Virginia now has it’s own DeSantis!

[Jim Bow]

4DE639D9-E17F-4F47-9FEB-6469B53F8656.jpg

[UCanoe_2]

Trump in a fleece vest. How freakin' embarrassing. And he has nominated Andrew Wheeler, coal lobbyist and Trump's last EPA director, to be secretary of natural and historic resources.

[woodpile]

Not to worry, there will be many more in November.

[Figment]

the clock is a nice detail

[SKIP KILPATRICK]

OP strikes too close to the truth.

All Covid restrictions are being rolled back. I expect mandatory open carry of firearms by the end of the first four year term. And the announcement of “Governor for Life” is soon to come.

[Curtism]

I feel for you folks in a real way. I have family up there who thought Tim Kaine was a socialist commie lib and prolly supported your current jackass, sorry to say.

I see bumper stickers here lately, done up to mimic the popular trumper stickers in colors and font, that read:

Make America Florida
Desantis 2024

[Osborne Russell]

OP strikes too close to the truth.

All Covid restrictions are being rolled back. I expect mandatory open carry of firearms by the end of the first four year term. And the announcement of “Governor for Life” is soon to come.

Going from right to bear arms to duty to bear arms? Grandpa could only carry a derringer. Most likely he'd shoot himself. Forget where he put it.

[CWSmith]

I'm not certain that critical race theory is a positive move forward. It seems like one of those jargonistic mantras that comes to mean what a person wants it to mean while the underlying ideas get blurred. The truth is that the racial problems in this country will not be solved until both sided (or is it now all 3 or more sides) recognize their contributions to the problem and work to fix it. That's the hard work that we need to perform. Mantras lead to simplistic solutions like social promotion that fail to address the underlying problems, but provide good optics.

[Garret]

I'm not certain that critical race theory is a positive move forward. It seems like one of those jargonistic mantras that comes to mean what a person wants it to mean while the underlying ideas get blurred. The truth is that the racial problems in this country will not be solved until both sided (or is it now all 3 or more sides) recognize their contributions to the problem and work to fix it. That's the hard work that we need to perform. Mantras lead to simplistic solutions like social promotion that fail to address the underlying problems, but provide good optics.

Best response I've heard (here I think) was a professor, when asked if he teaches CRT replied "If you can tell me what it is, I'll tell you whether or not I teach it." CRT is more a bogeyman of the right than anything else - as obviously we need to get a better understanding of racial issues in this country.

[Osborne Russell]

I'm not certain that critical race theory is a positive move forward. It seems like one of those jargonistic mantras that comes to mean what a person wants it to mean while the underlying ideas get blurred.

It's one of those hustles where the underlying ideas are intentionally blurred by the jargonistic mantras sold by the hustlers to conceal what they're really selling.

They got Democrats to defend the mantras because Democrats love the mantras and are ignorant of the underlying ideas. So are the Republicans, to varying degrees, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that Republicans believe the mantras are a hustle, and Democrats refuse to respond, because they can't. The mantras are all they know. And the governorship of Virginia was lost.

[George Jung]

Exactly. CRT was actually first 'activated' on a RWW talk show, as I recall. They needed an agitating issue - and they made one. And their sheeple are too dim to recognize the manipulation.

[Keith Wilson]

I'm not certain that critical race theory is a positive move forward.

You think? " Almost 100% of the time, "Critical Race Theory" is an imaginary boogeyman: the Jews poisoning the wells, witches making your cows stop giving milk and your hens stop laying, communists lurking under the bed, alien abductions . . . Nobody on the right knows what it is, but they know it's horrible and has to be stopped.

[CWSmith]

Best response I've heard (here I think) was a professor, when asked if he teaches CRT replied "If you can tell me what it is, I'll tell you whether or not I teach it." CRT is more a bogeyman of the right than anything else - as obviously we need to get a better understanding of racial issues in this country.

It's one of those hustles where the underlying ideas are intentionally blurred by the jargonistic mantras sold by the hustlers to conceal what they're really selling.

Exactly. CRT was actually first 'activated' on a RWW talk show, as I recall. They needed an agitating issue - and they made one. And their sheeple are too dim to recognize the manipulation.

You think? " Almost 100% of the time, "Critical Race Theory" is an imaginary boogeyman: ...

Guys, thank you! I mean that. I've heard so much of it here and elsewhere that I was beginning to think I was the only person who could not understand it, let alone get behind it.

