I’m utterly amazed at left wing parties such as the Democrats and Labour submerging themselves in CRT. They were originally formed to unite the working classes, not divide them, or at least Labour were. I think it also speaks volumes about the lack of working class people actually involved with these organisations at this moment in time. Way too many middle class progressives and not enough workers. Regarding Youngkin, he got his campaign spot on, Trumpian policies without the awful Trump rhetoric. If the Republicans can get behind a candidate like Youngkin, they will sweep to victory in 2024, if Trump runs again, it will be another close call.
I don’t realy know much about De Santis (I shall look him up), but “seeing off Trump” would be the best thing that the Republicans could do – for themselves and for the USA.
Trump had a role of door kicker, he is a blunt instrument. He my play an important role concentrating the lying media on himself, deflecting from DeSantis. But if is planning to be a presidential candidate then he is obviously as stupid as Democrats want him to be.
In Britain, The Labour Party was founded by practical working class Christians such as Keir Hardie who considered ” Self Help ” by Samuel Smiles as manual for socialism. Smiles ” Lives of the Engineers ” was seen as guide by many early socialists. Many Engineers such as Brindley came from poor backgrounds. Brindley who once walked 25 miles to inspect a mill which was not working properly in order to solve the problems.
Since the Webbs, (middle class socialists who lived on on inherited money) joined the Labour Party there has been a masive decline in measures which would improve the quality of lives of the poor and working class. Providing the quality of vocational and trade training as as provided in Switzerland in the USA and UK, would have enabled both countries to move all their low and medium value manufacturing, into advanced high value, such as in Germany and Switzerland. However, the teaching unions in the USA and UK lack the ability to provide the technical training of the vocational/trade schools of Switzerland. Switzerland, a country of 8.5m, supports ETH Zurich which is up with Imperial and MIT. For the USA to support similar numbers of advanced technical institutes per head of population it would need over 35. The language of the universe is mathematics which combined with craftsmanship produces engineering.
In Sumer, bridge builders were forced to have their families live under them for a money to test their worthyness. If the bridge collapsed, the family was killed. In engineering, mistakes can kill and the laws of the universe are not influenced by CRT.
The Republicans must figure out how to avoid a Trump nomination without nominating a RINO. The Democrats must figure out how to dump Biden without nominating Harris. Short of a convenient death, it’s Trump v. Biden, redux. I pass.
What is surprising is that the Republican Party appears to have nobody other than Trump who has constructed anything or any practical experience. They have no more practical experience than the Democrats.
That’s true for the vast majority of US politicians.
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
And lets not forget US Attorney General Garland saying he had the FBI investigating parents as Domestic Terrorists for resisting masks, CRT, and School closures.
That was the high point of Lefty Madness, and one any thinking person cannot ever get over. (and the pictures of the bloodied father, wrestled to the floor by cops for protesting a boy in a dress, in the girls bathroom, attacking his daughter.)
Yes, perhaps in the German press this action by the AG was reported as a fight back against a resurgence of the infamous Badder-MeinMann und BadderMeinFrau factions of American domestic terrorism.
Yes, and I was unaware until this week that the entire parents-as-terrorists thing was in fact a set up?!
Leaked emails show that the Biden admin’s Education Sec. actually ASKED the teaching union to write the letter, then used the letter as a pretext for using anti-terrorism tools against parents. That is totally outrageous corruption. There’s a short video showing the emails and explaining it here, I was very shocked by this, and especially that it hasn’t got more coverage:
This has been out for about 2 months, you need to widen where you get your news.
But it was obvious from the start. These kinds of things don’t “just happen.” The reports of specific collusion only confirmed the obvious.
Ha, well thank you Martin. I sense you may have been patronising me there, but honestly I don’t even have the energy to be offended by that. 🙂
I read pretty widely, but as a UK citizen with a full time job (in this totally insane, upside down, clown world) I do indeed find it difficult to keep up with all the insanity unfolding around the world!
