What is happening to the Democratic Party right now represents the fulfillment of a number of popular slogans or clichés. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, or what goes around comes around, or turnabout is fair play. And let’s try one more cliché to identify the state of the nation’s ruling party right about now: their chickens are coming home to roost. Democrats who were the recipients of the grandest stroke of political luck in our lifetime, a once-in-a-century pandemic which allowed them to shamelessly lay the deaths of hundreds of thousands at the feet of Donald Trump, are now realizing their own pandemic-related fortune has turned by about, oh, 180 degrees.
You could be excused for thinking this somewhat dramatic statement simply refers to the disastrous results for Democrats on Election Day 2021, best typified by the unthinkable defeat of New Jersey’s Senate majority leader at the hands of a truck driver. Yes, a truck driver. And of course, that’s on top of embarrassing performances by the Dems in the gubernatorial races in the Garden State and Virginia and the lopsided defeat of defunding the police in Minneapolis, among many other outcomes revealing widespread voter discontent with Biden, Pelosi, AOC and company. But none of those represent the most stinging defeat Democrats have suffered this year.
Save the Children?
(Photo by: Michael Siluk/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
No, what will hurt the worst for leftists is that the long game they were able to play under the radar for the longest time, the explicit indoctrination of children in government schools, has been unmasked to the point of being a defining issue in the Republicans’ sweep through the 2021 elections, most especially in their upset victory in Virginia. And the irony of it all is that Democrats essentially dug their own grave through their own rank exploitation of the pandemic. School closures, lockdowns and quarantines, particularly widespread in blue America, actually caused the worst possible upshot for the subterranean progressive agenda: it forced parents to be personally involved in their children’s education.
To say parents are affronted by what they have seen and heard over the last 18 months would be an understatement. They have witnessed their children being steeped in an oft-times perverted revision of American history, with the prominent infusion of race into every facet of curricula dividing people into oppressors and victims. The stinging rebuke of the nation’s public education system is evidenced not just by the election results, but even more so, and more directly, by the skyrocketing rate of homeschooling since the pandemic began to recede. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has quantified the startling trend:
“The most recent pre-pandemic federal publication (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2017) ... indicated that 3.3 percent of US school-age children were taught at home. However, by the time the first Household Pulse Survey was published at the outset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, the percent of homeschool households had grown to 5.4, rapidly increased to 11.1 by October, and continued climbing throughout most of spring 2021 until it peaked at 19.5 in mid-May (USCBb, 2021). Consequently, in one year’s time, the percent of homeschool households more than tripled.”
Move Along – No CRT to See Here
Covid-related health concerns have likely contributed to this historic increase in children now being taught at home, and some homeschoolers will probably return as the pandemic further recedes, but this trend would nevertheless appear to represent a stunning repudiation of America’s public schools. And it will lead to another dangerous turn for the left in the form of louder calls for school choice, anathema to paternalistic white progressives even as it has long been widely supported in communities of color.
Some leftists have defended the infusion of critical race theory into public school curricula, but many have actually tried to deny CRT even exists, arguing that there are no actual courses with such a title. But in fact, that is the root of the problem. Many if not most people might support the availability of a stand-alone elective course on this explosively controversial theory, but its effect is far more insidious than that of an isolated class, because its principles are designed to permeate the entirety of curricula, not simply the social sciences. But the stealth introduction of this poisonous theory, supported by teachers’ unions and culminating the decades-long slow-drip insertion of political correctness into public education, has now been finally and fully unmasked - and thoroughly rejected by voters.
On a night in early November of 2020, when they took down Trump, and another in early January of 2021, when they won control of Congress, even atheist Democrats could turn skyward and thank their lucky stars for the gigantic, election-saving political opportunities presented by a killer pandemic taking hold just as their enemy was to begin his reelection campaign. Little did they realize that the downdraft from their own actions during that dark time would come back to finally expose to the light of day arguably the most essential weapon in their arsenal, the furtive indoctrination of innocent young Americans. I believe the cliché is ... busted.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
