When David Brooks, token-center-right-teacup-poodle of the New York Times, attempted to write a sob-sister opinion piece on the horror of class divide, he ventured into unwitting irony with an anecdote about fear-inducing gourmet sandwiches and a high school grad.

The ensuing mockery was epic.

However, professional Feminist and Leftwing scold, Jill Filipovic, couldn’t resist an opportunity to engage in her usual brand of straining at imaginary right-wing gnats but ignoring the donkeys in her cup by blaming all the sins Brooks sobbed over on Brooks and, natch, the GOP.

But where Brooks (and many of the other commentators on the much-discussed class divide) gets it wrong is in blaming liberals and progressive coastal culture (sopressata sandwiches, fuel-efficient cars) instead of the cultural resentments and impediments (lack of well-funded public schools, zero paid parental leave) built and bred by the GOP. It’s not Italian cured meats keeping the wealthy and privileged in their gilded position. It’s policy.

The 2016 election brought with it a series of disturbing and frightening consequences. One of the sadder ones: Education is now a partisan issue.

What policy, Jill? Be specific. Inquiring minds would like to know how the fact that the US spends an average of $11K a year on student spending (a tie for 1st place with Switzerland) and that there has never been “paid parental leave” why it would be the radical Leftwing’s march through education since the mid-1960’s has had no effect on education, but a six-month old administration has?

Let me risk a few rolled eyes and insert my own anecdote here. As an admitted “get-off-my-lawn” old lady and Baby Boomer, I attended public schools in the bad old days of the late 1950s through early 70s. Growing up in the north end of the San Fernando Valley (the red-headed stepchild of the city of Los Angeles) filled with post-WWII tract homes, public school was where students went to learn reading, writing, math, history, civics, geography and citizenship. We also had time for art, music, home ec, shop and even FFA. My fellow students ran the gamut of 1st generation immigrants to the sons and daughters of actors and directors of the entertainment industry just over the Sepulveda pass. This rarely mattered because on the playground we were free to play as we saw fit and in the classroom the focus was on our studies, which were framed as important to us all as American citizens, not as our membership in a “group identity” of family, melanin, class or heritage.

Teachers didn’t sugar coat that America had serious flaws (I was 9 when JFK was assassinated and 11 years old at the time of the Watts Riot, watching the coverage on our black-and-white tv, worried about my dad making it home since he worked in LA) but they rarely failed to impress upon us that we shouldn’t make perfect the enemy of the good, and we needed work on ourselves first before presuming to work on others.

Yet by the time I left high school, I started to see the sea-change — the idea that America was really the worst of the worst was actively promoted and the Balkinization of society, by design not accident, was eagerly sought.

When Jill channels Brooks’ own projection with a series of risible assertions …

… it’s often a symptom of an extreme religious ideology hell-bent on bringing society back centuries — think Boko Haram in Nigeria or the Taliban in Afghanistan.

… the strategy of the GOP has for decades been to degrade the American public education system through funding cuts and funneling of resources toward privatized education.

…At the same time, they’ve perpetuated lies about climate change and undermined public trust in science and objective fact.

…On the culture side, they’ve tied education to liberalism — not unfairly, since the highly educated do tend to be more liberal — and portrayed the educated as elitists who are out of touch with authentic American values

… it’s clear after 50 years of Blame America First the Left is desperate now that its shibboleths have even been mildly challenged.

We even have Jill trying to conflate Leftism with liberalism – yet as we’ve seen at Claremont McKenna, Evergreen and other colleges, these campuses are decidedly il-liberal in their hostility to any dissent from the Leftwing orthodoxy.

The fact remains public education has degraded itself and the anti-parental-choice Leftists are less interested in increasing student knowledge and skills than in indoctrinating students into a “social justice” dogma where everything is viewed through the lens of “Race/Sex/Class” and individualism, let alone dissent, will not be tolerated.

It is certainly not partisan that parents are hesitant to fork over $15,000/yr. in tuition to a Leftwing seminary regardless of who is in the White House.

Ignoring that education funding has never gone down, Jill fails to explain how yanking yet more wealth from American earners and transferring it students to enable them to spend four-to-eight years working on free!! Anger Studies degrees will solve the class divide and get those deplorables-of-pallor and their uncle tom peers to shape up or else.

Exactly who is acting like Boko Harem here?

Jill is a good, little Stalinist – denouncing the kulaks and blaming them for the consequences of Leftist dogma.

But hey, when one looks to BigDaddyProgressiveGovernment as one’s God/Parent/Spouse, then defending it at the expense of the individual right of your neighbor to say “no”, excuses all dishonesty.

And “dishonest” is the mildest of descriptions for Filipovic’s enemy-of-the-state rant.

Heck of a job, Jill.