We could have told you this before San Francisco’s school board recall election, but it turns out that liberals love their children too.
No, they are not just ideological automatons hell-bent on carrying water for teachers unions, whose candidates they just unceremoniously threw out of office. Many of them, as parents, actually have something at stake when it comes to the next generation.
San Franciscans are obviously not conservative by reputation, to put it mildly. Yet during the pandemic, they endured far more abuse from big government idiocy than even the most hardened liberal can take. This is why more than 70% of them voted to throw out all three far-left members of their school board, with one of them nearly getting 80% in favor of her recall.
Although these three board members were not the only offenders, they found themselves in the line of fire because they focused the board’s attention on a massive politically correct project of renaming one-third of the city’s still-closed schools while completely ignoring the far more pressing project of reopening those very schools. Indeed, their push to rename closed schools (which was criticized for its historical illiteracy and not just its political correctness) made them look so stupid that Mayor London Breed didn’t even have to break a sweat in order to turn public opinion against them when she endorsed their recall in November.
The school board president, Gabriela Lopez, responded to Breed’s call for open schools by accusing the mayor of taking “any opportunity to cause further division.” As of Wednesday, the share of voters opting to recall Lopez stood at 75% — so for all her faults, at least Lopez helped foster a point of civic unity.
Another part of this recall campaign was part of a national theme — the ever-louder undertone of woke-progressive racism against Asians. Just as leftist university administrators now openly justify racial discrimination against Asians in the name of so-called equity, these ousted school board members attempted to abolish the city’s only merit-based admissions high school because too many Asian students were being admitted to it. One of the recalled board members, Alison Collins, had also used racial epithets on Twitter to refer to Asians. Collins won the distinction of garnering the most votes in favor of her recall, with Chinatown voters leading the way in terms of turnout and share of votes in favor of the recall.
This typical left-wing antipathy toward Asians confirms a pattern by which they are being targeted — not because of white supremacy or anything like it but because of their perceived success as a group. The far Left preaches from the rooftops, as part of its embrace of critical race theory, that success in an inherently white supremacist nation such as the United States is itself a sin worthy of collective retaliation. Therefore, successful groups become fair game — whites, of course, but now Asians too — and pretty soon, Hispanics of one nationality or another will face a similar fate.
Breed, who is suitably liberal for her city but not woke to the point of brain damage, will now appoint replacements for the three recalled board members. We do not expect her to choose conservatives — this is San Francisco, after all. But that isn’t the point. This recall was not about simple political ideology, or it never would have worked. This was about a toxic level of wokeness and an embrace of ahistorical ignorance that not even the most liberal city in America could tolerate.
All in all, this is a moment to celebrate. There may not be as much separating Americans ideologically as everybody says.
And the basic idea that school boards exist in order to facilitate children’s education, not to rename buildings in order to assuage adults’ guilty feelings about history, is not revolutionary anywhere — not even in San Francisco.
