Op-Ed: Republicans Must Remember the Lesson of Virginia and Bring the Fight Home
For conservatives and Republicans, the present flare-up in Ukraine has shone a spotlight on the profound foreign policy disagreements within their broader ranks.
From the ultra-hawkish calls for a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone or even the assassination of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin from the likes of Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Sen. Lindsey Graham to the nightly appeals for sobriety and de-escalation from Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the right remains deeply divided on how best to secure the American national interest in the Eastern European theater.
But whatever disagreements presently exist within the fold when it comes to foreign policy, most Republican voters are on the same page when it comes to how the party should confront the left’s destructive cultural agenda.
At a time when the militant left seeks to let men run roughshod over the very notion of femininity and to indoctrinate the younger generation in the civilizational arson that is critical race theory, Republican voters want their party to dive headfirst into the so-called culture war. It is past time for Republican leaders to ditch their misplaced fixation on their dog-eared, cocktail party-friendly supply-side economics playbook and to prudentially shift to a culture war-centric footing.
Consider the current battle in my state, Florida, over the sober and measured Parental Rights in Education law that has been disparaged by a supine corporate media as the nefarious “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
The relevant provision inducing the ginned-up controversy reads, “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Translation: Don’t teach 5- and 6-year-olds about sex stuff.
We have a word for the kind of person who gets hot and bothered about the overarching imperative to teach kindergarteners about the birds and the bees: pervert. Furthermore, to outsource those sensitive conversations to public school bureaucrats amounts to a reckless abdication of one’s parental duties.
But the all-too-predictable reaction from the establishment media was to lambast Gov. Ron DeSantis and his fellow Florida Republicans for their homophobia, transphobia, fascism and whatever other “-phobia” or “-ism” the blue-checked woke now deem in vogue.
The Walt Disney Company, which is headquartered in California but has a famed Florida presence, also had a meltdown.
CEO Bob Chapek declared his opposition to the bill and announced that in the aftermath of Disney’s failure to successfully lobby against its passage, it would suspend all political donations in the Sunshine State. Over the past few days, some Disney employees in Florida have vowed to walk out during their work breaks. The mind truly reels at how passionate some folks seem to be about teaching youngsters about sex.
Amidst the backlash, DeSantis, who has repeatedly demonstrated his understanding of the threat woke capital poses to the American way of life, has remained defiant.
“You have companies, like a Disney, that are going to … criticize parents’ rights. They’re going to criticize the fact that we don’t want transgenderism in kindergarten, in first-grade classrooms,” he said last week. But “first-graders shouldn’t have woke gender ideology imposed in their curriculums.”
DeSantis concluded, “In Florida, our policy’s got to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations.”
Fever-pitch media and corporate hysterics aside, DeSantis’ stance is popular.
A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that Americans support the Florida law by a whopping 16-point margin. Interestingly, that was despite the pollsters’ inclusion of the misleading “Don’t Say Gay” label in their phrasing of the question. A Daily Wire poll on the same question, which did not include the tendentious smear, showed Americans in support of the law by a massive 43-point margin.
By now, these results shouldn’t be surprising: Virginia Republicans swept statewide races in November by embracing the critical race theory issue. CRT, just like gender ideology, offers Republicans the opportunity to support parental rights and cultural sanity against woke overreach and cultural insanity.
Republicans should stop dithering and bring the fight to the core civilizational issues now confronting a confused citizenry. America was not conceived in irredeemable racism, and it is not systemically racist today. Biological sex still matters. Parents should control their own children’s upbringing.
Not only are these commonsense propositions, but they are very popular ones — and embracing them points the way toward a Republican national majority.
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