@gjohnsit Taibbi's saying just what I'm saying (in his own way).

The war over “Critical Race Theory” in this sense has become a political marketing campaign that’s uniquely double-edged in its cynicism. Democrats are pretending they don’t know what the fuss is all about. Republicans are pretending there isn’t a dog whistle in their backlash campaign. At the center of it all is the concept itself, which does exist but is much broader, and both more interesting and more frightening, than the narrow race theory that has Republican politicians in maximum wig-out mode.

Two years ago, writer Wesley Yang penned a series of tweets about the “new language of power throughout the non-profit sphere,” giving it a name: the “Successor Ideology.” The author of The Souls of Yellow Folk created an umbrella term to explain everything from whatever the hideous moniker “cancel culture” means to purges of classics and STEM disciplines in universities, to the new move toward segregated “affinity spaces,” to “intent doesn’t matter,” to the spread of workforce training sessions that ask white employees in both the public and private sectors to focus on things like “undoing your own whiteness,” to a dozen other things...

...The movement Yang describes is strategically brilliant and substantively moronic, a perfect intellectual killing machine. The Successor Ideology has blown through institutional America with great speed, coming to dominate everything from academia to the news media to Silicon Valley almost overnight.

The fact that GOP adversaries are totally missing the mark is sad, but hardly surprising.

If they really wanted to take the wind out of its sails, they should try vocally supporting it, like that South Park episode where Uncle Jimbo talks the KKK into supporting Chef's bid to change the city flag (couldn't find a good YouTube clip, somehow - this site really needs to start being made compatible with more/other video platforms).

#5.1.1 I looked up what Matt Taibbi wrote and found this:

Getting back to CNN’s story about the “panic” that “has White people afraid”: Republican politicians, mostly at the state level, are in the midst of an all-out, hair-on-fire campaign against “Critical Race Theory,” with legislators in 24 states attempting to introduce bans of its teaching. It’s become the main front in the culture war, and the Republican Party — which for decades now hasn’t yet met a political opportunity it can’t find a way to fuck up — is losing. Even a perfunctory glance at laws passed in Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, Idaho and Texas reveal they’re making a mess of a response to a phenomenon they don’t understand.

Take the Texas law. In what’s supposedly an effort to fight a movement hostile to speech rights and rife with irrational orthodoxies, the Lone Star State is responding with dumber versions of the same thing. Their law includes broad mandates against “being compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy,” while also requiring teachers to present controversies “without giving deference to any one perspective.” Nearly all the Republican laws share this quality of imposing draconian bans on what they perceive to be elements of CRT, without really defining what CRT is. They don’t know what they’re fighting, so their solutions look like insane overreactions — like smashing at a water bug with a hammer and missing over and over.