Impossibly Tedious Lying About Schools

The boring and dull-minded cluster of school policy journalists in California are all taking turns writing the same idiotic story over and over again. Here it is in EdSource:

Here’s another one at the impossibly dull CalMatters. And here’s the latest version from the Los Angeles Times, which used to be a newspaper:

How conservatives are waging a coordinated, anti-LGBTQ+ culture war in California schools

California’s notoriously powerful community of far-right extremists is targeting gay children! They’re waging an anti-LGBTQ+ war! Tragically, the piece in the LA Times is so aggressively paywalled that none of the paywall-removal sites will cough up the full text, and I wouldn’t pay a dime for the LA Times if they gave me a massage and an oceanfront hotel room, so it beats me what the whole thing says. But commenters on woke message boards have cut and pasted the first few paragraphs, so we can begin to get a tantalizing taste of the smorgasbord of strawmen:

The activists have built burgeoning communities around simplified mottos, such as “Leave Our Kids Alone,” which they wear on T-shirts. They also have a large presence on social media, where they demand changes to school policies and state law.

In the process, they have turned normally bureaucratic school board meetings into chaotic flashpoints in the modern American culture wars, with rowdy protests and scattered fights breaking out in places such as Glendale and North Hollywood. Three more-liberal school board members walked out of one meeting, professing fear for their safety. Outside such meetings, right-wing extremists with ties to the Proud Boys have faced off with queer advocates and some far-left counterprotesters.

Loud and on the ground, the traveling activists have had the highest public profile in the debate. But they aren’t acting alone.

Backing them are conservative strategists, think tanks and institutions at the state and national level that have deep pockets, core beliefs that run counter to LGBTQ+ rights and vested interests in energizing Republicans and raising doubts about the effectiveness of public education in the nation’s most populous liberal state.

My goodness, the dangerous extremists are raising doubts about the effectiveness of public education in the nation’s most populous liberal state. About that:

That story is from EdSource, by the way, which warns that the terrifying extremist parents are cruelly raising doubts about California public schools.

But the most obvious point is this one:

Eighty-four percent (84%) of California voters would support a local law that required parents to be notified of any major change in a child’s physical, mental, or emotional health or academic performance, including 66% who would Strongly Support such a law. Only 12% would oppose a law requiring parental notification. 

If such a law included notifying parents of a child identifying, requesting to identify, or being treated as a gender that doesn’t align with their biological sex, 62% of California voters would be more likely to support it, including 46% who would be Much More Likely to support the parental notification law. Twenty-seven percent (27%) would be less likely to support it.

In a deep blue state, overwhelming majorities of voters — and almost certainly even larger majorities of parents — favor policies that the news media is framing as far-right. It’s impossible to overstate how pathetic this is. I said this a little over a month ago, but it needs to be repeated. They won’t stop, not matter how obvious the lie is, and now matter how many times they get caught in it.