[UCanoe_2]

I expect mandatory open carry of firearms by the end of the first four year term.

Today, continuing their tradition of insensitivity, the Virginia Citizens' Defense League conducted its annual MLK day lobbying effort at the General Assembly.

https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news...massive-crowds

VCDL's wish list does not yet include mandatory open carry. Among the legislative items they are promoting is "Constitutional Carry," i.e., anyone who is lawfully permitted to possess a firearm can carry concealed without a permit. Here is their legislative tracking list:

https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news...massive-crowds

[SKIP KILPATRICK]

^Breaks your heart, doesn't it?

Ken follows the General Assembly as part of his job. So, I'm too familiar with the goings on at the Capitol....god, i wish i wasn't!

[SKIP KILPATRICK]

Ignorance can have a comforting factor.

[CWSmith]

I expect mandatory open carry of firearms by the end of the first four year term.

Mandatory? As in for everyone regardless of race? I don't think so.

[SKIP KILPATRICK]

Fired the intire Virginia State Parole Board.

[Jim Mahan]

We started watching the TV series Mrs. America, about Phyllis Schlafly, last night. As usual, the film-makers have done a stunning job of recreating the times with all the set details, like the correct model cars and kitchen appliances etc. Kate Blanchett does a superb job, as do the other stars playing Bella Abzug, Shirel Chisolm and names from the era, and I felt like I was a junior in high school again in nineteen-seventy-one.

What causes a pause is the dialogue as she discusses politics with the men of the day, while considering a run for a seat in Congress. Since it's a story centered on her, and she was a right-winger, anti-women's libber and a war hawk, being a student of nuclear policy on the nuclear disarmanent talks with Brezhnev's Soviet Union, the political dialogue sounds like conservative propaganda while she and her male cohort bash the libs.

[George Jung]

https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/mrs-america

On Hulu. I'd not been aware of that; looks compelling.

[Osborne Russell]

You think? " Almost 100% of the time, "Critical Race Theory" is an imaginary boogeyman: the Jews poisoning the wells, witches making your cows stop giving milk and your hens stop laying, communists lurking under the bed, alien abductions . . . Nobody on the right knows what it is, but they know it's horrible and has to be stopped.

Baloney. CRT wins politics for the Reds, and that is not imaginary. Libs, finding a flimsy refuge in their smug complacency and thinking it's an impregnable fortress, just lost the Governorship of Virginia , because of their of their refusal to look at CRT. So now they conclude, naturally, that the thing to do now is what failed before, repeatedly.

You Can’t Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary

Virginia is sending Democrats a warning: They’ve lost control of the narrative about education.
By Yascha Mounk

Other polls taken in the run-up to the election provide further evidence that Youngkin owes his victory to his focus on education. According to one poll taken in the week before the election, for example, Youngkin led McAuliffe by three percentage points among all likely voters. But among K–12 parents, the Republican led the Democrat by 15 points.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. Few middle or high schoolers are poring over academic articles written by Richard Delgado or Kimberlé Crenshaw. But across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ocrats/620595/

CRT isn't just anti-liberal, it's anti-liberal democracy. REDS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT. NOTHING. Stop with the denial. Midterms are coming. YOU'RE HELPING THE REDS. YOU'RE HELPING TRUMP.

Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘Democrats should have addressed concerns’

For months I’ve been predicting a win by Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, largely because of the reactions I’ve seen among my moderate-leaning, college-educated friends in the northern Virginia suburbs, where I lived for more than a decade.

These are socially tolerant, fiscally conservative people who in the past had often voted for moderate Republicans but were horrified by Trump’s racism and authoritarianism. Swing voters in this category were such a crucial bloc that their defection from the Republicans gave Joe Biden a 10 percentage-point win in Virginia and flipped both houses of the state legislature to Democrats in 2020.

But these same people have been filling my inbox with agonized stories about school administrators and teachers pushing a contentious racialized ideology on their children – which in many cases they were able to witness in person as classes moved online during the pandemic.

This ideology wasn’t critical race theory per se, in the sense that students weren’t reading original CRT texts. But after the George Floyd protests of last year, the curriculum undeniably became infused not only with a greater emphasis on America’s troubled racial history – which most of my suburban friends agreed was overdue – but also with CRT-influenced anti-racism pedagogy.

