Talking about politicians not understanding the importance includes all politicians. No Child Left Behind set the groundwork for standardized testing and removing funding from schools that performed poorly.

Republicans in power are constantly gerrymandering districts, lying about statistics they know are wrong like blue states having higher crime, claiming that CRT is being taught in public schools to indoctrinate their kids, punishing students who talk about their sexuality (especially if it’s not heterosexual), ban books, incite insurrections, and they never call out extremist tterrorists for what they are, because they are their own creation. They literally called themselves domestic terrorists to downplay the extremist violence that has come out of their party.

The vast majority of domestic terrorism in the last 30 years comes from the far-right. From Timothy McVeigh, to El Paso.

I think you underestimate the powerful in the GOP. They’re not uneducated. Rupert Murdoch studied philosophy and politics at Oxford and had a bust of Lenin in his dorm. DeSantis graduated magna cum laude from Yale and cum laude from Harvard Law.

These people aren’t dumb, backwater reactionaries. You might think it’s cartoonish, but there’s a reason that so much extreme policies and laws have been spreading through red states. Roe v Wade was a 50 year precedent, and then Alito’s opinion was leaked, something that rarely happens, which led to many states passing trigger laws.

I’m not saying everything is planned out and calculated. But it’s not just a happy accident that more and more right wing politicians have embraced extremism.