Democrats For Trump
That's effectively the outcome of the Democrats' "education lunacies," writes Matt Taibbi.
He reports that Meet The Press' Chuck Todd "interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work."
He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor's race, which seemingly was decided on the question, "How influential should parents be about curriculum?" Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what to teach," Todd asked her, "How do we do this?"Hannah-Jones's first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he'd just said, but because of a "right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated."
This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. "I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught," Hannah-Jones said. "I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies or science."
I'm against bills like the proposed Oklahoma measure that would ban the teaching of Jones's work at all state-sponsored educational institutions. I think bans are counter-productive and politically a terrible move by Republicans, who undercut their own arguments against authoritarianism and in favor of "local control" with such sweeping statewide measures. Still, it was pretty rich hearing the author of The 1619 Project say she lacked the expertise to teach, given that a) many historians agree with her there, yet b) she's been advocating for schools to teach her dubious work to students all over the country.
...People like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to "experts" and "expertise."
This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with "experts" on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or "experts" on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon "experts" who promised we'd find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of "experience" as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.
...Democrats across the country have instituted radical policy changes, mainly in an effort to address socioeconomic and racial disparities. These included eliminating standardized testing to the University of California system, doing away with gifted programs (and rejecting the concept of gifted children in general), replacing courses like calculus with data science or statistics to make advancement easier, and pushing a series of near-parodical ideas with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that include things like denouncing emphasis on "getting the right answer" or "independent practice over teamwork" as white supremacy.
When criticism ensued, pundits first denied as myth all rumors of radical change, then denounced complaining parents as belligerent racists unfit to decide what should be taught to their children, all while reaffirming the justice of leaving such matters to the education "experts" who'd spent the last decade-plus doing things like legislating grades out of existence. This "parents should leave ruining education to us" approach cost McAuliffe Virginia, because it dovetailed with what parents had long been seeing and hearing on the ground.
Galvanizing parents like this -- aggressively pushing ideology over education of their children -- is about the stupidest possible thing Democrats could do.








I've had this fight many times with Dems. Many are convinced without a shred of evidence that Republicans are erasing slavery from history books. That 1619 is the true history because Rep. fight it.
I ask for proof of their claims and it is well X made the claim therefore it must be true.
I provide links to crazy progressive teachers bragging about indoctrinating kids, (Thanks Project Veritas and Libs of Tic Toc) that sometimes works; sometimes it gets "well that's only a few teachers, not all"; sometimes it gets, "good, finally someone spreading the 'truth'".
Joe J at December 30, 2021 5:25 AM
Question for Matt: is it OK to teach students that because of the color of their skin they are irredeemably racist?
Is it wrong to ban that? I don't know why they insist on teaching white supremacy in this age.
I R A Darth Aggie at December 30, 2021 7:03 AM
FIRE gets this one mostly right: there is an important difference between teaching in K-12 schools and in higher education. Teaching CRT in K-12 schools is indoctrination and is unacceptable, both because of the students' age and because they are forced to attend. But in universities, the propositions of CRT are areas of legitimate debate.
But here's where I differ from FIRE's position: if an employer requires employees to participate in a CRT "diversity training" class, or a university makes it a required course, then that constitutes "hostile environment racial harassment," which is and should be absolutely banned.
(Substitute gender for race and all of the above holds true as well.)
jdgalt1 at December 30, 2021 8:46 AM
Parents are not asking to write the textbooks, which is what dems are claiming about their lack of expertise. They simply don't want their children taught that they are racists or that all the founding fathers were racist or that the US is a terrible country or that marxism is better than free markets. They do not want sexually explicit depictions of gay sex between children and men (as in VA).
cc at December 30, 2021 11:23 AM
So many problems came to light in VA. Girls getting sexually assaulted by privileged groups ( undocumented old students and "trans" ) and having the schools covering it up for political gains. Getting rid of merit based and advanced science/math classes because too many Asians.
With all the govt people, NOVA is the rich part of the swamp. But they never expected the bad stuff to happen to their kids. They were already very left, but there is no end to how far left the left will push
Joe J at December 30, 2021 12:40 PM
Umm..
It's not actually "Democrats for Trump", although the current environment has put him where he is.
It's "Democrats for anybody but the idiots in charge". Reminder: Trump beat all the other Republicans for the nomination because the others were a) indistinguishable from each other, and b) part of the existing political machine, seen by at least half the country to be ruining us all.
Fortunately for those of you who hate political outsiders, the last election has shown us that no one outside the political class will ever have an opportunity again. The amount of outright lying about Trump should shame anyone, and it continues with the President's own press secretary.
Radwaste at December 31, 2021 6:56 AM
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