Dec 7, 2022·edited Dec 7, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania
In my town of Guilford, CT (population 22,000, voted 66% Biden in 2020, up from 59% Obama in 2012 and 57% Kerry in 2004) the school board race last year was highly contentious. A group of conservative parents decisively defeated the incumbent Republican board members who had gone along with the covid restrictions (a hybrid 2-day-a-week in person schedule for the 2020-2021 school year) and the woke superintendent's CRT agenda (auditing the curriculum, instituting "social-emotional learning" and "diversity and inclusion" plans, buying every teacher a copy of Kendi's book, hiring diversity officers and consultants, creating teaching positions restricted to nonwhite applicants etc. etc.). There was no chance of the conservatives actually taking over the majority of the school board and being able to make decisions. We would have merely replaced 3 go-with-the-flow Republicans with 3 anti-woke (but not outspokenly Trump-y) Republicans on the 9 person board. Nonetheless the response was hysterical and utterly ruthless by the liberal majority in town. Since Democrats were prevented from taking all the open seats based on both a state law and the town charter that provide for minority party representation on all town boards (hooray for pluralism), they and their allies just created an "independent party" and then the Democrats ran a joint campaign for their own and the "independent" candidates. In the end the anti-woke Republicans all lost approximately 67-33 (slightly larger margin than Trump lost by year before) in an incredibly high off-year-turnout (61%) election and so got no representation at all on the school board (it's now 5 woke Democrats and 4 woke "independents"). I really wish I knew what was working so well in Florida's blueish counties to let conservative candidates improve so much on prior Republican performance. In my town it seems the tribalism now runs so deep that no progress has been possible. I think the town demographics (90% white, with 58% having at least a bachelors and 31% having an advanced degree) work against us in the context of your assertion of the Democrats as the "high status" party, since lots of people here just could never even consider voting for the deplorable party even if they have reservations about individual policies.
East Asians assimilate and outmarry. If you put them in the South, they will largely marry whites (or at least the women will) and some will become Southern Baptists. If you put them in California, they will become Californians.
South Asians are more like Jews (or more properly, the Jews of a generation or two ago) -- they intermarry and they'll only half-assimilate, and what they assimilate towards is universal cosmopolitan culture and never local/regional American culture. They will not under any circumstances become Southern Baptists. They'll have largely the same attitudes in Tennessee as they will in California.
"[F]or conservatives to get their way on social issues, they need ... the state government, the local school boards, and the courts. Or at least two out of three."
Indeed. RH is correct. Controlling most political offices is really the only way to offset the enormous "soft" power of academia, the "helping" professions, civil service, and most jobs requiring a graduate degree – roles where right-leaning people scarcely exist. As you point out in your "Why Is Everything Liberal" article, the proles make up a majority of conservative voters and they will never flood the institutions due to an inward contentedness that arises from some combination of culture and psychological traits (and perhaps, I suspect, genetics). So, the difficult task of needing to control nearly all electoral/judicial slots will not go away. The proles can't be fixed.
If some of mainstream metropolitan culture became intelligently right-wing in terms of merit, genetics, treatment of criminality, and thoughtful public policy ... there may be hope. The guys at CSPI are a good example of the smart, metropolitan Right that I would like to see.
Conservatives should let themselves relax a little about indoctrination in schools. I’m a first year English teacher who has bathed in soft-headed progressive nonsense during teacher training and went through job interviews where HR professionals consistently asked how seriously I consider race and sexuality in lesson planning. Coupled with constant conservative news about woke educators, I thought the professional pressure to pass on CRT would be huge. Half a year in, at a highly diverse school, I find it doesn’t exist.
Woke thought does not stand a chance against black 13 year olds. When I halfheartedly pass along some weak tea about the danger of stereotypes, I’m likely to here a summary of an Andrew Tate video in response. Up against the reality of teaching adolescents, SEL lessons become a limp formality. Perhaps contrary to the wishes of Ed schools and some administrators, indoctrination goes unachieved.
The status quo is stubborn. This makes more sense when you realize that teaching is the most blue collar - white collar profession there is. Aside from some young female strivers (more of them in elementary Ed, admittedly), it’s just not the type of workforce capable of carrying out a woke program of brain wash. Conservatives are right to notice the effort to make it so, but I highly doubt many classrooms conform to their fears. Remember, your son’s social studies teacher is also probably the wrestling coach.
Also damn you, my job is only sorta like babysitting.
I agree. Kids learn more from reality & mass culture (ESPECIALLY the internet) than school lessons to which they might give half their increasingly abbreviated attention spans on the best of days. For good or ill, schoolteachers of any stripe simply aren’t as interesting to kids as TikTok, YouTube, etc.
Of course I oppose woke indoctrination of any type, and appreciate these local elections mobilize discontent with anti-White racism, but I don’t think schools are a very important ideological avenue relative to the remainder of mass culture.
I think this is largely true -- peer group is a lot more important than teachers.
I also think school indoctrination is probably more effective if it's a monoculture. I remember teachers, both left and right, that were highly ideological growing up. They were never the most respected teachers. The most respected teachers were those that engaged with independent thought, rather than trying to shut it down. Also, if the students seemed to be of one mind on a topic, they tried to question it, if only to play Devil's advocate.
But what if all teachers were required to be of one mind ideologically and the entire system was reinforcing that certain ideas were bad/wrong/incorrect? I think that might carry more influence with students. It's sort of like how parenting is a lot more effective if parents provide a unified front than if they're continually competing with and subverting one another.
Woke brainwashing has been a wild success for 50+ years. I’m sure a minority of kids lol’ed at indoctrination about sexism or muh trail of tears in the 70s too. It didn’t stop the revolution
Eh, the fact of the matter is schoolchildren, in general have never found school (or their teachers) particularly interesting-certainly not compared to television/movies/advertising. I suspect these are more important than a teacher hammering half-remembered stock phrases into the heads of hapless 2nd graders.
One bright spot for Broward. One of the newly elected school board members is Brenda Fam, who won on a strongly anti-woke and pro-parenting platform despite being heavily outspent and out publicized by her Democratic opponent (who stood for nothing). Frankly, I don’t know how she did it as she won the runoff despite coming in second in the multiple candidate race. But it was a great win for my home county.
Desantis, being high IQ, has figured out how to provoke the left in the same way Trump did in 2016 (forcing them to defend unpopular ideas, which creates a backlash) and channel that backlash into something productive in way that Trump could not. He's also good at keeping the loons at arms length without offending them. He and maybe Youngkin are the only shot conservatives have at turning anything around.
Unfortunately he will never be president. I think he has a great chance to win the nom in 2024. Then Trump will run 3rd party, take 30%, and we'll have 8 years of President Buttigieg. Establishment GOP will decide we need to talk more about tax breaks, and less about immigration, and embrace wokeness to "win".
Pretty sad to know the Trump suicide cult is going to do this, unless God decides to intervene and take Trump to his heavenly home. But I think God wants us to suffer, kinda like the engineers in Prometheus decided to send the black goo to destroy Earth. Trump is our black goo.
I'm not as confident as you that Trump would sabotage DeSantis. It's not that likely he'll want to run as a third party and be sure to lose. And I think DeSantis has a chance in a 3-way race. Third parties are rarely successful, Trump may not get that many votes. And by running he'll make DeSantis seem like a moderate, sane compromise who will appeal to independents.
I assumed Trump would start to grow weary of losing and picking losers. Alas, he seems perfectly content to keep losing as long as he has a few worshippers. If he runs 3rd party he will pull waaaaay more voters from Desantis. Not even close.