Democrats should have addressed parental concerns over these educational issues openly and honestly. Instead they pretended that nothing resembling CRT was being taught in the schools while also claiming that anyone objecting to the new progressive pedagogy was a white supremacist.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ean-biden-2022

The bolded part wasn't imagined. It was witnessed. Libs imagine that they support CRT because they don't know what it is and refuse to find out.

[George Jung]

Interesting. It was my understanding that CRT - esp as outlined by your bolded part - wasn't being taught in grade or highschool. In fact - through college, grad, med school - I've never encountered it. Of course, that was years ago.

But in our local papers, I've heard the same . It's simply not taught. At all. But that hasn't stopped our Republicans from ranting about it, ad nauseum.

I'm curious, OR - what do you think should be done?

[Osborne Russell]

Interesting. It was my understanding that CRT - esp as outlined by your bolded part - wasn't being taught in grade or highschool. In fact - through college, grad, med school - I've never encountered it. Of course, that was years ago.

But in our local papers, I've heard the same . It's simply not taught. At all.

Not true. I never heard the name "John Locke" or the term "liberal democracy" in high school, but that was all that was being taught in Civics, every day. They might never mention Archimedes all the while they're teaching civics.

The local papers commonly are simply repeating what they read in the Big City papers.

But that hasn't stopped our Republicans from ranting about it, ad nauseum.

But it's not enough to say they're wrong, and leave it at that. Far too much is at stake. Virginia now has its own DeSantis!

I'm curious, OR - what do you think should be done?

I'm doing it now. Trying to inform and urging people to inform themselves. One can't tell Reds they don't know CRT when one doesn't, oneself. Libs think it's just a trendy new name for what they have believed since their youth. Not so.

Demystifying Critical Race Theory so We Can Get to the Point

By Helen Pluckrose
July 2, 2021
https://counterweightsupport.com/202...-to-the-point/

So, What is Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction describes it as a departure from liberal Civil Rights approaches:

Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

Funny how that's exactly what the Reds do. They're just too ignorant to know they're doing it. Until recently, CRT'ers made little effort to hide it. They have a theory; they constructed it.

BTW, they don't question the foundations of the liberal order; they reject them.

[John Smith]

I'm not certain that critical race theory is a positive move forward. It seems like one of those jargonistic mantras that comes to mean what a person wants it to mean while the underlying ideas get blurred. The truth is that the racial problems in this country will not be solved until both sided (or is it now all 3 or more sides) recognize their contributions to the problem and work to fix it. That's the hard work that we need to perform. Mantras lead to simplistic solutions like social promotion that fail to address the underlying problems, but provide good optics.

It's good he's stopped his state's schools from teaching something they weren't teaching.

I'm all for teaching an honest history of race in this country. I would hope everyone is.

[Garret]

It's good he's stopped his state's schools from teaching something they weren't teaching.

I'm all for teaching an honest history of race in this country. I would hope everyone is.

Not so much. Here are the first few directives in his executive order:

1.The Superintendent of Public Instruction shall review all policies within the
Department of Education to identify those that promote inherently divisive concepts.
Such policies shall be ended.

2.The Superintendent of Public Instruction shall immediately review all guidelines,
websites, best practices, and other materials produced by the Department of
Education to identify those that promote or endorse divisive or inherently racist
concepts. Such shall be removed.

3.Executive Employees shall be prohibited from directing or otherwise compelling
students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to inherently divisive concepts.

4.The Superintendent of Public Instruction shall review the Department of Education’s
Cultural Competency Training to determine if it or any portion promotes inherently
divisive concepts, and take action consistent with the laws of Virginia to modify such
training to end the use of inherently divisive concepts. In addition, the Superintendent
shall make recommendations on how the Department of Education and school
division can develop and make available to all teachers and school leaders model
professional development and training so teachers and schools are prepared to engage
students on important civics and historical issues in a fair and unbiased manner
without imposing their own personal beliefs

The whole order can be found here: https://www.governor.virginia.gov/me...G-EXCELLEN.pdf

Just looking at #1 - this could easily be interpreted as "You may not teach anything that others disagree with". Holocaust? Someone says it never happened - so teaching about it would be divisive. Etc. Etc. What he put in the EO is truly dangerous & anti-American.

[CWSmith]

I'm all for teaching an honest history of race in this country. I would hope everyone is.

Agreed!

[Osborne Russell]

It's good he's stopped his state's schools from teaching something they weren't teaching.

