‘A war for the minds of our children’ takes center stage

Georgia’s race for governor perfectly captures the degree to which the classroom has become a conservative battleground.

On Sunday, the Republican candidates gathered for their third and final debate before the May 24 primary. Some promoted the lie that Donald Trump had won in 2020 and called for tighter election security (another way of articulating a desire to suppress votes). Several railed against COVID19 mandates (especially masks) and stoked fears of rising crime.

There were the obligatory mentions of the “woke mob” and random mentions of George Soros, but, more than anything else, the supposed indoctrination of children in schools took center stage.

I’m not sure liberals and Democrats fully appreciate the degree to which Republicans are promoting parental rights as a way of wooing back some of the suburban white women who strayed from the party during the Trump years.

Democrats wave their list of policies at voters like a self-satisfied child waves their homework. But instead of being met with praise and stickers, they are met by an electorate in which an alarming number frowns on fact and is electrified by emotions — fear, anger and envy.

There were five candidates onstage during the debate, and four of the five — including the sitting governor, Brian Kemp, and his chief competitor, former Sen. David Perdue — rattled on about classroom indoctrination.

As Kemp put it: “We’re going to make sure we pass a bill that our kids aren’t indoctrinated in the classroom.”

Perdue followed up by going even further: “Right now, the No. 1 thing we can do for our teachers and our parents and most of all our children is to get the woke mob out of our schools in Georgia. I mean, that’s what’s happening right now. We have a war for the minds of our children. When they’re trying to teach first graders about gender choice, that’s the thing that we’ve got to stand up to.”

Another candidate, educator Kandiss Taylor, promised, “We’re going to ensure that boys aren’t in our girls’ bathrooms and girls aren’t in our boys’ bathrooms, and people aren’t being raped. And we’re going to get rid of kindergarten teachers — men with beards and lipstick and high heels — teaching our children. We’re going to get back to being moral in Georgia.”

As a white woman, and mother of three, Taylor is in the demographic that Republicans are trying to attract. But she is also a near-perfect encapsulation of the party’s fringe.

During the debate, she chastised Kemp for not contesting the 2020 results in Georgia, saying: “Donald Trump won. He won. We have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House because Gov. Kemp failed.” The idea that Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running the country is a central belief of QAnon.

The day after the debate, Taylor tweeted a video with a caption that read in part: “I am the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.”

She is endorsed by Mike Lindell, the Trump-supporting MyPillow CEO, and L. Lin Wood, the Trump lawyer who spun ludicrous conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump.

Republicans are more than a year into this parental rights campaign, so I doubt their strategy will be much altered. The question will be whether the oppression of women’s rights will outweigh what the Republicans are pushing: oppression as a parental right.