How Do We Win People Back To Our Side?

I want to tie a few stories together from my morning radio show and make an important point.

San Francisco Board of Education

Seth Brenzel is a gay, white dad to a biracial child. A parental advisory council, or PAC, unanimously voted to add Brenzel, but the San Francisco School Board — the one that voted against Washington and Lincoln remaining on schools — rejected him for a lack of diversity. This is from KGO radio.

“Opposition to his approval focused on the fact that he is White and will not provide enough diversity on the council. The council has five empty seats. Brenzel, who's the executive director of a music program for children, is openly gay.

”He lives in San Francisco with his husband and their young daughter. If approved, Brenzel would have been the only man on the council. According to an online transcript, when prompted a representative of the PAC said, ‘The PAC can have up to 15 regular members and three alternates. Currently, we have 10 regular members and no alternates.’ Currently, the parent advisory council has two African American parents, one Asian American parent, three Latinx parents. One Pacific Islander parent and three White parents. Currently, all of those are women.”

“Commissioner Mann Alexander, a new board member, and a former district principal said, ‘I'm probably going to get complaints now, I'm telling White parents not to be involved or something. I want to be clear, that's not what I'm saying. White parents also in the city tend to have a lot of privilege and power and access to the Board of Education in various ways.’ A Brenzel supporter noted he would have been the only man on the council and the only gay person on the council and there's diversity beyond the color of our skin. Another said, ‘Brenzel is overly qualified, if anything, for this position he's ready to serve, you should be grateful for service.’”

”Ultimately, the board rejected Brenzel's nomination and instead asked council representatives to find more candidates for consideration. The same school board voted six to one in January to change 44 school names as historic figures have ties to racism like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

Oakland

Two days ago on my morning show, I spent time on Oakland’s school board, which is right across the San Francisco Bay. In Oakland, they're teaching “ethnomathematics” which espouses that capitalism and individuality are signs of patriarchy and racism. In other words, you don't want to teach your kid how to become rich or think for themselves because that would be bad. They're essentially indoctrinating kids.

Amazon

Amazon has disappeared a book by my buddy, Ryan Anderson from the Heritage Foundation now over at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The book is a well regarded book on transgenderism.

Who among you is going to bully Jeff Bezos into putting the book back? You're not. And are you going to stop buying books from Amazon? Amazon sells 80% of the books in the country, are you going to boycott Amazon? Good luck to you. Good luck with that. There is a solution though.

In San Francisco, the Parent Advisory Council made up of a bunch of women of different skin colors wanted to put a white gay man with a biracial child on the board. And the school board that decided George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are offensive and can't be part of society, they decided that this guy can't be on the Parent Advisory Council.

I tie these stories together because I think conservatives can't fight like the left. I don't think we have the cultural clout or ownership of major cultural institutions to be able to fight against the left. I don't think we can affect cancel culture, because cancel culture is not about the American people choosing to cancel something, it's about institutions choosing to cancel something.

A Fortune 500 company governed by progressives like those who control Disney is more likely to cancel Gina Carano who made a comparison to conservative treatment now to Jews in Nazi Germany but will leave in place a progressive director who advocates throwing Trump supporters in wood chippers. It's a double standard and you've got to acknowledge the double standard.

There a lot of conservatives right now who want to engage the left on the left's terms. I actually think the bulk of the American people are with us. The left has marginalized themselves along coasts in progressive enclaves. They've got progressive enclaves even here in Georgia. They push things in education that do not remotely appeal to middle America or most Americans.

How do we respond? Mock it, laugh at it. What happened to the happy warrior on the right? You don't need to go destroy someone's life. You don't need to be Woke-O Haram.

The bulk of the American people are not politically engaged like you and me. What they see, are a bunch of jackasses on one side and a lot of conservatives who have concluded they too must behave like jackasses. I suggest conservatives not act like jackasses and not conclude nice guys lose. In fact, if you look at November and get past they mythology of the stolen election, it was the jackasses who lost. The voters rejected Donald Trump and wide range of Democrats who supported the insane policies of the left most Americans find contemptible.

How do we respond to the left? Mock and ridicule their policies. Laugh at the fact that in California your kids aren't going to learn two plus two because the school board is afraid they might become capitalists. Capitalism is a good thing. Individualism is a good thing. Laugh at them without acting like them. There's such a temptation now on the right to try to engage in reciprocal cancel culture but I have news for you — you can't do it. You don't have the cultural clout to do it, but you do have the people on your side. So laugh and ridicule the other side, mock them, explain the ridiculousness of their policies, explain the ridiculousness of their lack of logic, explain their lack of science and make it humorous instead of scowling and screaming and pounding your fist and being angry all the time.

There's a large portion of people in this country who are neither really of the left or of the right, but they want to side with the people who they like. They don't like what's happening on the left. If we're going to convert people back to our side, we can't do it with a fist and a scowl on our face. We do it with an open hand and a smile.

Loving your neighbor goes a long way, laughing at the left’s insanity gets us further, and not being a jackass gets us a few steps further with people who vote but are not committed partisans. I think the sooner the right realizes happy warriors win, the sooner we get out of the wilderness and back into power.