School choice has been a conservative policy going back to the slave system. Parents who were slaves were not allowed to educate their children the way they saw fit. Any slave or non-slave who attempted to provide an academic education to children born into slavery, an education beyond being indoctrinated in the "naturalness" and "morality" of the slave system, going beyond whatever basic labor skills the master required, would be punished for providing that education. The K-12 agenda on the left is pretty much the same thing today. Forget reading, writing and math as they will instead teach children the rightness of Progressive ideology.
Great article! It seems the left has always had the upper hand at utilizing emotions to their advantage...creating hysteria and turning EVERY issue into "emotional soup"...telling everyone how the right only cares about "bottom lines" & making money...and not your feelings & family....
The left always weaponizes language to make bad things sound good. We must counter with a one-two punch: ridiculing jabs and lofty high minded uppercuts for the KO. Here are terms to use: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-coin-a-term
I noticed especially Biden’s recent comment on the trans issue when he used the phrase “almost a sin.” It really struck me that he was moving even into religious territory. I think Christopher has a great point! Let’s use moral/values arguments as we battle identity politics.
“...an ideology based on resentment, revenge, and redistribution...”
Time to start framing “the left” in terms of what they’re really pushing/shoving down our throats, and what the majority of American citizens are completely sick of.
One of the values we need to promote is the dignity of hard work. The newly arrived immigrants, legal or not, have a yearning to work their way up in society. We can win hearts by recognizing and rewarding their success. For the broad population we need to recognize and reward small business success. Republicans should initiate some highly visible programs at local levels and national levels to give awards to the most innovative new businesses, or the most new employees hired.
Intersectional Identity Politics cannot be gamed. It must be rejected. I'm glad you've arrived at that conclusion. Even on the left they descend into purity spirals. Corey Deangelis and you are both onto something big. Keep on fleshing out these policies and pillars and we'll stand with you all the way to the WH and beyond. Blessings
Great article. Democracy depends on the idea the government has a moral consensus. Not only is the reframing effective to our side, but it also allows far more effective cohesion, removing sperging into various policy details and focusing on getting power.
The next step is to develop an effective media apparatus to replace the ossified platforms we currently have. There are way too many lynchpins to erase our moral framing from public discussion, as the cancelling of Alex Jones shows.
The left definitely snookers Republicans by manipulating language. Case in point: Social Emotional Learning. Thank you for addressing this!
I have the utmost respect and appreciation for your work and I rarely disagree with you. But, as one of the activist "white suburban moms" criticized a few years ago by Arne Duncan, my perspective on school choice is long-range, well-informed, and consequently, somewhat skeptical. The law of unintended consequences is in full bloom. Please hear me out.
I've been watching this closely for too many years, and have seen too many nuances in the implementation & definition, to believe that school choice is the silver bullet your colleague and his employer Betsy DeVos would have us believe. It's NOT just better use of language that is fueling the rush to school choice. For starters, it's more money.
DeVos's foundation also funded and promoted the Common Core movement and scuttled the efforts of Michigan parents who tried to end it in her home state. So DeVos, her foundation, and its lobbyists have not acted in good faith with regard to the impact of her educational agendas on families. They have acted as the adversaries of parents and have not even tried to earn trust. They just rolled over parents in pursuit of their agenda. And as operators of charter schools, they are not exactly objective participants in the school choice discussion. They are throwing money at school choice.
To actually fix the schools, we have to start by removing the Federal control that was codified into federal statute, via ESSA. We have to get rid of the unvalidated and demonstrably low quality "college and career-ready" Common Core 'standards' that have led to the stagnation and then falling NAEP scores. (The pandemic conveniently gets the blame for this, but the real culprit is 10 years of Common Core! Check the numbers, the slide started long before covid!)
And we have to stop the intrusive data-mining of our children and get back to teaching students, not test scores & data points. What good is school choice when EVERY choice is using Common Core-aligned tech platforms and materials (books also went away with CC). It just moves kids to another location to get a lousy common education.
School choice proponents like to cite free market competition, as the key to fixing schools. But this is a false premise, because public schools are NOT remotely 'free.' They are among the most regulated entities in existence! Free market competition is not possible. Nor would that be a good educational model to pursue, for one seeking quality, classical education, and not just the job training that is being pushed as workforce development.
The ill-defined school choice movement has a lot of support from leftist educrats. And a lot of funding from rich and powerful profiteers of every political stripe.
To your point, in the case of school choice, it is not just a better use of language that is helping school choice gain momentum, it is MORE MONEY and more earned media, because of other education issues that school choice profiteers are able to co-opt, and convince people 'choice' will solve. When in actuality, it won't. It's a bandwagon issue.
