Last week, nearly two dozen of the 30 school board candidates backed by Ron DeSantis in Florida won their races. The DeSantis-endorsed candidates oppose the left’s woke agenda for schools on matters like race and sexuality. They support giving parents more say in how, and to what extent, such issues will be taught to their children.
As a result of these wins, conservatives now claim new majorities on school boards in Miami-Dade, Duval, Sarasota, and Brevard counties. Hundreds of thousands of students attend public school in these jurisdiction.
The Washington Post tries to process these results for its left-wing readership. The Post portrays DeSantis as an opportunist who has “seized on parental rights as a key part of his messaging on education as he gears up for a reelection race. . .and potentially a 2024 presidential bid.” Missing from the Post’s analysis is an honest assessment of why his messaging has so much resonance.
The article is heavy on quotes from DeSantis’ enemies. Most of the statements quoted are misguided if not silly, but this one, by 25 year old liberal activist who is running for Congress, rings true:
DeSantis is someone who worries me more than Trump because if you look at what he’s done here, he’s going out and stumping for these school board candidates.
That’s a theme I’ve been advancing here at Ringside. DeSantis is better than Trump at fighting wokeism. As I put it in this post:
Ron DeSantis understands how to attack wokeism in creative ways. . . .
Trump understands the dangers of wokeism and knows how to make a strong speech on the subject. But as president, he didn’t follow through as strongly as DeSantis is doing as governor to combat the phenomenon. Indeed, for much of his presidency Trump did very little on this front.
Quotes from others disappointed by the school board results serve only to show how obtuse liberals can be. For example, a Gainesville liberal who prevailed in her school board race said:
People continue to play politics, but this is about the children. It’s also about democracy.
But what’s more democratic, having unelected bureaucrats dictate what “the children” are taught in school or giving the public, especially parents, a voice via an election in which a vision that runs counter to that of the bureaucrats is presented? What happened in the Florida school board races is a victory for democracy.
The Post found “a Jacksonville mother” who admitted:
I’ve literally been crying since [election] night. I’m beyond disappointed. I’m also terrified.
Get that mom some Play-Doh.
The Post even found a Republican who criticized DeSantis’ involvement in the school board races:
“I like DeSantis, but why is he spending so much political capital, and money, going after a fellow Republican [Marta Perez in Miami]?” asked Jose Perez, who was wearing a “Reagan-Bush” hat and is not related to Marta. “I and a lot of people are scratching our heads. Why is he doing this?
A hint appears near the end of the article when we learn that Marta Perez voted to designate October as “LGBTQ History Month” — a whole month of gender-bending propaganda. I guess DeSantis’ opposition to Perez isn’t such a head-scratcher after all.
The Post sees Tuesday’s results as “potentially reshaping [education] policies for more than half a million students and thousands of teachers.” That’s true as far as it goes.
But the “reshaping” is really just a rejection of some of the revisionist shaping woke bureaucrats recently imposed on schools with the complicity of school boards and without the consent or involvement of parents. If members of either side of this dispute are extremists, it’s those who did the original reshaping , not those who want to restore a bit of normalcy.
Let's talk turkey about Trump. He instinctively knew how to speak to a base that had been alienated for years. He wasn't afraid to tackle issues that traditional conservatives tiptoed around, BUT... Trump is lacking in many, many ways. He's not playing 4 dimensional chess. That's a joke. Trump is a guy who never understood the limits of his power as president or the extent of the power of the bully pulpit. He said "drain the swamp" but didn't know how the swamp operates. He gave the ultimate swamp creature, Anthony Fauci, a platform and didn't remove him from that platform even when it was obvious that Fauci only sought to undermine him. Trump got rolled by the deep state. He could have declassified every document related to the Russia collusion hoax. He could have declassified every document he took with him from the White House. It's time to move on from Trump. Let's consolidate our learnings from the Trump years and double down with DeSantis, who is a much better strategist and tactician than Trump. DeSantis went from barely winning in Florida to being extremely popular. DeSantis speaks to middle America in a way that rallies people toward him, not turn them off to him.
Yep. I taught public school a lifetime ago long enough to understand the limits of those in charge of our public schools, their often hard working dedicated practitioners on the ground, and the high walls around their perceptions of reality. These are, on the whole, really lovely people who unfortunately see right through everybody in America that isn't credentialed by the university system like they aren't even there. They almost exclusively associate with others just like them, and are completely unaware of the facts and attitudes that form our thinking. They are incurious for intellectual and cultural reasons. They often have been in this class for several generations. Only newcomers to it can see what I saw, and only now does my working class upbringing let me understand the whole structure of the thing. To them, it is the water they swim in.
They literally still do not see the resistance to this coming, and will not understand what hit them after it is over. They have a lot of power and I don't know what they will do in response. The fascist nomenclature scares me. Deeply.