Let me add, it's a fair bet that if he loses the primary, he'll contest the loss and argue the whole way down that DeSantis cheated him. So he might very well be willing to run just out of spite.
Also, let's be real and observe that Trump doesn't need to take 30 points from DeSantis. In a two-way race, if DeSantis got 52% of the vote to Biden's 48%, that would be an amazing, almost unbelievable achievement, the best performance by a Republican candidate since 1988 -- and running against an incumbent, no less!
Most likely if DeSantis wins, it would be by the skin of his teeth, the only way that a GOP Presidential candidate can ever seem to win these days. So Trump taking 3% would make it almost impossible for DeSantis -- especially because a fair number of those would probably be in Rustbelt states that really matter. Taking 5% would probably translate to rendering a DeSantis win fully impossible.
It's hard for me to imagine Trump doing worse than Perot in 1996 -- 8%. It's important to note that this situation is almost unprecedented. A former President with a fanatical fan base running as a third-party does not belong in the same category as Jo Jorgenson.
Yeah anything short of "Ron will make a great president and I support him 100%" will be enough for Trump to tank him. Even if Trump doesn't run 3rd party I could see him telling his followers to vote for Biden or Buttigieg just out of spite!
It's so strange to find someone who is impartially critical. Hanania is a unicorn, and much appreciated. Too bad we can't all think so critically of all things.
I would appreciate a DeSantis run because it creates something of a win-win situation, or at least a situation where opportunities may arise even if he loses. If he actually became president (I doubt that this can happen, but who knows, we live in interesting times), well, presumably that's a Good Thing.
But if DeSantis were to run and lose, people would really start having to ask themselves some hard questions about what exactly is going on. These hard questions have been deflected so far because Donald Trump exists, who everyone is happy to blame for Republican electoral failures, both left and right. A DeSantis loss would force these people to confront a world in which there is more in play than simply the antics of the Orange Man.
And, I actually think DeSantis has by far the best shot at the nomination as it stands. If nothing crazy happens between now and 24, I don't see how it could be anyone else. Trump has beclowned himself too much, and seems to be in the process of losing even many of the hardcore conservatives who would've defended him to the death back when he was in office.
I think there are some more things going on besides Orange Man antics but as I’ve said before it would take McCarthyism on steroids to solve them. And that’s coming from someone who uses the word “McCarthyism” as a compliment!
"I don't see how it could be anyone else." It will be Trump, because Trump gets 40% from his hard-core base, and DeSanctimonious, Lyin' Ted, that Indian woman, and whoever else, split the remaining 60%.
I don't think a packed Republican primary field would split the vote in the same way that they did in 2016. There was no clear front-runner in 2016 that can compare to DeSantis, who has a high profile and huge favorability years in advance of this primary. A '24 primary if held today would be Trump vs DeSantis with any other contender fading quickly into irrelevance, and I feel that DeSantis wins that handily.
Note, I am saying here "I feel." This is necessarily speculation, since I don't know the future. I might end up being totally wrong. Maybe Trump will skate to the nomination, crush Sleepy Joe, and usher himself in as immortal God-Emperor. As I said, we do live in interesting times.
Mr. Hanania, the school board revolutions are happening across the country. I live in Hanover, NH. It is Dartmouth college town, hence democrats win with 80% of the vote. There were 2 vocal school board members who wanted to make anti-racist training compulsory for elementary school by including books like Anti-racist baby ( Of Mr. Kendi) and the same members also instituted a policy that allowed schools to provide gender change counselling and changing of official school records for gender identity without informing parents. Normally school board issues are not covered in local press, but due to these policies there was heavy coverage in local newspaper. We even got flyers from republican school board candidates which never happened before and these two very liberal members were defeated soundly in school board elections in a 80-20 democrat leaning town.
A lot of right-leaning people have moved to Florida over the past two years in order to flee the COVID insanity of states like New York, Michigan, and California. That's what helped entrench the Sunshine State into solid-Republican territory (and, by the same token, what has made the aforementioned states even bluer). That, and DeSantis just being a very competent governor.
If conservatives can't win in metropolitan areas it means they can't win against non-taxpayers and against tribal groups who vote >90% Democrat, who are concentrated in large numbers in urban counties. I don't know how to fix this. There aren't enough taxpayers to wrest control of government from the people who rely on government for their sustenance.
In the United States, your right-ish parties can at least reduce taxes and slow the climate-emergency hysteria because you can use minoritarian rule. In Canada, we have too few taxpayers, and their power is diluted too much, for tax cuts to be politically possible.
Conservatives might not be able to win these metros outright, but developing a pipeline of minority candidates whose pitches are "same social safety net and city services w/o the leftism" might be able to cut into those margins. Otherwise we'll just keep trotting out the same pathetic "Dems are real raycists" candidates that get blown out by 60 points.
“Same social safety net” why on earth would such “based urban minorities” be worth having then? Just for an R next to their name? Still hostile tribalists who want to pick my families pocket.
I'd hope that a lesson from the Herschel Walker race is that Republicans are WAY, WAY too inclined to hand a nomination to underqualified minority candidates in the hope of getting minority votes, and they need to stop. It never works. Kemp, a white man running against a black woman, outperformed Walker among blacks. Republicans cannot affirmative action their way into winning black votes. The best bet is to just run the best man they can and sometimes that will be enough to get 15-20% of the black vote as opposed to 5-10%.
Agree with this for offices like US Senate, halfway disagree for local candidates. Machines (or in our case cutting into machines) are built by matching quality local candidates to the local demography and their addressing their concerns.
OK. Well, thinking on it, this also makes a lot more sense, and has a proven track record, with Latinos. I think it's a waste of time and counterproductive with blacks.
Agree that its worth running that strategy with Latinos, and maybe certain Asian blocs only. Long term, I think the 1970s-onward arrangement of "conservative White people" (R) vs. "liberal White people and minorities" (D) will revert back to true ideological/ethnic party wings like the old days. Too many contradictory interests on Blue team. A good example of this being the Chicago Daley machine delivering votes for the national party, in exchange for running a fairly conservative, patronage-based local fiefdom.
That only became true in 2020 when the white upper-middle class voted for Biden to regain social capital lost from the extremely unattractive Trump GOP. According to exit polling, HRC and Trump were basically tied for tax payers in 2016, and Romney had a good edge over Obama in the 50k+ income brackets despite losing that election.
Just as land doesn't vote, neither do districts. A fairly affluent metro area can be blue but that isn't a refutation of the exit polling which consistently showed that up until 2020, the high-earning residents of said area are still more likely to be red.
Business owners and higher-end medical professionals (e.g. surgeons and dentists not pediatricians and nurses) both tend red. Self-employed skilled workers are overwhelmingly red. Scientists are blue but scientists aren't such high-income workers, not to mention most work for the state or big pharma (aka net tax drains). The bulk of the blue voters in any metro area are the service workers, culinary unionists, school teachers, etcetc, who also have a substantial racial confounder. I don't think you've ever looked into this deeper than the occasional Slate/Vox infographic if you believe
I never said anything about middle-income earners in GOP states. You are putting words in my mouth. Of course it's obviously true that *people* in blue states are paying more tax than middle-income voters in red states. Duh, yeah, because there are more high-income and high-wealth people in blue states, drawn to work in the colossal wealth-generating businesses that concentrate in the large cities while factories leave rust-belt cities and opiates move in. But you can't say from that that the people *paying* those taxes are Democrats. You can only say that the taxes in any state are being paid mostly by high-income people, which is always true since income tax started, and that low-income low taxpayers vastly outnumber them. I guarantee you that the people in the top income quintile trend GOP, not just the top 1% or the top 0.01%. Why? Because it's in the top quintile you realize that your fellows are carrying the whole country.
