The San Francisco Board of Education recall

 While the impending Russian invasion of Ukraine is currently taking up more of our political oxygen, and understandably so, it is worth taking a moment to note what happened in San Francisco.  At least in part because it was San Francisco.  Look, I love San Francisco.  As cities go, it's right up there.  Great food, arts, great weather [as he looks outside at more and more snow].  Sure, I have a particular fondness for Berkeley, which is its own place, separate from the City By The Bay.  Equal?  That would require a few court cases to adjudicate.  Nevertheless, if each has an Amoeba Records...  Anyway, all places have their own kind of crazy.  Where would you rather hang out-- rural Texas, or the Castro District?  Dude, Castro.  I mean, Fidel himself was a psychopath, but the Castro is a way more fun place than some shithole country in a state that can damned-well secede, already.  This is one way to think about places.  Whose crazy do you accept?  Whose crazy drives you crazier?  Texas?  No.  Fuck 'em.  They're the worst.  The absolute worst.  I can deal with San Francisco crazy.

But they're crazy.

So let's take a moment to consider their Board of Education.  You know, those lovely people who voted to rename schools, 'n such, because Lincoln wasn't woke enough?  Fortuitously, I wrote about Stephen L. Carter's alternate history novel last week, and got in some snark about the SF Board of Education, but that was nothing more than serendipity.  This past week, a few of their wackier members were recalled.  What does this mean?

My general comment on off-year elections is that one should not over-interpret them.  They are, by definition, weird.  That applies.  What is striking here would be a few things.  First, recalls tend not to work.  Second, several Board of Education members were recalled by large margins.  In... again, San Francisco.  Can we glean any meaning, then?

The left wants to downplay the SF recalls.  Why?  They don't want any storyline about wokeness-gone-too-far.  Remember, there's no such thing as wokeness, right?  And there's no such thing as a backlash against wokeness, so stop looking at anything that could be construed as a backlash against wokeness!

The right will try to treat it as a symbol and a harbinger for everything.

Personally, what I'd love is NES-quality data to download, and analyze to pick apart the various influences on SF voters' choices, including turnout.  I'd love to know how much of an influence school closures, extended online learning, the Lincoln log-ins, and such had, and then... there's stuff like Alison Collins, herself.

How much have you read about this gem of a human being?  If you get your news from left-wing news sources, not much, I'd bet.  Let's... chat about her.  One way, of course, since I'm just some schlub, shouting into the void, but behold, the glory of Alison Collins, who was recalled from her lofty post at the San Francisco Board of Education.

She... had a twitter account.  As the Mythbusters used to say, "well, there's your problem."  Anyway, she had a heckava twitter rant in 2016, which could have given Donnie-boy himself a run for his money on straight-up, disgusting racism.  Basically, she doesn't like Asian-Americans.  Like, she really doesn't like Asian-Americans.  The tweets have been taken down, so giving you a single link is hard, but this one has most of the good stuff.  Her words:  "They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and 'get ahead.'"  What's she getting at?  Basically, they're studying instead of joining her critical race theory movement.  Oh, wait!  I thought there was no critical race theory in schools!  Oopsies!  Anyway, Collins goes on to call Asian-Americans "the house [n-word]," except that she doesn't say, "n-word."  That's right.  Instead of using the phrase, our warrior for anti-racism just fuckin' says it.  She calls Asian-Americans... that word, with the prefix, "house-."  Yup.

Like I said, gem of a human being.

She's just one example of the far-left wackos who got recalled.

Are we... supposed to pretend that nothing is happening here?  Move along, folks, nothing to see here?

Do I have to explain to you everything that is wrong here?

How about the observation that this is clearly worse than when some white podcaster has a discussion about the word, as a word, and says the word instead of using the phrase, "the n-word?"  I mean, I'm typing "the n-word" instead of typing the sequence of characters, basically because, like Dogen from Lost, I don't like how it tastes on my tongue.  But Collins?  She's using it, as an epithet, directed not even at a person, but rather, at an entire racial/ethnic group!

Holy shit!

And she's doing it for a particularly vile reason.

Alison Collins apologized.  That podcaster y'all claim to hate so much?  Whom y'all claim to think is the worst human ever?  He apologized.  The thing is... Collins was expressing personal, political and racial bile of a kind that makes any apology look unbelievable.  I do not believe her.

And so we turn to the question.  Is Alison Collins just some rando?  Is that still a thing you call a person?  I dunno.

The thing is, this is what ultra-woke critical race theorists sound like when they don't think anyone else is listening.  This is how critical race theory developed.  Some ideological extremists speaking only to each other, with no reality check, drove each other crazier and crazier, until you get stuff like Nikole Hannah-Jones saying that the Revolutionary War was fought to protect slavery from rising abolitionist sentiment in Britain, and being feted for it.  (Yeah.  She wrote that.  Have you actually read the 1619 Project?)

And consider.  Remember the Grievance Studies hoax?  One of the papers that Lindsey, Pluckrose & Boghossian managed to get praised by reviewers proposed that white students be forced to sit in the middle of the room in chains to experience slavery.  Collins is not an aberration.  This is just who they are, when they don't have a national spotlight on them.

When critical race theorists talk only to each other, with no reality check, they say crazy, vile shit, and then they encourage each other, and that positive feedback drives them crazier and crazier.  And they don't even realize they are doing it.

In Alison Collins's head, that stuff sounded sane.  What's more, she thinks she's anti-racist!  She defines herself as anti-racist.  What she says is as racist as anything Trump has ever said, but truly, in her head, she is a warrior for racial justice.

Why do some of us care about critical race theory?  Because this is what critical race theory does.  It turns a person into Alison Collins.  Go.  Read.  She's all about critical race theory.  And this turns into...

Hatred of Asian-Americans.  By accusing them of "white supremacy."

I work in academia.  That means I deal with people like Alison Collins.  There are environments in which that mentality is pervasive.  But the thing is, it's so fucking vile and insane that even in San Francisco, you can't get away with it.

OK, lefties.  Here's your choice.  You can live in denial, and have this stuff keep happening, or you can deal with your shit.  "The culture war" is not a thing that the right creates unilaterally.  I don't know how to dance, so tango metaphors are beyond me, but Alison Collins, however dramatic an example she may be, wrote those tweets herself.  Donald Trump, believe it or not, isn't some great computer genius who hacked her twitter account to write those tweets for her, to create a culture war against which to run.  That said, Collins is the fringiest of the fringe.

So what do you do?  How do you handle your fringe?  Denying its existence won't get you very far.  Most people are functionally illiterate, but they can read a tweet.  That's about the length limit of what they can read, but that's all they need to read to notice how crazy the fringe of the left really is.  Caving to the fringe?  Yeah, bad idea.

What makes Liz Cheney so awesome?  She has the courage and integrity to stand up to the crazy in her own party, on her own side.  She'll lose for it, but she will go down fighting, because she will not stand idly by while her party goes down that road.

School boards are thing right now, and it would be nice if it weren't Alison Collins versus QAnon.

And then I console myself with my data analysis from a few weeks back that the wokestir-teachers aren't accomplishing their goal of raising a woke army.  The wacko conspiracy theorists wouldn't accomplish much either.

Instead, all that is happening is that angry assholes are creating internecine fights.  To hell with Alison Collins, to hell with the wacko right-wing activists.  There's an actual war brewing in Ukraine, and people fight about stupid shit.

JJ Grey & Mofro, "99 Shades of Crazy."  The original is on This River.