It’s like drinking from a firehose of b*llshit, 24/7. Particularly the fact that I’m now spending hours (!!) each day after work having to sift through studies and other document references to just understand what the heck is true around Covid and the vaccines/treatments etc, as I have consequential decisions to make based on what is true/not. It’s actually becoming exhausting just trying to live as a diligent and interested person in this chaotic environment of all-out propaganda wars; there are almost no reliable sources left that aren’t lazy, corrupted or partisan.
I hate this current iteration of our world, it sucks.
As a US citizen I don’t expect citizens of other countries to know as much as I do if mine. If I had responded to you about this I would have tried to provide links. I have been patronized on British websites because my history of GB is a little weak. I do know about the same stamp act and government officials being appointed by London.
To be fair, the MSM hid this as much as possible. I knew about it because I subscribe to conservative web sites.
J Bryant
2 years ago
I really want to believe the author’s argument but I’m still not quite sure. So many left-leaning parents have been comfortable, apparently for years, with a progressive agenda in their schools. Admittedly, CRT seems to have reached fever pitch recently, but I wonder how far these parents are truly willing to back away from progressivism.
It’s the school closures, and, as the author notes, the veto power of the teachers’ unions over when schools close and open, that really alienated parents since the pandemic begun. If the teachers unions make some strategic concessions in that area the burgeoning parents movement might run out of steam.
So many of us have been so easily led and cowed over the past couple of years. I guess I’m now struggling to believe people are willing to stand up and be counted.
There isn’t the same emphasis on ideology over here but certainly my children were just desperate to get the grand children back to school because trying to simultaneously run a job, home and school is a nightmare.
I think you’re right. Once kids are back in school the real angst behind this will fizzle out.
There is a scale, from the farthest right to the farthest left, and it looks like a bell curve. The fat middle, both left and right, is pretty centrist and contains most people. What falls under the rubric of CRT is something that appeals to the far-far left. And when you take away what a school is actually supposed to do, educate people, those not completely under the sway of that ideology are taken aback.
Here in the state, much is being made of this, and there is starting to be quite a bit of pushback, starting in the more red areas of the country, but even in ultra-liberal San Fransisco people are starting to challenge this.
And it isn’t always because these people are suddenly against liberalism, it is because they have a belief in what education is. They always wrung their hands at how crappy a lot of it was, saying teaching was a hard job while still supporting public schools, but when they see a lot of it comes from just how poorly the teachers acted and how awfully they treated their own kids, the dam started to break.
I just don’t see the teachers unions conceding anything to the parents. Once they have power, they never want to give it up. Look at what’s happening in Chicago where the union is defying the school board and refusing to return to the class room.
You are right about Chicago, where I live. Parents who can afford it will go private. Parents who can’t will leave the city, if they can. My son reports several liberal friends leaving the sinking ship that is the Chicago public school system. The teachers union won’t care because they are, in effect, an affiliate of the Democratic Party, existing for the purpose of rent seeking on behalf of teachers and the Union administration, and funding Democrats.
My priority in life right now is to save my kids childhoods. If that means we have to move, then so be it. It is the most important thing I can do
I want to see every politician, advisor, “public health expert”, and academic who took part in any way with school closures, and masking of kids (up to college age) to be thrown out on their asses, and held accountable for their role in this crime against humanity
Once a political figure weaponizes this sentiment correctly, watch out.
It will take a politician to breath life into these issues. In the US it will happen – in most other places it won’t. A lot of people criticize the US political system – but I think their ‘take no prisoners’ approach to everything means that there is a lot more discussion of issues than in other countries.
Amen. I think that the school closures/CRT issue has served to unmask (pardon the pun) the excesses of the Left for a lot of middle-of-road folks in the States. I’ve watched my wife, who’s worked with special-needs kids in and out of the schools, go from a centrist to completely red-pilled. And there are a LOT of moms just like her in the States.
I hope that this issue also opens the conversation about the tremendous collateral damage that lockdowns and vaccine fetishism have wrought.
Harry Child
2 years ago
Last year Unherd posted the following brilliant comment ‘Often a Conservative is just a liberal mugged by reality’
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
… needed to go because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy” …
According to the KIPP site, meritocracy is seen as problematic as whiteness. It suggests that both meritocracy and whiteness are only normal as long as the “work hard, be nice” slogan is allowed to continue to be THE slogan. Ergo, meritocracy and whiteness are seen as not normal.