But a lot of parents who are new to the battle, don't know the long history of education reform, and have not connected the dots to see that school choice is just a way to funnel federal funds - through parents - into private, parochial, and even home schools, to ultimately give the feds TOTAL CONTROL over education. And that would be a win for the Dems.
So - pleeease do not say "color blind" but use the far more powerful "nondiscriminatory"
And the phrase I would like to see replace "woke" is "hateful abasement" or "abasementist". A lot of the woke rhetoric truly does serve to abase White Americans. Never say, "I am not racist." Rather say, "please do not abase my race with a rash accusation."
This is very insightful. Our power rests individually and collectively in the truth. I think we've settled for the individual, considering the moral argument unappealing to the general public. We've seen that it is fundamental.
Great work Chris. We need to dispense with the word salads and stop tip-toeing around "harmful" and "hurtful" words and start calling things like they are. One good place to start is calling wokeness etc. a mental illness or psychiatric condition. Once we've done that we need to try and steer education, politics and general society back to reality.
Can't get eggs from a roster and cant get milk from a bull. Can't identify as a millionaire and try to withdraw cash from a bank. Simple.
The fear of cancellation is overrated and those that have pushed back were successful. As I've said before, once they label everything racist, then nothing will be. This is the year they're unmasked for the manipulative opportunists they are. Keep grinding Chris, slow and steady wins this race.
Excellent and encouraging post. One observation I've had along these lines is that the most successful pushback against transgender nonsense seems to be the "erasing women" angle and focusing on how much harm it does to young girls, exemplified by very young female de-transitioners like Chloe Cole. From a logical perspective, the simple fact that men are not women should be more than enough to defeat transgender garbage, but unfortunately human beings are wired to prioritize social concerns over objective truth. Many people are quite happy to buy into lies if they believe that the lies make other people feel better. Making them face an eighteen year old girl who has lost her breasts forever, not to mention precious years of her teenage development, is much more effective at breaking through that kind of thinking compared to simply pointing out the untruth of the belief.
Mar 23, 2023·edited Mar 23, 2023Liked by Christopher F. Rufo
Very insightful. Have you seen the recent info - see Jonathan Haidt on substack for a discussion, that the pop. group with the most mental health issues are very liberal White women. No wonder, if they accept the notion that their own race is universally morally flawed. Wow, gee willikers, that would be plumb crazy makin'.
School choice has been a conservative policy going back to the slave system. Parents who were slaves were not allowed to educate their children the way they saw fit. Any slave or non-slave who attempted to provide an academic education to children born into slavery, an education beyond being indoctrinated in the "naturalness" and "morality" of the slave system, going beyond whatever basic labor skills the master required, would be punished for providing that education. The K-12 agenda on the left is pretty much the same thing today. Forget reading, writing and math as they will instead teach children the rightness of Progressive ideology.
Great article! It seems the left has always had the upper hand at utilizing emotions to their advantage...creating hysteria and turning EVERY issue into "emotional soup"...telling everyone how the right only cares about "bottom lines" & making money...and not your feelings & family....
Time for us to turn that frown...upside down!!!😊
The left always weaponizes language to make bad things sound good. We must counter with a one-two punch: ridiculing jabs and lofty high minded uppercuts for the KO. Here are terms to use: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-coin-a-term
I noticed especially Biden’s recent comment on the trans issue when he used the phrase “almost a sin.” It really struck me that he was moving even into religious territory. I think Christopher has a great point! Let’s use moral/values arguments as we battle identity politics.
“...an ideology based on resentment, revenge, and redistribution...”
Time to start framing “the left” in terms of what they’re really pushing/shoving down our throats, and what the majority of American citizens are completely sick of.
One of the values we need to promote is the dignity of hard work. The newly arrived immigrants, legal or not, have a yearning to work their way up in society. We can win hearts by recognizing and rewarding their success. For the broad population we need to recognize and reward small business success. Republicans should initiate some highly visible programs at local levels and national levels to give awards to the most innovative new businesses, or the most new employees hired.
Intersectional Identity Politics cannot be gamed. It must be rejected. I'm glad you've arrived at that conclusion. Even on the left they descend into purity spirals. Corey Deangelis and you are both onto something big. Keep on fleshing out these policies and pillars and we'll stand with you all the way to the WH and beyond. Blessings
Great article. Democracy depends on the idea the government has a moral consensus. Not only is the reframing effective to our side, but it also allows far more effective cohesion, removing sperging into various policy details and focusing on getting power.
The next step is to develop an effective media apparatus to replace the ossified platforms we currently have. There are way too many lynchpins to erase our moral framing from public discussion, as the cancelling of Alex Jones shows.
The left definitely snookers Republicans by manipulating language. Case in point: Social Emotional Learning. Thank you for addressing this!
