DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: How to Talk Yourself into Believing a Lie.
The backlash against CRT is very real. The notion, for example, that the incensed parents who are descending on school-board meetings in droves have been bamboozled by the Heritage Foundation betrays an unfamiliarity with both how local politics is conducted and the attention parents pay to their children’s education. NBC is one of the first national outlets to even address what has rapidly become a national phenomenon: the outrage over a consensus forged behind closed doors during a once-in-a-century pandemic. On the local level, dispatch after dispatch after dispatch chronicles this organic phenomenon and the surprise with which it has taken supporters of a race-conscious curriculum.
And while we have no way to know if this backlash will have electoral consequences for Democrats on the federal level, municipal elections that hinged on this controversial curriculum have shown that it’s a loser for Democrats. For example, in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Southlake, the slate of candidates who campaigned against a plan not just to teach CRT but to create databases of alleged racial transgressions both in and outside school lost a May election by a resounding 70 to 30 percent of the vote.
It’s whistling past the electoral graveyard to wave this phenomenon off as a fabrication of malevolent right-wing think tanks. More insulting is the notion that it is the right that is somehow obsessed with race. At best, the right can be accused only of noticing that obsession among its opponents.
Exit quote: “The idea that conservatives did anything more than notice this mania is laughable. The legislative efforts on the local level, some of which flirt with violating civic and constitutional propriety, deserve skepticism because this reckoning is entirely organic. Right-wing overreach threatens that emerging consensus. But Republicans should take heart in how Democrats are trying to convince themselves that none of this is real, and no serious person questions the validity of CRT’s sudden ubiquity. They’ll never see it coming.”