Documenting Righty SuccessLocal power is key to winning lasting power.
By David Hines
April 8, 2022
Lately, Team Righty has had some success on the education front, and it’s worth looking at why. A lot of the installments of this column have been about either how good the Lefties are at organizing, or how much the Righties suck at it, but we also need to look at places that Righties have been doing well. And there aren’t that many of those! Lefties are on the march all over the place; Righty confidence that “the people won’t stand for this” usually results in disappointment. So why is education (for the moment) different? What lessons should Righties learn?
The first lesson: You have better odds of building support and achieving effect if you pick an issue lots of people are heavily invested in. The more potential recruits you have, the better. And in the words of historian Robert Conquest’s First Law, as relayed in the memoirs of Kingsley Amis, “Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.” (Conquest’s second law was “Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.”) Something lots of people know well is effective grounds for organizing. Most American parents have their kids in public schools. Most American parents themselves went to public schools. American parents thus have reasonable expectations of public schools, and while they may have different values, they do overwhelmingly agree that kids who go to public school should actually learn to do things, like math.
Parents are discovering public schools are less invested in this outcome. Alarming numbers of public school teachers believe that “rigor” and “accuracy” are buzzwords for white supremacy, and that it’s more important for kids to vaguely know there are some forms of math where it’s possible for 2+2=5 than it is for them to be able to add two and two and get four in everyday life. This is the sort of thing that makes progressive white math teachers feel very good about themselves, but doesn’t help poor black kids grow up able to figure out how and where and for how much money a boss or a landlord or a bank or a government agency is ripping them off. Nor does it help public-school students of any ethnicity or socioeconomic level to learn more advanced mathematics of the sort that can lead to remunerative careers.
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The second lesson: Document in detail exactly what your enemies are saying and doing. You can’t talk about Righty success on the education front without mentioning Christopher Rufo’s efforts on that front. But to get anything out of that, you have to look at what he’s doing. Righties have a tendency toward hero-worship: When somebody has success at something, we tend to say that person is awesome rather than asking what they are doing that is effective and can be emulated. Rufo doesn’t just talk about the fact that woke education is bad; he talks about what woke education is, not in generalities, but in specifics, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction after jurisdiction. He collects internal documents leaked by friendly insiders and gathered by himself from filing public-records requests, and posts them publicly. Gathering detailed documentation is essential for effective counter-action, and it’s especially effective when your opponents are liars, e.g., “This isn’t happening.” It’s totally happening; here are examples! “It’s not common.” It’s happening in all sorts of places all over the country; here are more examples! “This isn’t really Critical Race Theory.” Here are documents saying it is! And so on.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/documenting-righty-success/
