Democrats, media continue to misrepresent the parents' rebellion

 Adam B. Coleman:

At the peak of the Critical Race Theory controversy in June of 2021, I was invited to Waukesha, Wisconsin to give a speech in front of a crowd of what was supposed to be a few hundred people about my thoughts on race and CRT in schools. 600 people showed up—double the number the organizers had expected.

This wasn't a Trump rally filled with politically active people; on the contrary, it was a crowd of concerned parents who wanted to learn. They were your middle of the road, working-class Americans who had been witnessing their public-school systems actively work against them, and they wanted to understand why, and what to do about it.

While the event was centered around CRT and the hyper-racialization happening in the surrounding school districts, I quickly found out that their concerns were much bigger than race; they were worried about things they believed their children were being taught about gender and sexual orientation, too. And they were not wrong: Since then, these parents have showed me documentation of school assignments introducing gender ideology and what they see as inappropriate sexual content either given to or made available to their children.

These are normal, middle class parents with reasonable concerns. But to hear the liberal media tell it, upset parents showing up to school districts around the country were simply racists who were there because Fox News created a moral panic about something that isn't happening.
I can tell you first hand how wrong this was, how the media's elitist snobbery overshadowed their journalistic curiosity. Instead of speaking with upset parents, journalists chose to dismiss them again and again—and even worse, they chose to tell them that what they are seeing it isn't really there. The mainstream media apparatus prefers gaslighting instead of investigating, especially when it involves the concerns of working-class people, speaking as if we are too dumb to understand concepts, speaking for us instead of with us and then gaslighting us when step out of line.

And now they are doing it with Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill, which protects children in grades K-3 from education about gender and sexual orientation. But the liberal media, in lockstep with Democratic politicians, smeared the bill as a "don't say gay" bill though those words don't appear anywhere in the legislation.

Behind the CRT outrage, just like behind the Florida bill, is a real story about disgruntled parents. Parents who don't like how public-school systems are implementing curricula they didn't approve of, how they are forcing the masking of their children when they felt it was unnecessary. They don't like discussions of sexuality and gender without the parent's prior notification and the hyperbolic nature with which race is being discussed with their children.

But rather than cover these legitimate concerns, the Left-leaning mainstream media made parental concerns into a partisan political issue, forcing apolitical people to get off the sidelines and choose a side. They assumed this sudden wave of parents shouting down school boards was a Republican-funded operation to manufacture a panic.

Ironically, the media's dismissive behavior toward the working class during the last couple of years has created more non-Democrats than any Republican effort could have accomplished.
...

Coleman is a black author who sees how the left's attacks on parents are backfiring on them. The parents' rebellion became stronger as they found out what the education was teaching as a result of the Covid lockdowns.  They did not like what they saw and liked it even less when they were attacked for raising the issue.