So much beating about the bush! Are the progressives against meritocracy in society or against the illusion of a meritocratic system? So much beating about the bush while schools are closed. Moreover! Is being white okay or not okay? That is what has surely annoyed parents. It’s most unlike America, as they would see it.
I’m a deep conservative, but I don’t see the function of the school system as supporting meritocracy. Particularly when narrowly defined as academic success. And I speak as a national merit scholar with a professional degree. I expect the schools to teach people to read, write, do math, and have some basic knowledge about the world. In Chicago, where I live, they can’t even produce a mediocracy.
I like to ask liberal-progressives in the States, “So who would YOU want to do your brain surgery or open heart procedure, regardless of race…the BEST surgeon, or the one who got through regardless of merit?”
Andrzej Wasniewski
2 years ago
I have no idea how much time the people who started their journey on the left defending dissidents, individual rights, freedom of speech need to understand that the TwitterSS, and the woke mobs in the academia did not have to be lectured by Charles Schwab about the reset. They immediately saw COVID as the opportunity of their lives to unite with oppressive state, its security apparatus, and corporations to create a totalitarian society they always dreamed off.
Seriously, how much more time you need? Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore figured it out pretty quickly.
By the way the fusion of oppressive state, its security apparatus, and corporations is exactly Mussolini’s definition of fascism. Do not tell he did know the subject.
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
So, the school choice system has taken off. More and more parents are getting paid not to send their children to school. And this means that the parents have woken up and want proper education for their children. Hm.
This idea was mooted in the UK. If I remember parents would get £6000 per year for not sending their children to school. It sounds like a Left idea to me.
Parents already pay for schooling through their property taxes. So, parents are being given back their own money to have their children taught by someone other than a public union indoctrinator. We stopped caring what British subjects think of us long ago, my friend.
I’m utterly amazed at left wing parties such as the Democrats and Labour submerging themselves in CRT. They were originally formed to unite the working classes, not divide them, or at least Labour were. I think it also speaks volumes about the lack of working class people actually involved with these organisations at this moment in time. Way too many middle class progressives and not enough workers. Regarding Youngkin, he got his campaign spot on, Trumpian policies without the awful Trump rhetoric. If the Republicans can get behind a candidate like Youngkin, they will sweep to victory in 2024, if Trump runs again, it will be another close call.
Exactly. If the Republicans can see off Trump and select someone like De Santis, they will obliterate the Democrats.
I don’t realy know much about De Santis (I shall look him up), but “seeing off Trump” would be the best thing that the Republicans could do – for themselves and for the USA.
Trump had a role of door kicker, he is a blunt instrument. He my play an important role concentrating the lying media on himself, deflecting from DeSantis. But if is planning to be a presidential candidate then he is obviously as stupid as Democrats want him to be.
In Britain, The Labour Party was founded by practical working class Christians such as Keir Hardie who considered ” Self Help ” by Samuel Smiles as manual for socialism. Smiles ” Lives of the Engineers ” was seen as guide by many early socialists. Many Engineers such as Brindley came from poor backgrounds. Brindley who once walked 25 miles to inspect a mill which was not working properly in order to solve the problems.
Since the Webbs, (middle class socialists who lived on on inherited money) joined the Labour Party there has been a masive decline in measures which would improve the quality of lives of the poor and working class. Providing the quality of vocational and trade training as as provided in Switzerland in the USA and UK, would have enabled both countries to move all their low and medium value manufacturing, into advanced high value, such as in Germany and Switzerland. However, the teaching unions in the USA and UK lack the ability to provide the technical training of the vocational/trade schools of Switzerland. Switzerland, a country of 8.5m, supports ETH Zurich which is up with Imperial and MIT. For the USA to support similar numbers of advanced technical institutes per head of population it would need over 35. The language of the universe is mathematics which combined with craftsmanship produces engineering.
In Sumer, bridge builders were forced to have their families live under them for a money to test their worthyness. If the bridge collapsed, the family was killed. In engineering, mistakes can kill and the laws of the universe are not influenced by CRT.
