Adam Coleman writes for Newsweek about one consequence of Democrats’ attack on middle-class values.
At the peak of the Critical Race Theory controversy in June of 2021, I was invited to Waukesha, Wisconsin to give a speech in front of a crowd of what was supposed to be a few hundred people about my thoughts on race and CRT in schools. 600 people showed up—double the number the organizers had expected.
This wasn’t a Trump rally filled with politically active people; on the contrary, it was a crowd of concerned parents who wanted to learn. They were your middle of the road, working-class Americans who had been witnessing their public-school systems actively work against them, and they wanted to understand why, and what to do about it.
While the event was centered around CRT and the hyper-racialization happening in the surrounding school districts, I quickly found out that their concerns were much bigger than race; they were worried about things they believed their children were being taught about gender and sexual orientation, too. And they were not wrong: Since then, these parents have showed me documentation of school assignments introducing gender ideology and what they see as inappropriate sexual content either given to or made available to their children.
These are normal, middle class parents with reasonable concerns. But to hear the liberal media tell it, upset parents showing up to school districts around the country were simply racists who were there because Fox News created a moral panic about something that isn’t happening.
I can tell you firsthand how wrong this was, how the media’s elitist snobbery overshadowed their journalistic curiosity. Instead of speaking with upset parents, journalists chose to dismiss them again and again—and even worse, they chose to tell them that what they are seeing it isn’t really there. The mainstream media apparatus prefers gaslighting instead of investigating, especially when it involves the concerns of working-class people, speaking as if we are too dumb to understand concepts, speaking for us instead of with us and then gaslighting us when step out of line.
