Democrats also losing the war on parents

 Glenn Reynolds:

The parents’ revolution has notched another win.

This week, three members of San Francisco’s Board of Education — Gabriela López, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga — suffered overwhelming defeat in a recall election brought by angry parents who felt they were more concerned with lefty politics than with children’s welfare. The parents’ case was strengthened by the fact that they were, well, right.

Siva Raj, one of the recall organizers, said, “The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable, to put our kids last.”

As COVID raged, the school board paid more attention to renaming schools — it wanted to rename Abraham Lincoln HS because its namesake didn’t show “that black lives ever mattered” to him — than educating kids. Again and again, the board placed woke politics before its actual job. (Collins had even accused Asians of using “white supremacist thinking” to get ahead.)

When parents objected, they were ignored, called racists or worse. And not just in San Francisco. In Loudoun County, Va., teachers and administrators ran a secret group aimed at taking action against parents who opposed their system’s commitment to critical race theory. One of them, school-board member Beth Barts, resigned her position after her role came out. Others face recalls organized by angry parents.

What some have called the “parents’ revolt” is spreading across the country, with parents in numerous other jurisdictions organizing around school-board elections and education policy. (Many more, of course, are quietly voting with their feet, taking their kids to private school or homeschooling rather than submitting to the diktats of woke and incompetent educational authorities.)

They face opposition. It wasn’t just Loudoun County education officials who went after critical parents. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona encouraged the National School Boards Association to ask Attorney General Merrick Garland to declare those parents domestic terrorists. The NSBA sent that letter, and Garland quickly obliged. An FBI whistleblower then reported that the FBI was employing counterterrorism tactics against parent groups nationwide.

After a firestorm of criticism, the NSBA retracted its letter, Garland issued a mealymouthed apology — and the FBI may even have stopped investigating people for peaceful complaints about government policies, though I wouldn’t bet on that.
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No sane person would respond this way, and yet respond this way they do, over and over again. (And every time they do, they label their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., wielding those adjectives like magic curse words, even though they’re pretty much always bogus.)

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The Democrats' response to objections to their policies has been to call opponents names like racist or worse.  That seems to be their go-to response to any opposition to their policy preferences.  Calling your opponents "systemic racists" and telling their kids that they are born "oppressors" is not a way to win friends and influence people.