The Republicans must figure out how to avoid a Trump nomination without nominating a RINO. The Democrats must figure out how to dump Biden without nominating Harris. Short of a convenient death, it’s Trump v. Biden, redux. I pass.
What is surprising is that the Republican Party appears to have nobody other than Trump who has constructed anything or any practical experience. They have no more practical experience than the Democrats.
That’s true for the vast majority of US politicians.
And lets not forget US Attorney General Garland saying he had the FBI investigating parents as Domestic Terrorists for resisting masks, CRT, and School closures.
That was the high point of Lefty Madness, and one any thinking person cannot ever get over. (and the pictures of the bloodied father, wrestled to the floor by cops for protesting a boy in a dress, in the girls bathroom, attacking his daughter.)
Yes, perhaps in the German press this action by the AG was reported as a fight back against a resurgence of the infamous Badder-MeinMann und BadderMeinFrau factions of American domestic terrorism.
Yes, and I was unaware until this week that the entire parents-as-terrorists thing was in fact a set up?!
Leaked emails show that the Biden admin’s Education Sec. actually ASKED the teaching union to write the letter, then used the letter as a pretext for using anti-terrorism tools against parents. That is totally outrageous corruption. There’s a short video showing the emails and explaining it here, I was very shocked by this, and especially that it hasn’t got more coverage:
This has been out for about 2 months, you need to widen where you get your news.
But it was obvious from the start. These kinds of things don’t “just happen.” The reports of specific collusion only confirmed the obvious.
Ha, well thank you Martin. I sense you may have been patronising me there, but honestly I don’t even have the energy to be offended by that. 🙂
I read pretty widely, but as a UK citizen with a full time job (in this totally insane, upside down, clown world) I do indeed find it difficult to keep up with all the insanity unfolding around the world!
It’s like drinking from a firehose of b*llshit, 24/7. Particularly the fact that I’m now spending hours (!!) each day after work having to sift through studies and other document references to just understand what the heck is true around Covid and the vaccines/treatments etc, as I have consequential decisions to make based on what is true/not. It’s actually becoming exhausting just trying to live as a diligent and interested person in this chaotic environment of all-out propaganda wars; there are almost no reliable sources left that aren’t lazy, corrupted or partisan.
I hate this current iteration of our world, it sucks.
Superb disposal of an attempt to patronise you.
Yes. That was uncalled for.
As a US citizen I don’t expect citizens of other countries to know as much as I do if mine. If I had responded to you about this I would have tried to provide links. I have been patronized on British websites because my history of GB is a little weak. I do know about the same stamp act and government officials being appointed by London.
To be fair, the MSM hid this as much as possible. I knew about it because I subscribe to conservative web sites.
I really want to believe the author’s argument but I’m still not quite sure. So many left-leaning parents have been comfortable, apparently for years, with a progressive agenda in their schools. Admittedly, CRT seems to have reached fever pitch recently, but I wonder how far these parents are truly willing to back away from progressivism.
It’s the school closures, and, as the author notes, the veto power of the teachers’ unions over when schools close and open, that really alienated parents since the pandemic begun. If the teachers unions make some strategic concessions in that area the burgeoning parents movement might run out of steam.
So many of us have been so easily led and cowed over the past couple of years. I guess I’m now struggling to believe people are willing to stand up and be counted.
There isn’t the same emphasis on ideology over here but certainly my children were just desperate to get the grand children back to school because trying to simultaneously run a job, home and school is a nightmare.
I think you’re right. Once kids are back in school the real angst behind this will fizzle out.
I hope you’re wrong.
There is a scale, from the farthest right to the farthest left, and it looks like a bell curve. The fat middle, both left and right, is pretty centrist and contains most people. What falls under the rubric of CRT is something that appeals to the far-far left. And when you take away what a school is actually supposed to do, educate people, those not completely under the sway of that ideology are taken aback.
Here in the state, much is being made of this, and there is starting to be quite a bit of pushback, starting in the more red areas of the country, but even in ultra-liberal San Fransisco people are starting to challenge this.
