LOL: The Republican [sic] Culture War Is Reaching New Heights In VA

Sidney Blumenthal...so...consider the source.

   The culture war--which I agree we're in--is a war in which the left is the aggressor. They're aiming for radical, antiliberal, antirational reengineering of the culture. In fact, the left has so lost its mind that surrendering to their cultural initiatives would constitute more destruction than reshaping. We have no alternative to fighting.
   It probably goes without saying that the left's favorite new nonexistence claim makes an appearance: CRT doesn't exist in VA schools! It's a total myth! 

   Soon enough, Youngkin waded into the murky waters of racial politics. He offered himself as the defender of schoolchildren from the menace of critical race theory, even though the abstruse legal doctrine is not taught in any Virginia public school. [Note: lie.]
   Yet he suggested that his opponent, former governor Terry McAuliffe, would impose its creed on innocent minds, depriving parents of control. “On day one, I will ban critical race theory in our schools,” Youngkin has pledged.
   But his brandishing of critical race theory, nonexistent in the schools’ curriculum [note: lie]  has been apparently insufficiently frightening to finish the job. Perhaps not enough people know what the theory is at all. He needed one more push, searched for one more issue and produced one more ad.
   So, Youngkin seized upon a novel racial symbol, in fact a novel. The danger, he claimed, comes from Beloved by Toni Morrison – the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, about the psychological toll and loss of slavery, especially its sexual abuse, and considered one of the most important American literary works.

The nonexistence argument is one of their two favorite arguments about CRT--the other being: it is literally impossible to teach kids anything at all without teaching them CRT.

   Followed closely by: none of you Neanderthal bigots understand what CRT even is.

   Which is pretty hilarious because parents and people on the right actually brought themselves up to speed on that nonsense pretty quickly. The left, however, seems to barely understand its own dogma.  Of course neither side understands CRT that well, because it's a giant pile of bullshit that has no place in K-12, and no sensible person spends a bunch of time thinking about such nonsense. It's such a peripheral, BS, fourth-string theory that I'm not sure I ever heard it mentioned in my entire time in philosophy graduate school. 

   Blumenthal's another Clinton toady, so it's not surprising that he's defending McAuliffe.

    [end ad hominem]

   Anyway: as for busting on Beloved--that does, in fact, seem nuts. I've not read the book, and it's not high on my list, so I can't and probably won't be able to speak to the controversial scenes specifically. But we're apparently talking about a good and difficult book--it's not like it's pr0n or anything. The scenes are obviously supposed to be horrible. Hard for me to imagine that Youngkin isn't pulling some bullshit here, and playing with fire. There's really nothing he can do about Beloved. Nobody's going to let him remove it from school libraries. He shouldn't even be suggesting that it ought to be done--but it's simply not going to happen. [All he's apparently saying is that parents should have a say in whether their kids participate in such assignments. I don't think that's an unreasonable view.]

   OTOH, getting CRT out of VA K-12 is fairly important, and might happen--though I doubt that it will. There's basically no chance that it would be taught objectively, and it's not objectively important. Currently, it undoubtedly shows up as it did in "DEI" "training" at my own university: as indoctrination--nutty, highly-politicized opinion taught as if it were knowledge. Of course it's now, in fact, important because the Dems are pushing it in every institution. So it'd be great if people knew about objections to it. But, again, that's never going to happen in a million years. Our real options are: (a) kids continue to get indoctrinated with a pseudoscientific, irrationalist theory way outside the bounds of what ordinarily gets taught in K-12 and (b) we keep it out entirely. Though, in fact, only (a) is really going to happen. A serious effort to achieve (b) would fail at high cost. But it's worth a try.