I was talking counties, not at the state level. You're making an ecological fallacy. A county that has large wealth-generating businesses will have relatively few highly paid workers who create that wealth. That's what income inequality means. Further, unless those high-income workers can afford Manhattan rents for nice apartments, they don't even live in the county where they work. It's the strivers and toilers who live in broom-closet apartments to be close to work and to find potential mates. And people who don't work at all concentrate in large cities where they can take advantage of free and subsidized municipal services like welfare, transit, and the poverty industry.
So these counties where the businesses are located generate most of the country's GDP, sure, but the voters who *live* in those counties are the ones who elect the politicians. That's the paradox of a blue county that generates fabulous wealth but is an urban slum full of people who contributed little or nothing to that wealth and who live to steal it, ruled by Democrats....whose policies make the problems worse but that's another argument.
My parting thought is that if you can afford to mock anyone's obsession with tax policy, it means you don't pay much income tax yourself. Nice to be you, I guess, if you don't mind being poor.
I hear your point about the Super Zips. What I'm not clear on, not being American, is (well, many things but particularly):
1) The Big Four Super Zips are heavily "doctrinaire liberal" and this is where the elite media and academic engines are concentrated, with Washington the worst because so many people work in public sector bubbles or in private sector businesses totally reliant on government and divorced from what the ordinary economy does. The Super Zips not in the Big 4 are more heterogenous politically, resembling the non-super zips (i.e. the non-rich ones) more than they resemble the Big Four. It would seem that your claim that the Super Zips are heavily Democrat apply to the Big Four Super Zips, which granted is a lot of wealth and a lot of wealthy people. Ditto that they pay highest taxes, but even here you may need more granularity to equate the income (and tax) of a Super Zip with voting.
I can see why Washington DC Super Zip residents would vote Democrat because even though the Democrats raise taxes, the tax money spent on their jobs trumps the tax rate. But why would high-income private-sector earners want to have high-tax Democratic governments elected? Does abortion mean that much to them?
2) How many zip codes make up a Congressional House District? Obviously it varies depending on the population of the zip codes and zip code boundaries don't align with District boundaries. But a House District can in principle have a Super Zip with small numbers of wealthy people and a non-Super Zip that is much poorer with a large population. Slums situated across a bridge from wealth in DC or Palo Alto, say. So that District would vote Democrat because there are a large number of poor minority voters in it. Yet it would still contribute disproportionately to GDP because of the high incomes of its small number of productive wealthy residents. A sprawling suburb doesn't have as many people in it as a public housing project. I remain to be convinced that the precincts with high income vote Democrat outside the Big Four Super Zips who are, as above, doctrinaire liberal. Maybe their tax professionals are just good at keeping them from having to pay the taxes they vote for.
It might be your partisan opinion that the rich need to be taxed more, not less but that argument always breaks down when you define rich as someone who earns one more dollar than you do.
Someone who earns one dollar less than you do will call *you* rich and want to raise your taxes.
Shifting the tax burden downward is not a strategy. More useful would be to reduce spending on the lowest quintile to encourage them to take even low-wage work and thus reduce the tax burden for all, or to reduce what amounts to welfare for everyone (Social Security, say, which is otherwise heading for insolvency.) Taxation ought not to be based on the maximum tax we can squeeze out of people, rich or poor, but how much we *need* to raise to do useful things that people won't do for themselves. Being envious of rich people, whether Democrat or GOP might be a winning strategy but only in the short term.
The GOP may be playing the culture wars because this is a way to convince poor white voters that they are on their side even if its the big donors calling the tune. (As it is for the Dems, too, of course.)
Do you see any middle ground in education, like to teaching crazy things, but teaching non-crazy things that many people don't know, like the Tulsa massacre, and filibustering anti lynching laws, that not so long ago interracial marriage and same sex marriage were actually Illegal?. How are children supposed to be intelligently proud of their country if they do not know how far we have come?
Also sorry you had such a bad experience with public education. In my high school I learned a lot of useful stuff about how atoms get attached to form molecules, some of Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and memorized Nelson Mandela's favorite poem "Invictus." I'm glad our district hired people who did not think of themselves as doing adolescent day-care. Even if many schools fall short of that (my daughters' high school was not as good), isn't that what we should strive for?
Personally, I don't particularly care whether children are proud of their country. I would err on the side of teaching children as apolitically as possible. If I asked you how you'd feel about a school district staffed overwhelmingly by right wing teachers having discussions with 6 year olds about race, IQ, genetics, and socioeconomic performance, would you say, "sure, these are important topics to discuss, whatever one's opinion, to participate in national politics?" Maybe, but I doubt it. You likely wouldn't trust teachers you believe to be politically wrong to teach such a complex and sensitive topic to children with nowhere-near fully developed brains. Well, conservatives are similarly distrustful of the ability of - mostly left of center - teachers to teach politics to children, even seemingly not-too-controversial politics.
It's worth remembering that children are terrible at critical thinking. Nearly any political content in school thus amounts to indoctrination, and progressive teachers and activists have proven to be experts at parlaying non-controversial topics - e.g. 'social-emotional learning' - into excuses to teach controversial politics. If that means kids don't read some essay by Frederick Douglass until they get to college, I think that's a pretty small cost, nor an unreasonable demand to make of progressives. People on the right already have tolerated having virtually no right-of-center thought or cause being taught or discussed in schools they finance with their tax dollars for a long time. You'll get over it too.
Education is inherently political, and by its nature indoctrinates children with the particular values of the educators. To pretend otherwise is to cede the field by default to someone else, as conservatives have found out the hard way. Personally, I don't think the public education system is fit for purpose any longer, but we do have to face the unfortunate political reality that it probably isn't going to go away for a while yet.
That being the case, teachers should be expected to teach correct values, and should be removed with extreme prejudice for teaching incorrect values (although, of course, since education is government-run, removal of the employees is practically impossible).
>Do you see any middle ground in education, like to teaching crazy things, but teaching non-crazy things that many people don't know, like the Tulsa massacre, and filibustering anti lynching laws, that not so long ago interracial marriage and same sex marriage were actually Illegal?. How are children supposed to be intelligently proud of their country if they do not know how far we have come?
What pure gaslighting. The treatment of blacks in the past is hammered into every American's head as the greatest Original Sin that must never be forgotten and can never truly be forgiven, second only perhaps to the Holocaust. This was the case when I attended public school quite some years ago, and by all accounts it has somehow gotten even worse in the time since.
>Also sorry you had such a bad experience with public education. In my high school I learned a lot of useful stuff about how atoms get attached to form molecules, some of Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and memorized Nelson Mandela's favorite poem "Invictus." I'm glad our district hired people who did not think of themselves as doing adolescent day-care.
I had a relatively good experience with public education because it did not yet at that time teach that white people were evil, that men are women, et cetera. We learned our moral worldview as being shaped by slavery, the Second World War, and such, but we were then fed the narrative that America has overcome the sins of its past and become a better place. This is apparently no longer the case. I grew up in a conservative area, so in liberal areas, maybe it was never the case.
>Even if many schools fall short of that (my daughters' high school was not as good), isn't that what we should strive for?
No. How often have you used those fascinating little factoids you listed off in an actual job? Has an employer ever asked about them, or cared that you know them?