And it isn’t always because these people are suddenly against liberalism, it is because they have a belief in what education is. They always wrung their hands at how crappy a lot of it was, saying teaching was a hard job while still supporting public schools, but when they see a lot of it comes from just how poorly the teachers acted and how awfully they treated their own kids, the dam started to break.
The unions are the problem, imo. I have a couple of union members in my family and they are insufferable.
School teacher union members, to be clear. They should be illegal, since they are government employees.
I just don’t see the teachers unions conceding anything to the parents. Once they have power, they never want to give it up. Look at what’s happening in Chicago where the union is defying the school board and refusing to return to the class room.
You are right about Chicago, where I live. Parents who can afford it will go private. Parents who can’t will leave the city, if they can. My son reports several liberal friends leaving the sinking ship that is the Chicago public school system. The teachers union won’t care because they are, in effect, an affiliate of the Democratic Party, existing for the purpose of rent seeking on behalf of teachers and the Union administration, and funding Democrats.
Yes, rent seekers, that’s exactly what they are.
I consider myself now a single issue individual
My priority in life right now is to save my kids childhoods. If that means we have to move, then so be it. It is the most important thing I can do
I want to see every politician, advisor, “public health expert”, and academic who took part in any way with school closures, and masking of kids (up to college age) to be thrown out on their asses, and held accountable for their role in this crime against humanity
Once a political figure weaponizes this sentiment correctly, watch out.
It will take a politician to breath life into these issues. In the US it will happen – in most other places it won’t. A lot of people criticize the US political system – but I think their ‘take no prisoners’ approach to everything means that there is a lot more discussion of issues than in other countries.
Amen. I think that the school closures/CRT issue has served to unmask (pardon the pun) the excesses of the Left for a lot of middle-of-road folks in the States. I’ve watched my wife, who’s worked with special-needs kids in and out of the schools, go from a centrist to completely red-pilled. And there are a LOT of moms just like her in the States.
I hope that this issue also opens the conversation about the tremendous collateral damage that lockdowns and vaccine fetishism have wrought.
Last year Unherd posted the following brilliant comment ‘Often a Conservative is just a liberal mugged by reality’
… needed to go because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy” …
According to the KIPP site, meritocracy is seen as problematic as whiteness. It suggests that both meritocracy and whiteness are only normal as long as the “work hard, be nice” slogan is allowed to continue to be THE slogan. Ergo, meritocracy and whiteness are seen as not normal.
So much beating about the bush! Are the progressives against meritocracy in society or against the illusion of a meritocratic system? So much beating about the bush while schools are closed. Moreover! Is being white okay or not okay? That is what has surely annoyed parents. It’s most unlike America, as they would see it.
I’m a deep conservative, but I don’t see the function of the school system as supporting meritocracy. Particularly when narrowly defined as academic success. And I speak as a national merit scholar with a professional degree. I expect the schools to teach people to read, write, do math, and have some basic knowledge about the world. In Chicago, where I live, they can’t even produce a mediocracy.
I like to ask liberal-progressives in the States, “So who would YOU want to do your brain surgery or open heart procedure, regardless of race…the BEST surgeon, or the one who got through regardless of merit?”
I have no idea how much time the people who started their journey on the left defending dissidents, individual rights, freedom of speech need to understand that the TwitterSS, and the woke mobs in the academia did not have to be lectured by Charles Schwab about the reset. They immediately saw COVID as the opportunity of their lives to unite with oppressive state, its security apparatus, and corporations to create a totalitarian society they always dreamed off.
Seriously, how much more time you need? Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore figured it out pretty quickly.
By the way the fusion of oppressive state, its security apparatus, and corporations is exactly Mussolini’s definition of fascism. Do not tell he did know the subject.
So, the school choice system has taken off. More and more parents are getting paid not to send their children to school. And this means that the parents have woken up and want proper education for their children. Hm.
This idea was mooted in the UK. If I remember parents would get £6000 per year for not sending their children to school. It sounds like a Left idea to me.
Parents already pay for schooling through their property taxes. So, parents are being given back their own money to have their children taught by someone other than a public union indoctrinator. We stopped caring what British subjects think of us long ago, my friend.