by James C. Sherlock

This blog is dedicated to tracking, reporting and assessing the political culture of Virginia. Our authors, right, center and left, report and assess individual events.  

But as we track the legislation, executive orders, regulations and rhetoric coming out of Richmond and the rogue actions of every state board the Governor appoints, we cannot but conclude that Virginia, by fair elections, is now run by people who reject the very idea of America. 

They see themselves as counter-culture warriors and the American culture a prison from which they need to provide an escape. They consider themselves uniquely enlightened and are thus utterly intolerant of dissent. 

They have not come to grips with the fact that their mindset opposing everything that made America great now commands the heights of American culture. Conflicting opinions have been banished from colleges, K-12 school faculties, most of the dominant media, government, social networks, executive suites, and the entertainment industry.

The fact that disagreement with their views persists despite that wall of noise frustrates them beyond measure. They believe that it requires further active suppression.

They are loudly and unrelievedly stricken by what they see as America’s fundamental failings and are deploying strategies to deal with them. I offer a few of those strategies for your consideration.

Make radical progressive ideology ubiquitous and mandatory

They are firmly in the camp of the adversary culture, acting in solidarity with activist groups bent on the wholesale transformation of American society. Their primary conceit and therefore strategy is that their concepts of right and wrong must be both all encompassing and mandatory.

Take control of children, teachers and curricula

They reject freedom by enforcing ideological regimentation and conversion strategies starting with the youngest children. Emulating the Chinese Communist Party, they distrust parents — all parents — to properly raise their children as social justice warriors and require the state to intervene from birth. 

Their distrust of parents does not extend to acknowledging and trying to change the social dysfunctions in some homes, including single parent households. The refuse to acknowledge that those home environments result in some of the problems that are exhibited in school that disrupt not only the learning by the children of those homes but entire classrooms.

To address what they see as “unfairness,” the Department of Education combines educational romanticism — the concept that all children are above average — and critical race theory into a poisonous stew that guarantees the frustration of its stated goals and the ultimate destruction of the public education system in Virginia.

They reject every form of traditional discipline used in schools, including the presence of school resource officers, to maintain order, substituting instead negotiations among offenders, teachers and the children hurt by the offenders. They mandate that such negotiations produce positive results and order principals and teachers to reduce minority child discipline outcomes like suspensions and expulsions, but will not let them be referred to as quotas.

They reject merit, equal opportunity, personal agency and science by insisting on equal educational outcomes from children of different intelligence, talents and efforts. They are particularly resentful of Asian-American academic excellence. 

They reject charter schools because those schools, properly conducted, have shown results with minority children that completely disprove the assumptions about how well minority children can succeed under traditional instruction and, thus, disprove the educational policies of the dominant Democrats.

They ban competitive entry into magnet schools and advanced instructional programs because they do not approve of the results of that competition. The Secretary of Education refers to children who work hard to achieve as having the same unfair advantages as athletes who take PEDs.

They transform entire curricula to reflect how they think things were and should be rather than how they were and are.

They require teachers to undergo reeducation camps and parrot critical race theory. They mandate “equity” in teacher ratios to match student demographics, ignoring the fact that that will require replacement of 30,000 white teachers in Virginia with minority teachers in a time when the supply of minority teachers is fast declining nationwide as other opportunities compete for minorities’ attention.

They demand not just acceptance of the LBGTQ agenda but its active promotion. The Department of Education thus crafts a regulation designed to force the schools to attempt, shielded from the knowledge of the parents, to increase the numbers of transgender children in order to validate the choices of others. To accomplish the goal they reject the lack of emotional maturity of children and purposely ignore the psychological, moral and medical complexities associated with such transitions.

Fight “systemic” racism

They reject personal agency by accusing “society” and of course “racism” of responsibility for any outcome they consider morally necessary. In service to those lies, they utterly ignore the extraordinary racial progress America has made.  

Nearly sixty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we have seen decades of affirmative action and spent trillions of dollars on social welfare transfer payments. We twice elected a black president  They ignore those things as inconvenient to the current discussion.  They also ignore the fact that the welfare rules of the Great Society helped destroy the Black family because that serves as evidence that good intentions of the left can create great harm. 

Meanwhile they reject Republican bills, like the health enterprise zones bill targeted to increase access to primary care in minority areas, that has proven hugely successful in Democratic Maryland. It could not be allowed to pass. It was a good idea that would work, did not require active government intervention and was sponsored by a Republican, Delegate and Attorney General candidate Jason Miyares.

Yet they maintain against all that evidence that our society remains captive to white supremacy, by which they mean Republicans still win elections.

Control voting and the judiciary

They are so sure they are right and those opposing them are not just wrong, but evil, that they work to change election laws and the structure of the legal system in an attempt to ensure that they cannot ever lose again either at the ballot box or in court.

Use permanent turmoil to maintain permanent power

Their default position is indignant perception of everything.

So they will always be disappointed in America, even under their new order. Luckily for them, their assumptions and prescriptions are so fundamentally flawed as to ensure permanent frustration.

When they find that many of the laws and regulations they write produce no change in fundamental outcomes or even negative results, they will, indeed can never accept those results as repudiation of their underlying assumptions and beliefs.  

In a combination of disappointment, embarrassment and moral panic, they will cite them rather as evidence that the beast has not been slain and will double down.