No, again, I think I had a relatively good experience with public education. However, its primary value was in forcing me to be around other young people all day long, thus forcing me to socialize and learn how to associate with others. Most of the subject matter taught is obviously and undeniably completely worthless in the actual world beyond school, and I don't see how one can possibly defend spending taxpayer money on it. Now it seems that the subject matter has progressed from merely useless to actively harmful and poisonous.
I agree with all of this. There's no reasonable way to deny that the chief function of school is daycare. Especially prior to high school.
Prior to high school, most kids really only learn two things in school: arithmetic and how to read (and I'll put an asterisk on the latter). A few learn algebra. They'll recognize the name George Washington and a few vague myths about history, most of which will miss the point entirely or otherwise give them a backwards understanding of how the world really works (regardless of whether those myths were taught from a leftist, rightist, or "neutral" perspective).
It's not like kids in school build upon their knowledge year after year. Lessons in history or science are mostly forgotten. Arithmetic is retained, but a 9-year-old doesn't have a brain that's capable of learning higher math. We spend about 6 years drilling arithmetic into kids, but that's because we're teaching them at the limit of what their brains can handle. If you taught them arithmetic for the first time at age 12, they'd learn it all in a few months and catch up immediately (an experiment proved this).
School will reinforce reading, and I do think it's probably valuable to learn how to read and write at an early age so that your mind assimilates the written word as if it is its own language. The vast majority of reading doesn't happen at school for learned kids though. If school is the main place you read, you'll surely grow up to be semi-illiterate. Though there are still major benefits to semi-literacy being the norm among the population as opposed to total illiteracy as in earlier times.
The Tulsa massacre began as a mass murder of nine whites, and in the last couple years has been reinvented as a mass murder of 100+ blacks primarily on the basis of unmarked graves and the testimony of people that were 3 years old at the time. Are you including that part in your pursuit of the middle ground?
> teaching non-crazy things that many people don't know, like the Tulsa massacre, and filibustering anti lynching laws, that not so long ago interracial marriage and same sex marriage were actually Illegal?
I expect most high school students already learn most of these things, & if they don't specifically learn about e.g. the Tulsa massacre, they would probably still learn in general about Jim Crow & the politics that supported it: the issue of race is too important to 20th century US history to be omitted or glossed over, & a curriculum so biased to the right that it treats these things as not a big deal &c. would probably be politically unacceptable to most people. (Such, at least, is my impression based partly on my (possibly unrepresentative) experience in high school: I went through a class in 20th century US history several years ago, at a public high school in a majority-conservative area of a mostly liberal state, with a rather outspokenly conservative teacher, & a substantial part of the class was still spent on segregation & the civil rights movement.)
There is such a gulf between some of the woke horror stories and what even my daughters saw in American History class that it shouldn't be hard to find a middle ground.
Strive for what? To become random particles and lumps of mutable protoplasm? That's it? How was it "useful" for you to study Chaucer and Mandela? I'm really curious. I'm not being sarcastic.
So you're striving to do something with language? I thought it was more about society in general. Yes, because I see you bring up whites DOING bad things to blacks in the US, in a previous paragraph. Which has nothing to do with language. So, you are confused, aren't you? If you're confused how do expect anyone to understand what you are saying?
You aske me what value I had found in things I had studied in high scholl that were not of immediate utility for earning income. If your were not interested, why ask?
Because I was curious as to what end you feel you, or we, are striving or progressing. Diversity, equality and inclusion? This is why you studied Chaucer? What's he got to do with DEI? It seems like such a bizarre incongruity to lump Nelson Mandela with Chaucer. Surely, Chaucer is a racist, hater, bigot, etc. Probably transphobic too.
I don't think I have the time to correct all the assumptions you seem to be making about my point of view. :) Yes, I do think that D, E, and I are all good things, but not a lot of the stuff that is done in their name. Etc.
To give the guy a bit of steelmanning for a moment here, I do see value in teaching children a common cultural heritage that they can be proud of, the history of their nation and the like. But this requires that the cultural heritage being taught is actually positive and worthwhile, whereas public schools now appear to do practically the opposite, teaching children to hate themselves and their nation.
Fine. Black south africans aren't part of my culture though. I have about as much interest in a poem by Mandela as he would have had for one by Chaucer, or by me for that matter. Just like I have no interest in eating monkeys I discriminate what I ingest into my psyche, and so should you.
Do conservatives really think that attempts at brainwashing in schools only happen in areas where liberals control schools? As someone who grew up in the Bible Belt (Tyler, Texas), I can assure you that conservatives actively and unapologetically force feed students conservative pablum.
How important do you think is the fact that over the last few years, almost a million people (presumably mostly conservative) have moved to Florida? If this is the real explanation for DeSantis's political success, then it means that DeSantis isn't really winning over people so much as governing at a particularly lucky time when conservatives are fleeing blue states and migrating to places like Florida. In that case, all these votes for DeSantis in Florida come at the expense of popular votes outside of Florida for presidential candidate DeSantis in 2024.
Indeed, wouldn't it be strange, in an era of extreme political polarization and hardening political preferences, for a highly divisive, culture-warrior politican to be winning over new constituencies? I am pessimistic that Republicans will ever again win the popular vote.
Public schools in Florida did not teach CRT( I'm a retired teacher). Nor did they assist in grooming kids to be LBGT. Many of the counties with mask mandates had opt out policies for parents. Majority of parents did not exercise the option. Moms for Liberty is a fringe group that does is not trained in education and is driven by religious ideology promoted by Hillsdale College. Very scary. You are naive to believe the DeSantis kool aid.
I live in Brevard and while I think DeSantis has had some effect it can easily be overstated in some of these counties like Brevard, Lee, and Polk. Mostly just framing the issue and making people defend their beliefs is the biggest thing. These places have a lot of old people and were already to the right of a lot of places even within Florida and there is an Albion's Seed founder effect that hasn't been overwhelmed by urbanization. There is also a ton of decentralization to the county level within Florida because of the lack of a strong centralized state and no state income taxes as well as a cap on property tax growth at the state level. During covid DeSantis ordered the beaches closed and the 100 percent Republican county commission in Brevard basically said we are going to take that as an advisement and not an order. Whether DeSantis was around or not Moms for Liberty and the county Sheriff are going to be the big factors locally. We have had BLM incidents on par with elsewhere and they just get no traction locally and the Sheriff was re-elected with 2/3 of the vote. Brevard also differs from Lee and Polk because 20 percent of the county is current or former Military. Even if Lee and Polk can't replace their old people and tip in another direction Brevard will still differ. The pandemic and woke stuff has really put how much local conditions matter into perspective for me. This is clearly where most people should be focusing their energy. Focus on the local D.A. and competent local government and not getting caught up in mood affiliation and identity bullshit to the detriment of your up close personal life and community.
Regarding DeSantis successfully outlawing mask mandates, unfortunately this did not prevent them from persisting in private schools (such as the one where my daughter goes) long after they had been eliminated in public ones. As a consequence, pre-school children including those with known speech problems during critical developmental periods were required to wear masks even outside (in the Florida heat, no less) during much of the pandemic.
More generally, as a result of DeSantis' success, Florida becomes a bit weird where choosing to send your child outside the public school system results in less freedom.
Did you ever consider taking your daughter out of the private school and sending her to public school? Or was the private school that good where you were assuming the Covid maximalism had some expiration date?
