote columns on it (and wrote posts on this board) as if it debunked the story. It didn’t do anything of the kind, because the story is:

  1. A girl was raped in the bathroom at school during school hours.
    1a) School officials were powerless to prevent it from happening in the first place (school safety issue).
    1b) School officials were far too accommodating to the perpetrator afterwards, up to and including transferring him to a different school instead of suspending him, where he victimized a second girl (more safety problems/total disconnect as to the role of administrators/no sense of responsibility).
    1c) The superintendent blatantly lied about the incident; when asked at a school board meeting, saying he wasn’t aware of any rape in the school despite sending e-mails about the specifics of the incident to the school board three weeks earlier. (policy of lying about what is going on instead of engaging with concerns)
    1d) The girl’s father was arrested, smeared as a “terrorist” who was screaming at the school board about trans bathrooms and vaccines, etc., for trying to speak about his daughter’s rape at the meeting, and prosecuted to a guilty verdict for disorderly conduct, by a prosecutor who ran on a policy of not prosecuting anyone. (school boards feeling that parental involvement is a crime/abusing their power and acting outside the democratic process).

Nothing about this being a rape of one acquaintance by another changes anything about what happened. So, why was that fact paraded out as if it “debunked” the story? Apparently, the McAuliffe squad thought it “debunked” the narrative that “this happened because the trans rapist was allowed in the bathroom.” The problem is, first off, it wouldn’t debunk that, and, more importantly, no one was talking about trans bathroom policies except them. Scott Smith’s problem is that his daughter was raped, the case was mishandled and lied about, and he was the only one prosecuted in relation to it until national media attention forced the local hand to actually do something about the rapist. It was never a “trans bathroom policy crusade” for anyone except the MSNBC airheads who take it as an article of faith that no one actually has a problem with their child being raped and any claim to the contrary must be part of some kind of bigoted agenda.

It’s symptomatic of the larger issue which is that Dems assume anyone who doesn’t already agree with them 100% is part of a conspiracy of bigots and can’t possibly be giving an honest accounting of what their beliefs and motives are. I have no doubt that there are SOME white supremacists in Virginia - the 44% of people who voted for Trump last year might be a starting point when figuring out how many - but assuming that’s the ONLY possible reason for disagreeing with you and therefore it’s not possible or desirable to actually campaign to anyone is an arrogant recipe for losing elections. The fact that McAuliffe’s education policy was so toxic that it pushed a substantial number of independent and Democratic voters into an alliance with the right wing of the Republican Party should say a lot about that policy.

142

So you’ll accept evidence, but not the evidence people have, not documents produced by the Department of Education as “reputable” evidence of what the Department of Education is saying, and oh yeah you’ve somehow never seen the smoking gun invoice that this whole campaign revolved around before, but you are very confident in making statements about who is and isn’t teaching CRT in Virginia.

That sounds like a “no” on whether there is any evidence you will actually accept.

143

Based on your past two responses, I’ll assume you don’t really have cites, but if you decide to provide some, I’ll be happy to look.

144

The “teaching teachers vs teaching students” thing is important. I’ve seen a lot of what’s beencirculatwd by Rufo and what I’ve seen looks like training materialsfor teachersand not something they were supposed to roll out in the actual curriculum.

145

Right - teachers are trained in CRT so they can be more aware when troublesome issues arise. Not to teach it to children. (Though it IS a valid, but different question just how good or relevant to the context is the training)

But of course teaching children anything but God Bless America Racism Ended in 1968 is “divisive”…

146

OK, so after a year of “CRT only exists in law schools and anyone who thinks it has anything to do with public schools is a liar,” we’ve gotten you this far. That’s somewhat encouraging. Maybe by 2022 we’ll get to admitting that CRT has been taught to students, is a noxiously evil philosophy that has no correspondence to reality, and needs to be removed from schools, so that we don’t end up with 350 Republicans in Congress.

147

Repeating that children are being taught something “evil” doesn’t make it true that they are or that it is.

148

Providing evidence for any of these claims would be the best way to achieve that.

149

A Republican winning election on an education platform in a +10 Democratic state is all the evidence I need that the time for tendentious refusal to engage with the CRT problem is over and done with.

150

From a campaign perspective I think the Democrats are atrocious at messaging this.

However you haven’t given any evidence that CRT was being taught to students in K-12.

