The Democratic Party is rightly concerned that the overwhelming unpopularity of Critical Race Theory will destroy its chances in the 2022 election. Democrats are therefore trying out various messages to try to stem the tide. This one, from NBC News, is comical, but it is not clear that the Democrats have anything better: “QAnon’s new ‘plan’? Run for school board.”
In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat and the disappearance of the anonymous online account “Q” that once served as QAnon’s inspiration, many people who spout QAnon’s false claims have hatched a new plan: run for school board or local office, spread the gospel of Q, but don’t call it QAnon.
It’s a scene that has played out at other school boards and comes as many local meetings have emerged in recent months as cultural flashpoints in a broader battle over the perceived encroachment of race-conscious education — sometimes separately lumped together under the label critical race theory.
The context for NBC’s “news” story is that conservative groups like mine have been urging local activists to run for their school boards to eject CRT from their communities’ schools. Several such efforts have received national publicity, but there are a great many more normal Americans running for their local school boards to wrest control from far-left activists, usually supported by the teachers’ unions, who advocate the racist, anti-American doctrines of CRT.
Rather than report on that reality, which to say the least is uncomfortable for Democrats, NBC prefers a diversion: the pretense that anti-CRT parents somehow are related to QAnon.
I don’t know anything about QAnon. Of my hundreds of conservative friends, I have encountered only one who professed sympathy with QAnon, which I take it has something to do with child sex abuse. This is unrelated to Critical Race Theory, and has nothing to do with the movement among parents and other concerned citizens to take back control of our public schools from the far left. NBC just wants to smear those activists with the QAnon brush.
A final observation: like other liberal news outlets, NBC does not hesitate to refer to QAnon’s “false claims,” which apparently have forever discredited that group, or movement, or whatever it was. But how about the greatest false claim of our time, the lie, paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian state in the 2016 election? NBC News participated in spreading that lie. Is NBC News now forever discredited? If not, why not? What is the difference? Will NBC News ever acknowledge its false reporting and apologize to President Trump?
Don’t hold your breath. For my part, I put QAnon and NBC News on a par. Both spread bizarre conspiracy theories that turned out to be false. The difference is that for NBC News, there has been no accountability.
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