In my town of Guilford, CT (population 22,000, voted 66% Biden in 2020, up from 59% Obama in 2012 and 57% Kerry in 2004) the school board race last year was highly contentious. A group of conservative parents decisively defeated the incumbent Republican board members who had gone along with the covid restrictions (a hybrid 2-day-a-week in person schedule for the 2020-2021 school year) and the woke superintendent's CRT agenda (auditing the curriculum, instituting "social-emotional learning" and "diversity and inclusion" plans, buying every teacher a copy of Kendi's book, hiring diversity officers and consultants, creating teaching positions restricted to nonwhite applicants etc. etc.). There was no chance of the conservatives actually taking over the majority of the school board and being able to make decisions. We would have merely replaced 3 go-with-the-flow Republicans with 3 anti-woke (but not outspokenly Trump-y) Republicans on the 9 person board. Nonetheless the response was hysterical and utterly ruthless by the liberal majority in town. Since Democrats were prevented from taking all the open seats based on both a state law and the town charter that provide for minority party representation on all town boards (hooray for pluralism), they and their allies just created an "independent party" and then the Democrats ran a joint campaign for their own and the "independent" candidates. In the end the anti-woke Republicans all lost approximately 67-33 (slightly larger margin than Trump lost by year before) in an incredibly high off-year-turnout (61%) election and so got no representation at all on the school board (it's now 5 woke Democrats and 4 woke "independents"). I really wish I knew what was working so well in Florida's blueish counties to let conservative candidates improve so much on prior Republican performance. In my town it seems the tribalism now runs so deep that no progress has been possible. I think the town demographics (90% white, with 58% having at least a bachelors and 31% having an advanced degree) work against us in the context of your assertion of the Democrats as the "high status" party, since lots of people here just could never even consider voting for the deplorable party even if they have reservations about individual policies.
College-educated white men vote Republican. More of them voted for Trump than for Biden in 2020.
East Asians assimilate and outmarry. If you put them in the South, they will largely marry whites (or at least the women will) and some will become Southern Baptists. If you put them in California, they will become Californians.
South Asians are more like Jews (or more properly, the Jews of a generation or two ago) -- they intermarry and they'll only half-assimilate, and what they assimilate towards is universal cosmopolitan culture and never local/regional American culture. They will not under any circumstances become Southern Baptists. They'll have largely the same attitudes in Tennessee as they will in California.
"[F]or conservatives to get their way on social issues, they need ... the state government, the local school boards, and the courts. Or at least two out of three."
Indeed. RH is correct. Controlling most political offices is really the only way to offset the enormous "soft" power of academia, the "helping" professions, civil service, and most jobs requiring a graduate degree – roles where right-leaning people scarcely exist. As you point out in your "Why Is Everything Liberal" article, the proles make up a majority of conservative voters and they will never flood the institutions due to an inward contentedness that arises from some combination of culture and psychological traits (and perhaps, I suspect, genetics). So, the difficult task of needing to control nearly all electoral/judicial slots will not go away. The proles can't be fixed.
If some of mainstream metropolitan culture became intelligently right-wing in terms of merit, genetics, treatment of criminality, and thoughtful public policy ... there may be hope. The guys at CSPI are a good example of the smart, metropolitan Right that I would like to see.
Basically, the City Journal, National Review types.
Conservatives should let themselves relax a little about indoctrination in schools. I’m a first year English teacher who has bathed in soft-headed progressive nonsense during teacher training and went through job interviews where HR professionals consistently asked how seriously I consider race and sexuality in lesson planning. Coupled with constant conservative news about woke educators, I thought the professional pressure to pass on CRT would be huge. Half a year in, at a highly diverse school, I find it doesn’t exist.
Woke thought does not stand a chance against black 13 year olds. When I halfheartedly pass along some weak tea about the danger of stereotypes, I’m likely to here a summary of an Andrew Tate video in response. Up against the reality of teaching adolescents, SEL lessons become a limp formality. Perhaps contrary to the wishes of Ed schools and some administrators, indoctrination goes unachieved.
The status quo is stubborn. This makes more sense when you realize that teaching is the most blue collar - white collar profession there is. Aside from some young female strivers (more of them in elementary Ed, admittedly), it’s just not the type of workforce capable of carrying out a woke program of brain wash. Conservatives are right to notice the effort to make it so, but I highly doubt many classrooms conform to their fears. Remember, your son’s social studies teacher is also probably the wrestling coach.
Also damn you, my job is only sorta like babysitting.
I agree. Kids learn more from reality & mass culture (ESPECIALLY the internet) than school lessons to which they might give half their increasingly abbreviated attention spans on the best of days. For good or ill, schoolteachers of any stripe simply aren’t as interesting to kids as TikTok, YouTube, etc.
Of course I oppose woke indoctrination of any type, and appreciate these local elections mobilize discontent with anti-White racism, but I don’t think schools are a very important ideological avenue relative to the remainder of mass culture.
I think this is largely true -- peer group is a lot more important than teachers.
I also think school indoctrination is probably more effective if it's a monoculture. I remember teachers, both left and right, that were highly ideological growing up. They were never the most respected teachers. The most respected teachers were those that engaged with independent thought, rather than trying to shut it down. Also, if the students seemed to be of one mind on a topic, they tried to question it, if only to play Devil's advocate.
But what if all teachers were required to be of one mind ideologically and the entire system was reinforcing that certain ideas were bad/wrong/incorrect? I think that might carry more influence with students. It's sort of like how parenting is a lot more effective if parents provide a unified front than if they're continually competing with and subverting one another.
Woke brainwashing has been a wild success for 50+ years. I’m sure a minority of kids lol’ed at indoctrination about sexism or muh trail of tears in the 70s too. It didn’t stop the revolution
Eh, the fact of the matter is schoolchildren, in general have never found school (or their teachers) particularly interesting-certainly not compared to television/movies/advertising. I suspect these are more important than a teacher hammering half-remembered stock phrases into the heads of hapless 2nd graders.
Hmm touché
One bright spot for Broward. One of the newly elected school board members is Brenda Fam, who won on a strongly anti-woke and pro-parenting platform despite being heavily outspent and out publicized by her Democratic opponent (who stood for nothing). Frankly, I don’t know how she did it as she won the runoff despite coming in second in the multiple candidate race. But it was a great win for my home county.
Desantis, being high IQ, has figured out how to provoke the left in the same way Trump did in 2016 (forcing them to defend unpopular ideas, which creates a backlash) and channel that backlash into something productive in way that Trump could not. He's also good at keeping the loons at arms length without offending them. He and maybe Youngkin are the only shot conservatives have at turning anything around.
Unfortunately he will never be president. I think he has a great chance to win the nom in 2024. Then Trump will run 3rd party, take 30%, and we'll have 8 years of President Buttigieg. Establishment GOP will decide we need to talk more about tax breaks, and less about immigration, and embrace wokeness to "win".
Pretty sad to know the Trump suicide cult is going to do this, unless God decides to intervene and take Trump to his heavenly home. But I think God wants us to suffer, kinda like the engineers in Prometheus decided to send the black goo to destroy Earth. Trump is our black goo.
I'm not as confident as you that Trump would sabotage DeSantis. It's not that likely he'll want to run as a third party and be sure to lose. And I think DeSantis has a chance in a 3-way race. Third parties are rarely successful, Trump may not get that many votes. And by running he'll make DeSantis seem like a moderate, sane compromise who will appeal to independents.
I assumed Trump would start to grow weary of losing and picking losers. Alas, he seems perfectly content to keep losing as long as he has a few worshippers. If he runs 3rd party he will pull waaaaay more voters from Desantis. Not even close.
Let me add, it's a fair bet that if he loses the primary, he'll contest the loss and argue the whole way down that DeSantis cheated him. So he might very well be willing to run just out of spite.
