Former GOP presidential candidate says woke education policies driving voter enthusiasm

Former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said that parental dissatisfaction with woke education policies, including transgender ideology and critical race theory, were driving GOP voter enthusiasm for the midterm elections.

Appearing on the Monday edition of the "Just the News, No Noise" television show, Bachmann called recent racial and gender-based education policies "breathtaking" and asserted that parents were becoming familiar with woke public school curricula. Host John Solomon had pointed to Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin's surprise victory in 2021 after running, in part, on curtailing political excesses in the state education curriculum. Bachmann asserted that Republicans were poised to capitalize on Youngkin's messaging at the national level.

"[I]t doesn't escape their notice in the culture," she said of parents and grandparents. "And so people are very simple. They say 'not with my kid, you don't.' And they don't want their kid to have pornography put in their face. And they don't want to think that their kid is being taught that maybe they're not a boy, or maybe they're not a girl, because that's going to come home. And the parents are the ones that have to deal with this."

"So this has gone a step too far for most parents," she continued. "And... they're taking a big look at this and saying 'there's one political party that's advancing this weird, bizarre agenda. It's a Democrat Party, the party in power,' and they're saying 'not with my kid... you don't and here's my pitchfork. Where do I sign up?' People are fired up over this issue."

Bachmann, currently the Dean of Regent University's Robertson School of Government, asserted that the educational indoctrination issues in the public system did not stop at the high school level, but were prominent in higher education as well. For her part, she asserted that her school would not go "along with the cultural sludge that's coming through the universities."

"[P]eople need to understand it is really bad at the academic level," she continued. "What's considered strong academics is actually indoctrination coming through from a revolutionary viewpoint. We don't hold to that here at Regent University. So it's very important that parents look very, very closely, very clearly at the school that they're thinking of sending their son or daughter to."