151

Look, if you spend a year saying “anyone who says the sky is blue is a racist liar,” then ask me to prove the sky is blue, and I tell you to fucking look up and you refuse to do so, then hand you a journal article on how the Rayleigh effect works, and your answer is to give me 6 reasons why you’re unwilling to read it, then whatever that makes me and you it’s definitely not “a person who refuses to provide evidence and a person who is simply concerned about making sure the blueness of the sky is properly cited.”

152

Like I said, I did look it up. Since you’re not citing I have to assume you’re referring to what I’ve been looking at which is the stuff Rufo has been circulating, and all of that stuff I’ve seen from that is materials for the teachers at schools on CRT.

153

I’m still waiting for the evidence that Democrats tried to sweep a rape under the rug. I can’t find one cite of anyone saying it was anything other than horrible. Show me evidence that anybody other than the superintendent tried to downplay it. Show me anywhere where somebody tried to frame it as a trans rights issue. The truth is that this case was mishandled badly. It was reported to the Sheriff who took two months to investigate before arresting the rapist. The superintendent lied about knowing it and the rapist was transferred to another school which should not have happened. I see only outrage on both sides. Show me where are all the Democrats saying that this is OK. As far as the father goes, I understand his frustration and I am not sure he should have been prosecuted but his actions however justified were unlawful. I am also not sure that defunding the public schools in favor of private and charter schools is a way to solve this problem.

154

So I was an English major in college, and one of the more advanced classes I took as part of that ordeal was “Introduction to Literary Theory.” In that course, we learned about the various types of literary theory, which were essentially just different lenses for assessing texts. So a Feminist Criticism of a text might focus on the ways it attacks or reinforces existing gender inequities; a New Historical Criticism of the same text would focus instead on the ways it reflects class structures. Reader-Response Criticism considers a text in terms of how the reader experiences it, regardless of the intent of the author or the circumstances of its creation. And so on.

There are many of these, and importantly none of them is “correct.” Our last assignment in that class was to choose a single literary theory and write an analysis of Dracula using that lens. There were 20-some papers on Dracula, taking a variety of different approaches to analyzing it. Again, none of these represented the “right” or a complete understanding of that novel, just a picture from a particular angle.

Now, I did not become a teacher (I lack the temperament). But if I had, it would absolutely have been the case that I was “trained” in Feminist Criticism, and a good English teacher will know what that is and understand how to apply it to a text. But neither of the following things would be true:

  • I am teaching Feminist Criticism to my middle- or high-school age students.

  • Feminist Criticism is, to borrow from Sam Stone’s bizarre “everyone knows” restatement of CRT, “male Fragility, ‘patriarchy’ being a serious thing impacting women today, men needing to be actively anti-sexist to be absolved of their male guilt, gender-based quotas to fight ‘patriarchy’ or for that matter ANY material that assigns differences to individuals based on their gender.

CRT is no different. It is a specific lens for looking at history – for considering historical events (especially legal events) in terms of how they represent, perpetuate, or undermine racist institutional structures. It is not the only or the objectively correct way to look at history; it’s just one of many tools in the box, and a decent teacher (or historian) should be aware of it and understand how and when to apply it. It’s not going to be taught to kids, because critical theory is not really something you teach at that level.

But it is a specific thing. You don’t get to redefine it as something else and then argue against it (well, I guess you do get to do that, but it’s a dishonest debating technique). We don’t teach calculus to fifth graders. This is a simple truth. If you say, to borrow again from Sam Stone’s remarkably troubling post, “When normal people, and not academics from ‘studies’ programs talk about calculus, everyone knows what they are talking about: addition, subtraction, and slaughtering Irish babies for food,” I don’t really know how anyone is supposed to engage with that.

All of that said, it is clear that the term “CRT” is widely misunderstood and misapplied. I don’t know how to fix that, because as a few posters here make clear, a lot of people are awfully invested in using a false definition even when they know it to be false.

155

I’m not sure how you know this. We can say with certainty that more people came out in this election than in 2017. So Republicans, Democrats and Independents were motivated, as the numbers show. What we don’t yet know is whether McAuliff’s comments motivated more Republicans to come out rather than cause Independents and Democrats to switch their vote to Youngkin. But if you have a cite that shows this to be true, I’d love to see it.

