Vicki Reece, founder of Joy of Mom, an online community of 2.3 million which seeks to empower and support women in their most significant journey - motherhood - gave us this memorable quote:

“Every mom has a mission. To love, guide and protect her family. Don’t mess with her while she’s on it.”

Three progressive members of the San Francisco school board could have used that advice before embarking on a doomed quest last year to rename 44 public schools in the district, including one for Abraham Lincoln, who emancipated the slaves in 1862. Angry parents wondered why the board members would waste time renaming schools when there were pressing issues like overreaching COVID restrictions or addressing a $125 million budget deficit in their schools.

It was a classic case of woke liberals “fiddling while Rome burns.”

Last week, voters showed they had had enough with progressive policies and voted to recall the trio. The ouster sent shock waves through the Democratic Party. A liberal bastion, San Francisco voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the last presidential election, 85.3% to 12.7%.

One of the deposed members, Alison Collins, first came under fire for comments she wrote in 2016 that Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward black students. Collins said the tweets were taken out of context and posted before she held her school board position. She refused to take them down or apologize for the wording and ignored calls from parents at that time to resign.

“The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last,” said Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort. “Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.”

“As Republicans, we’re fighting to ensure that families are never pushed out of the learning process, because at the end of the day, these are our children, not the government’s,” said Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow, a member of the House Education and Labor Committee.

Other parents vented their feeling over social media. One tweeted that the San Francisco recall was “a harbinger of The Death of Wokeness.”

“The moral of the story,” another tweeted, “is not that woke representatives who represent woke constituents are doing anything undemocratic. It’s that the rest of us should get up off our butts and vote in local elections every damn time. Because when we don’t, weird special interest groups who DO vote can take over our local government.”

Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation’s Will Skillman Fellow in Education, said that the recall is part of a “larger national trend” that began in Virginia last summer.

That’s when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe stated that parents had no right to be involved with what their children are being taught. More than any other, that remark led to McAuliff’s loss to Glenn Youngkin, who made education and children the priority in his campaign.

The National School Boards Association added fuel to the fire by requesting that the parental behavior at school board meetings be classified as “domestic terrorism.” Zack Roday, a veteran Virginia GOP strategist, stated that politicians under the control of teacher unions will continue to be held accountable by the long memory of fed-up parents.

North Carolina congresswoman Virginia Foxx, a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that there is “a lot of blood in the political waters, and Democrats are no longer running for the hills - they’re sprinting. She forecast a red wave coming in November, which will provide the coup de grace to the entire Democrat agenda.

The wounding of the Democratic Party has been self-inflicted. During the 2020 elections, presidential candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang shined on the Democratic debate stage, showing that they had a grasp of the issues. The party instead veered to the far left by appeasing the Bernie Sanders wing and endorsing the Biden-Harris ticket.

Republicans, meanwhile, boast a strong political lineup that can define and defend their policies. If Democrats choose to engage in identity politics, the GOP can readily debate them with veteran candidates like Dr. Ben Carson and South Carolina Gov. Tim Scott, rising political stars like Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears of Virginia and Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida and political commentators like Candace Owens. All are unflappable when confronted about racial politics, and will expertly articulate their conservative views.

But without a doubt, last year’s stunning Virginia gubernatorial election result and last week’s thrashing of three board members in a recall election in liberal-based San Francisco prove that parents across the nation are the newest rising stars and they present a voting block that has Democrats shuddering.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.