I have the utmost respect and appreciation for your work and I rarely disagree with you. But, as one of the activist "white suburban moms" criticized a few years ago by Arne Duncan, my perspective on school choice is long-range, well-informed, and consequently, somewhat skeptical. The law of unintended consequences is in full bloom. Please hear me out.
I've been watching this closely for too many years, and have seen too many nuances in the implementation & definition, to believe that school choice is the silver bullet your colleague and his employer Betsy DeVos would have us believe. It's NOT just better use of language that is fueling the rush to school choice. For starters, it's more money.
DeVos's foundation also funded and promoted the Common Core movement and scuttled the efforts of Michigan parents who tried to end it in her home state. So DeVos, her foundation, and its lobbyists have not acted in good faith with regard to the impact of her educational agendas on families. They have acted as the adversaries of parents and have not even tried to earn trust. They just rolled over parents in pursuit of their agenda. And as operators of charter schools, they are not exactly objective participants in the school choice discussion. They are throwing money at school choice.
To actually fix the schools, we have to start by removing the Federal control that was codified into federal statute, via ESSA. We have to get rid of the unvalidated and demonstrably low quality "college and career-ready" Common Core 'standards' that have led to the stagnation and then falling NAEP scores. (The pandemic conveniently gets the blame for this, but the real culprit is 10 years of Common Core! Check the numbers, the slide started long before covid!)
And we have to stop the intrusive data-mining of our children and get back to teaching students, not test scores & data points. What good is school choice when EVERY choice is using Common Core-aligned tech platforms and materials (books also went away with CC). It just moves kids to another location to get a lousy common education.
School choice proponents like to cite free market competition, as the key to fixing schools. But this is a false premise, because public schools are NOT remotely 'free.' They are among the most regulated entities in existence! Free market competition is not possible. Nor would that be a good educational model to pursue, for one seeking quality, classical education, and not just the job training that is being pushed as workforce development.
The ill-defined school choice movement has a lot of support from leftist educrats. And a lot of funding from rich and powerful profiteers of every political stripe.
To your point, in the case of school choice, it is not just a better use of language that is helping school choice gain momentum, it is MORE MONEY and more earned media, because of other education issues that school choice profiteers are able to co-opt, and convince people 'choice' will solve. When in actuality, it won't. It's a bandwagon issue.
But a lot of parents who are new to the battle, don't know the long history of education reform, and have not connected the dots to see that school choice is just a way to funnel federal funds - through parents - into private, parochial, and even home schools, to ultimately give the feds TOTAL CONTROL over education. And that would be a win for the Dems.
So - pleeease do not say "color blind" but use the far more powerful "nondiscriminatory"
And the phrase I would like to see replace "woke" is "hateful abasement" or "abasementist". A lot of the woke rhetoric truly does serve to abase White Americans. Never say, "I am not racist." Rather say, "please do not abase my race with a rash accusation."
This is very insightful. Our power rests individually and collectively in the truth. I think we've settled for the individual, considering the moral argument unappealing to the general public. We've seen that it is fundamental.
Great work Chris. We need to dispense with the word salads and stop tip-toeing around "harmful" and "hurtful" words and start calling things like they are. One good place to start is calling wokeness etc. a mental illness or psychiatric condition. Once we've done that we need to try and steer education, politics and general society back to reality.
Can't get eggs from a roster and cant get milk from a bull. Can't identify as a millionaire and try to withdraw cash from a bank. Simple.
The fear of cancellation is overrated and those that have pushed back were successful. As I've said before, once they label everything racist, then nothing will be. This is the year they're unmasked for the manipulative opportunists they are. Keep grinding Chris, slow and steady wins this race.
Well said Mr Rufo!
Excellent and encouraging post. One observation I've had along these lines is that the most successful pushback against transgender nonsense seems to be the "erasing women" angle and focusing on how much harm it does to young girls, exemplified by very young female de-transitioners like Chloe Cole. From a logical perspective, the simple fact that men are not women should be more than enough to defeat transgender garbage, but unfortunately human beings are wired to prioritize social concerns over objective truth. Many people are quite happy to buy into lies if they believe that the lies make other people feel better. Making them face an eighteen year old girl who has lost her breasts forever, not to mention precious years of her teenage development, is much more effective at breaking through that kind of thinking compared to simply pointing out the untruth of the belief.
Very insightful. Have you seen the recent info - see Jonathan Haidt on substack for a discussion, that the pop. group with the most mental health issues are very liberal White women. No wonder, if they accept the notion that their own race is universally morally flawed. Wow, gee willikers, that would be plumb crazy makin'.
I meant this as a reply to Sandra.
Sorry about the poor selling (above)