156

While not the one you asked, I’ll answer. As a Canadian you may be surprised to find out that the superpower to your South has national infrastructure in a state worse than has been seen in many decades. Two of the most significant parts of our infrastructure that are in bad disrepair are public roads and airports. One of the core issues with our interstate road system is that because it is funded as a joint funding activity between the Federal government and States (States generally build out the projects, which then qualify them for Federal matching funds, with the Federal government paying the majority of the cost but the states have to raise enough revenue to meet their share), States with bad budgetary issues have been inclined to let large stretches of interstate fall into serious disrepair. If you’ve ever driven around the interstates of Southeastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, southwestern Virginia (i.e. much of northern Appalachia), you would be very shocked that you were on “Federal interstate roads” of the most powerful nation on earth. Some of the few stretches of these roads that are even decently maintained are the few rare toll roads in the region.

Our airports are in similar terrible state. A lot of American don’t even realize that the vast majority of airports are publicly owned by what are typically regional organizations setup by a consortium of local governments to run/operate the airports. The airlines are just tenants in the airports. In theory the airports were supposed to be able to make enough money…from running the airports, to finance future construction and other upkeep. Unfortunately, that has not occurred, I don’t know all the details on this but I believe part of it is with airline deregulation airlines cut lots of airports out of their spoke and hub systems and many airports had trouble keeping enough airlines interested in their facilities. This led to a “race to the bottom” as airports started undercutting each other on tenancy agreements to attract airlines, this led to eventually even large and important airports that still host quite a few airlines are essentially underfunding because they can’t get enough money out of the airlines because the airlines will just move to another airport if push comes to shove.

I don’t know enough about airport economics to know per se what the right arrangement is for airports, but I do know the world’s most powerful country should not have airports that are second rate or third rate, and we do.

Port infrastructure (seaports and river ports) are also in serious decline.

The infrastructure bill is giving $17bn to water ports. $25bn to airports.

The bill also will set aside $110bn for surface transportation, $40bn of which is for bridge construction and repair–which is the largest outlay of money for interstate bridges since the interstate highway system was built–and if you want to really be shocked, read some reports on how many U.S. interstate bridges are assessed to be in some of the lowest categories a bridge can be in whilst still being considered “safe enough” to keep open. Most Americans are somewhat ignorant of the scale of decay in our interstate infrastructure.

So that spending would be the most important.

After that around $47bn is being spent on “resiliency”, this is flood and wildfire mitigation, weatherization and some money for ecosystem restoration and cybersecurity.

There’s also $55bn for water infrastructure (things like removing lead pipes), which after the Flint disaster I think is a good and important investment in our communities.

The $66bn in the bill for freight and passenger rail I’m a little less enthusiastic about. I am not a huge fan of large outlays for passenger rail, which I largely think outside of the Northeast corridor (which is profitable by itself, which is evidence that’s one of the best places for it to be built up) is kind of a relic of a bygone era in the United States. I’m also not a fan of huge outlays for freight rail simply because the freight rail companies are for profit enterprises and should have some expectation of maintaining their own systems from their profits.

The $40bn for local public transit I think is okay, but I wouldn’t lose sleep if it had been cut.

The $65bn in broadband infrastructure could be good, but I’d need more details. We actually had a lot of money spent through rural internet providers like Frontier et al. in the Obama era to build out broadband to underserved areas, and it was somewhat of a boondoggle. Frontier took a lot of money and in many cases barely expanded its network, so I would hope this funding is more carefully calibrated.

157

Storytell0910, this was extremely helpful … to anyone who cares about the actual definition of CRT. Thank you.

However, Republicans use “CRT” as shorthand for an honest assessment of American history – teaching things like “the Civil War was fought over slavery” and “Andrew Jackson may not be a hero after all”.

158

IOW, you have nothing. Thank you for playing.

159
Summary

So let me spell it out, then: You and I both know what CRT actually is (the philosophy that all actions in American society are calculated by inherently evil white people to harm black people, and that no other motivations for any behavior exist), and that it is taught in public schools in Virginia and many other places controlled by Democratic Party educrats. The entire game of denying or needing to “prove” this is just a political exercise in calculated dishonesty, and the only thing worth discussing now that the campaign is over is whether the Democrats’s strategy of continuing to both support and deny the existence of something that they know, as well as I do, is true makes any political sense given what a disaster it just caused.

The “person who is open to evidence about changing their mind on CRT” is a fictitious construct and cannot be persuaded because they don’t exist and the are being posited solely as an extension of a disingenuous partisan campaign tactic.

160

This is entirely false from beginning to end. I think you should change your news sources, because someone is really lying to you.