Also, let's be real and observe that Trump doesn't need to take 30 points from DeSantis. In a two-way race, if DeSantis got 52% of the vote to Biden's 48%, that would be an amazing, almost unbelievable achievement, the best performance by a Republican candidate since 1988 -- and running against an incumbent, no less!
Most likely if DeSantis wins, it would be by the skin of his teeth, the only way that a GOP Presidential candidate can ever seem to win these days. So Trump taking 3% would make it almost impossible for DeSantis -- especially because a fair number of those would probably be in Rustbelt states that really matter. Taking 5% would probably translate to rendering a DeSantis win fully impossible.
It's hard for me to imagine Trump doing worse than Perot in 1996 -- 8%. It's important to note that this situation is almost unprecedented. A former President with a fanatical fan base running as a third-party does not belong in the same category as Jo Jorgenson.
Yeah anything short of "Ron will make a great president and I support him 100%" will be enough for Trump to tank him. Even if Trump doesn't run 3rd party I could see him telling his followers to vote for Biden or Buttigieg just out of spite!
It's so strange to find someone who is impartially critical. Hanania is a unicorn, and much appreciated. Too bad we can't all think so critically of all things.
I would appreciate a DeSantis run because it creates something of a win-win situation, or at least a situation where opportunities may arise even if he loses. If he actually became president (I doubt that this can happen, but who knows, we live in interesting times), well, presumably that's a Good Thing.
But if DeSantis were to run and lose, people would really start having to ask themselves some hard questions about what exactly is going on. These hard questions have been deflected so far because Donald Trump exists, who everyone is happy to blame for Republican electoral failures, both left and right. A DeSantis loss would force these people to confront a world in which there is more in play than simply the antics of the Orange Man.
And, I actually think DeSantis has by far the best shot at the nomination as it stands. If nothing crazy happens between now and 24, I don't see how it could be anyone else. Trump has beclowned himself too much, and seems to be in the process of losing even many of the hardcore conservatives who would've defended him to the death back when he was in office.
I think there are some more things going on besides Orange Man antics but as I’ve said before it would take McCarthyism on steroids to solve them. And that’s coming from someone who uses the word “McCarthyism” as a compliment!
"I don't see how it could be anyone else." It will be Trump, because Trump gets 40% from his hard-core base, and DeSanctimonious, Lyin' Ted, that Indian woman, and whoever else, split the remaining 60%.
I don't think a packed Republican primary field would split the vote in the same way that they did in 2016. There was no clear front-runner in 2016 that can compare to DeSantis, who has a high profile and huge favorability years in advance of this primary. A '24 primary if held today would be Trump vs DeSantis with any other contender fading quickly into irrelevance, and I feel that DeSantis wins that handily.
Note, I am saying here "I feel." This is necessarily speculation, since I don't know the future. I might end up being totally wrong. Maybe Trump will skate to the nomination, crush Sleepy Joe, and usher himself in as immortal God-Emperor. As I said, we do live in interesting times.
Mr. Hanania, the school board revolutions are happening across the country. I live in Hanover, NH. It is Dartmouth college town, hence democrats win with 80% of the vote. There were 2 vocal school board members who wanted to make anti-racist training compulsory for elementary school by including books like Anti-racist baby ( Of Mr. Kendi) and the same members also instituted a policy that allowed schools to provide gender change counselling and changing of official school records for gender identity without informing parents. Normally school board issues are not covered in local press, but due to these policies there was heavy coverage in local newspaper. We even got flyers from republican school board candidates which never happened before and these two very liberal members were defeated soundly in school board elections in a 80-20 democrat leaning town.
A lot of right-leaning people have moved to Florida over the past two years in order to flee the COVID insanity of states like New York, Michigan, and California. That's what helped entrench the Sunshine State into solid-Republican territory (and, by the same token, what has made the aforementioned states even bluer). That, and DeSantis just being a very competent governor.
If conservatives can't win in metropolitan areas it means they can't win against non-taxpayers and against tribal groups who vote >90% Democrat, who are concentrated in large numbers in urban counties. I don't know how to fix this. There aren't enough taxpayers to wrest control of government from the people who rely on government for their sustenance.
In the United States, your right-ish parties can at least reduce taxes and slow the climate-emergency hysteria because you can use minoritarian rule. In Canada, we have too few taxpayers, and their power is diluted too much, for tax cuts to be politically possible.
Conservatives might not be able to win these metros outright, but developing a pipeline of minority candidates whose pitches are "same social safety net and city services w/o the leftism" might be able to cut into those margins. Otherwise we'll just keep trotting out the same pathetic "Dems are real raycists" candidates that get blown out by 60 points.
“Same social safety net” why on earth would such “based urban minorities” be worth having then? Just for an R next to their name? Still hostile tribalists who want to pick my families pocket.
I'd hope that a lesson from the Herschel Walker race is that Republicans are WAY, WAY too inclined to hand a nomination to underqualified minority candidates in the hope of getting minority votes, and they need to stop. It never works. Kemp, a white man running against a black woman, outperformed Walker among blacks. Republicans cannot affirmative action their way into winning black votes. The best bet is to just run the best man they can and sometimes that will be enough to get 15-20% of the black vote as opposed to 5-10%.
Agree with this for offices like US Senate, halfway disagree for local candidates. Machines (or in our case cutting into machines) are built by matching quality local candidates to the local demography and their addressing their concerns.
OK. Well, thinking on it, this also makes a lot more sense, and has a proven track record, with Latinos. I think it's a waste of time and counterproductive with blacks.
There are only 4 Asian majority or plurality House districts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_majority-minority_United_States_congressional_districts) and South Asians are fully Woke anyway, so I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble.
Agree that its worth running that strategy with Latinos, and maybe certain Asian blocs only. Long term, I think the 1970s-onward arrangement of "conservative White people" (R) vs. "liberal White people and minorities" (D) will revert back to true ideological/ethnic party wings like the old days. Too many contradictory interests on Blue team. A good example of this being the Chicago Daley machine delivering votes for the national party, in exchange for running a fairly conservative, patronage-based local fiefdom.
add the significant number of people who work for the government to that list.
That only became true in 2020 when the white upper-middle class voted for Biden to regain social capital lost from the extremely unattractive Trump GOP. According to exit polling, HRC and Trump were basically tied for tax payers in 2016, and Romney had a good edge over Obama in the 50k+ income brackets despite losing that election.
Just as land doesn't vote, neither do districts. A fairly affluent metro area can be blue but that isn't a refutation of the exit polling which consistently showed that up until 2020, the high-earning residents of said area are still more likely to be red.
Business owners and higher-end medical professionals (e.g. surgeons and dentists not pediatricians and nurses) both tend red. Self-employed skilled workers are overwhelmingly red. Scientists are blue but scientists aren't such high-income workers, not to mention most work for the state or big pharma (aka net tax drains). The bulk of the blue voters in any metro area are the service workers, culinary unionists, school teachers, etcetc, who also have a substantial racial confounder. I don't think you've ever looked into this deeper than the occasional Slate/Vox infographic if you believe
I never said anything about middle-income earners in GOP states. You are putting words in my mouth. Of course it's obviously true that *people* in blue states are paying more tax than middle-income voters in red states. Duh, yeah, because there are more high-income and high-wealth people in blue states, drawn to work in the colossal wealth-generating businesses that concentrate in the large cities while factories leave rust-belt cities and opiates move in. But you can't say from that that the people *paying* those taxes are Democrats. You can only say that the taxes in any state are being paid mostly by high-income people, which is always true since income tax started, and that low-income low taxpayers vastly outnumber them. I guarantee you that the people in the top income quintile trend GOP, not just the top 1% or the top 0.01%. Why? Because it's in the top quintile you realize that your fellows are carrying the whole country.
