You have your National Reviews or the Bulwark or the Dispatch or what have you. But those are the "polite" conservatives who generally socialize with liberal people in the NY/DC axis. They're usually the ones going on about policy.
I also go into the shit. Breitbart, Town Hall, Hot Air, Red State. There's a bunch of blogs I glance into once a week or so where they're just full on Trumpists.
The disconnect is here. On our side, we're seeing, "They don't know what CRT is. CRT is just teaching about racism in history!" (er, it's more complicated than that). You know what their side sees? Stories about that one teacher separating white students from non-whites calling them the oppressors and the oppressed. Stories about HR departments forcing employees into training about internalized white supremacy.
The Right gets a steady diet of this stuff from their chosen forms of media. They see it all the time.
Would those stories get posted here? No. They wouldn't come close to lasting. So when this CRT stuff suddenly arrived, it wasn't sudden. It's been percolating for years now. Trump unleashed it more starkly into the open, but it's been there for quite awhile. Making CRT an educational issue and going after school boards is the Republicans finally finding and seizing on a way to insinuate the narrative they see into a broader part of the electorate by making it just palatable enough to . . . suburbanites and independents. Just like we saw.
"They're coming for your children," taps into a deep, primal fear. The stuff going on in Virginia with Education was barely alighted on here. It was all over the Right. Not just what McAuliffe said, but the Loudon school board covering a sexual assault, to books in a middle school library that were so graphic, TV stations literally wouldn't run campaign ads about them - they were too obscene.
That's what they see everyday. So when people are shocked by this stuff, I just sigh. If we'd just read what the other side is actually doing, actually talking about instead of relying on the extreme examples and the stuff so dumb it defies parody, this stuff wouldn't catch us off guard as it seems to have here.
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