Some continue to insist that the anger and protective instincts were based on a fallacy, namely, that no one is teaching critical race theory in schools. The women are being called racists, in some ways directly and in others more implicit, as when the elite intelligentsia complain about “dog whistles” and failed gubernatorial candidates scream that voters are “better than that!” And then you have cable news commentators who accuse the “white Republican women” of hiding percale sheets under their workout suits. Then there are the attempts to gaslight us into believing that a book about sodomy isn’t about sodomy, it’s just about youthful exploration (namely, a middle-aged man exploring the genitalia of a teenage boy). And to top it all off, as I’ve written about in a previous column, we have the Department of Justice poised to treat these women as domestic terrorists at the behest of triggered school board members. The fact that our Attorney General refused to acknowledge the radical departure from sanity and legal precedent that this represented is proof positive that progressives have lost whatever is left of their collective minds. (It’s also a confirmation of the fact that we surely dodged a bullet when Mitch McConnell kept “moderate” Merrick Garland off of the Supreme Court).

Whenever someone tries to peddle the idea that critical race theory is a law school pedagogy, my first reaction is that it wasn’t on the curriculum at Villanova circa 1984-1987 when I attended. But more importantly, I get really angry at the attempt on the part of my interlocutor to play me for a fool, a simpleton who doesn’t understand that CRT is more dangerous than any single subject. It’s a way of teaching based on the premise that everything and everyone is motivated by race, and history/literature/politics/math/science and whatever else is on the academic menu must be viewed and presented through that threshold lens. It’s a distortion, toxic and dishonest and deeply divisive, of the world we inhabit.

And if I get enraged at this attempt to school me in CRT, I can just barely imagine how a mother who has one or more children vulnerable to this tainted attempt at indoctrination must feel. These lionesses sense the threat, and crouch, ready to attack.