I was talking counties, not at the state level. You're making an ecological fallacy. A county that has large wealth-generating businesses will have relatively few highly paid workers who create that wealth. That's what income inequality means. Further, unless those high-income workers can afford Manhattan rents for nice apartments, they don't even live in the county where they work. It's the strivers and toilers who live in broom-closet apartments to be close to work and to find potential mates. And people who don't work at all concentrate in large cities where they can take advantage of free and subsidized municipal services like welfare, transit, and the poverty industry.
So these counties where the businesses are located generate most of the country's GDP, sure, but the voters who *live* in those counties are the ones who elect the politicians. That's the paradox of a blue county that generates fabulous wealth but is an urban slum full of people who contributed little or nothing to that wealth and who live to steal it, ruled by Democrats....whose policies make the problems worse but that's another argument.
My parting thought is that if you can afford to mock anyone's obsession with tax policy, it means you don't pay much income tax yourself. Nice to be you, I guess, if you don't mind being poor.
I hear your point about the Super Zips. What I'm not clear on, not being American, is (well, many things but particularly):
1) The Big Four Super Zips are heavily "doctrinaire liberal" and this is where the elite media and academic engines are concentrated, with Washington the worst because so many people work in public sector bubbles or in private sector businesses totally reliant on government and divorced from what the ordinary economy does. The Super Zips not in the Big 4 are more heterogenous politically, resembling the non-super zips (i.e. the non-rich ones) more than they resemble the Big Four. It would seem that your claim that the Super Zips are heavily Democrat apply to the Big Four Super Zips, which granted is a lot of wealth and a lot of wealthy people. Ditto that they pay highest taxes, but even here you may need more granularity to equate the income (and tax) of a Super Zip with voting.
I can see why Washington DC Super Zip residents would vote Democrat because even though the Democrats raise taxes, the tax money spent on their jobs trumps the tax rate. But why would high-income private-sector earners want to have high-tax Democratic governments elected? Does abortion mean that much to them?
2) How many zip codes make up a Congressional House District? Obviously it varies depending on the population of the zip codes and zip code boundaries don't align with District boundaries. But a House District can in principle have a Super Zip with small numbers of wealthy people and a non-Super Zip that is much poorer with a large population. Slums situated across a bridge from wealth in DC or Palo Alto, say. So that District would vote Democrat because there are a large number of poor minority voters in it. Yet it would still contribute disproportionately to GDP because of the high incomes of its small number of productive wealthy residents. A sprawling suburb doesn't have as many people in it as a public housing project. I remain to be convinced that the precincts with high income vote Democrat outside the Big Four Super Zips who are, as above, doctrinaire liberal. Maybe their tax professionals are just good at keeping them from having to pay the taxes they vote for.
It might be your partisan opinion that the rich need to be taxed more, not less but that argument always breaks down when you define rich as someone who earns one more dollar than you do.
Someone who earns one dollar less than you do will call *you* rich and want to raise your taxes.
Shifting the tax burden downward is not a strategy. More useful would be to reduce spending on the lowest quintile to encourage them to take even low-wage work and thus reduce the tax burden for all, or to reduce what amounts to welfare for everyone (Social Security, say, which is otherwise heading for insolvency.) Taxation ought not to be based on the maximum tax we can squeeze out of people, rich or poor, but how much we *need* to raise to do useful things that people won't do for themselves. Being envious of rich people, whether Democrat or GOP might be a winning strategy but only in the short term.
The GOP may be playing the culture wars because this is a way to convince poor white voters that they are on their side even if its the big donors calling the tune. (As it is for the Dems, too, of course.)
Do you see any middle ground in education, like to teaching crazy things, but teaching non-crazy things that many people don't know, like the Tulsa massacre, and filibustering anti lynching laws, that not so long ago interracial marriage and same sex marriage were actually Illegal?. How are children supposed to be intelligently proud of their country if they do not know how far we have come?
Also sorry you had such a bad experience with public education. In my high school I learned a lot of useful stuff about how atoms get attached to form molecules, some of Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and memorized Nelson Mandela's favorite poem "Invictus." I'm glad our district hired people who did not think of themselves as doing adolescent day-care. Even if many schools fall short of that (my daughters' high school was not as good), isn't that what we should strive for?
Personally, I don't particularly care whether children are proud of their country. I would err on the side of teaching children as apolitically as possible. If I asked you how you'd feel about a school district staffed overwhelmingly by right wing teachers having discussions with 6 year olds about race, IQ, genetics, and socioeconomic performance, would you say, "sure, these are important topics to discuss, whatever one's opinion, to participate in national politics?" Maybe, but I doubt it. You likely wouldn't trust teachers you believe to be politically wrong to teach such a complex and sensitive topic to children with nowhere-near fully developed brains. Well, conservatives are similarly distrustful of the ability of - mostly left of center - teachers to teach politics to children, even seemingly not-too-controversial politics.
It's worth remembering that children are terrible at critical thinking. Nearly any political content in school thus amounts to indoctrination, and progressive teachers and activists have proven to be experts at parlaying non-controversial topics - e.g. 'social-emotional learning' - into excuses to teach controversial politics. If that means kids don't read some essay by Frederick Douglass until they get to college, I think that's a pretty small cost, nor an unreasonable demand to make of progressives. People on the right already have tolerated having virtually no right-of-center thought or cause being taught or discussed in schools they finance with their tax dollars for a long time. You'll get over it too.
Education is inherently political, and by its nature indoctrinates children with the particular values of the educators. To pretend otherwise is to cede the field by default to someone else, as conservatives have found out the hard way. Personally, I don't think the public education system is fit for purpose any longer, but we do have to face the unfortunate political reality that it probably isn't going to go away for a while yet.
That being the case, teachers should be expected to teach correct values, and should be removed with extreme prejudice for teaching incorrect values (although, of course, since education is government-run, removal of the employees is practically impossible).
>Do you see any middle ground in education, like to teaching crazy things, but teaching non-crazy things that many people don't know, like the Tulsa massacre, and filibustering anti lynching laws, that not so long ago interracial marriage and same sex marriage were actually Illegal?. How are children supposed to be intelligently proud of their country if they do not know how far we have come?
What pure gaslighting. The treatment of blacks in the past is hammered into every American's head as the greatest Original Sin that must never be forgotten and can never truly be forgiven, second only perhaps to the Holocaust. This was the case when I attended public school quite some years ago, and by all accounts it has somehow gotten even worse in the time since.
>Also sorry you had such a bad experience with public education. In my high school I learned a lot of useful stuff about how atoms get attached to form molecules, some of Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and memorized Nelson Mandela's favorite poem "Invictus." I'm glad our district hired people who did not think of themselves as doing adolescent day-care.
I had a relatively good experience with public education because it did not yet at that time teach that white people were evil, that men are women, et cetera. We learned our moral worldview as being shaped by slavery, the Second World War, and such, but we were then fed the narrative that America has overcome the sins of its past and become a better place. This is apparently no longer the case. I grew up in a conservative area, so in liberal areas, maybe it was never the case.
>Even if many schools fall short of that (my daughters' high school was not as good), isn't that what we should strive for?
No. How often have you used those fascinating little factoids you listed off in an actual job? Has an employer ever asked about them, or cared that you know them?
Sorry you have such a utilitarian view of education. I guess the unfortunate experience you describe played a role.
