Robert Bridge
The woke flag may be flying high inside of Democratic headquarters, but in towns and cities across America it looks every bit as ominous as the appearance of a Jolly Roger on the horizon.
The Democratic Party will be tempted to blame their recent crash and burn on the monument to national embarrassment that is Joe Biden, but that would be missing the wider picture, which is that most Americans find woke politics absolutely repulsive.
Just one month ago, few people believed that Republican Glenn Youngkin, a former business executive and newcomer to the political jungle, had any chance of beating Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia's high-stakes race for governor. But then McAuliffe laid his woke cards face up on the table and it was game over.
The revelatory moment came last month during the gubernatorial debate when the candidates were asked how much influence parents should have in their children's education. Before revealing McAuliffe's rather predictable answer (hint: he's a woke liberal), it is important to note that school board meetings are no longer the monotonous cures for insomnia they once were. Rather, they have become major social events where parents confidently take the podium to harangue school officials over the progressive perversities now being taught in the classroom.
It is no secret that the U.S. public school system, in cahoots with powerful advocacy groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Open Society Foundation, has been stealthily incorporating teachings on Critical Race Theory, which postulates, in a nutshell, that white people are inherently and irreconcilably racist. And when schoolchildren are not being warned of the pint-sized supremacists in their midst, they are being instructed on more titillating topics, like how the biological differences between the sexes, undisputed since before Cro-Magnon times, is in fact nothing more than a social construct of our lacking imaginations. So instead of learning proper grammar and sentence structure - glaring signs of racism - students are now focused on knowing the correct pronoun for the approximate 75 varieties of gender out there.
Needless to say, the liberal dream weavers pushed the mindf**kery too far and Loudon County, Virginia exploded into a modern day civil war between Republicans and Democrats. In fact, so great was the backlash against the unabashed educators that the National School Boards Association addressed a letter to Joe Biden where they compared the agitated parents to "a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes." That shows how venal, weak-minded and thin-skinned the limpid left has become: it can't even handle a dressing down by disgruntled soccer moms without calling in the Feds. The response by the establishment was no less pathetic.
Instead of telling the teachers union to grow a proverbial pair and face the music, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland fell into full metal jacket mode, directing the FBI to meet with local law enforcement to determine how to open "lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response." Needless to say, that directive didn't go down well with parents, or with Republican Senator Ted Cruz , especially considering that no acts of violence had been committed.
Here is where Terry McAuliffe put his political ambitions to pasture once and for all. With a degree of tone-deafness typically found only in nursing homes and CNN studios, the gubernatorial wannabe declared at the debates that, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." At this point, Glenn Youngkin could have taken a long swig of Jack Daniels from a brown paper bag on stage and he still would have become governor.
On a cautionary side note, Republicans would be wise not to bank too much on Mr. Youngkin, who seems to be cut from the same pricey cloth as his Euro contemporary across the pond, French President Emmanuel Macron. Both of these relative newcomers to the political stage emerged from the murky world of finance - Youngkin from the Washington-based Carlyle Group, where George H.W. Bush Sr. had once served, impeccably, of course, as a senior advisor; Macron hails from Rothschild & Co. where he was an investment banker. I only mention the connection because my faith in the U.S. election system (and those held abroad) has been shaken to the point where it is difficult to imagine fair and honest elections, but rather shady selections in secret retreats - a bit like Eyes Wide Shut meets The Manchurian Candidate. But I digress.
Let's be clear about something: the small and hugely overpublicized contingency of radical progressives, espousing Cultural Marxist claptrap, has little in common with America; that smack of reality does not seem to have hit the Democratic Party yet only because they have been deluded into believing that Joe Biden's (still unexplained) victory over Donald Trump somehow legitimized their unhinged, un-American ideals. The fact is these people live in some phony facsimile of the country beamed into their living rooms each evening courtesy of the legacy media dinosaurs. Rather than taking their talking points from the detached talking heads of Lemon, Maddow and Cuomo, for example, the Democrats should have paid heed to time-tested political strategists, like James Carville.
In an interview with PBS NewsHour, the 'Ragin' Cajun' nailed it when he blamed McAuliffe's defeat on "stupid wokeness."
"Don't just look at Virginia and New Jersey [where the incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy narrowly defeated his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli]. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington," Carville railed, and not for the first time. "I mean, this 'defund the police' lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln's name off of schools. I mean - people see that."
"Some of these people need to go to a 'woke' detox center or something," he added. "They're expressing a language that people just don't use, and there's backlash and a frustration at that."
The irony here is that the Democrats never stopped talking about how Donald Trump alienated himself from the 'suburban woman' electorate, yet they have gone out of their way to do exactly the same thing with their woke insanity. Instead of trying to appease the progressive prima AOC donnas who have tarnished the Democratic brand name, perhaps irreparably, the Democrats would do well to consider what their radical turn to the left looks like for average Americans -the omnipotent soccer moms and dads. It's easy to wager that for every lewd book that appears on school library shelves, and every new racist slander hurled at innocent folks, to every violent crime committed by a migrant crossing the border illegally, the Democrats lose considerable ground with their base.
The woke flag may be flying high inside of Democratic headquarters, but in towns and cities across America it looks every bit as ominous as the appearance of a Jolly Roger on the horizon. In short, the Democrats must ditch the woke, or they will, invariably, go broke.