Tipsheet

Progressives: 'Parental Rights' Is a Dog Whistle, CRT Doesn't Exist in Schools, and Stop Saying 'Woke'

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 09, 2021 10:15 AM

They've got their narrative, and they're not going to back away from it. They scoff at parents' rights, putting the term in scare quotes in news articles. They insist that offended parents have been fooled by dastardly Republicans, who've invented – for racial purposes, of course – the things they're seeing with their own eyes. And as is so often the case, they gaslight; treating a culture war they're waging as a right-wing culture war invention, cooked up to sow "division," etc. Noticing something real and reacting to it is not an "injection": 


Leftists and Democrats are doubling and tripling down on the proposition that Virginia parents bought into a giant racial manipulation, based on nothing: 


Hasan is an MSNBC host. He asserts, over and over, that CRT and racial controversies originate from "nowhere," and are "based on nothing." We have repeatedly documented how and why this is very obviously and verifiably untrue, but the official progressive/media/Democratic/McAuliffe line was to deny, deny, deny, along with a large dash of race-baiting, of course. This thread is useful in demolishing their lie even further: 


It's happening all over the country, too, not just in Virginia: 


If you missed it in my post last week, this public school administrator ripped the cover off of the duplicitous denials: 

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"Parents, when we tell you Critical Race Theory isn't taught in our schools, we're lying." Yet here's CNN, dutifully clinging to the spin that was so misplaced and misleading that it failed Democrats in Virginia just last week, "just to be clear": 


For an illuminating commentary on these matters, watch this clip of John McWhorter, whose book "Woke Racism" is a bestseller: 


Meanwhile, here's Mary Katharine Ham reminding people of another component of the broader schools issue, which has been vexing for parents: 


Ultimately, Ross Douthat is correct. The aggressive denialism is rooted in an assumption of stupidity on behalf of the propagandists' targets: 


I'll leave you with a new leftist rhetorical demand, which seems to have bubbled up overnight: Stop saying "woke." The people who toss around loaded terms like "racism" and "fascism" with reckless abandon now want to police words like "woke" and "wokeism," because they're supposedly too manipulative not specific enough. Incredible. This is very reminiscent of claiming that unless you're referring to an exceptionally narrow definition, you can't talk about CRT, either.  Same gaslighting energy. The fact that woke all-stars abruptly started shouting the same objection at the same time suggests that they recognize how wokery is harmful to their cause – and therefore want to restrict how it can be discussed, rather than changing or moderating their own behavior (they believe wokeness is morally correct). In short, anti-woke critiques are resonating, so they're 'working the refs' by pressuring journalists and others to back off: 


"People think Fox News is just about indoctrinating right-wingers, but it’s also about conditioning Dems on what to run away from," AOC writes. "We shouldn’t indulge it." I agree. Democrats should keep going with this stuff. This piece by a fed up lefty academic (content warning for language) captures the racket, and my frustration, pretty well: 

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here...Nobody gives you what you want. That’s not how it works. Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for f*ck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

It looks that way because it is that way.