What happens when ostensibly non-partisan institutions enter the culture wars on the side of radical leftwing social justice? They destroy themselves.
Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group.
Note the lie right off the bat. Obviously the NSBA was corrupted and infected with social justice before, but this fall was when they were caught.
Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter. It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of “domestic terrorism” and asked for federal law enforcement intervention.
Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.
In between, conservative think tanks, media, intellectuals, lawmakers, researchers and activists turned what might have been a forgotten mistake into a potentially fatal blow to a group that has for eight decades been a national advocate for public education.
Calling for the federal government to arrest and imprison parents who disagree with your radical leftwing ideology a “forgotten mistake” is some world-class gaslighting, Washington Post.
Note the omission of the word “parents” from that list of critics. Also note omission of the phrase “Critical Race Theory.” It was the attempt to indoctrinate children with CRT and transexual ideology that turned “parents” into “activists.”
It is a perfect illustration of how polarized education has become in the past year — a case study in how activists can shape not just big public policy debates, but also obscure interest groups that most Americans had never given a moment’s consideration.
Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this year’s membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.
“I hope they’ll give us a chance,” John Heim, the newly installed executive director, said in an interview. His goal, he said, is to “rebuild trust” in the association, which critics believe took sides in a partisan debate.
No, they shouldn’t be given another chance. Only an organization that has already been infected with social justice across multiple levels of the organization would think that getting the federal government to label ordinary parents who object to their radical indoctrination as “domestic terrorists” was a remotely acceptable idea, or even a conceivable idea.
In October, the association apologized and promised to conduct a “formal review” of its procedures and said it would announce “specific improvements” to ensure better coordination and consultation with its members, but nothing has been announced and a spokesperson would not say where the group is in this process.
No, vague, sheepish mea culpas are not enough. Everyone involved in the organization from top to bottom needs to lose their jobs and the institution shut down forever and replaced with one that will never make that mistake again. Everyone needs a pink slip.
The leftwing establishment would love if the NSBA were “reformed,” with a few insincere apologizes and a few token changes high in the organization, but their hard-left cadres still in control of the machinery deep in the bowels of the organization.
That’s why the NSBA needs to be completely destroyed. Only when backing social justice over the wishes of parents earns educators a pink slip will the fellow-travelers and weak-clingers fall away so that the real work of eliminating indoctrination and restoring education can begin.
Hard reboot.
No quarter.
(Hat tip: PrairiePundit.)