CRT is a new name for the Republican hatred of Education

"I love the poorly educated," Donald John Trump, Traitor and Criminal Feb 2016.

Conservatives have been angry over government interference in schools ever since the Federal Government integrated them.  Partly because of thinly veiled anger over non-whites getting the same educational standards as white children.  Now they've seen Glenn Youngkin emerge victorious by running the same playbook Southern Conservatives have always run; demonization of black skin.  Sure he called it CRT but, it's the one and only Eternal Crime in America; Unforgivable Blackness.

Conservatives have always known Won't Someone think of the Children?!?!? is a winning strategy to get white moderates to vote for Republicans.  So, when CRT was brought up as though this was some major conspiracy; white women ran to the arms of their Republican daddies yet again.

One of the worst things about the disingenuous moral panic conservatives have about children and Covid mitigation is how right-wingers take it as an axiom they Own their Children.  Parents' Rights is shorthand for conservatives standing athwart Education yelling 'STOP!'

It's odd how in many states children can get married while still legally juveniles yet, when it comes to vaccination and education southern conservatives are acting as though children are smooth-brained imbeciles unable to comprehend anything. 

Here is Darren Bailey, a southern Illinois Conservative (i.e. a Bigot) running for Governor and running the same school panic playbook in Illinois. 

There's a reason Hillary Rodham Clinton titled her book, It takes a Village, it's adopted from the proverb It takes a village to raise a child, this is a fundamental truth which infuriates right-wingers and another reason they've loathed HRC for 30 years.  Education has always been an obstacle to continuation of the conservative agenda of intolerance and oppression which is why conservatives are so hell bent on controlling everything and keeping their children uneducated and unexposed to "dangerous" ideas and counter-culture.

Conservatives have been furious with local, State, and the Federal Government for educating their children and thus turning them against conservative bigotry for years.   Notice how the conservative freakout didn't end with Masks, but then transitioned to CRT, and moved to LGBTQ issues, stories of the Holocaust.  Look at the number of states, (Oklahoma, Florida, Texas, Utah) proposing laws allowing Parents to sue teachers for teaching their children.  Conservatives won't stop undermining and censoring education because education opens minds and closed minds are what Conservatives desire.

Dopesick; Of The Deserving and The Undeserving

'Deserves' got nothing to do with it... Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven (1992)

Earlier this month I saw another opioid overdose.  It's not first, it won't be the last.   

Certainly it is easy to be hard-hearted and cynical but, it's my duty to myself and to society to not allow such feelings towards the daily deaths make me jaded and uncaring.  To not simply shrug and declare they deserve it.

Opioid induced overdoses have supplanted guns and cars as the biggest killers* in America.  According to CDC data, the United States has suffered 841,000 overdose deaths since 1999, 70% of those are opiate related; 50,000 opioid caused deaths in 2019 alone.

The levels of opiate addiction currently plaguing the US is something we've seen as a Nation in very select few times; i.e. after US Wars.  Those wounded in battle also became addicted to pain medication.  At first due to ignorance of narcotics functioning but now, we've decided to make ourselves victims by empowering the Sackler family and their Cartel Purdue Pharma. 

Watching the Netflix series Dopesick, Michael Stuhlbarg portrays Richard Sackler in a blended pastiche of Hannah Ardent's banality of evil and a wispy voiced Don Corleone.  The series also unflinchingly portrays the Sackler family as the immoral drug dealing kingpins they are; oblivious to anything but money and contemptuous of laws and morality.  The series Dopesick is based on Beth Macy's best-selling 2018 book.

Not everyone agrees with the portrayal of the Sackler family being villains every NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) story on the Sackler's takes great pains to repeatedly mention the Sackler family denies wrongdoing and no member of the family has ever been charged with a crime.  But, it does feel the last few years have changed the narrative and all the ostentatious donations to museums and pitiful donations to fight addiction earn them no credit.  If only the American Justice treated the Sackler family as harshly as it does men selling loose cigarettes on the street.  

In 2015, I watched a film called Heroin Cape Cod.  It was an unflinching look at the drug use.  There were no heroics, no glorious reunifications with the family, no arc of redemption.  By 2015 public health officials had catalogued a tripling of overdose deaths since 1999.  In reality it was most likely an undercount of opiate overdose related deaths.  Since then we had the treasonous criminal Trump in the White House who, of course, ignored it and so the deaths are still being ignored by the Republican Party writ large.

For 50 years, Republicans have linked drug use with criminality.  Worse than that Republicans were quite adamant the drug use was a moral failing and in no uncertain terms those who suffer from addiction are undeserving of care or even the barest compassion.  The Sackler's apparently knew this implicitly or explicitly as they spent decades falsely proclaiming the safety of their narcotics and blaming victims of addiction as criminals.  Conservatives have since Nixon been primed to blame addiction on low character, genetic flaws (i.e. black people), or immoral behavior.

Dualistic thinking dominates the right and all facets of conservative ideology.  There are no shades of gray.  There are no subtleties.  There is no subjective reality.  And more to the point, only their interpretation of objective reality exists and it conforms exactly to rightwing beliefs.  Now there are 3+ generations of conservatives who have steadily and increasingly absorbed rightwing propaganda and can not find grace to treat addiction any other way than those people deserve to die.

Pete Buttigieg points out the Institutional Racism trucked in on the Highway system

 

One of the tools of rightwing liars is to out wait history and then substitute something currently en vogue or palatable to the modern conservative.  Time has been on their side ever since conservatives decided to undo their loss in the Civil War in 1865 via subversion of the United States Government and domestic terrorism.  And they've been right.  Rightwing revisionist history is the dominant idea in numerous historical studies and is the current cause of conservatives pushing to undermine education with the CRT boogeyman.

Thus we have right-wingers and Republicans everywhere attacking Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for correctly pointing out the incredibly racist history of urban sprawl in the 1950's.  Right-wingers know all they have to do is post 'Dumbocrat thinks highways are racist hurr durr durr' and they brain-washed violent mob will immediately believe and swallow their daily rightwing pablum and agitprop.

Secretary Pete was correct in his remarks for New York and it wasn't limited to New York City either.  Anyone who has driven in on the Ike (I-290) into Chicago is struck by the wrong side exits in Oak Park.  This was not an accident or constraints of the land available requiring the left-hand exits.  But a conscious choice to ensure the white drivers would not have to exit on the black side of town.  The Ike and numerous highways across the country were specifically run through black and brown communities.

But, enough time has passed since the 1949 to 1961 construction of the Eisenhower Expressway to afford modern Republicans to lie, ridicule, and obfuscate.

The goal for Republicans is the same as it always has been; to stand astride History and Yell Stop. Conservatives have the Reactionary SCOTUS necessary to undo Lawerence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education.  Conservatives are coming for the 20th century.  Conservatives are coming for every advancement post-Civil War.  If you are scoffing at this, don't.  Conservatives are coming to undo the American Dream and create the Neo-Confederate Nation of oppression, intolerance, and worship of the rich.