No, again, I think I had a relatively good experience with public education. However, its primary value was in forcing me to be around other young people all day long, thus forcing me to socialize and learn how to associate with others. Most of the subject matter taught is obviously and undeniably completely worthless in the actual world beyond school, and I don't see how one can possibly defend spending taxpayer money on it. Now it seems that the subject matter has progressed from merely useless to actively harmful and poisonous.
I agree with all of this. There's no reasonable way to deny that the chief function of school is daycare. Especially prior to high school.
Prior to high school, most kids really only learn two things in school: arithmetic and how to read (and I'll put an asterisk on the latter). A few learn algebra. They'll recognize the name George Washington and a few vague myths about history, most of which will miss the point entirely or otherwise give them a backwards understanding of how the world really works (regardless of whether those myths were taught from a leftist, rightist, or "neutral" perspective).
It's not like kids in school build upon their knowledge year after year. Lessons in history or science are mostly forgotten. Arithmetic is retained, but a 9-year-old doesn't have a brain that's capable of learning higher math. We spend about 6 years drilling arithmetic into kids, but that's because we're teaching them at the limit of what their brains can handle. If you taught them arithmetic for the first time at age 12, they'd learn it all in a few months and catch up immediately (an experiment proved this).
School will reinforce reading, and I do think it's probably valuable to learn how to read and write at an early age so that your mind assimilates the written word as if it is its own language. The vast majority of reading doesn't happen at school for learned kids though. If school is the main place you read, you'll surely grow up to be semi-illiterate. Though there are still major benefits to semi-literacy being the norm among the population as opposed to total illiteracy as in earlier times.
The Tulsa massacre began as a mass murder of nine whites, and in the last couple years has been reinvented as a mass murder of 100+ blacks primarily on the basis of unmarked graves and the testimony of people that were 3 years old at the time. Are you including that part in your pursuit of the middle ground?
Not even my daughters had heard anything about Tulsa, so sure.
> teaching non-crazy things that many people don't know, like the Tulsa massacre, and filibustering anti lynching laws, that not so long ago interracial marriage and same sex marriage were actually Illegal?
I expect most high school students already learn most of these things, & if they don't specifically learn about e.g. the Tulsa massacre, they would probably still learn in general about Jim Crow & the politics that supported it: the issue of race is too important to 20th century US history to be omitted or glossed over, & a curriculum so biased to the right that it treats these things as not a big deal &c. would probably be politically unacceptable to most people. (Such, at least, is my impression based partly on my (possibly unrepresentative) experience in high school: I went through a class in 20th century US history several years ago, at a public high school in a majority-conservative area of a mostly liberal state, with a rather outspokenly conservative teacher, & a substantial part of the class was still spent on segregation & the civil rights movement.)
There is such a gulf between some of the woke horror stories and what even my daughters saw in American History class that it shouldn't be hard to find a middle ground.
Strive for what? To become random particles and lumps of mutable protoplasm? That's it? How was it "useful" for you to study Chaucer and Mandela? I'm really curious. I'm not being sarcastic.
If you can't see the value of a snapshot of our language evolving into what it is, I probably cannot persuade you of the value.
So you're striving to do something with language? I thought it was more about society in general. Yes, because I see you bring up whites DOING bad things to blacks in the US, in a previous paragraph. Which has nothing to do with language. So, you are confused, aren't you? If you're confused how do expect anyone to understand what you are saying?
You aske me what value I had found in things I had studied in high scholl that were not of immediate utility for earning income. If your were not interested, why ask?
Because I was curious as to what end you feel you, or we, are striving or progressing. Diversity, equality and inclusion? This is why you studied Chaucer? What's he got to do with DEI? It seems like such a bizarre incongruity to lump Nelson Mandela with Chaucer. Surely, Chaucer is a racist, hater, bigot, etc. Probably transphobic too.
I don't think I have the time to correct all the assumptions you seem to be making about my point of view. :) Yes, I do think that D, E, and I are all good things, but not a lot of the stuff that is done in their name. Etc.
To give the guy a bit of steelmanning for a moment here, I do see value in teaching children a common cultural heritage that they can be proud of, the history of their nation and the like. But this requires that the cultural heritage being taught is actually positive and worthwhile, whereas public schools now appear to do practically the opposite, teaching children to hate themselves and their nation.
Fine. Black south africans aren't part of my culture though. I have about as much interest in a poem by Mandela as he would have had for one by Chaucer, or by me for that matter. Just like I have no interest in eating monkeys I discriminate what I ingest into my psyche, and so should you.
Do conservatives really think that attempts at brainwashing in schools only happen in areas where liberals control schools? As someone who grew up in the Bible Belt (Tyler, Texas), I can assure you that conservatives actively and unapologetically force feed students conservative pablum.
How important do you think is the fact that over the last few years, almost a million people (presumably mostly conservative) have moved to Florida? If this is the real explanation for DeSantis's political success, then it means that DeSantis isn't really winning over people so much as governing at a particularly lucky time when conservatives are fleeing blue states and migrating to places like Florida. In that case, all these votes for DeSantis in Florida come at the expense of popular votes outside of Florida for presidential candidate DeSantis in 2024.
Indeed, wouldn't it be strange, in an era of extreme political polarization and hardening political preferences, for a highly divisive, culture-warrior politican to be winning over new constituencies? I am pessimistic that Republicans will ever again win the popular vote.
Public schools in Florida did not teach CRT( I'm a retired teacher). Nor did they assist in grooming kids to be LBGT. Many of the counties with mask mandates had opt out policies for parents. Majority of parents did not exercise the option. Moms for Liberty is a fringe group that does is not trained in education and is driven by religious ideology promoted by Hillsdale College. Very scary. You are naive to believe the DeSantis kool aid.
I live in Brevard and while I think DeSantis has had some effect it can easily be overstated in some of these counties like Brevard, Lee, and Polk. Mostly just framing the issue and making people defend their beliefs is the biggest thing. These places have a lot of old people and were already to the right of a lot of places even within Florida and there is an Albion's Seed founder effect that hasn't been overwhelmed by urbanization. There is also a ton of decentralization to the county level within Florida because of the lack of a strong centralized state and no state income taxes as well as a cap on property tax growth at the state level. During covid DeSantis ordered the beaches closed and the 100 percent Republican county commission in Brevard basically said we are going to take that as an advisement and not an order. Whether DeSantis was around or not Moms for Liberty and the county Sheriff are going to be the big factors locally. We have had BLM incidents on par with elsewhere and they just get no traction locally and the Sheriff was re-elected with 2/3 of the vote. Brevard also differs from Lee and Polk because 20 percent of the county is current or former Military. Even if Lee and Polk can't replace their old people and tip in another direction Brevard will still differ. The pandemic and woke stuff has really put how much local conditions matter into perspective for me. This is clearly where most people should be focusing their energy. Focus on the local D.A. and competent local government and not getting caught up in mood affiliation and identity bullshit to the detriment of your up close personal life and community.
Regarding DeSantis successfully outlawing mask mandates, unfortunately this did not prevent them from persisting in private schools (such as the one where my daughter goes) long after they had been eliminated in public ones. As a consequence, pre-school children including those with known speech problems during critical developmental periods were required to wear masks even outside (in the Florida heat, no less) during much of the pandemic.
More generally, as a result of DeSantis' success, Florida becomes a bit weird where choosing to send your child outside the public school system results in less freedom.
Well that seems the fault of parents, not DeSantis.
Yeah. Some of us tried, but it was just too high a hurdle given the circumstances.
Did you ever consider taking your daughter out of the private school and sending her to public school? Or was the private school that good where you were assuming the Covid maximalism had some expiration date?
The latter.