you know, good for her, i guess, but i absolutely fucking hate that they just paint this picture of her like a normal, well adjusted person who happened to get involved in some Weird Shit, because she has to have ignored or dismissed a LOT of red flags to get to where she was.

I have to mildly disagree here. Yes, some (I’ll even go so far as to say the majority) of the blame falls on her for being willfully blind for so long, but there’s also the fact that many of her colleagues simply tried shielding her from the information. Plus, in any case like this, you often don’t know the true reality of the situation until you roll up your sleeves and start digging in yourself.

But I’m willing to give her a lot of credit. She was willing to have her beliefs challenged, she was willing to look at everything objectively, and she didn’t follow her colleagues’ lead in ignoring the evidence for their own political benefit because the facts didn’t jive with their personal worldview (and apparently being willing to state as much, if only to her). That itself is a rarity in society today, where the only answer to extremism is more extremism, doubling down instead of compromising, and treating any attempt at admitting the other side may have a point as being a traitor to the cause. This holds especially true in the GOP, and even more so in places like Texas.

And in an area like that, I’d much rather have someone who at least seems to be willing to be objective and accept reality vs. yet another crackpot who wants a list of books banned because some of the words contain the letters G, A, and Y.

she has to have ignored or dismissed a LOT of red flags to get to where she was

Every news she watched told her a certain picture of how the world was.

Every person she talked to swears to her that the world is a certain way (and, if she starts questioning, they get real suspicious of her and maybe might ostracize her from their social circle).

It would be weird if she had arrived at the truth on her own before this point. And usually, it actually takes a lot more than just reading over the primary sources and realizing that they don’t say what the news and all her friends said they say, before someone realizes the truth.

She didn’t ignore any red flags, because the red flags exist in reality. You’re well acquainted with some information about reality that she’s not privy to, and so in your mind it was easy to spot. For her, her world picture is carefully managed and curated, and the instant that she saw some information that it wasn’t the way she’d been told, she realized the truth, told everyone (alienating more or less 100% of her former allies), and started working to try to put it right.

Don’t hedge your support for her, would be my way of looking at it. She wants to stop the Nazis. Okay, sounds great. I wouldn’t kick Eisenhower out of the wagon train because he’s a Republican, while the shooting against the ones who want to kill you and me and also her, is still going on.

Don’t let a thirst for justice get in the way of finding allies. It’s about the school districts and their future, not the individuals trying to fuck them up with religious indoctrination.

So, it’s not “good for her” as much as “good for those kids”. And what she deserves or not is less important than those kids futures of being brainwashed or not. She’s just one person, and punishing her would accomplish nothing helpful, you’re not going to scare off her old friends that way or anything.

Driven by straw bogeymen.

This is just like the old satanic panic.

While I hope this is the case, she may have simply been backed into a corner on a promise she couldn’t deliver.

This doesn’t address what she found or the fact that her stance changed. TLDR below. From the article:

"But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

So, in the spring of 2022, Gore went public with a series of Facebook posts. She told residents that her backers were using divisive rhetoric to manipulate the community’s emotions. They were interested not in improving public education but rather in sowing distrust, Gore said.

“I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”"

TLDR Far right republican ran on platform saying that schools are indoctrination students to be progressives. She spent many nights and weekends going over the curriculum for the district and found no evidence to support her previous claims and in her excitement, she told her supporters what she found. They didn’t believe her and she was so disgusted that she changed her platform.

No, there isn’t a prominent Democrat named Смирна.

Manchin isn’t somebody who had an epimistological epiphany; he’s somebody who is bought off by the fossil fuels industry and working in his personal financial interest.