PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THE STUPID.

Tom Knighton suggests that some self-styled progressives have been a little slow to distance themselves from the most lunatic among them.

Politics isn’t made up of people in little camps. Instead, they exist on a spectrum. Some people are more conservative or libertarian than others and others are more liberal than others.

Few people completely coexist on the exact same point.

In San Francisco, people are pretty liberal. They favor a lot of liberal policies that wouldn’t fly in most of the rest of the state, much less the nation as a whole. However, even for such liberal folks, there’s still a line.

The woke crowd, epitomized in The Squad, doesn’t seem to get that. They expect everyone to hold a particular line or else they might as well have voted for Trump.

Frankly, people get sick of that crap. They’re tired of seeing just how ridiculous the left can get.

They support trans rights but take umbrage at claims that if you don’t want to date a woman with a penis, you’re really a transphobic bastard who should be beaten to death.

They support equality but get kind of tired of being told just how racist they are simply because of the color of their skin.

While they’re clearly on the leftward end of the spectrum, they’re not in danger of falling off unlike some folks, and they’re sick of being denounced for it. They’re sick of seeing debate about renaming schools—even schools named after the man who freed the slaves—rather than getting kids back in classrooms.

That might be, but such people ought still be judged by the company they kept.

Democrats are trying to distance themselves from the woke rhetoric like defunding the police and [critical race theory]. They say they’re not like that and are desperate to make voters aware of that fact.

Personally, though, I can’t help but notice how silent they were on that when it really mattered. They didn’t speak out against defunding police departments or even anti-cop rhetoric. They were silent when people started talking about renaming schools and tearing down statues.

They. Said. Nothing.

Now, they want people to know they’re not the same as The Squad. Frankly, I’m not convinced.

If they had an ounce of principle, they’d have called it out. They didn’t, so I find I lack any sympathy for their plight.

Let's just take names now, and kick the required tails in elections and when it comes to donating to charities and universities.

That could go for Andrew Sullivan as well, who, you might recall suggested that Trig Palin was Bristol's kid.

It is perfectly possible for teachers to teach about sex and be attuned to gender-nonconforming kids, who may be gay or trans or straight — without transforming all of sex ed to comport with critical queer and gender theory, designed to dismantle the concepts of binary sex and biology altogether, and to begin this indoctrination in pre-K.

But this is what the educational elite now believes in. Teaching materials are full of the new and highly nebulous concept of “gender identity,” they are intent on blurring sex differences, and, in truly regressive fashion, they define sex by gender-stereotypical behaviors. If a little boy is playing with dolls, alarm bells go off. If a little girl wants to wear pants, or call herself by a boy’s name, trans ideology now explains it. One of the most basic building blocks in a kid’s education — the distinction between boys and girls — is being undermined.

Is anybody surprised that the denial of coherent beliefs, dressed up in the most recondite of word-noise, gets to a bad place?

What seems undeniable, however, is that many public schools have adopted an understanding of sex and gender that is very new and derived from postmodern theories, all of which seem very weird to normal people, especially outside elite circles.

The imposition of this successor ideology has been hugely controversial among adults. Bringing kids into it was always going to be even more explosive. It’s one thing to be subjected to a struggle session at work; it’s another to find out your kid is having to go through the same.

The reckoning is coming, and Mr Sullivan doesn't like what he sees.

Public schools must not be engines of indoctrination. The Democrats’ refusal to take on their left-extreme — in fact, Biden’s complete capitulation to all of it — is creating a tsunami of opposition. Rightly so.

And this is the underlying force behind a plethora of truly awful bills and laws proliferating in state legislatures, which, in an attempt to prevent this kind of excess, could do a hell of a lot of harm. This is the moment many of us feared: when extremist trans ideology backfires, and takes gay men and lesbians down with it.

I don't recall Mr Sullivan objecting to the proliferation of letters in the reference to the alphabet people, or the continued addition of stripes and shapes to the freak flag.  Let the experiments against reality end.

With any luck, many [culturally conservative education policy] bills may die in committee. I hope they do — or get far clearer in their text. But what they show is that resistance to the woke revolution from above has now spread to parents who see it as a threat to their children. That’s a very powerful force. It may well obliterate the Democrats in November.

That's the company the Democrats have been keeping.  Glenn Elmers is keeping score.  Let them be obliterated.

For almost half a century, the entire American Left, along with many moderate Democrats, were wrong about the Cold War—terribly, inexcusably, shamefully wrong. Yet the Left got away with it because Republicans and conservatives didn’t bother to claim the fruits of victory. From the New York Times suppressing the evidence of Stalin’s mass starvations to Jimmy Carter’s pathetic weakness in the face of Soviet aggression, the whole liberal Democratic establishment was missing in action during one of the greatest struggles between freedom and tyranny in human history. In fact, most liberals, with a very few notable exceptions, not only avoided the fight, they were often on the wrong side—excusing, covering up, and even defending Soviet Communism.

That passage alludes to an argument I raised earlier this week.  This time, we have to recognize the fountainheads of corona tyranny and the Trudeau totalitarian impulses and turf them out.

If we replace Cold War with COVID, we can see that the Left is planning the same gambit. Except this time they are not waiting for the Republicans to let them off the hook. They are already working to shift responsibility, even before the ink is dry on the new script: “We’ve never been at war with Europa; we’ve always been at war with East Asia.” (Whoops, that’s Orwell, not real life. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.) “We’ve never been in favor of lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and mandatory vaccinations. We’ve always been in favor of freedom and prosperity.”

Oh sure, when the spin begins in earnest they will abuse the English language, taking refuge in sly qualifications and quasi-dishonest modifiers. The Democrats, we will be told, did not actually favor “severe” lockdowns, they only supported “reasonable” and “limited” classroom restrictions, they gave mixed messages on masks (Anthony Fauci’s inconsistency will be turned into a virtue!), and they changed their position on vaccines as soon as the Ouija board of establishment science felt the subtle but unmistakable pressure of the midterm polling numbers.

It is better to have chastened incumbents offering to be better, but better still to have challengers who have been, from the beginning, in favor of focused protection for the people most susceptible to a bad experience with the coronavirus, while not soft on crime, not weak on counterterrorism, and not swayed by recondite postmodern word-noise.

In the 1990s, the Left could say they merely misunderstood the Soviet menace. After all, it was Stalin and Brezhnev—not the Democratic Party—who oppressed Eastern Europe and maintained the gulags. In this case, however, the Democrats really have no one else to blame. Although they might shamelessly reverse course on China and the United Nations, even their own base won’t really buy that.

Plus, their behavior with this pandemic was, amazingly, even more disgusting than their useful idiocy in the Cold War. A generation of children has had their lives turned upside down, with schools transformed into virtual prisons. Grandparents on their deathbeds were denied the comfort of seeing their families because “health” required social distancing; and to add grotesquery to grief, even funerals were curtailed. Vast numbers of small businesses were ruined, and whole industries crippled. The overall damage to the economy won’t be fully calculated for some time. The final costs to our physical, civic, and mental health may never be fully known.

Whether it's taking care of business this time, or personal payback, it is time for people who have been so stupid about being smart to be turfed out.