How do you know? The people of Virginia thought differently. Especially parents of children in the state's schools.

I'm all for teaching an honest history of race in this country. I would hope everyone is.

Is that what you think CRT means? Do you think CRT is honest history?

[Garret]

How do you know? The people of Virginia thought differently. Especially parents of children in the state's schools.



Is that what you think CRT means? Do you think CRT is honest history?

Please tell us what CRT means (& no, I don't mean Cathode Ray Tube).

[Osborne Russell]

Just looking at #1 - this could easily be interpreted as "You may not teach anything that others disagree with". Holocaust? Someone says it never happened - so teaching about it would be divisive. Etc. Etc. What he put in the EO is truly dangerous & anti-American.

"Inherently divisive" is bogus. Divisiveness is not evil. The whole point is to divide that which is better reasoned and supported by the evidence, from that which is less so. Shall we teach that the South didn't lose the Civil War, in order to not be "divisive"? They start firing teachers for "inherently divisive" and stand back, here come the lawsuits.

#3 is superfluous. Compelled speech has been unconsitutional since the Jehovah's Witnesses - Pledge of Allegiance case.

[Osborne Russell]

CRT is a moral and political ideology based on the paradigm of society divided into oppressors oppressing the oppressed, not necessarily personally, but necessarily through institutions. The personal oppression may not be intentional but the institutional oppression always is. This oppression is demonstrated, if not by inequality, then by inequity, regardless of intention, even though it's always intentional, in the sense that oppression is what the system is designed to produce.

The only remedy is the destruction of the offending institutions. Since these institutions form a seamless web within a society, indeed actually constituting the society, and inextricable from it, the entire system dedicated to oppression, CRT must penetrate and destroy all offending parts of existing society and its institutions, except the schools.

CRT discovered this for the first time in history but did their best to keep it locked up in academe. They were waiting to let it out until . . . I haven't figured out that part yet. They don't say. Anyway, at some point, they are going to destroy massive amounts of stuff. Perhaps they'll let us know.

The "critical" part doesn't mean objective criticism and disinterested interpretation, it means judging the facts and interpreting them according to how well that process serves the ideology as the only true road to equity and justice. "The philsophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. " Karl Marx said that -- it's inscribed on his gravestone -- but CRT is not Marxist.

[George Jung]

You may have encountered CRT - but I never have. Nor have my kids. The entire brouhaha began with a republican operative, raising the spector of a non-entity, on a far-right opinion show. Republicans recognized it as a useful tool, and ... here we are.

[Art Haberland]

well, I guess my Journeys southward have gotten a lot shorter. I do not see a need to go any further south than Md now.

Being so close to DC, "constitutional" carry is going to land a lot of people on the wrong side of the law if they venture northward past the potomac and into the District without forgetting to leave their guns behind.

[Joe (SoCal)]

[Osborne Russell]

You may have encountered CRT - but I never have. Nor have my kids. The entire brouhaha began with a republican operative, raising the spector of a non-entity, on a far-right opinion show. Republicans recognized it as a useful tool, and ... here we are.

The brouhaha began several decades ago. Took a while to get from the law schools into K-12, is all. People noticed the symptoms, which seemed bizarre. The underlying disease process is not immediately apparent, because it's a mutation having the ability to conceal its operation, if not its very existence. Like those fish that look like seaweed.

You encountered it when Virginia elected a Republican governor. Even closer when your state's Reeps fundraise off of it. Your neighbors tune into Hannity, Tucker Carlson, et al. We are about to encounter it in the midterm elections.

[Osborne Russell]

Yeah Joe, that's a good one. An encounter with CRT via Beau and the state of Virginia.

He quotes Thomas Paine: "Where knowledge is duty, ignorance is a crime." Applies to CRT in spades. CRT fosters ignorance by lying. For example, CRT'ers say that systemic racism has been hidden since it's origin. That's ridiculous. Was slavery systemic? Was it hidden?

They say the law helped to hide it behind a facade of "color-blindness" . Simply false. The law denounced the facade when the guarantee of equal protection was added to the Constitution, after the Civil War; with particularity, in the Supreme Court, twenty years later, nearly a century and a half ago.

Though the law itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution.

Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373–74 (1886)

If CRT comes from the law schools, then its originators are obliged to know this. Duty to know, like Thomas Paine said. Ignorance of the law is no defense, least of all in law school. But CRT'ers are not ignorant, they're just liars.