One day in the recent past, prompted by Fox News, millions of old white people woke up and figured out that their grandchildren weren’t like them. They were too touchy-feely, too tolerant of racial minorities and gays, and insufficiently tough and self-reliant. The public schools quite obviously were to blame. Something had to be done.
Ron DeSantis is doing it. He’s banning math textbooks for being too progressive. He’s terrorizing teachers and school districts by subjecting them to vague prohibitions about racism and LGBTQ people. He’s cracking down on tenure in the state universities. He’s trying to turn students into proper reactionaries like himself.
How should the left deal with this? By accusing him of trying to destroy the public school system, which, of course, has been an objective of some elements of the right for decades. Why else would you make teaching more stressful at a time when teachers are leaving the profession in droves?
Teachers, like cops and firemen, are popular with the general public. Attacking the guy who attacks them, particularly in a pandemic, can work.